Yep. This is Business Analysis 101. Shadow your users, build prototypes, shadow some more. That plus traditional requirement gathering for the non-functionals. And that's not even getting into professional GUI designer territory.
Honestly, if you want a programme designed right, don't let a "developer" design it; get the right professionals in. I put that in scare quotes because there's no reason someone can't be a developer and also experienced in other disciplines (and most of the best Analysts and Designers are also/formerly developers). But you should never let someone who's only skill is coding do the design work for a commercial-grade app; it's asking someone to do somebody else's job.
I believe him. He's a smart guy (multi-millionaire businessman and all that), I'm sure he knows and knew beforehand what an unholy row a trademark cease-and-desist letter would cause. And I'm 99% sure he isn't the one in charge of sending out legal letters- I'm certain Canonical employs people for that.
So yeah, I'm willing to believe that he thinks sending out the letter was a mistake.
Looking at that screenshot, I can sort of understand where Canonical were coming from. Sort of. Ish. In that it used their logo and their signature font.
Still a dick move, though. I'd have a lot more sympathy for Canonical if they'd sent him an email requesting that he just changes the appearance and adds a disclaimer on the front page. Asking him to stop using the word "Ubuntu" in the URL is clearly an attack on the site, and not just trademark shenanigans.
And I am certain that the increased desktop userbase had absolutely nothing to do with the improved support from graphics card and wifi card vendors, massive increase in Linux games (including Steam), increase in number of companies selling hardware with official (legally backed) Linux support...
OK, so maybe you don't care about any of that stuff- you were happy debugging every new wifi adapter you bought for hours at a time, using graphics processors that ran at a fraction of the speed they did under Windows, playing "HDD-controller-support bingo" with new laptops, and maybe you don't play computer games at all. Maybe all you want from Linux is a server OS, in which case bully for you. But as a desktop user, personally I'm very happy with the way things have panned out over the last decade.
And of course if you don't care about games, hardware support or plug-and-play devices, I don't know what you're doing anywhere near Ubuntu and its users in the first place. Stick to Slackware or Gentoo and you need never pollute your mind with any such nonsense ever again.
Or maybe you just enjoy a good rant. I can't wait to hear your opinion on Apple Darwin's effect on the open source movement, or good old Android Linux...
Technology stocks are at records highs at the moment. Companies that have no sound business plan have no difficulty in raising capital to fund their crazy dreams.
The fact that Facebook IPO was overpriced and keeps going up is supportive evidence of a bubble, not proof against one. The company still makes only a tiny profit (a few tens of millions of dollars on a multi-billion dollar revenue)- if they were a blue chip company, they'd be rated as "avoid like the plague".
Thanks. I remember seeing a demo of Plasma Active a while back, it's pleasing to see it's so far along. Sadly, it doesn't look like they're designing for phones though- only tablets. So I'm guessing a Nexus 5 build is a little unlikely.
I'm just replying to a thread- I didn't start anything re: iPhones. Nexus certainly is cheaper than the Galaxy range, and most of the other Android premium brands- it is very impressive indeed.
Not that it's a substitute for proper support, but one small sop is that the Nexus phones are the easiest Android phone to re-flash yourself, and Cyanogen Mod is at it's best polished on Nexus devices. As long as it can handle it hardware-wise, there's nothing stopping you installing the KitKat-derived version of Cyanogen Mod (once it is released).
The Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 also refer to their physical dimensions- (roughly) 4" and 5" screens respectively. The rumour mill has it that a "Nexus 4 v2" may be released some time next year- i.e., a new phone with a 4" screen.
The fact that Android is Linux should give you a clue to your answer- if it's already running Linux, then there's nothing stopping it running other Linux. The only thing that usually stands in the way of Android devices loading up other OSs is a locked bootloader- which Nexus thankfully doesn't have.
Ubuntu Touch uses the Android variant of the Linux kernel (I believe), including the Android hardware stack, which is why it runs so well on Android devices. Of course "runs well" is a misnomer here, seeing as it isn't actually finished. Cyanogen Mod (the community Android distro) is also Linux (obviously), is rather more complete than Ubuntu Touch, and has implemented a rather large portion of everything you would expect from a Linux distro- although it really does depend on what the killer feature you're after actually is.
Android is Linux- it is a Linux kernel with a userspace on top. What more do you want?
Nexus has an unlocked bootloader, so there are at least two other Linux variants that will run on it- Cyanogen Mod Android and Ubuntu Touch. Principally there is nothing stopping you installing any other OS you like, if you have another one that is hardware compatible. (If you do, post about it here- it would be interesting to read about it. Are there are Mer variants that work on Nexus, for example?).
Just to be clear, the Nexus is Google branded but is not made by Google. This one is made by LG, and other Nexus branded gear is made by a wide (and rotating) range of OEMs.
This differs rather from the MS Surface, which is made for MS directly by contract manufacturers (like Pegatron or Foxconn), cutting the OEMs out of the loop.
"Subsidy" is the wrong word, as it implies that they are paying something towards the phone for you. They do not. You pay for the phone (and then some) over time. "Loan" is the usual word for this.
The Nexus being cheaper than the iPhone is still noteworthy in a system where carriers loan you the money ("subsidise") for the phone, as the carrier will be able to offer you a lower monthly payment.
I would use whatever word is actually applicable to the policies that they're advocating.
"Socialist", for example, is not a dirty word. The Labour Party in the UK still has "democratic socialist" baked into their mission statement. Do you mean that the New York Times is a socialist paper? Because let me tell you, as a socialist myself, I find that very hard to believe.
Shuttleworth has said before that Canonical would be in the black if you discount the money they're spending on Touch. The server and OpenStack business is very profitable for them, the desktop business is around break even, and their Touch stuff is very loss-making. In the interview, he suggested that he'd rather spend his money (he being the major bankroller still) shooting for glory than settling for a profitable little server business pointlessly nibbling at Red Hat's leftovers.
You can say a lot about Shuttleworth, but he's not prone to lying about this sort of thing.
I don't know about your professional life, but mine would be MUCH improved if all the non-techies I deal with every day had a passing, rudimentary understanding of what programming actually is.
You wouldn't casually ask your mechanic, when taking your car in for a service, if he could just make your car electric instead of petrol. You wouldn't ask your plumber, when fixing a leaky sink, if he could just turn it into a jacuzzi while he's at it. But business people will frequently ask, from programmers carrying out routine development, if they can just add a colossally complex new product database to a webform "while we're at it". That's more or less the definition of "scope creep", and it's killed almost as many projects I've experienced as I've actually seen finished. And to be clear, I'm not expecting them to know how to do it themselves- just to understand the consequences of features they ask for.
If our business people had that basic level of understanding, more of our projects would complete successfully, more quickly, more cheaply, saving our company millions.
You also think you're better than your retard boss, that idiot, who the fuck does he think he is? He's a "boss" just because he's got an MBA, pfft... joke degrees (except your boss worked his ass of from nothing and now he owns a company. Because he knows a thing or two. And also, he drives a BMW and you drive a used toyota. Gee, if you're so much better than him, how come you don't have your own company?
You're just as foolish as the OP, but in the other direction. MY boss didn't work his way up from anything- he's a guy who applied for the job of departmental manager and got given it. The company's CEO didn't work his way up from anything, either- he's an upper-middle class guy, who was born to an upper-middle-class family, who went to a private school followed by a good University, got his degree in business and accounting, got a job as a finance guy in our company, and a few decades later found himself in a position to apply for the top job.
Now I'm not knocking either of them, or any of the others. They do a useful job and they do it well. But don't romanticise it- they're no different from anyone else in the company, including the techies. They learned a skill and do a job, and that's it. They deserve due respect for their skills, but the techies deserve due respect for theirs.
I see the problem all the time. You can have a guy with a masters in computer science and a guy with a masters in law in a room together with a senior manager, and see how they're treated differently. Despite the fact they're both highly trained professionals, the lawyer will get the respect due to an experienced businessman, and the IT consultant will get treated like a greasemonkey. You can even see it when looking at people like senior Enterprise Architects (just about the seniority "peak" for the IT field in my sort of company), and how they aren't treated with quite the same deference as their equivalents from other departments.
Thankfully, jingoism is not a disease that readily affects many people in Britain. There's a reason (and a good one at that) that we view flying the Union Jack or Flag of St George with distaste except in specific sets of context (sporting events, royal things, etc.), contrasted with the idolisation of the flag in the States.
Being happy with and supportive of your country is a wholly different thing to being a Nationalist. Thank god we have the sense in this country to keep the two separated.
It doesn't print food. It prints with food. If your kitchen printer can make a printed chocolate bar, you already had edible chocolate. If you can print pasta, you already had flour and water and could have made a passable flatbread with nothing more than a mixing bowl and a hot skillet.
In a disaster zone, the shape of the food is not the priority. Just having calories and vitamins, in any form, will do.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. This is Business Analysis 101. Shadow your users, build prototypes, shadow some more. That plus traditional requirement gathering for the non-functionals. And that's not even getting into professional GUI designer territory.
Honestly, if you want a programme designed right, don't let a "developer" design it; get the right professionals in. I put that in scare quotes because there's no reason someone can't be a developer and also experienced in other disciplines (and most of the best Analysts and Designers are also/formerly developers). But you should never let someone who's only skill is coding do the design work for a commercial-grade app; it's asking someone to do somebody else's job.
I believe him. He's a smart guy (multi-millionaire businessman and all that), I'm sure he knows and knew beforehand what an unholy row a trademark cease-and-desist letter would cause. And I'm 99% sure he isn't the one in charge of sending out legal letters- I'm certain Canonical employs people for that.
So yeah, I'm willing to believe that he thinks sending out the letter was a mistake.
Looking at that screenshot, I can sort of understand where Canonical were coming from. Sort of. Ish. In that it used their logo and their signature font.
Still a dick move, though. I'd have a lot more sympathy for Canonical if they'd sent him an email requesting that he just changes the appearance and adds a disclaimer on the front page. Asking him to stop using the word "Ubuntu" in the URL is clearly an attack on the site, and not just trademark shenanigans.
And I am certain that the increased desktop userbase had absolutely nothing to do with the improved support from graphics card and wifi card vendors, massive increase in Linux games (including Steam), increase in number of companies selling hardware with official (legally backed) Linux support...
OK, so maybe you don't care about any of that stuff- you were happy debugging every new wifi adapter you bought for hours at a time, using graphics processors that ran at a fraction of the speed they did under Windows, playing "HDD-controller-support bingo" with new laptops, and maybe you don't play computer games at all. Maybe all you want from Linux is a server OS, in which case bully for you. But as a desktop user, personally I'm very happy with the way things have panned out over the last decade.
And of course if you don't care about games, hardware support or plug-and-play devices, I don't know what you're doing anywhere near Ubuntu and its users in the first place. Stick to Slackware or Gentoo and you need never pollute your mind with any such nonsense ever again.
Or maybe you just enjoy a good rant. I can't wait to hear your opinion on Apple Darwin's effect on the open source movement, or good old Android Linux...
and then almost never-ending lines of roundabouts (although at least they were in straight lines unlike Swindon)...
Well where's the fun in that?
- A Swindonian.
Hardly, Red Hat dropped support for POWER with RHEL 5.
Not according to the horse's mouth:
http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/lnxinfo/v3r0m0/index.jsp?topic=%2Fliaam%2Fliaamdistros.htm
Hmmm, I do wonder if the even in 1929 and the event in 1931 were in any way connected... /snark.
Did you read the summary?
Technology stocks are at records highs at the moment. Companies that have no sound business plan have no difficulty in raising capital to fund their crazy dreams.
The fact that Facebook IPO was overpriced and keeps going up is supportive evidence of a bubble, not proof against one. The company still makes only a tiny profit (a few tens of millions of dollars on a multi-billion dollar revenue)- if they were a blue chip company, they'd be rated as "avoid like the plague".
It came pre-installed on my 2.1 Sony Ericcson X10 Mini Pro. Is this really "new" news?
Thanks. I remember seeing a demo of Plasma Active a while back, it's pleasing to see it's so far along. Sadly, it doesn't look like they're designing for phones though- only tablets. So I'm guessing a Nexus 5 build is a little unlikely.
I'm just replying to a thread- I didn't start anything re: iPhones. Nexus certainly is cheaper than the Galaxy range, and most of the other Android premium brands- it is very impressive indeed.
Not that it's a substitute for proper support, but one small sop is that the Nexus phones are the easiest Android phone to re-flash yourself, and Cyanogen Mod is at it's best polished on Nexus devices. As long as it can handle it hardware-wise, there's nothing stopping you installing the KitKat-derived version of Cyanogen Mod (once it is released).
The Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 also refer to their physical dimensions- (roughly) 4" and 5" screens respectively. The rumour mill has it that a "Nexus 4 v2" may be released some time next year- i.e., a new phone with a 4" screen.
The fact that Android is Linux should give you a clue to your answer- if it's already running Linux, then there's nothing stopping it running other Linux. The only thing that usually stands in the way of Android devices loading up other OSs is a locked bootloader- which Nexus thankfully doesn't have.
Ubuntu Touch uses the Android variant of the Linux kernel (I believe), including the Android hardware stack, which is why it runs so well on Android devices. Of course "runs well" is a misnomer here, seeing as it isn't actually finished. Cyanogen Mod (the community Android distro) is also Linux (obviously), is rather more complete than Ubuntu Touch, and has implemented a rather large portion of everything you would expect from a Linux distro- although it really does depend on what the killer feature you're after actually is.
Android is Linux- it is a Linux kernel with a userspace on top. What more do you want?
Nexus has an unlocked bootloader, so there are at least two other Linux variants that will run on it- Cyanogen Mod Android and Ubuntu Touch. Principally there is nothing stopping you installing any other OS you like, if you have another one that is hardware compatible. (If you do, post about it here- it would be interesting to read about it. Are there are Mer variants that work on Nexus, for example?).
Just to be clear, the Nexus is Google branded but is not made by Google. This one is made by LG, and other Nexus branded gear is made by a wide (and rotating) range of OEMs.
This differs rather from the MS Surface, which is made for MS directly by contract manufacturers (like Pegatron or Foxconn), cutting the OEMs out of the loop.
"Subsidy" is the wrong word, as it implies that they are paying something towards the phone for you. They do not. You pay for the phone (and then some) over time. "Loan" is the usual word for this.
The Nexus being cheaper than the iPhone is still noteworthy in a system where carriers loan you the money ("subsidise") for the phone, as the carrier will be able to offer you a lower monthly payment.
I would use whatever word is actually applicable to the policies that they're advocating.
"Socialist", for example, is not a dirty word. The Labour Party in the UK still has "democratic socialist" baked into their mission statement. Do you mean that the New York Times is a socialist paper? Because let me tell you, as a socialist myself, I find that very hard to believe.
Shuttleworth has said before that Canonical would be in the black if you discount the money they're spending on Touch. The server and OpenStack business is very profitable for them, the desktop business is around break even, and their Touch stuff is very loss-making. In the interview, he suggested that he'd rather spend his money (he being the major bankroller still) shooting for glory than settling for a profitable little server business pointlessly nibbling at Red Hat's leftovers.
You can say a lot about Shuttleworth, but he's not prone to lying about this sort of thing.
I don't know about your professional life, but mine would be MUCH improved if all the non-techies I deal with every day had a passing, rudimentary understanding of what programming actually is.
You wouldn't casually ask your mechanic, when taking your car in for a service, if he could just make your car electric instead of petrol. You wouldn't ask your plumber, when fixing a leaky sink, if he could just turn it into a jacuzzi while he's at it. But business people will frequently ask, from programmers carrying out routine development, if they can just add a colossally complex new product database to a webform "while we're at it". That's more or less the definition of "scope creep", and it's killed almost as many projects I've experienced as I've actually seen finished. And to be clear, I'm not expecting them to know how to do it themselves- just to understand the consequences of features they ask for.
If our business people had that basic level of understanding, more of our projects would complete successfully, more quickly, more cheaply, saving our company millions.
You also think you're better than your retard boss, that idiot, who the fuck does he think he is? He's a "boss" just because he's got an MBA, pfft... joke degrees (except your boss worked his ass of from nothing and now he owns a company. Because he knows a thing or two. And also, he drives a BMW and you drive a used toyota. Gee, if you're so much better than him, how come you don't have your own company?
You're just as foolish as the OP, but in the other direction. MY boss didn't work his way up from anything- he's a guy who applied for the job of departmental manager and got given it. The company's CEO didn't work his way up from anything, either- he's an upper-middle class guy, who was born to an upper-middle-class family, who went to a private school followed by a good University, got his degree in business and accounting, got a job as a finance guy in our company, and a few decades later found himself in a position to apply for the top job.
Now I'm not knocking either of them, or any of the others. They do a useful job and they do it well. But don't romanticise it- they're no different from anyone else in the company, including the techies. They learned a skill and do a job, and that's it. They deserve due respect for their skills, but the techies deserve due respect for theirs.
I see the problem all the time. You can have a guy with a masters in computer science and a guy with a masters in law in a room together with a senior manager, and see how they're treated differently. Despite the fact they're both highly trained professionals, the lawyer will get the respect due to an experienced businessman, and the IT consultant will get treated like a greasemonkey. You can even see it when looking at people like senior Enterprise Architects (just about the seniority "peak" for the IT field in my sort of company), and how they aren't treated with quite the same deference as their equivalents from other departments.
You have to be an inscrutable idiot if you believe that "Liberal" is the same as "Far Left".
Thankfully, jingoism is not a disease that readily affects many people in Britain. There's a reason (and a good one at that) that we view flying the Union Jack or Flag of St George with distaste except in specific sets of context (sporting events, royal things, etc.), contrasted with the idolisation of the flag in the States.
Being happy with and supportive of your country is a wholly different thing to being a Nationalist. Thank god we have the sense in this country to keep the two separated.
Medical supplies are rather uselss to someone who dies of thirst, too. What's your point?
It doesn't print food. It prints with food. If your kitchen printer can make a printed chocolate bar, you already had edible chocolate. If you can print pasta, you already had flour and water and could have made a passable flatbread with nothing more than a mixing bowl and a hot skillet.
In a disaster zone, the shape of the food is not the priority. Just having calories and vitamins, in any form, will do.