While I appreciate the irony, I'd consider this more humiliating if MS were actually in the wireless LAN software business. A better example is the internal use of Source Depot/Perforce, which, while it runs on Windows, has all the design sensibilities of a good Unix app.
After 5 years, I make $78K (started at the bottom). But, oh yeah, I haven't worked more than 35 hours/week in a couple of years. They love my work, and it all happens in a compact window between 10 and 5. It feels pretty fair, for the moment.
The two features you requested, real office applications and hi-DPI support, are both in the next release of the PocketPC. The current release of the PPC already has email software and a web browser, as well as office apps that will happily chew up your documents and spit them out with data loss.
As for the API set, most of the Windows API is represented in identical (if slightly less feature-rich) form on the PPC. The real difficulty in porting isn't in the APIs but in the drastically different UI paradigm combined with the space restrictions. Your average PPC has 16 MB available by default for application use, which isn't nearly enough for just about any modern desktop application.
Speech recognition is a fine idea, but the same device specification restrictions apply.
Every day I'm not developing for an open platform, I'm a mercenary. I take the skills that I can pick up on the job, and make myself more valuable to the next man with a plan who wants to pay me more than this one.
No one controls what I take with me in my mind. No one sees how I leverage it. It's all common-knowledge legos, assembled in interesting and useful ways.
It's nice to conribute to the community, but it's a lot nicer to make a sweet living wage while brushing up for the next employer.
The sluggishness of the device has nothing to do with the OS or apps software on the phone, and everything to do with the flash filesystem and the driver that powers it. The SPV is quite powerful enough to run snappy on WinCE - the bottleneck lies in the file I/O tech used for this version.
This will eventually be fixed, but it will require new hardware and/or driver upgrades. It is currently the #1 SPV complaint, I believe.
For the record, MS is providing everything on the phone, software-wise, from the hardware abstraction layer up. Beneath the HAL, in code not owned by MS, is the drivers and the radio stack.
The SPV suffers from 2 major software flaws that are outside MS control - IPSM (Intel Persistent Storage Manager) flash filesystem, which eliminates the need for a backup battery but introduces enormous performance problems, and a dodgy radio stack that is less than 100% reliable.
The SPV also suffers from several hardware-related problems, which are design flaws owned by HTC. Among these are inferior audio quality, key size and spacing, and general sturdiness.
At launch time, Orange completely locked down the SPV, which shut out every hobbyist developer and generated piles of (well-deserved) bad press. Shortly after this fiasco, 2 security holes were discovered that negated this lockdown. Sometime after that, Orange reversed their policy and provided the unlocking configuration for anyone who wanted it.
All the other flaws on the phone that are visible in the software are the fault of MS and its version 1 process, but it's interesting to note that many of the major complaints about the device are, in fact, breakdowns outside the sphere of MS influence. (Not that it makes any difference at all for Joe User.)
I second this experience. The 58 days I spent at MCI-WorldCom were the worst days of my life. I have never worked a worse job, and could never go back. It is by far the most morally repugnant work I've ever done.
You are as free as the schedule at Microsoft. Big thinkers who can execute on their ideas get big rewards, but it's the execution timeframe and the idea's direct marketability that are the deciding factors. Also, MS maintains a pretty sizeable research department where people mostly get to sit and come up with cool stuff all day.
Stinger was mostly Europe because it was initially GSM-only, the most unified and mature cell phone market at the time of the project's inception (1999). (That's still mostly true, although CDMA and digital PCS have come reasonably far on the high-speed data front).
There was no experimenting with different licensing and signing programs, just a lack of people to build the specialized hardware and mobile operators willing to deploy the device on their networks. To this day, only Orange in the UK has signed on as an operator.
Ozone for PPC GSM has shipped, but Ozone for Smartphone hasn't gone out the door yet.
As for the winner of this war, one thing is certain: whatever the eventually outcome, the fight will a very long time. Gates believes that mobile phone OS/apps sales are a business worth a couple of billion dollars/year, and he may be right. There will be money and dev work behind the MS push for many years to come.
What we really would have appreciated here is if your prime minister would have grown a set and resigned as Bush's poodle so that Dubya's farce of a coalition would lose its last legitimate leg. The UK is literally the only country that gives Dubya's imperialist war the slightest patina of multilateral legitimacy.
Fortunately, the rest of the world doesn't seem fooled. They just haven't gotten around to doing anything about it, yet.
Right...generating income for the populace. Uh huh. Just like US multinationals do all over the 3rd world.
It's no wonder Rove says that too much education makes a good Republican a Democrat. Someone needs to teach the dittos to back away from pit bull radio an hour per day and actually do some reading.
Hunger's really only a problem in the beginning-game, in my experience. There's enough edible corpses around that you can generally stay pretty fat and sassy further down.
Nethack compiles flawlessly on Win32, as long as you follow the instructions. I changed the color of floating eyes from dark blue to yellow, since I was tired of losing games by accidentally bumping into them thinking they were Orcs.
Principle of least privilege, OOP-style. It actually makes pretty good sense under a lot of business scenarios, I think, and it will ensure the upgrade cycle for at least one more release of Office, which is good news for MSFT shareholders.
Naa, this is just sweet revenge for years of torment. I love coming back to my hometown on vacation from my high-paying job and seeing the assholes who used to pick on me still working retail over at Sears. It's just, somehow.
I don't feel that way about the ones who didn't pick on me and are still stuck waiting tables - I'm friends with those folks.
I don't think it's so much the fact that the bundled software is there, but the fact that some of the software parts (most noticably IE) is so integrated into the OS that there is
no possible way to uninstall it!
Yes. If you uninstalled IE, you'd break the OS help system and probably lots of other bits, so you're not allowed. The act of not being able to delete a critical system file hardly sounds like a conspiracy to me.
Re:Pointless concept
on
Sim-Dud?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I can't figure out why EA ever thought this was a good idea. For me, 9/10ths of the appeal of a subscription game is being someone, and being somewhere, that I can't be in real life. Spending 3 hours to earn another bar in my "Strength" meter in order to keep up with my friends is completely worthless, unless I can take that extra bar and do something cool with it.
If the only cool thing I can do is get a slightly better job as a 3rd string linebacker and bring home $10 more/week to flush away on virtual McDs, there's no way I'd waste the time.
That's the irony of the Sims Online: in order to be fun, they'd have to do away with all the things that made the Sims (offline) a success.
Slashdot Mirror
While I appreciate the irony, I'd consider this more humiliating if MS were actually in the wireless LAN software business. A better example is the internal use of Source Depot/Perforce, which, while it runs on Windows, has all the design sensibilities of a good Unix app.
Heh heh, yes. We're just part of the shipping cycle, like the programmers and the designers. We ship a lot of bugs...
After 5 years, I make $78K (started at the bottom). But, oh yeah, I haven't worked more than 35 hours/week in a couple of years. They love my work, and it all happens in a compact window between 10 and 5. It feels pretty fair, for the moment.
...that this was one more step on the road to realizing the Hitchhiker movie's vision of a Point of View ray.
The two features you requested, real office applications and hi-DPI support, are both in the next release of the PocketPC. The current release of the PPC already has email software and a web browser, as well as office apps that will happily chew up your documents and spit them out with data loss.
As for the API set, most of the Windows API is represented in identical (if slightly less feature-rich) form on the PPC. The real difficulty in porting isn't in the APIs but in the drastically different UI paradigm combined with the space restrictions. Your average PPC has 16 MB available by default for application use, which isn't nearly enough for just about any modern desktop application.
Speech recognition is a fine idea, but the same device specification restrictions apply.
Am I seriously the only guy here who has slept with women at least partially due to my nerdy prowess behind a monitor?
It's probably a remote control for advancing PowerPoint slides from a distance.
Every day I'm not developing for an open platform, I'm a mercenary. I take the skills that I can pick up on the job, and make myself more valuable to the next man with a plan who wants to pay me more than this one.
No one controls what I take with me in my mind. No one sees how I leverage it. It's all common-knowledge legos, assembled in interesting and useful ways.
It's nice to conribute to the community, but it's a lot nicer to make a sweet living wage while brushing up for the next employer.
I don't think red hats are a good idea at all. Ever.
The sluggishness of the device has nothing to do with the OS or apps software on the phone, and everything to do with the flash filesystem and the driver that powers it. The SPV is quite powerful enough to run snappy on WinCE - the bottleneck lies in the file I/O tech used for this version.
This will eventually be fixed, but it will require new hardware and/or driver upgrades. It is currently the #1 SPV complaint, I believe.
For the record, MS is providing everything on the phone, software-wise, from the hardware abstraction layer up. Beneath the HAL, in code not owned by MS, is the drivers and the radio stack.
The SPV suffers from 2 major software flaws that are outside MS control - IPSM (Intel Persistent Storage Manager) flash filesystem, which eliminates the need for a backup battery but introduces enormous performance problems, and a dodgy radio stack that is less than 100% reliable.
The SPV also suffers from several hardware-related problems, which are design flaws owned by HTC. Among these are inferior audio quality, key size and spacing, and general sturdiness.
At launch time, Orange completely locked down the SPV, which shut out every hobbyist developer and generated piles of (well-deserved) bad press. Shortly after this fiasco, 2 security holes were discovered that negated this lockdown. Sometime after that, Orange reversed their policy and provided the unlocking configuration for anyone who wanted it.
All the other flaws on the phone that are visible in the software are the fault of MS and its version 1 process, but it's interesting to note that many of the major complaints about the device are, in fact, breakdowns outside the sphere of MS influence. (Not that it makes any difference at all for Joe User.)
I second this experience. The 58 days I spent at MCI-WorldCom were the worst days of my life. I have never worked a worse job, and could never go back. It is by far the most morally repugnant work I've ever done.
You are as free as the schedule at Microsoft. Big thinkers who can execute on their ideas get big rewards, but it's the execution timeframe and the idea's direct marketability that are the deciding factors. Also, MS maintains a pretty sizeable research department where people mostly get to sit and come up with cool stuff all day.
Stinger was mostly Europe because it was initially GSM-only, the most unified and mature cell phone market at the time of the project's inception (1999). (That's still mostly true, although CDMA and digital PCS have come reasonably far on the high-speed data front).
There was no experimenting with different licensing and signing programs, just a lack of people to build the specialized hardware and mobile operators willing to deploy the device on their networks. To this day, only Orange in the UK has signed on as an operator.
Ozone for PPC GSM has shipped, but Ozone for Smartphone hasn't gone out the door yet.
As for the winner of this war, one thing is certain: whatever the eventually outcome, the fight will a very long time. Gates believes that mobile phone OS/apps sales are a business worth a couple of billion dollars/year, and he may be right. There will be money and dev work behind the MS push for many years to come.
Why would MS cut AMD's throat? MS doesn't give a damn about who's making hardware, as long as OEMs are buying it and running Windows on it.
What we really would have appreciated here is if your prime minister would have grown a set and resigned as Bush's poodle so that Dubya's farce of a coalition would lose its last legitimate leg. The UK is literally the only country that gives Dubya's imperialist war the slightest patina of multilateral legitimacy.
Fortunately, the rest of the world doesn't seem fooled. They just haven't gotten around to doing anything about it, yet.
Right...generating income for the populace. Uh huh. Just like US multinationals do all over the 3rd world.
It's no wonder Rove says that too much education makes a good Republican a Democrat. Someone needs to teach the dittos to back away from pit bull radio an hour per day and actually do some reading.
Hunger's really only a problem in the beginning-game, in my experience. There's enough edible corpses around that you can generally stay pretty fat and sassy further down.
Nethack compiles flawlessly on Win32, as long as you follow the instructions. I changed the color of floating eyes from dark blue to yellow, since I was tired of losing games by accidentally bumping into them thinking they were Orcs.
Principle of least privilege, OOP-style. It actually makes pretty good sense under a lot of business scenarios, I think, and it will ensure the upgrade cycle for at least one more release of Office, which is good news for MSFT shareholders.
Sorry, that's incorrect - ebay does have a privacy policy (see this post.)
Naa, this is just sweet revenge for years of torment. I love coming back to my hometown on vacation from my high-paying job and seeing the assholes who used to pick on me still working retail over at Sears. It's just, somehow.
I don't feel that way about the ones who didn't pick on me and are still stuck waiting tables - I'm friends with those folks.
I can't figure out why EA ever thought this was a good idea. For me, 9/10ths of the appeal of a subscription game is being someone, and being somewhere, that I can't be in real life. Spending 3 hours to earn another bar in my "Strength" meter in order to keep up with my friends is completely worthless, unless I can take that extra bar and do something cool with it.
If the only cool thing I can do is get a slightly better job as a 3rd string linebacker and bring home $10 more/week to flush away on virtual McDs, there's no way I'd waste the time.
That's the irony of the Sims Online: in order to be fun, they'd have to do away with all the things that made the Sims (offline) a success.
Only difference is: UHF was a good movie.