The situation in the UK is entirely reversed. The government has wholeheartedly jumped on the man-made climate change bandwagon and is milking it at every opportunity. Extra taxation is being liberally applied to anything even remotely related to carbon dioxide emissions (just today, taxation on passenger air travel doubled).
However, an equal investment isn't being put towards improving public transport (which is truly horrendous in the UK).
I'd be wary of what you ask of the US government - it may be all too easy for them to follow the UK government's lead and just start using "climate change" as an excuse to extract cash from the populace.
If Ballmer sees mobile comms as the next big field of innovation, maybe he should take a look at the cost of mobile data. 3G's everywhere now, so we've the capability to transmit it all, it's just still prohibitively expensive!
When Microsoft gives us unlimited mobile data tariffs, then maybe they'll see a revolution!
Re:But does it work on Windows?
on
RAD with Ruby
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sorry, I hadn't made myself clear - the sticking point was is there a one-click installer for the GUI prototyping environment too like there is for Python+Glade (ok, it's a handful of one-click installers for Python/PyWin32/GTK+/Glade/PyGTK, but you get my drift)?
Is deployment of a Ruby+KDE(?) prototype application going to take anything other than double-clicking a few exe's to get the runtime environment setup and installed?
I may be completely wrong (and too lazy to do the research - welcome to Slashdot!), but last time I checked, KDE and Windows weren't a very happy couple.
But does it work on Windows?
on
RAD with Ruby
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Windows support is the big thing it needs to match the flexibility of Python+Glade for RAD stuff. I'm using Python+Glade every day at the moment for prototyping and for making up quick little proof-of-concept solutions, but Windows support is neccessary for my employer to take it at all seriously (even tho I do most of my actual development on Linux).
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The situation in the UK is entirely reversed. The government has wholeheartedly jumped on the man-made climate change bandwagon and is milking it at every opportunity. Extra taxation is being liberally applied to anything even remotely related to carbon dioxide emissions (just today, taxation on passenger air travel doubled).
However, an equal investment isn't being put towards improving public transport (which is truly horrendous in the UK).
I'd be wary of what you ask of the US government - it may be all too easy for them to follow the UK government's lead and just start using "climate change" as an excuse to extract cash from the populace.
If Ballmer sees mobile comms as the next big field of innovation, maybe he should take a look at the cost of mobile data. 3G's everywhere now, so we've the capability to transmit it all, it's just still prohibitively expensive! When Microsoft gives us unlimited mobile data tariffs, then maybe they'll see a revolution!
Sorry, I hadn't made myself clear - the sticking point was is there a one-click installer for the GUI prototyping environment too like there is for Python+Glade (ok, it's a handful of one-click installers for Python/PyWin32/GTK+/Glade/PyGTK, but you get my drift)? Is deployment of a Ruby+KDE(?) prototype application going to take anything other than double-clicking a few exe's to get the runtime environment setup and installed? I may be completely wrong (and too lazy to do the research - welcome to Slashdot!), but last time I checked, KDE and Windows weren't a very happy couple.
Windows support is the big thing it needs to match the flexibility of Python+Glade for RAD stuff. I'm using Python+Glade every day at the moment for prototyping and for making up quick little proof-of-concept solutions, but Windows support is neccessary for my employer to take it at all seriously (even tho I do most of my actual development on Linux).