I doubt your "inexpensive, durable, nearly 100% reliable, nearly 100% available" cell phone will ever be created. Cell phone carriers and manufacturers don't want to sell an inexpensive commodity. They need differentiating features and services with which to nickel and dime their customers.
I think this would be bigger news if DoCoMo had chosen NetBSD over Linux. NetBSD prides itself it being a portable and lightweight OS, but why doesn't it get more attention? You would think NetBSD's BSD license would be more attractive to manufacturers than Linux's GPL license. There is even commercial dev support for embedded NetBSD systems from Wasabi Systems, but they don't seem to be having much success in the cell phone arena.
Except that Symbian is controlled by Nokia. And the Symbian dev tools are sucky. You have to use their wacky C++ variant, incompatible with all your legacy code. They don't even have a remote debugger to debug programs running on the phone! Borland sells a Symbian remote debugger, but you have to pay extra, you have to switch to Borland's C++ compiler, and it barely works.
From the user's perspective, they can't tell the difference (given a decent GUI). Using Linux underneath a user-friendly GUI is an advantage to the phone manufacturer.
Either you are actually a registered Democrat Or, you are deluded into thinking that the Libertarian candidate will get 58% of the vote
Why can't someone registered Libertarian vote for a Democrat? He can't vote in the Democratic Party primary election, but in the general election, you can vote for any party's candidate you like.
I believe within the next 100 years, there will be a second Civil War. The growth of political, socio-economic, and technological divide in the US is accelerating. How long can the religious fundamentalist Big Brothers in power keep the masses fat and happy? The Medicare and Social Security pyramid schemes won't last forever. The backs of the younger generations will eventually break.
This is sad. The inconsistent app GUIs is part of the long-standing Unix problem, not part of the solution! I don't think Sun will ever understand design for end users.
If short-term thinking is truly the problem with today's corporate culture, I sometimes think we should get rid of the stock market. It's all a big pyramid scheme anyways. If companies and their owners didn't have stock options (or profit sharing), I wonder how that would change their management style?
so if EQ is using a 64-bit integer, then why didn't they just use MAX_INT_64 or whatever? They are probably using some arbitrary precision integer available in their database backend.
the court held that the Second Amendment guarantees the collective right of the people to maintain effective state militias, but does not provide any type of individual right to own or possess weapons.
Regulation allows phone providers a consistent rate of return on their capital investment while keeping rates down for everyone.
"Consistent rate of return" just means the provider is not allowed to charge more when the cost of providing the service costs more. If providing telephone or internet service in the rural boonies costs more than in the city, why SHOULDN'T the people living in the boonies pay more for their service? The more they have to pay, the more likely that competitive services (like wireless, satellite, or cable) will start drooling and want to provide their services.
yeah, your grandparents could use those trains to travel cross-country in just a few hours or anywhere in the world in just half a day. Today's planes can't do THAT. And I bet today's plane tickets are (comparitively) cheaper.
or maybe Bush did not actually go to Iraq. Like the 1960s moon mission, the Air Force just flew Bush and these gullible reporters around in circles before landing at a fake base in an allied country somewhere. The reporters were only on the ground for three hours. How would they know where they actually landed without cell phones or GPS?
no. Someone had recommended I try the Synaptics driver from the XFree86 CVS tree, but that was too bleeding edge for me... said as I boot linux-2.6.0-test kernels:-)
I have a Dell Latitude C400 laptop. The only problem I had with the linux-2.6.0-testX kernels was that it broke mouse pad support. The workaround is to add the following boot-time kernel parameter: psmouse=noext
Here is a story someone (not me:-) write about what happened when Quark outsourced the Mac OS X port of QuarkXpress 6.0 to "senior" developers in India:
----------------
QuarkXpress was indisputably the #1 publishing layout software in the world and almost all its users ran it on the Mac. In fact, this issue of graphics and publishing software on the Mac was probably the primary reason Apple computer even survived.
The original owner sold the company and the new owners fired the entire development staff and outsourced all development and customer service to India. They claimed that India had far superior developers who worked at a lower price and produced better, more stable, more feature filled software because of their better education and attention to process, a la the Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.
The project to port Quark to OS X, a simple carbonization exercise that many other programs of similar complexity accomplished with a modest staff over a period of a few months, dragged on and on in India. Eventually, the resulting version 6 was delivered two years late and at a far greater cost tahn any one could have imagined. But many customers had held on during these years and ignored the technically superior, file compatible, and less expensive Adobe InDesign (built in the USA, oddly). Customers had even refused to upgrade their hardware because Quark 4 (most skipped v5) didn't run well on newer machines that could not boot into OS 9. Apple's hardware sales suffered as a result. Apple even provided, free of charge, Apple consultants to India to assist with the port. But finally, very recently, version 6 was released and customers started to upgrade their hardware and move to version 6. During the two years, Quark went from around 90% market share to about 50%, but they still were a major player. Customers had a long history with the company and much invested in understanding the quirky and nonstandard ways that the software worked, and they did not want to give up on that investment.
Among the problems are file incompatibility, draconian licensing, sluggishness, poor feature set, nonstandard UI, instability, and so forth. In addition to this, the program reuires a flakey and unreliable dial up activation scheme as well as a dongle and can only be run on one computer total. If you want to work on your lap top AND your desktop as just about everyone does, you MUST buy 2 licenses at an outlay of two thousand dollars. In addition, customer support is abysmal. for your money you are entitiled to only one customer support issue through email. If you have a second issue, you must pay $15 for each emailed-to-india question. Customers have found that Quack hangs up, refuses to answer, provides nonsensical answers, and requires you to pay multiple times in a single-issue guessing game in which they play stupid in response to your questions in order to bilk you out of additional support money, just like a phone sex operator tries to keep you on hold as long as possible.
In the last three months, of the 50% of the market who was waiting for Quark 6 to come out, most of them have upgraded their hardware and tested Quark 6. The result is amazing -- almost all customers, within days of acquiring Quark 6, bought InDesign and are in the process of migrating, never to return. Adobe's sales have flown through the roof in the meantime.
So the market leader has completely gutted their business. No one will be left to buy any version 7. It's the last straw.
As a side issue, I'll note that in the last few months it has been extremely entertaining to watch questions posted on programming lists from senior engineers with quark.co.in and other.in addresses. The questions are below that of a teh sophistication of a clueless newbie -- these guys know absolutel/y nothi
Slashdot Mirror
They should have just called her "36 of D".
I doubt your "inexpensive, durable, nearly 100% reliable, nearly 100% available" cell phone will ever be created. Cell phone carriers and manufacturers don't want to sell an inexpensive commodity. They need differentiating features and services with which to nickel and dime their customers.
I think this would be bigger news if DoCoMo had chosen NetBSD over Linux. NetBSD prides itself it being a portable and lightweight OS, but why doesn't it get more attention? You would think NetBSD's BSD license would be more attractive to manufacturers than Linux's GPL license. There is even commercial dev support for embedded NetBSD systems from Wasabi Systems, but they don't seem to be having much success in the cell phone arena.
and what does the J2ME VM run on? The phone needs an OS to run the user apps.
Except that Symbian is controlled by Nokia. And the Symbian dev tools are sucky. You have to use their wacky C++ variant, incompatible with all your legacy code. They don't even have a remote debugger to debug programs running on the phone! Borland sells a Symbian remote debugger, but you have to pay extra, you have to switch to Borland's C++ compiler, and it barely works.
From the user's perspective, they can't tell the difference (given a decent GUI). Using Linux underneath a user-friendly GUI is an advantage to the phone manufacturer.
MontaVista. You can at least spell their name correctly.
or it's like virus scanner companies that write viruses or drug companies that create drug treatments but not cures.
Either you are actually a registered Democrat Or, you are deluded into thinking that the Libertarian candidate will get 58% of the vote
Why can't someone registered Libertarian vote for a Democrat? He can't vote in the Democratic Party primary election, but in the general election, you can vote for any party's candidate you like.
I believe within the next 100 years, there will be a second Civil War. The growth of political, socio-economic, and technological divide in the US is accelerating. How long can the religious fundamentalist Big Brothers in power keep the masses fat and happy? The Medicare and Social Security pyramid schemes won't last forever. The backs of the younger generations will eventually break.
This is sad. The inconsistent app GUIs is part of the long-standing Unix problem, not part of the solution! I don't think Sun will ever understand design for end users.
If short-term thinking is truly the problem with today's corporate culture, I sometimes think we should get rid of the stock market. It's all a big pyramid scheme anyways. If companies and their owners didn't have stock options (or profit sharing), I wonder how that would change their management style?
what's your company's URL? Slashdot is a great place to plug your company's service for free!
so if EQ is using a 64-bit integer, then why didn't they just use MAX_INT_64 or whatever? They are probably using some arbitrary precision integer available in their database backend.
If it bleeds, we can kill it.
5) SONY PROFIT!!!
since the status quo is to recgonize the basic human right to keep and bear arms.
Unfortunately this is not true: "U.S. Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Second Amendment Challenge to California's Assault Weapon Ban"
the court held that the Second Amendment guarantees the collective right of the people to maintain effective state militias, but does not provide any type of individual right to own or possess weapons.
Some researchers from UC Berkeley's Smart Dust project have founded a startup in Berkeley called Dust, Inc.
Regulation allows phone providers a consistent rate of return on their capital investment while keeping rates down for everyone.
"Consistent rate of return" just means the provider is not allowed to charge more when the cost of providing the service costs more. If providing telephone or internet service in the rural boonies costs more than in the city, why SHOULDN'T the people living in the boonies pay more for their service? The more they have to pay, the more likely that competitive services (like wireless, satellite, or cable) will start drooling and want to provide their services.
yeah, your grandparents could use those trains to travel cross-country in just a few hours or anywhere in the world in just half a day. Today's planes can't do THAT. And I bet today's plane tickets are (comparitively) cheaper.
or maybe Bush did not actually go to Iraq. Like the 1960s moon mission, the Air Force just flew Bush and these gullible reporters around in circles before landing at a fake base in an allied country somewhere. The reporters were only on the ground for three hours. How would they know where they actually landed without cell phones or GPS?
no. Someone had recommended I try the Synaptics driver from the XFree86 CVS tree, but that was too bleeding edge for me... said as I boot linux-2.6.0-test kernels
Linux 2.4 had the Greased Weasel, so shouldn't Linux 2.6 have a Greased Beaver?
Cougar and Panther? So Apple is still playing catch up to Microsoft?
I have a Dell Latitude C400 laptop. The only problem I had with the linux-2.6.0-testX kernels was that it broke mouse pad support. The workaround is to add the following boot-time kernel parameter: psmouse=noext
Here is a story someone (not me
----------------
QuarkXpress was indisputably the #1 publishing layout software in the world and almost all its users ran it on the Mac. In fact, this issue of graphics and publishing software on the Mac was probably the primary reason Apple computer even survived.
The original owner sold the company and the new owners fired the entire development staff and outsourced all development and customer service to India. They claimed that India had far superior developers who worked at a lower price and produced better, more stable, more feature filled software because of their better education and attention to process, a la the Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.
The project to port Quark to OS X, a simple carbonization exercise that many other programs of similar complexity accomplished with a modest staff over a period of a few months, dragged on and on in India. Eventually, the resulting version 6 was delivered two years late and at a far greater cost tahn any one could have imagined. But many customers had held on during these years and ignored the technically superior, file compatible, and less expensive Adobe InDesign (built in the USA, oddly). Customers had even refused to upgrade their hardware because Quark 4 (most skipped v5) didn't run well on newer machines that could not boot into OS 9. Apple's hardware sales suffered as a result. Apple even provided, free of charge, Apple consultants to India to assist with the port. But finally, very recently, version 6 was released and customers started to upgrade their hardware and move to version 6. During the two years, Quark went from around 90% market share to about 50%, but they still were a major player. Customers had a long history with the company and much invested in understanding the quirky and nonstandard ways that the software worked, and they did not want to give up on that investment.
Here are customer reviews of version 6:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos x/ 11887
Read all 261 reviews.
Among the problems are file incompatibility, draconian licensing, sluggishness, poor feature set, nonstandard UI, instability, and so forth. In addition to this, the program reuires a flakey and unreliable dial up activation scheme as well as a dongle and can only be run on one computer total. If you want to work on your lap top AND your desktop as just about everyone does, you MUST buy 2 licenses at an outlay of two thousand dollars. In addition, customer support is abysmal. for your money you are entitiled to only one customer support issue through email. If you have a second issue, you must pay $15 for each emailed-to-india question. Customers have found that Quack hangs up, refuses to answer, provides nonsensical answers, and requires you to pay multiple times in a single-issue guessing game in which they play stupid in response to your questions in order to bilk you out of additional support money, just like a phone sex operator tries to keep you on hold as long as possible.
In the last three months, of the 50% of the market who was waiting for Quark 6 to come out, most of them have upgraded their hardware and tested Quark 6. The result is amazing -- almost all customers, within days of acquiring Quark 6, bought InDesign and are in the process of migrating, never to return. Adobe's sales have flown through the roof in the meantime.
So the market leader has completely gutted their business. No one will be left to buy any version 7. It's the last straw.
As a side issue, I'll note that in the last few months it has been extremely entertaining to watch questions posted on programming lists from senior engineers with quark.co.in and other