All I care about is that QT ends up surviving and being independent again. As for Nokia they can rot back in the 90s where they seem to be stuck.
If Nokia had had half a brain they would have made QT for iPhone and then Android so that people could port their iPhone apps quickly to Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Window Mobile, and oh yes the Nokia phones. Nokia would have then become the center of the app universe while their own app library would have grown somewhat. I reluctantly learned Objective-C and have little desire to relearn Java so that I can port my iPhone apps to android. So with a C++ code once and tweak a bunch of times portability I would have been very happy.
My worry is that they will pull the rug on QT and then sell the carcass off to some group one step away from being a patent troll.
My key problem (that caused me to first drop.Net and then all MS products) is that Windows programming has long been dominated by Microsoft's desire that you make your apps integrate with their Enterprise stuff. But if I am building the next Angry birds then any MS specific enterprise libraries are just bloat. You might argue that a programmer can ignore the enterprise stuff. But a good example would be that.net started out as a small library to take on Java. version 1.1 filled in some gaps but by version two office had taken over and it started getting really big. By version 2.5 it was huge and the bloat was all enterprisey.
Also everything was becoming way more complicated than it needed to be. Instead of some simple object you would instantiate and then call member functions it was all wonky with.com style object factories.
So if Windows wants any chance for me to even look at programming for their devices I will only look if they break up their SDK into a basic SDK that will allow me access to those phone types bits such as the screen, audio, accelerometer, messaging, networking, etc. Then if I want to screw with outlook or other MS products then I will install a separate addon SDK.
Also with the SDK I don't want to follow some new fad that MS happens to be following. Just give me basic system calls with more advanced calls hidden away for more advanced features. So for sound give me a sound class with member functions such as PlaySound(soundfile). Don't initially make me use a DirectX complicated sound system that is so complicated that I end up just copying and pasting sample code blindly into my software and then hiding it behind my own PlaySound(soundfile) function. For those people who are hardcore give them a backdoor where things are necessarily weird.
So here is a bit of code that I want to be able to write (sans error handling and async stuff):
Net *net=new Network();
MSData *data=net->getFile('http://mysite.com/sound.mp3');
SoundSystem *sound_system=new SoundSystem();
sound_system->setVolume(100);
sound_system->playSound(data);
Don't make each of the above steps 10 lines long with all kinds of complicated templates and parameters. When you do that you might impress your CS professor but you have missed the point of encapsulation and the KISS principle. I love an SDK where you can start to guess the class names and the names of their member functions. So if you have a class called SoundInitSys3BuildFactory that requires that you pass it (MS_HRDWR_SYS_SPKR_EAR_HEAR2) you have failed. I would be willing to bet that MS has failed.
MS might make all kinds of arguments about good CS practices but at this point I have already bent over backwards to learn Objective-C for the iPhone. I did this because it was where the money was. But iPhone had the advantage of the being the first smartphone where the effort might pay off. At this point MS needs to study the concept of friction. For every small obstacle they put in people's way they can plan on loosing a fair chunk of their potential audience.
Anonymous comments is critical for the free flow of genuine information. It is one thing for some twerp to call people schoolyard names but it is critical for somebody working at say the police department to mention that the policeman waving the club is named Bob Smith and that you can tell because of his distinctive boots. Or if you negatively comment on a beating video that the cops should be fired won't result in the cops pulling you over and "finding" drugs in your car.
Not a flippant comment. I suspect that this guy gave a presentation like no 100 geeks could give. Because of his sports fame and no doubt an ability to have access to the corridors of power he was able to convince the government that they could "pick a winner". I have watched and dealt with people like this my whole career. They see money being made and they insist on getting a "taste" Then they use their one schmoozing skill, round up an obscene amount of money put on a great show which usually is designed to impress and round up even more money. Then since their single driving focus wasn't putting out a great product they fail.
In fact I have long suspected that these guys don't usually want a product out as then the product would potentially drive the success well beyond their simple abilities.
The real drag in these situations is that not only do they waste taxpayer's money but they drive legitimate start-ups out of business; this is through their eating much of the available investment money, eating up the local talent, overpaying for rent, and then leaving a sour taste in everyone's mouths in the area for tech start-ups with the whole once bitten twice shy thing. In my area there was a famous flameout of an educational business. Same deal these guys literally had top government education people working for them "on secondment". Then boom it all blew up over a decade ago. The lawsuits and criminal charges are still working through the system.
Any good tech business need some business savvy people near the top; but It all boils down to whether there are tech people making the decisions. The showmen should be the head of marketing, not the head of the company.
People should like what I like not what they like. Only my opinion matters and if you have any interests I don't have then you are wrong and should change that.
How much of an asshole do you have to be to hold an opinion like this? Some people enjoy sports and some people like polishing rocks. The world is a diverse collection of people and just because you might not care for the Olympics doesn't mean its wrong for any one else to do so.
I do care where my tax dollars go. I would vote zero dollars going to any sport beyond the level of entry level kids sports. It would be a great world where those who vote for more arenas and stadiums get discount tickets to those. But those who vote for more space exploration and science get the vaccines, safer cars, weather forecasts, and get to fly in airplanes built using modern technology.
The Olympics can teach us all kinds things about government corruption and inefficiencies. How the IOC is allowed to change the laws of a country ranging from IP to road laws. How the IOC gets a country verging on bankruptcy to spend around 20 billion dollars so that the 1%, the VIPs, and a token handful of us rif-raf can feel important. One the best examples of this is how the VIPs got so many tickets that the stands are half empty for venues that are "Sold out". Another is that the city with some of the worst traffic in the western world created lanes just like they had in Soviet Russia that were limited to well connected people.
All this to watch various countries send their OCD athletes who have nearly destroyed themselves try for a medal.
Bread and circuses.
The only silver lining is that the company that was an inch away from privatizing the police in Britain has humiliated itself to a point where this won't happen. Another study in where a company that can't find its ass with its hands was able to schmooze its way into the corridors of power and milk this single schmoozing skill for billions.
If the money and effort (considering what that many athletes working out for that many hours must also be worth) put into the Olympics were instead were to have been put into science and space exploration we wouldn't be watching a car sized robot touch down on Mars but would be watching the amateur Olympic team representing Mars participate in a scaled down Solar Olympics.
For a small site with limited functionality WYSIWYG is probably fine. A bit more complicated and WYSIWYG with some hand customization is also fine. But if you were building slashdot then handcoding is the only way to go. All that will happen with WYSIWYG on a big site is that you will take X amount of time to be 90% done and then you will fight the code for 2X time and then redo the whole thing by hand in 10X time. Or worse without a complete redo you will end up with a spaghetti bastard that never really works.
According to the Discovery channel the telescope was funded by aliens looking to contact their home planet. Or am I mixing that up with the History Channel? In that case the sequels will be Housewives of Astronomers, Flip this Telescope, Telescope Road Truckers, Most Dangerous Telescopes in the World.
Basically the Discovery Channel died when it ate TLC.
People who store food for long periods either often put nitrogen in, co2 in, or throw iron sachets in that eat the oxygen. The CO2 might join any moisture to make a weak acid and the iron can eat so much oxygen as to create a small vacuum that just pulls in air anyway. So a toot of nitrogen is probably best. Compared to oxygen nitrogen is basically inert. But an iron sachet wouldn't hurt on top of the nitrogen as it will eat any oxygen that leaks in.
The other key will be variety. If you use a technology that you could be certain of can you be certain of the longevity of the materials. I have 10 year old burnable CDs where the data layer just flaked off. I also have a very old external HD where the rubber feet turned to liquid goo. So even if you decided that a USB memory stick would be the way to go I would suggest buying 2 or three very different brands.
As to worrying about how to read the format just throw in an old laptop (minus its battery) which might last and be ready to read your data.
Also separate the different storage media into different ziplocks or containers so that if one melts into a corrosive goo that the rest might be spared.
If you throw in some silica gel packs to eat any moisture be aware that if moisture is getting in regularly over time those packets can start pooling moisture around them. Thus put it at the bottom with the good stuff propped above to keep it safe. Also the iron packs can become warm if exposed to a blast of air (like the handwarmers) so keep that away from the important bits that you don't want cooked.
Lastly keep the temperature cool and stable as entropy is slower when cold.
Acronyms usually equal a bullshit passing fad. Not always as in LASER. But when bureaucrats pull out the acronyms I call BS. Modern education has a single flaw, little real measurement; lots of fake measurement. You rarely hear of a school system doing a double blind test of the "New Math" and then comparing the results. They buy into some education guru's new magical thinking in the same way that eating bat wings will help you fly better and buy millions in new textbooks. The teachers go off on a "Knowledge filled weekend" and somehow come back ready to teach (gooder). Then when the few OK measures such as the SATs come along the students bomb yet nobody blames the "new math" or whatnot they just quietly move onto the next fad.
The one fad they avoid like a plague is to measure teacher/administrator performance and fire the bad ones. Great teachers will succeed with almost any crap system. The bad ones will destroy students regardless of how good the system is as long as there are no consequences for their lousy behavior.
A good newspaper that spends time investigating, digging, and has the balls to take on critical issues have been a huge pillar of our civilization. But take my local newspaper in Nova Scotia. Technically it is independent which is great but it is run by one rich family so do you think that it will run exposes on their friends? I can't remember the last time, if ever, they have nailed a slimy car dealership or real-estate agent to the wall as these are some of their biggest remaining advertisers. They did wail away at our current mayor but it was more schoolyard than Watergate. It was a local arts paper that did the gumshoe work that blew him out of office. The Mayor in waiting looks like a putz and I haven't seen them take a single shot at him.
Move one province over and the major newspapers are owned by the richest family there.
But the internet is made up of a bunch of little twerps with nothing to loose and everything to gain(becoming the next Drudge) by blowing up an old boys club or two by exposing truths that our local newspapers are too incestuously invested in.... I Love It!!!
I have found that almost without exception the type of person who is huge on over-managing a project is usually a Type A control freak that suffers physical pain when others are allowed to make any decision without running it by them. By far the best companies in the world give many of their employees a huge amount of freedom which allows the employees to thrive and the company to keep top notch employees. Most companies are the opposite and survive despite themselves being larded down with waste products for employees.
Agile programming all comes down to costs and benefits. If you are building a billion dollar bridge much like the last billion dollar bridge with a tight timeline then plan plan plan as the few millions spent planning will probably reduce the number of billion dollar disasters. But if you are building an innovative million dollar software project which is basically bunch of smaller projects where fixing mistakes isn't costly then it is not only inefficient to over plan it but irrational as you can't actually plan research which is what most projects largely are.
What you do is set goals and repeatedly check to see if all hands are rowing toward the goal. It is very easy to watch to see if a lazy git is rowing the other way. If so you toss him overboard and keep rowing. Not that hard really.
Personally my favorite experience on an agile group project is when other programmers do something with such style and innovation that I am green with envy. This sort of behavior brings out the competitor in most people who try to meet the newly raised bar. This is an everyone wins scenario in that even the crap programmer will be encouraged to grow. Oh sorry this is an everyone wins except for the now redundant Project lead, project manager, lead architect, project manager, producer, or whatever the paper pushing position used to be called before he was let go. I am not saying that you have no management control over a project just not a more chiefs than indians situation with layer after layer of reporting structure. You basically have one or two programmers assigned to give fairly regular status reports to someone who is monitoring(not micromanaging) the project to make sure it doesn't go off course.
I hate software patents, I really hate software patents. They are a giant parasitical suck on the vitality of the tech industry but I believe there is one area where they are potentially good and that is in the really non obvious which is already a requirement for getting a patent; a requirement that seems to be obviously ignored. So if you come up with an algorithm that factors 1024 bit numbers with a 486 in 2 seconds then maybe you deserve a patent. If you make a one click checkout then holy smokes no patent!
Also there should be a limited transferability to patents. Some sort of rule that the only owners of a patent can be either the original inventor or someone who is equipped to implement it; basically no patent lawyers. As part of the reform there should be a requirement that the people named on the patent should get a percentage of any money made from the patent regardless of their relationship to the owners. So when the Nortel patents were bought for billions the people on the patents should have received a percent or two.
Lastly there should be a bureau of patent invalidation which has no relationship with the original patent office. All they do is quickly review and kill patents. The problem now is that after years of fighting in court and probable settlements the patent might be killed, too little, too late.
I saw a beta of it run on a EEE netbook with 1G ram. It was crazy fast. Loaded office, outlook, explorer... boom boom boom. But the interface was from Star Trek TNG without the curves. Then there is this whole locking the machine to the OS business. Talk about turn off.
I stopped using windows years ago because everything was office office office. Most people type, spellcheck, then print/email. Or they make ugly powerpoints and the most advanced feature used is to import a graph from excel. This is not what MS should have based their entire company on; and if it truly was the core of the company they would have put office on Linux long ago.
I don't think MS knows what it is and while that is going on the Office section has mostly dominated.
To contrast it with Apple's success; They know they are iTunes. Google mostly knows it is searching mass amounts of data and ads. And facebook knows it is monkeys standing under the tree looking at the shiny thing.
So I suspect that the new Windows is a good idea at its core but it will end up soaking in a caustic bath of Office until it is brittle and smells funny.
Windows 9 will be an attempt to compensate for the Office induced stink by wrapping it in steel bands to reenforce the structure. I am willing to bet that if the OS programmers at MS were able to tell the Office people to bugger off and even go so far as to sandbox their whole suite that Windows might regain the crown. I was so happy when Firefox walled out crap from MS putting itself into FF. It is this sort of thinking that has dogged MS for over a decade.
I remember when NT was really popular with programmers and I think one of the main reasons was that it wasn't tripping over itself to push other MS products. They had designed it to be a server OS with a thin GUI and the office people left it largely alone.
The key is that the screen size is largely proportional to the amount and type of content being consumed or created.
Small screens are great for basic consumption of small games, music, messages, phone calls; but they are terrible for say editing a word doc, or editing a video. Larger, say iPad screens are great for more complicated consumption like movies or more complicated games. They are also good for basic data entry like say simple form entry; they are still terrible for any content creation beyond a very short document. A laptop is good for some programming, accounting, and a sweet spot for typing documents (probably as they are nearly the same size as a typewriter.) Gaming is better on laptops but still not that great. Keep in mind that gaming in a weird way is content creation as your inputs are as important as what happens on screen. Think of how many "key strokes" in a common game.
The single monitor PC is better for programming, video editing, accounting, and gaming. But it is when you get to the multi monitor setup that content creation is king. There is nothing better when programming, video editing, even editing.
Post-PC is a terrible term, what has been terrible is having Joe-surfs-alot using powerhouse of a machine to watch people puking on each other on YouTube. He should have had an iPad. The professionals will use PCs and the mass-consumers will use more locked in devices.
This also circles around to how the OS will be configured. For joe-surfs-alot the device is best locked up tight as any flexibility will result in misconfigurations and breakage. But a programmer or business user has to be able to tailor the machine to the exact configuration needed for maximum efficiency. As a programmer I have my machine set up in ways that would just be annoying and stupid for most of my non-programming family. The terminal in my dock would be the smallest example of this.
The simple question is what device will be used to create iPad applications? Or the iPad OS?
BB phones are actually pretty good for corporate types. They're tough, simple, have great keyboards, battery life, and so on. For corporate tough the basic phones do exactly what they need and do it well. Corporate types have a few critical needs: they need security and they need to respond to long emails with long emails. They don't need GPS, Angry Birds, or much else. I am not saying that BBs are better than the competition overall but they are extremely fit for the purpose they are put to with a single glaring exception. They are often crippled as someone who just stepped on a land mine.
First the Telcos often throw a few little twists of their own limiting things such as browsing over Wi Fi. Then the corporate IT people have and usually abuse the ability to set various permissions such as no installed Apps, no browsing certain web sites, and other anger inducing features. Phones such as the iPhone don't have these anger inducing features and leave lots of room for people to love them.
RIM could pull its ass out of the fire tomorrow morning by releasing an update that eliminated all blocks that have been imposed by telcos and IT departments. These people would scream and moan and make long lists as to how RIM had ruined their lives but seeing that RIM accountants must be looking up Novell as a case study it is time for bold moves that would suddenly turn that resented little brick into something they would fall in love with again.
My only memories of Novell are how much of a drag it was on my system and how the IT people would dominate my laptop until I just bought my own. Oh wait isn't that just like all the people given free BBs who go out and buy their own iPhones.
There are BB people and there are iPhone like people. BB can keep those people if they could give them a reason; QNX is not a reason. Freedom is a reason.
The key here is not who is the present CEO of tech companies but who was the (potentially mythical) founder. The title CEO implies that the company is public or at least has a bunch of shareholders; these CEOs are often MBAs. Often the founders have sold, retired, or the MBA types have pushed the founder out by this point. So the stat that I want to see is what percentage of successful tech companies are(or were) run by someone with a degree?
Plus think of all the companies that were bought out by a big company and technically no longer exist; who started those? I don't necessarily say that the article was wrong just that by narrowing it down to the title CEO that you have probably cut off the "Mythical" story that we have come to love. CEO would be the post script to that story. Lots of those "Mythical" people would probably have held the title: President, or Co-founder.
The command line is not better or worse than a beautiful GUI. It is a whole different paradigm with a whole different purpose. I love that I can go to my mac and type nearly the exact same commands as my linux box to do the same things; xvfz is nearly one keystroke. But these are not things I would ever impose on my family.
The key (hee hee) to the command line is constancy of knowledge. Things I do now, I have done for over a decade, and hopefully will do for another decade using the same keystrokes. These tend to be dark arcane things like ssh tunnels that again I would never impose upon my family. I don't need to learn a new interface from year to year, I don't need to learn a new interface from OS to OS. Much of my Solaris knowledge is still good. One of the reasons that I fled Windows was that its command line was not consistent with my other more Unix'y knowledge. If I had to noodle a Windows box I would start poking around looking for applications and menus that conceal the things I want almost as well as a command line ever could.
To eliminate the command line from an OS that I use would be to eliminate an OS from my use.
It is critical to understand the difference between responsibility and blame. Most MBA run development shops are big on figuring out who to blame and handing out bonuses, promotions, probation based upon it. The best shops make sure that if you broke it then you fix it. It is a great learning experience to have to fix it in that you both learn what you did wrong and to me more careful next time. (Fixing it means working with the sysadmin to restore the backups of uncorrupted data or whatnot) By removing the blame culture you also remove much of the need for titles like product manager, project manager, architect, and so on. It just a bunch of guys who know what they are doing working together building something cool. Then you only need a supreme court in the form of an owner or one boss who resolves disputes.
This all breaks down if you have troublemakers or incompetents. The troublemakers often come in the form of highly certified my way or the highway types and the incompetents should probably just not be developers.
A sure sign of dysfunction is if some formulaic style is imposed that sounds good to MBA types but otherwise sounds stupid. Think about who would hire a Six-Sigma-Blackbelt: someone with an MBA or someone with 10 years of successful projects under their belt?
I would be less quick to blame PHP than blame the fact that many PHP programmers come from "Web" developers. People who started with MS Paint and some HTML, then some CSS and then jammed in some PHP. After a while they got pretty good at small PHP 50 line programs. But when faced with huge projects people like this just aren't prepared. A great programmer could use PHP just as well as any other language.
But the second half is that PHP should be bad at times. Often a simple unstructured script is the best. It needs to do a simple thing quickly and well. There is no need for templating, language abstraction, unit testing, separation of data, logic, and view. So if you are a bank deploying a mission critical system then it should be rigorous and perfect. But if your blog about car tires needs a widget that reads from your odometer then hack away.
I would say that all arguments that condemn PHP should whither under the light that Facebook was developed primarily in PHP with MySQL. Even now they have their Hip Hop that converts PHP to C++. Arguing against PHP is like saying that Carbon Fiber is a better material than steel for car frames. Absolutely true but most cars are still successfully made from steel for a wide variety of reasons. Next time I need to win an F1 challenge and it had better be Carbon Fiber. But for the next ride to the grocery store and I just don't care.
So to circle around one could argue that the best cars are made from this or that but the reality is that what made the truly terrible cars terrible was that the designer would have made a terrible car out of anything. So teach a "better" language to the people making messes with PHP and you will just have a different kind of mess.
For me RIM has always reeked of arrogance. The people who use it, the people who sell it, the complicated plans, the whole dominating of companies, right down to the set up of their servers; all arrogant. There was nothing happy about their phones. iPhone users definitely have a "look at me, look at me" thing going but with apps like angry birds there is a more fun vibe with the iPhone. Nokia (I know it's Finnish) always had a Tutonic, "My phone is better engineered than your phone." thing going.
I don't know if RIM encouraged it but so many companies handed BBs to their managers and crap flip phones to their grunts. There often would be this huge cut off where some arbitrary level of employee would not be allowed to get a BB. To make it worse RIM gave the IT people the ability to select and block various features as they would choose. IT people are famous for pissing people off with their arbitrary policies so more Apple fodder. This sort of elitism just fed the Apple monster giving the joe employee the desire to buy a better phone for themselves. Then it got nasty for RIM when the top top management would break out from the RIM stranglehold and force the IT people to get them an Apple.
In the end all these companies ended up handing out BBs to employees who used their own money to get an iPhone/iPad for their own use. Pretty bad when your product is free and still can't win the hearts and minds of all but a few hard core MBA types.
He nailed it with the question as to what the stock market is for! Personally I feel that the whole stock market has gone almost completely off the rails. It seems as if a small number of New York finance companies have got an extortion racket going where they have set themselves up as gate keepers who believe they are entitled to a piece of everyone else's pie.
As a developer I have a micro taste of these types at least once a week. Someone sees me making money and decides that they want a taste. They want me to "help" them with their big idea. I'm not sure the offer has even been as good as 50/50 even though the work would be 99/1 and skill 99.999/.001 they usually have to hold back their anger when I recommend a few good C++ books. I can't imagine being in a scenario where people like this could force themselves into my business. They would have no problem saying "You would be nothing without my help." and walking away with their "share".
My other favorite is when MBA types tell successful software companies to get more corporate types and that a board of directors would be a valuable addition. The question that they don't like is "Why are we making too many millions?"
I didn't know that slashdot was taking paid advertisements. Well this one is excellent a blend of interesting tech fact, geek interest, and in your face sales (our product is better than the competitors).
Well I have some bio-gas generating land in Florida for sale. I will write a scholarly article about how a grid of microbial fuel cells could power a server farm and the water abundant environment can be used for green cooling. Get in before Oracle buys it all up.
Slashdot Mirror
All I care about is that QT ends up surviving and being independent again. As for Nokia they can rot back in the 90s where they seem to be stuck.
If Nokia had had half a brain they would have made QT for iPhone and then Android so that people could port their iPhone apps quickly to Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Window Mobile, and oh yes the Nokia phones. Nokia would have then become the center of the app universe while their own app library would have grown somewhat. I reluctantly learned Objective-C and have little desire to relearn Java so that I can port my iPhone apps to android. So with a C++ code once and tweak a bunch of times portability I would have been very happy.
My worry is that they will pull the rug on QT and then sell the carcass off to some group one step away from being a patent troll.
My key problem (that caused me to first drop .Net and then all MS products) is that Windows programming has long been dominated by Microsoft's desire that you make your apps integrate with their Enterprise stuff. But if I am building the next Angry birds then any MS specific enterprise libraries are just bloat. You might argue that a programmer can ignore the enterprise stuff. But a good example would be that .net started out as a small library to take on Java. version 1.1 filled in some gaps but by version two office had taken over and it started getting really big. By version 2.5 it was huge and the bloat was all enterprisey.
.com style object factories.
Also everything was becoming way more complicated than it needed to be. Instead of some simple object you would instantiate and then call member functions it was all wonky with
So if Windows wants any chance for me to even look at programming for their devices I will only look if they break up their SDK into a basic SDK that will allow me access to those phone types bits such as the screen, audio, accelerometer, messaging, networking, etc. Then if I want to screw with outlook or other MS products then I will install a separate addon SDK.
Also with the SDK I don't want to follow some new fad that MS happens to be following. Just give me basic system calls with more advanced calls hidden away for more advanced features. So for sound give me a sound class with member functions such as PlaySound(soundfile). Don't initially make me use a DirectX complicated sound system that is so complicated that I end up just copying and pasting sample code blindly into my software and then hiding it behind my own PlaySound(soundfile) function. For those people who are hardcore give them a backdoor where things are necessarily weird.
So here is a bit of code that I want to be able to write (sans error handling and async stuff):
Net *net=new Network();
MSData *data=net->getFile('http://mysite.com/sound.mp3');
SoundSystem *sound_system=new SoundSystem();
sound_system->setVolume(100);
sound_system->playSound(data);
Don't make each of the above steps 10 lines long with all kinds of complicated templates and parameters. When you do that you might impress your CS professor but you have missed the point of encapsulation and the KISS principle. I love an SDK where you can start to guess the class names and the names of their member functions. So if you have a class called SoundInitSys3BuildFactory that requires that you pass it (MS_HRDWR_SYS_SPKR_EAR_HEAR2) you have failed. I would be willing to bet that MS has failed.
MS might make all kinds of arguments about good CS practices but at this point I have already bent over backwards to learn Objective-C for the iPhone. I did this because it was where the money was. But iPhone had the advantage of the being the first smartphone where the effort might pay off. At this point MS needs to study the concept of friction. For every small obstacle they put in people's way they can plan on loosing a fair chunk of their potential audience.
Anonymous comments is critical for the free flow of genuine information. It is one thing for some twerp to call people schoolyard names but it is critical for somebody working at say the police department to mention that the policeman waving the club is named Bob Smith and that you can tell because of his distinctive boots. Or if you negatively comment on a beating video that the cops should be fired won't result in the cops pulling you over and "finding" drugs in your car.
Not a flippant comment. I suspect that this guy gave a presentation like no 100 geeks could give. Because of his sports fame and no doubt an ability to have access to the corridors of power he was able to convince the government that they could "pick a winner". I have watched and dealt with people like this my whole career. They see money being made and they insist on getting a "taste" Then they use their one schmoozing skill, round up an obscene amount of money put on a great show which usually is designed to impress and round up even more money. Then since their single driving focus wasn't putting out a great product they fail.
In fact I have long suspected that these guys don't usually want a product out as then the product would potentially drive the success well beyond their simple abilities.
The real drag in these situations is that not only do they waste taxpayer's money but they drive legitimate start-ups out of business; this is through their eating much of the available investment money, eating up the local talent, overpaying for rent, and then leaving a sour taste in everyone's mouths in the area for tech start-ups with the whole once bitten twice shy thing. In my area there was a famous flameout of an educational business. Same deal these guys literally had top government education people working for them "on secondment". Then boom it all blew up over a decade ago. The lawsuits and criminal charges are still working through the system.
Any good tech business need some business savvy people near the top; but It all boils down to whether there are tech people making the decisions. The showmen should be the head of marketing, not the head of the company.
People should like what I like not what they like. Only my opinion matters and if you have any interests I don't have then you are wrong and should change that.
How much of an asshole do you have to be to hold an opinion like this? Some people enjoy sports and some people like polishing rocks. The world is a diverse collection of people and just because you might not care for the Olympics doesn't mean its wrong for any one else to do so.
I do care where my tax dollars go. I would vote zero dollars going to any sport beyond the level of entry level kids sports. It would be a great world where those who vote for more arenas and stadiums get discount tickets to those. But those who vote for more space exploration and science get the vaccines, safer cars, weather forecasts, and get to fly in airplanes built using modern technology.
The Olympics can teach us all kinds things about government corruption and inefficiencies. How the IOC is allowed to change the laws of a country ranging from IP to road laws. How the IOC gets a country verging on bankruptcy to spend around 20 billion dollars so that the 1%, the VIPs, and a token handful of us rif-raf can feel important. One the best examples of this is how the VIPs got so many tickets that the stands are half empty for venues that are "Sold out". Another is that the city with some of the worst traffic in the western world created lanes just like they had in Soviet Russia that were limited to well connected people.
All this to watch various countries send their OCD athletes who have nearly destroyed themselves try for a medal.
Bread and circuses.
The only silver lining is that the company that was an inch away from privatizing the police in Britain has humiliated itself to a point where this won't happen. Another study in where a company that can't find its ass with its hands was able to schmooze its way into the corridors of power and milk this single schmoozing skill for billions.
If the money and effort (considering what that many athletes working out for that many hours must also be worth) put into the Olympics were instead were to have been put into science and space exploration we wouldn't be watching a car sized robot touch down on Mars but would be watching the amateur Olympic team representing Mars participate in a scaled down Solar Olympics.
For a small site with limited functionality WYSIWYG is probably fine. A bit more complicated and WYSIWYG with some hand customization is also fine. But if you were building slashdot then handcoding is the only way to go. All that will happen with WYSIWYG on a big site is that you will take X amount of time to be 90% done and then you will fight the code for 2X time and then redo the whole thing by hand in 10X time. Or worse without a complete redo you will end up with a spaghetti bastard that never really works.
According to the Discovery channel the telescope was funded by aliens looking to contact their home planet. Or am I mixing that up with the History Channel? In that case the sequels will be Housewives of Astronomers, Flip this Telescope, Telescope Road Truckers, Most Dangerous Telescopes in the World.
Basically the Discovery Channel died when it ate TLC.
People who store food for long periods either often put nitrogen in, co2 in, or throw iron sachets in that eat the oxygen. The CO2 might join any moisture to make a weak acid and the iron can eat so much oxygen as to create a small vacuum that just pulls in air anyway. So a toot of nitrogen is probably best. Compared to oxygen nitrogen is basically inert. But an iron sachet wouldn't hurt on top of the nitrogen as it will eat any oxygen that leaks in.
The other key will be variety. If you use a technology that you could be certain of can you be certain of the longevity of the materials. I have 10 year old burnable CDs where the data layer just flaked off. I also have a very old external HD where the rubber feet turned to liquid goo. So even if you decided that a USB memory stick would be the way to go I would suggest buying 2 or three very different brands.
As to worrying about how to read the format just throw in an old laptop (minus its battery) which might last and be ready to read your data.
Also separate the different storage media into different ziplocks or containers so that if one melts into a corrosive goo that the rest might be spared.
If you throw in some silica gel packs to eat any moisture be aware that if moisture is getting in regularly over time those packets can start pooling moisture around them. Thus put it at the bottom with the good stuff propped above to keep it safe. Also the iron packs can become warm if exposed to a blast of air (like the handwarmers) so keep that away from the important bits that you don't want cooked.
Lastly keep the temperature cool and stable as entropy is slower when cold.
acronyms=(LASER, BS, OK, SAT);
if(acronyms.size()>3){ironic=true;}
Acronyms usually equal a bullshit passing fad. Not always as in LASER. But when bureaucrats pull out the acronyms I call BS. Modern education has a single flaw, little real measurement; lots of fake measurement. You rarely hear of a school system doing a double blind test of the "New Math" and then comparing the results. They buy into some education guru's new magical thinking in the same way that eating bat wings will help you fly better and buy millions in new textbooks. The teachers go off on a "Knowledge filled weekend" and somehow come back ready to teach (gooder). Then when the few OK measures such as the SATs come along the students bomb yet nobody blames the "new math" or whatnot they just quietly move onto the next fad.
The one fad they avoid like a plague is to measure teacher/administrator performance and fire the bad ones. Great teachers will succeed with almost any crap system. The bad ones will destroy students regardless of how good the system is as long as there are no consequences for their lousy behavior.
A good newspaper that spends time investigating, digging, and has the balls to take on critical issues have been a huge pillar of our civilization. But take my local newspaper in Nova Scotia. Technically it is independent which is great but it is run by one rich family so do you think that it will run exposes on their friends? I can't remember the last time, if ever, they have nailed a slimy car dealership or real-estate agent to the wall as these are some of their biggest remaining advertisers. They did wail away at our current mayor but it was more schoolyard than Watergate. It was a local arts paper that did the gumshoe work that blew him out of office. The Mayor in waiting looks like a putz and I haven't seen them take a single shot at him.
Move one province over and the major newspapers are owned by the richest family there.
But the internet is made up of a bunch of little twerps with nothing to loose and everything to gain(becoming the next Drudge) by blowing up an old boys club or two by exposing truths that our local newspapers are too incestuously invested in.... I Love It!!!
I have found that almost without exception the type of person who is huge on over-managing a project is usually a Type A control freak that suffers physical pain when others are allowed to make any decision without running it by them. By far the best companies in the world give many of their employees a huge amount of freedom which allows the employees to thrive and the company to keep top notch employees. Most companies are the opposite and survive despite themselves being larded down with waste products for employees.
Agile programming all comes down to costs and benefits. If you are building a billion dollar bridge much like the last billion dollar bridge with a tight timeline then plan plan plan as the few millions spent planning will probably reduce the number of billion dollar disasters. But if you are building an innovative million dollar software project which is basically bunch of smaller projects where fixing mistakes isn't costly then it is not only inefficient to over plan it but irrational as you can't actually plan research which is what most projects largely are.
What you do is set goals and repeatedly check to see if all hands are rowing toward the goal. It is very easy to watch to see if a lazy git is rowing the other way. If so you toss him overboard and keep rowing. Not that hard really.
Personally my favorite experience on an agile group project is when other programmers do something with such style and innovation that I am green with envy. This sort of behavior brings out the competitor in most people who try to meet the newly raised bar. This is an everyone wins scenario in that even the crap programmer will be encouraged to grow. Oh sorry this is an everyone wins except for the now redundant Project lead, project manager, lead architect, project manager, producer, or whatever the paper pushing position used to be called before he was let go. I am not saying that you have no management control over a project just not a more chiefs than indians situation with layer after layer of reporting structure. You basically have one or two programmers assigned to give fairly regular status reports to someone who is monitoring(not micromanaging) the project to make sure it doesn't go off course.
I hate software patents, I really hate software patents. They are a giant parasitical suck on the vitality of the tech industry but I believe there is one area where they are potentially good and that is in the really non obvious which is already a requirement for getting a patent; a requirement that seems to be obviously ignored. So if you come up with an algorithm that factors 1024 bit numbers with a 486 in 2 seconds then maybe you deserve a patent. If you make a one click checkout then holy smokes no patent!
Also there should be a limited transferability to patents. Some sort of rule that the only owners of a patent can be either the original inventor or someone who is equipped to implement it; basically no patent lawyers. As part of the reform there should be a requirement that the people named on the patent should get a percentage of any money made from the patent regardless of their relationship to the owners. So when the Nortel patents were bought for billions the people on the patents should have received a percent or two.
Lastly there should be a bureau of patent invalidation which has no relationship with the original patent office. All they do is quickly review and kill patents. The problem now is that after years of fighting in court and probable settlements the patent might be killed, too little, too late.
Firebug just works but I have always had the feeling that it is hard on my browser.
If chrome would get a better debugger then bye bye firefox though.
I saw a beta of it run on a EEE netbook with 1G ram. It was crazy fast. Loaded office, outlook, explorer... boom boom boom. But the interface was from Star Trek TNG without the curves. Then there is this whole locking the machine to the OS business. Talk about turn off.
I stopped using windows years ago because everything was office office office. Most people type, spellcheck, then print/email. Or they make ugly powerpoints and the most advanced feature used is to import a graph from excel. This is not what MS should have based their entire company on; and if it truly was the core of the company they would have put office on Linux long ago.
I don't think MS knows what it is and while that is going on the Office section has mostly dominated.
To contrast it with Apple's success; They know they are iTunes. Google mostly knows it is searching mass amounts of data and ads. And facebook knows it is monkeys standing under the tree looking at the shiny thing.
So I suspect that the new Windows is a good idea at its core but it will end up soaking in a caustic bath of Office until it is brittle and smells funny.
Windows 9 will be an attempt to compensate for the Office induced stink by wrapping it in steel bands to reenforce the structure. I am willing to bet that if the OS programmers at MS were able to tell the Office people to bugger off and even go so far as to sandbox their whole suite that Windows might regain the crown. I was so happy when Firefox walled out crap from MS putting itself into FF. It is this sort of thinking that has dogged MS for over a decade.
I remember when NT was really popular with programmers and I think one of the main reasons was that it wasn't tripping over itself to push other MS products. They had designed it to be a server OS with a thin GUI and the office people left it largely alone.
The key is that the screen size is largely proportional to the amount and type of content being consumed or created.
Small screens are great for basic consumption of small games, music, messages, phone calls; but they are terrible for say editing a word doc, or editing a video. Larger, say iPad screens are great for more complicated consumption like movies or more complicated games. They are also good for basic data entry like say simple form entry; they are still terrible for any content creation beyond a very short document. A laptop is good for some programming, accounting, and a sweet spot for typing documents (probably as they are nearly the same size as a typewriter.) Gaming is better on laptops but still not that great. Keep in mind that gaming in a weird way is content creation as your inputs are as important as what happens on screen. Think of how many "key strokes" in a common game.
The single monitor PC is better for programming, video editing, accounting, and gaming. But it is when you get to the multi monitor setup that content creation is king. There is nothing better when programming, video editing, even editing.
Post-PC is a terrible term, what has been terrible is having Joe-surfs-alot using powerhouse of a machine to watch people puking on each other on YouTube. He should have had an iPad. The professionals will use PCs and the mass-consumers will use more locked in devices.
This also circles around to how the OS will be configured. For joe-surfs-alot the device is best locked up tight as any flexibility will result in misconfigurations and breakage. But a programmer or business user has to be able to tailor the machine to the exact configuration needed for maximum efficiency. As a programmer I have my machine set up in ways that would just be annoying and stupid for most of my non-programming family. The terminal in my dock would be the smallest example of this.
The simple question is what device will be used to create iPad applications? Or the iPad OS?
BB phones are actually pretty good for corporate types. They're tough, simple, have great keyboards, battery life, and so on. For corporate tough the basic phones do exactly what they need and do it well. Corporate types have a few critical needs: they need security and they need to respond to long emails with long emails. They don't need GPS, Angry Birds, or much else. I am not saying that BBs are better than the competition overall but they are extremely fit for the purpose they are put to with a single glaring exception. They are often crippled as someone who just stepped on a land mine.
First the Telcos often throw a few little twists of their own limiting things such as browsing over Wi Fi. Then the corporate IT people have and usually abuse the ability to set various permissions such as no installed Apps, no browsing certain web sites, and other anger inducing features. Phones such as the iPhone don't have these anger inducing features and leave lots of room for people to love them.
RIM could pull its ass out of the fire tomorrow morning by releasing an update that eliminated all blocks that have been imposed by telcos and IT departments. These people would scream and moan and make long lists as to how RIM had ruined their lives but seeing that RIM accountants must be looking up Novell as a case study it is time for bold moves that would suddenly turn that resented little brick into something they would fall in love with again.
My only memories of Novell are how much of a drag it was on my system and how the IT people would dominate my laptop until I just bought my own. Oh wait isn't that just like all the people given free BBs who go out and buy their own iPhones.
There are BB people and there are iPhone like people. BB can keep those people if they could give them a reason; QNX is not a reason. Freedom is a reason.
The key here is not who is the present CEO of tech companies but who was the (potentially mythical) founder. The title CEO implies that the company is public or at least has a bunch of shareholders; these CEOs are often MBAs. Often the founders have sold, retired, or the MBA types have pushed the founder out by this point. So the stat that I want to see is what percentage of successful tech companies are(or were) run by someone with a degree?
Plus think of all the companies that were bought out by a big company and technically no longer exist; who started those? I don't necessarily say that the article was wrong just that by narrowing it down to the title CEO that you have probably cut off the "Mythical" story that we have come to love. CEO would be the post script to that story. Lots of those "Mythical" people would probably have held the title: President, or Co-founder.
The command line is not better or worse than a beautiful GUI. It is a whole different paradigm with a whole different purpose. I love that I can go to my mac and type nearly the exact same commands as my linux box to do the same things; xvfz is nearly one keystroke. But these are not things I would ever impose on my family.
The key (hee hee) to the command line is constancy of knowledge. Things I do now, I have done for over a decade, and hopefully will do for another decade using the same keystrokes. These tend to be dark arcane things like ssh tunnels that again I would never impose upon my family. I don't need to learn a new interface from year to year, I don't need to learn a new interface from OS to OS. Much of my Solaris knowledge is still good. One of the reasons that I fled Windows was that its command line was not consistent with my other more Unix'y knowledge. If I had to noodle a Windows box I would start poking around looking for applications and menus that conceal the things I want almost as well as a command line ever could.
To eliminate the command line from an OS that I use would be to eliminate an OS from my use.
It is critical to understand the difference between responsibility and blame. Most MBA run development shops are big on figuring out who to blame and handing out bonuses, promotions, probation based upon it. The best shops make sure that if you broke it then you fix it. It is a great learning experience to have to fix it in that you both learn what you did wrong and to me more careful next time. (Fixing it means working with the sysadmin to restore the backups of uncorrupted data or whatnot) By removing the blame culture you also remove much of the need for titles like product manager, project manager, architect, and so on. It just a bunch of guys who know what they are doing working together building something cool. Then you only need a supreme court in the form of an owner or one boss who resolves disputes.
This all breaks down if you have troublemakers or incompetents. The troublemakers often come in the form of highly certified my way or the highway types and the incompetents should probably just not be developers.
A sure sign of dysfunction is if some formulaic style is imposed that sounds good to MBA types but otherwise sounds stupid. Think about who would hire a Six-Sigma-Blackbelt: someone with an MBA or someone with 10 years of successful projects under their belt?
I would be less quick to blame PHP than blame the fact that many PHP programmers come from "Web" developers. People who started with MS Paint and some HTML, then some CSS and then jammed in some PHP. After a while they got pretty good at small PHP 50 line programs. But when faced with huge projects people like this just aren't prepared. A great programmer could use PHP just as well as any other language.
But the second half is that PHP should be bad at times. Often a simple unstructured script is the best. It needs to do a simple thing quickly and well. There is no need for templating, language abstraction, unit testing, separation of data, logic, and view. So if you are a bank deploying a mission critical system then it should be rigorous and perfect. But if your blog about car tires needs a widget that reads from your odometer then hack away.
I would say that all arguments that condemn PHP should whither under the light that Facebook was developed primarily in PHP with MySQL. Even now they have their Hip Hop that converts PHP to C++. Arguing against PHP is like saying that Carbon Fiber is a better material than steel for car frames. Absolutely true but most cars are still successfully made from steel for a wide variety of reasons. Next time I need to win an F1 challenge and it had better be Carbon Fiber. But for the next ride to the grocery store and I just don't care.
So to circle around one could argue that the best cars are made from this or that but the reality is that what made the truly terrible cars terrible was that the designer would have made a terrible car out of anything. So teach a "better" language to the people making messes with PHP and you will just have a different kind of mess.
For me RIM has always reeked of arrogance. The people who use it, the people who sell it, the complicated plans, the whole dominating of companies, right down to the set up of their servers; all arrogant. There was nothing happy about their phones. iPhone users definitely have a "look at me, look at me" thing going but with apps like angry birds there is a more fun vibe with the iPhone. Nokia (I know it's Finnish) always had a Tutonic, "My phone is better engineered than your phone." thing going.
I don't know if RIM encouraged it but so many companies handed BBs to their managers and crap flip phones to their grunts. There often would be this huge cut off where some arbitrary level of employee would not be allowed to get a BB. To make it worse RIM gave the IT people the ability to select and block various features as they would choose. IT people are famous for pissing people off with their arbitrary policies so more Apple fodder. This sort of elitism just fed the Apple monster giving the joe employee the desire to buy a better phone for themselves. Then it got nasty for RIM when the top top management would break out from the RIM stranglehold and force the IT people to get them an Apple.
In the end all these companies ended up handing out BBs to employees who used their own money to get an iPhone/iPad for their own use. Pretty bad when your product is free and still can't win the hearts and minds of all but a few hard core MBA types.
He nailed it with the question as to what the stock market is for! Personally I feel that the whole stock market has gone almost completely off the rails. It seems as if a small number of New York finance companies have got an extortion racket going where they have set themselves up as gate keepers who believe they are entitled to a piece of everyone else's pie.
As a developer I have a micro taste of these types at least once a week. Someone sees me making money and decides that they want a taste. They want me to "help" them with their big idea. I'm not sure the offer has even been as good as 50/50 even though the work would be 99/1 and skill 99.999/.001 they usually have to hold back their anger when I recommend a few good C++ books. I can't imagine being in a scenario where people like this could force themselves into my business. They would have no problem saying "You would be nothing without my help." and walking away with their "share".
My other favorite is when MBA types tell successful software companies to get more corporate types and that a board of directors would be a valuable addition. The question that they don't like is "Why are we making too many millions?"
I didn't know that slashdot was taking paid advertisements. Well this one is excellent a blend of interesting tech fact, geek interest, and in your face sales (our product is better than the competitors).
Well I have some bio-gas generating land in Florida for sale. I will write a scholarly article about how a grid of microbial fuel cells could power a server farm and the water abundant environment can be used for green cooling. Get in before Oracle buys it all up.