The German translation isn't good. They could've easyly improved on the syntax. let ist translated into 'sein' (to be) rather than 'lasse' (let). There are a few other instances were they could've actually improved on the language as a whole but messed it up.
Besides, as others have pointed out: The PL being in a different language than the native is an *advantage*. Less mixing of words. It's great to have native Variables and english keywords - it gives you way more flexiblity with your code.
A little history: I was the first to automate price wars on amazon marketplace. (True thing.)
A friend had just joined marketplace with a freshly founded internet media sales joint after it opened and two weeks in was adjusting prices of his sale books manually. Like, seriously, clicking through 200 items a night and entering new prices. I told him to stop that nonsense and built an automated scraper, parser and some other tools in Python that would parse the actual websites for each of our articles ISBN and compare our prices to those of the competition (this was before the days of publicly available Amazon APIs), readjust our pricing to the cent accordingly and upload the freshly generated updates once all 200 000 items were parsed.
Orders went from 3 - 5 per day to 120 - 150 per day. My buddies were packaging books and CDs all day while I was sitting there grinning and petting my script and ama-bot setup (still those right here in my project folder:-) ). We made 700 000$ of revenue the first year. A few months in competitors started to do the same - no suprise, the concept is quite obvious to any computer or programming guy - and a ruinous price-war started. My friend went out of business a year later. We could have fine-tuned the automated price adjustments like the marketplace vendors are doing today, such as upping the price of an item only you have got in stock, but after a few bad business decisions my friend didn't want to continue. That was all back in the early 2000s (2003-2004ish).
On the issue discussed: Before a Flash Crash can happen on sites like amazon marketplace, the vendors involved will either die a painfull death before or finetune their algorythims to a much more complex model. Those still alive and well today have done the latter, and even if updates occur every 15 minutes, I'd bet money that they are still watching the sales and revenue with the appropriate tools and with their own eyeballs, because you can lose thousands within minutes if you don't. You can automate a lot, but you can't automate day-to-day business decisions, especially in such markets.
Bottom line: Crashes don't happen here, only individual foreclosures for those who don't watch out well enough.
The CLI is the only thing that either stays the same (99,9% of the time) or very gradually improves. The Unix CLI is the only thing that doesn't become outdated. The majority of commands I used in 1995 are still the exact same today, 17 years later and in 20 years they will still be the same. I will use the very same commands and still be able to utilize the very most up-to-date computing power with those very same commands.
With grafical UIs we can't even count on the CUAS being upheld throughout desktop enviroments. And just now touch UIs of various sizes and usage patterns have entered the fray. Some of them even riddled with patents.
The *nix CLI will stay the same for a very long time, just as the bizar QWERTZ KB Layout will probably stay the same. Allthough I'd say with the CLI there are way more practical reasons for this. Take away a powerfull *nix CLI from a system and experts will abandon it. It's that simple.
Every 1st world nation on the planet has healthcare, I don't get why this is such a debate in the US. Honestly, the style of political campaigning, the retoric and the poo-flinging going on in the States truely is some bizar spectacle when observed from over here (Europe).
I live in Germany and by US standards we've got a Mercedes-Benz class nanny state, the republic just pulled of a hideously expensive reunification in the last two decades and it's now sponsoring a lions share of the aftermath of crappy budget discipline in the southern parts of the continent and still it has one of the most stable economies. (BTW, I didn't vote for Merkel and I won't, but I sure hope she has some verbal ass-chewing ready for Bella Italia at tonights EU meeting)
I can't shake the feeling that you guys must be doing something wrong... aside from Irak invasions and insane military budgets, that is. Maybe you should just try this healthcare thing for a few years, I'm sure you guys will see the benefits.... Just saying.
And apologies to all USians who share my opinion... just pass that on to those fellow citizens who don't get it.
That specific tablet is an iPad rippoff, right down to the Icons on the UI and some of the UI designs. The calendar is basically a 1on1 copy of iPads iCal... allthough a slightly better one. They actually improved a little on the readability, usability and responsiveness.... Whatever...
What I'm saying is that overall the 10.1 shows blatant iPad rippoffs at many places and I would design a better looking non-ipad in 2 weeks. Samsung got lazy and had some chinese nobody copy the UI and workflow 1on1 and didn't stop to think twice about it. If I were Apple, I'd go after them too.
Asus, HTC and other Samsung Models have proven that you can be heavily inspired by a competitor without getting nasty. And, believe it or not, if one of these vendors had some balls, they could improve on the iPad concept in spades in less than a year. I could easyly if I had their resources. The HTC Flyer for instance, is in almost every aspect a better product than the iPad 2. The Transformer Prime enclosure has the iPad look like a toy. Etc., etc.... And if Canonical, with a fraction of their budget, can build a unique interface with Unity, so can they. Samsung got lazy and did risky stuff, now they'll have to deal with it.
General Interface is an industry grade Ajax toolkit designed to be a replacement/alternative in Java or Flex Client situations. It comes with an IDE built with its own components - think Ajax equivalent of Eclipse - which is basically a zipped HTML page with some subdirectories and stuff abused to be a full blow coding enviroment. It runs in FF or IE, loads tons of XML, JSON, JS and CSS stuff out of the subdirectories and behaves just like you'd expect an IDE to behave.
If you want to see what's possible with JS/Ajax if you go to the extreme, this is your ticket. One stop zero fuss coding fun without even running an additional binary aside from FF.
My mom healed her artritis with homeopathy.... Ok, ok, hear me out!
Yeah, yeah, I know. Magic, unscientific nonsense, jada-jada.
The fact is: You could *watch* my mothers joints move back into normal position and the build-up disapear once she had found the 'right substance' (... don't ask, it's this crazy homeopathy thing).
Placebo effect or whatever, it worked. She's 72 now and does regular garden work. She says without homeopathy and - probably more importantly, her homeopath - she'd be dead by now, and I believe her.
I don't believe in homeopathy as much as she does in her day to day life, but I do believe in astonishing placebo effects. Maybe this would be one.
Bottom line: Help your grandpa to exercise, a healthy and lean diet and get him 'hoocked' on homeopathy. It's cheap, shouldn't have any side-effects other than him getting a little 'new-agy';-) and chances are he'll get better. Actually, physically better. I've seen it on other people with my own eyes, it's definitely worth a try.
Since your requirements are quite specific (FOSS *nix OS + Editor) I suggest you go for a netbook. Don't under estimate the hassle with various devices. A single device is easyer to handle in cramped situations and you have less small parts that you can lose.
If you are travelling a lot your main concern will be universal power supply/recharging and battery time - aside from weight, which you mentioned already. It's for this reason you should consider a custom configuration of an android netbook or a tablet with attachable KB. I'm thinking about the Asus EEE Transformer Prime or a simular thing. If you can get some hacked version of Android running on there or maybe even a special linux build you're all set. It costs 500 Euros and has 15hrs of battery time. That's what I'd expect of a devbox for travelling. The further upside of the android tablet/netbook hybrids is that you can charge them with regular USB power which means you could theoretically save the wallwart/power supply.
An alternative would be some thin low-power lightweight netbook like the Asus EEE X101 and an extra battery pack for extended battery time. Maybe some off-the-beaten-track solution like the Pandora Open Gaming device with some Linux on it or so is what you'd like - after all the one shown behind the link is running Linux with XFCE... sounds good to me. Definitely also take a look at those expert devices. With most of them you'll probably get the USB power advantage aswell - if they are 'low power' enough that is.
Bottom line: Put your efforts into customizing the netbook / android device option and don't fiddle with microprojectors and such. AFAICT they are to much of fiddling and simply not ready for primetime yet.
A friend of mine has hearing problems and the hearing aid mafia is quite powerfull here in Germany. Thus I was wondering some time ago if one could not build a homebrew hearing aid out of some open electronics kit like an arduino with wireing, a mic, a batters and earbuds or something like that. Sure it would be larger than the usual hearing aid, but to be honest, I'd have nothing agains pinning a geeky looking piece of electronics to my garb to have a working and modifiable hearing aid - especially if I can same 3000$ on top of that.
Seriously, shouldn't it be relatively easy to build a feasable hearing aid with regular off-the-shelf parts, even if it weren't quite as small as the purpose built hearing aids? Any Ideas how one could go about this?
Them weaving the golden cage more and more tightly every day creeps me out just as much as the next geek, but you have to admit, these guys are fucking amazing.
Remember how shitty smartphones were before the iPhone? SJ said: No Flash and no carrier software on the iPhone. And thus endeth the era of Flash and crappy carrier scamware on phones. Btw., as a Flashdev I'm actually reorienting myself because of exact same incident.
Remember how abysmally sad and sorry tablet computers were before the iPad? Along came Apple and sold 14 million of them tablets in the first 3 quarters. 14 fucking million! Thus endeth the era of Bill Gates half-assed vision of bizarly overpriced and unwieldy tablet computers.
And now this. Notice how these days every geek worth his salt is bickerin about stagnation and retreat in laptop display resolution? We had a story on this here just a week ago or so. BAM! New MB Pro. Ahead of the pack at least 1,5 generations, hitting every other vendor on the planet on the back of their head with a Louisville Slugger Class cluestick in terms of laptop screen paradigms and a few other things. Just plain awesome, I have to say.... Just wait for the MB Pro rippoffs poping up in about a year or so, just like the Ultrabook stuff.
Apple is burning more and more Karma with me each day, but they sure to make quite a bit of it up in spades at times. Today is such a time I'd say. Cudos to them, and respect.
I consider a well configured KDE the best total-desktop-solution by far - and I'm a regular Mac OS X user btw. Truth is, a well configured KDE runs circles around OS X in terms of usability, consistency and featureset.
And it's right there where we have the one and only problem with KDE: Its default key shortcut configuration is a sad and sorry Windows rippoff with so many pointless, bad and potentially harmful settings that it turns many computer experts off. I know this is default and changing the keymappings in KDE is easy, but it is a downside.
Then agian, Ubuntu takes so much of the pain out of Gnome and Nautilus that I consider it good enough and couldn't be bothered messing with KDE. But should I eventually move away from OS X again - which I require for mulitmedia work and Flash development - I will probably go back to KDE, even if I have to spend quality time getting its setup right.... Although I definitely would miss the multitouch trackpad, that's for sure.... But Apple just needs to carry on with their ongoing lock-in strategy and I'm back to using the mouse on Linux again - no problem. Come next HW purchase I will look *very* carefully if the benefits of Apple still outweighs the downsides.
Bottom line: No Video to do? No profesional printwork to do? No application specific OS requirements? Use Linux with KDE, that's my general recommendation to anyone who requires a solid feature-rich working desktop.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is already putting serious, notable and measurable dents into 3rd world misery by means of information and working on optimised medication, simple methods for hygene and pathogen-free water and a number other things. Some of the richest people on the planet have vowed considerable portions of their fortune to the foundation and its cause and the foundations financial reserves and resources are massive on a scale never seen before.
However, this is a non-fight. Steve Jobs himself aknowledge BGs considerable contributions to the worlds improvement with his foundation and BGs intent of not simply wanting to be 'the richest guy on the graveyard' (quote from their joint interview).
As for Steve Jobs bickering about the oxygen mask on his death-bed, I must say, I'd side with Steve Jobs. There is an abundance of man-made shit in this world where the people building and designing it didn't give a seconds worth of thoughts to wether the design makes sense or not. I'd bet money that this also goes for most oxygen masks.
I praise him for giving his designers flak whenever they came up with half-assed shit. We need more CEOs like him who actually care.
Web development is a whole new ballgame, keep that in mind.
Since you are a non-webdev guy I strongly suggest you go with the most popular webdev toolkits in existance. Zend, Symfony or Flow3 for the webframework (each in PHP, of course) and jQuery or ExtJS for Ajax client stuff.
With Zend + jQuery and jQuery UI you're on the super safe side, it's safe to say that they are todays most widespread combination. OO PHP won't be any problem for you, since you're used to Java. PHP is going to be very easy for you... in a way modern PHP and Java are quite simular. Keep in mind though, that PHP has dynamic typing and tons of web-specific built in functions which let you things with one function call which would take 30 lines in Java. Symfony and Flow3 are also very neat Frameworks, you should look into those. Which you choose isn't that important, PHP is way ahead in delivering in this area compared to Java - you'll feel like a whole new world.
One more thing: What you want to do is a non-trivial web application that takes a lot of work, no matter the technology. You definitely should start out with an architecture model and some abstracts like usecases that leave the technology decisions for later. Maybe you'll feel like doing the whole thing in Java/Wicket and jQuery or something along the way. As far as I know, Wicket is the Java toolkit that comes closest to all the Python, PHP and Ruby stuff out there and has the least XML situp crap to go with it.
"PCIE SSDs are advertised to deliver 100,000 to 500,000 IOPs. Has anyone experimented with PCI-Express based SSD solutions in their VM hosts to keep high IO VMs like VDI and SQL from swamping their SAN infrastructure?"
Changes are that their Java Devs are way more cheaper than you and way better at chinese. And there are most certainly legion. I'd suggest you go with what you've got and do advanced english and english Java consulting. Maybe even some Technical Account Management with customers in the US... you'll have an edge as a native speaker.
See this as an opportunity to make a move from deving into management. You will not be able to outbid the local competition.... This is not switzerland, you know.
Oh, and do be prepared for some really extreme air pollution. Stock up on Masks and Air filters and such.
If you are ugly like me, poor countries may be your only chance. It's still not easy to get a pretty girl, but if you have some money and don't mind spending some on her you may be able to have a girlfriend or wife for whom you are mainly an ATM with legs.
Chicho Fumboli is fat as an elefant and looks like a monster. A monster with various facial piercings. Some of the hottest Girls on the entire f*cking planet would chop their right arm off for a chance to dance Tango with him. Every time I see him on some Tango video he's got a different hottie he's dancing with. And he isn't very rich either, btw.
It's the way the PUAs say: Attitude is 90%, the rest is a relatively trivial set of little things - hygene being one - and a little attention. It's the same with men, btw. A sweet word from my GF can make my day, and a frown and a bad mood stretch because last night she didn't get her share of Tango rounds with the other guys can give me a headache - quite physically actually.
An anecdote on this: I met a girl at a Milonga (Tango Dancing Event) in Oslo a few weeks ago and she was kinda sad, i.e. having the regular tango blues that men and women get when they're having a bad stretch or a bad night. We exchanged some words on how things were going and I could tell she would've wanted to dance with me, but rightfully she allready knew I had no interest at the time - the event was overbooked with +20 women. Easy pickings of great dancers.
Anyway, after a litte chit-chat I told her to take on the attitude of 'Tonight I'm going to f*ck your brains out, Mister!" for the dancer she was eyeing... and for everybody else. She inmediately started smiling, catching on and started to glow. Once frustrated women - and believe me, after 4.5 years of Tango I can asure you: Women do get just as sexually frustrated as men! - get their head out of their behind and get in attitude there's nothing they can't achive with men. And guys, it's the exact same thing vice versa.
Guys do Action Videogames and Porn, sometimes excessively, girls do their hair, play The Sims and Farmville, read braindead Fashion Zines and spend bizar amounts of money on Fashion and Cosmetics. Sometimes excessively.
At least so goes the cliche.
If a generation is being missed due to decadence, it's because of decadence with men and women. I call bullshit on the GP. In my experience women are becoming just as socially awkward as men. Just as many women sit in front of the Web on meeting plattforms clicking for their phantom prince lover and behave accordingly strange when you meet them in public.
That may be a phenomenon about societies becoming rich with resources and technology, but it sure does not just affect men, that is guaranteed.
If find that my girlfriend manages her moods much better when I'm around to cushion them and I also find that my sexual frustration dimishes to zero when she takes care of me. Porn becomes boring and uninspired and games are much less interesting than cooking or dancing with a lady that actually cares about you as a man. That's my experience anyway.
For instance, you might have the whole "going to dinner parties with the wife" thing in order to maintain a social norm. Meanwhile, you'd rather be in your garage tinkering with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino or something in your garage and making an anti-squirrel turret for your backyard.
As I'm getting older I'm realizing more and more that the hobbies I find intellectually satisfying are rarely something that can be plugged into a social component. As good (and intelligent) as my friends are, most of them wouldn't want to spend an afternoon learning something interesting in Perl or building a robot for the fuck of it. We go out for drinks or to a diner or something like that. I'm finding that I have to divorce "intellectually stimulating" from "social interaction" more and more every day.
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When socialising becomes boring, just as you describe - I can relate to that, btw. - it's because today people rarely have any time or interest in cultivating social forms of engagement. It's still a relatively thin wholy educated layer of demografic that does these things, if at all. If you want something stimulating to do that you do with other people it would be making music together, singing in a choir, staging a play or something like that.
4.5 years ago I discovered Tango dancing. And while I actually do have a diploma in performing arts and did that professionally in the 90ies (although not for a living really, you can't live off that), I never would have thought that I'd be doing that. I basically discovered Tango by accident, because a friend of mine asked me to come with her as her partner. Since then it's been like a drug. I go out 3 or more times a week at times and it only takes a little nudge to overcome the notion of just staying at my desk and doing a little programming or something.
Seriously, once you find a social activity that is stimulating beyond sitting together and chatting and getting slightly drunk, you're heading the right way. You can't dance while drunk, and you wouldn't want to, because you're having a ball (quite litterally at times:-) ) giving the ladies and girls a good time and improving your dancing skills. Just Tuesday I came back from Heidelberg with my feet hurting from dancing to much again. With a ladies/guy ratio like that (note the background), a mans gotta do what a mans gotta do,... I guess.:-)))
Bottom line: Find a higher cultivated social activity than drinking and clubbing, such as the above mentioned, and going social won't be so one dimensional anymore. A few years ago it was Aikido for me, but since I've discovered Tango, I think I've found my contrast programm for the rest of my life.
What's the German word for "the boner you get from too much Schadenfreude"? Speaking as an American expat living in NZ: fuck the US government and its thuggish international corporate rent-a-cop policies.
Just 2 weeks ago I asked with you guys what degree I should get for a late-ish career boost (BTW: Once again thanks for all the feedback, it's been a great help!).
It is because of this entire development that I actually am starting to move away from web stuff. It may seem that the web has won, and with Ajax and regular HTML 5 that may be the case, but it also is true that a few years ago we had a well-ordered world with 3 platforms at most and now with the mobile revolution we pratically are back in the 80ies with a bazillion proprietary platforms none of which are really compatible to one another.... Even the usage paradigms aren't as clear as they were in 2005 with only Win, Mac and *nix desktops to choose from.
As for the dangers of stagnation and lock-in - even with HTML5/CSS3 and Ajax - due to extreme verticalisation of markets, I'd say the GP and the related article are spot on. That's why I'm moving away from rich-client and web stuff, at least for the programming that's supposed to earn me stable money in the long term. The 2k years were a great time with lots of fun and opportunities in the web, but those are dimishing as we speak. At least for me it's time to move on.
I'm wondering how far they will be able to go with this until they *really* start loosing karma with IT experts, i.e.us. I'm mean really in the way that I say: "Awesome Hardware and value be damned, fully integrated *nix be damned, I'm going back to fiddling around with debian stable on some current UltraBook or sad-and-sorry mac mini rippoff because their OS has become to much of a pain and I'd rather spend 3 weeks configging my Window Manager than finding way around the lockin."
You are only 2 left and you're asking if handing out your libraries is a good idea. That rings a few bells.
To get things straight: Outsourcing can work, but you need to have your own software development process streamlined and standardized before it makes any sense. F.i., you should have documented APIs that you can expose without handing over source to 3rd parties - that's how you develop inhouse aswell, btw. Once the APIs are finished and documented, grunt work is outsourced and the inhouse crew can move on to the next technology frontier or prototype.
Since you don't have that - your question implies that - and you are only two left, I'd say you have other problems than outsourcing your code work. Doing that in this stage of things won't do any good and will most likely do harm.
I'm follwing the cult of less myself, and while not all of my important stuff fits in a briefcase, it does fit into one room without it looking cramped or stuffed with junk - and I plan to reduce my stuff even more in the next few years.
Here's what I do: My Hardware: MB Air, Mac Mini, HTC Flyer, HTC Desire HD My local storage: 2 HDDs for TimeMachine, 2 HDDs for redundant backup, storage and archiving My remote storage: Virtual Debian Server for word stuff versioned and synced with Git via SSH (roughly ten projects currently... all my current work of the last year)
Disaster recovery via TimeMachine, Backup via two extra redundant external USB 3 2.5" HDDs, FS is HFS non-journaled for easy access from linux. Regular offsite versioning, archiving and backups via Git or SCP for the stuff I work on, Backup from Computers to HDDs via rsync. I rely on the Mac OS X AES 128bit encryption of the MB Air SDD for data security. My calendar is on Google and syncs with both HTC devices (anonymous/fake account) and iCal on the MB, my contact data is only in my phone. Still thinking about wether a fresh copy of 'Missing Sync' is worthwhile.
I store all my notes in Evernote. I have the Evernote client hooked to my Evernote account on all devices.
My next move will be an rsync setup with some low-power netbook/nettop PC running linux that pushed the contents of the HDDs to my server (rented virtual server running debian).
If my stuff gets stolen I've got my backups. If someone breaks into my room and steals the HDDs aswell I'm in deep shit - until I get my off-site routine running that is. I've been consolidating my data handling for about a year now and it will take another year or two until I've got it all in place, i.e.: Full and total off-site backup and desaster recovery preperation, fully redundant local backup, archiving and storage, zero-fuss cross-device automatic project syncing and fail-safe, secure contacts and calendering.... I'm not to picky with encryption, the 128bit AES is enough for my taste. It's not that I work for the CIA or something.
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The German translation isn't good. They could've easyly improved on the syntax. let ist translated into 'sein' (to be) rather than 'lasse' (let). There are a few other instances were they could've actually improved on the language as a whole but messed it up.
Besides, as others have pointed out: The PL being in a different language than the native is an *advantage*. Less mixing of words. It's great to have native Variables and english keywords - it gives you way more flexiblity with your code.
My 2 cents.
A little history:
I was the first to automate price wars on amazon marketplace. (True thing.)
A friend had just joined marketplace with a freshly founded internet media sales joint after it opened and two weeks in was adjusting prices of his sale books manually. Like, seriously, clicking through 200 items a night and entering new prices. I told him to stop that nonsense and built an automated scraper, parser and some other tools in Python that would parse the actual websites for each of our articles ISBN and compare our prices to those of the competition (this was before the days of publicly available Amazon APIs), readjust our pricing to the cent accordingly and upload the freshly generated updates once all 200 000 items were parsed.
Orders went from 3 - 5 per day to 120 - 150 per day. My buddies were packaging books and CDs all day while I was sitting there grinning and petting my script and ama-bot setup (still those right here in my project folder :-) ). We made 700 000$ of revenue the first year. A few months in competitors started to do the same - no suprise, the concept is quite obvious to any computer or programming guy - and a ruinous price-war started. My friend went out of business a year later. We could have fine-tuned the automated price adjustments like the marketplace vendors are doing today, such as upping the price of an item only you have got in stock, but after a few bad business decisions my friend didn't want to continue. That was all back in the early 2000s (2003-2004ish).
On the issue discussed:
Before a Flash Crash can happen on sites like amazon marketplace, the vendors involved will either die a painfull death before or finetune their algorythims to a much more complex model. Those still alive and well today have done the latter, and even if updates occur every 15 minutes, I'd bet money that they are still watching the sales and revenue with the appropriate tools and with their own eyeballs, because you can lose thousands within minutes if you don't. You can automate a lot, but you can't automate day-to-day business decisions, especially in such markets.
Bottom line:
Crashes don't happen here, only individual foreclosures for those who don't watch out well enough.
My 2 cents. .... Aaaah, the memories ...
The CLI is the only thing that either stays the same (99,9% of the time) or very gradually improves. The Unix CLI is the only thing that doesn't become outdated. The majority of commands I used in 1995 are still the exact same today, 17 years later and in 20 years they will still be the same. I will use the very same commands and still be able to utilize the very most up-to-date computing power with those very same commands.
With grafical UIs we can't even count on the CUAS being upheld throughout desktop enviroments. And just now touch UIs of various sizes and usage patterns have entered the fray. Some of them even riddled with patents.
The *nix CLI will stay the same for a very long time, just as the bizar QWERTZ KB Layout will probably stay the same. Allthough I'd say with the CLI there are way more practical reasons for this. Take away a powerfull *nix CLI from a system and experts will abandon it. It's that simple.
Every 1st world nation on the planet has healthcare, I don't get why this is such a debate in the US. Honestly, the style of political campaigning, the retoric and the poo-flinging going on in the States truely is some bizar spectacle when observed from over here (Europe).
I live in Germany and by US standards we've got a Mercedes-Benz class nanny state, the republic just pulled of a hideously expensive reunification in the last two decades and it's now sponsoring a lions share of the aftermath of crappy budget discipline in the southern parts of the continent and still it has one of the most stable economies. (BTW, I didn't vote for Merkel and I won't, but I sure hope she has some verbal ass-chewing ready for Bella Italia at tonights EU meeting)
I can't shake the feeling that you guys must be doing something wrong ... aside from Irak invasions and insane military budgets, that is. Maybe you should just try this healthcare thing for a few years, I'm sure you guys will see the benefits. ... Just saying.
And apologies to all USians who share my opinion ... just pass that on to those fellow citizens who don't get it.
My 2 cents.
That specific tablet is an iPad rippoff, right down to the Icons on the UI and some of the UI designs. The calendar is basically a 1on1 copy of iPads iCal ... allthough a slightly better one. They actually improved a little on the readability, usability and responsiveness. ... Whatever ...
What I'm saying is that overall the 10.1 shows blatant iPad rippoffs at many places and I would design a better looking non-ipad in 2 weeks. Samsung got lazy and had some chinese nobody copy the UI and workflow 1on1 and didn't stop to think twice about it. If I were Apple, I'd go after them too.
Asus, HTC and other Samsung Models have proven that you can be heavily inspired by a competitor without getting nasty. And, believe it or not, if one of these vendors had some balls, they could improve on the iPad concept in spades in less than a year. I could easyly if I had their resources. The HTC Flyer for instance, is in almost every aspect a better product than the iPad 2. The Transformer Prime enclosure has the iPad look like a toy. Etc., etc. ... And if Canonical, with a fraction of their budget, can build a unique interface with Unity, so can they. Samsung got lazy and did risky stuff, now they'll have to deal with it.
My 2 cents.
General Interface is an industry grade Ajax toolkit designed to be a replacement/alternative in Java or Flex Client situations. It comes with an IDE built with its own components - think Ajax equivalent of Eclipse - which is basically a zipped HTML page with some subdirectories and stuff abused to be a full blow coding enviroment. It runs in FF or IE, loads tons of XML, JSON, JS and CSS stuff out of the subdirectories and behaves just like you'd expect an IDE to behave.
If you want to see what's possible with JS/Ajax if you go to the extreme, this is your ticket. One stop zero fuss coding fun without even running an additional binary aside from FF.
Enjoy.
My 2 cents.
My mom healed her artritis with homeopathy. ... Ok, ok, hear me out!
Yeah, yeah, I know. Magic, unscientific nonsense, jada-jada.
The fact is: You could *watch* my mothers joints move back into normal position and the build-up disapear once she had found the 'right substance' ( ... don't ask, it's this crazy homeopathy thing).
Placebo effect or whatever, it worked. She's 72 now and does regular garden work. She says without homeopathy and - probably more importantly, her homeopath - she'd be dead by now, and I believe her.
I don't believe in homeopathy as much as she does in her day to day life, but I do believe in astonishing placebo effects. Maybe this would be one.
Bottom line: Help your grandpa to exercise, a healthy and lean diet and get him 'hoocked' on homeopathy. It's cheap, shouldn't have any side-effects other than him getting a little 'new-agy' ;-) and chances are he'll get better. Actually, physically better. I've seen it on other people with my own eyes, it's definitely worth a try.
My 2 cents.
Java combines the natural and easy syntax of C with the blazing speed of Smalltalk.
*Tadum* *Crash* *Thud*
Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Try the fish and tip your waitor.
You could be over-analyzing the problem.
Since your requirements are quite specific (FOSS *nix OS + Editor) I suggest you go for a netbook. Don't under estimate the hassle with various devices. A single device is easyer to handle in cramped situations and you have less small parts that you can lose.
If you are travelling a lot your main concern will be universal power supply/recharging and battery time - aside from weight, which you mentioned already. It's for this reason you should consider a custom configuration of an android netbook or a tablet with attachable KB. I'm thinking about the Asus EEE Transformer Prime or a simular thing. If you can get some hacked version of Android running on there or maybe even a special linux build you're all set. It costs 500 Euros and has 15hrs of battery time. That's what I'd expect of a devbox for travelling. The further upside of the android tablet/netbook hybrids is that you can charge them with regular USB power which means you could theoretically save the wallwart/power supply.
An alternative would be some thin low-power lightweight netbook like the Asus EEE X101 and an extra battery pack for extended battery time. Maybe some off-the-beaten-track solution like the Pandora Open Gaming device with some Linux on it or so is what you'd like - after all the one shown behind the link is running Linux with XFCE ... sounds good to me. Definitely also take a look at those expert devices. With most of them you'll probably get the USB power advantage aswell - if they are 'low power' enough that is.
Bottom line: Put your efforts into customizing the netbook / android device option and don't fiddle with microprojectors and such. AFAICT they are to much of fiddling and simply not ready for primetime yet.
My 2 cents.
A friend of mine has hearing problems and the hearing aid mafia is quite powerfull here in Germany.
Thus I was wondering some time ago if one could not build a homebrew hearing aid out of some open electronics kit like an arduino with wireing, a mic, a batters and earbuds or something like that. Sure it would be larger than the usual hearing aid, but to be honest, I'd have nothing agains pinning a geeky looking piece of electronics to my garb to have a working and modifiable hearing aid - especially if I can same 3000$ on top of that.
Seriously, shouldn't it be relatively easy to build a feasable hearing aid with regular off-the-shelf parts, even if it weren't quite as small as the purpose built hearing aids? Any Ideas how one could go about this?
Them weaving the golden cage more and more tightly every day creeps me out just as much as the next geek, but you have to admit, these guys are fucking amazing.
Remember how shitty smartphones were before the iPhone?
SJ said: No Flash and no carrier software on the iPhone.
And thus endeth the era of Flash and crappy carrier scamware on phones.
Btw., as a Flashdev I'm actually reorienting myself because of exact same incident.
Remember how abysmally sad and sorry tablet computers were before the iPad?
Along came Apple and sold 14 million of them tablets in the first 3 quarters. 14 fucking million!
Thus endeth the era of Bill Gates half-assed vision of bizarly overpriced and unwieldy tablet computers.
And now this. ... Just wait for the MB Pro rippoffs poping up in about a year or so, just like the Ultrabook stuff.
Notice how these days every geek worth his salt is bickerin about stagnation and retreat in laptop display resolution? We had a story on this here just a week ago or so.
BAM! New MB Pro. Ahead of the pack at least 1,5 generations, hitting every other vendor on the planet on the back of their head with a Louisville Slugger Class cluestick in terms of laptop screen paradigms and a few other things.
Just plain awesome, I have to say.
Apple is burning more and more Karma with me each day, but they sure to make quite a bit of it up in spades at times. Today is such a time I'd say. Cudos to them, and respect.
My 2 cents.
I consider a well configured KDE the best total-desktop-solution by far - and I'm a regular Mac OS X user btw. Truth is, a well configured KDE runs circles around OS X in terms of usability, consistency and featureset.
And it's right there where we have the one and only problem with KDE: Its default key shortcut configuration is a sad and sorry Windows rippoff with so many pointless, bad and potentially harmful settings that it turns many computer experts off. I know this is default and changing the keymappings in KDE is easy, but it is a downside.
Then agian, Ubuntu takes so much of the pain out of Gnome and Nautilus that I consider it good enough and couldn't be bothered messing with KDE. But should I eventually move away from OS X again - which I require for mulitmedia work and Flash development - I will probably go back to KDE, even if I have to spend quality time getting its setup right. ... Although I definitely would miss the multitouch trackpad, that's for sure. ... But Apple just needs to carry on with their ongoing lock-in strategy and I'm back to using the mouse on Linux again - no problem. Come next HW purchase I will look *very* carefully if the benefits of Apple still outweighs the downsides.
Bottom line: No Video to do? No profesional printwork to do? No application specific OS requirements? Use Linux with KDE, that's my general recommendation to anyone who requires a solid feature-rich working desktop.
My 2 cents.
Gladwell could be right.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is already putting serious, notable and measurable dents into 3rd world misery by means of information and working on optimised medication, simple methods for hygene and pathogen-free water and a number other things. Some of the richest people on the planet have vowed considerable portions of their fortune to the foundation and its cause and the foundations financial reserves and resources are massive on a scale never seen before.
However, this is a non-fight. Steve Jobs himself aknowledge BGs considerable contributions to the worlds improvement with his foundation and BGs intent of not simply wanting to be 'the richest guy on the graveyard' (quote from their joint interview).
As for Steve Jobs bickering about the oxygen mask on his death-bed, I must say, I'd side with Steve Jobs. There is an abundance of man-made shit in this world where the people building and designing it didn't give a seconds worth of thoughts to wether the design makes sense or not. I'd bet money that this also goes for most oxygen masks.
I praise him for giving his designers flak whenever they came up with half-assed shit. We need more CEOs like him who actually care.
My 2 cents.
Web development is a whole new ballgame, keep that in mind.
Since you are a non-webdev guy I strongly suggest you go with the most popular webdev toolkits in existance. Zend, Symfony or Flow3 for the webframework (each in PHP, of course) and jQuery or ExtJS for Ajax client stuff.
With Zend + jQuery and jQuery UI you're on the super safe side, it's safe to say that they are todays most widespread combination. OO PHP won't be any problem for you, since you're used to Java. PHP is going to be very easy for you ... in a way modern PHP and Java are quite simular. Keep in mind though, that PHP has dynamic typing and tons of web-specific built in functions which let you things with one function call which would take 30 lines in Java.
Symfony and Flow3 are also very neat Frameworks, you should look into those. Which you choose isn't that important, PHP is way ahead in delivering in this area compared to Java - you'll feel like a whole new world.
One more thing: What you want to do is a non-trivial web application that takes a lot of work, no matter the technology. You definitely should start out with an architecture model and some abstracts like usecases that leave the technology decisions for later. Maybe you'll feel like doing the whole thing in Java/Wicket and jQuery or something along the way. As far as I know, Wicket is the Java toolkit that comes closest to all the Python, PHP and Ruby stuff out there and has the least XML situp crap to go with it.
My 2 cents.
If you understand this question:
"PCIE SSDs are advertised to deliver 100,000 to 500,000 IOPs. Has anyone experimented with PCI-Express based SSD solutions in their VM hosts to keep high IO VMs like VDI and SQL from swamping their SAN infrastructure?"
you are a computer expert.
What??!?
Changes are that their Java Devs are way more cheaper than you and way better at chinese. And there are most certainly legion. I'd suggest you go with what you've got and do advanced english and english Java consulting. Maybe even some Technical Account Management with customers in the US ... you'll have an edge as a native speaker.
See this as an opportunity to make a move from deving into management. You will not be able to outbid the local competition. ... This is not switzerland, you know.
Oh, and do be prepared for some really extreme air pollution. Stock up on Masks and Air filters and such.
My 2 cents.
If you are ugly like me, poor countries may be your only chance. It's still not easy to get a pretty girl, but if you have some money and don't mind spending some on her you may be able to have a girlfriend or wife for whom you are mainly an ATM with legs.
Chicho Fumboli is fat as an elefant and looks like a monster. A monster with various facial piercings. Some of the hottest Girls on the entire f*cking planet would chop their right arm off for a chance to dance Tango with him. Every time I see him on some Tango video he's got a different hottie he's dancing with. And he isn't very rich either, btw.
It's the way the PUAs say: Attitude is 90%, the rest is a relatively trivial set of little things - hygene being one - and a little attention. It's the same with men, btw. A sweet word from my GF can make my day, and a frown and a bad mood stretch because last night she didn't get her share of Tango rounds with the other guys can give me a headache - quite physically actually.
An anecdote on this:
I met a girl at a Milonga (Tango Dancing Event) in Oslo a few weeks ago and she was kinda sad, i.e. having the regular tango blues that men and women get when they're having a bad stretch or a bad night. We exchanged some words on how things were going and I could tell she would've wanted to dance with me, but rightfully she allready knew I had no interest at the time - the event was overbooked with +20 women. Easy pickings of great dancers.
Anyway, after a litte chit-chat I told her to take on the attitude of 'Tonight I'm going to f*ck your brains out, Mister!" for the dancer she was eyeing ... and for everybody else. She inmediately started smiling, catching on and started to glow. Once frustrated women - and believe me, after 4.5 years of Tango I can asure you: Women do get just as sexually frustrated as men! - get their head out of their behind and get in attitude there's nothing they can't achive with men. And guys, it's the exact same thing vice versa.
My 2 cents.
Seriously, ... WTF?
Guys do Action Videogames and Porn, sometimes excessively, girls do their hair, play The Sims and Farmville, read braindead Fashion Zines and spend bizar amounts of money on Fashion and Cosmetics. Sometimes excessively.
At least so goes the cliche.
If a generation is being missed due to decadence, it's because of decadence with men and women. I call bullshit on the GP.
In my experience women are becoming just as socially awkward as men. Just as many women sit in front of the Web on meeting plattforms clicking for their phantom prince lover and behave accordingly strange when you meet them in public.
That may be a phenomenon about societies becoming rich with resources and technology, but it sure does not just affect men, that is guaranteed.
If find that my girlfriend manages her moods much better when I'm around to cushion them and I also find that my sexual frustration dimishes to zero when she takes care of me. Porn becomes boring and uninspired and games are much less interesting than cooking or dancing with a lady that actually cares about you as a man. That's my experience anyway.
My 2 cents.
For instance, you might have the whole "going to dinner parties with the wife" thing in order to maintain a social norm. Meanwhile, you'd rather be in your garage tinkering with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino or something in your garage and making an anti-squirrel turret for your backyard.
As I'm getting older I'm realizing more and more that the hobbies I find intellectually satisfying are rarely something that can be plugged into a social component. As good (and intelligent) as my friends are, most of them wouldn't want to spend an afternoon learning something interesting in Perl or building a robot for the fuck of it. We go out for drinks or to a diner or something like that. I'm finding that I have to divorce "intellectually stimulating" from "social interaction" more and more every day.
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When socialising becomes boring, just as you describe - I can relate to that, btw. - it's because today people rarely have any time or interest in cultivating social forms of engagement. It's still a relatively thin wholy educated layer of demografic that does these things, if at all.
If you want something stimulating to do that you do with other people it would be making music together, singing in a choir, staging a play or something like that.
4.5 years ago I discovered Tango dancing. And while I actually do have a diploma in performing arts and did that professionally in the 90ies (although not for a living really, you can't live off that), I never would have thought that I'd be doing that. I basically discovered Tango by accident, because a friend of mine asked me to come with her as her partner. Since then it's been like a drug. I go out 3 or more times a week at times and it only takes a little nudge to overcome the notion of just staying at my desk and doing a little programming or something.
Seriously, once you find a social activity that is stimulating beyond sitting together and chatting and getting slightly drunk, you're heading the right way. You can't dance while drunk, and you wouldn't want to, because you're having a ball (quite litterally at times :-) ) giving the ladies and girls a good time and improving your dancing skills. Just Tuesday I came back from Heidelberg with my feet hurting from dancing to much again. With a ladies/guy ratio like that (note the background), a mans gotta do what a mans gotta do, ... I guess. :-)))
Bottom line: Find a higher cultivated social activity than drinking and clubbing, such as the above mentioned, and going social won't be so one dimensional anymore. A few years ago it was Aikido for me, but since I've discovered Tango, I think I've found my contrast programm for the rest of my life.
My 2 cents.
What's the German word for "the boner you get from too much Schadenfreude"? Speaking as an American expat living in NZ: fuck the US government and its thuggish international corporate rent-a-cop policies.
That would be "Schadenständer".
Hehe.
Just 2 weeks ago I asked with you guys what degree I should get for a late-ish career boost (BTW: Once again thanks for all the feedback, it's been a great help!).
It is because of this entire development that I actually am starting to move away from web stuff. It may seem that the web has won, and with Ajax and regular HTML 5 that may be the case, but it also is true that a few years ago we had a well-ordered world with 3 platforms at most and now with the mobile revolution we pratically are back in the 80ies with a bazillion proprietary platforms none of which are really compatible to one another. ... Even the usage paradigms aren't as clear as they were in 2005 with only Win, Mac and *nix desktops to choose from.
As for the dangers of stagnation and lock-in - even with HTML5/CSS3 and Ajax - due to extreme verticalisation of markets, I'd say the GP and the related article are spot on. That's why I'm moving away from rich-client and web stuff, at least for the programming that's supposed to earn me stable money in the long term. The 2k years were a great time with lots of fun and opportunities in the web, but those are dimishing as we speak. At least for me it's time to move on.
My 2 cents.
I'm wondering how far they will be able to go with this until they *really* start loosing karma with IT experts, i.e.us. I'm mean really in the way that I say: "Awesome Hardware and value be damned, fully integrated *nix be damned, I'm going back to fiddling around with debian stable on some current UltraBook or sad-and-sorry mac mini rippoff because their OS has become to much of a pain and I'd rather spend 3 weeks configging my Window Manager than finding way around the lockin."
You are only 2 left and you're asking if handing out your libraries is a good idea. That rings a few bells.
To get things straight: Outsourcing can work, but you need to have your own software development process streamlined and standardized before it makes any sense. F.i., you should have documented APIs that you can expose without handing over source to 3rd parties - that's how you develop inhouse aswell, btw. Once the APIs are finished and documented, grunt work is outsourced and the inhouse crew can move on to the next technology frontier or prototype.
Since you don't have that - your question implies that - and you are only two left, I'd say you have other problems than outsourcing your code work. Doing that in this stage of things won't do any good and will most likely do harm.
My 2 cents.
I'm follwing the cult of less myself, and while not all of my important stuff fits in a briefcase, it does fit into one room without it looking cramped or stuffed with junk - and I plan to reduce my stuff even more in the next few years.
Here's what I do: ... all my current work of the last year)
My Hardware: MB Air, Mac Mini, HTC Flyer, HTC Desire HD
My local storage: 2 HDDs for TimeMachine, 2 HDDs for redundant backup, storage and archiving
My remote storage: Virtual Debian Server for word stuff versioned and synced with Git via SSH (roughly ten projects currently
Disaster recovery via TimeMachine, Backup via two extra redundant external USB 3 2.5" HDDs, FS is HFS non-journaled for easy access from linux. Regular offsite versioning, archiving and backups via Git or SCP for the stuff I work on, Backup from Computers to HDDs via rsync. I rely on the Mac OS X AES 128bit encryption of the MB Air SDD for data security. My calendar is on Google and syncs with both HTC devices (anonymous/fake account) and iCal on the MB, my contact data is only in my phone. Still thinking about wether a fresh copy of 'Missing Sync' is worthwhile.
I store all my notes in Evernote. I have the Evernote client hooked to my Evernote account on all devices.
My next move will be an rsync setup with some low-power netbook/nettop PC running linux that pushed the contents of the HDDs to my server (rented virtual server running debian).
If my stuff gets stolen I've got my backups. If someone breaks into my room and steals the HDDs aswell I'm in deep shit - until I get my off-site routine running that is. I've been consolidating my data handling for about a year now and it will take another year or two until I've got it all in place, i.e.: Full and total off-site backup and desaster recovery preperation, fully redundant local backup, archiving and storage, zero-fuss cross-device automatic project syncing and fail-safe, secure contacts and calendering. ... I'm not to picky with encryption, the 128bit AES is enough for my taste. It's not that I work for the CIA or something.
Hope that helped.