I'd assume that the Symbian bit which becomes part of Nokia will continue to do this. Whether the licensee does this or not has always been a little vague i.e. Symbian would recommend this as 'the way to do things' whether that advice is taken is a different matter.
Yep, but it hasn't manifested itself in a product as of yet. Semicos have plans and there is an NEC test chip to start work on (Linux runs SMP on this already of course)
Sadly I think the Series 5 design belongs to Psion and is loaded with patents Don't expect David Potter (Chairman of Psion) to not ask for a large amount of cash up front rather than taking a per unit bit of cash.
1. Symbian OS is shipped in a whole bunch of phones and this move will ensure that current development projects based on the OS are more likely to continue because it became a whole lot cheaper to make a Symbian phone. $4 per unit doesn't sound like a lot but that is a huge margin for a phone manufacturer.
2. The licensing issues for Symbian OS and various UI components will become vastly easier to resolve and make it easier to start a phone project. Symbian OS is currently a web of various source categorizations depending on your partner status level (developer/device creator/semi conductor partner), that doesn't even consider the semi-co base port components, multimedia infrastructure/codecs and the UI (Series 60, UIQ etc).
The UI for Symbian products contains an extremely large amount of functionality you would expect in the base OS.
In the end it's a damn sight easier to do business with tech companies on an open source basis.
3. It raises interesting questions about whether there will be continued investment in Symbian oriented technologies. One technology question area that stands out is the kernel. The current Symbian OS kernel (called EKA2 by the way) is microkernel design optimised for the various ARM architectures with low latency features and a small memory footprint.
Application processors for mobile processors are starting to look towards SMP designs in order to increase performance without incurring large power consumption penalties. The Symbian kernel and OS design doesn't currently support SMP, so it is possible that the Linux kernel is the direction to go in - obsoleting the EKA2 kernel at some point in the future for high end mobile devices.
However it is probably worth pointing out that whilst the Linux kernel works well for SMP systems for scalable performance whether it does this AND manages to be good for power saving/consumption is possibly less proven.
4. There are questions over how open is this environment? If a $1500 dollar license is required to get the source, is this open? Doesn't quite sound like it.
5. How will this open source environment operate? There appear to be problems with open source projects which involve a dominant partner. IBM - Eclipse, Sun - Java,OpenOffice,MySQL are notable examples.
Being open source is good for doing business but there are many practicalities to work out which make a technology good or bad open source.
I don't think it upsets the 'whole' community. It's obviously bound to upset the say-alot/contribute-nothing crowd and Stallmanites.
Sure, perhaps it's not the best idea to raise issues which aren't popular with a certain body of people.
In the real world we have plenty of products which incorporate open source technologies and DRM. DRM will die for a lot better reasons than not being open source friendly.
I don't think you should link pro or anti DRM measures implicitly to 'open-source'ness' as in GPLv3 (see Linus's concerns about this http://www.linux.com/articles/51826)
They compare IM users opinions with non-IM users on how often they get interrupted on a work task. 29% or so people use IM and it turns out they think they think they don't get interrupted as much compared to the non-IM'ers.
IM is ok, but unfortunately I also associate it with a lot of non-work related activity when I see some other people using it.
Although some of the comments here have been fairly tasteless (what do you expect on the Internet) I think it is fair time to reflect on an author's works.
Obviously and unsurprisingly the Wheel of Time series dominates our impression of Mr Jordan. I'll start with saying that stand alone the first book is one of the best fantasy fiction books out there as far as I am concerned. I found the style and story imaginative and compelling, which is difficult to do in a heavily cliched genre.
However, like many others I went along for the ride with the rest of the series up until a point where I became frustrated with the author and I personally gave up at about book 9 though I had effectively given up on the series a couple of books before that.
I don't really know what Jordan's rationale for the length of this series was, I'm not a fanboy and don't follow any of the WoT forums for any insight into this, maybe I will do one day. I generally assume that he felt he had a story to tell and as far as he was concerned if it took many books to tell it - he would do so.
The lessons of the 'Wheel of time' series are that you need to bring all your readers with you, and that the value of literature isn't in the weight of paper. Readers are frankly puzzled that after 4 to 5 thousand pages why Jordan left his main characters in stasis whilst opening up new plots and new characters in the later books. The publisher and editors have a responsibility to help authors in this regard even if it causes tension. I'm left wondering if Jordan had a more focussed approach he would have been the top fantasy writer of his generation, but now I suspect he will be remembered as a curiousity.
Jayesh V. Rane works as a Systems Software Engineer for IBM and has five years of experience in product development, mostly working on network programming and storage management software. He has worked extensively on FreeBSD and AIX operating systems. Jayesh is currently working with the IBM India Systems and Technology Lab in Pune, India. You can contact him at jayesh.rane@in.ibm.com.
Unfortunately Jayesh doesn't understand that compiling your kernel with -g will in fact affect the systems performance and is currently looking for a job where he can pretend to be a kernel engineer. Contact Jayesh at jayesh.rane@aol.com
Rubbish. If you think communication is so effective via phone & email, how come firms spend millions on corporate travel for their employees to visit each other?
Take three teams:
Team 1 are based in the same location, same office, they know each other face to face and know each other well. Discussions can take place face to face, every so often on the phone when one is out of the office or in email or in tha group database.
Team 2 are in the same office but they are distributed around the building, they have occasion face to face contact, meetings will be arranged so everyone can sync up, the phone and email are often used.
Team 3 are distributed around the world, they my never have actually met face to face. Some of the team members have a average command of the primary language in either written or verbal form. Communication is mostly via email, because of the time zone difference.
Which team will win?
For all the hand wringing 'good teamwork' stuff, most people would bet on Team 1. Whether you like it or not, communication over timezones is very expensive. Any business process designer would be able to tell you that.
Disagree with your first point, if you're working for a national firm and there is that much disaparity in the same company and same nation, that engineer in Omaha is being ripped off. Sure, there are weightings for locations but there often not that great.
Also the local job is also the job that the company was going to create, but chooses to create elsewhere.
We work in an industry where the competition for the best is extremely high, sure locality (for salary) comes into it, however whatever your location you the company can 'easily' choose to pay an equivalent wage - because their contribution should be equal right?. In fact that might be a sign you're working for the right firm, those firms looking for commoditised skills are probably the ones who don't value them.
Depends what industry you're in. Manufacturing - well of course. Where you need to communicate over the time zone e.g. s/w development - in my experience it's a myth, and highly dependent on the quality of the people communicating. I haven't seen any good documented evidence of any efficiency improvements. In fact I've heard that it actually can decrease the net efficiency of your local team 40%.
It's even worse for US -> India than it is for UK->India, at least our timezones cross over a bit. I've seen simple questions been ping ponged across time zones for days, which would have been resolved locally in 5 minutes.
"Result: Projects get finished in about half the time"
Yeah right.
How to tell whether you're outsourcing
on
Outsourcing Evolving
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Outsourcing is about commoditising jobs which a business doesn't believe are more a cost than a value to them, they move existing local jobs out so people who are paid less can do them. US firms have had R&D centres throughout the world for decades, was that called outsourcing? Or is that a term only used when the guy with the job in the other country has a different colour skin - the answer is no, it's about salaries.
The controversy about outsourcing comes when the two are mixed up. For example businesses cite that it easier to hire talented people remotely. You can easily argue, well of course it is! Whether there are talented people or not. if you delegate your hiring decisions to someone six thousand miles away, whose only job is to hire people, they'll hire them. If they're not that productive, very few people in big business will be honest enough to say they made a mistake investing millions into an off shore site.
Businesses can distinguish between outsourcing and talent hunting with salaries. There is no substantive reason why in the market of an international firm someone in India can't be paid roughly equivalent salaries as those back at base - if they do the same job. If it is about talent, this shouldn't be a problem right? If your senior well respected engineer in India is paid the salary of a US grad, 1 year out of college you're outsourcing.
How do think you are doing keeping long term players interested in the game whilst making it enjoyable and worthwhile for new (or short term) players. Isn't the problem here is that you have to proportionally repay the effort and time that players have put into the game, but at the same time you want to allow people progress without devoting their entire lives on WoW [or getting their backside continuously kicked by the more devoted(obsessive)]
Bonus question: What do you think/compare/dislike about StarWars Galaxies? I'd also be interested to know whether you think the combat upgrade for SWG was worthwhile or whether they should have rewritten the game from scratch i.e. SWGII. Any interesting lessons for WoW to learn from this?
Over the past two years or so, Tim Butler and I have discussed GNOME quite a bit. He likes the current trend, and I don't. Tim's article, "Why GNOME's Got It Right" was partly stirred by the Slashdot article but also by our discussion.
I'm just an aspiring writer. Most of my stuff will never see the light of day, outside a small circle of friends. When I write for that tiny, narrow audience, I often take a good bit of license and engage in hyperbole, dramatic overstatement, and loads of sarcasm. I keep asking when the folks at W3C are going to include an attribute for sarcasm, because most people won't detect it unless they know the writer. My blog entry about the birth of GoneME was full of noise, and bit of substance thrown in for good measure.
By no means am I any kind of coder. I am just barely able to write a brain-dead simple webpage manually. I learned that much because it's the easiest format for storing my archive. I don't use a word processor much at all because I know how to print with HTML and a printer style sheet. Beyond that, I have no real interest in code. I write about computer technology as a side-line, simply because I write everything on my computer. When I discovered Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), I found the best writing tools ever. I'm also by nature a teacher, and I try to teach what I learn about Linux and Unix. Most of what I know about Open Source is what I experience directly or skim from a few technology news websites.
What I have to say about GNOME comes from having used it. Starting with "October GNOME" up through 2.6.1, I've at least tried it out on both Linux and FreeBSD. The new GNOME is not aimed at folks like me. I have little use for it. That's no different than saying pure CLI is not for me. I can get by in both, and have quite a bit at times, but neither of them is home. If you see in that something that marks me as inferior, I'd say that was your personal problem. FOSS is largely about freedom to choose, finding or making what meets your needs. If you can't code it yourself, you are left using what comes closest to what you would if you could. Most humans will make such choices in part from pure logic, but seldom by that alone.
It doesn't matter what I prefer instead, since every other desktop and window manager is competition, in a sense. The point of all this noise is GNOME, and it's virtues and failures as measured by its usefulness to each user. The last time I really liked GNOME was 1.4. Since that time, the project has taken a different path. Never mind whether that path was right; there's little chance it will change. The new GNOME is what it the project leaders make it, for whatever reason. How sad for me. At first I tried to make a bit of noise about it, but that got nowhere. People working on the project itself who dissented were told in various ways to forget it. I have no way of knowing how many went along and how many have bailed. That's the way it works when "free" as in liberty is a primary objective. That same freedom allows the project leaders to ignore my wishes.
Who can say where the watershed was, but somewhere along the way the complaints built up to the point someone decided to do something about it. He started with a patch to allow him some options he felt were missing from the project. His patch was rejected from the mainstream of the project, so he decided he would take his own path. Since he knew there were plenty of coders and users who felt as he did, he published his idea and got noticed. In a week's time, he was swamped with email. Enough of it was positive that he went ahead and established a new project. Enough coders joined right away that it was agreed to make a complete fork from GNOME.
Nobody on the Goneme Project is interfering with GNOME. The project page lists planned modifications to the GNOME base. That so many seem to take this list as a personal assault is beyond silly. How fragile is GNOME's place in the Linux/Unix world? Does it need rabid defense to prevent its evaporation? Persona
When will GNOME be available as the default
desktop on Solaris? It didn't appear in the last Solaris 9 beta.
Also, the GPL licensing implications always intrigued
me. Without getting too heavily into GPL issues, I was surprised that one could distribute GPL software as a default component in a proprietary system.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd assume that the Symbian bit which becomes part of Nokia will continue to do this. Whether the licensee does this or not has always been a little vague i.e. Symbian would recommend this as 'the way to do things' whether that advice is taken is a different matter.
Yep, but it hasn't manifested itself in a product as of yet. Semicos have plans and there is an NEC test chip to start work on (Linux runs SMP on this already of course)
Thanks, that explains that
The way to do this is to get an Open Signed i.e. limited to particular devices.
http://developer.symbian.com/main/signed/
Alternatively I wouldn't be surprised a port turned up for something like:
http://beagleboard.org/
or some such future variant
Sadly I think the Series 5 design belongs to Psion and is loaded with patents Don't expect David Potter (Chairman of Psion) to not ask for a large amount of cash up front rather than taking a per unit bit of cash.
It is a very cool design though
1. Symbian OS is shipped in a whole bunch of phones and this move will ensure that current development projects based on the OS are more likely to continue because it became a whole lot cheaper to make a Symbian phone. $4 per unit doesn't sound like a lot but that is a huge margin for a phone manufacturer.
2. The licensing issues for Symbian OS and various UI components will become vastly easier to resolve and make it easier to start a phone project. Symbian OS is currently a web of various source categorizations depending on your partner status level (developer/device creator/semi conductor partner), that doesn't even consider the semi-co base port components, multimedia infrastructure/codecs and the UI (Series 60, UIQ etc).
The UI for Symbian products contains an extremely large amount of functionality you would expect in the base OS.
In the end it's a damn sight easier to do business with tech companies on an open source basis.
3. It raises interesting questions about whether there will be continued investment in Symbian oriented technologies. One technology question area that stands out is the kernel. The current Symbian OS kernel (called EKA2 by the way) is microkernel design optimised for the various ARM architectures with low latency features and a small memory footprint.
Application processors for mobile processors are starting to look towards SMP designs in order to increase performance without incurring large power consumption penalties. The Symbian kernel and OS design doesn't currently support SMP, so it is possible that the Linux kernel is the direction to go in - obsoleting the EKA2 kernel at some point in the future for high end mobile devices.
However it is probably worth pointing out that whilst the Linux kernel works well for SMP systems for scalable performance whether it does this AND manages to be good for power saving/consumption is possibly less proven.
4. There are questions over how open is this environment? If a $1500 dollar license is required to get the source, is this open? Doesn't quite sound like it.
5. How will this open source environment operate? There appear to be problems with open source projects which involve a dominant partner. IBM - Eclipse, Sun - Java,OpenOffice,MySQL are notable examples.
Being open source is good for doing business but there are many practicalities to work out which make a technology good or bad open source.
I don't think it upsets the 'whole' community. It's obviously bound to upset the say-alot/contribute-nothing crowd and Stallmanites.
Sure, perhaps it's not the best idea to raise issues which aren't popular with a certain body of people.
In the real world we have plenty of products which incorporate open source technologies and DRM. DRM will die for a lot better reasons than not being open source friendly.
They get Symbian OS for free (and Series 60 access too) plus they have thrown UIQ into the Symbian Foundation pot.
I don't think you should link pro or anti DRM measures implicitly to 'open-source'ness' as in GPLv3 (see Linus's concerns about this http://www.linux.com/articles/51826)
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/garrett.html
They compare IM users opinions with non-IM users on how often they get interrupted on a work task. 29% or so people use IM and it turns out they think they think they don't get interrupted as much compared to the non-IM'ers.
IM is ok, but unfortunately I also associate it with a lot of non-work related activity when I see some other people using it.
Although some of the comments here have been fairly tasteless (what do you expect on the Internet) I think it is fair time to reflect on an author's works.
Obviously and unsurprisingly the Wheel of Time series dominates our impression of Mr Jordan. I'll start with saying that stand alone the first book is one of the best fantasy fiction books out there as far as I am concerned. I found the style and story imaginative and compelling, which is difficult to do in a heavily cliched genre.
However, like many others I went along for the ride with the rest of the series up until a point where I became frustrated with the author and I personally gave up at about book 9 though I had effectively given up on the series a couple of books before that.
I don't really know what Jordan's rationale for the length of this series was, I'm not a fanboy and don't follow any of the WoT forums for any insight into this, maybe I will do one day. I generally assume that he felt he had a story to tell and as far as he was concerned if it took many books to tell it - he would do so.
The lessons of the 'Wheel of time' series are that you need to bring all your readers with you, and that the value of literature isn't in the weight of paper. Readers are frankly puzzled that after 4 to 5 thousand pages why Jordan left his main characters in stasis whilst opening up new plots and new characters in the later books. The publisher and editors have a responsibility to help authors in this regard even if it causes tension. I'm left wondering if Jordan had a more focussed approach he would have been the top fantasy writer of his generation, but now I suspect he will be remembered as a curiousity.
RIP Robert Jordan
Jayesh V. Rane works as a Systems Software Engineer for IBM and has five years of experience in product development, mostly working on network programming and storage management software. He has worked extensively on FreeBSD and AIX operating systems. Jayesh is currently working with the IBM India Systems and Technology Lab in Pune, India. You can contact him at jayesh.rane@in.ibm.com. Unfortunately Jayesh doesn't understand that compiling your kernel with -g will in fact affect the systems performance and is currently looking for a job where he can pretend to be a kernel engineer. Contact Jayesh at jayesh.rane@aol.com
Rubbish. If you think communication is so effective via phone & email, how come firms spend millions on corporate travel for their employees to visit each other?
Take three teams: Team 1 are based in the same location, same office, they know each other face to face and know each other well. Discussions can take place face to face, every so often on the phone when one is out of the office or in email or in tha group database. Team 2 are in the same office but they are distributed around the building, they have occasion face to face contact, meetings will be arranged so everyone can sync up, the phone and email are often used. Team 3 are distributed around the world, they my never have actually met face to face. Some of the team members have a average command of the primary language in either written or verbal form. Communication is mostly via email, because of the time zone difference. Which team will win? For all the hand wringing 'good teamwork' stuff, most people would bet on Team 1. Whether you like it or not, communication over timezones is very expensive. Any business process designer would be able to tell you that.
Disagree with your first point, if you're working for a national firm and there is that much disaparity in the same company and same nation, that engineer in Omaha is being ripped off. Sure, there are weightings for locations but there often not that great.
Also the local job is also the job that the company was going to create, but chooses to create elsewhere.
We work in an industry where the competition for the best is extremely high, sure locality (for salary) comes into it, however whatever your location you the company can 'easily' choose to pay an equivalent wage - because their contribution should be equal right?. In fact that might be a sign you're working for the right firm, those firms looking for commoditised skills are probably the ones who don't value them.
Depends what industry you're in. Manufacturing - well of course. Where you need to communicate over the time zone e.g. s/w development - in my experience it's a myth, and highly dependent on the quality of the people communicating. I haven't seen any good documented evidence of any efficiency improvements. In fact I've heard that it actually can decrease the net efficiency of your local team 40%.
It's even worse for US -> India than it is for UK->India, at least our timezones cross over a bit. I've seen simple questions been ping ponged across time zones for days, which would have been resolved locally in 5 minutes.
"Result: Projects get finished in about half the time"
Yeah right.
Outsourcing is about commoditising jobs which a business doesn't believe are more a cost than a value to them, they move existing local jobs out so people who are paid less can do them. US firms have had R&D centres throughout the world for decades, was that called outsourcing? Or is that a term only used when the guy with the job in the other country has a different colour skin - the answer is no, it's about salaries. The controversy about outsourcing comes when the two are mixed up. For example businesses cite that it easier to hire talented people remotely. You can easily argue, well of course it is! Whether there are talented people or not. if you delegate your hiring decisions to someone six thousand miles away, whose only job is to hire people, they'll hire them. If they're not that productive, very few people in big business will be honest enough to say they made a mistake investing millions into an off shore site. Businesses can distinguish between outsourcing and talent hunting with salaries. There is no substantive reason why in the market of an international firm someone in India can't be paid roughly equivalent salaries as those back at base - if they do the same job. If it is about talent, this shouldn't be a problem right? If your senior well respected engineer in India is paid the salary of a US grad, 1 year out of college you're outsourcing.
How do think you are doing keeping long term players interested in the game whilst making it enjoyable and worthwhile for new (or short term) players. Isn't the problem here is that you have to proportionally repay the effort and time that players have put into the game, but at the same time you want to allow people progress without devoting their entire lives on WoW [or getting their backside continuously kicked by the more devoted(obsessive)]
Bonus question: What do you think/compare/dislike about StarWars Galaxies? I'd also be interested to know whether you think the combat upgrade for SWG was worthwhile or whether they should have rewritten the game from scratch i.e. SWGII. Any interesting lessons for WoW to learn from this?
Over the past two years or so, Tim Butler and I have discussed GNOME quite a bit. He likes the current trend, and I don't. Tim's article, "Why GNOME's Got It Right" was partly stirred by the Slashdot article but also by our discussion.
I'm just an aspiring writer. Most of my stuff will never see the light of day, outside a small circle of friends. When I write for that tiny, narrow audience, I often take a good bit of license and engage in hyperbole, dramatic overstatement, and loads of sarcasm. I keep asking when the folks at W3C are going to include an attribute for sarcasm, because most people won't detect it unless they know the writer. My blog entry about the birth of GoneME was full of noise, and bit of substance thrown in for good measure.
By no means am I any kind of coder. I am just barely able to write a brain-dead simple webpage manually. I learned that much because it's the easiest format for storing my archive. I don't use a word processor much at all because I know how to print with HTML and a printer style sheet. Beyond that, I have no real interest in code. I write about computer technology as a side-line, simply because I write everything on my computer. When I discovered Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), I found the best writing tools ever. I'm also by nature a teacher, and I try to teach what I learn about Linux and Unix. Most of what I know about Open Source is what I experience directly or skim from a few technology news websites.
What I have to say about GNOME comes from having used it. Starting with "October GNOME" up through 2.6.1, I've at least tried it out on both Linux and FreeBSD. The new GNOME is not aimed at folks like me. I have little use for it. That's no different than saying pure CLI is not for me. I can get by in both, and have quite a bit at times, but neither of them is home. If you see in that something that marks me as inferior, I'd say that was your personal problem. FOSS is largely about freedom to choose, finding or making what meets your needs. If you can't code it yourself, you are left using what comes closest to what you would if you could. Most humans will make such choices in part from pure logic, but seldom by that alone.
It doesn't matter what I prefer instead, since every other desktop and window manager is competition, in a sense. The point of all this noise is GNOME, and it's virtues and failures as measured by its usefulness to each user. The last time I really liked GNOME was 1.4. Since that time, the project has taken a different path. Never mind whether that path was right; there's little chance it will change. The new GNOME is what it the project leaders make it, for whatever reason. How sad for me. At first I tried to make a bit of noise about it, but that got nowhere. People working on the project itself who dissented were told in various ways to forget it. I have no way of knowing how many went along and how many have bailed. That's the way it works when "free" as in liberty is a primary objective. That same freedom allows the project leaders to ignore my wishes.
Who can say where the watershed was, but somewhere along the way the complaints built up to the point someone decided to do something about it. He started with a patch to allow him some options he felt were missing from the project. His patch was rejected from the mainstream of the project, so he decided he would take his own path. Since he knew there were plenty of coders and users who felt as he did, he published his idea and got noticed. In a week's time, he was swamped with email. Enough of it was positive that he went ahead and established a new project. Enough coders joined right away that it was agreed to make a complete fork from GNOME.
Nobody on the Goneme Project is interfering with GNOME. The project page lists planned modifications to the GNOME base. That so many seem to take this list as a personal assault is beyond silly. How fragile is GNOME's place in the Linux/Unix world? Does it need rabid defense to prevent its evaporation? Persona
Two questions.
When will GNOME be available as the default desktop on Solaris? It didn't appear in the last Solaris 9 beta.
Also, the GPL licensing implications always intrigued me. Without getting too heavily into GPL issues, I was surprised that one could distribute GPL software as a default component in a proprietary system.
This item in the GNU FAQ appears to be particularly pertinent.
How have you dealt with this apparent contradiction?