In the cases that I care about the inability to understand needs has been on the IT side, but the problem is with the very idea that the world is divided into this side and that side. Why do you need to have the business explained to you? Does it mean that you don't understand the business you're working in?
Someone is going to invent the "Marines" of computing - a sea based unit with it's own airforce and ships - a unit where decisions can be made quickly and permission does not have to be sought to obtain the necessary resources below a certain degree. In the computing world this might be a development organisation with it's own IT staff scattered throughout the teams. These people will understand needs because they will be spending their time with the people who have the need.
Testing is now done this way in some places and I think it's so much better than the "Test department" idea that existed at another company. Where there are 2 entities everyone blames the other for delays, bugs problems and an adversarial attitude develops.
Clouds and generic services are a balm - something that can soothe the tensions by making the issue of "why do you want this" go away. In most of the world you can have anything you can pay for as long as it's legal and so it should be inside companies. The IT department can run a cloud of it's own or can bulk buy capacity and leave the "embedded IT people" within the business units to use it as they see fit.
How can you say that? It's so cruel to poor little MS - getting shoved around by the big boys!:-( I want to join a "help MS defeat the system" society - do you know if there is one yet?
It doesn't seem too bad to me. It's not great in Argentina or my part of Africa. It's also quite a lot better than not having a map at all because you've run out of credit or can't get a signal.
Preloaded maps so you don't need to eat up bandwidth to look up how to get places. A 12MP camera that justifies the megapixel numbr by being fantastic and better if you get the panorama app. Longer battery life than most of them and certainly longer than a lot of cameras. Pentaband Radio - if it's GSM you can connect. Built like a brick shithouse. Sorry, that saying might be local to where I'm from but basically it's tough. The HDMI output is very nice for looking at photos you took that day or with the USB on the go feature you can use the phone to show the pictures off a camera which doesn't have a video output.
I have taken it on holiday and it's the one to have IMO. I am very biased, BTW so you should know that and I admit that many things might not seem great about its GUI etc but I just don't think they counted much when I was out there using it.
Here is an example of a Panorama I took with it of Table Mountain:
You're letting your politics choose bad friends for you and it's not a good idea because it means that without thought or consideration you choose to be on the side of some very bad people. Everyone has choices including the people in charge of the DPRK and my home too and if we wound back the problems of life far enough we'd find that the DPRK helped Mugabe, for example, or that Henry Kissenger helped Mugabe or that his mum wasn't nice to him or whatever. But I don't blame Mugabes behaviour on them.
The way you are trying to compare two very different things to try and bash the US or mitigate the DPRK is a loss of perspective and it's usually the stuff one reads in government controlled newspapers in the kind of place I'm from. It relies on people not really knowing what immense freedoms there are in the civilised world and on people from the civilised world not having the tiniest inkling what it's really like to live in a police state. I wonder if you have ever felt that you can't say what you think at a party of friends because you're not sure whether some of them have relatives in the secret police? I have.
This is why it makes me feel ill to see such, frankly and to be kind, silly comparisons. I
Unfortunately, I have now put you in a position where you have to argue on the side of even more horrible people in order to try and win the argument. But if you do then you're just making the same mistake even more thoroughly. Meanwhile people who have courage or morals or a sense of decency that got them into trouble are getting beaten and starved quietly far beyond the reach of the BBC to exclaim on their woes and you just tried to make it sound ok.
Interesting how ready people are to rush to the defence of anything to bash the US. I'm a Zimbabwean in the UK, BTW and I regularly hear people defending Mugabe, presumably because they think he's left wing and anti American. There is some incredible loss of perspective, unfortunately but also demonstrates how little anyone really cares about "the poor people in X" when compared to making some political point at home.
I'll take this situation any day over being dictated to. After all, for people who want to be serfs and sing in the landowner's choir, there are always the options you mention.
Actuially they regularly state that they don't intend to keep maintaining it when I have emailed the mailing lists. Not only that, but it doesn't appear to support applets so e.g. I can't see the current time on my "gnome fallback" panel.
I always take the bait, but just in case you are serious, it's a moble operating system. I was making the point that you have 3 options for your development environment. Symbian has had a huge bashing by some very self-satisfied people and I am enjoying pointing out that for all that, you aren't forced to buy a new computer to write software for it.
You should do be able to do whatever the heck you like.
I do like a place with a canteen though - helps you to meet people outside your team. Those who want privacy don't use it and those who do use it tend to be happy enough to talk. It gets my mind off my specific work and let me find out about things I'd never hear of otherwise.
That's like saying that its failure was inevitable because you couldn't be a working OS in the past and a powerful one in the present. I agree that their choices were not wrong for everything but they did not prepare for a different future - where's the equivalent for Symbian of Android's Dalvik or Windows mobile's Silverlight? I'm not really so familiar with iOS but at least Objective-C is "all virtual" afaik and there is quite a powerful and mature framework for desktop-sized applications..
The only clearly stupid idea was to write in C++ wih exceptions etc before any of the compilers supported it properly. Oh, and platsec was also stupid - simply killed all interest and prevented an ecosystem from happening (never seen suich a case of own foot shooting). Death before insecurity - death it is then.
A less clear but still stupid thing was to believe that code would be ported to Symbian. iOS and Android benefit from being able to use POSIX code defeloped for Linux, FreeBSD, solaris etc etc. With Symbian every conversion is a terrifying effort and once done, hard to maintain. By choosing to go the "odd C++" route, Symbian cut itself off from the industry. Symbian people seemed to imagine that it would become its own standard and that such things wouldn't matter. Oops.
A final thing that was silly was the idea of "binary compatibility forever" - something that didn't work all that well in practise and doesn't matter at all now that Symbian isn't going to be here anymore.
It has a good kernel and a very comprehensive API and Qt made the "bitch to program" thing considerably less of a problem but it was still a bitch to progam for the people working on the middleware and non-Qt user code. and consumer electronics companies tend not to see why they need to make their engineers more productive and how it requires that they produce different types of products (e.g. ones with enough RAM).
It was all the fault of Symbian Ltd for determinedly ignoring the programming problems years ago and of Nokia for being a bad customer and trying to push all the things that lead to the disaster and to both of them for ignoring the fact that higher performance hardware was coming and tha tpeople actualy would pay for it. Their entire focus was on trying to move down ro cheaper hardware and they dug themselves deeply into a hole before admitting the need for a 180 degree turn.
It's just a classic case of people "optimizing" something and of time making their optimisations first irrelevant and then a terrible burden.
Nokia could have fixed their problems at many points and didn't because the short term pain would have been high. Now it's much higher.
We all have to assume that you're defending your purchase to some extent. Some purchases are at least partially about status anyhow and there's also the question of how much it all resembles audio equipment where one can spend any amount of money in search of some kind of barely perceptible perfection.
If you start the day happy with your current TV and someone makes you feel it's not good enough and that another one is what you must have then to a certain extent you are at least being manipulated.
The lesson about Symbian and Nokia is one that one could have learned about UNIX when MS brought NT. And it would be true enough but UNIX sort of didn't die like it was told to exactly but spawned a bastard child which grew up to be stronger.
Life is full of near misses and one doen't know how near they are until you have strained every nerve trying. Even then you never know what could have happened if you had been just a little bit luckier or smarter or, indeed, slower or dumber.
There is so much w*****g about the Symbian UI but it's a good OS and does a lot of stuff that, e.g., Windows Phone cannot do now but makes up for with much more expensive hardware. What's crapulent is the organisation which wants everything (masses of models at different price points with exceedingly complex features in the OS to try and get around the deficiencies in the hardware, backwards compatibility with all the mistakes of the past etc) and ends up with nothing.
If you haven't learned that it's the people that matter most then you are missing the point.
Well you can create giant planet-sized data stores and find things in them:-) That's pretty cool.
It seems to me analagous to arguing that neural networks are inaccurate and "nowhere near as powerful as computers". Some 6 billion neural nets out there are nodding along in interest while someone demonstrates their X million line program to algorithmically teach a robot arm to play table tennis in a special room.
Have you not ever found a simple algorithm that beats a complex one simply because the situation converts the complex attempts to be "clever" into a disadvantage?
Simple things are flexible.
Re:What problem does Gnome 3 solve?
on
GNOME 3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I see, so it's for the lords and masters of Gnome to decide the the peasants are "in a rut" and make them run about adapting to some new aritrary "order"?
As a Zimbabwean I know that nobody's going to "misdirect" one of those 110 tomahawks a bit further south to sort out our problem but I do know that Mugabe considered Gadaffi an ally and has received help from Lybia. It is also clear that Bob has reacted to the situation in the middle east - i.e. he has felt the cold fear that bullies feel when they realise that they are more alone and beginning to stick out.
So from us Southern Africans to the rest of you - we don't have any aeroplanes to send but we are with you in spirit. Kick G's hairy arse as thoroughly as you can for us please. One day when we have sorted out our own home we will be able to help you like we did in WWI and WWII.
If I could mod you up I would. This is insightful. I suppose I think it's insightful because I have also noticed it often and it is frustrating.
The battle is about elites vs the rest. Countries that have a small middle class have a kind of power vacuum in which the elite dominates a powerless landless group. They have 100 excuses from "culture" to socialism but it is none of that - it's straightforward, medieval kings and barons and peasants and it's universal to humankind.
The developed world's best way of helping is anything that helps a middle class to grow because even though it is impossible not to have an elite, the middle class are the ones who have the knowledge, collective power, self-organising ability and money to keep the elite in check. They can create new members of the elite and tear down existing ones who overstep the mark.
Slashdot Mirror
In the cases that I care about the inability to understand needs has been on the IT side, but the problem is with the very idea that the world is divided into this side and that side. Why do you need to have the business explained to you? Does it mean that you don't understand the business you're working in?
Someone is going to invent the "Marines" of computing - a sea based unit with it's own airforce and ships - a unit where decisions can be made quickly and permission does not have to be sought to obtain the necessary resources below a certain degree. In the computing world this might be a development organisation with it's own IT staff scattered throughout the teams. These people will understand needs because they will be spending their time with the people who have the need.
Testing is now done this way in some places and I think it's so much better than the "Test department" idea that existed at another company. Where there are 2 entities everyone blames the other for delays, bugs problems and an adversarial attitude develops.
Clouds and generic services are a balm - something that can soothe the tensions by making the issue of "why do you want this" go away. In most of the world you can have anything you can pay for as long as it's legal and so it should be inside companies. The IT department can run a cloud of it's own or can bulk buy capacity and leave the "embedded IT people" within the business units to use it as they see fit.
Well, now we have the Holy Open Spirit and the Son so who's the daddy?
How can you say that? It's so cruel to poor little MS - getting shoved around by the big boys! :-( I want to join a "help MS defeat the system" society - do you know if there is one yet?
If this is ok for you then the maps should be ok too:
http://maps.ovi.com/#|47.7023446|-122.2419395|11|0|0|hybrid.day?
It doesn't seem too bad to me. It's not great in Argentina or my part of Africa. It's also quite a lot better than not having a map at all because you've run out of credit or can't get a signal.
Regards,
Tim
The N8's prime advantages on holiday are:
Preloaded maps so you don't need to eat up bandwidth to look up how to get places.
A 12MP camera that justifies the megapixel numbr by being fantastic and better if you get the panorama app.
Longer battery life than most of them and certainly longer than a lot of cameras.
Pentaband Radio - if it's GSM you can connect.
Built like a brick shithouse. Sorry, that saying might be local to where I'm from but basically it's tough.
The HDMI output is very nice for looking at photos you took that day or with the USB on the go feature you can use the phone to show the pictures off a camera which doesn't have a video output.
I have taken it on holiday and it's the one to have IMO. I am very biased, BTW so you should know that and I admit that many things might not seem great about its GUI etc but I just don't think they counted much when I was out there using it.
Here is an example of a Panorama I took with it of Table Mountain:
http://www.panogio.com/south-africa/3751101061399
Regards,
Tim
XFCE is quite a good alternative now - just install it and the option will appear in your login menu. YMMV but I found it to be a happy enough home.
Hi,
You're letting your politics choose bad friends for you and it's not a good idea because it means that without thought or consideration you choose to be on the side of some very bad people. Everyone has choices including the people in charge of the DPRK and my home too and if we wound back the problems of life far enough we'd find that the DPRK helped Mugabe, for example, or that Henry Kissenger helped Mugabe or that his mum wasn't nice to him or whatever. But I don't blame Mugabes behaviour on them.
The way you are trying to compare two very different things to try and bash the US or mitigate the DPRK is a loss of perspective and it's usually the stuff one reads in government controlled newspapers in the kind of place I'm from. It relies on people not really knowing what immense freedoms there are in the civilised world and on people from the civilised world not having the tiniest inkling what it's really like to live in a police state. I wonder if you have ever felt that you can't say what you think at a party of friends because you're not sure whether some of them have relatives in the secret police? I have.
This is why it makes me feel ill to see such, frankly and to be kind, silly comparisons. I
Unfortunately, I have now put you in a position where you have to argue on the side of even more horrible people in order to try and win the argument. But if you do then you're just making the same mistake even more thoroughly. Meanwhile people who have courage or morals or a sense of decency that got them into trouble are getting beaten and starved quietly far beyond the reach of the BBC to exclaim on their woes and you just tried to make it sound ok.
Regards,
Tim
And a quarter of the number of people that the US has in jail.
These are political prisoners, not ordinary every day thieves or drug dealers.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/images-reveal-scale-north-korean-political-prison-camps-2011-05-03
Interesting how ready people are to rush to the defence of anything to bash the US. I'm a Zimbabwean in the UK, BTW and I regularly hear people defending Mugabe, presumably because they think he's left wing and anti American. There is some incredible loss of perspective, unfortunately but also demonstrates how little anyone really cares about "the poor people in X" when compared to making some political point at home.
Can't mod you up but it's true - the less you know the more stuffed you are.
I'll take this situation any day over being dictated to. After all, for people who want to be serfs and sing in the landowner's choir, there are always the options you mention.
You just contradicted yourself! "You can have classic but it's going" that's the summary - we are being railroaded and that's not freedom.
Actuially they regularly state that they don't intend to keep maintaining it when I have emailed the mailing lists. Not only that, but it doesn't appear to support applets so e.g. I can't see the current time on my "gnome fallback" panel.
I always take the bait, but just in case you are serious, it's a moble operating system. I was making the point that you have 3 options for your development environment. Symbian has had a huge bashing by some very self-satisfied people and I am enjoying pointing out that for all that, you aren't forced to buy a new computer to write software for it.
Cheers :-)
. . .. . but with Symbian you can develop on a Mac, Windows or Linux...... YAY! :-)
You should do be able to do whatever the heck you like.
I do like a place with a canteen though - helps you to meet people outside your team. Those who want privacy don't use it and those who do use it tend to be happy enough to talk. It gets my mind off my specific work and let me find out about things I'd never hear of otherwise.
That's like saying that its failure was inevitable because you couldn't be a working OS in the past and a powerful one in the present. I agree that their choices were not wrong for everything but they did not prepare for a different future - where's the equivalent for Symbian of Android's Dalvik or Windows mobile's Silverlight? I'm not really so familiar with iOS but at least Objective-C is "all virtual" afaik and there is quite a powerful and mature framework for desktop-sized applications..
The only clearly stupid idea was to write in C++ wih exceptions etc before any of the compilers supported it properly. Oh, and platsec was also stupid - simply killed all interest and prevented an ecosystem from happening (never seen suich a case of own foot shooting). Death before insecurity - death it is then.
A less clear but still stupid thing was to believe that code would be ported to Symbian. iOS and Android benefit from being able to use POSIX code defeloped for Linux, FreeBSD, solaris etc etc. With Symbian every conversion is a terrifying effort and once done, hard to maintain. By choosing to go the "odd C++" route, Symbian cut itself off from the industry. Symbian people seemed to imagine that it would become its own standard and that such things wouldn't matter. Oops.
A final thing that was silly was the idea of "binary compatibility forever" - something that didn't work all that well in practise and doesn't matter at all now that Symbian isn't going to be here anymore.
It has a good kernel and a very comprehensive API and Qt made the "bitch to program" thing considerably less of a problem but it was still a bitch to progam for the people working on the middleware and non-Qt user code. and consumer electronics companies tend not to see why they need to make their engineers more productive and how it requires that they produce different types of products (e.g. ones with enough RAM).
It was all the fault of Symbian Ltd for determinedly ignoring the programming problems years ago and of Nokia for being a bad customer and trying to push all the things that lead to the disaster and to both of them for ignoring the fact that higher performance hardware was coming and tha tpeople actualy would pay for it. Their entire focus was on trying to move down ro cheaper hardware and they dug themselves deeply into a hole before admitting the need for a 180 degree turn.
It's just a classic case of people "optimizing" something and of time making their optimisations first irrelevant and then a terrible burden.
Nokia could have fixed their problems at many points and didn't because the short term pain would have been high. Now it's much higher.
We all have to assume that you're defending your purchase to some extent. Some purchases are at least partially about status anyhow and there's also the question of how much it all resembles audio equipment where one can spend any amount of money in search of some kind of barely perceptible perfection.
If you start the day happy with your current TV and someone makes you feel it's not good enough and that another one is what you must have then to a certain extent you are at least being manipulated.
The lesson about Symbian and Nokia is one that one could have learned about UNIX when MS brought NT. And it would be true enough but UNIX sort of didn't die like it was told to exactly but spawned a bastard child which grew up to be stronger.
Life is full of near misses and one doen't know how near they are until you have strained every nerve trying. Even then you never know what could have happened if you had been just a little bit luckier or smarter or, indeed, slower or dumber.
There is so much w*****g about the Symbian UI but it's a good OS and does a lot of stuff that, e.g., Windows Phone cannot do now but makes up for with much more expensive hardware. What's crapulent is the organisation which wants everything (masses of models at different price points with exceedingly complex features in the OS to try and get around the deficiencies in the hardware, backwards compatibility with all the mistakes of the past etc) and ends up with nothing.
If you haven't learned that it's the people that matter most then you are missing the point.
Well you can create giant planet-sized data stores and find things in them :-) That's pretty cool.
It seems to me analagous to arguing that neural networks are inaccurate and "nowhere near as powerful as computers". Some 6 billion neural nets out there are nodding along in interest while someone demonstrates their X million line program to algorithmically teach a robot arm to play table tennis in a special room.
Have you not ever found a simple algorithm that beats a complex one simply because the situation converts the complex attempts to be "clever" into a disadvantage?
Simple things are flexible.
I see, so it's for the lords and masters of Gnome to decide the the peasants are "in a rut" and make them run about adapting to some new aritrary "order"?
As a Zimbabwean I know that nobody's going to "misdirect" one of those 110 tomahawks a bit further south to sort out our problem but I do know that Mugabe considered Gadaffi an ally and has received help from Lybia. It is also clear that Bob has reacted to the situation in the middle east - i.e. he has felt the cold fear that bullies feel when they realise that they are more alone and beginning to stick out.
So from us Southern Africans to the rest of you - we don't have any aeroplanes to send but we are with you in spirit. Kick G's hairy arse as thoroughly as you can for us please. One day when we have sorted out our own home we will be able to help you like we did in WWI and WWII.
Regards,
Tim
CS doesn't need calculus and your experience as a physicist is not relevant.
It could do with a bit of psychology or maybe sociology though.
If I could mod you up I would. This is insightful. I suppose I think it's insightful because I have also noticed it often and it is frustrating.
The battle is about elites vs the rest. Countries that have a small middle class have a kind of power vacuum in which the elite dominates a powerless landless group. They have 100 excuses from "culture" to socialism but it is none of that - it's straightforward, medieval kings and barons and peasants and it's universal to humankind.
The developed world's best way of helping is anything that helps a middle class to grow because even though it is impossible not to have an elite, the middle class are the ones who have the knowledge, collective power, self-organising ability and money to keep the elite in check. They can create new members of the elite and tear down existing ones who overstep the mark.