I was selling an old CRT (when they were worth something) and I put it on the floor beside my computer. When the guy came in to see it the whole image was screwed. After the guy left I picked up my monitor and it un-distorted. The beam in the floor had somehow become a compass spinning monster. But beyond messing with classified ad sales I don't know what other negative impact it might have had.
An Oracle salesperson lied? That has to be the first time. Oracle never lies.
They named themselves after a rather deceitful figure from Greek mythology so this is sort of funny to see them proven to be a bunch of lying turds.
Every time I have ever dealt with Oracle I was left with a foul taste in my mouth.
I have set my mouth on fire more than once only to find that milk didn't stop me from crying like a little girl for one second. The only thing that works like a fire extinguisher is lime juice in water. It is like a light switch. You don't even need that much lime juice so you don't have to replace one misery with another. I suspect that something in it destroys the molecules that either induce pain or detect pain. Maybe the heat doesn't work in an acidic environment?
Digital computers had micro transactions long long ago. They were a cool idea. You could do micro-transactions like 1/1000th of a cent. Might seem useless but the idea would actually work for things like workable paywalls for newspapers and magazines. You could be paying like half a cent per page and not really caring how many pages you click on. But it would quickly add up for the site getting paid. Or online gaming. You could even charge by the bullet. If they had gotten some traction I suspect the web would be a very different place today.
BTW Sorry about the anonymous dup post, somehow got logged out.
I would say that.net died around the time of Sharepoint. Too much of the.net API started to support more and more of Microsoft's products and solve fewer and fewer of my problems as a programmer. When.net version 1.0 came out I was able to delete dozens of functions I had written for interacting with email and web servers from an application. Then 1.1 was even better. I would say that Java even was feeling a bit of heat from.net. But 2.0 started to get a bit weird; still good but weird. Microsoft lost me with 2.5. Simply didn't upgrade and soon moved to LAMP. I can't tell you what the last version of.net is. All my application programming has been with QT and C++. It works and is rock solid. It looks like Nokia is now screwing up QT so I will eventually have to move but I won't be leaving C++.
Where I found.net starting to go wrong was that it was telling me how to program. Also each upgrade was very painful to deploy..net 2.5 was basically hostile to machines that hadn't seen an upgrade in a while. Whereas with C++ I do whatever I damn well please. If I think of a feature then I can build the feature without some part of the architecture tripping me up. And as for deployment: worst case scenario you pile the libraries in with the executable. I also find with C++ that old code stays around for a much longer time. With.net code I found myself recoding/updating it over and over.
Technology and frequencies have all been changing over the last few years. Even analog to digital. I would be interested in seeing if the studies that all show harm are for the same technology. And the harmless studies are for a different set of frequencies.
One the many reasons that programmers that I know are adopting these technologies is that it breaks the back of the in-house DBA. Often there are a few in-house DBAs with certifications up the wazoo who squeeze themselves into every project that has to store data(all projects). But somehow their word becomes the final word. Getting a table added to a schema can take days or even weeks and might not be approved at all. Suddenly with MongoDB or whatever the DBA has no possible input. One can make all kinds of arguments for and against relational systems and how valuable a DBA is to the long term health of a datastore but from many developer's / project manager's perspective a modern DBA often acts as a brick wall to on time on budget.
Code reviews can be a great opportunity to grow but not when:
The reviewers are MSDN programmers who disagree with your choice of Linux and thus wouldn't rate theoretically perfect code better than a 1 out of 10.
The reviewers are Java programmers who disagree with your choice of C++ and while unable to understand C++ will rate your code a 2 out of 10 because it isn't Java.
The reviewers are crappy programmers who you diligently kept off your project because they suck but someone wants them doing billable hours so poof they get on your project through a back door. Then they start making changes to your code while reviewing it because their testing manager gave them write access to your code repository.
The review process would literally take 10 person hours and generate dozens of pages of paper work to review Hello World.
The 58 year old PhD in CS doesn't like your brace style and won't sign off until you change it.
The testing/QA department who had been successfully kept away from a project that is on version 3 with almost zero and only minor bugs in 6 years creates a code review process that finds "Serious Shortcomings" with your code that requires that they get 1/3rd of your development budget for version 4 before this project becomes an "embarrassment" to the company and results in your entire coding team working for a competitor in under two months then resulting in your old company being sued for millions a two years later when the promised version 4 is delivered late and broken.(true story)
I have seen build environments that made life so much better. But in most cases I have seen complex build environments that could be described as nothing more than make work projects. When you have a dual processored 8-12 core desktops incremental build times are generally pretty damn short unless you are compiling something massive. So no savings there. Where build environments can help is when you are working with a cluster of monkeys who would simply screw the build up every time they added their so called contributions. After discovering Git I really came to realize that many tools are designed to prevent stupidity at the cost of efficiency. Git would be a great example of a tool that promotes efficiency but won't keep the morons at bay. For many smaller projects build environments are generally moron prevention tools.
But at a certain level of complexity they do really act as a traffic cop of sorts.
The best company that I ever did work for used the ISP model for services. It had three IT departments. The Main IT department provided a solid connection to the Internet and a solid email service. The other two also offered a menu of services that each department could use or not use at their pleasure. This included bulk software licensing, computer purchasing, and best of all repair and technical support. But these services came with a price. If an employee bought their own crap computer and the IT people had to fight with it daily then the department would be billed a pile and probably do something about it. But unless the computer posed a clear threat then they had to support it. This way any department that felt that macs were better than pcs could try it out and find out if this were true.
The only check the IT people had to do was a software license check and an important data backup plan check.
Where this got interesting was that with two separate support groups you could call one and if they wouldn't come or pissed on your selection of computers then you could call the other. The result was that the grumpy IT department would bill less and have its budget cut.
The main IT people could also bill any department that caused a disaster. So if you had a bunch of infected PCs show up and they had to cut you off then they would send you a whopper of a bill. Thus the individual departments were motivated to not make stupid decisions.
I never saw a company outsource less. Also before I was leaving they were about to do the same thing with software development except they were talking about setting up three competing sections.
Also this company had the most interesting selection of systems working I have ever seen. In the security room they had (not kidding) a VIC-20 which overlaid some text (really BIG text) onto the video feed. This had been set up when the VIC-20 was new. The video system had been upgraded but since the VIC was a working solution no IT person could ever kill it on a whim.
The printing department had a crap Sun Sparc setup years past its best by date because that was what they wanted. The IT people wanted it long gone but the only thing they could do was support it and then bill appropriately.
Another department (the one I dealt with) was serving data up from MongoDB. Things like MongoDB are hard to get past a stodgy old IT department.
If I were one of the owners and you made a play like this I would mentally consider our relationship over, you might as well talk of unionizing. One of my top priorities would be to make sure that you weren't so indispensable as you say you are. My probable delay tactic would be that this needs to be discussed and we'll get back to you.
I have seen variations on this scenario before even among partners where one suddenly says something like, "If it weren't for me we wouldn't have landed that whale. Thus we should go from 50/50 to 40/60. Or my wife has been putting in some time on this and we need to cut her in for 10%." Without exception the relationship went to hell regardless of direction taken. The only time I have ever seen this succeed was when the "partners" had never seen the original incorporation paperwork and didn't realize until the big sale that they only owned a tiny minority while the one who filed the paperwork held the vast majority. Never even made it to court.
Just go for it. Don't let technological niceties get in your way. If you can get it to work and you are comfortable some non web friendly language such as ASM, cobol, fortran just getting it done still puts you ahead of most people with an idea. Worst case scenario you will find that as the hits pile up you have to redo the slowest bits. The funny truth is that for even medium sized sites the servers rarely cost even a tiny fraction of your revenue. Up to a fairly good sized site with a bad architecture you can just throw a monster 8 CPU zillion gig system at it that will keep it alive for a while.
As they say those are good problems. Too many great ideas spent their time being perfected and not released. But many good ideas were badly built but quickly released and later switched architectures. Twitter is famous for their Ruby to Scala switch.
For anyone who looked through the gawker code (love them or hate them they are big) it was crap on a stick. They waited too long to fix it and paid the price. But it would have been a greater price if they had made it perfect before releasing and then missed the boat.
Where you have to be careful with the cloud is that a burst of hits results in a burst of revenue. Otherwise you will just be left with a burst of costs. I can't imagine what a slashdot hit would cost on amazon.
Good luck.
We need an application that takes this data and makes crap up. Some sort of semi sensible random walk. Then let apple steal this data and make what they would like of it. Thompson Manitoba (over 10,000,000 visitors a year).
As someone who is about to add a third monitor I might be a "power user" but when I use my iPad I realize that here is the future baby. For most people the choice of a small handheld device will become more and more obvious. Thinking through my family I can't count many who need a anything much beyond a tablet/smartphone to meet their computing needs.
This might actually bode well for us users of many monitors and powerful desktops as these "old school" computers will be more aimed at us instead of the youtube webmail crowd. There will always be a demand from engineers, artists, programmers, accounts, etc for a big screen general purpose computer.
I read about people dismissing tablets as juvenile and that they won't adopt one until they can program in RANDOM_LANGUAGE on it in their favorite IDE and for us this will remain true for a while. But what won't be juvenile is the massive numbers of tablet users that are going to have these, along with a smart phone, as their sole general purpose computing device.
Obviously the base programming of these cars will be to have them follow the local rules and being computers will be very good at this. Which means that government types will feel free to keep adding more and more rules to satisfy every voter. Thus these cars will quickly stop following the most efficient routes and going the fastest speed that is safe but will end up following routes that take them away from schools, parks, politicians' houses, and whatever whim they want. Even though these cars will soon be able to scream around at full speed safer than cars now they will end up going slower.
Also how are the morality police going to get their rocks off if now you can be passed out drunk in your car?
If the cars are all carefully following the rules and in theory you need far fewer traffic cops then who will catch people who jailbreak their cars into ignoring speed limits?
Lastly in this litigious society who will you sue if an empty car has an accident? The owner, the coder, or the local government who probably designed a crappy intersection or whatnot that induces the cars to crash at that spot.
I have seen people get hysterical over a fender bender screaming "Oh my baby!" and I have seen people laughing while trying to control a broken airplane. Just hire dispatchers with a bit of common sense.
This is like the TSA always trying to find a machine to do the job that a human could do way better if they were allowed to do it with common sense.
Here is a video that my daughter put together on how to make a diffusion cloud chamber. It takes about 10 minutes to make and you need a keyboard air duster. With it you can see the tracks left by background and cosmic radiation. It is a pretty cool way to visually introduce particle physics.
Lost all interest. I was holding my breath until Wind came to my Canadian city. Not any more. Not even a tiny bit.
Don't they realize that Canadian regulators will look at this and laugh?
I don't like Objective-C (after releasing 5 iPhone apps) because my code is useless outside the iPhone/iPad. Plus I have to use xcode which is yards behind eclipse and even Visual Studio. My dream would be to program in C++ once for multiple platforms and to have my choice of original development platform as well as IDE.. I am not a fan of Java plus it looks like Apple is going to keep putting shots into the head of Java so to do anything Apple means avoiding Java.
In any given month I maintain/develop in about 6 languages (if you count HTML/CSS as a language). So I am not against learning languages but I like my languages to be improvements such as my switch from perl to PHP. Not a step back to the early 90s. I My personal preference is C++ using a good framework like QT. Boost looks like it might be on my horizon.
It is good that this is free of Microsoft but will anyone in the new organization have the brains to prepare the iPhone and Android versions?
I basically cried when QT was bought by Nokia to try and save their dying platform. If they had had any sense they would have hitched onto the iPhone bandwagon and ported QT to iPhone so that people could program for iPhone using the great QT and then it would have been a cinch to port it over to Nokia.
Seeing that people like me are willing to learn the horrid Objective-C to get into the iPhone camp they would die for a closer to C++ solution that would allow their marketing departments to dream about easy porting to other platforms.
It is probably too late for this but that is the wicked smart thing to do. Their are already community efforts out there doing this but I suspect that if QT takes all the people who were dealing with the Nokia bureaucrats and replaces them with programmers assigned to porting then they will have a huge win.
Apple might try and block this but they seem to be getting weaker and weaker on these sort of blocks
QT is by far my favorite framework with Cocos2d coming in a close second (although not so multiplatform).
They are just pulling this crap so that 50cents per month won't seem unreasonable. Quite simply I can't remember the last Canadian artist that I listened to. Maybe American Pie 5 years ago?
Most Canadian content is crap. I DON'T want to pay 1 cent a year for that crap. Then ask artists about the money that comes from CD and tape taxes and they will tell you that it nearly all goes to a few connected artists like Celine Dion and other Quebec artists.
This is quiet simply a money grab by a bunch of paper pushers.
What the Canadian government should be doing is supporting Canadian businesses that will grow Canada's economy via the internet by beating the crap out of the ISPs that are already charging too much. This instead of supporting a dying industry.
I blocked the crap out of some sites using this old tool but due to the billion page nature of these sites they just kept coming up anyway.
This crowd sourced feature will only sort of work if you do something like google and have random moderators with a vested interest in their reputations. Even here on slashdot you can't vary too far from the demographic before you will get your comments moderated out of existence. Try saying something favorable about Microsoft or going all right wing and you are a goner. But if fox news used a slashdot type engine the reverse would be true.
I have seen very little if any gaming of slashdot. Bit of trolling but this works. The google thing won't as it stands. What it might do though is give them the heads up on anything that people really hate.
If a zillion other users block something like EE then block EE.
Where this is going to get messy is over issues where people disagree. Abortion and whatnot. All I can say is Good luck google.
Slashdot Mirror
I was selling an old CRT (when they were worth something) and I put it on the floor beside my computer. When the guy came in to see it the whole image was screwed. After the guy left I picked up my monitor and it un-distorted. The beam in the floor had somehow become a compass spinning monster. But beyond messing with classified ad sales I don't know what other negative impact it might have had.
An Oracle salesperson lied? That has to be the first time. Oracle never lies.
They named themselves after a rather deceitful figure from Greek mythology so this is sort of funny to see them proven to be a bunch of lying turds.
Every time I have ever dealt with Oracle I was left with a foul taste in my mouth.
I have set my mouth on fire more than once only to find that milk didn't stop me from crying like a little girl for one second. The only thing that works like a fire extinguisher is lime juice in water. It is like a light switch. You don't even need that much lime juice so you don't have to replace one misery with another. I suspect that something in it destroys the molecules that either induce pain or detect pain. Maybe the heat doesn't work in an acidic environment?
Digital computers had micro transactions long long ago. They were a cool idea. You could do micro-transactions like 1/1000th of a cent. Might seem useless but the idea would actually work for things like workable paywalls for newspapers and magazines. You could be paying like half a cent per page and not really caring how many pages you click on. But it would quickly add up for the site getting paid. Or online gaming. You could even charge by the bullet. If they had gotten some traction I suspect the web would be a very different place today.
BTW Sorry about the anonymous dup post, somehow got logged out.
I would say that .net died around the time of Sharepoint. Too much of the .net API started to support more and more of Microsoft's products and solve fewer and fewer of my problems as a programmer. When .net version 1.0 came out I was able to delete dozens of functions I had written for interacting with email and web servers from an application. Then 1.1 was even better. I would say that Java even was feeling a bit of heat from .net. But 2.0 started to get a bit weird; still good but weird. Microsoft lost me with 2.5. Simply didn't upgrade and soon moved to LAMP. I can't tell you what the last version of .net is. All my application programming has been with QT and C++. It works and is rock solid. It looks like Nokia is now screwing up QT so I will eventually have to move but I won't be leaving C++. .net starting to go wrong was that it was telling me how to program. Also each upgrade was very painful to deploy. .net 2.5 was basically hostile to machines that hadn't seen an upgrade in a while. Whereas with C++ I do whatever I damn well please. If I think of a feature then I can build the feature without some part of the architecture tripping me up. And as for deployment: worst case scenario you pile the libraries in with the executable. I also find with C++ that old code stays around for a much longer time. With .net code I found myself recoding/updating it over and over.
Where I found
Technology and frequencies have all been changing over the last few years. Even analog to digital. I would be interested in seeing if the studies that all show harm are for the same technology. And the harmless studies are for a different set of frequencies.
One the many reasons that programmers that I know are adopting these technologies is that it breaks the back of the in-house DBA. Often there are a few in-house DBAs with certifications up the wazoo who squeeze themselves into every project that has to store data(all projects). But somehow their word becomes the final word. Getting a table added to a schema can take days or even weeks and might not be approved at all. Suddenly with MongoDB or whatever the DBA has no possible input. One can make all kinds of arguments for and against relational systems and how valuable a DBA is to the long term health of a datastore but from many developer's / project manager's perspective a modern DBA often acts as a brick wall to on time on budget.
I was at my bank (a big Canadian one) and the manager told me that they finally upgraded to XP. I was to stunned to ask what they upgraded from.
Code reviews can be a great opportunity to grow but not when:
The reviewers are MSDN programmers who disagree with your choice of Linux and thus wouldn't rate theoretically perfect code better than a 1 out of 10.
The reviewers are Java programmers who disagree with your choice of C++ and while unable to understand C++ will rate your code a 2 out of 10 because it isn't Java.
The reviewers are crappy programmers who you diligently kept off your project because they suck but someone wants them doing billable hours so poof they get on your project through a back door. Then they start making changes to your code while reviewing it because their testing manager gave them write access to your code repository.
The review process would literally take 10 person hours and generate dozens of pages of paper work to review Hello World.
The 58 year old PhD in CS doesn't like your brace style and won't sign off until you change it.
The testing/QA department who had been successfully kept away from a project that is on version 3 with almost zero and only minor bugs in 6 years creates a code review process that finds "Serious Shortcomings" with your code that requires that they get 1/3rd of your development budget for version 4 before this project becomes an "embarrassment" to the company and results in your entire coding team working for a competitor in under two months then resulting in your old company being sued for millions a two years later when the promised version 4 is delivered late and broken.(true story)
I have seen build environments that made life so much better. But in most cases I have seen complex build environments that could be described as nothing more than make work projects. When you have a dual processored 8-12 core desktops incremental build times are generally pretty damn short unless you are compiling something massive. So no savings there. Where build environments can help is when you are working with a cluster of monkeys who would simply screw the build up every time they added their so called contributions. After discovering Git I really came to realize that many tools are designed to prevent stupidity at the cost of efficiency. Git would be a great example of a tool that promotes efficiency but won't keep the morons at bay. For many smaller projects build environments are generally moron prevention tools.
But at a certain level of complexity they do really act as a traffic cop of sorts.
The best company that I ever did work for used the ISP model for services. It had three IT departments. The Main IT department provided a solid connection to the Internet and a solid email service. The other two also offered a menu of services that each department could use or not use at their pleasure. This included bulk software licensing, computer purchasing, and best of all repair and technical support. But these services came with a price. If an employee bought their own crap computer and the IT people had to fight with it daily then the department would be billed a pile and probably do something about it. But unless the computer posed a clear threat then they had to support it. This way any department that felt that macs were better than pcs could try it out and find out if this were true.
The only check the IT people had to do was a software license check and an important data backup plan check.
Where this got interesting was that with two separate support groups you could call one and if they wouldn't come or pissed on your selection of computers then you could call the other. The result was that the grumpy IT department would bill less and have its budget cut.
The main IT people could also bill any department that caused a disaster. So if you had a bunch of infected PCs show up and they had to cut you off then they would send you a whopper of a bill. Thus the individual departments were motivated to not make stupid decisions.
I never saw a company outsource less. Also before I was leaving they were about to do the same thing with software development except they were talking about setting up three competing sections.
Also this company had the most interesting selection of systems working I have ever seen. In the security room they had (not kidding) a VIC-20 which overlaid some text (really BIG text) onto the video feed. This had been set up when the VIC-20 was new. The video system had been upgraded but since the VIC was a working solution no IT person could ever kill it on a whim.
The printing department had a crap Sun Sparc setup years past its best by date because that was what they wanted. The IT people wanted it long gone but the only thing they could do was support it and then bill appropriately.
Another department (the one I dealt with) was serving data up from MongoDB. Things like MongoDB are hard to get past a stodgy old IT department.
If I were one of the owners and you made a play like this I would mentally consider our relationship over, you might as well talk of unionizing. One of my top priorities would be to make sure that you weren't so indispensable as you say you are. My probable delay tactic would be that this needs to be discussed and we'll get back to you.
I have seen variations on this scenario before even among partners where one suddenly says something like, "If it weren't for me we wouldn't have landed that whale. Thus we should go from 50/50 to 40/60. Or my wife has been putting in some time on this and we need to cut her in for 10%." Without exception the relationship went to hell regardless of direction taken. The only time I have ever seen this succeed was when the "partners" had never seen the original incorporation paperwork and didn't realize until the big sale that they only owned a tiny minority while the one who filed the paperwork held the vast majority. Never even made it to court.
Just go for it. Don't let technological niceties get in your way. If you can get it to work and you are comfortable some non web friendly language such as ASM, cobol, fortran just getting it done still puts you ahead of most people with an idea. Worst case scenario you will find that as the hits pile up you have to redo the slowest bits. The funny truth is that for even medium sized sites the servers rarely cost even a tiny fraction of your revenue. Up to a fairly good sized site with a bad architecture you can just throw a monster 8 CPU zillion gig system at it that will keep it alive for a while.
As they say those are good problems. Too many great ideas spent their time being perfected and not released. But many good ideas were badly built but quickly released and later switched architectures. Twitter is famous for their Ruby to Scala switch.
For anyone who looked through the gawker code (love them or hate them they are big) it was crap on a stick. They waited too long to fix it and paid the price. But it would have been a greater price if they had made it perfect before releasing and then missed the boat.
Where you have to be careful with the cloud is that a burst of hits results in a burst of revenue. Otherwise you will just be left with a burst of costs. I can't imagine what a slashdot hit would cost on amazon.
Good luck.
My detailed jargon filled response to this idea is "BURN IN HELL KASPERSKY!!!"
We need an application that takes this data and makes crap up. Some sort of semi sensible random walk. Then let apple steal this data and make what they would like of it. Thompson Manitoba (over 10,000,000 visitors a year).
As someone who is about to add a third monitor I might be a "power user" but when I use my iPad I realize that here is the future baby. For most people the choice of a small handheld device will become more and more obvious. Thinking through my family I can't count many who need a anything much beyond a tablet/smartphone to meet their computing needs.
This might actually bode well for us users of many monitors and powerful desktops as these "old school" computers will be more aimed at us instead of the youtube webmail crowd. There will always be a demand from engineers, artists, programmers, accounts, etc for a big screen general purpose computer.
I read about people dismissing tablets as juvenile and that they won't adopt one until they can program in RANDOM_LANGUAGE on it in their favorite IDE and for us this will remain true for a while. But what won't be juvenile is the massive numbers of tablet users that are going to have these, along with a smart phone, as their sole general purpose computing device.
Obviously the base programming of these cars will be to have them follow the local rules and being computers will be very good at this. Which means that government types will feel free to keep adding more and more rules to satisfy every voter. Thus these cars will quickly stop following the most efficient routes and going the fastest speed that is safe but will end up following routes that take them away from schools, parks, politicians' houses, and whatever whim they want. Even though these cars will soon be able to scream around at full speed safer than cars now they will end up going slower.
Also how are the morality police going to get their rocks off if now you can be passed out drunk in your car?
If the cars are all carefully following the rules and in theory you need far fewer traffic cops then who will catch people who jailbreak their cars into ignoring speed limits?
Lastly in this litigious society who will you sue if an empty car has an accident? The owner, the coder, or the local government who probably designed a crappy intersection or whatnot that induces the cars to crash at that spot.
I have seen people get hysterical over a fender bender screaming "Oh my baby!" and I have seen people laughing while trying to control a broken airplane. Just hire dispatchers with a bit of common sense.
This is like the TSA always trying to find a machine to do the job that a human could do way better if they were allowed to do it with common sense.
Here is a video that my daughter put together on how to make a diffusion cloud chamber. It takes about 10 minutes to make and you need a keyboard air duster. With it you can see the tracks left by background and cosmic radiation. It is a pretty cool way to visually introduce particle physics.
Lost all interest. I was holding my breath until Wind came to my Canadian city. Not any more. Not even a tiny bit.
Don't they realize that Canadian regulators will look at this and laugh?
I don't like Objective-C (after releasing 5 iPhone apps) because my code is useless outside the iPhone/iPad. Plus I have to use xcode which is yards behind eclipse and even Visual Studio. My dream would be to program in C++ once for multiple platforms and to have my choice of original development platform as well as IDE.. I am not a fan of Java plus it looks like Apple is going to keep putting shots into the head of Java so to do anything Apple means avoiding Java.
In any given month I maintain/develop in about 6 languages (if you count HTML/CSS as a language). So I am not against learning languages but I like my languages to be improvements such as my switch from perl to PHP. Not a step back to the early 90s. I My personal preference is C++ using a good framework like QT. Boost looks like it might be on my horizon.
It is good that this is free of Microsoft but will anyone in the new organization have the brains to prepare the iPhone and Android versions?
I basically cried when QT was bought by Nokia to try and save their dying platform. If they had had any sense they would have hitched onto the iPhone bandwagon and ported QT to iPhone so that people could program for iPhone using the great QT and then it would have been a cinch to port it over to Nokia.
Seeing that people like me are willing to learn the horrid Objective-C to get into the iPhone camp they would die for a closer to C++ solution that would allow their marketing departments to dream about easy porting to other platforms.
It is probably too late for this but that is the wicked smart thing to do. Their are already community efforts out there doing this but I suspect that if QT takes all the people who were dealing with the Nokia bureaucrats and replaces them with programmers assigned to porting then they will have a huge win.
Apple might try and block this but they seem to be getting weaker and weaker on these sort of blocks
QT is by far my favorite framework with Cocos2d coming in a close second (although not so multiplatform).
They are just pulling this crap so that 50cents per month won't seem unreasonable. Quite simply I can't remember the last Canadian artist that I listened to. Maybe American Pie 5 years ago?
Most Canadian content is crap. I DON'T want to pay 1 cent a year for that crap. Then ask artists about the money that comes from CD and tape taxes and they will tell you that it nearly all goes to a few connected artists like Celine Dion and other Quebec artists.
This is quiet simply a money grab by a bunch of paper pushers.
What the Canadian government should be doing is supporting Canadian businesses that will grow Canada's economy via the internet by beating the crap out of the ISPs that are already charging too much. This instead of supporting a dying industry.
I blocked the crap out of some sites using this old tool but due to the billion page nature of these sites they just kept coming up anyway.
This crowd sourced feature will only sort of work if you do something like google and have random moderators with a vested interest in their reputations. Even here on slashdot you can't vary too far from the demographic before you will get your comments moderated out of existence. Try saying something favorable about Microsoft or going all right wing and you are a goner. But if fox news used a slashdot type engine the reverse would be true.
I have seen very little if any gaming of slashdot. Bit of trolling but this works. The google thing won't as it stands. What it might do though is give them the heads up on anything that people really hate.
If a zillion other users block something like EE then block EE. Where this is going to get messy is over issues where people disagree. Abortion and whatnot. All I can say is Good luck google.