The problem becomes the cost of testing on all the handsets. I think we spend somewhere around $2500 between 2008 - and Q1 2010 on i* devices for testing. Original iPhone, 3G, 3Gs, and two iPod Touches. We spent more than that from August 2009 - to Jan 2010 on android handsets and haven't even bothered to keep up this year. It was getting too expensive for a small shop. Especially given the current economic climate so we finally gave up quoting iPhone development being the same cost as Android.
Right now we're quoting: iOS = $X Android = iOS * 5
And that's for the same QA as iOS for up to 4 handsets. If they want additional handsets, it's $1500 per handset for initial testing and QA and additional %fee for continuing maintenance and update testing.
Developing for Android reminds me of trying to develop for Linux circa 10 years ago. Yeah 90% is the same, but that 10% that is different between distros can be a bitch to overcome. So you settle in on supporting 1 or 2 popular handsets/distros and charge a lot of $$$$ if anyone wants to deviate.
I remember 20 years ago when my Grand Parents weren't in good health and my Parents would feel it necessary to stay at home or near home in case something happened to them. Especially in their later years. They lived 4 hours away by car, so while they were not next door, but we were the closest family.
Now I'm in a similar situation with my Father who is in his mid 70's and has some heath issues. He's been rushed to the hospital a couple times in the past five years to have emergency surgery including once where I had to hop on a plane @ 5AM because they didn't know if he'd make it. But unlike my parents who were tied to having to be close to a landline, I am free to travel. And I do because of my Job. It doesn't matter if I'm in Delaware, Denver, LA, New York, or at home. If I want to take a weekend road trip, I can and still know if something happens to my Dad, I can be contacted in case of an emergency.
Ten years ago there was the mythos that the internet was this kind of wild-wild-west. Back then, governments were looking at custom built gear for DPI, firewalls, etc. and most didn't have the expertise, money, or were willing to wait. In 2008 the world watched as Iran effectively controlled all communications within and in/out of their country. Was it 100% effective, no, but effective enough. That was the tipping point that proved that the idea/hopes/dreams of free and open communication without barriers was over. The ball is back in the governments court.
I just went back to using Mac Mail and my iPhone checking all my accounts via IMAP. Everything keeps synced up. Very rarely do I log into Gmail from the web anymore.
ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264. You have a bunch of companies that decide to share patents into one resource. It makes it easy for other companies to pay 1 fee and then use the technology. And H.264's licensing terms are reasonable. There is a cost of doing business. I know that is not popular around here, but it's the truth.
Unfortunately it's going to be harder for Free software going forward. Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing. And I see more of these types of industry barriers to entry popping up.
We deal with a lot of international clients and right now Skype offers us the best deal of easily being able to acquire local phone numbers for our clients to call without paying huge routing fees, etc.. Having to sit in front of a computer used to be the problem until Skype for iPhone was released. Still had to be in wifi range at the time and logged into skype on the iphone, but if you knew a call was scheduled, you could take it on the phone. Now, however, with the multitasking Skype app and calls over 3g, you can use an iPhone and not be tied to your computer.
Not sure if Google plans to offer this for phones or not. What will be interesting to see is what ISP's do. Especially those ISP's that happen to be phone providers as well. I've already seen complaints with throttling of Vonage. Wonder if they will do it to Google too.
Falling home prices and lack of people willing to purchase big ticket items are giving the illusion of deflation. The government is still printing more money and if you look at the costs of basic goods, such as food prices, they are going up. Eventually the fed is going to owe too much and their likely way out is to just print more money. That's what they are doing now.
That being said, the reason why you keep that much cash around is for emergencies or uncertainty. Right now we have a bunch of cash at home and in a safe deposit box split between USD, Euro, Pounds, Yen, Swiss Franc, and about 25 1oz gold coins my grandfather and dad bought back in the early 1980's. I own my house, own my cars, and with the cash on hand even if all my investments and bank accounts were worth $0 tomorrow, we still have something.
No they won't. Corporations tried that "Cloud" thing back in the 1970's and early 80's. It was called time share. There is a reason why so many companies went to microcomputers (PC's) back then. Sure they may try. I have friends that work at a Fortune 500 here in town. They went to the centralized servers "cloud" method with thin clients at one of their two HQ buildings in 2008. They're back to buying laptops or desktop PC's for employees. Why? They quickly found that is something like a network switch failed, an entire floor would be down until it was fixed. That could be 100 or more employees with out the ability to do much "work". Take an average persons salary of $25/hour and for every hour that switch is down is $2500 minimum in lost productivity. And if it's not the switch and some other problem with the network that takes a day to fix. Apparently they were averaging about 10 hours of downtime a month due to one reason or another.
With a laptop or desktop, if one goes down, one employee is not productive until fixed. If the network switch goes down, work can still be done, although maybe not as much. But some work getting done is better than 0.
I still use desktop apps every day. I find reading my email with Mail is far easier than logging into 3 separate websites for web mail.
I didn't have a car, but the only time I rode the train was when I was going from the town I lived in (Lueneburg) to Hamburg. If I was going anywhere more than about 3 hours hours away, I flew. The reason being was a flight from Hamburg to Muenchen was something like 120euro round trip with a single carry on and took about 3 hours to get to the airport, on the plane, and arrival at destination. I was often traveling on weekends and time was something I had limited amounts of while studying or working in the country. If I were taking a regional train, the fare was 140 Euro and the trip took like 13 hours one way. If you wanted to take a ICE (Fast) train, the ticket was like 400 Euro with 6 hour travel time. And that was back when they had a Junge fare.
That's the thing about Sci-fi. Someone dreams it up, then it becomes even scarier when it is found to exist in real life. (or something close to it). I know, Halo isn't the first to explore the motiff, but I have to say it:
Already happening. Just about anyone running a Tor Exit node is at risk for Kiddie porn charges. I had friends that set up Tor nodes during the Iran unrest. One of them decided to see if it was doing any good and was shocked that more than half the traffic was actually porn and a fair amount of it kiddie porn. As soon as he told the others, everyone stopped hosting the nodes and a couple even Dbaned their HDD's. No one wanted to risk being caught. None of them were rich enough to fight it.
I don't know, Iran proved it's easier than you'd think to effectively block out access. DPI and other technologies have come a long way in the past decade. Ten years ago I bought into the Worlds of End argument. But today...I don't buy it. There are not an unlimited number of backbone providers. All it takes is control of those nodes and you can effectively, not absolutely, block/control access to whatever content you want.
One of those things, if you don't have an economy and it causes the numbers of "unfortunate" to rise to a critical mass, civil rights usually become the least of your worries.
Depends, do you have meet QA assurances to customers? I know we've dropped QA assurance for Android devices from our contracts now unless the client asks for specific models with specific OS's. We still offer a QA assurance standard for iOS based applications because it's not costing us $8k a year for hardware like it was with Android for iDevices. Making sure your application runs on android isn't a problem. Guaranteeing it works well across a range of devices is a different ball-game.
All it takes is a C&C machine and a few other pieces of tooling and you can most certainly create a homemade "gun lab". And they'll get their guns from somewhere. There are plenty of arms dealers out there and if these people can smuggle drugs, smuggling arms is not much different. I wouldn't be surprised if more arms came from Brazil or other south american countries that are producing Galil & Fal clones.
And most of the stuff on the Russian documents front are internal economic analysis reports. Stuff that I'm sure the Russian like to keep sensitive, but aren't exactly damning information. If Wikileaks got a list of known Russian informants around world and published it or the name of people in Gaza providing intel to Israel if Assange would be as keen to publish.
I wonder if he had stuff on the Russians or the Israelis if he would be as willing to release it. The most the US is going to do is make strongly worded speeches and maybe try to get him on some kind of charge and throw him in jail. And even that is doubtful as there are enough countries out there that would "protect" him if he fled there so long as his remarks and leaks are directed at the US. Because the Israelis and Russians in the past have proven that they will go anywhere and do anything to make an example.
If gets bold enough and starts outing everybody's dirty laundry, he'll be dealt with. And that point everyone will just shrug and suggest the other guy did it. Just look at the unsolved murder of Gerald Bull. While most people conclude it was Mossad, nobody is really sure as there was a half a dozen parties that might have been behind the assassination.
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The problem becomes the cost of testing on all the handsets. I think we spend somewhere around $2500 between 2008 - and Q1 2010 on i* devices for testing. Original iPhone, 3G, 3Gs, and two iPod Touches. We spent more than that from August 2009 - to Jan 2010 on android handsets and haven't even bothered to keep up this year. It was getting too expensive for a small shop. Especially given the current economic climate so we finally gave up quoting iPhone development being the same cost as Android.
Right now we're quoting:
iOS = $X
Android = iOS * 5
And that's for the same QA as iOS for up to 4 handsets. If they want additional handsets, it's $1500 per handset for initial testing and QA and additional %fee for continuing maintenance and update testing.
Developing for Android reminds me of trying to develop for Linux circa 10 years ago. Yeah 90% is the same, but that 10% that is different between distros can be a bitch to overcome. So you settle in on supporting 1 or 2 popular handsets/distros and charge a lot of $$$$ if anyone wants to deviate.
I remember 20 years ago when my Grand Parents weren't in good health and my Parents would feel it necessary to stay at home or near home in case something happened to them. Especially in their later years. They lived 4 hours away by car, so while they were not next door, but we were the closest family.
Now I'm in a similar situation with my Father who is in his mid 70's and has some heath issues. He's been rushed to the hospital a couple times in the past five years to have emergency surgery including once where I had to hop on a plane @ 5AM because they didn't know if he'd make it. But unlike my parents who were tied to having to be close to a landline, I am free to travel. And I do because of my Job. It doesn't matter if I'm in Delaware, Denver, LA, New York, or at home. If I want to take a weekend road trip, I can and still know if something happens to my Dad, I can be contacted in case of an emergency.
Ten years ago there was the mythos that the internet was this kind of wild-wild-west. Back then, governments were looking at custom built gear for DPI, firewalls, etc. and most didn't have the expertise, money, or were willing to wait. In 2008 the world watched as Iran effectively controlled all communications within and in/out of their country. Was it 100% effective, no, but effective enough. That was the tipping point that proved that the idea/hopes/dreams of free and open communication without barriers was over. The ball is back in the governments court.
I just went back to using Mac Mail and my iPhone checking all my accounts via IMAP. Everything keeps synced up. Very rarely do I log into Gmail from the web anymore.
ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264. You have a bunch of companies that decide to share patents into one resource. It makes it easy for other companies to pay 1 fee and then use the technology. And H.264's licensing terms are reasonable. There is a cost of doing business. I know that is not popular around here, but it's the truth.
Unfortunately it's going to be harder for Free software going forward. Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing. And I see more of these types of industry barriers to entry popping up.
I thought the F-4 pretty much proved you can make bricks fly if you put big enough engines on them.
We deal with a lot of international clients and right now Skype offers us the best deal of easily being able to acquire local phone numbers for our clients to call without paying huge routing fees, etc.. Having to sit in front of a computer used to be the problem until Skype for iPhone was released. Still had to be in wifi range at the time and logged into skype on the iphone, but if you knew a call was scheduled, you could take it on the phone. Now, however, with the multitasking Skype app and calls over 3g, you can use an iPhone and not be tied to your computer.
Not sure if Google plans to offer this for phones or not. What will be interesting to see is what ISP's do. Especially those ISP's that happen to be phone providers as well. I've already seen complaints with throttling of Vonage. Wonder if they will do it to Google too.
Falling home prices and lack of people willing to purchase big ticket items are giving the illusion of deflation. The government is still printing more money and if you look at the costs of basic goods, such as food prices, they are going up. Eventually the fed is going to owe too much and their likely way out is to just print more money. That's what they are doing now.
That being said, the reason why you keep that much cash around is for emergencies or uncertainty. Right now we have a bunch of cash at home and in a safe deposit box split between USD, Euro, Pounds, Yen, Swiss Franc, and about 25 1oz gold coins my grandfather and dad bought back in the early 1980's. I own my house, own my cars, and with the cash on hand even if all my investments and bank accounts were worth $0 tomorrow, we still have something.
No they won't. Corporations tried that "Cloud" thing back in the 1970's and early 80's. It was called time share. There is a reason why so many companies went to microcomputers (PC's) back then. Sure they may try. I have friends that work at a Fortune 500 here in town. They went to the centralized servers "cloud" method with thin clients at one of their two HQ buildings in 2008. They're back to buying laptops or desktop PC's for employees. Why? They quickly found that is something like a network switch failed, an entire floor would be down until it was fixed. That could be 100 or more employees with out the ability to do much "work". Take an average persons salary of $25/hour and for every hour that switch is down is $2500 minimum in lost productivity. And if it's not the switch and some other problem with the network that takes a day to fix. Apparently they were averaging about 10 hours of downtime a month due to one reason or another.
With a laptop or desktop, if one goes down, one employee is not productive until fixed. If the network switch goes down, work can still be done, although maybe not as much. But some work getting done is better than 0.
I still use desktop apps every day. I find reading my email with Mail is far easier than logging into 3 separate websites for web mail.
Maybe in the server room, where linux killed commercial unix for the most part. On the desktop is another matter.
So now you can tell Foursquare to go away as I've replaced you with a small perl script?
"Stop quoting laws to us. We have machine guns." (with all due respect to Pompey)
I didn't have a car, but the only time I rode the train was when I was going from the town I lived in (Lueneburg) to Hamburg. If I was going anywhere more than about 3 hours hours away, I flew. The reason being was a flight from Hamburg to Muenchen was something like 120euro round trip with a single carry on and took about 3 hours to get to the airport, on the plane, and arrival at destination. I was often traveling on weekends and time was something I had limited amounts of while studying or working in the country. If I were taking a regional train, the fare was 140 Euro and the trip took like 13 hours one way. If you wanted to take a ICE (Fast) train, the ticket was like 400 Euro with 6 hour travel time. And that was back when they had a Junge fare.
That's the thing about Sci-fi. Someone dreams it up, then it becomes even scarier when it is found to exist in real life. (or something close to it). I know, Halo isn't the first to explore the motiff, but I have to say it:
"Glass the amazon, it's the only way to be sure!"
Clicked enter for some reason:
Here is the module: http://search.cpan.org/~jmadler/Acme-LeetSpeak-0.01/lib/Acme/LeetSpeak.pm
Yes, there is a perl module for that.
Doesn't matter what the law should say, it's what it does say. And are you going to quote law with the cops? Because they have guns.
Already happening. Just about anyone running a Tor Exit node is at risk for Kiddie porn charges. I had friends that set up Tor nodes during the Iran unrest. One of them decided to see if it was doing any good and was shocked that more than half the traffic was actually porn and a fair amount of it kiddie porn. As soon as he told the others, everyone stopped hosting the nodes and a couple even Dbaned their HDD's. No one wanted to risk being caught. None of them were rich enough to fight it.
I don't know, Iran proved it's easier than you'd think to effectively block out access. DPI and other technologies have come a long way in the past decade. Ten years ago I bought into the Worlds of End argument. But today...I don't buy it. There are not an unlimited number of backbone providers. All it takes is control of those nodes and you can effectively, not absolutely, block/control access to whatever content you want.
One of those things, if you don't have an economy and it causes the numbers of "unfortunate" to rise to a critical mass, civil rights usually become the least of your worries.
Depends, do you have meet QA assurances to customers? I know we've dropped QA assurance for Android devices from our contracts now unless the client asks for specific models with specific OS's. We still offer a QA assurance standard for iOS based applications because it's not costing us $8k a year for hardware like it was with Android for iDevices. Making sure your application runs on android isn't a problem. Guaranteeing it works well across a range of devices is a different ball-game.
Else they'll start trying to destroy hardrives with virtual butyric acid
All it takes is a C&C machine and a few other pieces of tooling and you can most certainly create a homemade "gun lab". And they'll get their guns from somewhere. There are plenty of arms dealers out there and if these people can smuggle drugs, smuggling arms is not much different. I wouldn't be surprised if more arms came from Brazil or other south american countries that are producing Galil & Fal clones.
And most of the stuff on the Russian documents front are internal economic analysis reports. Stuff that I'm sure the Russian like to keep sensitive, but aren't exactly damning information. If Wikileaks got a list of known Russian informants around world and published it or the name of people in Gaza providing intel to Israel if Assange would be as keen to publish.
I wonder if he had stuff on the Russians or the Israelis if he would be as willing to release it. The most the US is going to do is make strongly worded speeches and maybe try to get him on some kind of charge and throw him in jail. And even that is doubtful as there are enough countries out there that would "protect" him if he fled there so long as his remarks and leaks are directed at the US. Because the Israelis and Russians in the past have proven that they will go anywhere and do anything to make an example.
If gets bold enough and starts outing everybody's dirty laundry, he'll be dealt with. And that point everyone will just shrug and suggest the other guy did it. Just look at the unsolved murder of Gerald Bull. While most people conclude it was Mossad, nobody is really sure as there was a half a dozen parties that might have been behind the assassination.