I don't want a Shuttleworth phone, I want a linux capable phone. I want a phone so controllable that if the phone is capable of doing it then I or someone else is doing it. The ideal phone would be one so controllable that some hardcore dude would instantly cobble together a complete command line interface to the phone:
phone-dial 5551234
sms-message -u5551234 'I will be 5 minutes late'
list-recent-calls
I am sick of phones that are missing features that would tick off the telcos. I want to block text messages from certain users (I'm looking at you Telus) I want to have a list of people who can and can't call me at certain times of the day. I want to block calls from certain callers. I want an easy button to turn my cell data on and off. I want to delete any app that I don't want. When (not if) I reinstall the OS I want to strip out everything and then put back only that I want (I'm looking at you NewsStand). Whereas I see an Ubuntu phone as being Shuttleworth trying to get his piece of the appstore pie. I want a phone that cannot be locked to a carrier.
Your operating system, almost all shrink wrap applications such as MS Office or Photoshop, Your console's operating system, Your games, Your microwave's OS, Your car. C or C++ but even the C++ in most of the above systems is more C like than C++. Where people mistake the popularity of Java is that many of the jobs at hand such as the local phone company's new billing system will be in Java. But the code that makes the phones actually ring will be something more hardcore such as C or even erlang.
So most of the public will go through their day probably using C or C++ based code 99% of the time and a bit will be say the timesheet software running Java that they access through their C based browser using C based network drivers on viewed through a video card with C based drivers on a C based OS with their packets going through C based routers and switches after using a C based security system to get into the building where they used a C based elevator system to get up to work. Of course many of the above systems use a smattering of other bits such as scripting libraries but those are being run by a C library. The only other language that the average person might encounter would be some Objective-C on their iPhone or some Java on their Android; but again those OS's are basically C.
When they get home and browse the web they then get the full onslaught of servers running a dog's breakfast of PHP, Java, RoR, etc. But those servers are all programmed in.... you guessed it C.
The bulk of my recent programming has been in Objective C but once I leave API calls my code quickly becomes pretty classic C with elements of C++. Yes I love the simplicity of a foreach type structure where it is brain dead to iterate through some set/hash/array of objects with little or no thought about bounds but once I start to really hammer the data hard I often find my code "degenerating" into c. Instead of a class I will create a structure. Instead of vectors I use arrays. I find the debugging far simpler and the attitude to what can be done changes. In fairly raw C I start having thoughts like: I'll mathematically process 500,000 structures every time someone moves their mouse and then I literally giggle when it not only works but works smoothly. What you largely have in C is if the machine is theoretically able to do it then you can program it. Good mathematics can often optimize things significantly but sometimes you just have brute manipulations that need to be fast.
But on a whole other level my claim with most higher level languages ranging from PHP to.net to Java is that they often make the first 90% of a large project go so very quickly. You seem to jump from prototype to 90% in a flash; but then you hit some roadblocks. The garbage collection is kicking in during animations causing stuttering and the library you are using won't let you entirely stop garbage collection. Or memory isn't being freed quickly enough resulting in the requirement that all the users' machines be upgraded to 16Gb. Then that remaining 10% ends up taking twice as long as the first 90%. Whereas I find with C (or C++) you start slow and end slow but the first 90% actually takes 90% of the final time.
But where C is a project killer is the whole weakest link in the chain thing. If you have a large project with many programmers as is typically found in a large business system working on many different modules that basically work on the same data set that a safer language like Java is far far better. I am pretty sure that if the business programmers working on projects that I have seen were to have used C instead of Java that those server systems would crash more than once a minute. You can still program pretty badly in Java but a decent programmer shouldn't blow the system apart. Whereas a decent C programmer might not be good enough for a large project.
So the story is not if C is better than say Java but what is the best language for any given problem set. I find broad systems, like those found in the typical business, with many programmers of various skill levels are idea for Java. But for deep system where you layer more and more difficulty on a single problem such as real-time robotic vision that C or C++ are far superior. A simple way to figure out what is the best language is to not compare strengths and weaknesses generally but how they apply to the problem at hand. In a large business system where horsepower is plentiful then garbage collection is good and pointers are only going to be a liability. But if you are pushing up to the limits of what the machine can do such as a game then a crazy pointer dance might be the only possible solution and thus demand C or even ASM.
I could see a really crappy bomb fizzing or whatnot if it the contents ignited instead of detonating. Years ago I flew model rockets and the occasional one would do something strange. It wasn't uncommon for one to ignite, smoke for a huge amount of time, and then sort of fly. Keep in mind that these bozos are potentially cobbling these things together and are likely to not get it quite right.
Given the first thought of most baggage handlers is: dildo followed by razor or toothbrush it is pretty dumb. But I don't think they are hiring from the leading engineering schools. They are getting guys from the hardware store where a guy told me the new LED lights don't break because instead of a filament they use a spark. Did I give him a quick lecture in Quantum physics; it would have probably have been as useful as telling this guy that all those training videos document the least likely thing in peoples' bags.
I can not cast stones at these people as I recently arrived home from a trip to find that there was a horrible buzzing noise in my house. I could hear the noise from the front door and thought it might be the furnace; no joy. Maybe the fridge, nyet. Oh no my computer, nope. But no matter where I went it was of roughly even volume. Then as I took off my backpack I realized it was my electric toothbrush buzzing in the backpack. So my little lesson is that you hear the sound you are expecting. In a airport the paranoid are expecting bombs and so they hear bombs.
The supreme court of Canada recently made a very radical decision I think regarding a bunch of guys who left a big bank here. Basically the court decision was that people can work wherever the hell they want for whomever will have them. The court seems to have completely tossed out the idea of an employee having any kind of non-compete as violating their right to work. But the decision went much further. It wasn't just about working for the competition or even stealing former employees but the court even said stealing old clients and their phone numbers was fine as long as it was reasonable that the employee could have remembered that data. So if an employee even wrote some names and numbers down it was fine as long as it was a reasonably memorable list. In the particular case the employees were dealing with a fairly small elite clientele so the bank really lost big time. Again the court said that you can't make an employee forget stuff.
This of course is a Canadian supreme court case but I went to a lecture given by a supreme court justice who said that most supreme courts look to other supreme courts around the world that are based upon the English system of law as the same sort of cases tend to crop up in the various courts at similar times. So without a doubt the US courts will at least glance at this outstanding decision supporting workers rights.
To me the answer is quite simple. What is HP doing for any employee the day they leave? Absolutely nothing. So what should an ex-HP employee do for HP after they leave? Absolutely nothing. As for any contract. You could sign a slavery contract but any court would toss it out in a second. The key to a contract is that there is an exchange. If I promise to give you a gift of $1,000,000 tomorrow for absolutely nothing on your part you can't actually sue me when I don't deliver. There has to be an exchange. When the employee stops paying the employee the contract has ended regardless of what extra bits HP might wish for. I suspect that this will be going to the supreme court in the US as people will think that it is "unfair" for the employees to be so disloyal and some lower courts might be so foolish as to fall for this argument. But the law is not about fairness. It is about rules; and contract law is fairly old and boring that way. So it will be interesting to see how this all turns out. Personally I was surprised to see our supreme court side so thoroughly with the little guy when the other side was one of the biggest banks in Canada.
An apple like laptop for $300 bucks seems to be a bit of a no brainer. Like many slashdotters I am the technical adviser for most of my large family as well as work. With the exception of those who need specific Microsoft Programs or iTunes a Linux desktop on a machine with those specs would nicely meet the budget and needs of at least half my family. For my self I would love it as a second laptop. There are so many specs in the typical computer that far exceed the typical user's needs. My sister for example just bought an asus machine that I suggested as staples had a pretty good deal and her 7 year desktop really needed replacement. She is one of the people who must run a Windows machine so the specs are more demanding yet her 2TB HD is extreme overkill as she might need 20GB between the OS, MS Office and whatnot. I am willing to bet that in 2018 when she replaces this machine that the vast majority of her machine will be empty. Thus the tiny storage capacity of a Chromebook should be little detriment to most. But the better construction and lighter weight are far more important features that make the chromebook comparable to staples machines priced closer to $1000 as most of the sub $1000 stapes machines are clunky with cheap features such the split left shift key and load of bloatware. The same with many of the other lesser features of the chromebook as compared to "better" machines; most of the features where the chromebook is lesser are unimportant. The fact that at a glance the thing looks like a macbook won't hurt sales at all. So for anyone to be surprised that the chromebook is kicking ass is a surprise to me.
I am willing to bet that the MBA-types at places like HP are scratching their heads saying HP entry models are better than that damn thing as they go through a check list of how their machines are so much better feature for feature not realizing that 98% of customers don't even know what RAM does but their customers do know what they like when they see a friend with one and see that it runs a HD youtube video just as smoothly as the HP machine that has way more "L2 Cache".
The other thing that the MBA types are not realizing is that they are no longer competing with the laptop next to theirs in the display section of Staples or Best Buy but they are competing with the cell phone in the person's pocket.
I suspect that the average Pakistani thinks little of their government; thus anything the government blocks must be good and should be checked out. I suspect that the total amount of blasphemy watched is higher in the end as the population end runs any poorly implemented systems the same way Canadians end run the whole "This content not available in your region."
Once in a blue moon someone might have the exactly relevant facts (which I still think might be a load of BS) but I come to the comments to see the interesting side comments where people might say things like, "HP makes a big load of crap except their Model X is a hidden gem at half the cost and twice the power of anything else" Or "I stopped buying HP servers because company X makes this brain dead simple blade server system with each server coming in at $199..."
About 15 years ago I was buying an HP printer from Canada's equivalent to Best Buy and they were trying to do the usual crap warranty upsell. I told the guy, "For $10 off I'll take an HP product with no warranty." That was 15 years ago. I recently opened a cheap little HP inkjet and the included black cartridge had zero ink in it. I don't mean it had dried out but it had never contained ink as I cut it open and found no sign of ink. I didn't flip out or was even a tiny bit surprised. This is what I expect from HP products.
The same with HP laptops; I expect a mountain of bloated trialware that will be a huge pain to remove and a variety of other cheapnesses such as the whole split left shift key thing.
I also buy servers and with no experience at all with HP servers would simply not touch them with a bargepole due to my experiences with the rest of their product line. But back to their older products. I know people with older(10 years+) laserjets that just keep going and going; while I know others with newer colour laser jets where the red is fading due to dust buildup on a mirror buried deep inside the machine.
And don't get me going on the prices of toner and ink. So my guess is that HP is a company run by MBA types "proving" all kinds of "facts" using spreadsheets while leaving the basics such as loyal happy customers in the dust as those things don't spreadsheet very well. If you are wondering what I mean by the misuse of spreadsheets think about this scenario: You are HP and you have some new trialware product to add to your latest laptop. The product looks like it will make an average of $16.95 per machine. You expect to sell 300,000 units. Well that works out to 6 million dollars. Then you add another trialware column, and another, and another. Soon those machines are simply printing money. But how do you calculate the number of customers who will never buy another HP after realizing that they basically just bought the electronic equivalent to postal junk flyers? Not so easy to put that into a spreadsheet; you can but it tends to be built on more fuzzy information that can be tainted with optimism. My personal guess is that a goodly portion of high priced Apple's sales are built upon people seeing a machine that didn't come with Norton AV and its bloaty brethren. These technologically unsophisticated people then reason that it is worth double to not get this crap. I like Apple products so I am not casting aspersions and I also know that there are many other reasons people buy them both worthy and shallow but I know many people who have no inclination to waste one second fighting with their machine and value their time accordingly.
So when I hear that HP is squabbling over $11 billion that would potentially be detectable from the proper use of spreadsheets (accounting) I just laugh like a drain.
Desktop motherboard manufacturers know that in the past and in the present that following the dictates of Microsoft is how to survive. But those days are mostly over. I doubt any of the MB manufacturers are going to stand up and fart in Microsoft's face and say NO. But I suspect they know the trend is moving away from Microsoft and with the Linux noises that companies like Valve are making that Microsoft will only get weaker. Thus they will probably pretend to put UEFI onto the motherboard but make it really really easy for anyone with the capability to install linux to turn it off. So I suspect that the motherboards will soon come with UEFI enabled by default (maybe) but that you can either go into the bios and turn it off or short a jumper.
Other options would be to leave a weakness in the system so that it is easily hacked and thus bypassed; this way they can meet the letter of Microsoft's law but not at all the spirit. And of course they don't need to make a hole, they know people will find a hole and they won't bother patching it. But I just don't see the manufacturers coming out and directly attracting Microsoft's rage. Plus companies know that all kinds of businesses will want to put a whole range of products on their systems from oddballs like DOS with many wanting XP, Vista, and Windows 7. It wasn't that long ago that I saw an ATM running OS/2. I suspect the guts of the ATM were newish.
But in the near term Microsoft is going to ask "Who farted?" and the various manufacturers are going to pretend that they didn't.
All that said, Microsoft's worst nightmare would be for a company to start releasing Motherboards/Machines with UEFI disabled as a feature and telling the world that smart discerning high-end customers buy systems without UEFI and that the drones buy what the suits at Microsoft tell them. What microsoft seems to forget that while computer nerds running things like Linux are not a significant market share in and of themselves they are who guides, or outright chooses what systems get picked. Minimally how many slashdoter's are involved by their families when they are picking machines. Without starting a religious war about my personal tastes I can say that when people around me are buying a system I give them a fairly narrow range of choices that if they stray from I won't take their "urgent" calls at 10pm when things are going wrong a month later. "Oh your poorly designed laptop that sucks cooling air in only from the bottom overheated when sitting on the sofa and now you need your data pulled from its carcass? How about no." So while people like us probably only represent 1% of the market we probably influence 30+% of the market. So if we don't like UEFI the manufacturers will soon find that we have a bigger vote than simplistic market surveys might otherwise suggest. So even if they totally cave to MS I suspect cracks will appear fairly quickly.
Simply set their reviews aside and mark them as such. So if the author of Cooking Carrots reviews Cooking Lots of Carrots you can get a better understanding. If they give an otherwise 5 star book a crap review you think "sour grapes" but if they give it a 5 star review then you think, "Hmmmm an expert and competitor giving 5 stars is pretty damn good."
I read one Amazon thing where the author does a video about their books. The author trashes one of their own books. Basically the author said the publishing company ruined it. That is the most awesome review I have seen on Amazon.
If they are going to ban anybody it should be two groups, first the angry group that just keeps handing out 1 star reviews. The second group should be publishers. You can tell their 5 star review from a mile away all perfect market speak that nearly matches the books official description, "A gripping tale spanning 4 continents and two world wars..."
One thing to keep in mind is that the ARM is much more general purpose while the Intel chips tend to have a more complex assembly instruction set. So for adding one number to another (x=y+z) I suspect the simpler ARM architecture is going to win on power consumption. But many Intel chips have assembly instructions specifically for crazy things like AES encryption. This is used as the basis of many encryption protocols, hashing, and random number generation. So if a machine is basically serving up all encrypted data then it is possible that an Intel chip will be much faster and consume much less power while performing these operations. Depending on whether he software will take advantage
So I thing this is a case where you really have to look at the significantly broken down performance results to see if your use case fits one chip better than the other. A normal consumer example would be if your OS is encrypting your file system and using these cool Intel instructions. I suspect that it would then be a night and day difference in battery drain. But the drag is that you probably have to pretty well buy a device with both chips, set up your standard configuration, and then test it out. This is generally only something an IT person about to provision a department might be expected to do.
I guess that the overall benchmark is all we really have to go by which really doesn't tell the whole story.
I suspect that people are going to fight empty cars (which are just too cool). But more interestingly some of the people who fight drunk driving will show their true colours and be shown to actually be anti drink people. And before you cast any stones at me for that one it is the position of the woman who founded one of the biggest anti drinking and driving movements; she started it after losing loved ones but feels that the organization has been co opted by temperance types.
This is totally correct. The key is controlling information flow. Usually an org chart does not only suggest who has power but is usually designed to control the flow of information. This is why MBA types are so keen on huge complicated org charts which usually quickly get dotted lines here and there. So if you can end run your boss information control wise they usually get really anxious. The nightmare scenario in a classic MBA polluted company would be some rubber on the road type like a programmer is golfing buddies with say the CFO. Every layer of management in between the programmer and the CFO will literally lose sleep over this disastrous situation any reports up or directives down must suddenly contain the untwisted truth; horrible situation for all those useless middle managers.
Actually wrong, one it is too many years, and two they published his name in a staff directory. The only "Insider" knowledge was that he was a useless douche which was not gained from the inside of the new company but from outside it. Basically this would be the same as being an oil engineer who is told about a new drilling technology that will make old oil fields new again and then going out and buying up old oil fields before this becomes generally known; the fact might be little known but it is not "insider" information. If someone inside that company had disclosed that he was still being a useless waste product then that would have been insider info; but his behavior was actually irrelevant. What he gave me was an insight into how poor their hiring practices were; had they asked around for anyone who ever worked with him I suspect they would have trash talked him into the dust; so either they didn't ask around or they ignored the feedback. I don't think he was there a day before he finished moving and was laid off. So the information I had was basically information the company had leaking out into the world for anyone to think through. Sort of like the oddities of recent Apple decisions making me think that they have a critical gap left by Steve Jobs. Things like the new iMac has a crappier HD than the previous model. I can see Steve Jobs making someone cry if they tried that stunt on his watch.
Now had I bet against my own company knowing he was a useless douche then that would be insider info but seeing that he was being called on his QA stupidity if anything I should have bought shares in the company I worked for (would have made good money there)
Insist on a one person reporting structure. The moment you are reporting to more that one person all is lost as each then is competing for your time and will try to shove in more features or reporting demand than the other.
Years ago I was happily working on a project where I basically dealt with the client. But our QA department just lost a big contract and saw my good sized budget and weaseled in. The head of the QA department did his damnedest to get more and more people onto the project and then started communicating with the client which somehow was being then communicated to me as we need more testing. So after a few weeks I was having to deal with 5 QA people, a QA manager, and the client. Productivity dropped like a stone. So I met on the side with the client who demanded that they approve any billable time for any employee ahead of time. So the QA manager would send in a huge complicated (30 pages) request for this and that and the client would send back a note, "At this time I will only accept billable time on programming, at the end of the project we will re-examine the need for QA." Then the next time the QA manager phoned him he answered the call with, "the time on this call had better not be billable."
A week later the QA manager had an all-hands-onboard management meeting where he demanded that all projects have a set minimum percentage of QA. This failed and he then layed off half of his QA staff.
The best part of all this is that I made some good money. The QA Manager was hired by a huge tech company (2000 bubble) and I played the options market to basically short the crap out of that company as he had been hired for a very senior position and my logic was that any company that could not filter out this waste product was doomed. Their share price went from $120 to around $10 in a couple of months and he basically moved there and was then laid off.
So insist on a single reporting person which will then result in your MBA type having to stack his MBA underling on top of you. This will be so obviously silly that it is doomed. If you do end up reporting to more than one person get the resume cooking as the stress of reporting to more than one person on a project is just not worth it. If you have 3 MBA types all piling on with their own perverse desires(TPA reports) then they will each demand 40 plust hours of work from you per week so either you will die trying to feed their stupid requests or you will fail and they will all sabotage you as they will need someone to blame and they are higher up the information food chain than you.
I don't care if any single company gathers information. They can gather away and store the information like squirrels in little burrows they dug in the hillside. What I do care about is when they share the data. This whole "trusted third parties" crap is well crap. I really really get upset when I hear about companies that gather up personal data and then sell it on to other companies that start vacuuming it all together to start building a profile as you move through the internet.
So if these politicians had the slightest understanding of where the problem really lay they would ban the sharing of any data from one company to another. I don't want anyone but the electrical company to know anything about my account. The amount of information that your electrical system leaks is quite extraordinary. Minimally they can figure out what time you get home each day and sell that to telemarketers who will know exactly when to call you, If they can time the call perfectly to your arrival with your jacket still on you might run for the phone and not have enough time to check to see that it is a crap number.
Your phone company can see you phoning car companies and then suddenly an insurance company will phone you to see if you want insurance for your soon to be new car. But then you get the insidious government prying. There might be a mugging at 6pm and they see you arrive at your house at 6:05 and now you are on their suspect list. Let's look at his surfing. Oh he bought a jacket last year that roughly matches the description given by the victim and he is behind on a few bills and maybe needs some money quick.
So I don't care if a website gathers all kinds of data to figure out what seemed to have attracted me to their site and which page I left off on, as long as they don't share that with anyone... ever.
Never was a fan of Mr. Cuban; now I am a huge fan. Thanks.
One of the qualifications of a patent is that it is non-obvious to a professional in that industry. That is pretty well ignored when most patents that I see litigated are 100% obvious to people well outside that area. Keyboards on a cell phone for texting. Wow that must have take a room full of geniuses working since Edison to work out that combo. Sweeping gestures on a touch surface; I bet only one person in history would have ever come up with that one. Backup sensors, never would have thought about people wondering if they would crash into something while backing up; that one is nearly as ingenious as putting rear view mirrors into cars.
Then you get the best ones where everybody on both sides agree the patent is total shit, but do you want to risk a jury not agreeing, so let's settle. RIM settled for a zillion dollars on a patent that then got thrown out.
So if I were to modify the patent system I would suggest, No software patents, you build software or you don't, only two people can hold a patent, the inventor or a company that actually builds significant quantities of the patented product. No patent holding companies. Change the patent lawsuit process. First is you name a company in a claim. Then the company has 1 year to to get your patent tossed. The patent people must complete a full review within that year and if they don't the patent is tossed. An appeal of the patent itself can be brought before a jury but in this case a jury of peers must be at least half people in that industry. Patent awards must be severely tempered by actual gains. And lastly patents need to have way shorter lives. This life must be partially based upon active product sales. So a patent would give you say 5 years to get to market. But once sales start you have another 5 years of protection. Then its out. So if apple comes up with a cool new antenna and immediately puts it into their phones they can't deny the consumer that innovation in other products until 2032 just 2017.
But if I could have any two rule changes it would be that only inventors and genuine producers can hold patents and no software patents.
First I plead guilty to the worst time estimating ever. I would probably guess wrong as to how long it will take me to make this post. I have had personal 2 week projects drag on for 6 months no problem. So if anyone has some great rules of thumb I would love to know. Years ago I met a CFO who had just finished grilling his tech guy for over an hour getting the tech guy to come up with a worst case scenario for the project they were about to begin. In that hour the tech guy nearly tripled his time and cost estimates. After he left the CFO doubled the time and cost estimate for the budget. In the end the CFO was nearly bang on.
I have taken a great PMI course and would recommend it to anyone in tech. Yet the PMI stuff was great if the project was fairly straightforward. But most tech projects, especially those found on kickstarter, are not really building projects so much as R&D which by its nature delves into the unknown. So scheduling the unknown is either going to be very fuzzy or lies. Since most people insist on a fixed date they are insisting on being lied to.
So I would be the last to cast stones and would doubt fraud until the fuzziness of R&D had been eliminated.
He didn't want a bag of cash with a $ on the side. It obviously would have been transferred into a normal account and then wired or whatnot. In the heated craziness of the last days of the real-estate boom you moved fast as many auctions and whatnot required that you bring a bank draft for some minimum amount to prove that you were serious. This would be like going to your mutual fund and saying you wanted to cash out and they would tell you "no", except that the whole idea of money market fund is that they are almost like a bank account but they provide higher interest but come with a tiny amount of risk. Typically your broker is loaning that money out in things like overnight commercial paper. The whole 24 hour withdrawal thing is pretty well an industry standard.
Also people don't keep large amounts in normal bank accounts for two reasons. One is that they aren't insured past a small amount (say $300,000) so if the bank goes bust you lose any excess money whereas a brokerage account is somewhat safer except that your investment itself can go bloop. The second reason people don't keep large amounts in normal bank accounts is that you don't get a very good return on your money.
So if you have a pile of money you also don't generally put it all into long term investments like stocks and bonds because you might want to keep some money handy for things like opportunities to buy cool houses.; thus you compromise and put some of your money into something that generates better interest yet is almost as liquid as a bank account like a money market fund but doesn't have the larger sales penalties. The normal consumer would look at something like a GIC in Canada.
Keep in mind that this is a huge bad sign. Either they don't have the money, they are too disorganized to pay some small fry, or they are just bad people. Any which way that is not how to run a business.
A potentially similar sign came shortly before the big sub prime disaster. A guy had money in a Big Euro Bank money market fund which, in theory, will return your money in about 24 hours. So a really good deal came up on a house (house prices were about to crash but hadn't yet) and he needed a big down payment of a million dollars. So he goes to his guy and says, "Withdraw a million." the guy invokes some obscure clause and says NO. He freaks out and then demands all his money. They say they can delay something like 30 or 90 days and they do. So it turns out to be fortunate and he misses out on the house and eventually gets his money. But when I told this to a person I know who is a huge trader he just told me I was wrong wrong wrong, the Big Euro Bank was probably the most sound bank in the world and that they were old and had a huge reputation and wouldn't screw someone like that in a million years. He went on to say my money market friend was probably lying to cover up the fact that he was out of money, not the bank. Needless to say that bank went right to the brink and without government intervention would have died.
The take-away is that either the people who are handling your account are incompetent, are mean, or that you now have a valuable insight into a company on the brink.
What the hell is wrong with a university when it is so rudderless that it feels that one ounce of effort should be directed toward immigration control? If illegal immigration is causing some sort of problem for the university that is interfering with their core mandate of teaching students then yes get all over that. But if this is a paper pusher problem where some people are signing up for a third rate university to get a visa and then booking it then who cares. The university could just provide transcripts to the border people for their foreign students and let the government deal with it.
But even for their domestic students who gives a crap if a student attends a lecture; this is the 21st century and any modern educational institution should be providing a video or audio lecture for students anyway. I recently was watching a Stanford lecture series on iTunes where the classroom had around 20 regular attendees with well over 200 students signed up. The professor made frequent references to those students in their bunny slippers. So if a university is taking the opposite approach than Stanford University they would need pretty extraordinary evidence to prove to me that they are heading in the correct direction and not in the exact wrong direction.
If, as a parent, this joke of an institution were on my children's list of candidate universities I would explain to my kids that this was a really bad sign and that they should not consider the place. Luckily for my kids we live far away and have far better choices.
I dumped Eclipse for Sublime Text 2 and XCode. I wouldn't call Sublime an IDE nor a text editor but damn it makes me happy just using it. XCode just grew on me while using it for Apps but I would dump it in a second for Sublime if there was a realistic way to make and debug an app in Sublime.
I don't like QT Creator for two reasons; one is that it is pretty desperate for you to do things the QT way and the other is that it is really only useful for programming QT. I used to love Eclipse and love Sublime because you can program anything in it; C++, PHP, Python, SQL, HTML, anything. I long ago dumped the whole visual studio thing because Microsoft was pushing more and more to do things their way. I will give XCode kudos for leaving me along as to what and how I want to approach a project. They have this whole new storyboard thing that they are no doubt excited about but they let you do things your way regardless.
My experience with QT is that I will use it for a project that lasts through at least one good version of QT. Then for the next project I will start with the new version and have a huge battle to get QT entirely working with the IDE I am using. Often my battle results in a clunky set of hacks to get the intellisense and debuging working along with dealing with.pro files and whatnot. This is just stupid. I should be able to go into any of the popular IDEs click on New Project and select QT and be off and running. How much work would it have been for the QT people to make this for all the major IDEs? The only thing that really impressed me with QT Creator was that QT worked really well with it. But a simple template or plug in for the other IDEs would accomplish as much. Personally I think they built it primarily to get people using QT Quick and the whole QML crap so that they would then be trapped. They seemed to forget that the trap would result in it being more of a wall and keeping people out just as much as it kept people in.
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I don't want a Shuttleworth phone, I want a linux capable phone. I want a phone so controllable that if the phone is capable of doing it then I or someone else is doing it. The ideal phone would be one so controllable that some hardcore dude would instantly cobble together a complete command line interface to the phone:
phone-dial 5551234
sms-message -u5551234 'I will be 5 minutes late'
list-recent-calls
I am sick of phones that are missing features that would tick off the telcos. I want to block text messages from certain users (I'm looking at you Telus) I want to have a list of people who can and can't call me at certain times of the day. I want to block calls from certain callers. I want an easy button to turn my cell data on and off. I want to delete any app that I don't want. When (not if) I reinstall the OS I want to strip out everything and then put back only that I want (I'm looking at you NewsStand). Whereas I see an Ubuntu phone as being Shuttleworth trying to get his piece of the appstore pie. I want a phone that cannot be locked to a carrier.
Your operating system, almost all shrink wrap applications such as MS Office or Photoshop, Your console's operating system, Your games, Your microwave's OS, Your car. C or C++ but even the C++ in most of the above systems is more C like than C++. Where people mistake the popularity of Java is that many of the jobs at hand such as the local phone company's new billing system will be in Java. But the code that makes the phones actually ring will be something more hardcore such as C or even erlang.
So most of the public will go through their day probably using C or C++ based code 99% of the time and a bit will be say the timesheet software running Java that they access through their C based browser using C based network drivers on viewed through a video card with C based drivers on a C based OS with their packets going through C based routers and switches after using a C based security system to get into the building where they used a C based elevator system to get up to work. Of course many of the above systems use a smattering of other bits such as scripting libraries but those are being run by a C library. The only other language that the average person might encounter would be some Objective-C on their iPhone or some Java on their Android; but again those OS's are basically C.
When they get home and browse the web they then get the full onslaught of servers running a dog's breakfast of PHP, Java, RoR, etc. But those servers are all programmed in.... you guessed it C.
Quite a few people are using the NDK and programming in C++ much to the chagrin of Google. So technically there might be 10-100 lines of Java loading 20,000 lines of C or C++. A great place to get started is: http://www.raywenderlich.com/11283/cocos2d-x-for-ios-and-android-getting-started
Here they have the most popular iOS game development library ported for programming on android in C++.
The bulk of my recent programming has been in Objective C but once I leave API calls my code quickly becomes pretty classic C with elements of C++. Yes I love the simplicity of a foreach type structure where it is brain dead to iterate through some set/hash/array of objects with little or no thought about bounds but once I start to really hammer the data hard I often find my code "degenerating" into c. Instead of a class I will create a structure. Instead of vectors I use arrays. I find the debugging far simpler and the attitude to what can be done changes. In fairly raw C I start having thoughts like: I'll mathematically process 500,000 structures every time someone moves their mouse and then I literally giggle when it not only works but works smoothly. What you largely have in C is if the machine is theoretically able to do it then you can program it. Good mathematics can often optimize things significantly but sometimes you just have brute manipulations that need to be fast.
.net to Java is that they often make the first 90% of a large project go so very quickly. You seem to jump from prototype to 90% in a flash; but then you hit some roadblocks. The garbage collection is kicking in during animations causing stuttering and the library you are using won't let you entirely stop garbage collection. Or memory isn't being freed quickly enough resulting in the requirement that all the users' machines be upgraded to 16Gb. Then that remaining 10% ends up taking twice as long as the first 90%. Whereas I find with C (or C++) you start slow and end slow but the first 90% actually takes 90% of the final time.
But on a whole other level my claim with most higher level languages ranging from PHP to
But where C is a project killer is the whole weakest link in the chain thing. If you have a large project with many programmers as is typically found in a large business system working on many different modules that basically work on the same data set that a safer language like Java is far far better. I am pretty sure that if the business programmers working on projects that I have seen were to have used C instead of Java that those server systems would crash more than once a minute. You can still program pretty badly in Java but a decent programmer shouldn't blow the system apart. Whereas a decent C programmer might not be good enough for a large project.
So the story is not if C is better than say Java but what is the best language for any given problem set. I find broad systems, like those found in the typical business, with many programmers of various skill levels are idea for Java. But for deep system where you layer more and more difficulty on a single problem such as real-time robotic vision that C or C++ are far superior. A simple way to figure out what is the best language is to not compare strengths and weaknesses generally but how they apply to the problem at hand. In a large business system where horsepower is plentiful then garbage collection is good and pointers are only going to be a liability. But if you are pushing up to the limits of what the machine can do such as a game then a crazy pointer dance might be the only possible solution and thus demand C or even ASM.
Lastly do you want your OS programmed in Java?
I could see a really crappy bomb fizzing or whatnot if it the contents ignited instead of detonating. Years ago I flew model rockets and the occasional one would do something strange. It wasn't uncommon for one to ignite, smoke for a huge amount of time, and then sort of fly. Keep in mind that these bozos are potentially cobbling these things together and are likely to not get it quite right.
Given the first thought of most baggage handlers is: dildo followed by razor or toothbrush it is pretty dumb. But I don't think they are hiring from the leading engineering schools. They are getting guys from the hardware store where a guy told me the new LED lights don't break because instead of a filament they use a spark. Did I give him a quick lecture in Quantum physics; it would have probably have been as useful as telling this guy that all those training videos document the least likely thing in peoples' bags.
I can not cast stones at these people as I recently arrived home from a trip to find that there was a horrible buzzing noise in my house. I could hear the noise from the front door and thought it might be the furnace; no joy. Maybe the fridge, nyet. Oh no my computer, nope. But no matter where I went it was of roughly even volume. Then as I took off my backpack I realized it was my electric toothbrush buzzing in the backpack. So my little lesson is that you hear the sound you are expecting. In a airport the paranoid are expecting bombs and so they hear bombs.
The supreme court of Canada recently made a very radical decision I think regarding a bunch of guys who left a big bank here. Basically the court decision was that people can work wherever the hell they want for whomever will have them. The court seems to have completely tossed out the idea of an employee having any kind of non-compete as violating their right to work. But the decision went much further. It wasn't just about working for the competition or even stealing former employees but the court even said stealing old clients and their phone numbers was fine as long as it was reasonable that the employee could have remembered that data. So if an employee even wrote some names and numbers down it was fine as long as it was a reasonably memorable list. In the particular case the employees were dealing with a fairly small elite clientele so the bank really lost big time. Again the court said that you can't make an employee forget stuff.
This of course is a Canadian supreme court case but I went to a lecture given by a supreme court justice who said that most supreme courts look to other supreme courts around the world that are based upon the English system of law as the same sort of cases tend to crop up in the various courts at similar times. So without a doubt the US courts will at least glance at this outstanding decision supporting workers rights.
To me the answer is quite simple. What is HP doing for any employee the day they leave? Absolutely nothing. So what should an ex-HP employee do for HP after they leave? Absolutely nothing. As for any contract. You could sign a slavery contract but any court would toss it out in a second. The key to a contract is that there is an exchange. If I promise to give you a gift of $1,000,000 tomorrow for absolutely nothing on your part you can't actually sue me when I don't deliver. There has to be an exchange. When the employee stops paying the employee the contract has ended regardless of what extra bits HP might wish for. I suspect that this will be going to the supreme court in the US as people will think that it is "unfair" for the employees to be so disloyal and some lower courts might be so foolish as to fall for this argument. But the law is not about fairness. It is about rules; and contract law is fairly old and boring that way. So it will be interesting to see how this all turns out. Personally I was surprised to see our supreme court side so thoroughly with the little guy when the other side was one of the biggest banks in Canada.
An apple like laptop for $300 bucks seems to be a bit of a no brainer. Like many slashdotters I am the technical adviser for most of my large family as well as work. With the exception of those who need specific Microsoft Programs or iTunes a Linux desktop on a machine with those specs would nicely meet the budget and needs of at least half my family. For my self I would love it as a second laptop. There are so many specs in the typical computer that far exceed the typical user's needs. My sister for example just bought an asus machine that I suggested as staples had a pretty good deal and her 7 year desktop really needed replacement. She is one of the people who must run a Windows machine so the specs are more demanding yet her 2TB HD is extreme overkill as she might need 20GB between the OS, MS Office and whatnot. I am willing to bet that in 2018 when she replaces this machine that the vast majority of her machine will be empty. Thus the tiny storage capacity of a Chromebook should be little detriment to most. But the better construction and lighter weight are far more important features that make the chromebook comparable to staples machines priced closer to $1000 as most of the sub $1000 stapes machines are clunky with cheap features such the split left shift key and load of bloatware. The same with many of the other lesser features of the chromebook as compared to "better" machines; most of the features where the chromebook is lesser are unimportant. The fact that at a glance the thing looks like a macbook won't hurt sales at all. So for anyone to be surprised that the chromebook is kicking ass is a surprise to me.
I am willing to bet that the MBA-types at places like HP are scratching their heads saying HP entry models are better than that damn thing as they go through a check list of how their machines are so much better feature for feature not realizing that 98% of customers don't even know what RAM does but their customers do know what they like when they see a friend with one and see that it runs a HD youtube video just as smoothly as the HP machine that has way more "L2 Cache".
The other thing that the MBA types are not realizing is that they are no longer competing with the laptop next to theirs in the display section of Staples or Best Buy but they are competing with the cell phone in the person's pocket.
I suspect that the average Pakistani thinks little of their government; thus anything the government blocks must be good and should be checked out. I suspect that the total amount of blasphemy watched is higher in the end as the population end runs any poorly implemented systems the same way Canadians end run the whole "This content not available in your region."
Once in a blue moon someone might have the exactly relevant facts (which I still think might be a load of BS) but I come to the comments to see the interesting side comments where people might say things like, "HP makes a big load of crap except their Model X is a hidden gem at half the cost and twice the power of anything else" Or "I stopped buying HP servers because company X makes this brain dead simple blade server system with each server coming in at $199..."
About 15 years ago I was buying an HP printer from Canada's equivalent to Best Buy and they were trying to do the usual crap warranty upsell. I told the guy, "For $10 off I'll take an HP product with no warranty." That was 15 years ago. I recently opened a cheap little HP inkjet and the included black cartridge had zero ink in it. I don't mean it had dried out but it had never contained ink as I cut it open and found no sign of ink. I didn't flip out or was even a tiny bit surprised. This is what I expect from HP products.
The same with HP laptops; I expect a mountain of bloated trialware that will be a huge pain to remove and a variety of other cheapnesses such as the whole split left shift key thing.
I also buy servers and with no experience at all with HP servers would simply not touch them with a bargepole due to my experiences with the rest of their product line. But back to their older products. I know people with older(10 years+) laserjets that just keep going and going; while I know others with newer colour laser jets where the red is fading due to dust buildup on a mirror buried deep inside the machine.
And don't get me going on the prices of toner and ink. So my guess is that HP is a company run by MBA types "proving" all kinds of "facts" using spreadsheets while leaving the basics such as loyal happy customers in the dust as those things don't spreadsheet very well. If you are wondering what I mean by the misuse of spreadsheets think about this scenario: You are HP and you have some new trialware product to add to your latest laptop. The product looks like it will make an average of $16.95 per machine. You expect to sell 300,000 units. Well that works out to 6 million dollars. Then you add another trialware column, and another, and another. Soon those machines are simply printing money. But how do you calculate the number of customers who will never buy another HP after realizing that they basically just bought the electronic equivalent to postal junk flyers? Not so easy to put that into a spreadsheet; you can but it tends to be built on more fuzzy information that can be tainted with optimism. My personal guess is that a goodly portion of high priced Apple's sales are built upon people seeing a machine that didn't come with Norton AV and its bloaty brethren. These technologically unsophisticated people then reason that it is worth double to not get this crap. I like Apple products so I am not casting aspersions and I also know that there are many other reasons people buy them both worthy and shallow but I know many people who have no inclination to waste one second fighting with their machine and value their time accordingly.
So when I hear that HP is squabbling over $11 billion that would potentially be detectable from the proper use of spreadsheets (accounting) I just laugh like a drain.
Desktop motherboard manufacturers know that in the past and in the present that following the dictates of Microsoft is how to survive. But those days are mostly over. I doubt any of the MB manufacturers are going to stand up and fart in Microsoft's face and say NO. But I suspect they know the trend is moving away from Microsoft and with the Linux noises that companies like Valve are making that Microsoft will only get weaker. Thus they will probably pretend to put UEFI onto the motherboard but make it really really easy for anyone with the capability to install linux to turn it off. So I suspect that the motherboards will soon come with UEFI enabled by default (maybe) but that you can either go into the bios and turn it off or short a jumper.
Other options would be to leave a weakness in the system so that it is easily hacked and thus bypassed; this way they can meet the letter of Microsoft's law but not at all the spirit. And of course they don't need to make a hole, they know people will find a hole and they won't bother patching it. But I just don't see the manufacturers coming out and directly attracting Microsoft's rage. Plus companies know that all kinds of businesses will want to put a whole range of products on their systems from oddballs like DOS with many wanting XP, Vista, and Windows 7. It wasn't that long ago that I saw an ATM running OS/2. I suspect the guts of the ATM were newish.
But in the near term Microsoft is going to ask "Who farted?" and the various manufacturers are going to pretend that they didn't.
All that said, Microsoft's worst nightmare would be for a company to start releasing Motherboards/Machines with UEFI disabled as a feature and telling the world that smart discerning high-end customers buy systems without UEFI and that the drones buy what the suits at Microsoft tell them. What microsoft seems to forget that while computer nerds running things like Linux are not a significant market share in and of themselves they are who guides, or outright chooses what systems get picked. Minimally how many slashdoter's are involved by their families when they are picking machines. Without starting a religious war about my personal tastes I can say that when people around me are buying a system I give them a fairly narrow range of choices that if they stray from I won't take their "urgent" calls at 10pm when things are going wrong a month later. "Oh your poorly designed laptop that sucks cooling air in only from the bottom overheated when sitting on the sofa and now you need your data pulled from its carcass? How about no." So while people like us probably only represent 1% of the market we probably influence 30+% of the market. So if we don't like UEFI the manufacturers will soon find that we have a bigger vote than simplistic market surveys might otherwise suggest. So even if they totally cave to MS I suspect cracks will appear fairly quickly.
Simply set their reviews aside and mark them as such. So if the author of Cooking Carrots reviews Cooking Lots of Carrots you can get a better understanding. If they give an otherwise 5 star book a crap review you think "sour grapes" but if they give it a 5 star review then you think, "Hmmmm an expert and competitor giving 5 stars is pretty damn good."
I read one Amazon thing where the author does a video about their books. The author trashes one of their own books. Basically the author said the publishing company ruined it. That is the most awesome review I have seen on Amazon.
If they are going to ban anybody it should be two groups, first the angry group that just keeps handing out 1 star reviews. The second group should be publishers. You can tell their 5 star review from a mile away all perfect market speak that nearly matches the books official description, "A gripping tale spanning 4 continents and two world wars..."
One thing to keep in mind is that the ARM is much more general purpose while the Intel chips tend to have a more complex assembly instruction set. So for adding one number to another (x=y+z) I suspect the simpler ARM architecture is going to win on power consumption. But many Intel chips have assembly instructions specifically for crazy things like AES encryption. This is used as the basis of many encryption protocols, hashing, and random number generation. So if a machine is basically serving up all encrypted data then it is possible that an Intel chip will be much faster and consume much less power while performing these operations. Depending on whether he software will take advantage
So I thing this is a case where you really have to look at the significantly broken down performance results to see if your use case fits one chip better than the other. A normal consumer example would be if your OS is encrypting your file system and using these cool Intel instructions. I suspect that it would then be a night and day difference in battery drain. But the drag is that you probably have to pretty well buy a device with both chips, set up your standard configuration, and then test it out. This is generally only something an IT person about to provision a department might be expected to do.
I guess that the overall benchmark is all we really have to go by which really doesn't tell the whole story.
I suspect that people are going to fight empty cars (which are just too cool). But more interestingly some of the people who fight drunk driving will show their true colours and be shown to actually be anti drink people. And before you cast any stones at me for that one it is the position of the woman who founded one of the biggest anti drinking and driving movements; she started it after losing loved ones but feels that the organization has been co opted by temperance types.
This is totally correct. The key is controlling information flow. Usually an org chart does not only suggest who has power but is usually designed to control the flow of information. This is why MBA types are so keen on huge complicated org charts which usually quickly get dotted lines here and there. So if you can end run your boss information control wise they usually get really anxious. The nightmare scenario in a classic MBA polluted company would be some rubber on the road type like a programmer is golfing buddies with say the CFO. Every layer of management in between the programmer and the CFO will literally lose sleep over this disastrous situation any reports up or directives down must suddenly contain the untwisted truth; horrible situation for all those useless middle managers.
Actually wrong, one it is too many years, and two they published his name in a staff directory. The only "Insider" knowledge was that he was a useless douche which was not gained from the inside of the new company but from outside it. Basically this would be the same as being an oil engineer who is told about a new drilling technology that will make old oil fields new again and then going out and buying up old oil fields before this becomes generally known; the fact might be little known but it is not "insider" information. If someone inside that company had disclosed that he was still being a useless waste product then that would have been insider info; but his behavior was actually irrelevant. What he gave me was an insight into how poor their hiring practices were; had they asked around for anyone who ever worked with him I suspect they would have trash talked him into the dust; so either they didn't ask around or they ignored the feedback. I don't think he was there a day before he finished moving and was laid off. So the information I had was basically information the company had leaking out into the world for anyone to think through. Sort of like the oddities of recent Apple decisions making me think that they have a critical gap left by Steve Jobs. Things like the new iMac has a crappier HD than the previous model. I can see Steve Jobs making someone cry if they tried that stunt on his watch.
Now had I bet against my own company knowing he was a useless douche then that would be insider info but seeing that he was being called on his QA stupidity if anything I should have bought shares in the company I worked for (would have made good money there)
Insist on a one person reporting structure. The moment you are reporting to more that one person all is lost as each then is competing for your time and will try to shove in more features or reporting demand than the other.
Years ago I was happily working on a project where I basically dealt with the client. But our QA department just lost a big contract and saw my good sized budget and weaseled in. The head of the QA department did his damnedest to get more and more people onto the project and then started communicating with the client which somehow was being then communicated to me as we need more testing. So after a few weeks I was having to deal with 5 QA people, a QA manager, and the client. Productivity dropped like a stone. So I met on the side with the client who demanded that they approve any billable time for any employee ahead of time. So the QA manager would send in a huge complicated (30 pages) request for this and that and the client would send back a note, "At this time I will only accept billable time on programming, at the end of the project we will re-examine the need for QA." Then the next time the QA manager phoned him he answered the call with, "the time on this call had better not be billable."
A week later the QA manager had an all-hands-onboard management meeting where he demanded that all projects have a set minimum percentage of QA. This failed and he then layed off half of his QA staff.
The best part of all this is that I made some good money. The QA Manager was hired by a huge tech company (2000 bubble) and I played the options market to basically short the crap out of that company as he had been hired for a very senior position and my logic was that any company that could not filter out this waste product was doomed. Their share price went from $120 to around $10 in a couple of months and he basically moved there and was then laid off.
So insist on a single reporting person which will then result in your MBA type having to stack his MBA underling on top of you. This will be so obviously silly that it is doomed. If you do end up reporting to more than one person get the resume cooking as the stress of reporting to more than one person on a project is just not worth it. If you have 3 MBA types all piling on with their own perverse desires(TPA reports) then they will each demand 40 plust hours of work from you per week so either you will die trying to feed their stupid requests or you will fail and they will all sabotage you as they will need someone to blame and they are higher up the information food chain than you.
I don't care if any single company gathers information. They can gather away and store the information like squirrels in little burrows they dug in the hillside. What I do care about is when they share the data. This whole "trusted third parties" crap is well crap. I really really get upset when I hear about companies that gather up personal data and then sell it on to other companies that start vacuuming it all together to start building a profile as you move through the internet.
So if these politicians had the slightest understanding of where the problem really lay they would ban the sharing of any data from one company to another. I don't want anyone but the electrical company to know anything about my account. The amount of information that your electrical system leaks is quite extraordinary. Minimally they can figure out what time you get home each day and sell that to telemarketers who will know exactly when to call you, If they can time the call perfectly to your arrival with your jacket still on you might run for the phone and not have enough time to check to see that it is a crap number.
Your phone company can see you phoning car companies and then suddenly an insurance company will phone you to see if you want insurance for your soon to be new car. But then you get the insidious government prying. There might be a mugging at 6pm and they see you arrive at your house at 6:05 and now you are on their suspect list. Let's look at his surfing. Oh he bought a jacket last year that roughly matches the description given by the victim and he is behind on a few bills and maybe needs some money quick.
So I don't care if a website gathers all kinds of data to figure out what seemed to have attracted me to their site and which page I left off on, as long as they don't share that with anyone... ever.
Never was a fan of Mr. Cuban; now I am a huge fan. Thanks.
One of the qualifications of a patent is that it is non-obvious to a professional in that industry. That is pretty well ignored when most patents that I see litigated are 100% obvious to people well outside that area. Keyboards on a cell phone for texting. Wow that must have take a room full of geniuses working since Edison to work out that combo. Sweeping gestures on a touch surface; I bet only one person in history would have ever come up with that one. Backup sensors, never would have thought about people wondering if they would crash into something while backing up; that one is nearly as ingenious as putting rear view mirrors into cars.
Then you get the best ones where everybody on both sides agree the patent is total shit, but do you want to risk a jury not agreeing, so let's settle. RIM settled for a zillion dollars on a patent that then got thrown out.
So if I were to modify the patent system I would suggest, No software patents, you build software or you don't, only two people can hold a patent, the inventor or a company that actually builds significant quantities of the patented product. No patent holding companies. Change the patent lawsuit process. First is you name a company in a claim. Then the company has 1 year to to get your patent tossed. The patent people must complete a full review within that year and if they don't the patent is tossed. An appeal of the patent itself can be brought before a jury but in this case a jury of peers must be at least half people in that industry. Patent awards must be severely tempered by actual gains. And lastly patents need to have way shorter lives. This life must be partially based upon active product sales. So a patent would give you say 5 years to get to market. But once sales start you have another 5 years of protection. Then its out. So if apple comes up with a cool new antenna and immediately puts it into their phones they can't deny the consumer that innovation in other products until 2032 just 2017.
But if I could have any two rule changes it would be that only inventors and genuine producers can hold patents and no software patents.
First I plead guilty to the worst time estimating ever. I would probably guess wrong as to how long it will take me to make this post. I have had personal 2 week projects drag on for 6 months no problem. So if anyone has some great rules of thumb I would love to know. Years ago I met a CFO who had just finished grilling his tech guy for over an hour getting the tech guy to come up with a worst case scenario for the project they were about to begin. In that hour the tech guy nearly tripled his time and cost estimates. After he left the CFO doubled the time and cost estimate for the budget. In the end the CFO was nearly bang on.
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I have taken a great PMI course and would recommend it to anyone in tech. Yet the PMI stuff was great if the project was fairly straightforward. But most tech projects, especially those found on kickstarter, are not really building projects so much as R&D which by its nature delves into the unknown. So scheduling the unknown is either going to be very fuzzy or lies. Since most people insist on a fixed date they are insisting on being lied to
So I would be the last to cast stones and would doubt fraud until the fuzziness of R&D had been eliminated.
He didn't want a bag of cash with a $ on the side. It obviously would have been transferred into a normal account and then wired or whatnot. In the heated craziness of the last days of the real-estate boom you moved fast as many auctions and whatnot required that you bring a bank draft for some minimum amount to prove that you were serious. This would be like going to your mutual fund and saying you wanted to cash out and they would tell you "no", except that the whole idea of money market fund is that they are almost like a bank account but they provide higher interest but come with a tiny amount of risk. Typically your broker is loaning that money out in things like overnight commercial paper. The whole 24 hour withdrawal thing is pretty well an industry standard.
Also people don't keep large amounts in normal bank accounts for two reasons. One is that they aren't insured past a small amount (say $300,000) so if the bank goes bust you lose any excess money whereas a brokerage account is somewhat safer except that your investment itself can go bloop. The second reason people don't keep large amounts in normal bank accounts is that you don't get a very good return on your money.
So if you have a pile of money you also don't generally put it all into long term investments like stocks and bonds because you might want to keep some money handy for things like opportunities to buy cool houses.; thus you compromise and put some of your money into something that generates better interest yet is almost as liquid as a bank account like a money market fund but doesn't have the larger sales penalties. The normal consumer would look at something like a GIC in Canada.
Keep in mind that this is a huge bad sign. Either they don't have the money, they are too disorganized to pay some small fry, or they are just bad people. Any which way that is not how to run a business.
A potentially similar sign came shortly before the big sub prime disaster. A guy had money in a Big Euro Bank money market fund which, in theory, will return your money in about 24 hours. So a really good deal came up on a house (house prices were about to crash but hadn't yet) and he needed a big down payment of a million dollars. So he goes to his guy and says, "Withdraw a million." the guy invokes some obscure clause and says NO. He freaks out and then demands all his money. They say they can delay something like 30 or 90 days and they do. So it turns out to be fortunate and he misses out on the house and eventually gets his money. But when I told this to a person I know who is a huge trader he just told me I was wrong wrong wrong, the Big Euro Bank was probably the most sound bank in the world and that they were old and had a huge reputation and wouldn't screw someone like that in a million years. He went on to say my money market friend was probably lying to cover up the fact that he was out of money, not the bank. Needless to say that bank went right to the brink and without government intervention would have died.
The take-away is that either the people who are handling your account are incompetent, are mean, or that you now have a valuable insight into a company on the brink.
What the hell is wrong with a university when it is so rudderless that it feels that one ounce of effort should be directed toward immigration control? If illegal immigration is causing some sort of problem for the university that is interfering with their core mandate of teaching students then yes get all over that. But if this is a paper pusher problem where some people are signing up for a third rate university to get a visa and then booking it then who cares. The university could just provide transcripts to the border people for their foreign students and let the government deal with it.
But even for their domestic students who gives a crap if a student attends a lecture; this is the 21st century and any modern educational institution should be providing a video or audio lecture for students anyway. I recently was watching a Stanford lecture series on iTunes where the classroom had around 20 regular attendees with well over 200 students signed up. The professor made frequent references to those students in their bunny slippers. So if a university is taking the opposite approach than Stanford University they would need pretty extraordinary evidence to prove to me that they are heading in the correct direction and not in the exact wrong direction.
If, as a parent, this joke of an institution were on my children's list of candidate universities I would explain to my kids that this was a really bad sign and that they should not consider the place. Luckily for my kids we live far away and have far better choices.
I dumped Eclipse for Sublime Text 2 and XCode. I wouldn't call Sublime an IDE nor a text editor but damn it makes me happy just using it. XCode just grew on me while using it for Apps but I would dump it in a second for Sublime if there was a realistic way to make and debug an app in Sublime.
.pro files and whatnot. This is just stupid. I should be able to go into any of the popular IDEs click on New Project and select QT and be off and running. How much work would it have been for the QT people to make this for all the major IDEs? The only thing that really impressed me with QT Creator was that QT worked really well with it. But a simple template or plug in for the other IDEs would accomplish as much. Personally I think they built it primarily to get people using QT Quick and the whole QML crap so that they would then be trapped. They seemed to forget that the trap would result in it being more of a wall and keeping people out just as much as it kept people in.
I don't like QT Creator for two reasons; one is that it is pretty desperate for you to do things the QT way and the other is that it is really only useful for programming QT. I used to love Eclipse and love Sublime because you can program anything in it; C++, PHP, Python, SQL, HTML, anything. I long ago dumped the whole visual studio thing because Microsoft was pushing more and more to do things their way. I will give XCode kudos for leaving me along as to what and how I want to approach a project. They have this whole new storyboard thing that they are no doubt excited about but they let you do things your way regardless.
My experience with QT is that I will use it for a project that lasts through at least one good version of QT. Then for the next project I will start with the new version and have a huge battle to get QT entirely working with the IDE I am using. Often my battle results in a clunky set of hacks to get the intellisense and debuging working along with dealing with