... by diligently following those managers out the door.
People are clearly free to disagree with the course that the company is taking, and then find a different job. But, if they are doing so because they are following the managers--who will inevitably be let go--making these bad decisions, then they are just as bad for it.
Now the in-fighting cannot frequently cripple development of other projects.
Makes me feel a lot less bad for the Nokia employees that walked out. Although likely moving at the whims of management, this report makes them sound more like hobbyists that simply want to build their own and tinker, rather than shipping a good product.
It certainly makes a good case for replacing a lot of the management as well. If employees end up leaving as a result, then they probably weren't great employees anyway, or they did not understand the problems that they were causing to their own development cycle by diligently following those managers out the door.
Microsoft, Acer, Samsung, HTC, LG, and Nokia. Those are all big names, although--to be fair--LG may not continue with WP7. With or without LG, that's a fair number to call "a lot."
That's very true, but they were only doing fine in the sense that they were selling things now. I don't believe that they could continue to sell things by pushing Symbian, and MeeGo is a joke at this point.
Only because Nokia was overvalued to begin with. If moving to WP7 is the end of the world as they know it, then maintaining Symbian while launching MeeGo as a pathetic alternative the other much better developed ecosystems (actually including WP7) means that their world was already over.
At the end of the day, it does not make a difference whether they managed to jump to WP7, Android, iOS, WebOS or even BlackBerry OS. The key is that they needed to either build yet another competitive ecosystem, which they appeared unable to do, or join one. They chose the one that enabled them to exceptionally reduce their R&D budget, which was also on a roller coaster ride out of control while bearing no fruits (somehow they were spending over400% of Apple's R&D budget and still only pumping out the irrelevant Symbian and MeeGo).
Both Bing and Zune may have small market shares, but they both have grown substantially month-to-month over the past 2-3 months.
Microsoft's market percentage is small, but it's a solid number two in both markets.
I actually own a MacBook Pro, but I dual boot with Windows 7 because I vastly prefer the experience. The only negative is that the poorly written drivers for the Windows side lead to noticeably lower battery life, but that's thanks to Apple.
I am tired of Apple's stranglehold of their devices, and with the Mac App Store, it's only getting worse. I hate Java, but Apple's killing it off simply to make a tighter grip on their platform and funnel people into writing Mac specific software. In some cases, that is probably good for the end user, but in all cases it is to lock people into Apple. Look what Apple is trying to do to competing eReaders written for iOS--trying to leech 30% of the revenues from now-required in-app purchases.
I've seen that movie. It ends with the US Government investigating the company and either breaking it up, or fining them excessively (depends if you have the Director's Cut or not).
And I am not sure about anything that is in absolute love with Google. I use Google for their search only when Bing cannot find it (Google is better at finding developer related topics, but Bing seems better at most other things for me), and I use Google for GMail because nothing comes close. But, I have no attachment to Google, just as I have no attachment to Facebook. The second a better service that is more keen to protect my privacy appears, rather than basing its business model on destroying my privacy, then I will jump ship.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I think your blowing it far FAR out of proportion.
Intentionally to make the point. Sure, it happens to a very small group, but the odds of it hitting you probably increase with every text that you send on an Android 2.2 device. My point isn't even that it's the end of the world. Rather, my point is that such fundamental issue could be left unfixed on your phone, and that's a huge deal.
Secondly using your own numbers, your telling me that 89% of Android phones are running 2.x? Ya, that's some SERIOUS fragmentation.
They're not my numbers. I linked to them directly on Wikipedia.
And yes, that is serious fragmentation because what I didn't note was that of that 89%, 31.4% are running Android 2.0, or Android 2.1, which came out well over a year ago. A tenth of the platform is using Android 1.5 or 1.6. Roughly a third is using Android 2.0 or 2.1. About half is using Android 2.2. Less than a hundredth is using Android 2.3. Those are huge percentages in every single group, except the latest release that was not even released this year.
WHA?!?! no software support? Where did THAT come from? Ok so PC's have more then 1 OS and more then 1 Hardware type. Are you telling me I cannot depend on getting any software support for my PC?
You missed the entire point. This goes right back to my original point of the texting bug. If you are stuck in Android 2.2 with a brand new phone, then you have no support.
What, did Programmers suddenly become dumb or something? ZOMG, I have to support 800x480 AND 800x400.. ZOMG, only 89% of people use Froyo, I don't know what Operating System version to target!!
Tell that to the Angry Birds developers. And 89% are not on Froyo. It has not even broken 60%. Clearly the target, but also clearly a joke.
Your entire post seems to suggest that all Android phones are powerful phones. In reality, they fall along the entire gamut of the market. A smart phone does not necessarily have to cost a lot, nor does it have to be a good phone, and Android definitely covers that ground.
Palm is even about to cover that ground with their new credit card sized, WebOS 3.0 phone. The fact that Windows Phone 7 already included a smaller screen size in its specs immediately suggests to me that you not only ignored them because you assume anything pro-MS is done by an MS fanboy (I currently own an iPhone 4 on AT&T, but I am tired of iOS), and that you lack the ability to see beyond what is happening the market right now.
I never once suggested to anyone that Windows Mobile 6.5 would beat Android because it was a hack on top of a dated OS. Windows Phone 7 will scale down nicely, especially given their strong development tools rooted with WPF, which places a strong emphasis on vectors. Contrast that to Android, and you don't even know if an app will run on your phone (whether by performance or other reasons), and I'd take the smaller WP7 experience that any day of the week.
Microsoft completely wrote their mobile platform starting from a new WinCE kernel. In their eyes, Windows Mobile is no-more.
Therefore, the APIs could note be written and effectively tested in time to ensure performance and battery life were maintained. This is similar to the fact that when WP7 was announced, iOS (then, iPhone OS 3.0) had not announced multitasking, nor had they announced that the original iPhone (2G) would not be supported at all, and the iPhone 3G would not support multitasking.
As it turns out, the iPhone 3G does not have enough memory to handle multitasking. It's performance is abysmal, at best, with it turned on (on a jailbroken device). So, with that in mind, I would consider the brisk pace that Microsoft has actually developed the entire OS, "soon" (mid-to-late 2011) to be including multitasking, a very good sign. Under two years to have a fully featured mobile OS? That's faster than Google.
My biggest concern with Windows Phone 7 is how long will Microsoft play ball with the carriers before simply bypassing them to send users the updates directly. Users will have waited about two months for the first WP7 update simply because the carriers are dragging their feet and stifling everyone, except themselves. I hope this process woke Microsoft up because users getting screwed by the carriers is going to look bad on Microsoft, as the carriers will not accept any of the blame.
The only mobile OS development that has been faster might be WebOS, which took a nosedive following HP's purchase of Palm.
As Nokia shifts to support Windows Phone, I think that 1% will start to grow considerably. At the very least, people will accidentally buy Windows Phone as they continue their Nokia stable of phones, which still outsells Android. Add to that their very real customer satisfaction rate (a large percentage [reportedly 90%+ in their marketing material] of a relatively small number), and you have a huge problem for Android.
Not to mention, as Android starts to falter based on its inability to force carriers and manufacturers to upgrade. Why is my friend still using an unrooted Evo running Android 2.2? According to the table on Wikipedia, less than 1% of Android users are running 2.3 (the version with the fix that stops texts from going to random people...). Over 10% are still running Android 1.5 and 1.6, combined.
My officemate (we're both Java developers) wants an Android, but he refuses to get one for two reasons. First, there are major hardware changes coming in the next month or two, which make it obvious to wait (he may actually get the Bionic). Second, fragmentation means he cannot depend on actually receiving any software support after whatever is initially on the phone. That's pathetic.
That is not a platform that I want to develop for, nor is it one that I want to even use. Google needs to take a serious look at this fragmentation and take care of it, or Windows Phone really will take over its current position. After all, it's not like most Android users have a track record for buying non-free apps that are locking them to the platform.
I wonder how many people use the same username as their email address.
Honestly, who thinks it would be that hard to go through and scan the internet for usernames, and then append every popular domain name after them.
Add to that the profiles that could be scanned, and combined, along the way, and you can probably find pretty good, targeted ads in a very automatable way.
Business people. This is oddly similar to Apple actually, where they finally turned things around with Steve Jobs who, like Steve Ballmer, is not an engineer.
Steve Jobs may be all about sales, but he effectively placed smart people with the engineering mindsets where they needed to be.
I look forward to Microsoft doing the same, but I hope that they don't just promote/hire engineers for the sake of having an engineer in the position and actually find someone capable of doing both.
It is different. They are copying a term related to a clicked on link. It would happen on Slashdot searches (well, probably, because I'm not sure how convoluted the new search system is or is not) too.
It just happens that it was Google that caught them doing it. And not a grocery store making the honey pot.
It's as-if you didn't even read the summary, or understand it. This is Slashdot, so I can forgive your ignorance with regard to not reading the story, but the summary?!
Both Google and Microsoft take voluntary user input (their Toolbars) to help improve their results. So, if a million people in Bing search for "1s44c" and they decide that the third result in their search result is the best, then it will be clicked on the most by a large quantity. Over time, with probably few people searching for such a unique term, that third result would rise to the top.
Similarly, by scanning for user input--likely from all textboxes, just like the Google Toolbar does--and associating it with a user's click, they can associate terms with links. If an explosive number of users, such as a swarm of Google machines acting as bots to select "fqweqfasfqfasda" and then clicking on "the History of Unicorns," then it associates the term with the link, thereby raising the relevance of the link with respect to the term.
By doing it with such an unusual term, it was easy to raise the relevance/value of the link when querying for the random letters because there was almost certainly nothing else to pull from with respect to it. Had Google attempted to do this with a term like, say, "Slashdot," then I highly doubt that they would have been nearly as successful.
This is click fraud. Plain and simple. They intentionally linked their clicks to search criteria that did not match. Google has been crowing about this for years, and fighting spammers that do it. I just hope Microsoft can return the favor using Google's Toolbar.
Thanks for posting the dumbest comment of the year.
Maybe we can have a poll and start links to this and others?
The stupidity of the OP is just insane. Lets not give the armor to the people that need it the most, and who are the frontline defenders of our freedom (NO MATTER WHAT COUNTRY). Whether or not you agree with the Iraq war is completely irrelevant.
You, sir (I say this VERY loosely), need to move to a country without a military if you feel this way. That, or just go somewhere like North Korea and have fun. If you live in a free country, then be happy that your stupid ass was allowed to be born and move on with your life, because your incredible sense of strategy and logic was doing something else when stupidity was creeping into your brain.
Actually, I have always found my.NET sites to be extremely responsive.
Really, the only hold up with sites is the databases, and caching is so powerful in.NET that can become extremely managable.
I had once coded a news engine that used caching, and I had extremely fast load times using output caching, standard data caching, and web controls. The site never launched to the public, and the server would not have been able to handle it anyway, but my point is that coded correctly, I would gladly use.NET on a project like you mentioned.
It could be that I have a bias, but I also code Windows software with.NET.
I tend to completely agree with that and it really tends to work against us to have generic My Documents folders.
I'm actually looking forward to the Vista feature with the dynamic folder searches. It may have existed on something else first, but I don't really care and I still am looking quite forward to organizing dynamically and effectively. From what I've seen of the beta, it does work pretty well and very quickly.
No better at spreading than any current issues. So lets say they break the honeypots, all that they did was make it so people suddenly don't get a warning coming their way (probably), and maybe when they contact the honeypot server (since they couldn't be contacting us due to sheer volume), then they can send something to us. However, all we need from the honeypot is a signature, and we don't have to execute ANYTHING coming from their transmition to our computers because the point of it is to show us a virus or trojan. So, the virus on the honeypot needs to double its efforts and know an exploit on the callers system in order to break into it.
It's not worth it because there would most certainly be plenty of system unprotected and messing with a computer that is monitored for signs of trouble by people that know what they're doing is an easy way to get caught earlier in the game than they do these days.
That's my opinion anyway. I don't think the system would really work because who would manage all 800,000+ machines? Who would pay for it?
My understanding is that the program that is being dealt with has some control over the whole restart process. So, if the program tells the restart manager, "No, I want to going with the session using current data," then the restart manager waits until it is done and probably requires a reboot. If the restart manager is told, "Ya, go ahead and restart," then I would most certainly assume all session data is lost because a side effect of the browser closing is the session data is lost (by design).
So, IE could tell the restart manager to hang on while it informs the user to either close the session, or delay the updates.
Of course, that's just my understanding and I could be off base.
Slashdot Mirror
Read to the end of the sentence next time.
People are clearly free to disagree with the course that the company is taking, and then find a different job. But, if they are doing so because they are following the managers--who will inevitably be let go--making these bad decisions, then they are just as bad for it.
HTC, Motorola and Samsung are doing terribly these days.
Now the in-fighting cannot frequently cripple development of other projects.
Makes me feel a lot less bad for the Nokia employees that walked out. Although likely moving at the whims of management, this report makes them sound more like hobbyists that simply want to build their own and tinker, rather than shipping a good product.
It certainly makes a good case for replacing a lot of the management as well. If employees end up leaving as a result, then they probably weren't great employees anyway, or they did not understand the problems that they were causing to their own development cycle by diligently following those managers out the door.
The government knows best, right? Right?
Microsoft, Acer, Samsung, HTC, LG, and Nokia. Those are all big names, although--to be fair--LG may not continue with WP7. With or without LG, that's a fair number to call "a lot."
That's very true, but they were only doing fine in the sense that they were selling things now. I don't believe that they could continue to sell things by pushing Symbian, and MeeGo is a joke at this point.
Only because Nokia was overvalued to begin with. If moving to WP7 is the end of the world as they know it, then maintaining Symbian while launching MeeGo as a pathetic alternative the other much better developed ecosystems (actually including WP7) means that their world was already over.
At the end of the day, it does not make a difference whether they managed to jump to WP7, Android, iOS, WebOS or even BlackBerry OS. The key is that they needed to either build yet another competitive ecosystem, which they appeared unable to do, or join one. They chose the one that enabled them to exceptionally reduce their R&D budget, which was also on a roller coaster ride out of control while bearing no fruits (somehow they were spending over 400% of Apple's R&D budget and still only pumping out the irrelevant Symbian and MeeGo).
Both Bing and Zune may have small market shares, but they both have grown substantially month-to-month over the past 2-3 months.
Microsoft's market percentage is small, but it's a solid number two in both markets.
I actually own a MacBook Pro, but I dual boot with Windows 7 because I vastly prefer the experience. The only negative is that the poorly written drivers for the Windows side lead to noticeably lower battery life, but that's thanks to Apple.
I am tired of Apple's stranglehold of their devices, and with the Mac App Store, it's only getting worse. I hate Java, but Apple's killing it off simply to make a tighter grip on their platform and funnel people into writing Mac specific software. In some cases, that is probably good for the end user, but in all cases it is to lock people into Apple. Look what Apple is trying to do to competing eReaders written for iOS--trying to leech 30% of the revenues from now-required in-app purchases.
I've seen that movie. It ends with the US Government investigating the company and either breaking it up, or fining them excessively (depends if you have the Director's Cut or not).
And I am not sure about anything that is in absolute love with Google. I use Google for their search only when Bing cannot find it (Google is better at finding developer related topics, but Bing seems better at most other things for me), and I use Google for GMail because nothing comes close. But, I have no attachment to Google, just as I have no attachment to Facebook. The second a better service that is more keen to protect my privacy appears, rather than basing its business model on destroying my privacy, then I will jump ship.
Intentionally to make the point. Sure, it happens to a very small group, but the odds of it hitting you probably increase with every text that you send on an Android 2.2 device. My point isn't even that it's the end of the world. Rather, my point is that such fundamental issue could be left unfixed on your phone, and that's a huge deal.
They're not my numbers. I linked to them directly on Wikipedia.
And yes, that is serious fragmentation because what I didn't note was that of that 89%, 31.4% are running Android 2.0, or Android 2.1, which came out well over a year ago. A tenth of the platform is using Android 1.5 or 1.6. Roughly a third is using Android 2.0 or 2.1. About half is using Android 2.2. Less than a hundredth is using Android 2.3. Those are huge percentages in every single group, except the latest release that was not even released this year.
You missed the entire point. This goes right back to my original point of the texting bug. If you are stuck in Android 2.2 with a brand new phone, then you have no support.
Tell that to the Angry Birds developers. And 89% are not on Froyo. It has not even broken 60%. Clearly the target, but also clearly a joke.
Your entire post seems to suggest that all Android phones are powerful phones. In reality, they fall along the entire gamut of the market. A smart phone does not necessarily have to cost a lot, nor does it have to be a good phone, and Android definitely covers that ground.
Palm is even about to cover that ground with their new credit card sized, WebOS 3.0 phone. The fact that Windows Phone 7 already included a smaller screen size in its specs immediately suggests to me that you not only ignored them because you assume anything pro-MS is done by an MS fanboy (I currently own an iPhone 4 on AT&T, but I am tired of iOS), and that you lack the ability to see beyond what is happening the market right now.
I never once suggested to anyone that Windows Mobile 6.5 would beat Android because it was a hack on top of a dated OS. Windows Phone 7 will scale down nicely, especially given their strong development tools rooted with WPF, which places a strong emphasis on vectors. Contrast that to Android, and you don't even know if an app will run on your phone (whether by performance or other reasons), and I'd take the smaller WP7 experience that any day of the week.
Microsoft completely wrote their mobile platform starting from a new WinCE kernel. In their eyes, Windows Mobile is no-more.
Therefore, the APIs could note be written and effectively tested in time to ensure performance and battery life were maintained. This is similar to the fact that when WP7 was announced, iOS (then, iPhone OS 3.0) had not announced multitasking, nor had they announced that the original iPhone (2G) would not be supported at all, and the iPhone 3G would not support multitasking.
As it turns out, the iPhone 3G does not have enough memory to handle multitasking. It's performance is abysmal, at best, with it turned on (on a jailbroken device). So, with that in mind, I would consider the brisk pace that Microsoft has actually developed the entire OS, "soon" (mid-to-late 2011) to be including multitasking, a very good sign. Under two years to have a fully featured mobile OS? That's faster than Google.
My biggest concern with Windows Phone 7 is how long will Microsoft play ball with the carriers before simply bypassing them to send users the updates directly. Users will have waited about two months for the first WP7 update simply because the carriers are dragging their feet and stifling everyone, except themselves. I hope this process woke Microsoft up because users getting screwed by the carriers is going to look bad on Microsoft, as the carriers will not accept any of the blame.
The only mobile OS development that has been faster might be WebOS, which took a nosedive following HP's purchase of Palm.
As Nokia shifts to support Windows Phone, I think that 1% will start to grow considerably. At the very least, people will accidentally buy Windows Phone as they continue their Nokia stable of phones, which still outsells Android. Add to that their very real customer satisfaction rate (a large percentage [reportedly 90%+ in their marketing material] of a relatively small number), and you have a huge problem for Android.
Not to mention, as Android starts to falter based on its inability to force carriers and manufacturers to upgrade. Why is my friend still using an unrooted Evo running Android 2.2? According to the table on Wikipedia, less than 1% of Android users are running 2.3 (the version with the fix that stops texts from going to random people...). Over 10% are still running Android 1.5 and 1.6, combined.
My officemate (we're both Java developers) wants an Android, but he refuses to get one for two reasons. First, there are major hardware changes coming in the next month or two, which make it obvious to wait (he may actually get the Bionic). Second, fragmentation means he cannot depend on actually receiving any software support after whatever is initially on the phone. That's pathetic.
That is not a platform that I want to develop for, nor is it one that I want to even use. Google needs to take a serious look at this fragmentation and take care of it, or Windows Phone really will take over its current position. After all, it's not like most Android users have a track record for buying non-free apps that are locking them to the platform.
I wonder how many people use the same username as their email address.
Honestly, who thinks it would be that hard to go through and scan the internet for usernames, and then append every popular domain name after them.
Add to that the profiles that could be scanned, and combined, along the way, and you can probably find pretty good, targeted ads in a very automatable way.
Business people. This is oddly similar to Apple actually, where they finally turned things around with Steve Jobs who, like Steve Ballmer, is not an engineer.
Steve Jobs may be all about sales, but he effectively placed smart people with the engineering mindsets where they needed to be.
I look forward to Microsoft doing the same, but I hope that they don't just promote/hire engineers for the sake of having an engineer in the position and actually find someone capable of doing both.
It is different. They are copying a term related to a clicked on link. It would happen on Slashdot searches (well, probably, because I'm not sure how convoluted the new search system is or is not) too. It just happens that it was Google that caught them doing it. And not a grocery store making the honey pot.
It's as-if you didn't even read the summary, or understand it. This is Slashdot, so I can forgive your ignorance with regard to not reading the story, but the summary?! Both Google and Microsoft take voluntary user input (their Toolbars) to help improve their results. So, if a million people in Bing search for "1s44c" and they decide that the third result in their search result is the best, then it will be clicked on the most by a large quantity. Over time, with probably few people searching for such a unique term, that third result would rise to the top. Similarly, by scanning for user input--likely from all textboxes, just like the Google Toolbar does--and associating it with a user's click, they can associate terms with links. If an explosive number of users, such as a swarm of Google machines acting as bots to select "fqweqfasfqfasda" and then clicking on "the History of Unicorns," then it associates the term with the link, thereby raising the relevance of the link with respect to the term. By doing it with such an unusual term, it was easy to raise the relevance/value of the link when querying for the random letters because there was almost certainly nothing else to pull from with respect to it. Had Google attempted to do this with a term like, say, "Slashdot," then I highly doubt that they would have been nearly as successful. This is click fraud. Plain and simple. They intentionally linked their clicks to search criteria that did not match. Google has been crowing about this for years, and fighting spammers that do it. I just hope Microsoft can return the favor using Google's Toolbar.
Maybe we can have a poll and start links to this and others?
The stupidity of the OP is just insane. Lets not give the armor to the people that need it the most, and who are the frontline defenders of our freedom (NO MATTER WHAT COUNTRY). Whether or not you agree with the Iraq war is completely irrelevant.
You, sir (I say this VERY loosely), need to move to a country without a military if you feel this way. That, or just go somewhere like North Korea and have fun. If you live in a free country, then be happy that your stupid ass was allowed to be born and move on with your life, because your incredible sense of strategy and logic was doing something else when stupidity was creeping into your brain.
Really, the only hold up with sites is the databases, and caching is so powerful in .NET that can become extremely managable.
I had once coded a news engine that used caching, and I had extremely fast load times using output caching, standard data caching, and web controls. The site never launched to the public, and the server would not have been able to handle it anyway, but my point is that coded correctly, I would gladly use .NET on a project like you mentioned.
It could be that I have a bias, but I also code Windows software with .NET.
I'm actually looking forward to the Vista feature with the dynamic folder searches. It may have existed on something else first, but I don't really care and I still am looking quite forward to organizing dynamically and effectively. From what I've seen of the beta, it does work pretty well and very quickly.
Personally, I'm kind of worried that a server-side fix from Google can fix it--what else are they doing with a Google Desktop connection?
It's not worth it because there would most certainly be plenty of system unprotected and messing with a computer that is monitored for signs of trouble by people that know what they're doing is an easy way to get caught earlier in the game than they do these days.
That's my opinion anyway. I don't think the system would really work because who would manage all 800,000+ machines? Who would pay for it?
So, IE could tell the restart manager to hang on while it informs the user to either close the session, or delay the updates.
Of course, that's just my understanding and I could be off base.
If an author threatened to sue me, then I'd just remove the book completely.
Also, I love how you use "eventually" as though it actually means something for profit seeking people/businesses.
versus
November 18, 2001One hell of a launch title.