Very well put. In the US you are at the mercy of your carrier as to what phones they will allow you to use. For example, try and get a J2ME enabled phone you can use on Verizon.
Of course they have bucketloads using their GetItNow service (also known as Qualcomm BREW) and the apps only come for a fee (which Qualcomm and Verizon get a portion of).
To write a "free" program for any Verizon cellphone would require me to spend over $6,000 a year at Qualcomm, get it certified by Qualcomm and Verizon, and then have a revenue sharing agreement.
It has run on Cygwin for quite a while. Although it may sound silly, it helps improve Cygwin as well as Wine. (People have also tried running Cygwin under Wine).
...for an estimated retail price of $129, $100 less than the Connectix price of $229
A nice little piece of revisionist history there. The Connectix price was $129 for the last several months. In the two weeks before they completely removed the ability to buy the product, it dropped to $119. The day before I made up my mind to buy it, Microsoft took it off the market.
Why didn't I pick VMWare? Choice #1 was upgrading my Win98 machine to XP, and buying VPC ($90+$119). Choice #2 was upgrading my Win98 to Linux and buying VMWare ($24+$300). In the end a friend who is a Microsoft employee gave me a copy of XP Pro from their corporate store which cost them $20, making choice #1 even cheaper!
IMHO VMWare is just too expensive for home users like me. Their price is comparable to buying a whole new machine. (They used to have a $99 home edition which they dumped).
I also detest the VMWare support. I have a bootdisk (Bart's BootDisk) that has booted on every real machine I have as well as several friends' machines, and VPC. It just crashes under VMWare. VMWare also doesn't understand dual monitors (try making a window go full screen).
I duly entered support issues for these at the VMWare support site and never got any form of response. I should also mention that I tried VMWare on another machine and it just refused to run claiming my license key was invalid. I think it is due to some anti-piracy broadcast on the network scheme they have going. Of course they never answered my support requests, nor could I try it on another machine.
So VPC it is for me when Microsoft will finally agree to take my money.
I am very impressed that the presenter doesn't know the difference between VPN and VNC. And as others pointed out, Borland have historically been terrible at updates and fixes for released versions of their products.
The real question is can you trust them to keep up to date with new versions of GNU tools, Intel tools and their own without repeated dinging you for more cash?
How do you improve your crash record in a dangerous way? Try to make other pilots crash?
You could take more risky landings and fly through riskier weather in order to be on time. You could refuse to take riskier flights (eg because of weather, short runways etc) so that newer less experienced pilots end up with them.
You could refuse to fly the planes if tiny little things are wrong. (Do a Google search for "minimum equipment list" - results such as
this).
Generally wherever there are incentives to do things for pay, people will take them. Some may do it not at all, and others may do it a lot. But it isn't something you want going through a pilot's mind as he deciding what to do in a situation.
For starters, point out that a 30th year pilot is not 19 times as valuable as a new recruit
Ok, put a value on it then. A new recruit flies puddle jumpers with 19 people on board doing hour long flights. The 30 year pilot flies $180 million aircraft with 350 people on board on 12 hour flights between continents (oh, and has 30 years of experience).
Now comes the fun part. You are running an airline and you recruit more pilots. You have an existing corp of pilots and you could promote one of them, and make the new hires join the end of queue. Or you could ignore your existing pilots and just stuff the new ones in wherever you want, effectively ignoring the loyalty of your existing pilots. Initially the system seems fine, but run it for several decades, get unions, management, government ("deregulation" only happened 20 years ago) involved and you will end up with a mess that is illogical and bad for everyone involved at the extremes.
They ignored how pilots actually get paid. It is based ENTIRELY on length of service with their current airline. When they start. it is around $13,000 a year (yes, really). And don't forget they often have to pay back for flight school. The longer they serve, they more they get paid as they move up ("seniority"). Their career can be instantly over failing the six month physical/medical. And that isn't failing like ordinary folk would. The health standards are significantly higher. Oh, and if they have to leave an airline while earning $250,000 a year and start at another, they really do start at $13,000.
The pay is definitely broken, but it isn't really apparent how to fix it. If they were paid on timely arrivals or lack of crashes, then there would be an incentive to buck the system to improve those in dangerous ways. They can hardly be blamed for maintenance, weather, in flight emergencies with passengers or any other "performance related" means. So seniority/length of service it remains.
So why do pilots fight so hard for their pay. Simple. When you have been making $13,000 a year and growing slowly until you eventually hit bigger numbers many decades later, you feel like you have earned it. And all the pilots who have put in a decade at low pay don't want the future rewards they have sacrificed for taken away. You should also be aware that very few pilots earn those big bucks.
Check out the series of articles "Ask the Pilot" on Salon which goes into way more detail. Quite frankly you would be insane to become a pilot for the money.
The web site seems to completely lack examples. It also isn't apparent how they do 'objects' (ie bundles of data and the functions that operate on them). It just looks like a very poor man's version of Python to me.
Re:We had been thinking about using kylix
on
Kylix in Limbo
·
· Score: 1
You should look at the Wiki. It is trivial to produce binaries that work on Windows and Linux without having other dependencies or the user even having a clue what language the stuff is written in. If you want to test an example out, google for BitPim.
http://wiki.wxpython.org/index.cgi/CreatingStand al oneExecutables
"Those Who Remember History Are Doomed To Watch It Repeat"
I was there in the early nineties as all the UNIX vendors had desktops and decided to give them up to get the more lucrative "server" stuff. Back then, business apps ran on UNIX desktops. Microsoft Windows, OS/2, GEM and Macs were dismissed as niche players and certainly not doing software where you could make money.
So they let other companies fight over the desktop since they knew their superior UNIX offerings would be picked for servers. Except the people who picked Windows for their desktops became comfortable picking Windows for their servers. And Microsoft courted developers really hard. (While the UNIX vendors were charging increasingly ludicrous amounts for compilers).
Out of all that, Microsoft ended up with a very respectable share of the server side stuff, and Linux and free compilers ate into the UNIX vendors.
Operating system deployments follow the network effect. The more you have of them the more useful they are. (Another example was fax machines. If you are the only person on the planet with one, then it is useless. The more who have them, the more useful each one is).
You can see this in software support. Look at which operating systems you get drivers, games, business software, productivity software, media players, certifications etc for. They closely follow the deployments of each. Redhat was/is popular because it was widespread, which therefore made it even more widespread.
Redhat's mistake is assuming that they can give up quantity of customers instead to get just the quality ones. They will lose that one, just like all those UNIX companies. Less and less people will be familiar with the Redhat offerings - and it doesn't look like Fedora will have much in common with Real Redhat. Software built on Fedora will be using way more recent versions of libraries etc and so won't even install on Real Redhat.
You can also see from all the comments that people HATE changing Linux distributions (and even dislike upgrading). Redhat is betting on that hatred being more than $300-$2500 per machine. I suspect it isn't. And once they realise their mistake, they are going to find it just as hard to get people to move back.
If you do any open source projects that release RPMs for the convenience of your users, figure out which platforms/versions you will be releasing them for in the future. Those are the ones that will take over from Redhat desktop distros.
A lot of the people who worked on the networking were UNIX folks. Basically Microsoft recruited a bunch of UNIX weenies who brought UNIXy stuff with them (either code for BSD things, or following traditional UNIX command line arguments and tool names). That all happened in the early 90's.
Having a meeting with several of them at Redmond. Heck some of them even used vi as an editor. It is more than coincidence that the netstat command under Windows is very similar to the one on Unix.
In fact Microsoft developers on the OS side do a lot of their development on non-Intel platforms such as PowerPC. The reason is that it ensures the code is cleaner and architecture neutral. Later on it is "ported" to Intel.
Give them as much time off as you can. Being able to spend time with families, friends or just chilling. You could even hire temps to cover for some of the time.
I am an unemployed home user and do need virtual machine like stuff for various Windows and Linux open source projects. Unfortunately VMWare is just too damn expensive at $300 while VPC is $120 (and less buggy!)
The day I decided to buy VPC was the day after they pulled it from the market. Now it looks like they don't want my money.
I find it really bizarre that MS would pull Linux support. Even if someone is using Linux as a guest in VPC, Microsoft will have received revenue for the Windows host and for VPC.
S&T is great. If you are a Costco member you can get it for $15 if you send in the annoying rebate. It also doesn't limit you to a tiny image like all the online maps do (I have a dual monitor 1600x1200 setup so a postage stamp in the middle of my screen doesn't qualify as a map).
My only complaint against S&T is that what you see on the screen isn't exactly what is printed. In particular it will 'declutter' the printed map by not printing some of the street names that it does show you on the screen. Thankfully my printer driver (EPSON) has print preview so I can fiddle until it shows enough street names.
S&T 2004 can also show you where you are based on a GPS. It doesn't do routing or anything on the GPS, but knowing exactly where you are is usually enough for me.
You miss the point. I said archives, as in multiple files. bzip2 only does compression. It doesn't solve the problem of how do you do multiple files that you want to distribute as one file. zip, tar and several other formats support making a single file out of many. If the individual files are already compressed, then the compression used by the archiver is irrelevant.
As an example, Sun ship 'patch clusters' as a single zip file. These are sort of equivalent to Service Packs in the Windows world. They are a group of patches that have been tested together.
The Solaris packaging system is the standard one used for SVR4 (ie is also on several other UNIXen). Having worked extensively with both it and RPM, I can assure that being "old" is not a problem. In fact, it is WAY better than the crap that is RPM. And it isn't based on pkzip. In fact it uses cpio under the hood, just like RPM. Sun do ship archives as zip files, but then what is wrong with that?
Quite frankly I couldn't care less how much the console costs. The game prices are what annoys me. I refuse to pay more than $30 for a game unless it is really really good. As a GameCube owner, I am now down to buying about one game every 6 months because of this.
One employer I worked for decided that times were tough and they would require everyone to work an extra 15 minutes a day. Everyone ended up working less. The reason was that most used to work at least an half an hour extra each day, if not more. When the edict came down (roughly phrased as "accept this or your employment is terminated in two weeks as per your contract"), everyone started working exactly the required hours, and not a second more.
I guess we had issues being treated like that, and all the managers getting Jaguars as company cars.
I own a GameCube. It almost only gets played when I have parties, when doing Monkey Ball is great. (The new Mario Kart looks like a crowd pleaser as well). I also ended up getting a PS2, and the only title I have for it is Dance Dance Revolution. I am going to get the Eye Toy since I think it will be just as much fun for parties.
While word of mouth is good for the popularity of movies, it isn't in the studio's interest. When a film first opens, the vast majority of the revenue goes to the studio, with almost none to the cinema (they make it up on popcorn sales). As time progresses, the split moves to favour the cinema.
Consequently, they would prefer the entire audience to visit in the first week, rather than be spread over many (which is how good word of mouth would work).
I tried Gentoo for a while and eventually gave up. The problem is that you still have dependency hell. Most packages look for stuff at compile time, and many have optional components. For example a video player may not include support for QuickTime unless the libraries are already on there at compile time.
So the fun starts when you start installing stuff, they don't include support for other components because they weren't there at compile time, you then discover the missing support, have to install the missing libraries and then recompile every package.
This is an especially big issue with multi-media stuff, and gets many layers deep as some libraries have optional components depending on other optional components.
About the only way to guarantee a fully uptodate system is to keep doing complete recompiles of the entire system until there are no changes.
So if I forgot my password, google can just tell me what it is? Can it tell me my credit card number too?
Funnily enough it can. Get the latest (beta) Google toolbar and there is an autofill button. It works really well, and will paste in name, email, address and credit card info into fields it automagically recognises.
Sad but true: the Google toolbar is the main killer app that stops me migrating from Windows to Linux. I use almost all of its features daily. The equivalent toolbars on Linux browsers have significantly fewer features.
Slashdot Mirror
Very well put. In the US you are at the mercy of your carrier as to what phones they will allow you to use. For example, try and get a J2ME enabled phone you can use on Verizon.
Of course they have bucketloads using their GetItNow service (also known as Qualcomm BREW) and the apps only come for a fee (which Qualcomm and Verizon get a portion of).
To write a "free" program for any Verizon cellphone would require me to spend over $6,000 a year at Qualcomm, get it certified by Qualcomm and Verizon, and then have a revenue sharing agreement.
It has run on Cygwin for quite a while. Although it may sound silly, it helps improve Cygwin as well as Wine. (People have also tried running Cygwin under Wine).
A nice little piece of revisionist history there. The Connectix price was $129 for the last several months. In the two weeks before they completely removed the ability to buy the product, it dropped to $119. The day before I made up my mind to buy it, Microsoft took it off the market.
Why didn't I pick VMWare? Choice #1 was upgrading my Win98 machine to XP, and buying VPC ($90+$119). Choice #2 was upgrading my Win98 to Linux and buying VMWare ($24+$300). In the end a friend who is a Microsoft employee gave me a copy of XP Pro from their corporate store which cost them $20, making choice #1 even cheaper!
IMHO VMWare is just too expensive for home users like me. Their price is comparable to buying a whole new machine. (They used to have a $99 home edition which they dumped).
I also detest the VMWare support. I have a bootdisk (Bart's BootDisk) that has booted on every real machine I have as well as several friends' machines, and VPC. It just crashes under VMWare. VMWare also doesn't understand dual monitors (try making a window go full screen).
I duly entered support issues for these at the VMWare support site and never got any form of response. I should also mention that I tried VMWare on another machine and it just refused to run claiming my license key was invalid. I think it is due to some anti-piracy broadcast on the network scheme they have going. Of course they never answered my support requests, nor could I try it on another machine.
So VPC it is for me when Microsoft will finally agree to take my money.
I am very impressed that the presenter doesn't know the difference between VPN and VNC. And as others pointed out, Borland have historically been terrible at updates and fixes for released versions of their products.
The real question is can you trust them to keep up to date with new versions of GNU tools, Intel tools and their own without repeated dinging you for more cash?
You could take more risky landings and fly through riskier weather in order to be on time. You could refuse to take riskier flights (eg because of weather, short runways etc) so that newer less experienced pilots end up with them.
You could refuse to fly the planes if tiny little things are wrong. (Do a Google search for "minimum equipment list" - results such as this).
Generally wherever there are incentives to do things for pay, people will take them. Some may do it not at all, and others may do it a lot. But it isn't something you want going through a pilot's mind as he deciding what to do in a situation.
Ok, put a value on it then. A new recruit flies puddle jumpers with 19 people on board doing hour long flights. The 30 year pilot flies $180 million aircraft with 350 people on board on 12 hour flights between continents (oh, and has 30 years of experience).
Now comes the fun part. You are running an airline and you recruit more pilots. You have an existing corp of pilots and you could promote one of them, and make the new hires join the end of queue. Or you could ignore your existing pilots and just stuff the new ones in wherever you want, effectively ignoring the loyalty of your existing pilots. Initially the system seems fine, but run it for several decades, get unions, management, government ("deregulation" only happened 20 years ago) involved and you will end up with a mess that is illogical and bad for everyone involved at the extremes.
They ignored how pilots actually get paid. It is based ENTIRELY on length of service with their current airline. When they start. it is around $13,000 a year (yes, really). And don't forget they often have to pay back for flight school. The longer they serve, they more they get paid as they move up ("seniority"). Their career can be instantly over failing the six month physical/medical. And that isn't failing like ordinary folk would. The health standards are significantly higher. Oh, and if they have to leave an airline while earning $250,000 a year and start at another, they really do start at $13,000.
The pay is definitely broken, but it isn't really apparent how to fix it. If they were paid on timely arrivals or lack of crashes, then there would be an incentive to buck the system to improve those in dangerous ways. They can hardly be blamed for maintenance, weather, in flight emergencies with passengers or any other "performance related" means. So seniority/length of service it remains.
So why do pilots fight so hard for their pay. Simple. When you have been making $13,000 a year and growing slowly until you eventually hit bigger numbers many decades later, you feel like you have earned it. And all the pilots who have put in a decade at low pay don't want the future rewards they have sacrificed for taken away. You should also be aware that very few pilots earn those big bucks.
Check out the series of articles "Ask the Pilot" on Salon which goes into way more detail. Quite frankly you would be insane to become a pilot for the money.
Yes, but the only "object" example was a maximum concept. It is true that one test of a language is if you can write its own compiler in itself.
My other test is what a Space Invaders program looks like. It would have to deal with drawing, responding to user input, timers etc.
The web site seems to completely lack examples. It also isn't apparent how they do 'objects' (ie bundles of data and the functions that operate on them). It just looks like a very poor man's version of Python to me.
You should look at the Wiki. It is trivial to produce binaries that work on Windows and Linux without having other dependencies or the user even having a clue what language the stuff is written in. If you want to test an example out, google for BitPim.
d al oneExecutables
http://wiki.wxpython.org/index.cgi/CreatingStan
I was there in the early nineties as all the UNIX vendors had desktops and decided to give them up to get the more lucrative "server" stuff. Back then, business apps ran on UNIX desktops. Microsoft Windows, OS/2, GEM and Macs were dismissed as niche players and certainly not doing software where you could make money.
So they let other companies fight over the desktop since they knew their superior UNIX offerings would be picked for servers. Except the people who picked Windows for their desktops became comfortable picking Windows for their servers. And Microsoft courted developers really hard. (While the UNIX vendors were charging increasingly ludicrous amounts for compilers).
Out of all that, Microsoft ended up with a very respectable share of the server side stuff, and Linux and free compilers ate into the UNIX vendors.
Operating system deployments follow the network effect. The more you have of them the more useful they are. (Another example was fax machines. If you are the only person on the planet with one, then it is useless. The more who have them, the more useful each one is).
You can see this in software support. Look at which operating systems you get drivers, games, business software, productivity software, media players, certifications etc for. They closely follow the deployments of each. Redhat was/is popular because it was widespread, which therefore made it even more widespread.
Redhat's mistake is assuming that they can give up quantity of customers instead to get just the quality ones. They will lose that one, just like all those UNIX companies. Less and less people will be familiar with the Redhat offerings - and it doesn't look like Fedora will have much in common with Real Redhat. Software built on Fedora will be using way more recent versions of libraries etc and so won't even install on Real Redhat.
You can also see from all the comments that people HATE changing Linux distributions (and even dislike upgrading). Redhat is betting on that hatred being more than $300-$2500 per machine. I suspect it isn't. And once they realise their mistake, they are going to find it just as hard to get people to move back.
If you do any open source projects that release RPMs for the convenience of your users, figure out which platforms/versions you will be releasing them for in the future. Those are the ones that will take over from Redhat desktop distros.
A lot of the people who worked on the networking were UNIX folks. Basically Microsoft recruited a bunch of UNIX weenies who brought UNIXy stuff with them (either code for BSD things, or following traditional UNIX command line arguments and tool names). That all happened in the early 90's.
Having a meeting with several of them at Redmond. Heck some of them even used vi as an editor. It is more than coincidence that the netstat command under Windows is very similar to the one on Unix.
In fact Microsoft developers on the OS side do a lot of their development on non-Intel platforms such as PowerPC. The reason is that it ensures the code is cleaner and architecture neutral. Later on it is "ported" to Intel.
Give them as much time off as you can. Being able to spend time with families, friends or just chilling. You could even hire temps to cover for some of the time.
I am an unemployed home user and do need virtual machine like stuff for various Windows and Linux open source projects. Unfortunately VMWare is just too damn expensive at $300 while VPC is $120 (and less buggy!)
The day I decided to buy VPC was the day after they pulled it from the market. Now it looks like they don't want my money.
I find it really bizarre that MS would pull Linux support. Even if someone is using Linux as a guest in VPC, Microsoft will have received revenue for the Windows host and for VPC.
S&T is great. If you are a Costco member you can get it for $15 if you send in the annoying rebate. It also doesn't limit you to a tiny image like all the online maps do (I have a dual monitor 1600x1200 setup so a postage stamp in the middle of my screen doesn't qualify as a map).
My only complaint against S&T is that what you see on the screen isn't exactly what is printed. In particular it will 'declutter' the printed map by not printing some of the street names that it does show you on the screen. Thankfully my printer driver (EPSON) has print preview so I can fiddle until it shows enough street names.
S&T 2004 can also show you where you are based on a GPS. It doesn't do routing or anything on the GPS, but knowing exactly where you are is usually enough for me.
You miss the point. I said archives, as in multiple files. bzip2 only does compression. It doesn't solve the problem of how do you do multiple files that you want to distribute as one file. zip, tar and several other formats support making a single file out of many. If the individual files are already compressed, then the compression used by the archiver is irrelevant.
As an example, Sun ship 'patch clusters' as a single zip file. These are sort of equivalent to Service Packs in the Windows world. They are a group of patches that have been tested together.
The Solaris packaging system is the standard one used for SVR4 (ie is also on several other UNIXen). Having worked extensively with both it and RPM, I can assure that being "old" is not a problem. In fact, it is WAY better than the crap that is RPM. And it isn't based on pkzip. In fact it uses cpio under the hood, just like RPM. Sun do ship archives as zip files, but then what is wrong with that?
Quite frankly I couldn't care less how much the console costs. The game prices are what annoys me. I refuse to pay more than $30 for a game unless it is really really good. As a GameCube owner, I am now down to buying about one game every 6 months because of this.
One employer I worked for decided that times were tough and they would require everyone to work an extra 15 minutes a day. Everyone ended up working less. The reason was that most used to work at least an half an hour extra each day, if not more. When the edict came down (roughly phrased as "accept this or your employment is terminated in two weeks as per your contract"), everyone started working exactly the required hours, and not a second more.
I guess we had issues being treated like that, and all the managers getting Jaguars as company cars.
I own a GameCube. It almost only gets played when I have parties, when doing Monkey Ball is great. (The new Mario Kart looks like a crowd pleaser as well). I also ended up getting a PS2, and the only title I have for it is Dance Dance Revolution. I am going to get the Eye Toy since I think it will be just as much fun for parties.
:-)
Oh, and I am 33
While word of mouth is good for the popularity of movies, it isn't in the studio's interest. When a film first opens, the vast majority of the revenue goes to the studio, with almost none to the cinema (they make it up on popcorn sales). As time progresses, the split moves to favour the cinema.
Consequently, they would prefer the entire audience to visit in the first week, rather than be spread over many (which is how good word of mouth would work).
I tried Gentoo for a while and eventually gave up. The problem is that you still have dependency hell. Most packages look for stuff at compile time, and many have optional components. For example a video player may not include support for QuickTime unless the libraries are already on there at compile time.
So the fun starts when you start installing stuff, they don't include support for other components because they weren't there at compile time, you then discover the missing support, have to install the missing libraries and then recompile every package.
This is an especially big issue with multi-media stuff, and gets many layers deep as some libraries have optional components depending on other optional components.
About the only way to guarantee a fully uptodate system is to keep doing complete recompiles of the entire system until there are no changes.
Funnily enough it can. Get the latest (beta) Google toolbar and there is an autofill button. It works really well, and will paste in name, email, address and credit card info into fields it automagically recognises.
Sad but true: the Google toolbar is the main killer app that stops me migrating from Windows to Linux. I use almost all of its features daily. The equivalent toolbars on Linux browsers have significantly fewer features.