You can Sympathy from folks, but unless you've been there, you can't empathize with someone. A lesson I learned many years ago when my mother died when I was a teen. Got plenty of Sympathy, but there was only one person that I met in that time who could empathize because she had gone through the same situation. We talked one day a little while after the funeral and something she said then still strikes me now well over a decade later and part of it was her tone. It wasn't the soft and gentle tone you'd think. Her response seemed sort of cold at the time. "It sucks. Nothing said is going to change that no matter how much you want someone to say some magic words and it will be better. But there isn't. There is a hole in your heart. It does gets smaller as time goes on, but it never goes away." I guess cold isn't the right word...it was more like sobering. Especially at that age because I was 18 at the time, she was probably 16. And it was the only response I got that looking back today I would call Empathetic.
Competes with the phone company selling minutes. I have a skype in number and the last two weeks I've been directing conference calls to my skype account. I still use Skype on my iPhone for talking, just connected to my WiFi router at home. If I had taken those calls directly to my cell, I would have been way over on my minutes this month.
I'm sure the cell phone company would much rather bill me for the over use of minutes. (although I do have like 2800 roll over minutes)
Problem is what constitutes a "business". For instance, i've inherited most of the family farms totally about 500 acres. I rent the farms to a farmer, but I still have to spend a few weeks a year down there to do maintenance on the bins, building, tractors, bush hog, spraying, etc.. I'm not sure how familiar you are with farm equipment, but if anything breaks, chances are it's going to cost more than $600 in parts & labor to fix.
Right now taxes are pretty easy. It's the checks that come in when we sell the grain against the expenses that go out for Diesel fuel, my share of the fertilizer. I keep a separate bank account for the farms to make things a bit easier. But now having to spent the time to send the fertilizer folks a 1099, the gas station (I buy diesel 20 gallons at a time) a 1099, the local mechanic a 1099, the kobota dealer a 1099, Rural Kinga 1099, and damn that gets to be a lot of work on top of keeping track of everything for my day job (software company I own).
At the software company, I expect having to keep track of everything as part of the cost of doing business. The farms are something that are just there and I would like to keep the farms. They've been in the family for 4 generations and provide a nice annual bonus for the amount of time I do put into it. But time is getting to be a problem for me and it really begs the question is it time to put the farms up for sale.
Our CPA is going to a seminar training session about this in June or July, but that was pretty much my response. If I go to Sams club and buy $600 worth of stuff for my house a year, which we probably do, I have to send Sams a 1099-K? What about the grocery store? What about Wal-Mart? Hell I spend $600 a month on basic needs. Hell I probably spend $600 a year at my favorite restaurant. Do I need to send them a 1099-K? Am I supposed to now itemize EVERYTHING I spend? I try to do that now for business expenses, but now if I walk into Walmart to buy a $3.00 can of shaving cream because I ran out that morning mean I have to keep track of all that shit?
Oh well, I guess that means we'll have to use plastic. "Visa, everywhere you want your purchases tracked....priceless."
Ditto. I needed something to replace my 6 year old 12.1" powerbook that is/was on its last legs. I had a 15" MacBook Pro at work that was purchased last year, but I was still actively involved in coding and code auditing. I now travel a lot on business and mainly I need something that I can use for communications purposes (email, skype) and making small edits to documents. Only complaint is a lack of a video camera at this point for video conferencing. But even at work I gave my MBP to a new developer hire. And at $30 per month for wireless, it is half what we were paying for a similar USB 3G card with only 5GB of transfer per month. Now when I travel and stay in certain hotels, it saves $15 per day for wireless internet. Hell, at that rate, the saving for not having to buy hotel wireless will pay for the device by september.
iWork for iPad does enough document editing for my needs.
I can think of one magazine I that I read cover to cover on a weekly basis: The Economist. It seems to be one of the few sources that at least has reports and briefs on what is going on around the world beyond what is on the bbc homepage. And yes, I will be getting the iPad app if/when offered.
3 years from now? H.264 is on my computers, my blu ray player, my phone, my camera, my video camera, it's everywhere now. In order for any codec to replace H.264 it has to be technically superior, just not "free". And from what I've seen, VP8 is better than Theora, but still not H.264.
I just simplified after my house got destroyed last year and took the old G5 quadcore out along with 6 Mac Mini's I picked up cheap off ebay to play with Xgrid with and just bought a single Core2Duo Mac Mini with 4GB of Ram and hooked it up to the LED TV via the VGA port. My laptop at home is still my 6 year old 12.1" PowerBook G4, and recently an iPad 3G. At work I just gave my MBP to the new grad we hired as a developer (kid's worked for us for 2 years as an intern) and replaced it with an iPad docking station. Only thing the iPad is lacking the video camera for video conferencing.
I don't write code anymore. All I really need to do is answer emails and Skype inquiries while on the phone and iWork does enough on the iPad version for the things I need.
We have an Epson MFP that we use for scanning and occasional printing on CD's and other materials the laser won't handle. Then we have a Samsung CLP 315 color laser that we picked up for around $150 and still haven't replaced toner in over a year.
Mostly, it's hardware differences that is the problem. The customer wants "really cool feature x" then we have to go do testing and report back which phones will and which phones will not support that feature. But there are some software differences that produces some really ugly code and hacks if you want an app to work across all 5 OS versions. However the software differences are annoying for the programmers but can be dealt with. Hardware differences we can't do anything about.
I do the final QA and Management sign off before a product is delivered to a customer. I keep an eye on the number of support tickets filed for various platforms & products so I know roughly what to budget. I can tell you the number of ticket reports filed for interpretability problems on Android is over 8 to 1 compared to the iPhone. To be fair the Blackberry has similar QA costs to Android.
I know we're dropping 1G iPhones and iPhone OS 2.x when the 4G comes out. By that time, the original iPhone users will likely have upgraded with new contracts. It makes the SDLC easier to adapt to as we've had a planned EOL schedule for over a year now with legacy iphone apps.
We've been developing for Android for a year now and we've gone from two versions to now 5 different OS's in 12 months. We've bought about $2500 worth of iPhones and iPod Touches since 2008. We've spent over twice that since august of last year. And while it may be "developer" friendly, it's not nearly as QA testing friendly thanks to all the different devices from different manufactures with different hardware features and different UI specs.
And then one person with Android A can download it and tells their friend with Android B about it. Android B user goes to the market place and can't find or download that app and gets pissed off. It happens more than you'd think with a friend of mine. He has an HTC, his wife a motorola with the keyboard so she can send 500 texts a day. They've come across several apps that will work on his phone, but she can't even find it in the market place.
As a developer, we're charging 4 - 5x's the price for an android app vs. an iPhone App. Reason being that Android is more expensive to develop for due to the number of phones on the market all with different OS & hardware specs. Since august of last year, we've spent over $6k now on Android and sets. To give you an idea, we spent $2500 from 2008 - present for iPhones and iPod touches.
It was amazing here in St. Louis. They shut down a major chunk of I-64 for a year or more for reconstruction and so all the local cities had to coordinate their traffic lights and traffic on those side roads moved a lot smoother than they had before. I'm not sure what the cities have done now that I-64 is reopened, but damn, I hope they've kept the syncing as it really did speed up travel in those areas.
But currently h.264 is every where from my computer, to flash, to my cell phone, to my blu-ray player, to my video camera, to my digital camera and I have one format that I can load into any video editing software made in the last 5 years and plug away. Until VP8 can do that, it is not going to get a lot of traction.
They now have Solaris. Which has been their preferred OS up until a few years ago when they tried pushing Oracle Linux. And Solaris has a few nice features for the enterprise customer which Linux still lacks.
That's when PA-DSS takes affect. And PA-DSS applies to any application that stores or transmits cardholder data (credit card number). They require all that information to be stored using "strong encryption", which is defined as either TripleDES with a 168bit Key or AES. Bunch of other rules too for anything web-based. Like for one the database storing the data cannot be connected to the internet. Requires at least 2 servers with your web facing server having 2 nics. One that connects to a DMZ or has access to the internet and the other that connects to a private local network with the database server(s).
But the real question is how long until carriers start treating Android phones like any phone before it only authorizing their firmware to operate on their network and going to their "Market place"? I see that day coming soon rather than later as most carriers in the US don't want to be turned into dumb pipes. Talking with friends in Australia, it appears this has already happened down there with Android phones. They have to purchase apps through the carrier store, it blocks the Google Market Place.
The carriers great metric is "Revenue per customer". That is what they want to maximize. They saw how AT&T got pretty much blind sided by the success Apple has had with the iTunes App Store. They would rather see that 30% commission on each app sold than Google or independent developers.
I've already heard some complaints from friends with different Droid phones not being able to run the same apps. One person downloads an App that works great on a HTC, but a person with a Motorola can't down download the same app due to incompatible hardware.
As a developer, we're already charging 4x's the amount to develop for Android vs iPhone. Why? Because with Android we have test against 4 software versions and a number of different handsets and that adds a lot of time/cost in the QA phase. Not to mention keeping up with all the hardware is getting to be expensive for a small shop.
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You can Sympathy from folks, but unless you've been there, you can't empathize with someone. A lesson I learned many years ago when my mother died when I was a teen. Got plenty of Sympathy, but there was only one person that I met in that time who could empathize because she had gone through the same situation. We talked one day a little while after the funeral and something she said then still strikes me now well over a decade later and part of it was her tone. It wasn't the soft and gentle tone you'd think. Her response seemed sort of cold at the time. "It sucks. Nothing said is going to change that no matter how much you want someone to say some magic words and it will be better. But there isn't. There is a hole in your heart. It does gets smaller as time goes on, but it never goes away." I guess cold isn't the right word...it was more like sobering. Especially at that age because I was 18 at the time, she was probably 16. And it was the only response I got that looking back today I would call Empathetic.
There's even a button that makes it easy to send to your wall post!
Damn I wish I had mod points.
Competes with the phone company selling minutes. I have a skype in number and the last two weeks I've been directing conference calls to my skype account. I still use Skype on my iPhone for talking, just connected to my WiFi router at home. If I had taken those calls directly to my cell, I would have been way over on my minutes this month.
I'm sure the cell phone company would much rather bill me for the over use of minutes. (although I do have like 2800 roll over minutes)
Problem is what constitutes a "business". For instance, i've inherited most of the family farms totally about 500 acres. I rent the farms to a farmer, but I still have to spend a few weeks a year down there to do maintenance on the bins, building, tractors, bush hog, spraying, etc.. I'm not sure how familiar you are with farm equipment, but if anything breaks, chances are it's going to cost more than $600 in parts & labor to fix.
Right now taxes are pretty easy. It's the checks that come in when we sell the grain against the expenses that go out for Diesel fuel, my share of the fertilizer. I keep a separate bank account for the farms to make things a bit easier. But now having to spent the time to send the fertilizer folks a 1099, the gas station (I buy diesel 20 gallons at a time) a 1099, the local mechanic a 1099, the kobota dealer a 1099, Rural Kinga 1099, and damn that gets to be a lot of work on top of keeping track of everything for my day job (software company I own).
At the software company, I expect having to keep track of everything as part of the cost of doing business. The farms are something that are just there and I would like to keep the farms. They've been in the family for 4 generations and provide a nice annual bonus for the amount of time I do put into it. But time is getting to be a problem for me and it really begs the question is it time to put the farms up for sale.
Our CPA is going to a seminar training session about this in June or July, but that was pretty much my response. If I go to Sams club and buy $600 worth of stuff for my house a year, which we probably do, I have to send Sams a 1099-K? What about the grocery store? What about Wal-Mart? Hell I spend $600 a month on basic needs. Hell I probably spend $600 a year at my favorite restaurant. Do I need to send them a 1099-K? Am I supposed to now itemize EVERYTHING I spend? I try to do that now for business expenses, but now if I walk into Walmart to buy a $3.00 can of shaving cream because I ran out that morning mean I have to keep track of all that shit?
Oh well, I guess that means we'll have to use plastic. "Visa, everywhere you want your purchases tracked....priceless."
My money is on the oil cartel. They had to silence the competition of energy from the sun.
Ditto. I needed something to replace my 6 year old 12.1" powerbook that is/was on its last legs. I had a 15" MacBook Pro at work that was purchased last year, but I was still actively involved in coding and code auditing. I now travel a lot on business and mainly I need something that I can use for communications purposes (email, skype) and making small edits to documents. Only complaint is a lack of a video camera at this point for video conferencing. But even at work I gave my MBP to a new developer hire. And at $30 per month for wireless, it is half what we were paying for a similar USB 3G card with only 5GB of transfer per month. Now when I travel and stay in certain hotels, it saves $15 per day for wireless internet. Hell, at that rate, the saving for not having to buy hotel wireless will pay for the device by september.
iWork for iPad does enough document editing for my needs.
What Would Jobs Do?
I can think of one magazine I that I read cover to cover on a weekly basis: The Economist. It seems to be one of the few sources that at least has reports and briefs on what is going on around the world beyond what is on the bbc homepage. And yes, I will be getting the iPad app if/when offered.
3 years from now? H.264 is on my computers, my blu ray player, my phone, my camera, my video camera, it's everywhere now. In order for any codec to replace H.264 it has to be technically superior, just not "free". And from what I've seen, VP8 is better than Theora, but still not H.264.
I just simplified after my house got destroyed last year and took the old G5 quadcore out along with 6 Mac Mini's I picked up cheap off ebay to play with Xgrid with and just bought a single Core2Duo Mac Mini with 4GB of Ram and hooked it up to the LED TV via the VGA port. My laptop at home is still my 6 year old 12.1" PowerBook G4, and recently an iPad 3G. At work I just gave my MBP to the new grad we hired as a developer (kid's worked for us for 2 years as an intern) and replaced it with an iPad docking station. Only thing the iPad is lacking the video camera for video conferencing.
I don't write code anymore. All I really need to do is answer emails and Skype inquiries while on the phone and iWork does enough on the iPad version for the things I need.
Direct Democracy has another name: Tyranny of the Majority. (All Apologies to Plato)
We have an Epson MFP that we use for scanning and occasional printing on CD's and other materials the laser won't handle. Then we have a Samsung CLP 315 color laser that we picked up for around $150 and still haven't replaced toner in over a year.
Mostly, it's hardware differences that is the problem. The customer wants "really cool feature x" then we have to go do testing and report back which phones will and which phones will not support that feature. But there are some software differences that produces some really ugly code and hacks if you want an app to work across all 5 OS versions. However the software differences are annoying for the programmers but can be dealt with. Hardware differences we can't do anything about.
I do the final QA and Management sign off before a product is delivered to a customer. I keep an eye on the number of support tickets filed for various platforms & products so I know roughly what to budget. I can tell you the number of ticket reports filed for interpretability problems on Android is over 8 to 1 compared to the iPhone. To be fair the Blackberry has similar QA costs to Android.
A federal Jury seems to think novell does own the copyrights.
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/jury-says-novell-owns-unix-copyright-20100331/
I know we're dropping 1G iPhones and iPhone OS 2.x when the 4G comes out. By that time, the original iPhone users will likely have upgraded with new contracts. It makes the SDLC easier to adapt to as we've had a planned EOL schedule for over a year now with legacy iphone apps.
We've been developing for Android for a year now and we've gone from two versions to now 5 different OS's in 12 months. We've bought about $2500 worth of iPhones and iPod Touches since 2008. We've spent over twice that since august of last year. And while it may be "developer" friendly, it's not nearly as QA testing friendly thanks to all the different devices from different manufactures with different hardware features and different UI specs.
And then one person with Android A can download it and tells their friend with Android B about it. Android B user goes to the market place and can't find or download that app and gets pissed off. It happens more than you'd think with a friend of mine. He has an HTC, his wife a motorola with the keyboard so she can send 500 texts a day. They've come across several apps that will work on his phone, but she can't even find it in the market place.
As a developer, we're charging 4 - 5x's the price for an android app vs. an iPhone App. Reason being that Android is more expensive to develop for due to the number of phones on the market all with different OS & hardware specs. Since august of last year, we've spent over $6k now on Android and sets. To give you an idea, we spent $2500 from 2008 - present for iPhones and iPod touches.
Clearly owning the Unix copyrights has to be worth something.
It was amazing here in St. Louis. They shut down a major chunk of I-64 for a year or more for reconstruction and so all the local cities had to coordinate their traffic lights and traffic on those side roads moved a lot smoother than they had before. I'm not sure what the cities have done now that I-64 is reopened, but damn, I hope they've kept the syncing as it really did speed up travel in those areas.
But currently h.264 is every where from my computer, to flash, to my cell phone, to my blu-ray player, to my video camera, to my digital camera and I have one format that I can load into any video editing software made in the last 5 years and plug away. Until VP8 can do that, it is not going to get a lot of traction.
They now have Solaris. Which has been their preferred OS up until a few years ago when they tried pushing Oracle Linux. And Solaris has a few nice features for the enterprise customer which Linux still lacks.
That's when PA-DSS takes affect. And PA-DSS applies to any application that stores or transmits cardholder data (credit card number). They require all that information to be stored using "strong encryption", which is defined as either TripleDES with a 168bit Key or AES. Bunch of other rules too for anything web-based. Like for one the database storing the data cannot be connected to the internet. Requires at least 2 servers with your web facing server having 2 nics. One that connects to a DMZ or has access to the internet and the other that connects to a private local network with the database server(s).
But the real question is how long until carriers start treating Android phones like any phone before it only authorizing their firmware to operate on their network and going to their "Market place"? I see that day coming soon rather than later as most carriers in the US don't want to be turned into dumb pipes. Talking with friends in Australia, it appears this has already happened down there with Android phones. They have to purchase apps through the carrier store, it blocks the Google Market Place.
The carriers great metric is "Revenue per customer". That is what they want to maximize. They saw how AT&T got pretty much blind sided by the success Apple has had with the iTunes App Store. They would rather see that 30% commission on each app sold than Google or independent developers.
I've already heard some complaints from friends with different Droid phones not being able to run the same apps. One person downloads an App that works great on a HTC, but a person with a Motorola can't down download the same app due to incompatible hardware.
As a developer, we're already charging 4x's the amount to develop for Android vs iPhone. Why? Because with Android we have test against 4 software versions and a number of different handsets and that adds a lot of time/cost in the QA phase. Not to mention keeping up with all the hardware is getting to be expensive for a small shop.