I saw The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo first (US version), and it was awesome. And the book was, too. I am holding off reading the second book until the movie because you can only see the story first once, and I want that to be the movie.
go see the non-US versions. far better and very accurate to the books.
I thought that was something people used back when MS-DOS was a popular OS was not even aware the product still existed.
I am talking about Watcom C++ of course.
It was open sourced some time ago. Now it supports Linux (to some extent) and some other CPU architectures.
It can still make DOS/4GW exes, though. Ahh, nostalgia.
As someone that has maintained Watcom C/C++ code, the Watcom and OpenWatcom are slightly different and code needs porting from Watcom to OpenWatcom. How much I don't know...I just know that our code needed quite a bit of work to do that. Would have been nice if we did...but no one wanted to.
First off, why wasn't Microsoft's C++ compiler included in this? That's the one we use at work, so that's the one I'd really like compared to all those others. Are we the only ones still using it or something?
Probably because it doesn't run on Linux, and one of the few compilers that is not multi-platform.
it is absolutely unforgivable to allow a system design allowing for single authority.
Every OS I can think of - Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris and every descendent of Unix - has a single root account, with a single root password, which can change every other password on the system. The tablet/phone OSes (iOS and Android) are similar but worse - they give administration privileges to the one and only *user* account, with an optional-and-rarely-set password, and completely block the ability to log in as root.
Got any examples of a system design that does NOT allow for a single authority?
When you get into routers, etc the OS quite quickly comes down to 1 user - the root user. If you're lucky, it'll recognize several but then it'll usually authenticate against another source (e.g. LDAP, AD, Kerberos, etc). You're basically thinking of user-facing devices (e.g. PCs) and servers, not the backend infrastructure that connects it all.
I'm not saying what Terry did was right/wrong, but if they didn't have procedures/process in place, then it's there own fault a cocky sys admin grabbed them by the cohones.
Agreed. They should have at least asked for the password prior to firing him.
On a separate note, would you really re-grant sysadmin access to someone that wasn't "pleasant" about handing over the keys?
On a 1-day contract that is explicit about being for the sole purpose of providing the password(s) to another employee so that employee can then access and change the password? Yes, but no $1k/day - probably $100/hr, and only keep them around long enough to get and verify the passwords. Perhaps 1-2 hours per day for several days as needed by the other employee, but no - they would not be allowed to touch any equipment. If they needed to touch type for the password, a separate (controlled) system would be provided for them to do so into "notepad" (or equivalent).
learning logic skills should be well in advance of coding. i do think our society waits too late on that.
that alone could improve lots of things out side of computer programming as well.
I learned Logo in 4th grade. We mostly had fun with it by making the turtle wrap the screen and change colors. It certainly helped produce an interest.
According to Linus Torvald's book "Just for Fun", he learned to program by typing in his grandfather's assembly code and moving on from there.
So all-in-all, I don't think logic skills are necessary to start learning to program, but they should at least be developed along side it. Really what you need to do is foster an interest in programming using some tool that kids like - whether Logo or a OLPC or Arduino or Lego Robotics or whatever. Spark the interest and it'll go on its own from there - and they'll get into the logic stuff (Algebra, Boolean Algebra, Calculus, etc) on their own as they realize the need.
Photons at rest could then have a Really (really really...) small mass...
Well, theoretically (and only theoretically) photons could have a gigantive rest mass that is 100% converted to energy when in motion. The problem we normally face is that we cannot convert (or think of how to convert) 100% to 100% energy in a manner required to do that - t0 at rest, t1 in motion, a=c over t0 to t1 and (t1-t0) is nearly zero (e.g. 0.000.....0001 or 1*10^-infinity).
Damn it people, so much emotional attachment to a company because it once had the distinction to cock up an OSS-based project.
That has nothing to do with my statement. My statement was purely that they could in fact go back to MeeGo/Maemo if they wanted. There's nothing preventing that.
Please get it through your heads: Nokia shareholders' objectives do not include supporting the cause of Linux, or Qt, or whatever. It is, plainly, to make money. They are fucking happy to see something sellworthy made out of the dysfunctional wreck that Nokia was in 2010.
The objective of any business is to make money. Whether or not that includes Linux or Qt or whatever - even Microsoft Windows - is different matter based on what products and features the company thinks they can sell to others (corporate or not) to make money. Often the case is more aligning to Linux now than it is to Microsoft Windows; but as I noted that is an entirely separate issue than the comment I made pertaining to MeeGo/Maemo and Nokia's ability to continue with that platform if they so chose.
Honestly, while having users authenticate a self-signed cert in a browser did help with security, etc it also broke a lot of devices. I still cannot use my WRT54G with any modern browser aside from the default browser on Android 2.3.6; same with my newer model router with latest firmware.
And honestly the problem IS NOT the hardware I'm accessing - its the stupid browsers.
They're only going to cause the same kinds of headaches for everyone.
P.S. I'm not in favor of Java or Java Appletes, but it still seems like a bad thing given how it impacted browsers accessing valid websites with self-signed certs.
Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
And RIM were selling quite a lot of Blackberries until it was too late.
My point was that comparing RIM/BB and Nokia is not valid - its an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Nokia is where it is today because of Elop and numerous things he did as CEO - from declaring symbian/meego/maemo dead and their move to WP. Prior to all of that Nokia was relatively healthy and in a good position to make a transition; after those things they were not. Please take off your revisionist history glasses.
RIM/BB is where they are because they had a technical failure in their network that severely hurt their customers. Up to that point in time, they were doing extremely well. When that occurred, people realized how tied their own communications were to RIM/BB itself. I don't think people realized how centralized the RIM/BB network was until then.
FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.
That's what the powerpoint said. In practice, there were... issues.
Please share what inside information you have? Having participated in the Qt mailing lists at that time ( and I still do ) there was quite a lot going on. Qt for Symbian was doing well, and people were doing Qt for various platforms - including Symbian - and recompiling to go between them. Not saying everything was perfect or that they weren't fully ready to push it out migration wise, but it was something they had - unlike the complete and utter drop of all their partners, app developers, etc for the move to WP. (I would actually have been quite surprised if it was 100% perfect.)
Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers.
Nokia had another issue: being the company that allowed the N97 to be released. That was in 2009, years after iPhone was on the market. All that happened after was, in essence, karmic justice.
So what? N97 was not the N900.
The N900 is what Elop completely killed before it was released, and outsold Lumias without any issue; it was a very high demand phone that Nokia under Elop decided they would only do a limited number of because they were doing WP instead of MeeGo/Maemo.
In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market.
Your time window for "just about to be released" must stretch for half a year.
The N900 was originally released with Maemo5 (presented Sept 2009, released Nov 2009), and later released with MeeGo (May 2010). Just prior to its MeeGo release, Elop did exactly as I noted.
And, I'm afraid, your description of a presentation has no basis in documented reality. It was known since February that Nokia is pivoting towards Windows Phone and everybody knew that the N9 was a dead end. Moreover, it wasn't ever meant to be a proper MeeGo device. It was fucked up by internal politics long before Elop came on stage.
Please share your inside information.
Yet, as others have pointed out, with no marketing the MeeGo Phone outsold the Lumias wherever they were both sold in the same markets - and not by small margins - by 3:1 ratios.
I'm sorry to see you believe in a myth with no credible evidence whatsoever.
What myth? It's in numerous sources backed up by financials and information from Nokia itself.
You missed a key fact: Elop took a good brand that now had only unwanted, aging products that could no longer compete, executed the most expensive failures, and sold the rest before the marketplace killed them completely.
Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
Had he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Symbian, and tried to make a go of it based on an existing loyal fan base and lots of marketing, he would have ended up EXACTLY like Blackberry -- warehouses filled with unsold phones, flat broke, and completely irrelevant in the marketplace.
FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.
Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers. That is really why BB fell in market share - everyone was looking for something more reliable. BB10 is a great little platform, but they have a reputation they have to fix - something that takes a long time to do and they may not be able to recover from.
At least with Microsoft owning them, they're not broke. I don't know why everyone on slashdot has remained so deluded about Nokia's potential future had Elop not taken those actions. They were not competitive, and their prospects were poor. If Symbian and Meego were as great as everyone here imagines, why weren't they crushing iPhones back in 2010?
In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market. Yet, as others have pointed out, with no marketing the MeeGo Phone outsold the Lumias wherever they were both sold in the same markets - and not by small margins - by 3:1 ratios. Every review of the MeeGo phones compared it to the iPhone; it would have been a killer - and at the very least a very strong third, leaving everyone else to fight for fourth - had it not been for Elop.
My fear is that QT will become almost dependent on KDE.
The Qt Developers at Qt-project.org are making sure that does not happen for the official Qt itself.
Now whether developers pull in enough KDE Frameworks to effectively make that happen is a different issue, and one Qt developers cannot help aside from pulling more from KDE into the official Qt releases.
Yes. It's called "Escalation of Commitment", and it happens in larger firms, too, and Government. Also with individuals. A good counter-example is HP ditching WebOS and now selling Android tablets.
Another good example is the Democrats and Obama with APA, aka ObamaCare - escalating in commitment to the destruction of everyone else.
If you try, you end up like US car companies in the 1980's. They're still digging themselves out of the hole they dug by their shortsightedness, and none of them would even exist if it weren't for government bailouts.
I don't know about any previous bailouts to the ones just a couple years back, but Ford did not participate in those bailouts. They requested the option if necessary, but they did not participate and advocated that they should be available for GM and Chrysler, both of which did use them.
The main thing that both Android and Apple based tablets have that Microsoft doesn't, is customers.
Yeah, well, if Google decides to move to a ChromeOS and does a little "embrace, extend, extinguish" dance with Android, Microsoft's offerings are going to be the most open on the market.
But Google doesn't do evil?
Yeah, bullshit. Google's an ad agency. That makes money by selling your privacy.
Google doesn't fully control Android. Sure they're the primary sponsor but Android is mostly controlled by the Open Handset Alliance.
Which is not what you want to see in, say, an Apple verses Samsung style case where "previous art" and earlier applications are all that separate you from being successfully sued into the Stone Age.
FYI - the courts require that web content have screen shots taken with time-date stamps to avoid this exact issue. The screen shots must also contain the information in a certain manner, only then can it be used as evidence/exhibits. If the lawyers are not doing that, then they are not properly writing/citing their court paperwork (briefs, etc).
And no, it does not amount to a copyright violation.
IANAL, but that's my understanding thanks to Groklaw and other sources.
While true there are many devices that are simply not maintained by the hardware vendors, which does cause an issue..
The desktop problem is a problem of too much hardware, in a Windows world
That is not really the problem. Most hardware will work under Linux without any issue. The vendors typically took shortcuts and used common chipsets that Linux quickly picked up on and implemented support for. Many vendors still are starting to provide direct support too; more and more devices are starting to ship with a little Tux logo on them.;-)
So the hardware is not the problem.
The problem is mainly software and compatibility. Too much software is tied only to Windows. My wife honestly doesn't care if she uses Mac or Windows or Linux; but she has to have MS Office for her CPA work, and nearly all Accounting software is Windows only, some offer Mac ports. And it's the same in the majority of the software fields.
So really it's the same reason why Win8 is failing - too big a change with too little support for legacy software.
Toxic lights bulbs don't actually save as much power as they claim. The daylight saving time change actually resulted in more energy being consumed than saved. BUT that doesn't mean they were ineffective. They're having just the result desired, making people feel like they are doing something to solve the problems but having those same problems still around to force even greater changes.
DST was never about saving energy. It was about aligning workers to shifts for production in a manner that made sense for war time.
Yes, there are people that claim it would save energy - not burning candles at night when you could just get up a little earlier kind of thing; but it was really about making the most of the daytime for war efforts when enacted (WWII). It made sense for the manufacturing economies of that era, but now we run 24/7, so it really doesn't make sense any more.
Um, no. God only shrinks if you're explanation for every problem is "God did it".
Faith only shrinks if it is "God did it through magic". Realizing God may have used some processes we can scientifically discover does not shrink ones Faith. The problem comes when people try to use Scientific processes to discover things that are not discoverable - e.g. the magic.
For instance, assume that God did say a word and everything poofed into existence in a given state. You can't prove it didn't happen scientifically, and you can't prove it did happen either. Science rejects that at "nonsense" because it can't prove one way or the other where faith takes it as fact.
Oddly enough though, Science does the same thing with Evolution and the origins of everything. You can't prove evolution created anything. You can prove evolution exists in a micro-evolutionary method today, and that it has existed that way for a very long time. You can't prove things like a fish becoming a person, or an amoeba becoming a fish. Yet Evolutionists assume those very things because they're predicted and assume they will eventually find the evidence, so it's not labelled as "nonsense".
If that's why you believe in a deity, then you miss the point of faith.
Very true.
To make the point differently, just because I know exactly how a chair was built, it doesn't mean that I stop believing that a carpenter built it.
Also think about if God thought ahead to various evolutionary hurdles.
Since he is credited with designing even the evolutionary system, it's still "his bad". Why would he implement an evolutionary system that isn't perfect?
I know, I know, "God works in mysterious ways.":) Amazing that phrase ends people's natural curiosity, but combined with eternal damnation it seems to work.
But he did engineer it perfectly (v1). He sabotaged it due to the fall in Genesis 3 by introducing imperfections (v2). The perfect design had no decay or death. Those "features" will be removed for the v3 version (Revelations).
Gates chose a big, fat, retarded individual to run the company after he retired. And Gates got a lost decade in return.
That individual also happens to be one of the founders/early employees of the company, one of the few remaining from that era. So it's not like Gates had much choice.
It's also not like Gates had much choice but to step aside.
The bulk of the bible was written in Hebrew and Greek, not just Aramaic. Also, there is no "original" bible. We have fragments. Some rather large ones (Textus Receptus, Textus Sinaiticus, and Testus Vaticinus." Which adds to your translation of a translation thought.
As someone who has done Biblical translations...
There has been much study done on the various texts, and ones found from quite a long time ago, e.g. Dead Sea Scrolls. What has been found is that the "Old Testament" was kept very rigorlessly and was virtually unchanged after centuries. The Levite Priests in charge of copying the texts would typically destroy copies that had even a single stroke out of place. Yes, others outside the temple also made copies, but they were not considered authoritative copies - and those copies would usually end up with commentary as well.
Most of the debate about texts does not occur over the "Old Testament" texts written in Hebrew, but the "New Testament" texts written in Greek. The entire "New Testament" was written first in Greek; Aramaic versions would have been translations much like our English versions are. Quite a few of the texts for the "New Testament" have been proven to be passed down without change; the issue comes in that there has had to be many comparisons done as monks would write their commentaries in the margins in many cases and those commentaries became hard to decipher.
Regarding what is considered to be the "Canonical" text - that is what makes up the official Bible - that was settled in 300 A.D and has not changed since. There is a secondary set of books called the Apocrapha that some consider to be part of the Bible, however those books did not meet the requisite criteria for the council in 300 A.D for them to be considered "Canonical" texts. Many things, like David Brown's DaVinci Code, rely more on the Apocrapha texts to do what they do.
Most Prostestant churches view the Apocrapha as having some value as a secondary source, but do not consider it to be equal to the Bible. The "Book of Mormon", on the other hand, is considered heresy.
You need to read up on the facts before making such statements. First, Stephen Elop wasn't directly involved with much of the negotiation that happened between Microsoft and Nokia.
I could them telling Elop not to be involved for the sake of conflicts of interest; however, my guess is that Elop was involved on the Microsoft side about this kind of thing before he took the position at Nokia.
Secondly, and more importantly, Nokia was as good as dead without Microsoft and Windows Phone.
Quite incorrect. I'm familiar with quite a few people who worked for Nokia and they had a great line up coming about. The only MeeGo-based phone ever sold (the N900) did far better than any WIndows Phones, had rave reviews, etc. It did so well that when Nokia kicked it to the curb the employees who worked on it started a new company (Jolla) and are now producing it under a new name - SailFish - and still getting rave reviews, a good audience, etc. That could have been Nokia - only better since Nokia had a full pipeline (some of which Jolla picked up in terms of sales channels) that they could have really pumped it full with.
Nokia's decline started over a decade ago when they thought the future of mobile phones was disposable fashion accessories. When they finally got into smartphones late in the game they chose technological dead ends.
Again, incorrect. They did make some mistakes with how they handled Symbian. However, they had a very large market using Symbian and they had setup a complete transition for customers and partners to move from Symbian to MeeGo. Something that got completely tossed out in the move to Windows.
Praise Symbian or Meego to your heart's content but it's all irrelevant. Nokia didn't have the resources to turn either into a relevant platform.
Incorrect. Nokia had plenty of capability to turn MeeGo into a competitor to iOS and Android.
There was far too much effort and expense required to turn them into viable competitors to Android or iOS, let alone then getting third parties to support the platform with apps.
Again incorrect. They had a very viable platform with a large community of developers under Symbian that they were providing a means of transition to MeeGo for. They had all the third party apps - and one of the biggest and oldest app stores (Ovi) to do it with.
Some have suggested that Nokia should have adopted Android. There's already an overwhelming glut of Android devices on the market.
There is now. There were not that many when Elop started at Nokia. Android was well established - it was quickly becoming a dominant player - but many had not yet aligned themselves to it. It was obvious Android would be #1 or #2 alongside iOS. Either way, Android with a transition plan for their existing Symbian partners would have let them keep what they had - a very sizeable chunk of the mobile market.
Samsung is the dominant player by a huge margin with LG, HTC, Sony fighting over scraps.
FYI - Samsung picked up that position and margin in the wake of people's reaction to Elop's burning memo platform and total annihilation of their Symbian and MeegGo products in favor of a Windows Phone they had not yet finished making. If Elop had not pre-emptively killed MeeGo then they would have had kept that dominant position and Samsung would have had to fight to get there.
So what would be Nokia's strategy? Enter the fray as an also ran and hope that in the next 5+ years they somehow evolve into a relevant player?
That was certainly the position in taking on Windows phone.
Don't forget that they were already heavily bleeding cash by this point.
Again, as others pointed out they were still profitable - which means they were not bleeding cash. You only bleed cash when your books go
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I saw The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo first (US version), and it was awesome. And the book was, too. I am holding off reading the second book until the movie because you can only see the story first once, and I want that to be the movie.
go see the non-US versions. far better and very accurate to the books.
I thought that was something people used back when MS-DOS was a popular OS was not even aware the product still existed.
I am talking about Watcom C++ of course.
It was open sourced some time ago. Now it supports Linux (to some extent) and some other CPU architectures. It can still make DOS/4GW exes, though. Ahh, nostalgia.
As someone that has maintained Watcom C/C++ code, the Watcom and OpenWatcom are slightly different and code needs porting from Watcom to OpenWatcom. How much I don't know...I just know that our code needed quite a bit of work to do that. Would have been nice if we did...but no one wanted to.
First off, why wasn't Microsoft's C++ compiler included in this? That's the one we use at work, so that's the one I'd really like compared to all those others. Are we the only ones still using it or something?
Probably because it doesn't run on Linux, and one of the few compilers that is not multi-platform.
it is absolutely unforgivable to allow a system design allowing for single authority.
Every OS I can think of - Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris and every descendent of Unix - has a single root account, with a single root password, which can change every other password on the system. The tablet/phone OSes (iOS and Android) are similar but worse - they give administration privileges to the one and only *user* account, with an optional-and-rarely-set password, and completely block the ability to log in as root.
Got any examples of a system design that does NOT allow for a single authority?
When you get into routers, etc the OS quite quickly comes down to 1 user - the root user. If you're lucky, it'll recognize several but then it'll usually authenticate against another source (e.g. LDAP, AD, Kerberos, etc). You're basically thinking of user-facing devices (e.g. PCs) and servers, not the backend infrastructure that connects it all.
I'm not saying what Terry did was right/wrong, but if they didn't have procedures/process in place, then it's there own fault a cocky sys admin grabbed them by the cohones.
Agreed. They should have at least asked for the password prior to firing him.
On a separate note, would you really re-grant sysadmin access to someone that wasn't "pleasant" about handing over the keys?
On a 1-day contract that is explicit about being for the sole purpose of providing the password(s) to another employee so that employee can then access and change the password? Yes, but no $1k/day - probably $100/hr, and only keep them around long enough to get and verify the passwords. Perhaps 1-2 hours per day for several days as needed by the other employee, but no - they would not be allowed to touch any equipment. If they needed to touch type for the password, a separate (controlled) system would be provided for them to do so into "notepad" (or equivalent).
learning logic skills should be well in advance of coding. i do think our society waits too late on that. that alone could improve lots of things out side of computer programming as well.
I learned Logo in 4th grade. We mostly had fun with it by making the turtle wrap the screen and change colors. It certainly helped produce an interest.
According to Linus Torvald's book "Just for Fun", he learned to program by typing in his grandfather's assembly code and moving on from there.
So all-in-all, I don't think logic skills are necessary to start learning to program, but they should at least be developed along side it. Really what you need to do is foster an interest in programming using some tool that kids like - whether Logo or a OLPC or Arduino or Lego Robotics or whatever. Spark the interest and it'll go on its own from there - and they'll get into the logic stuff (Algebra, Boolean Algebra, Calculus, etc) on their own as they realize the need.
Photons at rest could then have a Really (really really ...) small mass ...
Well, theoretically (and only theoretically) photons could have a gigantive rest mass that is 100% converted to energy when in motion. The problem we normally face is that we cannot convert (or think of how to convert) 100% to 100% energy in a manner required to do that - t0 at rest, t1 in motion, a=c over t0 to t1 and (t1-t0) is nearly zero (e.g. 0.000.....0001 or 1*10^-infinity).
Damn it people, so much emotional attachment to a company because it once had the distinction to cock up an OSS-based project.
That has nothing to do with my statement. My statement was purely that they could in fact go back to MeeGo/Maemo if they wanted. There's nothing preventing that.
Please get it through your heads: Nokia shareholders' objectives do not include supporting the cause of Linux, or Qt, or whatever. It is, plainly, to make money. They are fucking happy to see something sellworthy made out of the dysfunctional wreck that Nokia was in 2010.
The objective of any business is to make money. Whether or not that includes Linux or Qt or whatever - even Microsoft Windows - is different matter based on what products and features the company thinks they can sell to others (corporate or not) to make money. Often the case is more aligning to Linux now than it is to Microsoft Windows; but as I noted that is an entirely separate issue than the comment I made pertaining to MeeGo/Maemo and Nokia's ability to continue with that platform if they so chose.
Honestly, while having users authenticate a self-signed cert in a browser did help with security, etc it also broke a lot of devices. I still cannot use my WRT54G with any modern browser aside from the default browser on Android 2.3.6; same with my newer model router with latest firmware.
And honestly the problem IS NOT the hardware I'm accessing - its the stupid browsers.
They're only going to cause the same kinds of headaches for everyone.
P.S. I'm not in favor of Java or Java Appletes, but it still seems like a bad thing given how it impacted browsers accessing valid websites with self-signed certs.
Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
And RIM were selling quite a lot of Blackberries until it was too late.
My point was that comparing RIM/BB and Nokia is not valid - its an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Nokia is where it is today because of Elop and numerous things he did as CEO - from declaring symbian/meego/maemo dead and their move to WP. Prior to all of that Nokia was relatively healthy and in a good position to make a transition; after those things they were not. Please take off your revisionist history glasses.
RIM/BB is where they are because they had a technical failure in their network that severely hurt their customers. Up to that point in time, they were doing extremely well. When that occurred, people realized how tied their own communications were to RIM/BB itself. I don't think people realized how centralized the RIM/BB network was until then.
FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.
That's what the powerpoint said. In practice, there were... issues.
Please share what inside information you have? Having participated in the Qt mailing lists at that time ( and I still do ) there was quite a lot going on. Qt for Symbian was doing well, and people were doing Qt for various platforms - including Symbian - and recompiling to go between them. Not saying everything was perfect or that they weren't fully ready to push it out migration wise, but it was something they had - unlike the complete and utter drop of all their partners, app developers, etc for the move to WP. (I would actually have been quite surprised if it was 100% perfect.)
Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers.
Nokia had another issue: being the company that allowed the N97 to be released. That was in 2009, years after iPhone was on the market. All that happened after was, in essence, karmic justice.
So what? N97 was not the N900.
The N900 is what Elop completely killed before it was released, and outsold Lumias without any issue; it was a very high demand phone that Nokia under Elop decided they would only do a limited number of because they were doing WP instead of MeeGo/Maemo.
In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market.
Your time window for "just about to be released" must stretch for half a year.
The N900 was originally released with Maemo5 (presented Sept 2009, released Nov 2009), and later released with MeeGo (May 2010). Just prior to its MeeGo release, Elop did exactly as I noted.
And, I'm afraid, your description of a presentation has no basis in documented reality. It was known since February that Nokia is pivoting towards Windows Phone and everybody knew that the N9 was a dead end. Moreover, it wasn't ever meant to be a proper MeeGo device. It was fucked up by internal politics long before Elop came on stage.
Please share your inside information.
Yet, as others have pointed out, with no marketing the MeeGo Phone outsold the Lumias wherever they were both sold in the same markets - and not by small margins - by 3:1 ratios.
I'm sorry to see you believe in a myth with no credible evidence whatsoever.
What myth? It's in numerous sources backed up by financials and information from Nokia itself.
They've sold off MeeGo's crown jewels, Qt. Now Qt is powering the direct competition, from Jolla to Android, iOS and even WP.
Sure they could. They don't have to control Qt to do MeeGo - they could just buy back Jolla and what MeeGo became - SailfishOS.
You missed a key fact: Elop took a good brand that now had only unwanted, aging products that could no longer compete, executed the most expensive failures, and sold the rest before the marketplace killed them completely.
Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
Had he pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Symbian, and tried to make a go of it based on an existing loyal fan base and lots of marketing, he would have ended up EXACTLY like Blackberry -- warehouses filled with unsold phones, flat broke, and completely irrelevant in the marketplace.
FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.
Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers. That is really why BB fell in market share - everyone was looking for something more reliable. BB10 is a great little platform, but they have a reputation they have to fix - something that takes a long time to do and they may not be able to recover from.
At least with Microsoft owning them, they're not broke. I don't know why everyone on slashdot has remained so deluded about Nokia's potential future had Elop not taken those actions. They were not competitive, and their prospects were poor. If Symbian and Meego were as great as everyone here imagines, why weren't they crushing iPhones back in 2010?
In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market. Yet, as others have pointed out, with no marketing the MeeGo Phone outsold the Lumias wherever they were both sold in the same markets - and not by small margins - by 3:1 ratios. Every review of the MeeGo phones compared it to the iPhone; it would have been a killer - and at the very least a very strong third, leaving everyone else to fight for fourth - had it not been for Elop.
My fear is that QT will become almost dependent on KDE.
The Qt Developers at Qt-project.org are making sure that does not happen for the official Qt itself.
Now whether developers pull in enough KDE Frameworks to effectively make that happen is a different issue, and one Qt developers cannot help aside from pulling more from KDE into the official Qt releases.
Yes. It's called "Escalation of Commitment", and it happens in larger firms, too, and Government. Also with individuals. A good counter-example is HP ditching WebOS and now selling Android tablets.
Another good example is the Democrats and Obama with APA, aka ObamaCare - escalating in commitment to the destruction of everyone else.
If you try, you end up like US car companies in the 1980's. They're still digging themselves out of the hole they dug by their shortsightedness, and none of them would even exist if it weren't for government bailouts.
I don't know about any previous bailouts to the ones just a couple years back, but Ford did not participate in those bailouts. They requested the option if necessary, but they did not participate and advocated that they should be available for GM and Chrysler, both of which did use them.
The main thing that both Android and Apple based tablets have that Microsoft doesn't, is customers.
Yeah, well, if Google decides to move to a ChromeOS and does a little "embrace, extend, extinguish" dance with Android, Microsoft's offerings are going to be the most open on the market.
But Google doesn't do evil?
Yeah, bullshit. Google's an ad agency. That makes money by selling your privacy.
Google doesn't fully control Android. Sure they're the primary sponsor but Android is mostly controlled by the Open Handset Alliance.
Which is not what you want to see in, say, an Apple verses Samsung style case where "previous art" and earlier applications are all that separate you from being successfully sued into the Stone Age.
FYI - the courts require that web content have screen shots taken with time-date stamps to avoid this exact issue. The screen shots must also contain the information in a certain manner, only then can it be used as evidence/exhibits. If the lawyers are not doing that, then they are not properly writing/citing their court paperwork (briefs, etc).
And no, it does not amount to a copyright violation.
IANAL, but that's my understanding thanks to Groklaw and other sources.
The desktop problem is a problem of too much hardware, in a Windows world
That is not really the problem. Most hardware will work under Linux without any issue. The vendors typically took shortcuts and used common chipsets that Linux quickly picked up on and implemented support for. Many vendors still are starting to provide direct support too; more and more devices are starting to ship with a little Tux logo on them. ;-)
So the hardware is not the problem.
The problem is mainly software and compatibility. Too much software is tied only to Windows. My wife honestly doesn't care if she uses Mac or Windows or Linux; but she has to have MS Office for her CPA work, and nearly all Accounting software is Windows only, some offer Mac ports. And it's the same in the majority of the software fields.
So really it's the same reason why Win8 is failing - too big a change with too little support for legacy software.
Toxic lights bulbs don't actually save as much power as they claim. The daylight saving time change actually resulted in more energy being consumed than saved. BUT that doesn't mean they were ineffective. They're having just the result desired, making people feel like they are doing something to solve the problems but having those same problems still around to force even greater changes.
DST was never about saving energy. It was about aligning workers to shifts for production in a manner that made sense for war time.
Yes, there are people that claim it would save energy - not burning candles at night when you could just get up a little earlier kind of thing; but it was really about making the most of the daytime for war efforts when enacted (WWII). It made sense for the manufacturing economies of that era, but now we run 24/7, so it really doesn't make sense any more.
I also am concerned as to how faith and love lead you to protest at strangers' funerals and wish harm to others.
They dont. Which is why that church has a very negative light on it even among the rest of the Christian Churches. No one condones what they do.
Um, no. God only shrinks if you're explanation for every problem is "God did it".
Faith only shrinks if it is "God did it through magic". Realizing God may have used some processes we can scientifically discover does not shrink ones Faith. The problem comes when people try to use Scientific processes to discover things that are not discoverable - e.g. the magic.
For instance, assume that God did say a word and everything poofed into existence in a given state. You can't prove it didn't happen scientifically, and you can't prove it did happen either. Science rejects that at "nonsense" because it can't prove one way or the other where faith takes it as fact.
Oddly enough though, Science does the same thing with Evolution and the origins of everything. You can't prove evolution created anything. You can prove evolution exists in a micro-evolutionary method today, and that it has existed that way for a very long time. You can't prove things like a fish becoming a person, or an amoeba becoming a fish. Yet Evolutionists assume those very things because they're predicted and assume they will eventually find the evidence, so it's not labelled as "nonsense".
If that's why you believe in a deity, then you miss the point of faith.
Very true.
To make the point differently, just because I know exactly how a chair was built, it doesn't mean that I stop believing that a carpenter built it.
True.
Also think about if God thought ahead to various evolutionary hurdles.
Since he is credited with designing even the evolutionary system, it's still "his bad". Why would he implement an evolutionary system that isn't perfect?
I know, I know, "God works in mysterious ways." :) Amazing that phrase ends people's natural curiosity, but combined with eternal damnation it seems to work.
But he did engineer it perfectly (v1). He sabotaged it due to the fall in Genesis 3 by introducing imperfections (v2). The perfect design had no decay or death. Those "features" will be removed for the v3 version (Revelations).
Gates chose a big, fat, retarded individual to run the company after he retired. And Gates got a lost decade in return.
That individual also happens to be one of the founders/early employees of the company, one of the few remaining from that era. So it's not like Gates had much choice.
It's also not like Gates had much choice but to step aside.
The bulk of the bible was written in Hebrew and Greek, not just Aramaic. Also, there is no "original" bible. We have fragments. Some rather large ones (Textus Receptus, Textus Sinaiticus, and Testus Vaticinus." Which adds to your translation of a translation thought.
As someone who has done Biblical translations...
There has been much study done on the various texts, and ones found from quite a long time ago, e.g. Dead Sea Scrolls. What has been found is that the "Old Testament" was kept very rigorlessly and was virtually unchanged after centuries. The Levite Priests in charge of copying the texts would typically destroy copies that had even a single stroke out of place. Yes, others outside the temple also made copies, but they were not considered authoritative copies - and those copies would usually end up with commentary as well.
Most of the debate about texts does not occur over the "Old Testament" texts written in Hebrew, but the "New Testament" texts written in Greek. The entire "New Testament" was written first in Greek; Aramaic versions would have been translations much like our English versions are. Quite a few of the texts for the "New Testament" have been proven to be passed down without change; the issue comes in that there has had to be many comparisons done as monks would write their commentaries in the margins in many cases and those commentaries became hard to decipher.
Regarding what is considered to be the "Canonical" text - that is what makes up the official Bible - that was settled in 300 A.D and has not changed since. There is a secondary set of books called the Apocrapha that some consider to be part of the Bible, however those books did not meet the requisite criteria for the council in 300 A.D for them to be considered "Canonical" texts. Many things, like David Brown's DaVinci Code, rely more on the Apocrapha texts to do what they do.
Most Prostestant churches view the Apocrapha as having some value as a secondary source, but do not consider it to be equal to the Bible. The "Book of Mormon", on the other hand, is considered heresy.
You need to read up on the facts before making such statements. First, Stephen Elop wasn't directly involved with much of the negotiation that happened between Microsoft and Nokia.
I could them telling Elop not to be involved for the sake of conflicts of interest; however, my guess is that Elop was involved on the Microsoft side about this kind of thing before he took the position at Nokia.
Secondly, and more importantly, Nokia was as good as dead without Microsoft and Windows Phone.
Quite incorrect. I'm familiar with quite a few people who worked for Nokia and they had a great line up coming about. The only MeeGo-based phone ever sold (the N900) did far better than any WIndows Phones, had rave reviews, etc. It did so well that when Nokia kicked it to the curb the employees who worked on it started a new company (Jolla) and are now producing it under a new name - SailFish - and still getting rave reviews, a good audience, etc. That could have been Nokia - only better since Nokia had a full pipeline (some of which Jolla picked up in terms of sales channels) that they could have really pumped it full with.
Nokia's decline started over a decade ago when they thought the future of mobile phones was disposable fashion accessories. When they finally got into smartphones late in the game they chose technological dead ends.
Again, incorrect. They did make some mistakes with how they handled Symbian. However, they had a very large market using Symbian and they had setup a complete transition for customers and partners to move from Symbian to MeeGo. Something that got completely tossed out in the move to Windows.
Praise Symbian or Meego to your heart's content but it's all irrelevant. Nokia didn't have the resources to turn either into a relevant platform.
Incorrect. Nokia had plenty of capability to turn MeeGo into a competitor to iOS and Android.
There was far too much effort and expense required to turn them into viable competitors to Android or iOS, let alone then getting third parties to support the platform with apps.
Again incorrect. They had a very viable platform with a large community of developers under Symbian that they were providing a means of transition to MeeGo for. They had all the third party apps - and one of the biggest and oldest app stores (Ovi) to do it with.
Some have suggested that Nokia should have adopted Android. There's already an overwhelming glut of Android devices on the market.
There is now. There were not that many when Elop started at Nokia. Android was well established - it was quickly becoming a dominant player - but many had not yet aligned themselves to it. It was obvious Android would be #1 or #2 alongside iOS. Either way, Android with a transition plan for their existing Symbian partners would have let them keep what they had - a very sizeable chunk of the mobile market.
Samsung is the dominant player by a huge margin with LG, HTC, Sony fighting over scraps.
FYI - Samsung picked up that position and margin in the wake of people's reaction to Elop's burning memo platform and total annihilation of their Symbian and MeegGo products in favor of a Windows Phone they had not yet finished making. If Elop had not pre-emptively killed MeeGo then they would have had kept that dominant position and Samsung would have had to fight to get there.
So what would be Nokia's strategy? Enter the fray as an also ran and hope that in the next 5+ years they somehow evolve into a relevant player?
That was certainly the position in taking on Windows phone.
Don't forget that they were already heavily bleeding cash by this point.
Again, as others pointed out they were still profitable - which means they were not bleeding cash. You only bleed cash when your books go