PhoneGap. Now it won't work for every type of app, but it does work for 90% of the applications we do, which are just HTML/JS which is then placed inside either an Obj-C Wrapper or Android Wrapper, or WebOS wrapper, or Blackberry Wrapper, etc.. Still in Javascript and the application is still portable, but we do fine we have to make tweaks between the iPhone and Android usually. Not's not quite a write once, run everywhere type solution, but does work well when using a library like jQtouch.
I used to use Blender a lot as I liked to do 3D stuff for fun, but not enough to soak $1k every year or two into Lightwave. Well, everytime it seemed like I'd download the latest and greatest, everything changed. Animations had been spending years on suddenly had to be redone because of major changes to the particles engine, the GUI layout would change and by the time I learned where the buttons had moved or what all the new buttons did it would be time for an upgrade. I finally gave up and loaded my ancient version of lightwave.
Conversely we found out with our project that rapid develop and agile didn't work once it was actually deployed and we had customers to deal with. Basically, any major updates more than once a year and we'll get angry emails and phone calls on how things changed. Even when we give a 3 month "beta" period for people to try the new way or use the old way. Also, now, compliance documentation has to be done early or every time you release a new version. The cost of writing and maintaining such documentation means we do it once a year.
We're learned this the hard way. I know a lot of weekend coders who rant and rave Android because they can open eclipse do their thing, and go and be cool, but when you have to produce apps commercially and guarantee quality in contracts Android looks a lot less attractive compared to the iPhone. In the last two years we've spent about $3k in test hardware from Apple. We've spent twice that since last August on droid phones for testing. We're now quoting android development costs at 4x's that of the iPhone because of QA. With the iPhone, generally you test against the last two point releases of iPhone OS and make sure that nothing drags on the 2G iPhone. But generally if it works on one, it works on all.
That is just simply not the case for android. You've got to test it against 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and on different hardware specs, different screen sizes (and some of our clients are anal about pixal perfect), and the fact that some have keyboards, others are touchscreens only and you have to ensure user experience is clean and effective for both types of users. Frankly it is starting to remind me of trying to develop applications for Linux 10 years ago when every distro would place their libraries in a different location for some reason or another. (Okay, not quite that bad, but bad enough).
I have friends (husband and wife) who both got Driod phones for christmas. One has the motorola, the other HTC and sometimes they'll go to download and app and find one can download it, but the other can't because of differences in the phone.
And it's not just video codecs. Want to create an application that stores, processes, or transmits credit card data? You had better have about $50k in cash ready ready to pay for PA-DSS or PCI-DSS Level I certification. And that is the starting point. The documentation process pretty much means that Opensource, by its very nature, will never be PA-DSS certified. We're in the process of taking an opensource project we forked and getting it PA-DSS certified. Small development team of 4 people and it is a nightmare. While we ship the source code on every install CD the development process itself is pretty much restricted to a BSD-like invite only approach.
90% of PA-DSS is documentation. A lot of that documentation revolves around your development process including interviews with the developers to make sure that things like code reviews are indeed implemented and that requires at least 2 developers since the person who writes the code can't review the code, technical support cases are documented, if any cardholder data is used for troubleshooting, it is properly and securely deleted, etc..
And I see more of this coming down the line in the name of "data security". While it won't kill Opensource, it is going to make it pretty damn hard for a weekend hacker to create something.
Now don't get me wrong, after a year of dealing with PCI-DSS and six months of PA-DSS, I fully understand why their standards are the way they are and for the most part it's mostly a good thing. However the fact that it takes at least $10k (and as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars for PA-DSS) pretty much means that the project has to be maintained by a company that is making money off the product in some way.
BTW, the only Opensource project I know of that is PA-DSS certified is Magento. And ONLY the Enterprise edition ($8995). The Community Edition is NOT.
The last FPS tactical shoot I actually enjoyed is a tie between Rainbow 6: Rouge Spear and Ghost Recon 1. After Ubi bought Red Storm, the games seemed more and more like arcade shoot 'em ups rather than the experience of planning an attack before going into a mission.
I stopped buying video games because no one made games I wanted to play anymore. Last game I bought was Falcon 4: Allied Force.
I remember seeing this in the late 1990's where we had some vector math or particle simulation software that we used UltraSparcs for the number crunching, but the program's interface ran like molasses on UltraSparc workstations. When we ran them on 32-bit Sparc workstations, the GUI ran fine. So they did all the front-end work on 32-Bit machines and then sent the simulations off to the 64-bit servers when they needed the heavy number crunching. Apparently the front end was never designed to run in 64-bit mode.
We have two test Point-Of-Sale terminals. One is a 1.6ghz single core Atom, the other is a dual Core 1.6ghz Atom. Both are running WEPOS with 1GB of Ram and the dual core Atom runs the Java based POS app and PostgreSQL 8.4 just as snappy as our Core2Duo machines. The single core machine we notice there is about a 2 second lag when you start a new ticket when running the POS+DB server on the same machine.
Still, the energy usage of the Dual Core Atom is way below the P4 machines they've replaced.
It also allows you to push applications, run installers, and run scripts on a bunch of remote Macs.
Bingo, which is exactly what we're doing with some help desk features. (Being able to see what a client is doing that causes a repeatable bug in their environment that we can't reproduce in house.)
The real mistake is that local governments didn't lay the fiber and then lease the lines to whatever ISP wanted to offer service in the area. At least back in days of dial up, I could use my phone line to connect to whatever ISP I wanted to connect to.
Nuclear doesn't produce that much waste. Especially if we could reprocess the fuel. In the end you get a few tons of waste that's hot for a couple hundred years, but that can be dealt with better than the tons of crap coal spews out a day. It's just that we've had 30+ years of people scaremongering about Nuclear energy.
I still have my HP48G from circa 1993 and still use it from time to time. But I stopped carrying it in my brief case when the m48 app for the iPhone was released. They have a skin that is the iPhone calculator with a stack and RPN which is brilliant if I'm not having to do complex scientific or financial work.
I also have their business calculator that I needed for one test in college. Only thing the HP48 wouldn't do: modified internal rate of return.
The only problem is that it's windows only. There is no UltraVNC SC for Mac/Linux users.
Also, if your dealing with a shop that has to be PCI-DSS or as part of a PA-DSS application, the PCI folks want to see at least 256bit AES encryption. The 128-bit solution isn't enough. So far the closest we've found is Logmein and we only support clients on Windows or OSX.
But we're looking at an NX based solution to deploy later this year or early next year which will allow us to do remote administration/maintenance for Windows, OSX, and Linux boxes.
Or you can go into system preferences>sharing>screen sharing and use VNC. It's built in. Hell, you can do it through iChat. And then you have Apple Remote Desktop which allows for some more advanced options and it's $500 to support an unlimited number of macs.
We've been exploring this for a while, but we have to make sure any solutions meet PCI-DSS and PA-DSS compliance. That really leaves us with Logmein as the only way to support both Windows and Mac clients behind a firewall on our budget.
Those who produce video content and offer playback have pretty much decided on a codec: H.264. It is technically a very good codec that functions on just about everything these days. It just doesn't fit with some peoples ideologies.
Get parallels or VMware if they really need Windows from something, have them run it in a virtual machine. Yes there may be an upfront cost to switch from MS Office for Mac from the windows version, but if the VM gets infected, nuke the VM and install a fresh one.
Something we learned real quick was that higher up front costs with macs were quickly recovered since we weren't dealing with these type of problems on a regular basis.
Hell, I have programmers that are good programmers but frankly don't know the first thing about systems administration.
22% of all hits to our site are from IE6, but IE 6 users still account for something like 40% of all orders (i.e. revenue) for the site. And anytime we break anything with IE6 we hear about it quickly. This is down from about 45% of all browser hits and nearly 60% of all orders last year.
Verizon is more about "Let's deploy a network that almost no one else in the world uses. (CDMA)". How many CDMA potential customers are there world wide versus GSM potential customers again?
This is basically our set up only we have 4 L-shaped desks in the middle of each wall since one of our corners is occupied by the door. It works out nicely. They get room for their two monitors and a bit of privacy, but if they need something, it's roll over to the guy you need to talk to and figure it out.
That being said, if you look at the code commits they do just as much from home from 10PM - 2AM as they do in the office from 11AM - 4PM.
At least one of our customers were affected as they run our point of sale software on XP Pro SP3 and used McAffee as their anti-virus. That was the IT environment they chose, we told them we prefer OSX as our first choice/Linux as second choice, but they already had a previous POS solution deployed on Windows.
They've requested price quotes on the OSX and Linux hardware solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
PhoneGap. Now it won't work for every type of app, but it does work for 90% of the applications we do, which are just HTML/JS which is then placed inside either an Obj-C Wrapper or Android Wrapper, or WebOS wrapper, or Blackberry Wrapper, etc.. Still in Javascript and the application is still portable, but we do fine we have to make tweaks between the iPhone and Android usually. Not's not quite a write once, run everywhere type solution, but does work well when using a library like jQtouch.
I used to use Blender a lot as I liked to do 3D stuff for fun, but not enough to soak $1k every year or two into Lightwave. Well, everytime it seemed like I'd download the latest and greatest, everything changed. Animations had been spending years on suddenly had to be redone because of major changes to the particles engine, the GUI layout would change and by the time I learned where the buttons had moved or what all the new buttons did it would be time for an upgrade. I finally gave up and loaded my ancient version of lightwave.
Conversely we found out with our project that rapid develop and agile didn't work once it was actually deployed and we had customers to deal with. Basically, any major updates more than once a year and we'll get angry emails and phone calls on how things changed. Even when we give a 3 month "beta" period for people to try the new way or use the old way. Also, now, compliance documentation has to be done early or every time you release a new version. The cost of writing and maintaining such documentation means we do it once a year.
We're learned this the hard way. I know a lot of weekend coders who rant and rave Android because they can open eclipse do their thing, and go and be cool, but when you have to produce apps commercially and guarantee quality in contracts Android looks a lot less attractive compared to the iPhone. In the last two years we've spent about $3k in test hardware from Apple. We've spent twice that since last August on droid phones for testing. We're now quoting android development costs at 4x's that of the iPhone because of QA. With the iPhone, generally you test against the last two point releases of iPhone OS and make sure that nothing drags on the 2G iPhone. But generally if it works on one, it works on all.
That is just simply not the case for android. You've got to test it against 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and on different hardware specs, different screen sizes (and some of our clients are anal about pixal perfect), and the fact that some have keyboards, others are touchscreens only and you have to ensure user experience is clean and effective for both types of users. Frankly it is starting to remind me of trying to develop applications for Linux 10 years ago when every distro would place their libraries in a different location for some reason or another. (Okay, not quite that bad, but bad enough).
I have friends (husband and wife) who both got Driod phones for christmas. One has the motorola, the other HTC and sometimes they'll go to download and app and find one can download it, but the other can't because of differences in the phone.
And it's not just video codecs. Want to create an application that stores, processes, or transmits credit card data? You had better have about $50k in cash ready ready to pay for PA-DSS or PCI-DSS Level I certification. And that is the starting point. The documentation process pretty much means that Opensource, by its very nature, will never be PA-DSS certified. We're in the process of taking an opensource project we forked and getting it PA-DSS certified. Small development team of 4 people and it is a nightmare. While we ship the source code on every install CD the development process itself is pretty much restricted to a BSD-like invite only approach.
90% of PA-DSS is documentation. A lot of that documentation revolves around your development process including interviews with the developers to make sure that things like code reviews are indeed implemented and that requires at least 2 developers since the person who writes the code can't review the code, technical support cases are documented, if any cardholder data is used for troubleshooting, it is properly and securely deleted, etc..
And I see more of this coming down the line in the name of "data security". While it won't kill Opensource, it is going to make it pretty damn hard for a weekend hacker to create something.
Now don't get me wrong, after a year of dealing with PCI-DSS and six months of PA-DSS, I fully understand why their standards are the way they are and for the most part it's mostly a good thing. However the fact that it takes at least $10k (and as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars for PA-DSS) pretty much means that the project has to be maintained by a company that is making money off the product in some way.
BTW, the only Opensource project I know of that is PA-DSS certified is Magento. And ONLY the Enterprise edition ($8995). The Community Edition is NOT.
The last FPS tactical shoot I actually enjoyed is a tie between Rainbow 6: Rouge Spear and Ghost Recon 1. After Ubi bought Red Storm, the games seemed more and more like arcade shoot 'em ups rather than the experience of planning an attack before going into a mission.
I stopped buying video games because no one made games I wanted to play anymore. Last game I bought was Falcon 4: Allied Force.
I was thinking the same thing. We've been dealing with PCI certification stuff and one of the requirements is to turn off NetBIOS.
I remember seeing this in the late 1990's where we had some vector math or particle simulation software that we used UltraSparcs for the number crunching, but the program's interface ran like molasses on UltraSparc workstations. When we ran them on 32-bit Sparc workstations, the GUI ran fine. So they did all the front-end work on 32-Bit machines and then sent the simulations off to the 64-bit servers when they needed the heavy number crunching. Apparently the front end was never designed to run in 64-bit mode.
That was DEC and not HP. And DEC pretty much was destroyed by Compaq and then obliterated by HP.
We have two test Point-Of-Sale terminals. One is a 1.6ghz single core Atom, the other is a dual Core 1.6ghz Atom. Both are running WEPOS with 1GB of Ram and the dual core Atom runs the Java based POS app and PostgreSQL 8.4 just as snappy as our Core2Duo machines. The single core machine we notice there is about a 2 second lag when you start a new ticket when running the POS+DB server on the same machine.
Still, the energy usage of the Dual Core Atom is way below the P4 machines they've replaced.
It also allows you to push applications, run installers, and run scripts on a bunch of remote Macs.
Bingo, which is exactly what we're doing with some help desk features. (Being able to see what a client is doing that causes a repeatable bug in their environment that we can't reproduce in house.)
The real mistake is that local governments didn't lay the fiber and then lease the lines to whatever ISP wanted to offer service in the area. At least back in days of dial up, I could use my phone line to connect to whatever ISP I wanted to connect to.
Nuclear doesn't produce that much waste. Especially if we could reprocess the fuel. In the end you get a few tons of waste that's hot for a couple hundred years, but that can be dealt with better than the tons of crap coal spews out a day. It's just that we've had 30+ years of people scaremongering about Nuclear energy.
I'll take your mobileVMS and raise you a Tru64 Mobile Edition.
I still have my HP48G from circa 1993 and still use it from time to time. But I stopped carrying it in my brief case when the m48 app for the iPhone was released. They have a skin that is the iPhone calculator with a stack and RPN which is brilliant if I'm not having to do complex scientific or financial work.
I also have their business calculator that I needed for one test in college. Only thing the HP48 wouldn't do: modified internal rate of return.
The only problem is that it's windows only. There is no UltraVNC SC for Mac/Linux users.
Also, if your dealing with a shop that has to be PCI-DSS or as part of a PA-DSS application, the PCI folks want to see at least 256bit AES encryption. The 128-bit solution isn't enough. So far the closest we've found is Logmein and we only support clients on Windows or OSX.
But we're looking at an NX based solution to deploy later this year or early next year which will allow us to do remote administration/maintenance for Windows, OSX, and Linux boxes.
Or you can go into system preferences>sharing>screen sharing and use VNC. It's built in. Hell, you can do it through iChat. And then you have Apple Remote Desktop which allows for some more advanced options and it's $500 to support an unlimited number of macs.
We've been exploring this for a while, but we have to make sure any solutions meet PCI-DSS and PA-DSS compliance. That really leaves us with Logmein as the only way to support both Windows and Mac clients behind a firewall on our budget.
Those who produce video content and offer playback have pretty much decided on a codec: H.264. It is technically a very good codec that functions on just about everything these days. It just doesn't fit with some peoples ideologies.
Get parallels or VMware if they really need Windows from something, have them run it in a virtual machine. Yes there may be an upfront cost to switch from MS Office for Mac from the windows version, but if the VM gets infected, nuke the VM and install a fresh one.
Something we learned real quick was that higher up front costs with macs were quickly recovered since we weren't dealing with these type of problems on a regular basis.
Hell, I have programmers that are good programmers but frankly don't know the first thing about systems administration.
unfortunately. July 13th the office is going to the wineries to celebrate.
22% of all hits to our site are from IE6, but IE 6 users still account for something like 40% of all orders (i.e. revenue) for the site. And anytime we break anything with IE6 we hear about it quickly. This is down from about 45% of all browser hits and nearly 60% of all orders last year.
Verizon is more about "Let's deploy a network that almost no one else in the world uses. (CDMA)". How many CDMA potential customers are there world wide versus GSM potential customers again?
Have you joined any of the groups on Linkedin? They are usually filled with nothing but spam.
Divorce Lawyers....absolutely.
This is basically our set up only we have 4 L-shaped desks in the middle of each wall since one of our corners is occupied by the door. It works out nicely. They get room for their two monitors and a bit of privacy, but if they need something, it's roll over to the guy you need to talk to and figure it out.
That being said, if you look at the code commits they do just as much from home from 10PM - 2AM as they do in the office from 11AM - 4PM.
At least one of our customers were affected as they run our point of sale software on XP Pro SP3 and used McAffee as their anti-virus. That was the IT environment they chose, we told them we prefer OSX as our first choice/Linux as second choice, but they already had a previous POS solution deployed on Windows.
They've requested price quotes on the OSX and Linux hardware solutions.