I think it would be far cheaper and more effective for Apple to "contract" their map data (and services?) from Nokia than to buy Nokia outright. I could see Nokia liking such a "buy" for the cash-flow it would bring them while they try to figure out how to survive the lambasting they've been getting for their Windows 8 phone series.
I'm sure Apple would like to acquire Nokia's patents, but buying the whole company to get them when they could lease the map data would be crazy, not to mention it would be rife with anti-trust issues around the world.
PETA seems to protest everything except actual animal abuse. Their record for their owned animal shelters in the US isn't any better than other groups. In fact, they apparently terminate more animals than the "average" shelter does, rather than see the animals "abused" by new owners.
What I can't understand is why they get any press. Or is the press just because they seem to have more nubile young women in their protests than most organizations, making for good eye candy backgrounds while their representatives speak during interviews?
Sometimes documentation is difficult to write because the concepts explored by the software are difficult to explain in terms other than rewriting the code as English algorithm descriptions, which aren't particularly helpful.
My documentation for MSS Code Factory is such a case. I've provided high-level documentation of the GEL syntax and underlying object hierarchies, but to actually apply that knowledge you need to get your hands dirty and play with the tool. There is no concise way to explain how to use it, but there are thousands of lines of examples showing you what to do to make it go.
The basic input itself (the XML Business Application Model format) is particularly terse on the documentation, because it's intended for use by someone who'd want to integrate the tool with an existing design or UML GUI, or who's willing to write raw XML. It's not a "pretty" tool with a GUI interface, and the lack of a GUI puts a lot of people off.
But the goal of the system never was to write a GUI. It was to provide a back end code manufacturing tool that could be integrated to existing projects that already tackle the work of a GUI. Maybe some day I'll have time to work on a GUI, but if anyone is waiting for that to happen, they may as well give up on my tool because that won't be happening for a year or few.
I've worked for a few companies that talked the talk about profit sharing, but after the upper management and shareholders took "their share", the so-called "share" for employees worked out to less than a day's work. The staff would have been happier to be paid overtime for night support, paid a rate for pager/cell duty, and so on.
"Cake Day"? Give me a break! Even in France they had a revolution when the queen said "Let them eat cake." Taking a break and eating some cake is nice, but it is not an incentive to work harder when the break is over.
Ditto massages. Look, I love a good massage -- but I follow it up with a nap after I'm all nice and relaxed. The last thing I'd want to do after a good massage is go back to hunching over the computer in my chair.
Make sure your employees are properly paid. Reward good productivity with more money -- at least annually. Warn those who aren't being productive that their performance raise is at risk early so they have time to correct the bad behaviour.
Minimize the paperwork. Techs hate paperwork, without exception. People who like paperwork are rarely skilled developers.
Flex hours are critical for happy employees. People like myself who suffer migraines can't work a fixed schedule, and "flex time" does not mean "You can work 8-4 or 9-5, your choice." It means real flexibility to deal with life's issues and work in the evening or on weekends sometimes. Flex time means you may be getting a call from me at 08h30 to let you know I can't come in this morning, not that I'll be in an hour late.
What I like about Avast is it's boot-time scan option. That's been able to clean out some viruses on friend's machines that couldn't be cleaned out by other tools I tried.
You can give anyone a brush and a palette, and they can throw colour on canvas.
Does this make them an artist?
The same applies to programming. Anyone can pick up a book and sling a bit of code, but that's a far cry from being good at grasping and designing complex distributed systems.
Still, until programming tasks are automated, we need a lot of those paint throwers to produce the grunt code. Unfortunately for the North American programming market, that learning environment has moved to offshore cheap contracting sites, which means our local talent isn't getting the exposure to how the internals of frameworks are coded that they used to.
In the long run, that's going to hurt the senior programming market because there will be a shortage of people who've learned through experience rather than by Google and textbook.
Doesn't entanglement also imply faster-than-light communications between the two quantum nodes? Or does the speed of light still apply to the entangled systems?
If the former, this would eliminate the lag for satellite communications, which would be a major breakthrough in global communications, even if the satellites could only link up to a few ground stations because of the limited number of entangled "transmitters" per satellite.
I can see McAfee's software interfering with one's ability to save or print a photo that has a watermark it recognizes as a "do not copy" code, but I completely fail to see how it could impact my browser on a Linux box if I don't have their software installed.
Lord knows there is no shortage of sites that would have implemented such technology to stop my browser from doing a right-menu-save-as on pictures years ago if such a thing were possible.
When you look at a tablet, it's a relatively small image at a fair distance, so a screen display that is zipping and popping just looks animated, and maybe even nice (Gnome 3.) When you have a close up monitor on a desktop, that zipping is dizzying and disconcerting. A more stable UI is needed that isn't quite so animated.
Gnome 3 gave me a headache to use because of the excess animation and screen flipping going on. (A migraine, literally.)
Some key design point differences between tablet and keyboard-mouse UIs:
The tablet user cannot right-click a menu very easily, if at all.
Tablet users need big friendly easy-to-press buttons. Those same big buttons mean much more mouse travel for a KM user, which is a conflict.
If you only have one button to make the default upper-right button, you should have control over what that default is going to be (i.e. minimize vs. close -- there's no way I can think of to minimize a window with Gnome 3 when using a tablet, because of the right-mouse issue.)
No kidding. The Gnome 2 base is perfectly usable. What does Gnome 3 bring to the table except a bunch of tablet-oriented design decisions? They should have just made the thing a fork and called it "Gnome Tablet Edition", not tried to usurp the keyboard-mouse user base.
Microsoft is making the same mistake right now.
The tablet UI may be part of the future, but it is not the future, and the tablet metaphor simply does not map well to a keyboard-mouse combo. But it's going to take a widespread customer/user revolt before these "design" bozos realize there's more than one user metaphor market to be served, and that each metaphor is best served by it's own targetted UI.
Isn't it about time that the patent trolls, legitimite patent holders, and the whole litigation industry built up around them were pimp-slapped into realizing that patents are not business models.
I spent my first few months coding BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I, Level I at the local store, then realized it was too slow. So I bought the assembly language book, used graph paper to map out memory, and poked it all in. Who could afford an assembler in those days?
The problems and challenges I solved in those days were ever so much simpler than the big enterprise scale issues I deal with today. But I have to admit -- I'm a little more productive with modern tools than I was back then.:D
Unfortunately, Charlie Sheen has enough money to pay to promote every single one of his posts to the entireity of Facebook. With a pay-for-views option, Charlie could soon top George Takei as most viewed celebrity...:P
As far as I know, OpenGL was available for Windows as well. There never was a reason for people to use the DX stack, save that the DX stack was available for the XBox and therefore if you wanted to sell to the platform market as well you were going to have to do a DX implementation no matter what.
Personally I've never coded a line of DX in my life. Why would I want to use a vendor-specific toolkit when the performance differences were never significant enough to justify making such a switch?
The goal of GNU and the FSF was never to lock out commercial providers, but to provide a free core system. Nothing is being broken, stolen, taken away, or rescinded.
The whole article is nothing but pseudo-pedantic flame bait.
Power users want tools that are tailored to the job at hand. Hence the plethora of languages and desktop managers available for Linux, no one of which has ever been so dramatically superior as to even begin to threaten total dominance.
But to the average user, simplicity comes from predictability. If they can do what they want everywhere with one set of gestures and actions, they'll leap on that consistency in a heartbeat.
The fact that tablet/gesture and keyboard/mouse user interfaces are driven by dramatically different technologies and limitations is irrelevant to the user. They want it the same, even though they'd realize that's a fundamentally flawed idea if they took the time to think about it.
Because at the heart of it, the "average" user doesn't want to think about their computer use at all! They just want it to work, which to them means "the same way."
To be honest, I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with Unity, Gnome 3, or Metro. I don't like them for my own needs, but they are better able to deal with tablet/touchscreen interfaces. Like it or not, the vast majority of new devices connecting to the internet are now such portable devices, not new desktop PCs of any brand.
It won't be long before the keyboard/mouse driven PC is the minority in the overall web community, if it isn't already.
But the *AA industries have never been willing to pay for enforcement. For as long as I've heard them whining and bitching in my life, part of their whine and bitch routine was to justify why someone else should pay the costs of enforcement.
They are, without a doubt, the single most "self entitled" group I have ever encountered. Even the religious organizations which beg their parishioners for money don't claim the money is owed to them like these trough-suckers do.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would be far cheaper and more effective for Apple to "contract" their map data (and services?) from Nokia than to buy Nokia outright. I could see Nokia liking such a "buy" for the cash-flow it would bring them while they try to figure out how to survive the lambasting they've been getting for their Windows 8 phone series.
I'm sure Apple would like to acquire Nokia's patents, but buying the whole company to get them when they could lease the map data would be crazy, not to mention it would be rife with anti-trust issues around the world.
PETA seems to protest everything except actual animal abuse. Their record for their owned animal shelters in the US isn't any better than other groups. In fact, they apparently terminate more animals than the "average" shelter does, rather than see the animals "abused" by new owners.
What I can't understand is why they get any press. Or is the press just because they seem to have more nubile young women in their protests than most organizations, making for good eye candy backgrounds while their representatives speak during interviews?
Just a warning based on experience and the documentation of several PBX solutions I investigated while working with such software:
PBX software will not run properly in a VM. PBXs need uninterrupted access to the CPU, or the calls get "choppy".
Sometimes documentation is difficult to write because the concepts explored by the software are difficult to explain in terms other than rewriting the code as English algorithm descriptions, which aren't particularly helpful.
My documentation for MSS Code Factory is such a case. I've provided high-level documentation of the GEL syntax and underlying object hierarchies, but to actually apply that knowledge you need to get your hands dirty and play with the tool. There is no concise way to explain how to use it, but there are thousands of lines of examples showing you what to do to make it go.
The basic input itself (the XML Business Application Model format) is particularly terse on the documentation, because it's intended for use by someone who'd want to integrate the tool with an existing design or UML GUI, or who's willing to write raw XML. It's not a "pretty" tool with a GUI interface, and the lack of a GUI puts a lot of people off.
But the goal of the system never was to write a GUI. It was to provide a back end code manufacturing tool that could be integrated to existing projects that already tackle the work of a GUI. Maybe some day I'll have time to work on a GUI, but if anyone is waiting for that to happen, they may as well give up on my tool because that won't be happening for a year or few.
I've worked for a few companies that talked the talk about profit sharing, but after the upper management and shareholders took "their share", the so-called "share" for employees worked out to less than a day's work. The staff would have been happier to be paid overtime for night support, paid a rate for pager/cell duty, and so on.
"Cake Day"? Give me a break! Even in France they had a revolution when the queen said "Let them eat cake." Taking a break and eating some cake is nice, but it is not an incentive to work harder when the break is over.
Ditto massages. Look, I love a good massage -- but I follow it up with a nap after I'm all nice and relaxed. The last thing I'd want to do after a good massage is go back to hunching over the computer in my chair.
Make sure your employees are properly paid. Reward good productivity with more money -- at least annually. Warn those who aren't being productive that their performance raise is at risk early so they have time to correct the bad behaviour.
Minimize the paperwork. Techs hate paperwork, without exception. People who like paperwork are rarely skilled developers.
Flex hours are critical for happy employees. People like myself who suffer migraines can't work a fixed schedule, and "flex time" does not mean "You can work 8-4 or 9-5, your choice." It means real flexibility to deal with life's issues and work in the evening or on weekends sometimes. Flex time means you may be getting a call from me at 08h30 to let you know I can't come in this morning, not that I'll be in an hour late.
When I see an ad on TV or hear one on radio, or even read one in print media, the advertiser has no idea who I am.
You do not need to TRACK someone to display ads. Do Not Track does not mean Do Not Advertise.
So if you have a new and potentially disruptive technology, you shouldn't be allowed to go into business because you'll hurt the existing providers?
Tough shit! That's something called "progress" and "innovation."
Suck it up, cupcake -- you're a dinosaur!
What I like about Avast is it's boot-time scan option. That's been able to clean out some viruses on friend's machines that couldn't be cleaned out by other tools I tried.
If we can't be #1, we're going to take our ball and go home...
You can give anyone a brush and a palette, and they can throw colour on canvas.
Does this make them an artist?
The same applies to programming. Anyone can pick up a book and sling a bit of code, but that's a far cry from being good at grasping and designing complex distributed systems.
Still, until programming tasks are automated, we need a lot of those paint throwers to produce the grunt code. Unfortunately for the North American programming market, that learning environment has moved to offshore cheap contracting sites, which means our local talent isn't getting the exposure to how the internals of frameworks are coded that they used to.
In the long run, that's going to hurt the senior programming market because there will be a shortage of people who've learned through experience rather than by Google and textbook.
Doesn't entanglement also imply faster-than-light communications between the two quantum nodes? Or does the speed of light still apply to the entangled systems?
If the former, this would eliminate the lag for satellite communications, which would be a major breakthrough in global communications, even if the satellites could only link up to a few ground stations because of the limited number of entangled "transmitters" per satellite.
I can see McAfee's software interfering with one's ability to save or print a photo that has a watermark it recognizes as a "do not copy" code, but I completely fail to see how it could impact my browser on a Linux box if I don't have their software installed.
Lord knows there is no shortage of sites that would have implemented such technology to stop my browser from doing a right-menu-save-as on pictures years ago if such a thing were possible.
I blame Unity and Gnome 3 for the death of the Linux desktop.
Both are hell bent on burying the keyboard and mouse in favour of the touchscreen tablet.
The "under 30 seconds part" is not as easy as you think.
You're mounting new drives -- that means Linux will probably want to fsck them, which with such volume, is going to take way more than 30 seconds.
Despite their detractors and legal issues, it would seem that Apple is laughing all the way to the bank for both revenue and stock value.
Say what you will, the "walled garden" would seem to be quite acceptable to a significant percentage of the population.
When you look at a tablet, it's a relatively small image at a fair distance, so a screen display that is zipping and popping just looks animated, and maybe even nice (Gnome 3.) When you have a close up monitor on a desktop, that zipping is dizzying and disconcerting. A more stable UI is needed that isn't quite so animated.
Gnome 3 gave me a headache to use because of the excess animation and screen flipping going on. (A migraine, literally.)
Some key design point differences between tablet and keyboard-mouse UIs:
No kidding. The Gnome 2 base is perfectly usable. What does Gnome 3 bring to the table except a bunch of tablet-oriented design decisions? They should have just made the thing a fork and called it "Gnome Tablet Edition", not tried to usurp the keyboard-mouse user base.
Microsoft is making the same mistake right now.
The tablet UI may be part of the future, but it is not the future, and the tablet metaphor simply does not map well to a keyboard-mouse combo. But it's going to take a widespread customer/user revolt before these "design" bozos realize there's more than one user metaphor market to be served, and that each metaphor is best served by it's own targetted UI.
Isn't it about time that the patent trolls, legitimite patent holders, and the whole litigation industry built up around them were pimp-slapped into realizing that patents are not business models.
I spent my first few months coding BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I, Level I at the local store, then realized it was too slow. So I bought the assembly language book, used graph paper to map out memory, and poked it all in. Who could afford an assembler in those days?
The problems and challenges I solved in those days were ever so much simpler than the big enterprise scale issues I deal with today. But I have to admit -- I'm a little more productive with modern tools than I was back then. :D
Unfortunately, Charlie Sheen has enough money to pay to promote every single one of his posts to the entireity of Facebook. With a pay-for-views option, Charlie could soon top George Takei as most viewed celebrity... :P
As far as I know, OpenGL was available for Windows as well. There never was a reason for people to use the DX stack, save that the DX stack was available for the XBox and therefore if you wanted to sell to the platform market as well you were going to have to do a DX implementation no matter what.
Personally I've never coded a line of DX in my life. Why would I want to use a vendor-specific toolkit when the performance differences were never significant enough to justify making such a switch?
The goal of GNU and the FSF was never to lock out commercial providers, but to provide a free core system. Nothing is being broken, stolen, taken away, or rescinded.
The whole article is nothing but pseudo-pedantic flame bait.
Power users want tools that are tailored to the job at hand. Hence the plethora of languages and desktop managers available for Linux, no one of which has ever been so dramatically superior as to even begin to threaten total dominance.
But to the average user, simplicity comes from predictability. If they can do what they want everywhere with one set of gestures and actions, they'll leap on that consistency in a heartbeat.
The fact that tablet/gesture and keyboard/mouse user interfaces are driven by dramatically different technologies and limitations is irrelevant to the user. They want it the same, even though they'd realize that's a fundamentally flawed idea if they took the time to think about it.
Because at the heart of it, the "average" user doesn't want to think about their computer use at all! They just want it to work, which to them means "the same way."
To be honest, I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with Unity, Gnome 3, or Metro. I don't like them for my own needs, but they are better able to deal with tablet/touchscreen interfaces. Like it or not, the vast majority of new devices connecting to the internet are now such portable devices, not new desktop PCs of any brand.
It won't be long before the keyboard/mouse driven PC is the minority in the overall web community, if it isn't already.
But the *AA industries have never been willing to pay for enforcement. For as long as I've heard them whining and bitching in my life, part of their whine and bitch routine was to justify why someone else should pay the costs of enforcement.
They are, without a doubt, the single most "self entitled" group I have ever encountered. Even the religious organizations which beg their parishioners for money don't claim the money is owed to them like these trough-suckers do.