there's a way to do MIDP through an application that creates an emulation layer. I don't know what it's like, though. And someone's written a MIDP to APK converter.
There's a real feeling that it's a hacker phone, though. Few restrictions on apps (you can jailbreak it but it's hardly worth it) and lots of FOSS because the developer kit is free, Eclipse based and cross-platform.
The problem for Apple is that they want to control the store but they also don't want bad PR. If they allow more adult apps on the store, then when some kid manages to get an app from it, it's Apple who are to blame.
Android aren't going to allow anything adult on their store either, but the difference in attitude is that you can override your phone easily and get apps elsewhere. This allows those users who want those apps (or political apps) to get them without without it reflecting on Google.
Android is about the right mix - AppStore and initially, the OS only allows AppStore apps. But go into options, change the setting and you can start getting apps from anywhere. There's quite a lot of Android FOSS out there.
Didn't you read the dozens of articles on the net about how Apple works with regards to The App Store? They're like Cohaagen in Total Recall, absolute rulers. It's their shit and they can fuck with you however they want in the most inconstent way they like and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Sorry, but you developers who get fucked over by Apple can just STFU. That's the risk you took when you went iPhone. Maybe you should have considered developing for a more open OS
This law won't help the retail/online problem. The people who will be hit most by this are people flogging mobile phone cables on eBay where they already know what they want (but want to pay a fraction of their ripoff mobile company).
The likes of Amazon or Play.com will simply set up a shop in the most hostile place imaginable (Islay would work well), staff it with an incompetent, ugly, surly bastard and pass the rule while not getting a single visitor.
I want to see what happens with Han, Chewie and Leia. Let's face it... Han's a bit of a scoundrel, so once the big romance has been going for a few years, he's going to want to go out with Chewie, maybe sink a few beers, see some strippers, watch the game. And Leia's hardly going to be the Stepford Wife about it.
You could do it on a low budget, get someone like PT Anderson, Jane Campion or Wes Anderson to direct.
I was old enough to be annoyed at little kids laughing at the ewoks.
On the other hand, I'm going to defend the ewoks... The main thing about the ewoks is that they are small, primitive and yet, take on the empire and win. And yes, they look like teddy bears, but they're quite badass (like they're going to eat everyone at the start).
Or in the old days: "Once you let the cat out of the bag..."
You can restore things. But it takes some extra effort. It's going to take George Lucas to recognise that his role in Star Wars is as Executive Producer, to hire a talented team of writers, directors and producers and let them get on with making whatever comes next in that universe. That means hiring someone with some vision who is prepared to argue with you to defend his vision.
Personally, I never even saw EP3. I saw EP1 & 2 and then read Maddox's summary of how Vadar turned bad and just gave it a miss. I'll watch it on TV sometime, maybe. I'll have to hear some amazing buzz on the next Star Wars thing before wasting my time on it.
The "first" film was the best because you were 12 years old at the time. Talk to a 12 year old now and they love pod races.
Nostalgia is a lie. I liked Jedi the most because it appealed to me at my age at that time.
I'm not going to deny that there's some nostalgia involved. But we don't have nostalgia for every movie from our childhood. No-one's waiting for the Blu-Ray of Battle Beyond the Stars.
Star Wars was a reasonably serviceable story with some well-defined characters that was visually groundbreaking.
The prequels weren't this. The stories were a mess, the characters were a mess. That's basic filmmaking. That's what makes The Terminator, Pretty Woman, The Incredibles, The Wizard of Oz and Goodfellas work. You care about the characters and the story. Kids know this. The generation of kids who were around when the prequels came out will be nostalgic about Pixar movies, not Star Wars prequels.
In the original trilogy, there wasn't a light saber battle until the end of ESB. In the prequels, there were so much light sabering I could barely bring myself to care when they came to the ultimate battle between Obi Wan and Anikan.
And if you watch the one in EPIII, it goes on... and on... and on...
Vader vs Luke in ROTJ, a highly emotionally charged Lightsabre fight lasts 3.5 minutes. You watch it and you think "what could I cut from this without damaging the film" and the answer is "not a lot".
Too many films forget this. Action sequences aren't supposed to be an end unto themselves, they're about the characters going somewhere. That doesn't mean that you can't put the sugar icing of them being cool on top, but there has to be a point. Oh, and you have to give a damn about the characters involved in them.
I'm convinced there's a way to do the prequels but to make good movies. Firstly, you'd need someone who would take Anakin's journey to Darth Vadar and make it plausible. That's the key story throughout and everything should follow from that. What happened in EP3 was just ridiculous.
And how often do you actually need more than 5 hours without charge?
If I'm at home, I'm on charge. If I'm at a client, I plug in. If I'm staying in a hotel, I charge. And in most of the main train services in the UK you now have plugs you can use.
Anyone know of any large outsourcing company that deliver what they promised, to a decent quality?
No. And I'd never in my life hire one.
If you're a big company with a reasonably bespoke requirement for software which isn't going to die after a few months, then you should treat it as part of your company. I'm amazed when companies think they can treat their complex data like something as simple as business stationery or the car fleet.
The one time it's worth going 3rd party is for highly specialised expertise or non-bespoke software.
This is all spot on. I do contracting work for clients, and my A1 priority is that the client is happy with the job, even if it means I don't make much on it. Reason? Because I want the client to come back to me. Unless they were a gigantic pain in the ass, in which case, I don't.
I saw a company go to the wall because they would try to do anything to charge their clients for code changes. If a spec was vague, they'd argue like crazy every time that the client should pay. A few times, I spent more time creating a defence of their vague spec than what I would have spent just changing the damn code as a goodwill gesture. The end result for the company is that they lost a lot of clients who got pissed off at the beligerence they were facing.
I really think large companies buying these systems are going to start recording the sales presentations, burn them to DVD, and insist on including them in the contract.
Or do what I do - completely ignore sales presentations except as a rough filter that they might be able to help you, throw it all away and get sitting down with their project managers. I was always amazed when I worked for large corporates at the shit that senior management bought based on a couple of sales presentations.
Somewhat off topic, but perhaps related to the topic:
Has anyone ever worked in a company where they had a SAP implementation where overall the users and management (and I don't mean snr management who are above it) are actually happy with the outcome?
But I also want a button that says "this article sucked big time. I want my money back for it." After a few negative votes on an author I want all future news from that author to be marked as "suspected crap" or vanish completely from my newsfeed so I don't pay that hack's dreck ever again.
Serious questions: why does my view of The Times or The Guardian look like your view of it? This might make sense when you're printing thousands of copies, but there's no excuse online. They know which stories I click, can see that I never click the fashion section, so why not push the fashion stories down?
And why use Adsense? I'm pretty sure that Google takes half of the money from that. Which makes sense if you're a small time blogger but a major newspaper could easily build its own system and actually make better ads orientated around the context of the story (Adsense just uses keywords).
It's stuck in history. When Churchill went to Africa to report on the Boer War, it made sense. One thing a lot of established businesses have is adjusting to technology. They're unprepared to say "we're not going to make money like we have" or to find ways to make money differently or to save money. Instead, they try to defend their position.
I read something recently where someone at The Times (London) was saying how much newspapers cost money to make and how it had cost £20K to send someone to Sri Lanka to report on some violence there. When newspapers were making a fortune, people could do this because the cost didn't make much difference.
My first thought was to ask why they didn't just hire a freelancer in Sri Lanka for a fraction of that money to go up there to do the job. You could probably pay for a dozen reporters to go up there and just find the best copy.
Another thing: one of the commentators on the Guardian is paid over £100K/annum. That's not someone connecting with sources or anything investigative - they're commentating on the news. You can find bloggers who'd knock out a column every week for a fraction of that.
One of my theories about the newspaper business is that they're used to their prestigious positions. They want to still pay journalists to fly around the world (rather than hiring a local guy to do the job for a fraction of the price). They want flash offices. They want huge profits. The Guardian pays one of their columnists over £100K, despite the fact that they could easily replace them with a blogger to do it part time for 1/10th of that.
There are online "newspapers" making money. They do it by having loose networks of freelance bloggers and paying them a tiny amount and no offices. And no, the people running them aren't going to be billionaires any time soon...
Exactly. Newspapers never made money out of selling papers. They made it out of selling ads. And that's the problem - while the total size of the cake for advertising has gone up, the papers are losing a lot of that because there are so many places to advertise.
Give you an example. I worked for a company which advertised for volunteers to do something (I can't go into too much detail). In the days before the net, we'd have only used newspapers and radio. We did a test with adwords and one of the options was that we could advertise on certain suggested sites which we researched and found were specialist forums with exactly the sort of people that we wanted. We were paying almost nothing per click and targetting exactly who we wanted.
Can newspapers replace ads with subs? I doubt it. For one thing, most news is also on TV. The number of newspaper scoops of merit is tiny. Commentary is easily replaced by blogs (who frequently do a better job).
Blogs actually do a much better job of reporting accurately, in part because they tend to have a narrow focus and deep knowledge about that focus, and in part because of reader comments.
One thing about blogging is that it's generally a hobby by professionals. A friend of mine writes a blog which has quite a bias about taxation. He's a tax accountant by day, so he lives and breathes the subject. Which means that he frequently pulls apart some awful commentary which gets into this subject, because the writers just don't know.
Groklaw was interesting because it exposed what most of the computer media as lightweights who would do not much more than copy and paste press releases, turn up at product launches and do a quick review of a product.
You've not heard of Paul Staines AKA Guido Fawkes then? He's done more breaking of political stories in the UK than most of the newspapers in the past couple of years.
Or maybe Drudge? The guy who broke the Clinton/Lewinsky story?
Slashdot Mirror
there's a way to do MIDP through an application that creates an emulation layer. I don't know what it's like, though. And someone's written a MIDP to APK converter.
There's a real feeling that it's a hacker phone, though. Few restrictions on apps (you can jailbreak it but it's hardly worth it) and lots of FOSS because the developer kit is free, Eclipse based and cross-platform.
The problem for Apple is that they want to control the store but they also don't want bad PR. If they allow more adult apps on the store, then when some kid manages to get an app from it, it's Apple who are to blame.
Android aren't going to allow anything adult on their store either, but the difference in attitude is that you can override your phone easily and get apps elsewhere. This allows those users who want those apps (or political apps) to get them without without it reflecting on Google.
Android is about the right mix - AppStore and initially, the OS only allows AppStore apps. But go into options, change the setting and you can start getting apps from anywhere. There's quite a lot of Android FOSS out there.
developers are up in arms?
Didn't you read the dozens of articles on the net about how Apple works with regards to The App Store? They're like Cohaagen in Total Recall, absolute rulers. It's their shit and they can fuck with you however they want in the most inconstent way they like and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Sorry, but you developers who get fucked over by Apple can just STFU. That's the risk you took when you went iPhone. Maybe you should have considered developing for a more open OS
The problem is that the people using IE6 have no control over their situation.
I worked in a company and all our browsers were IE6 and the people maintaining the software build just did't care about upgrading.
This law won't help the retail/online problem. The people who will be hit most by this are people flogging mobile phone cables on eBay where they already know what they want (but want to pay a fraction of their ripoff mobile company).
The likes of Amazon or Play.com will simply set up a shop in the most hostile place imaginable (Islay would work well), staff it with an incompetent, ugly, surly bastard and pass the rule while not getting a single visitor.
I want to see what happens with Han, Chewie and Leia. Let's face it... Han's a bit of a scoundrel, so once the big romance has been going for a few years, he's going to want to go out with Chewie, maybe sink a few beers, see some strippers, watch the game. And Leia's hardly going to be the Stepford Wife about it.
You could do it on a low budget, get someone like PT Anderson, Jane Campion or Wes Anderson to direct.
I was old enough to be annoyed at little kids laughing at the ewoks.
On the other hand, I'm going to defend the ewoks... The main thing about the ewoks is that they are small, primitive and yet, take on the empire and win. And yes, they look like teddy bears, but they're quite badass (like they're going to eat everyone at the start).
Jar-Jar, on the other hand, was just annoying.
What about Han, Leia and Chewie? "Well, you did say you'd rather kiss a wookie".
Or in the old days: "Once you let the cat out of the bag..."
You can restore things. But it takes some extra effort. It's going to take George Lucas to recognise that his role in Star Wars is as Executive Producer, to hire a talented team of writers, directors and producers and let them get on with making whatever comes next in that universe. That means hiring someone with some vision who is prepared to argue with you to defend his vision.
Personally, I never even saw EP3. I saw EP1 & 2 and then read Maddox's summary of how Vadar turned bad and just gave it a miss. I'll watch it on TV sometime, maybe. I'll have to hear some amazing buzz on the next Star Wars thing before wasting my time on it.
The "first" film was the best because you were 12 years old at the time. Talk to a 12 year old now and they love pod races. Nostalgia is a lie. I liked Jedi the most because it appealed to me at my age at that time.
I'm not going to deny that there's some nostalgia involved. But we don't have nostalgia for every movie from our childhood. No-one's waiting for the Blu-Ray of Battle Beyond the Stars.
Star Wars was a reasonably serviceable story with some well-defined characters that was visually groundbreaking.
The prequels weren't this. The stories were a mess, the characters were a mess. That's basic filmmaking. That's what makes The Terminator, Pretty Woman, The Incredibles, The Wizard of Oz and Goodfellas work. You care about the characters and the story. Kids know this. The generation of kids who were around when the prequels came out will be nostalgic about Pixar movies, not Star Wars prequels.
In the original trilogy, there wasn't a light saber battle until the end of ESB. In the prequels, there were so much light sabering I could barely bring myself to care when they came to the ultimate battle between Obi Wan and Anikan.
And if you watch the one in EPIII, it goes on... and on... and on...
Vader vs Luke in ROTJ, a highly emotionally charged Lightsabre fight lasts 3.5 minutes. You watch it and you think "what could I cut from this without damaging the film" and the answer is "not a lot".
Too many films forget this. Action sequences aren't supposed to be an end unto themselves, they're about the characters going somewhere. That doesn't mean that you can't put the sugar icing of them being cool on top, but there has to be a point. Oh, and you have to give a damn about the characters involved in them.
I'm convinced there's a way to do the prequels but to make good movies. Firstly, you'd need someone who would take Anakin's journey to Darth Vadar and make it plausible. That's the key story throughout and everything should follow from that. What happened in EP3 was just ridiculous.
If you ever want to attract lots of blog comments, there are 2 subjects to cover:-
Seriously, what put me off Rails was the utter zealotry of some of the people involved in it. Django is full of more sane folks.
And how often do you actually need more than 5 hours without charge?
If I'm at home, I'm on charge. If I'm at a client, I plug in. If I'm staying in a hotel, I charge. And in most of the main train services in the UK you now have plugs you can use.
I think it's becoming an irrelevant measure now.
Anyone know of any large outsourcing company that deliver what they promised, to a decent quality?
No. And I'd never in my life hire one.
If you're a big company with a reasonably bespoke requirement for software which isn't going to die after a few months, then you should treat it as part of your company. I'm amazed when companies think they can treat their complex data like something as simple as business stationery or the car fleet.
The one time it's worth going 3rd party is for highly specialised expertise or non-bespoke software.
This is all spot on. I do contracting work for clients, and my A1 priority is that the client is happy with the job, even if it means I don't make much on it. Reason? Because I want the client to come back to me. Unless they were a gigantic pain in the ass, in which case, I don't.
I saw a company go to the wall because they would try to do anything to charge their clients for code changes. If a spec was vague, they'd argue like crazy every time that the client should pay. A few times, I spent more time creating a defence of their vague spec than what I would have spent just changing the damn code as a goodwill gesture. The end result for the company is that they lost a lot of clients who got pissed off at the beligerence they were facing.
I really think large companies buying these systems are going to start recording the sales presentations, burn them to DVD, and insist on including them in the contract.
Or do what I do - completely ignore sales presentations except as a rough filter that they might be able to help you, throw it all away and get sitting down with their project managers. I was always amazed when I worked for large corporates at the shit that senior management bought based on a couple of sales presentations.
Somewhat off topic, but perhaps related to the topic:
Has anyone ever worked in a company where they had a SAP implementation where overall the users and management (and I don't mean snr management who are above it) are actually happy with the outcome?
Just put a fucking robots.txt file in and Google will respect it. Murdoch's content would disappear within hours.
But I also want a button that says "this article sucked big time. I want my money back for it." After a few negative votes on an author I want all future news from that author to be marked as "suspected crap" or vanish completely from my newsfeed so I don't pay that hack's dreck ever again.
Serious questions: why does my view of The Times or The Guardian look like your view of it? This might make sense when you're printing thousands of copies, but there's no excuse online. They know which stories I click, can see that I never click the fashion section, so why not push the fashion stories down?
And why use Adsense? I'm pretty sure that Google takes half of the money from that. Which makes sense if you're a small time blogger but a major newspaper could easily build its own system and actually make better ads orientated around the context of the story (Adsense just uses keywords).
It's stuck in history. When Churchill went to Africa to report on the Boer War, it made sense. One thing a lot of established businesses have is adjusting to technology. They're unprepared to say "we're not going to make money like we have" or to find ways to make money differently or to save money. Instead, they try to defend their position.
I read something recently where someone at The Times (London) was saying how much newspapers cost money to make and how it had cost £20K to send someone to Sri Lanka to report on some violence there. When newspapers were making a fortune, people could do this because the cost didn't make much difference.
My first thought was to ask why they didn't just hire a freelancer in Sri Lanka for a fraction of that money to go up there to do the job. You could probably pay for a dozen reporters to go up there and just find the best copy.
Another thing: one of the commentators on the Guardian is paid over £100K/annum. That's not someone connecting with sources or anything investigative - they're commentating on the news. You can find bloggers who'd knock out a column every week for a fraction of that.
One of my theories about the newspaper business is that they're used to their prestigious positions. They want to still pay journalists to fly around the world (rather than hiring a local guy to do the job for a fraction of the price). They want flash offices. They want huge profits. The Guardian pays one of their columnists over £100K, despite the fact that they could easily replace them with a blogger to do it part time for 1/10th of that.
There are online "newspapers" making money. They do it by having loose networks of freelance bloggers and paying them a tiny amount and no offices. And no, the people running them aren't going to be billionaires any time soon...
Exactly. Newspapers never made money out of selling papers. They made it out of selling ads. And that's the problem - while the total size of the cake for advertising has gone up, the papers are losing a lot of that because there are so many places to advertise.
Give you an example. I worked for a company which advertised for volunteers to do something (I can't go into too much detail). In the days before the net, we'd have only used newspapers and radio. We did a test with adwords and one of the options was that we could advertise on certain suggested sites which we researched and found were specialist forums with exactly the sort of people that we wanted. We were paying almost nothing per click and targetting exactly who we wanted.
Can newspapers replace ads with subs? I doubt it. For one thing, most news is also on TV. The number of newspaper scoops of merit is tiny. Commentary is easily replaced by blogs (who frequently do a better job).
Blogs actually do a much better job of reporting accurately, in part because they tend to have a narrow focus and deep knowledge about that focus, and in part because of reader comments.
One thing about blogging is that it's generally a hobby by professionals. A friend of mine writes a blog which has quite a bias about taxation. He's a tax accountant by day, so he lives and breathes the subject. Which means that he frequently pulls apart some awful commentary which gets into this subject, because the writers just don't know.
Groklaw was interesting because it exposed what most of the computer media as lightweights who would do not much more than copy and paste press releases, turn up at product launches and do a quick review of a product.
You've not heard of Paul Staines AKA Guido Fawkes then? He's done more breaking of political stories in the UK than most of the newspapers in the past couple of years.
Or maybe Drudge? The guy who broke the Clinton/Lewinsky story?