I was perhaps your biggest fan. But an Apple boycott is not how you come back to us unless they've done something dire and they haven't.
Come back and let us beat down your trolls. That would be better than this.
If you can't do that, at least make the issue SOPA and PIPA. That we can get behind. Apple's not going to do it because their fans really don't give a darn about what us geeks think.
I realize now I failed to respond to the question. No, I did not get paid, nor induced to post that post. It was my own organic opinion. Normally that would be implied, but the times are what they are.
I don't - and haven't ever - worked for any of Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Nokia, Google, Dell, HP, ASUS, Acer, Nokia, HTC, LG, Lenovo, nor contractors thereto, nor any of their direct competitors - nor ever held any of their securities to date, nor expect to. I'm a small business kind of guy. My opinions here on/. are my own, and are of no relation (and quite dissonant to) my employer's position. I post here only on my own time and give only what I've got of my own opinion. My account predates my present job, and they're quite tolerant of free speech where I work so they'd be fine with me putting my opinion on their time and dime but I still don't do it because I don't want the suspicion of taint. If you're wondering about some other company then please do reply with the name so I can deny it, because it's unlikely you'll guess who I work for - it's a really small company and way off the radar.
I work in IT of course, so sometimes when some of the above companies have the best answer for the customer I recommend them - but in that case I'm working for the customer, not the vendor - and I have no preference for a vendor. The best fit, the latest reliable tech is what I recommend. I recommend many millions of dollars worth of gear a year and the best recommend for a particular customer is a complex metric best not aired here. You were better off trying to educate me than just calling me a shill.
I'm not in marketing, and I'm not some geek in his mom's basement either. I'm a systems architect in servers, storage and networking. If you'd been paying attention to/. these last eight years you'd know better than call me a shill. Your account is too old to be part of the bangalore astroturf crew, so I'm guessing you're a Microsoft new hire with an old/. account yearning to prove your worth. Try again with somebody else, but don't fight with me here unless you want to lose because I don't put stuff here I can't back up. This is/., and the standards are strict.
Somebody's asking for something (BASIC on a phone) and claiming that the rest of us are feeble for not providing it for him. That's lame. BASIC is so simple that if he were not so feeble he could provide it for himself and give it to us instead of complaining we didn't give it to him. While I don't dig the Randian philosophy, "Atlas shrugged" is a resonant tie for the liberal arts folks among us to engage the question. The GP ought not be modded down as it's an actual complaint about an extant social issue, topical and insightful.
It's OK to make fun of him for demanding something so simple. It's not OK to be so hateful about it.
Your post, it's got control issues. You seem conflicted. You should consult a professional to help you accept your maternal issues and latent homosexuality before sublimating your natural inclinations becomes a social violence issue. A stitch in time saves nine. I can offer a referral, or you can Google it. Please - get help.
Finding the right algorithm is definitely fun. It helps young minds develop and despite the great mass of established art a young mind can find a new path that solves a classical problem exactly because they don't know it's difficult, nor been distracted by the ways others have tried. I've been there on both sides. IBM and Microsoft both lend their engineers to high schools and colleges to gather this IP that the students don't know might be great wealth beyond their imagining - and have since the early '80's at least. There's a lot of dross to wade through, but the effort is worth the gems.
It's also fun to know the lay of the land, to be skilled in the art of Wirth and Turing and Venn and up-to-date with the Journals of the ACM, to stand on the shoulders of giants and lift the bar just a bit higher in one little corner of the field in the hope that one day somebody might deem your work worthy to stand on your shoulder too.
At some point the young minds must transition from the former to the latter, or you're just exploiting them. You owe some of them the bridge. BASIC isn't required (and is, perhaps, prohibitive) for any of this. It's better to teach the machine in the abstract. The effort is probably best moved to elementary schools now. Kids today are pretty far advanced relative to kids from my day. In my day access to actual computers was a special privilege reserved for folks who'd had at least a year's high school instruction. Now kids take to the Internet at 1 or 2 years of age. Finding kids who don't know proving P!=NP is difficult and yet are capable of exploring the question without that bias is going to be a challenge.
The entire basis for this slashdot article is a Y-Combinator blog post from a poster with 3 Karma with 4 comments from 7 hours ago lamenting that there's no full package for developing for phones produced by the OS vendors. The "Boot to BASIC" thing is a retrocon issue more appropriately stated "and we wore onions on our belts" (a sin of which I am also guilty). While I applaud the/. rapid response on this critical issue the underlying assumption that these things don't exist is simply untrue. You'll find the Android SDK here. If you prefer an easier install - especially if developing for nVidia Tegra (but not exclusively) you will find that here. The equivalent iOS version is here. If you must have it, the Windows Phone SDK can be found here.
And yes, all of these things are for developing the app on a PC and deploying and testing on a phone or tablet. Much like the designers of landing gear for the 787 don't machine their prototypes out on the tarmac at Boeing field like their progenitors did, mobile app designers now prefer sitting in a comfortable workstation with a comfortable chair with decent compile times, multiple monitors, a reasonable keyboard and mouse, printing and debugging support rather than developing software on the device itself.
Booting to BASIC (or as was the case on the IBM 5100, APL) was very useful at that time because there were no apps - in some cases no media reader to store or load apps if you could get them on media. We got our apps by buying magazines or such, and manually typing the code in and debugging the typos. That day is long gone, and that's a good thing. Even Windows Phone has thousands of apps and a publicly available SDK - though for me the cyanogen and Android route would be more fun.
Now how did this manage to hit the front page of/.? I smell a rat.
Don't most of us get our netflix some other way now? It's embedded in five phones, two tv's, five tablets, six PCs just at my house. They probably think I'm sharing the account by now. Who really needs another way to watch Netflix? BTW: am watching Netflix right now on tv while tapping this out on my tablet.
Libraries are pretty good about adapting to changes in technology. Some of them already mirror or "lend" vast repositories of ebooks that are public domain or permissively licensed. As this body of work grows it will become an ever-larger share of their assets.
So we will come to an accommodation in between these extremes, since the e-book model costs so much less in paper, printing and freight and overhead profits that the publishers could set the life of a book a 100 lendout and still be ahead.
In addition to providing this service the publishers act as gatekeepers - in a process that could take years and had little to do with improving the quality of published works, but saved to reduce the rate of releases (and hence, the publishers' exposure to risk). If Joe Unknown couldn't get them to publish his books, he was out of the game entirely and there was nothing he could do about it. Now many can and do just self-publish their work through an ePub distributor and can build enough of a following to sustain a nice livelihood without any gatekeeper.
In dead-tree books the cost and risk of self-publishing a minimum run of books was prohibitive and finding bookstores to carry it required more work than the profits to be gained therefrom.
Of course if your works don't delight the reader you're not going to get the following and will have no success. But at least whether or not you get your chance is within your control now.
You can start here and read up on it. It's a rather abstract concept. Publishers need a market with friction because they live on the transaction costs people buying books. In a sense, publishers are the friction.
I don't like these guys but this is the correct assessment of the situation. Limitless free library ebooks are the death of them.
As this year marked the passing of this brilliant man who struggled with this question all his adult life, perhaps it would be best to read it in his own words.
Friction in this context is the level of effort a library patron has to go to to get the book. Zero friction is: as soon as it occurs to them they want the book, it magically appears in their hand. Which is pretty much would unlimited library ebook lending over the Internet would be like. Since it's so much easier to borrow the ebook for free than pay for it, it's not a viable marketplace for publishers to sell books in.
Your deposits are perfectly safe because they don't really exist. They could burn your dollars on deposit and print you new ones on withdrawal. To you it's precious acquired wealth - tokens representing the sweat of your brow, the profits of careful negotiation. To them, it's just not.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose for patents is not to protect the invention any more. It's to protect against ANY invention. And that's not what patents are for.
I was perhaps your biggest fan. But an Apple boycott is not how you come back to us unless they've done something dire and they haven't.
Come back and let us beat down your trolls. That would be better than this.
If you can't do that, at least make the issue SOPA and PIPA. That we can get behind. Apple's not going to do it because their fans really don't give a darn about what us geeks think.
I remember Symbian. That was a Nokia thing, from before they married Microsoft, right? How's that working out?
I realize now I failed to respond to the question. No, I did not get paid, nor induced to post that post. It was my own organic opinion. Normally that would be implied, but the times are what they are.
I don't - and haven't ever - worked for any of Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Nokia, Google, Dell, HP, ASUS, Acer, Nokia, HTC, LG, Lenovo, nor contractors thereto, nor any of their direct competitors - nor ever held any of their securities to date, nor expect to. I'm a small business kind of guy. My opinions here on /. are my own, and are of no relation (and quite dissonant to) my employer's position. I post here only on my own time and give only what I've got of my own opinion. My account predates my present job, and they're quite tolerant of free speech where I work so they'd be fine with me putting my opinion on their time and dime but I still don't do it because I don't want the suspicion of taint. If you're wondering about some other company then please do reply with the name so I can deny it, because it's unlikely you'll guess who I work for - it's a really small company and way off the radar.
I work in IT of course, so sometimes when some of the above companies have the best answer for the customer I recommend them - but in that case I'm working for the customer, not the vendor - and I have no preference for a vendor. The best fit, the latest reliable tech is what I recommend. I recommend many millions of dollars worth of gear a year and the best recommend for a particular customer is a complex metric best not aired here. You were better off trying to educate me than just calling me a shill.
I'm not in marketing, and I'm not some geek in his mom's basement either. I'm a systems architect in servers, storage and networking. If you'd been paying attention to /. these last eight years you'd know better than call me a shill. Your account is too old to be part of the bangalore astroturf crew, so I'm guessing you're a Microsoft new hire with an old /. account yearning to prove your worth. Try again with somebody else, but don't fight with me here unless you want to lose because I don't put stuff here I can't back up. This is /., and the standards are strict.
I'll close with this recent link, where Nokia and Microsoft astroturfers were calling shill on other blog posters: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/dec/19/nokia-microsoft-lumia-comments
Somebody's asking for something (BASIC on a phone) and claiming that the rest of us are feeble for not providing it for him. That's lame. BASIC is so simple that if he were not so feeble he could provide it for himself and give it to us instead of complaining we didn't give it to him. While I don't dig the Randian philosophy, "Atlas shrugged" is a resonant tie for the liberal arts folks among us to engage the question. The GP ought not be modded down as it's an actual complaint about an extant social issue, topical and insightful.
It's OK to make fun of him for demanding something so simple. It's not OK to be so hateful about it.
Your post, it's got control issues. You seem conflicted. You should consult a professional to help you accept your maternal issues and latent homosexuality before sublimating your natural inclinations becomes a social violence issue. A stitch in time saves nine. I can offer a referral, or you can Google it. Please - get help.
Finding the right algorithm is definitely fun. It helps young minds develop and despite the great mass of established art a young mind can find a new path that solves a classical problem exactly because they don't know it's difficult, nor been distracted by the ways others have tried. I've been there on both sides. IBM and Microsoft both lend their engineers to high schools and colleges to gather this IP that the students don't know might be great wealth beyond their imagining - and have since the early '80's at least. There's a lot of dross to wade through, but the effort is worth the gems.
It's also fun to know the lay of the land, to be skilled in the art of Wirth and Turing and Venn and up-to-date with the Journals of the ACM, to stand on the shoulders of giants and lift the bar just a bit higher in one little corner of the field in the hope that one day somebody might deem your work worthy to stand on your shoulder too.
At some point the young minds must transition from the former to the latter, or you're just exploiting them. You owe some of them the bridge. BASIC isn't required (and is, perhaps, prohibitive) for any of this. It's better to teach the machine in the abstract. The effort is probably best moved to elementary schools now. Kids today are pretty far advanced relative to kids from my day. In my day access to actual computers was a special privilege reserved for folks who'd had at least a year's high school instruction. Now kids take to the Internet at 1 or 2 years of age. Finding kids who don't know proving P!=NP is difficult and yet are capable of exploring the question without that bias is going to be a challenge.
What's a "Blackberry Bold 9700"? Is this some new Android phone I haven't heard of, or are you installing Android on a dead badger?
The entire basis for this slashdot article is a Y-Combinator blog post from a poster with 3 Karma with 4 comments from 7 hours ago lamenting that there's no full package for developing for phones produced by the OS vendors. The "Boot to BASIC" thing is a retrocon issue more appropriately stated "and we wore onions on our belts" (a sin of which I am also guilty). While I applaud the /. rapid response on this critical issue the underlying assumption that these things don't exist is simply untrue. You'll find the Android SDK here. If you prefer an easier install - especially if developing for nVidia Tegra (but not exclusively) you will find that here. The equivalent iOS version is here. If you must have it, the Windows Phone SDK can be found here.
And yes, all of these things are for developing the app on a PC and deploying and testing on a phone or tablet. Much like the designers of landing gear for the 787 don't machine their prototypes out on the tarmac at Boeing field like their progenitors did, mobile app designers now prefer sitting in a comfortable workstation with a comfortable chair with decent compile times, multiple monitors, a reasonable keyboard and mouse, printing and debugging support rather than developing software on the device itself.
Booting to BASIC (or as was the case on the IBM 5100, APL) was very useful at that time because there were no apps - in some cases no media reader to store or load apps if you could get them on media. We got our apps by buying magazines or such, and manually typing the code in and debugging the typos. That day is long gone, and that's a good thing. Even Windows Phone has thousands of apps and a publicly available SDK - though for me the cyanogen and Android route would be more fun.
Now how did this manage to hit the front page of /.? I smell a rat.
It only took a year to find a WP7 USP.
If you want BASIC for your phone, make one.
We have several. Why shouldn't they?
Don't most of us get our netflix some other way now? It's embedded in five phones, two tv's, five tablets, six PCs just at my house. They probably think I'm sharing the account by now. Who really needs another way to watch Netflix? BTW: am watching Netflix right now on tv while tapping this out on my tablet.
You can get a 25-30U rolling rack and put it into the garage. I did. $100 at surplus.
Libraries are pretty good about adapting to changes in technology. Some of them already mirror or "lend" vast repositories of ebooks that are public domain or permissively licensed. As this body of work grows it will become an ever-larger share of their assets.
So we will come to an accommodation in between these extremes, since the e-book model costs so much less in paper, printing and freight and overhead profits that the publishers could set the life of a book a 100 lendout and still be ahead.
Or maybe not...
In addition to providing this service the publishers act as gatekeepers - in a process that could take years and had little to do with improving the quality of published works, but saved to reduce the rate of releases (and hence, the publishers' exposure to risk). If Joe Unknown couldn't get them to publish his books, he was out of the game entirely and there was nothing he could do about it. Now many can and do just self-publish their work through an ePub distributor and can build enough of a following to sustain a nice livelihood without any gatekeeper.
In dead-tree books the cost and risk of self-publishing a minimum run of books was prohibitive and finding bookstores to carry it required more work than the profits to be gained therefrom.
Of course if your works don't delight the reader you're not going to get the following and will have no success. But at least whether or not you get your chance is within your control now.
You can start here and read up on it. It's a rather abstract concept. Publishers need a market with friction because they live on the transaction costs people buying books. In a sense, publishers are the friction.
I don't like these guys but this is the correct assessment of the situation. Limitless free library ebooks are the death of them.
As this year marked the passing of this brilliant man who struggled with this question all his adult life, perhaps it would be best to read it in his own words.
Friction in this context is the level of effort a library patron has to go to to get the book. Zero friction is: as soon as it occurs to them they want the book, it magically appears in their hand. Which is pretty much would unlimited library ebook lending over the Internet would be like. Since it's so much easier to borrow the ebook for free than pay for it, it's not a viable marketplace for publishers to sell books in.
Announced in 2010 Found on Reddit.
It's probably time to remind Google what "Don't be evil" is. Breaking the Internet is definitely a no-no.
I wonder how many other companies need to be reminded of this. Anybody got a list?
Or maybe not.
Your deposits are perfectly safe because they don't really exist. They could burn your dollars on deposit and print you new ones on withdrawal. To you it's precious acquired wealth - tokens representing the sweat of your brow, the profits of careful negotiation. To them, it's just not.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Google+market+share
You went AC on this one because you knew it was a horrid thing to say. Are you proud of yourself now? That would measure you.