I also say we should strap some remote-controlled ion thrusters to the ISS and push it over to the moon where it can orbit indefinitely. That would be so cool.
Actually, I've heard that lunar orbits aren't known for being stable. So that might actually be a lot trickier than keeping it in Earth orbit.
There was a time that I preferred the "classic" theme (a.k.a. Windows 2000 style), but that time has long since passed. What did it for me? I started writing software for Windows (at work, did it for 2 years, now back to Java/Linux, FYI), and paid attention to little details.
The WinXP theme may give you Fisher Price window borders (less annoying if you shrink their size, and there are other themes), but it also gives you MUCH nicer widgets/controls. Look closely sometime at a GUI (minus the window borders) in both the WinXP and Classic styles, and the difference is plain as day. So once you make a nice pretty GUI with the visual themes enabled, its a little disheartening to see it look like crap on someone's desktop who is using the Classic style.
Well, if it wasn't for your little island nation, and that larger nation to the south both wanting to exact revenge on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles after WWI, there wouldn't have been a WWII in the first place. So there!
If only President Wilson had been in better health and was able to get his plans for the treaty through the heads of European leaders...
And that official reference implementation is supported on *more* than one OS family.
And there are first-rate development environments (IDEs) available in the F/OSS world, for any Java-supporting platform.
Seriously, on a language-vs-language level, I'll admit that C# is leaping way ahead of Java (which seems far too complacent). But on a platform-vs-platform level, Java has *loads* more of a community of stuff than.NET has. (with.NET, it either comes from MS, or you have to pay some dippy little shop lots of license fees to use it)
This reminds me of my main gripe against ClearCase/ClearQuest when my last project team switched to it from CVS/Bugzilla. It seemed like the #1 requirement for the product suite was to extract maximal license revenue. (and it also had more admin overhead, and was less usable from the web, and was yet another toolset that works in Windows and Linux but doesn't give a flying F*%#$ about the Mac)
Based on some off-the-wall estimates, they also wound up not getting enough floating licenses for the thing initially. Seemed like it was a game, where you predict your grab/use/release license needs and buy accordingly, instead of just having it setup where everyone can use it whenever they want without caring.
Imagine not being able to check in your code because there are no ClearCase licenses free, and you have to kick someone off. Imagine not being able to look up the ClearQuest bug # a manager just sent you (and they just sent the number) because there are no ClearQuest licenses free, yet all the managers leave their clients open 24/7 (hogging the licenses and making it easier for them to act like anyone can look up a # in 10 seconds)
Sure, that was intended as a joke, but a lot of protocols in the computer world sure feel like they were invented with the assumption that everyone communicated in nothing but 7-bit US-ASCII.
After all, why else would we need Quoted-Printable and Base64 encoding, which let you put non-7bit data into 7-bit US-ASCII?
And then we have character sets. Its a total mess. It started (most likely) with US-ASCII, and eventually ended up at the all-encompassing Unicode. But along the way, we gained dozens of "legacy character sets" that are inconsistently supported and no one wants to use, but are still outputted by plenty of software.
That said, the RIM JDE is the only way to really profile your app for both performance and memory, they haven't implemented those simulator features into eclipse (yet?).
They have implemented those features in Eclipse, and they've been there for quite a while now. You just have to know where to find them. (basically some additional views you can open) So yes, you can do all the performance/memory profiling on the Debug perspective of Eclipse now. I also recommend looking into the BlackBerry Developer Conference coming up later this year. I went to it last year, and IMHO, it was a very positive experience.
When I kicked off my main BlackBerry project, a surprisingly useful app called LogicMail, I had some similar motivations. I basically really wanted something that didn't exist (at least in any usable form) for the platform.
Though instead of trying to commercialize it, I went for the F/OSS route. In retrospect, one could say I was short-changing myself, but there are other very important pieces of the puzzle that you need to consider first.
First of all, the moment you decide to sell an app, you pretty much cut yourself off from any and all possibility of community contribution to the code. In the beginning, its no big deal as no one contributes anyways. But as the project grows, everyone has a pet feature they want and you don't have the time to work on. Often these are low-risk items you don't mind including.
Second, and probably the biggest issue, is support. If you are going to sell an app, you really should be able to confidently stand behind it. You are essentially taking on an obligation to support it and resolve any user issues. This might seem reasonable at first, especially with small apps, self-contained apps, or apps that talk to sufficiently known/standardized servers with highly constrained protocols. But with my sort of app, there were just too damn many variables to consider. I basically had to turn my users into testers, and a beta stage wouldn't have really helped much. There are just too many e-mail servers and encoding formats to catch it all up front.
Finally, having an open source project is kind of like the developer equivalent of having a portfolio. Its an open way you can show what you're capable of, to a degree pretty much impossible with your day job.
Oh, and I do have a day job, and it pays well enough that I really don't need to stress myself to death for a few extra bucks.
BIS pisses me off even more. Why provide an IMAP client when you can force people to provide their login credentials to their honest and trustworthy cell phone carrier? Not to mention that well into 2008 the idea of syncing e-mail (as opposed to POP3 download) was looked at as some sort of freak request. It's not like anyone would want to get their mail from both their phone AND their PC.
Yeah, I wasn't too fond of that either. That's why I decided to go ahead and write my own IMAP/POP client (LogicMail) for the BlackBerry.
Of course now I'm stuck to the BlackBerry, since I do want to continue working on and supporting the app. But overall its been a pretty good experience, albeit way too much of a time sink.
I've had a Bold 9000 since a couple weeks before it hit the US market. Sure, the early pre-release firmware (4.6.0.125, I think) was flaky. But every upgrade since has been pretty solid.
You forgot the thousands of pages of architecture, systems engineering, regulations, requirements, and certification documents that support said code:-)
In my own experience, I've found there are 3 different battery life numbers you run into with any laptops. These numbers are always significantly different.
1. The life the manufacturer tells you that you'll get 2. The life every reviewer (and some/. readers) swear you'll actually get 3. The life you actually do get
Regardless of 1 or 2, I've found that 2.5 hrs is a good ballpark for 3 when the laptop is new. (ok, for Apple, the newest one I've used is a bit over 2 years old, but was in that ballpark when new. My newer HP w/o the add-on battery is a little better than that, but same ballpark)
Except even RIM's browser is improving. Sure, Opera was more functional (albeit slower, more cumbersome, and poorly integrated) on older BlackBerry devices, but that's changed.
As of BlackBerry OS 4.6 and newer, the built-in browser is actually usable and capable, and Opera Mini no longer has a purpose on the phone.
Of course most people's phones are running BB OS 4.2 (or 4.3). Many of them could upgrade to 4.5, which is improved a little. But you need the latest models to run 4.6 or newer.
They sure seem to want to make all the customers think that they are. Heck, all their marketing seems to be about the "phones they offer" almost more so than the "service they provide".
People need to wake up and realize that their beloved phones come from Apple, RIM, HTC, Palm, Nokia, etc, and *not* from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, or Sprint.
Of course in the US its a little more complicated in that every carrier seems to use a different radio technology, sometimes with overlap and sometimes without. (i.e. AT&T and T-Mobile are both GSM, but diverge for 3G) And of all the hot smartphones, it seems like only RIM actually cares about supporting all carriers and radio technologies (for the most part, as the Storm is an exception, sorta).
Yeah, so much of my web browsing today depends on a number of Firefox add-ons that simply JFW for a variety of things. Opera could be the greatest browser on the planet, but without AdBlock Plus (no, a manually configured host-filtering hack is not equivalent) or GreaseMonkey, or any other FF extensions I occasionally find use for (FxIF, del.icio.us, TwitterFox, , I simply can't adopt it seriously.
I hope Eclipse's C++ support has improved since I last tried it. The last time I used that plugin, it was slower than molasses. That was a few years ago, so things may have gotten better. However, I've heard that NetBeans has a surprisingly good C++ plugin, which I have not had an opportunity to try.
Of course I use Eclipse as a Java IDE all day without complaint (ok, the UI is cluttered, but the functionality is there). Then again, this discussion is for a C++ IDE.
My company is going in the other direction. In years past we had very liberal policies, and half my office (a tiny office in terms of the company) went Mac. Of course corporate IT continued to hate us for it (despite being Mac users at-home) since the Mac never plays nice with their corporate enterprise solutions. (and no, MS Office for OSX isn't covered under the MS enterprise software agreements. we have to find money for it separately)
Now policies have changed, Windows PCs are now mandated by policy, and we'll be clinging on to our Macs for dear life until they're old enough we have to replace them with Dell bricks.
Slashdot Mirror
I also say we should strap some remote-controlled ion thrusters to the ISS and push it over to the moon where it can orbit indefinitely. That would be so cool.
Actually, I've heard that lunar orbits aren't known for being stable. So that might actually be a lot trickier than keeping it in Earth orbit.
There was a time that I preferred the "classic" theme (a.k.a. Windows 2000 style), but that time has long since passed. What did it for me? I started writing software for Windows (at work, did it for 2 years, now back to Java/Linux, FYI), and paid attention to little details.
The WinXP theme may give you Fisher Price window borders (less annoying if you shrink their size, and there are other themes), but it also gives you MUCH nicer widgets/controls. Look closely sometime at a GUI (minus the window borders) in both the WinXP and Classic styles, and the difference is plain as day. So once you make a nice pretty GUI with the visual themes enabled, its a little disheartening to see it look like crap on someone's desktop who is using the Classic style.
Well, if it wasn't for your little island nation, and that larger nation to the south both wanting to exact revenge on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles after WWI, there wouldn't have been a WWII in the first place. So there!
If only President Wilson had been in better health and was able to get his plans for the treaty through the heads of European leaders...
Mod this one up. I've only tried it once, many years ago, but it was pretty cool. I only wish more IDEs had such features.
Well, in my experience on these sites, the only women who actually initiate contact are usually the ugly ones (and sometimes the crazy ones).
(yes, I've still given then the benefit of the doubt, and my standards are not unreasonable, but I do have them.)
But RIM BlackBerry developers are not required to use RIM's store to distribute their apps. They can (and do) distribute them directly.
And 3rd parties (i.e. Mobihand/Crackberry) have created their own app stores too, which are probably more usable than RIM's implementation.
Except "Windows 7" is really just Vista SP3 :-)
(okay, Vista is NT 6.0, Win7 is NT 6.1)
And that official reference implementation is supported on *more* than one OS family.
And there are first-rate development environments (IDEs) available in the F/OSS world, for any Java-supporting platform.
Seriously, on a language-vs-language level, I'll admit that C# is leaping way ahead of Java (which seems far too complacent). But on a platform-vs-platform level, Java has *loads* more of a community of stuff than .NET has. (with .NET, it either comes from MS, or you have to pay some dippy little shop lots of license fees to use it)
This reminds me of my main gripe against ClearCase/ClearQuest when my last project team switched to it from CVS/Bugzilla. It seemed like the #1 requirement for the product suite was to extract maximal license revenue. (and it also had more admin overhead, and was less usable from the web, and was yet another toolset that works in Windows and Linux but doesn't give a flying F*%#$ about the Mac)
Based on some off-the-wall estimates, they also wound up not getting enough floating licenses for the thing initially. Seemed like it was a game, where you predict your grab/use/release license needs and buy accordingly, instead of just having it setup where everyone can use it whenever they want without caring.
Imagine not being able to check in your code because there are no ClearCase licenses free, and you have to kick someone off. Imagine not being able to look up the ClearQuest bug # a manager just sent you (and they just sent the number) because there are no ClearQuest licenses free, yet all the managers leave their clients open 24/7 (hogging the licenses and making it easier for them to act like anyone can look up a # in 10 seconds)
Sure, that was intended as a joke, but a lot of protocols in the computer world sure feel like they were invented with the assumption that everyone communicated in nothing but 7-bit US-ASCII.
After all, why else would we need Quoted-Printable and Base64 encoding, which let you put non-7bit data into 7-bit US-ASCII?
And then we have character sets. Its a total mess. It started (most likely) with US-ASCII, and eventually ended up at the all-encompassing Unicode. But along the way, we gained dozens of "legacy character sets" that are inconsistently supported and no one wants to use, but are still outputted by plenty of software.
You know that you can buy the RAM from NewEgg and install it, right?
Or if you want to buy the same RAM that Apple is selling, for a more reasonable price, just go to Crucial.
That said, the RIM JDE is the only way to really profile your app for both performance and memory, they haven't implemented those simulator features into eclipse (yet?).
They have implemented those features in Eclipse, and they've been there for quite a while now. You just have to know where to find them. (basically some additional views you can open) So yes, you can do all the performance/memory profiling on the Debug perspective of Eclipse now. I also recommend looking into the BlackBerry Developer Conference coming up later this year. I went to it last year, and IMHO, it was a very positive experience.
When I kicked off my main BlackBerry project, a surprisingly useful app called LogicMail, I had some similar motivations. I basically really wanted something that didn't exist (at least in any usable form) for the platform.
Though instead of trying to commercialize it, I went for the F/OSS route. In retrospect, one could say I was short-changing myself, but there are other very important pieces of the puzzle that you need to consider first.
First of all, the moment you decide to sell an app, you pretty much cut yourself off from any and all possibility of community contribution to the code. In the beginning, its no big deal as no one contributes anyways. But as the project grows, everyone has a pet feature they want and you don't have the time to work on. Often these are low-risk items you don't mind including.
Second, and probably the biggest issue, is support. If you are going to sell an app, you really should be able to confidently stand behind it. You are essentially taking on an obligation to support it and resolve any user issues. This might seem reasonable at first, especially with small apps, self-contained apps, or apps that talk to sufficiently known/standardized servers with highly constrained protocols. But with my sort of app, there were just too damn many variables to consider. I basically had to turn my users into testers, and a beta stage wouldn't have really helped much. There are just too many e-mail servers and encoding formats to catch it all up front.
Finally, having an open source project is kind of like the developer equivalent of having a portfolio. Its an open way you can show what you're capable of, to a degree pretty much impossible with your day job.
Oh, and I do have a day job, and it pays well enough that I really don't need to stress myself to death for a few extra bucks.
BIS pisses me off even more. Why provide an IMAP client when you can force people to provide their login credentials to their honest and trustworthy cell phone carrier? Not to mention that well into 2008 the idea of syncing e-mail (as opposed to POP3 download) was looked at as some sort of freak request. It's not like anyone would want to get their mail from both their phone AND their PC.
Yeah, I wasn't too fond of that either. That's why I decided to go ahead and write my own IMAP/POP client (LogicMail) for the BlackBerry.
Of course now I'm stuck to the BlackBerry, since I do want to continue working on and supporting the app. But overall its been a pretty good experience, albeit way too much of a time sink.
I've had a Bold 9000 since a couple weeks before it hit the US market. Sure, the early pre-release firmware (4.6.0.125, I think) was flaky. But every upgrade since has been pretty solid.
I seem to have plenty of geek friends that I've sworn were on that pill. Never quite figured out what it was called, or where to find it.
You forgot the thousands of pages of architecture, systems engineering, regulations, requirements, and certification documents that support said code :-)
In my own experience, I've found there are 3 different battery life numbers you run into with any laptops. These numbers are always significantly different.
1. The life the manufacturer tells you that you'll get /. readers) swear you'll actually get
2. The life every reviewer (and some
3. The life you actually do get
Regardless of 1 or 2, I've found that 2.5 hrs is a good ballpark for 3 when the laptop is new. (ok, for Apple, the newest one I've used is a bit over 2 years old, but was in that ballpark when new. My newer HP w/o the add-on battery is a little better than that, but same ballpark)
Except even RIM's browser is improving. Sure, Opera was more functional (albeit slower, more cumbersome, and poorly integrated) on older BlackBerry devices, but that's changed.
As of BlackBerry OS 4.6 and newer, the built-in browser is actually usable and capable, and Opera Mini no longer has a purpose on the phone.
Of course most people's phones are running BB OS 4.2 (or 4.3). Many of them could upgrade to 4.5, which is improved a little. But you need the latest models to run 4.6 or newer.
Thank goodness I don't use Verizon, and will continue to avoid them like the plague.
I actually want my Wi-Fi and GPS (usable by 3rd party software), damnit!
They sure seem to want to make all the customers think that they are. Heck, all their marketing seems to be about the "phones they offer" almost more so than the "service they provide".
People need to wake up and realize that their beloved phones come from Apple, RIM, HTC, Palm, Nokia, etc, and *not* from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, or Sprint.
Of course in the US its a little more complicated in that every carrier seems to use a different radio technology, sometimes with overlap and sometimes without. (i.e. AT&T and T-Mobile are both GSM, but diverge for 3G) And of all the hot smartphones, it seems like only RIM actually cares about supporting all carriers and radio technologies (for the most part, as the Storm is an exception, sorta).
I guess I spoke too soon on the GreaseMonkey bit:
How To : Greasemonkey in Opera
Yeah, so much of my web browsing today depends on a number of Firefox add-ons that simply JFW for a variety of things. Opera could be the greatest browser on the planet, but without AdBlock Plus (no, a manually configured host-filtering hack is not equivalent) or GreaseMonkey, or any other FF extensions I occasionally find use for (FxIF, del.icio.us, TwitterFox, , I simply can't adopt it seriously.
I hope Eclipse's C++ support has improved since I last tried it. The last time I used that plugin, it was slower than molasses. That was a few years ago, so things may have gotten better. However, I've heard that NetBeans has a surprisingly good C++ plugin, which I have not had an opportunity to try.
Of course I use Eclipse as a Java IDE all day without complaint (ok, the UI is cluttered, but the functionality is there). Then again, this discussion is for a C++ IDE.
And that's why Windows gets mandated by policy...
My company is going in the other direction. In years past we had very liberal policies, and half my office (a tiny office in terms of the company) went Mac. Of course corporate IT continued to hate us for it (despite being Mac users at-home) since the Mac never plays nice with their corporate enterprise solutions. (and no, MS Office for OSX isn't covered under the MS enterprise software agreements. we have to find money for it separately)
Now policies have changed, Windows PCs are now mandated by policy, and we'll be clinging on to our Macs for dear life until they're old enough we have to replace them with Dell bricks.