Yet, as a father of two kids, I have seen most of the other parents buy iPads and iPhones in the past few years because they're more practical. Games cost $1 and with the attention span of most kids, they are generally happy with lite versions which are free. A larger initial investment gets you a device which is far less expensive than a Nintendo DS when you count games. In addition, if your kid is missing, you can use "Find iPhone" to find your kid. Every parent knows they'll eventually have to buy their kid a phone, so they skip the Nintendo.
Then there's Wii U. Consider an average of five new games a year for 5 years. Games cost $50 or more for new releases. That's $1250 plus the console cost and you'll probably have to buy two consoles. If you have two kids, two controllers are needed. That's about a $2000 investment in a toy that lacks anything other than toy value.
6 years ago, my kids school would have Nintendo day. Now they have tablet day. I haven't seen a DS in 3 years. Not even my friends kids have them.
Honestly, linux on set tops and stuff is great. But Linux on the desktop is a pipedream I stopped believing long ago. If I need Linux on the desktop, I have an SSH client.
As for games on PC, that's worthwhile. I like games and I want more games on the PC and would love it if Nintendo would give up on hardware and go the Sega way. I haven't found any Playstation games worthy of investing in a BIG BULKY PLAYSTATION for. I mean that beast is a burden to the eyes. Who honestly needs better graphics when it comes at a visual cost like that?
XBox is ok, I have one and even bought a game for it.
I have a Steam account. I have about 100 games I bought through steam. I have all my apps on Windows and have SSH into my Linux box. I don't see the point of games on Linux... but ok. I guess someone wants them.
Now making a game console which runs Linux is nifty. Hope it works out... but I don't see this as a Linux box, I see this as just another console. Who cares what the OS is? The games on it are what matters.
You want Linux on the desktop? Get a Chrome OS device. Done. Lots of games, lots of support.
Do you really need another Linux desktop? Why not get one to work first?
Some manager type is trying to solve the problem by throwing people at the job. As if it were and assembly line.
The problem is pretty damn obvious. They threw too many people at it to begin with using a government contractor with a long established history of always late, always over-budget.
This is especially why a national system is required. The fed will throw money at it until it works. What would poor states like Mississippi do if they had to build their own system?
Honestly, even most IT majors can barely handle most technology since they spend years basically learning to hack around until something works. I meet hundreds of IT people every year and many function entirely based on hacking, misconception and rumor. Want an example? Ask IT pros which OS is best. Instead of choosing based on educated reasoning, research or better yet explaining that each has a purpose and you'd have to choose based on the task at hand, many will choose based on religion and mostly hearsay.
The best IT professionals I know have studied computer science inside or out of a school. Algorithms and operating system design are core components of their knowledge. They understand how to research and study technology before choosing tools because of pretty boxes and articles on their favorite blog.
I am glad these people exist. If it weren't for them, I'd have to install antivirus software and reinstall Windows for everyone I know.
Linux is all over the place. I know plenty of people who use it daily. I lived on Linux for years. Hell, I even ported the Opera Web Browser to the platform.
What it boils down to is simple, OS wars are dead. There's more than just Microsoft now. I personally prefer Windows 8 because it's faster than anything I've ever used before and it has less obvious bugs than the other platforms. Other people like Mac, others Linux, others Chrome (which is more of a Java platform than a Linux platform).
I think it's about time to consider that 99% of game development has moved into a new era of platform independent game engines. Using Unreal Engine, Unigine Game Engine, Unity3D and others you write the game once and tweak the controls for a dozen different platforms from phones to XBox/PS to Linux. Companies who code their own game engines and want to reinvent the wheel can do so if they want, but honestly, it's not so interesting. These days, if a game system developer really wants their platform to take off, they can make agreements with the platform system company and pay for the port or do it themselves.
Take a look at Microsoft. No one wanted to port to the Metro platform and Microsoft basically made it happen by working with the game engine companies. Now all the game vendors need to do is simply generate a new executable and tweak the controls.
If Valve wants support for SteamOS, the answer is simple, port the game engines. But I have no interest in games locked into a platform. I stopped buying consoles because I don't need a special machine for games anymore. Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, etc... are all powerful enough to play the best of them. Game consoles were only interesting when porting to a platform meant an endless amount of problems with hardware incompatibility. We don't do it anymore. These days, the game engines do the work for us. Content developers can produce awesome games without worrying about AMD vs. Pentium or nVidia vs. Intel vs. AMD. Hell, they don't even have to think much about Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux. They can develop games and simply deploy them.
SteamOS seems interesting, but I want one device for everything. I use a Surface Pro at the moment. Surface Pro 2 later this month. It's a laptop, a tablet, a video player, an ebook reader and a game system. Would I like better graphics? Yep... but Pro 2 has better graphics. And the graphics on the Surface Pro 2 are good enough that it's now more about game content than graphics quality. I carry an XBox controller in my backpack so I can play Sonic Racing or Lara Croft on airplanes.
It'll be pretty cool though if Valve makes it so I can buy a game and play it on SteamBox or my Surface without buying a second copy.
Ok... I know there aren't many alternatives, but seriously... moving to Google Docs doesn't sound good in the current climate. It means that all business mails and documents will be easily accessible by the U.S. government.
I don't know whether Whirlpool stores and information that is considered customer confidential, but I'd imagine that they have documents regularly stored on their systems that are marked "Corporate Confidential". Does voluntarily choosing to store files on a server owned by a U.S. corporation that regularly breeches confidentiality by providing their records to the U.S. government (NSA, FBI, etc...) no violate those terms of the agreements?
Of course, pretending like it's not happening might count as "not voluntarily doing so". The only reason I like Offie 365 is because of Office 365 Enterprise which can be hosted by non-Microsoft corporations in countries with privacy laws.
Really... when was the last time Lockheed delivered a project on time and/or on budget?
This is a company with a distinguished history of pillaging the federal government. After all, why charge $10 for a pencil sharpener if you can charge $10,000. Just quote $5 and then show up late complaining that the guy who quoted the deal was fired for underbidding and you'll need another $10,000 to deliver it because of the extra costs involved in cleaning up the first guy's cock up.
Hope the government stays closed long enough for Lockheed to go tits up.
What happens when news papers choose to use azure, aws, etc... Because the sales people convince news paper CEOs that they should use U.S. based cloud services because the U.S. government dubs the service secure?
I hate stupid litigation, but I would sue any news paper for failure to take measures to properly protect their sources the moment they use a U.S. based cloud.
How about medical records?
How about psychological records?
How about juvenile records?
How about adoption records?
How about engineering designs?
Companies all over the world are using Amazon, Google, DropBox, Microsoft and more to store their data. This is because CxOs are signing agreements without properly understanding that they are illegally making their data more or less freely available to the American government.
People need to make noise and inform the decision makers that just because the DoD says a service is secure, it doesn't mean that their data is safe.
Want to see the worst one? How about SAP cloud services? This system is actually able to topple countries if the U.S. decides to make use of "legal taps" to launch "cyber warfare" against some countries.
Note, I know I'm blowing it a bit out of proportion, but I'm intentionally making these points to make others think about it and hopefully dig deeper.
$5 or $20 means nothing in 2013. If you already have your budget planned, $5 or $20 won't make a big difference. The $5 doesn't even cover the additional cost of eating at a salad buffet instead of a cheap pizza buffet for two people. $20 however can mean eating steak tonight.
$50 however means a much better month. $200 is better, but $50 as a sure thing is the best.
I bought two surface pros and a surface. The surface was nice because I use it for a Skype terminal. For the Pros, I gave one to the wife. She loves it. I have one and I love it. Dying to get the new one. Won't hesitate to pay for it. It's a lot lighter than the MacBook Air and iPad I used to carry around with me.:)
Ok, if I were to look at how to make this win, I'd say
Step 1 is to make a cheap device a lot of people will buy Step 2 get a lot of apps into the store where you can make a profit on each one Step 3 get more people to buy the device... possibly at a loss on the hardware Step 4 sell music, apps, videos, etc... and collect the profits.
Elop joined a phone company who proved over and over that they didn't understand the new phone market was about the value adds and not the phones. He then managed to find a way to keep the company from going bankrupt long enough while still decreasing its value long enough to make it inexpensive enough to sell off for a bunch of money. He saved tons of jobs, successfully killed counterproductive relationships with Intel and Symbian, both companies who would keep the majority of the app store profits to themselves. And all the while, as Nokia died while trying to be a handset seller, hooked up with Microsoft who could never enter the phone business themselves without giving Nokia grounds to sue them for billions or buying Nokia and making it an accessory to their mobile business.
If he and Ballmer planned this, they probably saved Nokia, kept their share holders from losing 100% instead of 30% and saved tons of jobs, viliages and more.
If it happened by convenience caused by negligence... It still had the same effect.
Too many people here base their opinion on a false belief that Nokia would have done better another way.Their internal corporate culture is well documented as having been broken. They invested billions in projects like Symbian because of stupid ideas like "it'll run on much less hardware than the other operating systems". They made their platform suck for everything by trying to force that approach. So they put 33mhz CPUs in their phones when everyone else out 200Mhz CPUs in. Sure! The OS ran great on that. Same as if you put Windows or any other OS on it. But app developers were screwed. Web browsers sucked. Games sucked. Graphics sucked. But the battery lasted long.
Apple, Qualcomm and everyone else used bigger, faster CPUs and Nokia kept using crap. Apple makes their own CPUs. Samsung, Qualcomm, etc... All did. Nokia kept trying to use off the shelf general purpose crap. When using TI OMAP chips, they didn't even make the DSP core work which would have helped massively. Nokia just did it all wrong.
Look at Sony... Still doesn't understand the phone market. Ericsson is gone. HTC and Samsung are unique because they both use the cheapest engineers in the cheapest countries to develop phones to be manufactured as cheaply as possible. So they can make a profit on a phone and cut a profit. Samsung (not HTC) competes against Apple by making all their own parts and depending on no one else.
Microsoft might be able to make this work if they do phones like tablets.
Throughout my life, I have never heard of a government contractor completing a project anywhere near on budget or on time. I assume it must happen sometimes, but what their incentive to do so?
The bidders come in, underbid each other to an unrealistic level, pump out a bunch of documents claiming they can accomplish a project without any proof of actually understanding the project.
The government pays a certain amount up front and some along the way and that money isn't used to develop the project but instead is invested in preparing for second round funding and lobbying for it.
The people who bid the initial deal are fired with gigantic golden parachutes for gross negligence.
Papers and stuff are assembled to make it look like they project is far enough along that the government can't possibly justify dumping the contractor and feeds the contractor the "Real financing" which they should have asked for when they initially bid.
The project is then overstaffed through an employment/consulting agency which charges 400% of what they're paying the employees which happens to be run by one of the guys fired for gross negligence.
Management is constantly promoted and the developers who actually can do the work are promoted to management several times ensuring that at no point in time does anyone actually have a good overview of the project.
A product goes into testing only to find out that instead of a medical billing system they wrote a medical pilling system for pharmaceutical management.
A new budget is approved to adapt the pill pusher records to hold medical data for patients.
Rinse and repeat.
This is not even something we need to be surprised about. These people are thieves and they play their hands the same way every time. Wouldn't it be better to feed all the bidders the startup money for the project. Then as milestones are met, the companies not managing to keep up lose their budgets until there's only one? It's a massive amount of wasted energy and work, but the project will probably come in at much less money then if they're managed in the classic sense.
Ok, I worked with Nokia on at least 5 models of phones which never made it past the labs. Prototypes and proofs of concept.
Playing the conspiracy theorist, let's try this.
1) Microsoft announces development of a Surface phone. 2) Nokia threatens to sue Microsoft for billions of dollars because of business agreements which have had Microsoft passing Nokia phones off as flagship Microsoft products. 3) Microsoft decides if Windows Phone will ever work, they will have to make a phone themselves. 4) Microsoft buys Nokia's failing phone division which has absolutely no hope of ever recovering because Nokia doesn't own or know how to market their own platform. They only know how to build and manufacture devices. 5) Microsoft now has full license to probably more patents in the phone market than most of the market combined.
I am of course just speculating.. But isn't this a bit more likely?
Just to nitpick, wouldn't you suppose that Intel's claims to power consumption takes two chips of equal performance and specifications and claim that across the board, the new fab process provides a 30% less power yield based purely on the process?
So, the real question isn't 30% compared to something else. That one is easily justified. Just assume a broadwell will use 30% less power than a haswell... Same architecture, smaller die.
I taught a Cisco course three weeks ago. I bring beer for late lab session on Wednesdays. I sometimes play YouTube videos in front of the class and when a link came up for "Naked men doing the Harlem Shake in the snow." the female student said "I wouldn't mind that one.", so I played it in front of the class.
This obviously was not in the U.S.. If it had been, I'd have been fired and sued.
The behavior mentioned in a civilized country would have spawned boos or jokes at the expense of the presenters. Their comments weren't sexism, it was bad humor. And if you're upset about the issue of the 9 year old. I'm pretty sure the parent should have know that at a conference for adults, a kid didn't really belong there.
When a company goes public, it allows professional gamblers buy parts of the company in order to raise money. At this point, these gamblers demand that the company post regular results and news no matter how silly to give them some reason why other gamblers should buy these shares... or vouchers for a higher value. The value of this voucher on the gambling market almost never reflect the actual performance of the company. And the gambler market value has little actual impact on the actual value of the company. It's similar in nature to how betting on a horse doesn't make it run faster. Gambling on a football game doesn't actually alter the results of the game.
When a company like Dell volunteers to remove itself from the gambling pool because the people who run it feel they'd prefer the value of the company is actually based on the actual results of its performance, it is highly responsible. Like paying off a loan to the bank because you don't need the loan anymore.
While every experience I've ever had with Dell has been that they're a company full of hackers who lack the ability to do anything other than repackage technology they don't actually understand, I applaud them for setting a great example of financial responsibility even against the will of gamblers who pressure them to behave irresponsibly for their own personal gains.
I would like to see many other companies take the same path. Other tech companies, food companies, manufacturing companies, etc. The first step to fixing the U.S. economy is to gamble less and behave responsibly.
Step 1: Say "Thank you very much for your time and devotion to Nokia. You're not needed anymore". Step 2: Make nVidia or Qualcomm design the ultimate reference phone design for Microsoft Step 3: Hire a set of industrial designers who are more about design than industry. Nokia doesn't have any.. don't look there Step 4: Make a frigging awesome phone. Step 5: Ship just one model a year. Nokia's "of course we support our customers when they buy a phone from us. We start designing their next phone for them immediately." attitude. Make one damn phone and quit this crap about being a phone company. Be a solution company. Step 6: Fire Elop, Fire Elop, Fire Elop... DO NOT LET HIM AND STEVE BALLMER SIT ON A STAGE WEARING SUITS AND ROLLING IN THEIR OWN WRINKLED ASSES TALKING ABOUT HOW COOL THE NEW PHONE IS!!! Seriously... would you want to base your version of cool on what those losers think is cool? You do? Go get a damn job kissing some middle managers ass at PwC and say words like Synergize a lot. GET THOSE BASTARDS OFF THE STAGE!!! They're ruining everything! Step 7: Fix the damn store!!! There are 900 apps in the top 10 category for getting half naked pictures of russian house wives. There's no films in the store outside of America. FIX IT!!!
Unless MS plans on learning that it's about the OS and most importantly the store, this is a mess about to happen. The goal is not to sell a new phone to every user every year, it's about selling one phone to each user and making sure the store rocks.
If MS lets Elop keep his disgusting "users want 20 phones we'll ignore after we sell them" tactic, it'll fail horribly. MS really needs their own phone... Not phones. Do it once and do it right.
And QUIT letting Nokia do the design!!! Nokia's industrial design sucks. Microsoft proved they do it right with Surface Pro which was an awesome design. I love that Surface Pro 2 didn't come out when Haswell did. I will buy it when it does.
Now, fix Windows Phone. The keyboard sucks. The task switching sucks. Exchange support sucks. The store is loaded with crap... Be selective. Less is more. Make a silent mode button on the phone. Ditch the back and search buttons... Make it part of the apps. Get a good browser. IE is sad. Time to go webkit. Get app session management working. Help Amazon get their apps for the phone right. Let the play/pause button on the headset actually continue play on third party players. Add a codec API to the player so we don't need to recode videos.
Step 1) Compare the number of students entering the school vs. the number of students graduating school. The higher the percentage, the lower the academic requirements of the school. To suggest that the academics of the school are so damn good that they can overcome the overwhelming odds that students will go nuts the second they are free from control by their parents is nonsense. If too many students are dropping out, the students are passing even though they're generally drunk.
Step 2) Evaluate the sports program. If the sports program is really good, it's less likely the academic program will be as good. It means the administration is less focused on academics and more focused on what they "Think Really Counts"
***** Most important ****** Step 3) Evaluate the number of students graduating the school during hard economic times and manage to get jobs that actually can cover the cost of their student debt. If a school knowingly admits a student who needs to borrow 50% or more of the money required to gain a degree in a career that DOES NOT offer a pay scale following graduation to cover the cost of the loan, the school should be declared predatory.
As an example, if only 10-20% of university graduates from a law school are likely to gain employment as lawyers, it means that the chances of defaulting on a student loan is high. It is then necessary to evaluate the most likely career path for a law school graduate that can't work as a lawyer and identify the amount of money that career is likely to pay. Then identify the amount the student can afford to repay.
Another example is giving a kid from a lower-middle-class home a loan to pay $150,000 for 4 years to become a pianist from Julliard. The student has about 0.5% chance of gaining a career playing piano in a concert hall. The student has a 10% chance of gaining employment as a music teacher in an elementary school. This loan should be denied.
Another example would be a student studying to become a school teacher. School teachers will earn an average of $75K a year after earning tenure. They are almost 100% guaranteed to be stable and responsible regarding loan payments. Loan then up to $125,000 for their education to be paid over a period of 25 years at national mortgage rates.
Leaving aside my political beliefs that high speed trading needs to be banned, let me say this.
Switching to Java should yield similar results to C++. What matters is whether the programmer understands the memory architecture of the run-time environment well enough to not have issues. Generally, you'll find that even the best programmers in either language will overlook things like garbage collectors and memory fragmentation issues. It's a time-to-market thing. When working with large dynamic data sets, it doesn't matter if you're using Java or C++, the developer needs to be able to adapt their code to perform well on the system.
Code written without considering the processing time of memory management will probably work much better in C++ than Java. That said for huge data sets, Java could perform better since the memory itself is location independent and it is highly probable that you're gain a great deal of performance from being able to defragment memory. Consider however that the garbage collector and the defragmenter will have unpredictable times which can cause multi-millisecond hiccoughs during processing.
I recommend if you take this route, you hire a compiler geek to work on staff optimizing the memory operations.
Some people also work on multi-million line projects which compile in a minute or less. It's a trade-off. Most compiler issues are related to obscene (and generally unnecessary) amounts of header dependencies. 1000 lines takes an almost immeasurably small period of time to compile, but a 2 line file can take a minute if it includes the wrong headers. The ISO C/C++ library or boost is pure evil in these regards.
A well formed program can compile extremely rapidly. A poorly formed program can often compile extremely quickly with enough CPUs working in parallel across a fast enough network. However a decent program will take time for the initial compile but take almost no time for each consecutive compile when only a file here or there changes.
Also, to make things politically incorrect on Slashdot, good tools like Visual C++ 2012 can even take poor code and make it compile quickly if the projects files are designed well. Do your coding there and compile it later on GCC.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet, as a father of two kids, I have seen most of the other parents buy iPads and iPhones in the past few years because they're more practical. Games cost $1 and with the attention span of most kids, they are generally happy with lite versions which are free. A larger initial investment gets you a device which is far less expensive than a Nintendo DS when you count games. In addition, if your kid is missing, you can use "Find iPhone" to find your kid. Every parent knows they'll eventually have to buy their kid a phone, so they skip the Nintendo.
Then there's Wii U. Consider an average of five new games a year for 5 years. Games cost $50 or more for new releases. That's $1250 plus the console cost and you'll probably have to buy two consoles. If you have two kids, two controllers are needed. That's about a $2000 investment in a toy that lacks anything other than toy value.
6 years ago, my kids school would have Nintendo day. Now they have tablet day. I haven't seen a DS in 3 years. Not even my friends kids have them.
Honestly, linux on set tops and stuff is great. But Linux on the desktop is a pipedream I stopped believing long ago. If I need Linux on the desktop, I have an SSH client.
As for games on PC, that's worthwhile. I like games and I want more games on the PC and would love it if Nintendo would give up on hardware and go the Sega way. I haven't found any Playstation games worthy of investing in a BIG BULKY PLAYSTATION for. I mean that beast is a burden to the eyes. Who honestly needs better graphics when it comes at a visual cost like that?
XBox is ok, I have one and even bought a game for it.
I have a Steam account. I have about 100 games I bought through steam. I have all my apps on Windows and have SSH into my Linux box. I don't see the point of games on Linux... but ok. I guess someone wants them.
Now making a game console which runs Linux is nifty. Hope it works out... but I don't see this as a Linux box, I see this as just another console. Who cares what the OS is? The games on it are what matters.
You want Linux on the desktop? Get a Chrome OS device. Done. Lots of games, lots of support.
Do you really need another Linux desktop? Why not get one to work first?
Some manager type is trying to solve the problem by throwing people at the job. As if it were and assembly line.
The problem is pretty damn obvious. They threw too many people at it to begin with using a government contractor with a long established history of always late, always over-budget.
This is especially why a national system is required. The fed will throw money at it until it works. What would poor states like Mississippi do if they had to build their own system?
Honestly, even most IT majors can barely handle most technology since they spend years basically learning to hack around until something works. I meet hundreds of IT people every year and many function entirely based on hacking, misconception and rumor. Want an example? Ask IT pros which OS is best. Instead of choosing based on educated reasoning, research or better yet explaining that each has a purpose and you'd have to choose based on the task at hand, many will choose based on religion and mostly hearsay.
The best IT professionals I know have studied computer science inside or out of a school. Algorithms and operating system design are core components of their knowledge. They understand how to research and study technology before choosing tools because of pretty boxes and articles on their favorite blog.
I am glad these people exist. If it weren't for them, I'd have to install antivirus software and reinstall Windows for everyone I know.
Linux is all over the place. I know plenty of people who use it daily. I lived on Linux for years. Hell, I even ported the Opera Web Browser to the platform.
What it boils down to is simple, OS wars are dead. There's more than just Microsoft now. I personally prefer Windows 8 because it's faster than anything I've ever used before and it has less obvious bugs than the other platforms. Other people like Mac, others Linux, others Chrome (which is more of a Java platform than a Linux platform).
I think it's about time to consider that 99% of game development has moved into a new era of platform independent game engines. Using Unreal Engine, Unigine Game Engine, Unity3D and others you write the game once and tweak the controls for a dozen different platforms from phones to XBox/PS to Linux. Companies who code their own game engines and want to reinvent the wheel can do so if they want, but honestly, it's not so interesting. These days, if a game system developer really wants their platform to take off, they can make agreements with the platform system company and pay for the port or do it themselves.
Take a look at Microsoft. No one wanted to port to the Metro platform and Microsoft basically made it happen by working with the game engine companies. Now all the game vendors need to do is simply generate a new executable and tweak the controls.
If Valve wants support for SteamOS, the answer is simple, port the game engines. But I have no interest in games locked into a platform. I stopped buying consoles because I don't need a special machine for games anymore. Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, etc... are all powerful enough to play the best of them. Game consoles were only interesting when porting to a platform meant an endless amount of problems with hardware incompatibility. We don't do it anymore. These days, the game engines do the work for us. Content developers can produce awesome games without worrying about AMD vs. Pentium or nVidia vs. Intel vs. AMD. Hell, they don't even have to think much about Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux. They can develop games and simply deploy them.
SteamOS seems interesting, but I want one device for everything. I use a Surface Pro at the moment. Surface Pro 2 later this month. It's a laptop, a tablet, a video player, an ebook reader and a game system. Would I like better graphics? Yep... but Pro 2 has better graphics. And the graphics on the Surface Pro 2 are good enough that it's now more about game content than graphics quality. I carry an XBox controller in my backpack so I can play Sonic Racing or Lara Croft on airplanes.
It'll be pretty cool though if Valve makes it so I can buy a game and play it on SteamBox or my Surface without buying a second copy.
Ok... I know there aren't many alternatives, but seriously... moving to Google Docs doesn't sound good in the current climate. It means that all business mails and documents will be easily accessible by the U.S. government.
I don't know whether Whirlpool stores and information that is considered customer confidential, but I'd imagine that they have documents regularly stored on their systems that are marked "Corporate Confidential". Does voluntarily choosing to store files on a server owned by a U.S. corporation that regularly breeches confidentiality by providing their records to the U.S. government (NSA, FBI, etc...) no violate those terms of the agreements?
Of course, pretending like it's not happening might count as "not voluntarily doing so". The only reason I like Offie 365 is because of Office 365 Enterprise which can be hosted by non-Microsoft corporations in countries with privacy laws.
As in Stockholm Finland right? :)
Really... when was the last time Lockheed delivered a project on time and/or on budget?
This is a company with a distinguished history of pillaging the federal government. After all, why charge $10 for a pencil sharpener if you can charge $10,000. Just quote $5 and then show up late complaining that the guy who quoted the deal was fired for underbidding and you'll need another $10,000 to deliver it because of the extra costs involved in cleaning up the first guy's cock up.
Hope the government stays closed long enough for Lockheed to go tits up.
What happens when news papers choose to use azure, aws, etc... Because the sales people convince news paper CEOs that they should use U.S. based cloud services because the U.S. government dubs the service secure?
I hate stupid litigation, but I would sue any news paper for failure to take measures to properly protect their sources the moment they use a U.S. based cloud.
How about medical records?
How about psychological records?
How about juvenile records?
How about adoption records?
How about engineering designs?
Companies all over the world are using Amazon, Google, DropBox, Microsoft and more to store their data. This is because CxOs are signing agreements without properly understanding that they are illegally making their data more or less freely available to the American government.
People need to make noise and inform the decision makers that just because the DoD says a service is secure, it doesn't mean that their data is safe.
Want to see the worst one? How about SAP cloud services? This system is actually able to topple countries if the U.S. decides to make use of "legal taps" to launch "cyber warfare" against some countries.
Note, I know I'm blowing it a bit out of proportion, but I'm intentionally making these points to make others think about it and hopefully dig deeper.
Offer $50 or a chance to win $200 on a lottery.
$5 or $20 means nothing in 2013. If you already have your budget planned, $5 or $20 won't make a big difference. The $5 doesn't even cover the additional cost of eating at a salad buffet instead of a cheap pizza buffet for two people. $20 however can mean eating steak tonight.
$50 however means a much better month. $200 is better, but $50 as a sure thing is the best.
I bought two surface pros and a surface. The surface was nice because I use it for a Skype terminal. For the Pros, I gave one to the wife. She loves it. I have one and I love it. Dying to get the new one. Won't hesitate to pay for it. It's a lot lighter than the MacBook Air and iPad I used to carry around with me. :)
Ok, if I were to look at how to make this win, I'd say
Step 1 is to make a cheap device a lot of people will buy
Step 2 get a lot of apps into the store where you can make a profit on each one
Step 3 get more people to buy the device... possibly at a loss on the hardware
Step 4 sell music, apps, videos, etc... and collect the profits.
Is this really a bad idea?
Elop joined a phone company who proved over and over that they didn't understand the new phone market was about the value adds and not the phones. He then managed to find a way to keep the company from going bankrupt long enough while still decreasing its value long enough to make it inexpensive enough to sell off for a bunch of money. He saved tons of jobs, successfully killed counterproductive relationships with Intel and Symbian, both companies who would keep the majority of the app store profits to themselves. And all the while, as Nokia died while trying to be a handset seller, hooked up with Microsoft who could never enter the phone business themselves without giving Nokia grounds to sue them for billions or buying Nokia and making it an accessory to their mobile business.
If he and Ballmer planned this, they probably saved Nokia, kept their share holders from losing 100% instead of 30% and saved tons of jobs, viliages and more.
If it happened by convenience caused by negligence... It still had the same effect.
Too many people here base their opinion on a false belief that Nokia would have done better another way.Their internal corporate culture is well documented as having been broken. They invested billions in projects like Symbian because of stupid ideas like "it'll run on much less hardware than the other operating systems". They made their platform suck for everything by trying to force that approach. So they put 33mhz CPUs in their phones when everyone else out 200Mhz CPUs in. Sure! The OS ran great on that. Same as if you put Windows or any other OS on it. But app developers were screwed. Web browsers sucked. Games sucked. Graphics sucked. But the battery lasted long.
Apple, Qualcomm and everyone else used bigger, faster CPUs and Nokia kept using crap. Apple makes their own CPUs. Samsung, Qualcomm, etc... All did. Nokia kept trying to use off the shelf general purpose crap. When using TI OMAP chips, they didn't even make the DSP core work which would have helped massively. Nokia just did it all wrong.
Look at Sony... Still doesn't understand the phone market. Ericsson is gone. HTC and Samsung are unique because they both use the cheapest engineers in the cheapest countries to develop phones to be manufactured as cheaply as possible. So they can make a profit on a phone and cut a profit. Samsung (not HTC) competes against Apple by making all their own parts and depending on no one else.
Microsoft might be able to make this work if they do phones like tablets.
I think I remember using it once. But the alternative was Netscape 4.
Throughout my life, I have never heard of a government contractor completing a project anywhere near on budget or on time. I assume it must happen sometimes, but what their incentive to do so?
The bidders come in, underbid each other to an unrealistic level, pump out a bunch of documents claiming they can accomplish a project without any proof of actually understanding the project.
The government pays a certain amount up front and some along the way and that money isn't used to develop the project but instead is invested in preparing for second round funding and lobbying for it.
The people who bid the initial deal are fired with gigantic golden parachutes for gross negligence.
Papers and stuff are assembled to make it look like they project is far enough along that the government can't possibly justify dumping the contractor and feeds the contractor the "Real financing" which they should have asked for when they initially bid.
The project is then overstaffed through an employment/consulting agency which charges 400% of what they're paying the employees which happens to be run by one of the guys fired for gross negligence.
Management is constantly promoted and the developers who actually can do the work are promoted to management several times ensuring that at no point in time does anyone actually have a good overview of the project.
A product goes into testing only to find out that instead of a medical billing system they wrote a medical pilling system for pharmaceutical management.
A new budget is approved to adapt the pill pusher records to hold medical data for patients.
Rinse and repeat.
This is not even something we need to be surprised about. These people are thieves and they play their hands the same way every time. Wouldn't it be better to feed all the bidders the startup money for the project. Then as milestones are met, the companies not managing to keep up lose their budgets until there's only one? It's a massive amount of wasted energy and work, but the project will probably come in at much less money then if they're managed in the classic sense.
Ok, I worked with Nokia on at least 5 models of phones which never made it past the labs. Prototypes and proofs of concept.
Playing the conspiracy theorist, let's try this.
1) Microsoft announces development of a Surface phone.
2) Nokia threatens to sue Microsoft for billions of dollars because of business agreements which have had Microsoft passing Nokia phones off as flagship Microsoft products.
3) Microsoft decides if Windows Phone will ever work, they will have to make a phone themselves.
4) Microsoft buys Nokia's failing phone division which has absolutely no hope of ever recovering because Nokia doesn't own or know how to market their own platform. They only know how to build and manufacture devices.
5) Microsoft now has full license to probably more patents in the phone market than most of the market combined.
I am of course just speculating.. But isn't this a bit more likely?
Just to nitpick, wouldn't you suppose that Intel's claims to power consumption takes two chips of equal performance and specifications and claim that across the board, the new fab process provides a 30% less power yield based purely on the process?
So, the real question isn't 30% compared to something else. That one is easily justified. Just assume a broadwell will use 30% less power than a haswell... Same architecture, smaller die.
The question is, how fast is the 5W part?
I taught a Cisco course three weeks ago. I bring beer for late lab session on Wednesdays. I sometimes play YouTube videos in front of the class and when a link came up for "Naked men doing the Harlem Shake in the snow." the female student said "I wouldn't mind that one.", so I played it in front of the class.
This obviously was not in the U.S.. If it had been, I'd have been fired and sued.
The behavior mentioned in a civilized country would have spawned boos or jokes at the expense of the presenters. Their comments weren't sexism, it was bad humor. And if you're upset about the issue of the 9 year old. I'm pretty sure the parent should have know that at a conference for adults, a kid didn't really belong there.
When a company goes public, it allows professional gamblers buy parts of the company in order to raise money. At this point, these gamblers demand that the company post regular results and news no matter how silly to give them some reason why other gamblers should buy these shares... or vouchers for a higher value. The value of this voucher on the gambling market almost never reflect the actual performance of the company. And the gambler market value has little actual impact on the actual value of the company. It's similar in nature to how betting on a horse doesn't make it run faster. Gambling on a football game doesn't actually alter the results of the game.
When a company like Dell volunteers to remove itself from the gambling pool because the people who run it feel they'd prefer the value of the company is actually based on the actual results of its performance, it is highly responsible. Like paying off a loan to the bank because you don't need the loan anymore.
While every experience I've ever had with Dell has been that they're a company full of hackers who lack the ability to do anything other than repackage technology they don't actually understand, I applaud them for setting a great example of financial responsibility even against the will of gamblers who pressure them to behave irresponsibly for their own personal gains.
I would like to see many other companies take the same path. Other tech companies, food companies, manufacturing companies, etc. The first step to fixing the U.S. economy is to gamble less and behave responsibly.
Let's hope this becomes a trend. Good job Dell!
Step 1: Say "Thank you very much for your time and devotion to Nokia. You're not needed anymore".
Step 2: Make nVidia or Qualcomm design the ultimate reference phone design for Microsoft
Step 3: Hire a set of industrial designers who are more about design than industry. Nokia doesn't have any.. don't look there
Step 4: Make a frigging awesome phone.
Step 5: Ship just one model a year. Nokia's "of course we support our customers when they buy a phone from us. We start designing their next phone for them immediately." attitude. Make one damn phone and quit this crap about being a phone company. Be a solution company.
Step 6: Fire Elop, Fire Elop, Fire Elop... DO NOT LET HIM AND STEVE BALLMER SIT ON A STAGE WEARING SUITS AND ROLLING IN THEIR OWN WRINKLED ASSES TALKING ABOUT HOW COOL THE NEW PHONE IS!!! Seriously... would you want to base your version of cool on what those losers think is cool? You do? Go get a damn job kissing some middle managers ass at PwC and say words like Synergize a lot. GET THOSE BASTARDS OFF THE STAGE!!! They're ruining everything!
Step 7: Fix the damn store!!! There are 900 apps in the top 10 category for getting half naked pictures of russian house wives. There's no films in the store outside of America. FIX IT!!!
Unless MS plans on learning that it's about the OS and most importantly the store, this is a mess about to happen. The goal is not to sell a new phone to every user every year, it's about selling one phone to each user and making sure the store rocks.
If MS lets Elop keep his disgusting "users want 20 phones we'll ignore after we sell them" tactic, it'll fail horribly. MS really needs their own phone... Not phones. Do it once and do it right.
And QUIT letting Nokia do the design!!! Nokia's industrial design sucks. Microsoft proved they do it right with Surface Pro which was an awesome design. I love that Surface Pro 2 didn't come out when Haswell did. I will buy it when it does.
Now, fix Windows Phone. The keyboard sucks. The task switching sucks. Exchange support sucks. The store is loaded with crap... Be selective. Less is more. Make a silent mode button on the phone. Ditch the back and search buttons... Make it part of the apps. Get a good browser. IE is sad. Time to go webkit. Get app session management working. Help Amazon get their apps for the phone right. Let the play/pause button on the headset actually continue play on third party players. Add a codec API to the player so we don't need to recode videos.
If MS builds a phone I hope it uses Intel.
Step 1) Compare the number of students entering the school vs. the number of students graduating school. The higher the percentage, the lower the academic requirements of the school. To suggest that the academics of the school are so damn good that they can overcome the overwhelming odds that students will go nuts the second they are free from control by their parents is nonsense. If too many students are dropping out, the students are passing even though they're generally drunk.
Step 2) Evaluate the sports program. If the sports program is really good, it's less likely the academic program will be as good. It means the administration is less focused on academics and more focused on what they "Think Really Counts"
***** Most important ******
Step 3) Evaluate the number of students graduating the school during hard economic times and manage to get jobs that actually can cover the cost of their student debt. If a school knowingly admits a student who needs to borrow 50% or more of the money required to gain a degree in a career that DOES NOT offer a pay scale following graduation to cover the cost of the loan, the school should be declared predatory.
As an example, if only 10-20% of university graduates from a law school are likely to gain employment as lawyers, it means that the chances of defaulting on a student loan is high. It is then necessary to evaluate the most likely career path for a law school graduate that can't work as a lawyer and identify the amount of money that career is likely to pay. Then identify the amount the student can afford to repay.
Another example is giving a kid from a lower-middle-class home a loan to pay $150,000 for 4 years to become a pianist from Julliard. The student has about 0.5% chance of gaining a career playing piano in a concert hall. The student has a 10% chance of gaining employment as a music teacher in an elementary school. This loan should be denied.
Another example would be a student studying to become a school teacher. School teachers will earn an average of $75K a year after earning tenure. They are almost 100% guaranteed to be stable and responsible regarding loan payments. Loan then up to $125,000 for their education to be paid over a period of 25 years at national mortgage rates.
Leaving aside my political beliefs that high speed trading needs to be banned, let me say this.
Switching to Java should yield similar results to C++. What matters is whether the programmer understands the memory architecture of the run-time environment well enough to not have issues. Generally, you'll find that even the best programmers in either language will overlook things like garbage collectors and memory fragmentation issues. It's a time-to-market thing. When working with large dynamic data sets, it doesn't matter if you're using Java or C++, the developer needs to be able to adapt their code to perform well on the system.
Code written without considering the processing time of memory management will probably work much better in C++ than Java. That said for huge data sets, Java could perform better since the memory itself is location independent and it is highly probable that you're gain a great deal of performance from being able to defragment memory. Consider however that the garbage collector and the defragmenter will have unpredictable times which can cause multi-millisecond hiccoughs during processing.
I recommend if you take this route, you hire a compiler geek to work on staff optimizing the memory operations.
Poor code uses a lot of memory in any language.
Some people also work on multi-million line projects which compile in a minute or less. It's a trade-off. Most compiler issues are related to obscene (and generally unnecessary) amounts of header dependencies. 1000 lines takes an almost immeasurably small period of time to compile, but a 2 line file can take a minute if it includes the wrong headers. The ISO C/C++ library or boost is pure evil in these regards.
A well formed program can compile extremely rapidly. A poorly formed program can often compile extremely quickly with enough CPUs working in parallel across a fast enough network. However a decent program will take time for the initial compile but take almost no time for each consecutive compile when only a file here or there changes.
Also, to make things politically incorrect on Slashdot, good tools like Visual C++ 2012 can even take poor code and make it compile quickly if the projects files are designed well. Do your coding there and compile it later on GCC.