I think that they can't make you do all that truly and your fear of consequences is probably more to do with you being exhausted all the time and not wanting to take the strain of fighting for yourself.
Fighting is only one option - there are a lot of places to work in the UK where you don't need to do battle to be treated reasonably.
Because you can't install new software on them. Usually that is the way smartphone makers like to characterise their stuff. Lots of the apps are online, however...
I am not an American, I'm actually from Zimbabwe. I promise you that Zimbabweans are as nasty and arrogant and superior as Americans in spite of all the s*** they are in at the moment.:-) I live in Britain and the British are arrogant and superior too, particularly going on all the time about how non arrogant and nice they are and how awesome their own sense of humour is. I see it because I am a foreigner and because when I go back to Zimbabwe I realise I have become a foreigner there too.
You often don't notice your own arrogance - I know I don't.
In the end, everyone needs to think that they are great, part of a great team or group. It makes us feel safe. There must be some branch of psychology or sociology devoted to this and I will look it up some day. The problem is that if your team is really good then it must be really good compared to something else - like that other team over there who talk funny and eat disgusting food and wear odd clothes and . . . .
Americans can just do all this bragging and loud mouthing with a greater degree of confidence than everyone else - partly because America is powerful and partly because they don't know any better. I've heard Chinese and Indian people express awful and immensely arrogant opinions but not quite so loudly.
Anyhow I think you're right about putting that surrender thing to bed but I also think that everyone needs to "pick the beam out of their own eye before picking the splinter out of the other guys" more than they think.
The Science Museum gets my top vote - I love it. You can see Babbage's difference engine, for example, or the NeXT cube that the WWW was born on.
If you can afford a day then get on a train to Cambridge - there is a bus from there to the Duxford Imperial War Museum. There are a lot of wonderful aircraft (e.g. see the TSR2) and there is a land warfare exhibition too which is enormous. It's a lot of travelling but I loved it.
There is a very good RAF museum that's closer at Hendon which is good if you can't make the longer trip.
At Greenwich (gren-idge) you can see the observatory at 0 degrees longitude. The main geek interest here is seeing how the longitude problem was solved - I thought it was a wonderful story with a great moral for computer scientists and engineers about complexity.
The Imperial War Museum in Lambeth is also pretty good.
But it's worth catching a play or some music because those are the things which are best here.
This isn't what I'm missing in Gnome. I'm missing desktop sharing and conferencing software like Livemeeting. I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
Instead, some *person* for want of a better word, thinks I need to have yet another new way to select the same applications, wants to "improve" (i.e. remove the choice from) the task list to be *more* application-centric (so retrograde it's laughable).. What a waste of time. What about an Object-Oriented or task-oriented desktop? How about some *actual* innovation? Being force-fed this kind of thing is pretty unpleasant;.
I have a tool like that - it's called tar. I have distributed applications for 5 OSes with different architectures like this. The startup program is a script which works out what binaries to run. No messing around in kernels is required.
The GGp did complain - he said "for pete's sake". Which I assumed to be a complaint although it's not clear exactly what it was about. Perhaps at there being too many instruction sets. What is too many?
Thumb is a compression scheme for the existing instruction set implemented with 16-bit opcodes. It does not add anything new. To quote the ARM description:
'A "Thumb-aware" core is a standard ARM processor fitted with a Thumb decompressor in the instruction pipeline. The designer therefore gets all the underlying power of the 32-bit ARM architecture as well as excellent code density from Thumb, all at 8-bit system code density.'
So I can point to one thing which it is a bit misleading to complain about.
The points made about there being no magic in ARM were in response to an implication that an i386 design could be made that did what ARM does. I'm trying to say that there may not be magic but you can't make the instruction sets the same and that *is* important since the instruction set is part of the design.
Thumb is just a subset of ARM - so not another instruction set:-) and you haven't really said how a mini-i386 will get that code density. Jazelle etc just let you implement very fast Java apps on a very low power CPU - so what's wrong with that?
There is no such thing as magic - it's all design at some point. ARM had the freedom to invent a better instruction set and they did. It allowed them to make very cheap CPUs at a time when that was needed. Now that processes have improved we can consider x86 but only when wearing very pink spectacles.
So there were problems with floating point but it doesn't seem to have stopped anyone.
I think that you're a bit fixated on CPUs that fit into machines with power cords or heavy batteries and what makes them good - which isn't what makes mobile CPUs good. I think that ARM deserve credit for seeing how important it would become and having exactly what was needed at the right time. They have salespeople (cough) now like any successful company but I have never thought that they benefit from more hype than anyone else.
ARM has a lot of processors out there, in a lot of devices that are quite powerful (frankly those Chinese netbooks are probably less powerful than an iPhone with it's ARM). MIPS could have been the standard mobile CPU but it never was. Why? Someone just didn't think that was important? They missed out in other words but I think that's because they didn't see it coming.
....but one has a lot more baggage to carry around than the other. One doesn't have thumb and one doesn't have a very clever and compact instruction set. So it's dumb 386-mode would not make such good use of it's cache etc etc. Otherwise why didn't VIA or cyrix do what you're suggesting? Every company hypes it's products, Intel too, so what? At least ARM have actually been highly successful. PowerPC and MIPS - they aren't the embedded champions so why bring them up?
Perhaps the reason why ARM did well is because it really did have a clever idea or two and everyone else was too arrogant to have considered the market that they all now want to enter.
I am biased because I worked for Symbian and now Nokia. What I say is entirely my personal opinion.
There's a lot to be dissatisfied with in Symbian but the kernel is good. It works on a lot of different hardware and is very economical with power. It's also extremely reliable. For all that it is a microkernel-based OS, it needs very little in the way of hardware It isn't like Linux or Darwin because they were originally made under the assumption of all sorts of nice things like having a power socket all the time. They catch up but they aren't there yet.
It's also written in pretty simple C++ without the warts that the user-side APIs. Since the user-side stuff is being supplanted by QT and the STL I think that there is hope there. It's also getting some fairly serious SMP support which is well suited to the mobile world (having more less powerful CPUs is good for power consumption if you can switch them on and off).
I work on another thing that's about to be open sourced and I must be a good boy and wait for the SEE next week (what used to be the Smartphone show) before talking about it. But a lot is being done and by people who are just as unhappy or more so about the status quo.
It will be interesting to see how other OSes fare when they try to tackle the problems associated with scale and numbers of different models.
BTW, I use Linux on my desktop and I am a big fan of it.
A better world is in your interest and you do spend money on making it quite directly in the form of aid - except that this is very effective aid.
These people will go home and help to create new industries that will reduce the press of people trying to get into the US - because they too will be able to get decent work at home.
The relative advantage that the US has can't be maintained indefinitely without something new happening. All you're seeing is that the rest of the world is becoming a slightly better place. If you want to keep your standard of living high compared to the rest of the world (which it probably is for people without high-powered degrees) then you're going to have to have something new to offer.
I don't think that this will be other than a nuisance for Obama. As US president he has all the recognition and power he needs. This just puts pressure on him and could end up completely backfiring on the committee if he ever has to do something that's good for America but not, on the face of it, for overall world peace.
For Mr Tsanvgirai it would be very helpful in every way because his rather disgusting opponents do try to belittle him at every step.
He's a man who has been hospitalised by beatings but he has always preached for peace so Zimbabweans, though miserable and downtrodden, have not become murderers. It seems to be working very slowly but all would be lost if there were military coups or Tianemen-square-type failed protests.
Company IT is often handled by an IT department that tries to offer a "service" to the rest of the company. Some of them are not all that good and a bigger provider could do it better. You can get more availability and storage and much faster searching out of a gmail address than out of a corporate email account.
I think a business could give up on providing email and concentrate on doing other more specific things better. Since it's another department, with consultants and other people in it, I see no huge reason to trust them with my email any more than anyone else - there's nothing stopping them from leaking critical information. Hell, I have known such departments to install trojans by mistake within updates.
Why is only work "real"? I use OSS every day that's vital for my job and that's done by people in their spare time. BTW, I use Python at work and not Java or C# because they would be rubbish for what I need to do.
...because the non-programming parts of the job take a lot of effort and I'm not going to waste time on Java's overdesigned class system.
Python is very easy to refactor too thanks to duck typing. You get to concentrate that much more on the problem and that much less on the mechanics of types. Java and C++ send you off on the path of creating some complex class hierarchy and trying to get it right first time. In Python you do what's good enough for your current understanding and keep refactoring as you understand better it's easy to develop as you learn. Your programs change more but end up being less warped and overcomplicated.
I also write a little C and some fairly complicated GNU Make macros to be fair.
I will not go back to Java or C++ because I think they are the worst of all worlds - compromises that give you part of what you want instead of opposites that you can combine.
Hasn't the ban on smoking in public places had any effect? I'm certainly a big fan of that one.
On another note, would you like big tobacco firms to be given the product of their dreams to sell? How do you think society would cope with that - same as with smoking?
Sorry - I realise that I was assuming you meant a Symbian dev environment for Linux. Anyhow there is one and it's getting lots of effort poured into it.
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Just imagine if that $100,000,000,000 had been spent on developing a low-cost spaceflight capability instead.
Then it would quickly have become high-cost.
I think that they can't make you do all that truly and your fear of consequences is probably more to do with you being exhausted all the time and not wanting to take the strain of fighting for yourself.
Fighting is only one option - there are a lot of places to work in the UK where you don't need to do battle to be treated reasonably.
so they have been incrementally moving people to more expensive entbooks which are more and more like laptops.
Because you can't install new software on them. Usually that is the way smartphone makers like to characterise their stuff. Lots of the apps are online, however...
Java runs on non-smartphones so ... :-)
I am not an American, I'm actually from Zimbabwe. I promise you that Zimbabweans are as nasty and arrogant and superior as Americans in spite of all the s*** they are in at the moment. :-) I live in Britain and the British are arrogant and superior too, particularly going on all the time about how non arrogant and nice they are and how awesome their own sense of humour is. I see it because I am a foreigner and because when I go back to Zimbabwe I realise I have become a foreigner there too.
You often don't notice your own arrogance - I know I don't.
In the end, everyone needs to think that they are great, part of a great team or group. It makes us feel safe. There must be some branch of psychology or sociology devoted to this and I will look it up some day. The problem is that if your team is really good then it must be really good compared to something else - like that other team over there who talk funny and eat disgusting food and wear odd clothes and . . . .
Americans can just do all this bragging and loud mouthing with a greater degree of confidence than everyone else - partly because America is powerful and partly because they don't know any better. I've heard Chinese and Indian people express awful and immensely arrogant opinions but not quite so loudly.
Anyhow I think you're right about putting that surrender thing to bed but I also think that everyone needs to "pick the beam out of their own eye before picking the splinter out of the other guys" more than they think.
The Science Museum gets my top vote - I love it. You can see Babbage's difference engine, for example, or the NeXT cube that the WWW was born on.
If you can afford a day then get on a train to Cambridge - there is a bus from there to the Duxford Imperial War Museum. There are a lot of wonderful aircraft (e.g. see the TSR2) and there is a land warfare exhibition too which is enormous. It's a lot of travelling but I loved it.
There is a very good RAF museum that's closer at Hendon which is good if you can't make the longer trip.
At Greenwich (gren-idge) you can see the observatory at 0 degrees longitude. The main geek interest here is seeing how the longitude problem was solved - I thought it was a wonderful story with a great moral for computer scientists and engineers about complexity.
The Imperial War Museum in Lambeth is also pretty good.
But it's worth catching a play or some music because those are the things which are best here.
Why is this a preview if they don't want people to say what they think?
You really aren't going to help F/OSS by calling people whingers - it's a kind of whinging in itself.
This isn't what I'm missing in Gnome. I'm missing desktop sharing and conferencing software like Livemeeting. I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
Instead, some *person* for want of a better word, thinks I need to have yet another new way to select the same applications, wants to "improve" (i.e. remove the choice from) the task list to be *more* application-centric (so retrograde it's laughable).. What a waste of time. What about an Object-Oriented or task-oriented desktop? How about some *actual* innovation? Being force-fed this kind of thing is pretty unpleasant;.
http://llvm.org/
I have a tool like that - it's called tar. I have distributed applications for 5 OSes with different architectures like this. The startup program is a script which works out what binaries to run. No messing around in kernels is required.
"part of the design" should read "an important part of the success of the overall design"
The GGp did complain - he said "for pete's sake".
Which I assumed to be a complaint although it's not clear exactly what it was about. Perhaps at there being too many instruction sets. What is too many?
Thumb is a compression scheme for the existing instruction set implemented with 16-bit opcodes. It does not add anything new. To quote the ARM description:
'A "Thumb-aware" core is a standard ARM processor fitted with a Thumb decompressor in the instruction pipeline. The designer therefore gets all the underlying power of the 32-bit ARM architecture as well as excellent code density from Thumb, all at 8-bit system code density.'
So I can point to one thing which it is a bit misleading to complain about.
The points made about there being no magic in ARM were in response to an implication that an i386 design could be made that did what ARM does. I'm trying to say that there may not be magic but you can't make the instruction sets the same and that *is* important since the instruction set is part of the design.
Thumb is just a subset of ARM - so not another instruction set :-) and you haven't really said how a mini-i386 will get that code density. Jazelle etc just let you implement very fast Java apps on a very low power CPU - so what's wrong with that?
There is no such thing as magic - it's all design at some point. ARM had the freedom to invent a better instruction set and they did. It allowed them to make very cheap CPUs at a time when that was needed. Now that processes have improved we can consider x86 but only when wearing very pink spectacles.
So there were problems with floating point but it doesn't seem to have stopped anyone.
I think that you're a bit fixated on CPUs that fit into machines with power cords or heavy batteries and what makes them good - which isn't what makes mobile CPUs good. I think that ARM deserve credit for seeing how important it would become and having exactly what was needed at the right time. They have salespeople (cough) now like any successful company but I have never thought that they benefit from more hype than anyone else.
ARM has a lot of processors out there, in a lot of devices that are quite powerful (frankly those Chinese netbooks are probably less powerful than an iPhone with it's ARM). MIPS could have been the standard mobile CPU but it never was. Why? Someone just didn't think that was important? They missed out in other words but I think that's because they didn't see it coming.
....but one has a lot more baggage to carry around than the other. One doesn't have thumb and one doesn't have a very clever and compact instruction set. So it's dumb 386-mode would not make such good use of it's cache etc etc. Otherwise why didn't VIA or cyrix do what you're suggesting? Every company hypes it's products, Intel too, so what? At least ARM have actually been highly successful. PowerPC and MIPS - they aren't the embedded champions so why bring them up?
Perhaps the reason why ARM did well is because it really did have a clever idea or two and everyone else was too arrogant to have considered the market that they all now want to enter.
Can't tell you till next week. :-)
I am biased because I worked for Symbian and now Nokia. What I say is entirely my personal opinion.
There's a lot to be dissatisfied with in Symbian but the kernel is good. It works on a lot of different hardware and is very economical with power. It's also extremely reliable. For all that it is a microkernel-based OS, it needs very little in the way of hardware It isn't like Linux or Darwin because they were originally made under the assumption of all sorts of nice things like having a power socket all the time. They catch up but they aren't there yet.
It's also written in pretty simple C++ without the warts that the user-side APIs. Since the user-side stuff is being supplanted by QT and the STL I think that there is hope there. It's also getting some fairly serious SMP support which is well suited to the mobile world (having more less powerful CPUs is good for power consumption if you can switch them on and off).
I work on another thing that's about to be open sourced and I must be a good boy and wait for the SEE next week (what used to be the Smartphone show) before talking about it. But a lot is being done and by people who are just as unhappy or more so about the status quo.
It will be interesting to see how other OSes fare when they try to tackle the problems associated with scale and numbers of different models.
BTW, I use Linux on my desktop and I am a big fan of it.
A better world is in your interest and you do spend money on making it quite directly in the form of aid - except that this is very effective aid.
These people will go home and help to create new industries that will reduce the press of people trying to get into the US - because they too will be able to get decent work at home.
The relative advantage that the US has can't be maintained indefinitely without something new happening. All you're seeing is that the rest of the world is becoming a slightly better place. If you want to keep your standard of living high compared to the rest of the world (which it probably is for people without high-powered degrees) then you're going to have to have something new to offer.
I don't think that this will be other than a nuisance for Obama. As US president he has all the recognition and power he needs. This just puts pressure on him and could end up completely backfiring on the committee if he ever has to do something that's good for America but not, on the face of it, for overall world peace.
For Mr Tsanvgirai it would be very helpful in every way because his rather disgusting opponents do try to belittle him at every step.
He's a man who has been hospitalised by beatings but he has always preached for peace so Zimbabweans, though miserable and downtrodden, have not become murderers. It seems to be working very slowly but all would be lost if there were military coups or Tianemen-square-type failed protests.
So I'm Zimbabwean, obviously.
Company IT is often handled by an IT department that tries to offer a "service" to the rest of the company. Some of them are not all that good and a bigger provider could do it better. You can get more availability and storage and much faster searching out of a gmail address than out of a corporate email account.
I think a business could give up on providing email and concentrate on doing other more specific things better. Since it's another department, with consultants and other people in it, I see no huge reason to trust them with my email any more than anyone else - there's nothing stopping them from leaking critical information. Hell, I have known such departments to install trojans by mistake within updates.
Why is only work "real"? I use OSS every day that's vital for my job and that's done by people in their spare time. BTW, I use Python at work and not Java or C# because they would be rubbish for what I need to do.
Python is very easy to refactor too thanks to duck typing. You get to concentrate that much more on the problem and that much less on the mechanics of types. Java and C++ send you off on the path of creating some complex class hierarchy and trying to get it right first time. In Python you do what's good enough for your current understanding and keep refactoring as you understand better it's easy to develop as you learn. Your programs change more but end up being less warped and overcomplicated.
I also write a little C and some fairly complicated GNU Make macros to be fair.
I will not go back to Java or C++ because I think they are the worst of all worlds - compromises that give you part of what you want instead of opposites that you can combine.
Hasn't the ban on smoking in public places had any effect? I'm certainly a big fan of that one.
On another note, would you like big tobacco firms to be given the product of their dreams to sell? How do you think society would cope with that - same as with smoking?
Sorry - I realise that I was assuming you meant a Symbian dev environment for Linux. Anyhow there is one and it's getting lots of effort poured into it.