It's simple - if you want a (smart)phone that will have a regularly-updated OS and new features as they become available, then the only choice is the iPhone.
The iPhone will for a limited time. Or you could go with a Sony Android phone where your chances are about the same, since Sony has publicly committed to supporting their phones with the latest Android until the hardware no longer meets the requirements. (Sure Sony could go back on it, lose a lawsuit, and payout fines, but so could Apple really.) The other alternative is that, as a geek, you get one of the more open hardware sets and manage your own OS updates. But that is sort of beside the point. You're oversimplifying and Sony is as good of a bet as Apple (this from someone who thinks Sony is scum of the earth and would never buy a product from them).
I hate to break it to you, but if you're sending documents back and forth, you are doing it wrong. What you should have is an information management system, where all the information is updated in realtime when people make changes to it (and of course track changes).
Umm, welcome to the real world. We have three of them and for security reasons no one shares access with anyone else. The client doesn't want to pay for a dedicated CMS for this project so things are mostly shared via encrypted e-mail then manually synched in the respective archiving system.
But you talked about having a dozens of engineers just for messing around with this thing in word processor formats, right? Why not let the professional writers do their writing without worrying about the scripting or anything more than the most basic markup (bold, italic, etc.), and then letting someone else (the "TeX guru") handle the serious markup and scripting?
The problem with that is the engineers need a tool to write in that includes basic formatting and pictures. Not all of the want to write TeX markup. This means we need a word processor, but then we need to export from that word processor to a publishing software and to HTML. LaTeX is good if you can get the word processor into a decent XML format and then employ some scripts to bash it into shape, but at that point it is easier to just use something like Framemaker and Webworks to take RTF or.doc and put it into both formats in a nicer way that doesn't require any knowledge of scripting and is not as brittle.
One of the whole points of LaTeX is to make it relatively easy to separate the content from the presentation. Most LaTeX documents are pretty simple-looking really, as far as the markup goes; the hard stuff is in the template.
You don't need to sell me on LaTeX. I'm a big fan. For writing markup I want to single source from one or two competent authors, I love it. When sourcing content from a restricted CMS text or wiki, it is a very nice, free solution. I just have't had a lot of luck getting more than a few people using it when I did not have an automated system already build for user input. The average person, even the average network engineer, just doesn't want to but the time in to learn to use it and markup the text themselves and pulling things into LaTeX from word processors and the like has never worked out well, in my experience.
It's good to hear of a successful case of OO/LO adoption, but it sounds like maybe you were really using the wrong tools for the job anyway, and should have been using TeX or LaTeX, especially for very large documents.
I've certainly used LaTeX for various projects, but it was not appropriate for this one. It was a collaborative set of documentation with a wide variety of contributors that needed to be edited by professional writers without scripting or markup expertise running on both Linux and Windows. LaTeX was not the tool to facilitate easy authoring, editing, and technical editing from a team of about 20.
In the study of computer-human interaction one quickly sees there are design compromises made between how easy an interface is to learn and how flexible and fast it is one learned. A UI element no one ever learns to use is useless, but likewise an easy to discover UI element that is very slow gets in the user's way just as much. A good example might be using a modifier key and tab to switch applications. Windows and OS X both have this user interface with a slight difference. Windows has a single layer modifier that switches to each window in turn. This is easy to learn but can be slow to use. OS X has two modifier keys, one to switch applications and one to switch windows within an application. This is harder to learn, but once learned, much faster for users with multiple apps and multiple windows per app. For power users the latter is much better, but a larger percentage of novices use the Windows feature because it is easier to train themselves on.
No-one running Office software in a production environment would pick LibreOffice over Microsoft Office for anything other than the most basic of mundane word processing.
I worked at a place that switched to OpenOffice (before LibreOffice existed). We left three MSOffice boxes for translation and everything else moved over. It was a very successful and beneficial transition. One of the main problems it was solving was the needs of the documentation team. We needed dozens of engineers to have the ability to modify very large documents. The problem was, above a certain size Word regularly corrupted the files on save and the next time someone opened it we ended up having to roll back to the previous version of the document, losing all the work of the last person. Before switching to OpenOffice we had to institute a policy that everyone had to save a document, then (without closing it) send it elsewhere and test opening it before they could quit and save. It was ridiculous and I still see people complaining about this same issue in professional writing forums. After the switch this annoying and very costly failure was no longer wasting our time and money.
My current client, my co-workers and I, and an outside consulting firm for regulatory compliance, often exchange MSOffice documents. Using Word and the native formats is horrible. Templates, TOC, comments, headers and footers, they all break all the time switching between various versions of Word for various platforms. The manpower waste is easily in the tens of thousands of dollars already and project is in the early stages. With LibreOffice (which we use on other projects) we have no such problems because clients can always upgrade to the same version and the same document format in short order given the free nature of the licensing.
And finally, I'm a bit confused about what tasks you think users hould be employing Word for where it is more suitable than LibreOffice. I see Word misused a lot for tasks where a proper CMS and/or Framemaker or Indesign or Quark is the real type of tool that professionals use. If you're using Word for "advanced tasks" from a publishing or documentation standpoint, you've already failed. For the tasks Word is actually suited, LibreOffice seems a fine replacement.
I read the whole list of comments and did not see a single person mention the fairly important part of the article that seems left out by he summary and headline:
The alternative is that Apple has given some of its patents to Digitude because the patent troll came after it first. The dozen patents Apple has handed over may have been part of a settlement with the firm, along with the license agreement (which would presumably give Apple the rights to its patents, and additional Digitude patents). This seems more likely.
How is it with over a hundred comments no one seems to have RTFA and seen the analysis by Kincaid that says this is most probably a case where Apple was sued by the patent troll and transferred patents as part of a settlement for the lawsuit? Mind you Apple probably could have and should have fought back and demanded a cash only settlement in order to prevent the patent trolling form propagating, but then I can understand not doing so. Microsoft has certainly transferred its patents with trolls several times so paying hard cash to protect competitors seems like a losing strategy in our very, very broken market.
The problem with extreme programming (and with all good practice, really) is that it's inefficient (in the context of getting it out the door). It has a cost. Management doesn't want to pay for good practice now - now they want to pay for shipping the code.
That is called "incompetence" and is very common in management. I'm sorry you have to work with clueless managers that don't know their business. If you don't insist on good practices for your coders for a long term project it is unlikely any first rate talent wants to work with you anyway.
First, enough turnover will always kill you no matter your procedures. If a team turns over 75% of its developers in 6 months, there's nothing to be done. So step 1: make sure your developers don't want to quit.
Turnover is very harmful, but as I said spreading out the coding tasks across a whole team mitigates the damage and allows you to scale back up to efficiency in a reasonable timeframe. Brooks law states, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later", but I've seen it proved false. With paired programming adding 50% more programmers on a late project did not slow our development at all and within a few weeks it had sped up significantly. The caveat being you have to be doing paired programming in the first place.
Maybe a unit test isn't maintained well enough, and it passes even though the code isn't really doing what the test description said.
With good coding practices, relevant tests should be written and modified so they fail before you start coding anything new on the actual project. Additionally, with good QA practices there should be a separately maintained functional regression test that should catch the vast majority of things a unit test does not. Of course not all of this applies to all kinds of projects and there will still be bugs, but the kind of unmaintainable code no one understands that sticks around in an active project, well it just is really, really, really rare.
And even with the best intentions, there's always slip ups.
True, but with good practices they become a very rare event that does not have real impact on the work.
It doesn't work. You'd need people that follow the same coding practices and have enough experience to move at the same pace. Which is pretty much impossible.
Heh, it's funny since the place I work now has been making money doing it for a decade. People don't have to have the exact same level of experience to work on the same code and hand it off, especially when working as pairs in a group environment where you can always just ask the team if you don't understand something. You learn a whole lot faster when sharing a keyboard with someone who already has been working on the code base for a few years.
While I understand the point you are making when I hear the term "Extreme Programming" my imagination runs wild.
Yeah and the term for writing computer programs is "coding" and the anode on a battery is labeled "-" those are the dreadfully inappropriate terms that stuck. Deal with it.
Are your[sic] trying to run with the Bulls[sic] in Pamplona while trying to figure where that Division[sic] by zero takes place?
Yes I am, but that is unrelated to the term "extreme programming". Also, you improperly capitalized "Bulls" and "Division"; maybe you've been watching too much basketball?
Somebody writes the code, doesn't bother to comment it at all and then you come in years after the fact. You look at the code and wonder, "why did he do it that way instead of this way?" Then the big gotcha, you think I could ask him but he left the company 5 years ago(At this point slap your forehead and hope you don't break anything working on the code.)
One way to mitigate this is "extreme programming" where developers pair and constantly switch off projects and tasks. You end up with a larger body of people that understand the code and comments and code that is much more understandable because if you write it in a way that isn't, someone will notice the next week, complain and you have to go back and fix it.
Also, if you're hoping you don't break anything, hopefully you have a battery of unit tests and functional regression tests that will catch the lion's share of anything you might break and let you know in short order.
Too bad it doesn't make good sense. I'd say tech designs turn over almost as fast as fashion designs.
This is mostly true, but not so much for companies that file and use design patents as intended. For example, the latest iPhone is the 5th revision of a product released four years ago and the design has intentionally not changed in order to promote the brand and recognition. Other similar examples might include the VW beetle, and the Coca-cola bottle. Because the point of design patents is to build recognition few companies are willing to walk away from the marketing and effort they have put into building a strong recognizable product.
P.S. Please don't confuse my comments for an endorsement of our current, very broken patent system. I'm just explaining the intent of the laws and the reasoning behind them. They can be used appropriately and Apple may have even done so, but it is still a very messed up system in general with a great deal of room for abuse which discourages innovation.
Next, the Court considers whether Samsung’s products, in the eyes of an ordinary observer, would likely be deemed substantially the same as Apple’s iPhone.
To this end, the Court finds that an ordinary observer would, in fact, find the Samsung Galaxy S 4G to be substantially the same as the iPhone.
But I thought the criterion was obviousness to one skilled in the art?
You're confusing the obviousness clause for granting utility patents with the consumer discernment criteria for design patents. To be granted a utility patent it cannot be obvious to a normal person skilled in the relevant art. To be granted a design patent you have to have a combination of appearance features distinct to your product which, if copied significantly, could confuse a normal consumer about which product was which.
Because fashion changes. That's how things go. Apple is a fashion leader, but having a monopoly on any "style" of design is just... stupid. Or should Ferrari be the only car company that can design supercars, because they were the first?
Design patents are like trademarks. They are designed to prevent companies from making clone products that confuse consumers, even if they don't have the exact trademark of the company. A design patent (even were it granted) on rectangular black phones would be un-enforcable by itself. That said, Samsung's conduct goes well beyond that. They cloned the basic look of the iPhone, the layout of the GUI buttons, the color, gradient, and icons on some of the buttons (trademarked icons by the way), the packaging of the iPhone. They also seem to have infringed upon some basic, everyday hardware patents, like the new style of rocker switch Apple invented for the iPhone. It is this combination of patent and trademark infringement that may well show a pattern of behavior designed to mislead and confuse consumers. Samsung could have gone for a new look, with a different GUI or different physical appearance and different packaging. If they were interested in creating a distinct brand and selling it based upon having a better product, this is what they would have done. Instead they made an iPhone clone.
no they should not be forced to sell os to clones. apple it just one of many company's abusing ip patents.
I'm sorry, but this abuse of your copyright by only including your comments from this post in this post is intolerable. You should be forced to write half your words on a topic in one comment on Slashdot and half on comment in a French language "My Little Pony" fan site.
their proprietary commercial mail system that sucks is the problem.
You really think so? Microsoft sell Exchange to some of the largest organizations on the planet. It might not be my choice of mail server, but I don't think blaming the software is the right think to do here. There's plenty of evidence that Exchange can scale - it might need powerful hardware, or specialized configuration but it's clearly possible and widely implemented.
I'm fairly sure Exchange could scale up to more users. The problem is most likely twofold, they don't have the hardware resources and they don't have enough client licenses. Both can be solved with money, but the latter is only a problem on a proprietary commercial platform that makes you pay per user.
You don't know why people write articles that you admit you find interesting?
I find one speculation in the article interesting, the rest is just remarking on the obvious. I also find it interesting that Isaac Newton stuck a leather awl into his eye, but that doesn't mean it is news.
You judge Slashdot articles on whether computer supply chain logistics readers already know the stories?
I judge articles based on if they present useful information and I judge news articles based upon their presenting non-obvious facts about current events. This provided obvious statements about current events and speculation about a very specific topic that was interesting... but which it had no real evidence for.
I guess I'm just not sure why people are writing articles about this. Apple of course has prototypes with various chipsets. I find it interesting that they likely bailed on AMD because they were not up to the volume requirements, but that's not news so much as a market assessment people in the computer supply chain logistics business probably already knew.
That's an interesting idea, although when I only have 5 windows it sort of seems like overkill. Is there a way to scale past 10 windows? Another innovation that someone has probably implemented but I haven't seen is window managers being aware of tabs within an application and optionally treating them as windows for purposes of keyboard navigation.
I suppose I could also just cycle through [Alt]TAB as you would on Windows, but that seems cumbersome to me.
On Windows I still do this a lot. I used to do it on OS X before Expose and it was nicer (one chording key to switch apps and one to switch windows within an app is way, way faster when you have lots of apps and lots of windows). Now though, I think we've found a better way.
Apple doesn't want other distribution networks for applications on their mobile devices because they are worried about quality
"Quality" is nebulous. There are bad movies on the iTunes Store; why should apps be any different?
Because when a movie is bad, people don't blame Apple or the quality of the iPhone. When an app is poor quality it can kill the battery life of the device and people do blame the phone maker. Android developers at Google said this was their #1 problem and it is the reason why they are investing so much money into trying to make new technologies to make it easier to find out what is killing your battery life and warn users of "bad" apps.
development practices that will limit future improvements
If by such "development practices" you mean use of private APIs, then have the executable loader fail if it detects the name of any such private API in the list of symbols that the executable imports.
By development practices, I mean they don't want developers on their platform tied to tools from a company that has little incentive to rapidly implement features they put into new versions of hardware and the OS. They already had similar problems on their desktop platform where they implemented things like spellchecking for any apps that use text, but end users had no access to them because the dev tools did not support the new features (cross platform tools focused on Windows that had no complementary feature). The last thing Apple wants is to be making rapid improvements to the OS designed to facilitate better apps (which in turn sell more hardware) and have no payout because most developers chose tools that did not bother updating to take advantage of the new OS improvements.
and malware tarnishing the brand.
Malware can be dealt with by applying sandbox policies similar to those of OLPC Bitfrost to unapproved applications.
Umm, you do know they guy who made Bitfrost is now working for Apple on the sandboxing Apple uses in iPhones and OS X, right? The point is, appropriate sandboxing based upon signatures and ACLs. I'm a huge advocate for a more open and inclusive repository and sandboxing strategy, but no one has built it yet in a way that works for real users, lets hope someone does innovate instead of copying Apple's model as MS is.
Apple would love to sell movies and apps from the iTunes store without DRM.
You've just got to love how the fanboys will speak for a corporation as if they have any standing to do so. It's pretty arrogant really. It also flies in the fact of the fact that they clearly benefit from the arrangement.
You've got to love how people can present the logical fallacies of ad hominem and implicit statement in a single paragraph. It's wonderful how initially a poster presented as fact that Apple was leveraging DRM on music to make money as their business model, then when that was shown to be completely wrong, someone else asserts how, with a nearly identical business model Apple is benefiting too much from DRM on movies so they would not abandon it. I mean, did you even read the thread or can you not make that simple of a connection? And clearly anyone who thinks Apple is a corporation with a razor business model instead of a blades business model makes then a "fanboy".
They could also allow for 3rd party DRM implementations if they were willing.
Sure, but it would make for worse battery life on the hardware, leading to the brand being diminished. That's the whole point you seem to have missed, Apple makes money on the hardware. If you don't understand that you'll constantly be making incorrect predictions and assertions about their motivations and actions.
So how long before movies and mobile applications bought on iTunes Store will be DRM-free?
Apple would love to sell movies and apps from the iTunes store without DRM. Those are basically break even enterprises Apple uses as a way to make money selling hardware. Anything that makes it easier and more common for people to get more movies or apps also gives users more reason to buy Apple devices and that is where Apple cashes in. The one caveat being, Apple doesn't want other distribution networks for applications on their mobile devices because they are worried about quality, development practices that will limit future improvements, and malware tarnishing the brand. DRM free movies are prevented by the MPAA, although maybe some day Apple will be able to pressure them as it did the RIAA.
Oh wait: the estate of Steve Jobs is the biggest shareholder of both Apple and Disney.
umm, half a percent of the shares of Apple isn't going to give Jobs's estate a lot of sway in major strategic decisions at Apple. Apple does have a close partnership with Disney, but I think they'd be more than happy to go DRM free for movies simply because i makes good business sense for Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
It's simple - if you want a (smart)phone that will have a regularly-updated OS and new features as they become available, then the only choice is the iPhone.
The iPhone will for a limited time. Or you could go with a Sony Android phone where your chances are about the same, since Sony has publicly committed to supporting their phones with the latest Android until the hardware no longer meets the requirements. (Sure Sony could go back on it, lose a lawsuit, and payout fines, but so could Apple really.) The other alternative is that, as a geek, you get one of the more open hardware sets and manage your own OS updates. But that is sort of beside the point. You're oversimplifying and Sony is as good of a bet as Apple (this from someone who thinks Sony is scum of the earth and would never buy a product from them).
I hate to break it to you, but if you're sending documents back and forth, you are doing it wrong. What you should have is an information management system, where all the information is updated in realtime when people make changes to it (and of course track changes).
Umm, welcome to the real world. We have three of them and for security reasons no one shares access with anyone else. The client doesn't want to pay for a dedicated CMS for this project so things are mostly shared via encrypted e-mail then manually synched in the respective archiving system.
But you talked about having a dozens of engineers just for messing around with this thing in word processor formats, right? Why not let the professional writers do their writing without worrying about the scripting or anything more than the most basic markup (bold, italic, etc.), and then letting someone else (the "TeX guru") handle the serious markup and scripting?
The problem with that is the engineers need a tool to write in that includes basic formatting and pictures. Not all of the want to write TeX markup. This means we need a word processor, but then we need to export from that word processor to a publishing software and to HTML. LaTeX is good if you can get the word processor into a decent XML format and then employ some scripts to bash it into shape, but at that point it is easier to just use something like Framemaker and Webworks to take RTF or .doc and put it into both formats in a nicer way that doesn't require any knowledge of scripting and is not as brittle.
One of the whole points of LaTeX is to make it relatively easy to separate the content from the presentation. Most LaTeX documents are pretty simple-looking really, as far as the markup goes; the hard stuff is in the template.
You don't need to sell me on LaTeX. I'm a big fan. For writing markup I want to single source from one or two competent authors, I love it. When sourcing content from a restricted CMS text or wiki, it is a very nice, free solution. I just have't had a lot of luck getting more than a few people using it when I did not have an automated system already build for user input. The average person, even the average network engineer, just doesn't want to but the time in to learn to use it and markup the text themselves and pulling things into LaTeX from word processors and the like has never worked out well, in my experience.
It's good to hear of a successful case of OO/LO adoption, but it sounds like maybe you were really using the wrong tools for the job anyway, and should have been using TeX or LaTeX, especially for very large documents.
I've certainly used LaTeX for various projects, but it was not appropriate for this one. It was a collaborative set of documentation with a wide variety of contributors that needed to be edited by professional writers without scripting or markup expertise running on both Linux and Windows. LaTeX was not the tool to facilitate easy authoring, editing, and technical editing from a team of about 20.
Basically any UI is easy once one learn it.
In the study of computer-human interaction one quickly sees there are design compromises made between how easy an interface is to learn and how flexible and fast it is one learned. A UI element no one ever learns to use is useless, but likewise an easy to discover UI element that is very slow gets in the user's way just as much. A good example might be using a modifier key and tab to switch applications. Windows and OS X both have this user interface with a slight difference. Windows has a single layer modifier that switches to each window in turn. This is easy to learn but can be slow to use. OS X has two modifier keys, one to switch applications and one to switch windows within an application. This is harder to learn, but once learned, much faster for users with multiple apps and multiple windows per app. For power users the latter is much better, but a larger percentage of novices use the Windows feature because it is easier to train themselves on.
No-one running Office software in a production environment would pick LibreOffice over Microsoft Office for anything other than the most basic of mundane word processing.
I worked at a place that switched to OpenOffice (before LibreOffice existed). We left three MSOffice boxes for translation and everything else moved over. It was a very successful and beneficial transition. One of the main problems it was solving was the needs of the documentation team. We needed dozens of engineers to have the ability to modify very large documents. The problem was, above a certain size Word regularly corrupted the files on save and the next time someone opened it we ended up having to roll back to the previous version of the document, losing all the work of the last person. Before switching to OpenOffice we had to institute a policy that everyone had to save a document, then (without closing it) send it elsewhere and test opening it before they could quit and save. It was ridiculous and I still see people complaining about this same issue in professional writing forums. After the switch this annoying and very costly failure was no longer wasting our time and money.
My current client, my co-workers and I, and an outside consulting firm for regulatory compliance, often exchange MSOffice documents. Using Word and the native formats is horrible. Templates, TOC, comments, headers and footers, they all break all the time switching between various versions of Word for various platforms. The manpower waste is easily in the tens of thousands of dollars already and project is in the early stages. With LibreOffice (which we use on other projects) we have no such problems because clients can always upgrade to the same version and the same document format in short order given the free nature of the licensing.
And finally, I'm a bit confused about what tasks you think users hould be employing Word for where it is more suitable than LibreOffice. I see Word misused a lot for tasks where a proper CMS and/or Framemaker or Indesign or Quark is the real type of tool that professionals use. If you're using Word for "advanced tasks" from a publishing or documentation standpoint, you've already failed. For the tasks Word is actually suited, LibreOffice seems a fine replacement.
I read the whole list of comments and did not see a single person mention the fairly important part of the article that seems left out by he summary and headline:
The alternative is that Apple has given some of its patents to Digitude because the patent troll came after it first. The dozen patents Apple has handed over may have been part of a settlement with the firm, along with the license agreement (which would presumably give Apple the rights to its patents, and additional Digitude patents). This seems more likely.
How is it with over a hundred comments no one seems to have RTFA and seen the analysis by Kincaid that says this is most probably a case where Apple was sued by the patent troll and transferred patents as part of a settlement for the lawsuit? Mind you Apple probably could have and should have fought back and demanded a cash only settlement in order to prevent the patent trolling form propagating, but then I can understand not doing so. Microsoft has certainly transferred its patents with trolls several times so paying hard cash to protect competitors seems like a losing strategy in our very, very broken market.
The problem with extreme programming (and with all good practice, really) is that it's inefficient (in the context of getting it out the door). It has a cost. Management doesn't want to pay for good practice now - now they want to pay for shipping the code.
That is called "incompetence" and is very common in management. I'm sorry you have to work with clueless managers that don't know their business. If you don't insist on good practices for your coders for a long term project it is unlikely any first rate talent wants to work with you anyway.
I'm pretty sure he was just making a joke.
Me too... which is why I responded in kind.
First, enough turnover will always kill you no matter your procedures. If a team turns over 75% of its developers in 6 months, there's nothing to be done. So step 1: make sure your developers don't want to quit.
Turnover is very harmful, but as I said spreading out the coding tasks across a whole team mitigates the damage and allows you to scale back up to efficiency in a reasonable timeframe. Brooks law states, "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later", but I've seen it proved false. With paired programming adding 50% more programmers on a late project did not slow our development at all and within a few weeks it had sped up significantly. The caveat being you have to be doing paired programming in the first place.
Maybe a unit test isn't maintained well enough, and it passes even though the code isn't really doing what the test description said.
With good coding practices, relevant tests should be written and modified so they fail before you start coding anything new on the actual project. Additionally, with good QA practices there should be a separately maintained functional regression test that should catch the vast majority of things a unit test does not. Of course not all of this applies to all kinds of projects and there will still be bugs, but the kind of unmaintainable code no one understands that sticks around in an active project, well it just is really, really, really rare.
And even with the best intentions, there's always slip ups.
True, but with good practices they become a very rare event that does not have real impact on the work.
It doesn't work. You'd need people that follow the same coding practices and have enough experience to move at the same pace. Which is pretty much impossible.
Heh, it's funny since the place I work now has been making money doing it for a decade. People don't have to have the exact same level of experience to work on the same code and hand it off, especially when working as pairs in a group environment where you can always just ask the team if you don't understand something. You learn a whole lot faster when sharing a keyboard with someone who already has been working on the code base for a few years.
While I understand the point you are making when I hear the term "Extreme Programming" my imagination runs wild.
Yeah and the term for writing computer programs is "coding" and the anode on a battery is labeled "-" those are the dreadfully inappropriate terms that stuck. Deal with it.
Are your[sic] trying to run with the Bulls[sic] in Pamplona while trying to figure where that Division[sic] by zero takes place?
Yes I am, but that is unrelated to the term "extreme programming". Also, you improperly capitalized "Bulls" and "Division"; maybe you've been watching too much basketball?
Somebody writes the code, doesn't bother to comment it at all and then you come in years after the fact. You look at the code and wonder, "why did he do it that way instead of this way?" Then the big gotcha, you think I could ask him but he left the company 5 years ago(At this point slap your forehead and hope you don't break anything working on the code.)
One way to mitigate this is "extreme programming" where developers pair and constantly switch off projects and tasks. You end up with a larger body of people that understand the code and comments and code that is much more understandable because if you write it in a way that isn't, someone will notice the next week, complain and you have to go back and fix it.
Also, if you're hoping you don't break anything, hopefully you have a battery of unit tests and functional regression tests that will catch the lion's share of anything you might break and let you know in short order.
Too bad it doesn't make good sense. I'd say tech designs turn over almost as fast as fashion designs.
This is mostly true, but not so much for companies that file and use design patents as intended. For example, the latest iPhone is the 5th revision of a product released four years ago and the design has intentionally not changed in order to promote the brand and recognition. Other similar examples might include the VW beetle, and the Coca-cola bottle. Because the point of design patents is to build recognition few companies are willing to walk away from the marketing and effort they have put into building a strong recognizable product.
P.S. Please don't confuse my comments for an endorsement of our current, very broken patent system. I'm just explaining the intent of the laws and the reasoning behind them. They can be used appropriately and Apple may have even done so, but it is still a very messed up system in general with a great deal of room for abuse which discourages innovation.
Next, the Court considers whether Samsung’s products, in the eyes of an ordinary observer, would likely be deemed substantially the same as Apple’s iPhone. To this end, the Court finds that an ordinary observer would, in fact, find the Samsung Galaxy S 4G to be substantially the same as the iPhone.
But I thought the criterion was obviousness to one skilled in the art?
You're confusing the obviousness clause for granting utility patents with the consumer discernment criteria for design patents. To be granted a utility patent it cannot be obvious to a normal person skilled in the relevant art. To be granted a design patent you have to have a combination of appearance features distinct to your product which, if copied significantly, could confuse a normal consumer about which product was which.
Because fashion changes. That's how things go. Apple is a fashion leader, but having a monopoly on any "style" of design is just... stupid. Or should Ferrari be the only car company that can design supercars, because they were the first?
Design patents are like trademarks. They are designed to prevent companies from making clone products that confuse consumers, even if they don't have the exact trademark of the company. A design patent (even were it granted) on rectangular black phones would be un-enforcable by itself. That said, Samsung's conduct goes well beyond that. They cloned the basic look of the iPhone, the layout of the GUI buttons, the color, gradient, and icons on some of the buttons (trademarked icons by the way), the packaging of the iPhone. They also seem to have infringed upon some basic, everyday hardware patents, like the new style of rocker switch Apple invented for the iPhone. It is this combination of patent and trademark infringement that may well show a pattern of behavior designed to mislead and confuse consumers. Samsung could have gone for a new look, with a different GUI or different physical appearance and different packaging. If they were interested in creating a distinct brand and selling it based upon having a better product, this is what they would have done. Instead they made an iPhone clone.
no they should not be forced to sell os to clones. apple it just one of many company's abusing ip patents.
I'm sorry, but this abuse of your copyright by only including your comments from this post in this post is intolerable. You should be forced to write half your words on a topic in one comment on Slashdot and half on comment in a French language "My Little Pony" fan site.
their proprietary commercial mail system that sucks is the problem.
You really think so? Microsoft sell Exchange to some of the largest organizations on the planet. It might not be my choice of mail server, but I don't think blaming the software is the right think to do here. There's plenty of evidence that Exchange can scale - it might need powerful hardware, or specialized configuration but it's clearly possible and widely implemented.
I'm fairly sure Exchange could scale up to more users. The problem is most likely twofold, they don't have the hardware resources and they don't have enough client licenses. Both can be solved with money, but the latter is only a problem on a proprietary commercial platform that makes you pay per user.
You don't know why people write articles that you admit you find interesting?
I find one speculation in the article interesting, the rest is just remarking on the obvious. I also find it interesting that Isaac Newton stuck a leather awl into his eye, but that doesn't mean it is news.
You judge Slashdot articles on whether computer supply chain logistics readers already know the stories?
I judge articles based on if they present useful information and I judge news articles based upon their presenting non-obvious facts about current events. This provided obvious statements about current events and speculation about a very specific topic that was interesting... but which it had no real evidence for.
Have another bottle of beer.
Done and done.
I guess I'm just not sure why people are writing articles about this. Apple of course has prototypes with various chipsets. I find it interesting that they likely bailed on AMD because they were not up to the volume requirements, but that's not news so much as a market assessment people in the computer supply chain logistics business probably already knew.
That's an interesting idea, although when I only have 5 windows it sort of seems like overkill. Is there a way to scale past 10 windows? Another innovation that someone has probably implemented but I haven't seen is window managers being aware of tabs within an application and optionally treating them as windows for purposes of keyboard navigation.
I suppose I could also just cycle through [Alt]TAB as you would on Windows, but that seems cumbersome to me.
On Windows I still do this a lot. I used to do it on OS X before Expose and it was nicer (one chording key to switch apps and one to switch windows within an app is way, way faster when you have lots of apps and lots of windows). Now though, I think we've found a better way.
Apple doesn't want other distribution networks for applications on their mobile devices because they are worried about quality
"Quality" is nebulous. There are bad movies on the iTunes Store; why should apps be any different?
Because when a movie is bad, people don't blame Apple or the quality of the iPhone. When an app is poor quality it can kill the battery life of the device and people do blame the phone maker. Android developers at Google said this was their #1 problem and it is the reason why they are investing so much money into trying to make new technologies to make it easier to find out what is killing your battery life and warn users of "bad" apps.
development practices that will limit future improvements
If by such "development practices" you mean use of private APIs, then have the executable loader fail if it detects the name of any such private API in the list of symbols that the executable imports.
By development practices, I mean they don't want developers on their platform tied to tools from a company that has little incentive to rapidly implement features they put into new versions of hardware and the OS. They already had similar problems on their desktop platform where they implemented things like spellchecking for any apps that use text, but end users had no access to them because the dev tools did not support the new features (cross platform tools focused on Windows that had no complementary feature). The last thing Apple wants is to be making rapid improvements to the OS designed to facilitate better apps (which in turn sell more hardware) and have no payout because most developers chose tools that did not bother updating to take advantage of the new OS improvements.
and malware tarnishing the brand.
Malware can be dealt with by applying sandbox policies similar to those of OLPC Bitfrost to unapproved applications.
Umm, you do know they guy who made Bitfrost is now working for Apple on the sandboxing Apple uses in iPhones and OS X, right? The point is, appropriate sandboxing based upon signatures and ACLs. I'm a huge advocate for a more open and inclusive repository and sandboxing strategy, but no one has built it yet in a way that works for real users, lets hope someone does innovate instead of copying Apple's model as MS is.
Apple would love to sell movies and apps from the iTunes store without DRM.
You've just got to love how the fanboys will speak for a corporation as if they have any standing to do so. It's pretty arrogant really. It also flies in the fact of the fact that they clearly benefit from the arrangement.
You've got to love how people can present the logical fallacies of ad hominem and implicit statement in a single paragraph. It's wonderful how initially a poster presented as fact that Apple was leveraging DRM on music to make money as their business model, then when that was shown to be completely wrong, someone else asserts how, with a nearly identical business model Apple is benefiting too much from DRM on movies so they would not abandon it. I mean, did you even read the thread or can you not make that simple of a connection? And clearly anyone who thinks Apple is a corporation with a razor business model instead of a blades business model makes then a "fanboy".
They could also allow for 3rd party DRM implementations if they were willing.
Sure, but it would make for worse battery life on the hardware, leading to the brand being diminished. That's the whole point you seem to have missed, Apple makes money on the hardware. If you don't understand that you'll constantly be making incorrect predictions and assertions about their motivations and actions.
So how long before movies and mobile applications bought on iTunes Store will be DRM-free?
Apple would love to sell movies and apps from the iTunes store without DRM. Those are basically break even enterprises Apple uses as a way to make money selling hardware. Anything that makes it easier and more common for people to get more movies or apps also gives users more reason to buy Apple devices and that is where Apple cashes in. The one caveat being, Apple doesn't want other distribution networks for applications on their mobile devices because they are worried about quality, development practices that will limit future improvements, and malware tarnishing the brand. DRM free movies are prevented by the MPAA, although maybe some day Apple will be able to pressure them as it did the RIAA.
Oh wait: the estate of Steve Jobs is the biggest shareholder of both Apple and Disney.
umm, half a percent of the shares of Apple isn't going to give Jobs's estate a lot of sway in major strategic decisions at Apple. Apple does have a close partnership with Disney, but I think they'd be more than happy to go DRM free for movies simply because i makes good business sense for Apple.