A rather inaccurate and useless comment. Android phones do not require any tinkering. IOS and Android are 2 separate mobile operating systems which in all honesty do the same thing. Most useful apps have IOS and Android versions. The thing is that they do not both have separate place, they are in direct competition. Differences: 1. Android seamlessly integrates with google's services and Iphone with mobile me. This over time has become a slight problem for Apple. It just does not have the portfolio of services that google has. The maps application on IOS is frankly rather dated now. Google voice , an incredibly powerful service has very recently made a re-appearance in the App store. After the initial google-voice spat, google has been very choosy with the native apps it wants to make for IOS. If you have a digital life integrated with google's services, Android serves you better. If you are a mobile me user, IOS is a better choice. 2. When you buy an Iphone you have an uniform user experience. The hardware / software combo is tightly controlled by Apple and the whole process of upgrades and an unified user experience is fantastic. When you use an iphone, you are guaranteed to get all the right updates at the right time and you phone will ALWAYS get the latest supported version of the software. Google royally sucks at this. Buying an android phone is risky business. You could go for the android name and end up with a phone which royally sucks. I have had that experience. The hardware may be sluggish, the manufacturer nursing delusions of grandeur will try and skin the base android distribution with some puerile touch flo interface ( HTC, you are a bunch of morons ) which end up making the phone fugly and slow. Also, most manufacturers do not give a flying fuck about upgrading the versions of android after they have sold the unit to the hapless customer. 3. The rate at which Android innovates is awesome. In a year they have gone from a wannabe IOS to a better and more modern mobile OS. IOS is getting slightly dated now. Facetime (on wifi) and printing are not features that really push the envelope. The good thing however is that when Apple comes up with a new feature, you will get it. With an Android phone, you would most probably never ever get the official update with the new features. You would have to buy a new phone for it.
I really do not see this as a big leap apart from the fact there is no physical mouse. In fact it would be more complicated to execute specific motions to get something done. I still move my hand away from the keyboard and then wave my hands in the air to get something done.
Dear Microsoft,
Today you sit and rue the face that you have lost the developer base and to
feel better about it, you label them as 'young and hip'. Here is some news:
Very few developers actually enjoy writing for windows. People have been
writing code on microsoft platforms since there are a huge number of people
who use microsoft products and ignoring the windows platform amounts to
ignoring a huge customer base which the developer could not afford to do.
We, as developers never really enjoyed developing for windows -- it is just
that we did not have a choice.
Today however, the scene has been changing.
1. A large number of GUI-based applications have moved into the browser.
2. Windows servers are not really used in large technology companies
They still are a dominant force in small to medium company's IT
infrastructures. That is all exchange and sharepoint. Any sane startup will
not consider windows to host their servers.
3. Developers now are used to and are aware of desktop platforms which
work well and also are very good programming platforms. Macs have a robust
BSD backbone and Linux is well, Linux. So everybody now have platforms
on which they can hack code and also play their movies.
4. Java provides for a development environment which can make pretty windows
without having to use developer studio.
So you have a scenario where where Microsoft is not the only viable
desktop/laptop OS. Also, it is a terrible programming environment. So any
self-respecting developer will not run windows on his personal machine and
as a result will want to push it out of his workplace too. The process
started a long time back. You guys are feeling it now.
So we come to the next question: Why do we hate writing code for windows ?
I will not cite the BSOD. The "windows crashes" and "windows is not stable"
are old arguments.
Windows is much much more stable than it used to be. In all honesty it has
been ages since I last saw a BSOD. We hate writing code for the windows
platform is because it sucks as a development platform.
1. The design is not based on any implementation of UNIX. That makes any CS
student uncomfortable. I am not saying that that the developer is
uncomfortable because windows has a bad programming interface (which btw it
is ). I am saying that it makes him uncomfortable because he cannot
recognize patterns he used to learn his computer science. He cannot refer to
the kernel source when he runs into a thorny problem, he cannot go online to
get a real educated answer to his problems. It is unfamiliar and since he is
not used to the paradigm. The developer finds it inelegant.
2. The second point is that it IS a bad programming interface. Till very
recently did not have a scripting interface worth its salt, has an extremely
convoluted device driver infrastructure and has that terrible thing called
the registry.
3. The development environment is not free as in beer and as in speech. It
is a closed heavily controlled environment in which the developer has no say
and is an interface which changes very frequently. You can get away with
changing rapidly and being open ( which linux does ) but you cannot get away
by being closed and also changing every 2 years. It drives the developer
mad.
4. Emacs and Vim do not integrate well with visual studio:)
I would really prefer Dell to ship the standard xfce or gnome interface for their machines, rather than trying something 'cute' like HP. A pretty layer would entail developing a whole new layer over the existing UI. This layer, inevitably would have bugs and irritating traits because of one simple reason -- It takes a lot of time and talent to create a good user interface/desktop environment. I would think that HP has slapped on a pretty but buggy and quickly developed layer over gnome to make it look cool, which ultimately will go on to frustrate the user. Then, Linux would be blamed and not that cruddy attempt at coolness.
Lasercopter: Cannot work with 1.0 compiled for 2.0 autocosmos tv: Does not even detect the plugin Meshviewer: Does not detect the plugin Lorenzo Reca: Does not detect the plugin Manic Miner: Does not detect the plugin
I think that the honeymoon is finally over. Google too, will now slowly leave behind the free lunch culture to the inevitable areas of concern --> bottom line and market valuation. The question remains as to whether it will be able to continue with the innovative and creative work culture despite financial concerns.
This dom0 was rather important for me. I am still running FC8 for that reason. I guess xen virtualization is slowly disappearing. Kvm I presume will be the way to go eventually...
About a year back voice connectivity and edge data cost about 350 INR a month. At present exchange rates it is 8 USD a month. Significantly lower. However one must remember that real-estate and labour costs are much lower in India.
I have been living in the US for less than a year now. I have been working for more than ten years. This is the first time that I have been living in the US. Here is what I think of the whole matter.
1. The H1B program, in spirit is a wonderful, clever thing. I have lived and worked in Europe, Japan and India. I love to travel and take in new experiences. Thanks to the H1 program, it allows for me to actually live and work here. In all honesty, it has been a great experience.
2. The H1B program allows for _american_ companies to actually fill in a labour gap as and when required.
3. Does the H1B program get abused as the article states ? Absolutely. I have seen it happen myself. There are huge number of shell companies ( called consultants ) out there who are absolutely flooding the H1B channels with applications for requirements which do not exist. The article is spot-on with its observations. The biggest victim of this whole thing however is the H1B program. Due to this channel-stuffing, legitimate american companies cannot actually recruit an employee when it is _really_ required since the quota has already been filled by fraudulent/redundant applications. These redundant and fraudulent applications really really need to be stopped for the H1B program to actually deliver what it actually set out to deliver.
4. There is a lot of talk about salaries and cost, and this is what I think. The H1B program is a cleverly crafted law in some ways. The H1 application belongs to the employee and and not the employer. The employee is free to change his employers as and when he or she wants to. If an employee thinks that he is being paid less than the market value, he or she is free to seek out an employer who will pay him as much as he or she deserves. The free market will, at the end of the day take care of it. Also if there is a company which pays its employees based on his legal status and not his skills and ability, please do not consider working for it, whatever might be your legal status.
5. In my professional career, I have worked with some of the biggest bozos and some of the most exquisitely talented engineers. Race or geographical location had absolutely nothing to do with their abilities. There are smart people and idiots everywhere. Supposing that a H1B worker to be inferior in terms of ability, is not a very clever viewpoint.
Bad observation. Hackneyed observation. Disease and violence are symptoms. They are not the cause. The underlying cause is an underdevloped, impoverished economy and the lack of human-resource. Treat the causes by developing the economy and educating the people. Treating the symptoms never help. Although broadband access is not the silver bullet, but it is the the variety of change that would be desired.
It is for the 3G wireless networks. The capacity of a network is calculated on a probabilistic model where a bunch of users communicate in intermittent quanta of downloads and uploads. So the bandwidth is provisioned, ( especially in a wireless network ) in such a way that you have the promised amount of bandwidth in spike. There is only that much you can put in a single wireless burst. A P2P application in sharp contradistinction, will generate a stream of steady and large volume of traffic in both directions, for as long as it is running. This will lock up a bunch of slots on a burst, starving other user terminals in the vicinity. The problem with torrents I think is not the amount of data transferred, but the pattern in which it is used. The attempt I think is to provide an uniform user experience for all. It is understandable from a provisioning point of view, but let us see how it works out in the market.
1. Management is not an exclusive skill. Good tech managers are those people who have worked/coded in the trenches and understand the nitty-gritties of the development cycle. The are able to delegate to, and manage a group of techies because they understand the complexities of a problem statement and not just because the can just delegate and manage, which BTW is also an necessary skill. Necessary, but not exclusive. So consider working in the trenches for some time before becoming a general. 2. Coding/programming for CS is not the end, it is the means. So all CS jobs (proper ones that is ) are not mainly programming jobs but mainly about something else, in which the programming languages are the tools. Let me explain -- my areas of expertise are OS internals, Hardware-software interfaces and network stacks. Programming is the tool I use to control and extract a specific functionality from a device. So, I personally feel that you are reluctant to code, it would be difficult for you to learn CS. 3. You could however go into sysadmin, network admin or DBA jobs which do not require any coding. Those jobs however are not core computer science jobs. They however do pay well. 4. The best option for you would be to go for an MBA I think. As I read on a T-shirt recently "MBA -- when your BS wont get you any higher". I am presuming that the pun was intended.
It is my personal opinion that if Chumby tries to market the thingy as a consumer product, it just might fail completely. What this product seems to be good for would be a platform product which could be sold to other OEMs, who could then use it as a platform for the development of small and smart consumer appliances. The customers of Chumby therefore would save a bunch of time and money by having to do away with the basic product design and schematics and work on the value addition via the idea. The would however would have to package a powerful development environment with their product. If they wanted to just sell a Chumby as a standalone product I do not think that it would fit in anywhere. Neither is an internet tablet and neither is it a phone. It is not mobile. I really do not see the use for this thing as a standalone consumer product..
Slashdot Mirror
Terrible article. Complete waste of time.
A rather inaccurate and useless comment. Android phones do not require any tinkering. IOS and Android are 2 separate mobile operating systems which in all honesty do the same thing. Most useful apps have IOS and Android versions. The thing is that they do not both have separate place, they are in direct competition. Differences:
1. Android seamlessly integrates with google's services and Iphone with mobile me. This over time has become a slight problem for Apple. It just does not have the portfolio of services that google has. The maps application on IOS is frankly rather dated now. Google voice , an incredibly powerful service has very recently made a re-appearance in the App store. After the initial google-voice spat, google has been very choosy with the native apps it wants to make for IOS. If you have a digital life integrated with google's services, Android serves you better. If you are a mobile me user, IOS is a better choice.
2. When you buy an Iphone you have an uniform user experience. The hardware / software combo is tightly controlled by Apple and the whole process of upgrades and an unified user experience is fantastic. When you use an iphone, you are guaranteed to get all the right updates at the right time and you phone will ALWAYS get the latest supported version of the software. Google royally sucks at this. Buying an android phone is risky business. You could go for the android name and end up with a phone which royally sucks. I have had that experience. The hardware may be sluggish, the manufacturer nursing delusions of grandeur will try and skin the base android distribution with some puerile touch flo interface ( HTC, you are a bunch of morons ) which end up making the phone fugly and slow. Also, most manufacturers do not give a flying fuck about upgrading the versions of android after they have sold the unit to the hapless customer.
3. The rate at which Android innovates is awesome. In a year they have gone from a wannabe IOS to a better and more modern mobile OS. IOS is getting slightly dated now. Facetime (on wifi) and printing are not features that really push the envelope. The good thing however is that when Apple comes up with a new feature, you will get it. With an Android phone, you would most probably never ever get the official update with the new features. You would have to buy a new phone for it.
Nope. Not enough. They will be arrested and then forced to watch M. Night Shyamalan's movies.
I really do not see this as a big leap apart from the fact there is no physical mouse. In fact it would be more complicated to execute specific motions to get something done. I still move my hand away from the keyboard and then wave my hands in the air to get something done.
Dear Microsoft,
Today you sit and rue the face that you have lost the developer base and to
feel better about it, you label them as 'young and hip'. Here is some news:
Very few developers actually enjoy writing for windows. People have been
writing code on microsoft platforms since there are a huge number of people
who use microsoft products and ignoring the windows platform amounts to
ignoring a huge customer base which the developer could not afford to do.
We, as developers never really enjoyed developing for windows -- it is just
that we did not have a choice.
Today however, the scene has been changing.
1. A large number of GUI-based applications have moved into the browser.
2. Windows servers are not really used in large technology companies
They still are a dominant force in small to medium company's IT
infrastructures. That is all exchange and sharepoint. Any sane startup will
not consider windows to host their servers.
3. Developers now are used to and are aware of desktop platforms which
work well and also are very good programming platforms. Macs have a robust
BSD backbone and Linux is well, Linux. So everybody now have platforms
on which they can hack code and also play their movies.
4. Java provides for a development environment which can make pretty windows
without having to use developer studio.
So you have a scenario where where Microsoft is not the only viable
desktop/laptop OS. Also, it is a terrible programming environment. So any
self-respecting developer will not run windows on his personal machine and
as a result will want to push it out of his workplace too. The process
started a long time back. You guys are feeling it now.
So we come to the next question: Why do we hate writing code for windows ?
I will not cite the BSOD. The "windows crashes" and "windows is not stable"
are old arguments.
Windows is much much more stable than it used to be. In all honesty it has
been ages since I last saw a BSOD. We hate writing code for the windows
platform is because it sucks as a development platform.
1. The design is not based on any implementation of UNIX. That makes any CS
student uncomfortable. I am not saying that that the developer is
uncomfortable because windows has a bad programming interface (which btw it
is ). I am saying that it makes him uncomfortable because he cannot
recognize patterns he used to learn his computer science. He cannot refer to
the kernel source when he runs into a thorny problem, he cannot go online to
get a real educated answer to his problems. It is unfamiliar and since he is
not used to the paradigm. The developer finds it inelegant.
2. The second point is that it IS a bad programming interface. Till very
recently did not have a scripting interface worth its salt, has an extremely
convoluted device driver infrastructure and has that terrible thing called
the registry.
3. The development environment is not free as in beer and as in speech. It
is a closed heavily controlled environment in which the developer has no say
and is an interface which changes very frequently. You can get away with
changing rapidly and being open ( which linux does ) but you cannot get away
by being closed and also changing every 2 years. It drives the developer
mad.
4. Emacs and Vim do not integrate well with visual studio :)
Yet another comment without any prior knowledge. I just remembered why I stopped reading slashdot.
Finally reaches the human brain...
I would really prefer Dell to ship the standard xfce or gnome interface for their machines, rather than trying something 'cute' like HP. A pretty layer would entail developing a whole new layer over the existing UI. This layer, inevitably would have bugs and irritating traits because of one simple reason -- It takes a lot of time and talent to create a good user interface/desktop environment. I would think that HP has slapped on a pretty but buggy and quickly developed layer over gnome to make it look cool, which ultimately will go on to frustrate the user. Then, Linux would be blamed and not that cruddy attempt at coolness.
Keeping up with the microsoft tradition novell unleashes a much touted piece of software which really does not work. Typically inept.
Firefox 3.0.6 32 bit Intrepid
Randomly tried some different stuff from the microsoft showcase http://silverlight.net/Showcase/:
Lasercopter: Cannot work with 1.0 compiled for 2.0
autocosmos tv: Does not even detect the plugin
Meshviewer: Does not detect the plugin
Lorenzo Reca: Does not detect the plugin
Manic Miner: Does not detect the plugin
My teeth start gnashing and give up
I think that the honeymoon is finally over. Google too, will now slowly leave behind the free lunch culture to the inevitable areas of concern --> bottom line and market valuation. The question remains as to whether it will be able to continue with the innovative and creative work culture despite financial concerns.
{Free,Net}BSD has linux binary compatibility I think. A linux port should be running on them. Opera flies that way I think.
Jungle disk frontend for s3. Easy, pay as you go and redundancy and multiple backups are taken care of by s3
This dom0 was rather important for me. I am still running FC8 for that reason. I guess xen virtualization is slowly disappearing. Kvm I presume will be the way to go eventually...
About a year back voice connectivity and edge data cost about 350 INR a month. At present exchange rates it is 8 USD a month. Significantly lower. However one must remember that real-estate and labour costs are much lower in India.
I have been living in the US for less than a year now. I have been working for more than ten years. This is the first time that I have been living in the US. Here is what I think of the whole matter.
1. The H1B program, in spirit is a wonderful, clever thing. I have lived and worked in Europe, Japan and India. I love to travel and take in new experiences. Thanks to the H1 program, it allows for me to actually live and work here. In all honesty, it has been a great experience.
2. The H1B program allows for _american_ companies to actually fill in a labour gap as and when required.
3. Does the H1B program get abused as the article states ? Absolutely. I have seen it happen myself. There are huge number of shell companies ( called consultants ) out there who are absolutely flooding the H1B channels with applications for requirements which do not exist. The article is spot-on with its observations. The biggest victim of this whole thing however is the H1B program. Due to this channel-stuffing, legitimate american companies cannot actually recruit an employee when it is _really_ required since the quota has already been filled by fraudulent/redundant applications. These redundant and fraudulent applications really really need to be stopped for the H1B program to actually deliver what it actually set out to deliver.
4. There is a lot of talk about salaries and cost, and this is what I think. The H1B program is a cleverly crafted law in some ways. The H1 application belongs to the employee and and not the employer. The employee is free to change his employers as and when he or she wants to. If an employee thinks that he is being paid less than the market value, he or she is free to seek out an employer who will pay him as much as he or she deserves. The free market will, at the end of the day take care of it. Also if there is a company which pays its employees based on his legal status and not his skills and ability, please do not consider working for it, whatever might be your legal status.
5. In my professional career, I have worked with some of the biggest bozos and some of the most exquisitely talented engineers. Race or geographical location had absolutely nothing to do with their abilities. There are smart people and idiots everywhere. Supposing that a H1B worker to be inferior in terms of ability, is not a very clever viewpoint.
Introduction To Algorithms -- Cormen
Unix Internals : The New Frontiers -- Uresh Vahalia
Programming Pearls: John Bentley
The STL reference . Please keep this page open when you are writing your C++....
Bit Torrent Scenario -> 1. File 86 % complete and no other seeders. Stuck for 5 days ! Dang !
Wuala Scenario -> 1. Stored Large File.
2. Want to download file.
3. File 86 % complete and no other seeders. Stuck for 5 days ! Dang !
Possible ?
Bad observation. Hackneyed observation. Disease and violence are symptoms. They are not the cause. The underlying cause is an underdevloped, impoverished economy and the lack of human-resource. Treat the causes by developing the economy and educating the people. Treating the symptoms never help. Although broadband access is not the silver bullet, but it is the the variety of change that would be desired.
It is for the 3G wireless networks. The capacity of a network is calculated on a probabilistic model where a bunch of users communicate in intermittent quanta of downloads and uploads. So the bandwidth is provisioned, ( especially in a wireless network ) in such a way that you have the promised amount of bandwidth in spike. There is only that much you can put in a single wireless burst. A P2P application in sharp contradistinction, will generate a stream of steady and large volume of traffic in both directions, for as long as it is running. This will lock up a bunch of slots on a burst, starving other user terminals in the vicinity. The problem with torrents I think is not the amount of data transferred, but the pattern in which it is used. The attempt I think is to provide an uniform user experience for all.
It is understandable from a provisioning point of view, but let us see how it works out in the market.
1. Management is not an exclusive skill. Good tech managers are those people who have worked/coded in the trenches and understand the nitty-gritties of the development cycle. The are able to delegate to, and manage a group of techies because they understand the complexities of a problem statement and not just because the can just delegate and manage, which BTW is also an necessary skill. Necessary, but not exclusive. So consider working in the trenches for some time before becoming a general.
2. Coding/programming for CS is not the end, it is the means. So all CS jobs (proper ones that is ) are not mainly programming jobs but mainly about something else, in which the programming languages are the tools. Let me explain -- my areas of expertise are OS internals, Hardware-software interfaces and network stacks. Programming is the tool I use to control and extract a specific functionality from a device. So, I personally feel that you are reluctant to code, it would be difficult for you to learn CS.
3. You could however go into sysadmin, network admin or DBA jobs which do not require any coding. Those jobs however are not core computer science jobs. They however do pay well.
4. The best option for you would be to go for an MBA I think. As I read on a T-shirt recently "MBA -- when your BS wont get you any higher". I am presuming that the pun was intended.
Please note that I used the word "succeeded". Whether Bush and Paris Hilton are successful individuals is a debatable point.
Absolutely. I totally agree with you. But all people who have succeeded, have risked.
The fact that he is doing it although it is risky, is probably the reason he has the billion dollars in the first place.
It is my personal opinion that if Chumby tries to market the thingy as a consumer product, it just might fail completely. What this product seems to be good for would be a platform product which could be sold to other OEMs, who could then use it as a platform for the development of small and smart consumer appliances. The customers of Chumby therefore would save a bunch of time and money by having to do away with the basic product design and schematics and work on the value addition via the idea. The would however would have to package a powerful development environment with their product.
If they wanted to just sell a Chumby as a standalone product I do not think that it would fit in anywhere. Neither is an internet tablet and neither is it a phone. It is not mobile. I really do not see the use for this thing as a standalone consumer product..