...considering Verizon, AT&T, etc. all charge $5 to unlist any landline phone or to list any cell phone on contract, it's nothing new.
Yes, by default all landlines are listed, and you have to pay to unlist them. Where as by default cell phones have generally been unlisted by default, and you have to pay to list them.
Now, how would they know what to list it under for a pre-paid phone? You don't exactly sign a contract, and the buyer may not be the phone owner. So this really doesn't make any sense.
You, sir, are the moron if you truly believe that you need any of the following in order to learn "how to think for yourself" while in pursuit of any degree.
It all depends on your perspective...and the professor...
<sarcasm>
FILM 1005(Intro to Film)
Oh, so that's how I make a YouTube video...
GEOG 1101(Human Geography)
To my ancestor lived where?
SOCI(1101(Intro to Sociology)
Now you're telling me I need to be a communist...no, wait...a Capitalist?...wait...what was that again I'm a racist, bigot, and sexist because I don't agree with you?
ARTS 1100(Art Appreciation)
That's for the Picaso, and yes, I like those models too...but did you really have to do that with the replica of Michaelango's David? It may be anatomically cororect, but we didn't need to see that.
</sarcasm>
Perhaps YOU needed classes such as these to teach YOU to think for yourself. The majority of the rest of us around here are intelligent enough to have gained that basic skill well before college and to have further developed it without the need for art appreciation classes.
While about 5% of what Ahonen says is insightful, about 95% of it is just inane gibbering. His blog is best avoided.
In this case, that specific blog post would be in the 5%. A lot of what he's stated I've been seeing in other areas where I deal with Nokia or Nokia personnel.
That wasn't Elop and that wasn't the burning platform memo. By 3rd quarter 2010 the board had made up their mind that the MeeGo strategy wasn't viable. This wasn't one guy. If they were wrong why where they so wrong?
Short-sightenness. They didn't see their strategy through. No Maemo/MeeGo phone had been released yet; and nothing had been built up yet. They were probably talking with Ballmer and Elop at that point as well, and getting a lot of FUD from those circles on why Maemo/MeeGo wouldn't go.
The developer community didn't know what to think of Maemo/MeeGo quite yet as they hadn't seen it. But coming out of the gate it was more mature than Windows phone 7.5, and many third party developers quickly got behind it even after Elop's buring platform memo. Maemo/MeeGo is actually a very viable 3rd OS platform for the mobile market - more viable than Windows Phone is. All that is to say, prior to the N9 being released there was a lot of hype but not many bites - so the market was really unknown. However, releasing the N9 and the N900 and having Elop get out on stage the next day to show of a phone that wasn't going to be released for another year really undercut the platform. As it was, the N9 and N900 when compared to top of the line Android and iPhones give them a go for their money.
It would have been better for the Nokia to shoot a multiple OS strategy and let the market itself figure out which one to keep. If you're making a business decision you let the numbers run through. If you make a political decision, you choose what you want and ignore the numbers. As it stands, that's what Nokia did - a political decision.
That might be true from Digia's point of view, hopefully they got value for their money but from Nokia's point of view they certainly bought something very expensive, produced very little with it and sold the rest for breadcrumbs. Laying off people certainly doesn't provide any revenue. Trolltech had about 250 employees when Nokia bought them, they've laid off a lot, transferred 19 employees in the last agreement and 125 employees now so I don't think there's many unaccounted for. Does Nokia really retain anything of value from their Trolltech acquisition? If not then the money Digia gave them is all they'll get, the rest is a dead loss.
Very true. To note, many are still working on Qt but have other employers. May be Digia will pick them back up; or may be they'll continue with the new employers. At least it is an equitable relationship - one which Nokia started but destroyed after Elop took over. Any how... back to Qt work...
And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets.
Their Maemo/MeeGo devices don't sell nearly enough to sustain a company Nokia's size. If Nokia was a small company the N9 would have been awesome. Elop BTW agrees, that they might be able to get the N9 down to around $250 by 2014/2015 and then they do have a viable device.
The N9 and its cousins without any marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.) sold at full price and outsold its Lumia brethren which had millions of dollars in marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.). The Maemo/MeeGo OS also would have run on a lot cheaper devices than they can run the Windows Phone OS on. So I call bull - especially on it coming from Elop. If Nokia pursued Maemo/MeeGo on their phones they could easily have transitioned to it from Symbian. If they had put out the N9 and its brethren in sufficient quantity they could have lowered the price through volume discounts. Instead, under the direction of Elop, they did the least possible - low volume kept the price high, no marketing meant lower sales than they could have had, etc. It was simply a matter of he didn't want the Maemo/MeeGo platform to outshine the Windows platform - which, ironically, it did anyway only proving how strong a platform it is. Jolla will have a good business at Nokia expense as a result.
The problem was he didn't have enough money to last that long.
They had plenty of money, and plenty of sales to last that long. Nokia was far larger than the smart phone market and dominated the phone market around the world. The exception was the US where they didn't dominate the smart phone market, and were not quite as strong in the feature phone and dumb phone markets. However, the rest of their business more than offset it. Until Elop, his direction for abandoning Maemo/MeeGo, and his statements about abandoning Symbian for Windows in a very short time frame Nokia was very profitable. And, btw, it's hard to destroy a company like Elop did to Nokia, and as the article I linked to shows the shareholders have a very good likelihood for a successful lawsuit against him for what he's done - in 3 different countries nonetheless.
Certainly customers hate the Lumia and that hasn't worked out for Nokia yet, and may not work out. But the problem with MeeGo devices when we start talking about sustaining Nokia was the ability to produce something inexpensive enough to transition their Symbian base quickly enough. I've read Tomi's blog. Its an interesting blog. But he tends to think like a guy who works for Nokia not a control investor. The people who held Nokia's bonds didn't share Tomi's opinions about Nokia's prospects. Nokia was at $40 a share in late 2007 and at $15 a share when Elop came in. If there had been a MeeGo phone like the N9 when he showed up with a strategy to cut the cost of manufacture there never would have been an alliance with Microsoft.
Now don't get me wrong I think Tomi's criticism of the terrible job Elop did in managing the transition are spot on. But I don't have access to the T&C with Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft, after the fiasco with LG, can afford to let Nokia sink and the strategy may always have been: heads Windows works out and the investors get profits from Windows, tails Windows 7 flounders and Microsoft buys Nokia the time it needs.
Who knows what the strategy was. As the blog noted, the board had to be involved in the decision for such things to go on without Elop's head rolling (thus they're liable too).
Share value is not a metric of how successful a company is, but rather a metric on how willing others are to bet on the success of the company. You can be the most successful company in the world and have a zero share price; or the worst in the world and have a very high share price.
Only time will tell if the investors truly agree with Elop. For now, they seem to be sitting on the sidelines; but they may be waiting for another shoe to fall (or so to speak) before doing anything more.
With Qt your skills still stay very relevant; but you still do need to learn newer APIs as they come along just as with anything else. However, those APIs are more developer demanded than feature demanded based on the goals of one entity (e.g. Microsoft) due to its open source nature. (Yes, the commercial owners - TrollTech, Nokia, and now Digia - have had the ability to push new APIs for their needs, but it's still mostly developer oriented.)
Watching the Win APIs targets for the last year or so, it seems:
Microsoft tried to drop MFC/ATL/STL in favor of.Net C++/CLI, C#, VB.Net/VB#, etc. prior to Win8.
MFC is dead-end. It hasn't been properly maintained since WinXP; a rev was done for Vista but only to update it for Vista's APIs. same for Win7.
With Win8, they seem to be bringing back Native C++ more, but you get two options: (i) Native C++ with WinRT API, or (ii) the Native C++ with the deprecated Win32 API. Only one of which will run on all Win8 platforms.
With Win8,.Net is elevated to a higher role in the system, but only if you use it with the WinRT API. You could also do HTML5+WinRT as well.
So, for Win8.Net seems to be getting scaled back quite considerably as to really be that first class citizen it needs to be using the WinRT APIs - avoiding nearly all of Win32, etc. And of course if you want your app in the Windows App Store, then it has to do that too. As a result, expect to have a split in.Net - one that supports Win32 for "classic" desktop, and one that supports WinRT for Win8 platforms.
Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
Nokia didn't need anything. And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets. They had a credible OS and one they didn't need to pay someone else for. And as someone else pointed out, they were profitable and didn't need the cash. Their ability to remain profitable changed only after they started pursuing Windows at all costs.
If you want to get an accurate picture of what Microsoft and Stephen Elop did - try reading this blog from a former Nokia Exec that is highly respected in Mobile Phone Sales. You'll see why Nokia is doing so poorly and having to sell off everything, and why Windows Phone will be a no-go (and who made it such).
Their market cap is only about 50 million euro - significantly less than the 104 million euro Nokia paid for Trolltech back in 2008 and you get the rest of Digia for free. I'd wager that Digia paid less than 10 million for this, with Nokia taking a loss of over 90%, maybe even 99%. The thing is, I don't see who'd buy it today. Apple and Android have their own toolkits on mobile, Microsoft and Apple have their own toolkit on desktop so nobody needs it to sell hardware except maybe RIM. Going back to the dual GPL/commercial licensing model is nearly hopeless now that it's gone LGPL, people will fork off the last release and split the community. It's a nice product but I don't see how you'd make money on it.
Remember, Nokia bought all of TrollTech. Digia already purchased the Commercial Licensing from Nokia almost a year ago; and now they're purchasing most of the rest - that is, all the stuff that is Qt, but not necessarily all the people. For instance, on the Qt Dev/interest list it was noted they were assuming 125 people from Nokia; of a possible estimate of 150 max - some of which may have already left. And of course the Australian office was already closed by Nokia so they're not assuming that either (though they are getting the quite a bit of the equipment from what I can tell).
So just because they're only paying a fraction of what Nokia paid does not mean that they are actually paying less than Nokia did overall. You'd have to run the numbers and do a good comparison of what is actually getting transferred. If they are taking a loss, it's probably not much.
But Microsoft has an history of successfully managing to destroy competition by bundling inferior products (As an example: real-time compression almost died during the Stacker vs. Doublespace saga).
Valve is completely right in attempting to get prepared for the worst.
Counterexamples: Winzip (albeit now an arm of Corel) and RAR Labs still exist and sell compression utilities, despite Windows having bundled ZIP file handling for the last 11 years.
In all honesty, Windows Compressed Folders suck compared to WinZIP and WinRAR. You have zero options, and it tends to fall over when you get to between 700MB and 1GB of data (don't know if they fixed that since say WinXP SP1, but it's probably still a problem).
Corel, Cyberlink, and Adobe's Fisher Price division are still making plenty of money despite the existence of Windows Movie Maker.
And Windows Movie Maker sucks compared to nearly anything else. Also note, that all those companies provide versions for Mac as well.
Stardock makes a majority of their money by making programs that change the look of Windows despite Windows having a perfectly functional UI out of the box.
Some people like to customize their desktop look 'n feel. Microsoft does provide some ability to do that, but it can be rather difficult to setup. For example, try changing the colors for the various dialogs in a consistent way - it's a PITA on Windows. Third Party tools make it easier to get all those settings correct, and build themes that are consistent.
Just because Microsoft bundles something doesn't equate with destroying established inertia.
That depends on their goal. In most cases its the Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE of Microsoft), and then they do. Sometimes they add something and kind of forget about it - it still affects the competitor - yes WinRAR and WinZIP likely lost some business because of Compressed Folders; but then, most of what they lost was probably just customers using their demo products so it's not much of a loss. (7zip has a deeper impact on them both.)
Claiming that scientists have figured out a way to incorporate all data to fit their model is not bad science, it is good science.
Except when such incorporations are done merely to explain away things they find inconvenient and don't actually fit their model so that they can go on with their model.
That is, if the model predicts A but you get B, then saying the model predicts B simply because it the model doesn't improve the model. Kind of like the way a lot of/.ers don't like String Theory because if something contradicts it they just write another "string" into the the theory even if it contradicts all other strings.
So the secret sauce I need to become a multibillion dollar multinational corporation is spend a lot on advertising, give my projects fabulous color names, hang up a fight club poster... Thats all it takes?
Lumia sales provide evidence that such is a falsehood. At least Microsoft was useful for something.
> No, that's just an advantage of a byte-encoded language since you effectively have the source all the time as a result. And while Eclipse is in many ways superior to even MSVS, it also faulters in many ways as well - e.g. handling C/C++ projects is a PITA to get setup.
Fortunately I've moved on from C++ and only have to use it when interfacing hardware. Given a choice between developing in Java or C++ there is no contest anymore IMHO, unless you are on a severely memory constrained device (getting increasingly rare these days) Java wins for development speed, ease, cross-platform portability, tools, and breadth of modern libraries.
I'm glad to be in C++ still; and I would quite well beg to differ. But it'd be pointless to argue.
I don't believe that this is the real reason Microsoft is changing the branding. If they thought it was valuable enough to keep, they would fight for it. But among tech-savvy users, Metro has become a punchline and a negative brand, just like Vista. I smell another Mojave coming up.
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
The difference here is that with VIsta they actually had a few technical glitches early on (namely how they changed the product between RC2 to RTM without telling anyone or giving anyone time to test) that caused a lot of problems. Vista was generally a very good OS. So Vista vs Mojave wasn't unexpected.
However, with Win8, there's a design and functional problem that users are going to take issue with no matter what you call it. So changing the name won't solve the issue.
Shame you aren' working in Java. The debugger is first rate in any of the IDEs (you have a choice) and JVisualVM is unparalled - you don' have to do anything special, just attach to any program running in your VM and away you go. Plus, with Java you can use JoGL for write one run anywhere (apart from a few AMD vs Nvidia gotchas) high-performance OpenGL programs, that's what I'm doing and it is awesome to use the same code between Mac, Linux and Windows without having to any porting effort (since the OpenJK, jogamp and jinput guys smooth over all of that away for you).
No, that's just an advantage of a byte-encoded language since you effectively have the source all the time as a result. And while Eclipse is in many ways superior to even MSVS, it also faulters in many ways as well - e.g. handling C/C++ projects is a PITA to get setup.
I know I am going to come off as a 'shill' but MS tools rock (I am not talking about their frameworks). It is the one thing that holds me to windows these days. All those tools you mention are available in windows and usually better polished. Valgrind compaired to say using boundschecker. You goto valgrind and bisect issues, boundschecker puts you right on the offending line that they think either overwrote memory or leaked. There are dozens of tools in windows like that. Valgrind is good for what it is (and better than nothing) but needs major work. If I am looking for memory/threading issues I usually port it to windows then debug it there. Most of the the IDE frameworks out there are clumsy wrappers around GDB. They have really improved in the past 5 years. But they still have a long way to go. Dont get me wrong. There is a tool for everything and many that are better than windows. But many are clumsy and tedious to use.
I've moved over to entirely Linux development after working in Windows for years. MSVS is quite well refined compared to nearly all the GUIs on Linux, and the MS Debuggers are certainly far better than GDB in many respects. So I very much agree with your sentiment.
That said, many of the times I do break points in GDB I have the same issues with MS Debugger - e.g. looking at STL objects under the debugger. GDB is doing a good job of catching up with their "pretty printers" API in that respect, which can make it just as good on the command-line as in the MSVS GUI. The GUI tools around GDB (DD, etc.) just aren't keeping up in that respect either.
Of course, GDB is designed to be more universal so that other tools can easily plug-in. Where MS Debugger is pretty much limited to just what MS puts out. The Qt Creator guys have done a good job of hooking into both; but they're one of the very few out there that do.
And finally, I'm finding some of the newer MSVS releases to become increasingly flashy while breaking down in functionality. (Yes, I still have to use them to deliver Windows-based versions of my Qt-based applications that I develop nearly solely under Linux.)
Right. The default in embryonic development in humans is female. You can be XYY, and if you do not react to the various androgens, you are a fully functioning female. Remember that in normal XX females. one or the two X chromosomes in each cell is deactivated (the Barr body.) Only one functioning X chromosome is required to be female.
They may look fully functional female; but they won't be as they are typically unable to conceive children for various reasons - that is, they're infertile. Fully functional in most other respects yes.
That said, many with androgen insensitivity can still build muscle like normal males do. So they still would have an advantage over a normal female.
"The problem with that" is the very reason gender segregation in sports exists in the first place - that women wouldn't be able to compete with men and would thus be effectively removed from higher-level sports competitions. By making that you're standard, you're letting men into women's sports. All of the top results would go to men who lucked into being XX.
That's only an issue if you eliminate gender segregation; not if you do what several of the GPs proposed.
Quicken and Quickbooks is the only application I know of to have survived a full-on Microsoft assault on their business. Microsoft Money has folded. It's something to be proud of, I guess - for now.
So have PeachTree and a number of other solutions. Good to see Microsoft Money gone; it what pure shiite.
I disagree. As long as your books are kept correctly, the accountant only needs three things:
1) Profit and Loss
2) Balance Sheet
3) Depreciation Schedule
Gnucash does all of those. Print them out. Hand it to your account. And you're done.
As a small business owner using GnuCash, it's not quite that simple. Accountants like using tools like QuickBooks that they are very familiar with, and they don't want to have to re-enter all the data. So printing out the information is useless for them. You really need to export it to a format that both support.
Sadly, GnuCash does not support exporting Quicken/QuickBooks formats. It will important them with some extra file filters, but no export capability. My solution is to export to CVS which QuickBooks can import as well. Haven't tried it yet, but my accountant & I will be working through it when the time comes.
Slashdot Mirror
...considering Verizon, AT&T, etc. all charge $5 to unlist any landline phone or to list any cell phone on contract, it's nothing new.
Yes, by default all landlines are listed, and you have to pay to unlist them. Where as by default cell phones have generally been unlisted by default, and you have to pay to list them.
Now, how would they know what to list it under for a pre-paid phone? You don't exactly sign a contract, and the buyer may not be the phone owner. So this really doesn't make any sense.
A sign of a good programmer is that they put themselves out of a job/project/etc so they can move on to the next one.
You, sir, are the moron if you truly believe that you need any of the following in order to learn "how to think for yourself" while in pursuit of any degree.
It all depends on your perspective...and the professor...
<sarcasm>
FILM 1005(Intro to Film)
Oh, so that's how I make a YouTube video...
GEOG 1101(Human Geography)
To my ancestor lived where?
SOCI(1101(Intro to Sociology)
Now you're telling me I need to be a communist...no, wait...a Capitalist?...wait...what was that again I'm a racist, bigot, and sexist because I don't agree with you?
ARTS 1100(Art Appreciation)
That's for the Picaso, and yes, I like those models too...but did you really have to do that with the replica of Michaelango's David? It may be anatomically cororect, but we didn't need to see that.
</sarcasm>
Perhaps YOU needed classes such as these to teach YOU to think for yourself. The majority of the rest of us around here are intelligent enough to have gained that basic skill well before college and to have further developed it without the need for art appreciation classes.
Well, they can be quite entertaining, no?
While about 5% of what Ahonen says is insightful, about 95% of it is just inane gibbering. His blog is best avoided.
In this case, that specific blog post would be in the 5%. A lot of what he's stated I've been seeing in other areas where I deal with Nokia or Nokia personnel.
Short-sightenness. They didn't see their strategy through. No Maemo/MeeGo phone had been released yet; and nothing had been built up yet. They were probably talking with Ballmer and Elop at that point as well, and getting a lot of FUD from those circles on why Maemo/MeeGo wouldn't go.
The developer community didn't know what to think of Maemo/MeeGo quite yet as they hadn't seen it. But coming out of the gate it was more mature than Windows phone 7.5, and many third party developers quickly got behind it even after Elop's buring platform memo. Maemo/MeeGo is actually a very viable 3rd OS platform for the mobile market - more viable than Windows Phone is. All that is to say, prior to the N9 being released there was a lot of hype but not many bites - so the market was really unknown. However, releasing the N9 and the N900 and having Elop get out on stage the next day to show of a phone that wasn't going to be released for another year really undercut the platform. As it was, the N9 and N900 when compared to top of the line Android and iPhones give them a go for their money.
It would have been better for the Nokia to shoot a multiple OS strategy and let the market itself figure out which one to keep. If you're making a business decision you let the numbers run through. If you make a political decision, you choose what you want and ignore the numbers. As it stands, that's what Nokia did - a political decision.
That might be true from Digia's point of view, hopefully they got value for their money but from Nokia's point of view they certainly bought something very expensive, produced very little with it and sold the rest for breadcrumbs. Laying off people certainly doesn't provide any revenue. Trolltech had about 250 employees when Nokia bought them, they've laid off a lot, transferred 19 employees in the last agreement and 125 employees now so I don't think there's many unaccounted for. Does Nokia really retain anything of value from their Trolltech acquisition? If not then the money Digia gave them is all they'll get, the rest is a dead loss.
Very true. To note, many are still working on Qt but have other employers. May be Digia will pick them back up; or may be they'll continue with the new employers. At least it is an equitable relationship - one which Nokia started but destroyed after Elop took over. Any how... back to Qt work...
And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets.
Their Maemo/MeeGo devices don't sell nearly enough to sustain a company Nokia's size. If Nokia was a small company the N9 would have been awesome. Elop BTW agrees, that they might be able to get the N9 down to around $250 by 2014/2015 and then they do have a viable device.
The N9 and its cousins without any marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.) sold at full price and outsold its Lumia brethren which had millions of dollars in marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.). The Maemo/MeeGo OS also would have run on a lot cheaper devices than they can run the Windows Phone OS on. So I call bull - especially on it coming from Elop. If Nokia pursued Maemo/MeeGo on their phones they could easily have transitioned to it from Symbian. If they had put out the N9 and its brethren in sufficient quantity they could have lowered the price through volume discounts. Instead, under the direction of Elop, they did the least possible - low volume kept the price high, no marketing meant lower sales than they could have had, etc. It was simply a matter of he didn't want the Maemo/MeeGo platform to outshine the Windows platform - which, ironically, it did anyway only proving how strong a platform it is. Jolla will have a good business at Nokia expense as a result.
The problem was he didn't have enough money to last that long.
They had plenty of money, and plenty of sales to last that long. Nokia was far larger than the smart phone market and dominated the phone market around the world. The exception was the US where they didn't dominate the smart phone market, and were not quite as strong in the feature phone and dumb phone markets. However, the rest of their business more than offset it. Until Elop, his direction for abandoning Maemo/MeeGo, and his statements about abandoning Symbian for Windows in a very short time frame Nokia was very profitable. And, btw, it's hard to destroy a company like Elop did to Nokia, and as the article I linked to shows the shareholders have a very good likelihood for a successful lawsuit against him for what he's done - in 3 different countries nonetheless.
Certainly customers hate the Lumia and that hasn't worked out for Nokia yet, and may not work out. But the problem with MeeGo devices when we start talking about sustaining Nokia was the ability to produce something inexpensive enough to transition their Symbian base quickly enough. I've read Tomi's blog. Its an interesting blog. But he tends to think like a guy who works for Nokia not a control investor. The people who held Nokia's bonds didn't share Tomi's opinions about Nokia's prospects. Nokia was at $40 a share in late 2007 and at $15 a share when Elop came in. If there had been a MeeGo phone like the N9 when he showed up with a strategy to cut the cost of manufacture there never would have been an alliance with Microsoft.
Now don't get me wrong I think Tomi's criticism of the terrible job Elop did in managing the transition are spot on. But I don't have access to the T&C with Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft, after the fiasco with LG, can afford to let Nokia sink and the strategy may always have been: heads Windows works out and the investors get profits from Windows, tails Windows 7 flounders and Microsoft buys Nokia the time it needs.
Who knows what the strategy was. As the blog noted, the board had to be involved in the decision for such things to go on without Elop's head rolling (thus they're liable too).
Share value is not a metric of how successful a company is, but rather a metric on how willing others are to bet on the success of the company. You can be the most successful company in the world and have a zero share price; or the worst in the world and have a very high share price.
Only time will tell if the investors truly agree with Elop. For now, they seem to be sitting on the sidelines; but they may be waiting for another shoe to fall (or so to speak) before doing anything more.
With Qt your skills still stay very relevant; but you still do need to learn newer APIs as they come along just as with anything else. However, those APIs are more developer demanded than feature demanded based on the goals of one entity (e.g. Microsoft) due to its open source nature. (Yes, the commercial owners - TrollTech, Nokia, and now Digia - have had the ability to push new APIs for their needs, but it's still mostly developer oriented.)
So, for Win8 .Net seems to be getting scaled back quite considerably as to really be that first class citizen it needs to be using the WinRT APIs - avoiding nearly all of Win32, etc. And of course if you want your app in the Windows App Store, then it has to do that too. As a result, expect to have a split in .Net - one that supports Win32 for "classic" desktop, and one that supports WinRT for Win8 platforms.
Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
Nokia didn't need anything. And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets. They had a credible OS and one they didn't need to pay someone else for. And as someone else pointed out, they were profitable and didn't need the cash. Their ability to remain profitable changed only after they started pursuing Windows at all costs.
If you want to get an accurate picture of what Microsoft and Stephen Elop did - try reading this blog from a former Nokia Exec that is highly respected in Mobile Phone Sales. You'll see why Nokia is doing so poorly and having to sell off everything, and why Windows Phone will be a no-go (and who made it such).
Their market cap is only about 50 million euro - significantly less than the 104 million euro Nokia paid for Trolltech back in 2008 and you get the rest of Digia for free. I'd wager that Digia paid less than 10 million for this, with Nokia taking a loss of over 90%, maybe even 99%. The thing is, I don't see who'd buy it today. Apple and Android have their own toolkits on mobile, Microsoft and Apple have their own toolkit on desktop so nobody needs it to sell hardware except maybe RIM. Going back to the dual GPL/commercial licensing model is nearly hopeless now that it's gone LGPL, people will fork off the last release and split the community. It's a nice product but I don't see how you'd make money on it.
Remember, Nokia bought all of TrollTech. Digia already purchased the Commercial Licensing from Nokia almost a year ago; and now they're purchasing most of the rest - that is, all the stuff that is Qt, but not necessarily all the people. For instance, on the Qt Dev/interest list it was noted they were assuming 125 people from Nokia; of a possible estimate of 150 max - some of which may have already left. And of course the Australian office was already closed by Nokia so they're not assuming that either (though they are getting the quite a bit of the equipment from what I can tell).
So just because they're only paying a fraction of what Nokia paid does not mean that they are actually paying less than Nokia did overall. You'd have to run the numbers and do a good comparison of what is actually getting transferred. If they are taking a loss, it's probably not much.
But Microsoft has an history of successfully managing to destroy competition by bundling inferior products (As an example: real-time compression almost died during the Stacker vs. Doublespace saga).
Valve is completely right in attempting to get prepared for the worst.
Counterexamples: Winzip (albeit now an arm of Corel) and RAR Labs still exist and sell compression utilities, despite Windows having bundled ZIP file handling for the last 11 years.
In all honesty, Windows Compressed Folders suck compared to WinZIP and WinRAR. You have zero options, and it tends to fall over when you get to between 700MB and 1GB of data (don't know if they fixed that since say WinXP SP1, but it's probably still a problem).
Corel, Cyberlink, and Adobe's Fisher Price division are still making plenty of money despite the existence of Windows Movie Maker.
And Windows Movie Maker sucks compared to nearly anything else. Also note, that all those companies provide versions for Mac as well.
Stardock makes a majority of their money by making programs that change the look of Windows despite Windows having a perfectly functional UI out of the box.
Some people like to customize their desktop look 'n feel. Microsoft does provide some ability to do that, but it can be rather difficult to setup. For example, try changing the colors for the various dialogs in a consistent way - it's a PITA on Windows. Third Party tools make it easier to get all those settings correct, and build themes that are consistent.
Just because Microsoft bundles something doesn't equate with destroying established inertia.
That depends on their goal. In most cases its the Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE of Microsoft), and then they do. Sometimes they add something and kind of forget about it - it still affects the competitor - yes WinRAR and WinZIP likely lost some business because of Compressed Folders; but then, most of what they lost was probably just customers using their demo products so it's not much of a loss. (7zip has a deeper impact on them both.)
Not from what I can tell. The community seems about split on both.
Claiming that scientists have figured out a way to incorporate all data to fit their model is not bad science, it is good science.
Except when such incorporations are done merely to explain away things they find inconvenient and don't actually fit their model so that they can go on with their model.
/.ers don't like String Theory because if something contradicts it they just write another "string" into the the theory even if it contradicts all other strings.
That is, if the model predicts A but you get B, then saying the model predicts B simply because it the model doesn't improve the model. Kind of like the way a lot of
...that is interesting and join it. Take little nibbles out of their bug reports, and work your way to adding features.
So the secret sauce I need to become a multibillion dollar multinational corporation is spend a lot on advertising, give my projects fabulous color names, hang up a fight club poster... Thats all it takes?
Lumia sales provide evidence that such is a falsehood. At least Microsoft was useful for something.
> No, that's just an advantage of a byte-encoded language since you effectively have the source all the time as a result. And while Eclipse is in many ways superior to even MSVS, it also faulters in many ways as well - e.g. handling C/C++ projects is a PITA to get setup.
Fortunately I've moved on from C++ and only have to use it when interfacing hardware. Given a choice between developing in Java or C++ there is no contest anymore IMHO, unless you are on a severely memory constrained device (getting increasingly rare these days) Java wins for development speed, ease, cross-platform portability, tools, and breadth of modern libraries.
I'm glad to be in C++ still; and I would quite well beg to differ. But it'd be pointless to argue.
I don't believe that this is the real reason Microsoft is changing the branding. If they thought it was valuable enough to keep, they would fight for it. But among tech-savvy users, Metro has become a punchline and a negative brand, just like Vista. I smell another Mojave coming up.
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
The difference here is that with VIsta they actually had a few technical glitches early on (namely how they changed the product between RC2 to RTM without telling anyone or giving anyone time to test) that caused a lot of problems. Vista was generally a very good OS. So Vista vs Mojave wasn't unexpected.
However, with Win8, there's a design and functional problem that users are going to take issue with no matter what you call it. So changing the name won't solve the issue.
How about Windows Defenestration UI?
Or better yet - the Microsoft Windows Penitration UI.
Shame you aren' working in Java. The debugger is first rate in any of the IDEs (you have a choice) and JVisualVM is unparalled - you don' have to do anything special, just attach to any program running in your VM and away you go. Plus, with Java you can use JoGL for write one run anywhere (apart from a few AMD vs Nvidia gotchas) high-performance OpenGL programs, that's what I'm doing and it is awesome to use the same code between Mac, Linux and Windows without having to any porting effort (since the OpenJK, jogamp and jinput guys smooth over all of that away for you).
No, that's just an advantage of a byte-encoded language since you effectively have the source all the time as a result. And while Eclipse is in many ways superior to even MSVS, it also faulters in many ways as well - e.g. handling C/C++ projects is a PITA to get setup.
I know I am going to come off as a 'shill' but MS tools rock (I am not talking about their frameworks). It is the one thing that holds me to windows these days. All those tools you mention are available in windows and usually better polished. Valgrind compaired to say using boundschecker. You goto valgrind and bisect issues, boundschecker puts you right on the offending line that they think either overwrote memory or leaked. There are dozens of tools in windows like that. Valgrind is good for what it is (and better than nothing) but needs major work. If I am looking for memory/threading issues I usually port it to windows then debug it there. Most of the the IDE frameworks out there are clumsy wrappers around GDB. They have really improved in the past 5 years. But they still have a long way to go. Dont get me wrong. There is a tool for everything and many that are better than windows. But many are clumsy and tedious to use.
I've moved over to entirely Linux development after working in Windows for years. MSVS is quite well refined compared to nearly all the GUIs on Linux, and the MS Debuggers are certainly far better than GDB in many respects. So I very much agree with your sentiment.
That said, many of the times I do break points in GDB I have the same issues with MS Debugger - e.g. looking at STL objects under the debugger. GDB is doing a good job of catching up with their "pretty printers" API in that respect, which can make it just as good on the command-line as in the MSVS GUI. The GUI tools around GDB (DD, etc.) just aren't keeping up in that respect either.
Of course, GDB is designed to be more universal so that other tools can easily plug-in. Where MS Debugger is pretty much limited to just what MS puts out. The Qt Creator guys have done a good job of hooking into both; but they're one of the very few out there that do.
And finally, I'm finding some of the newer MSVS releases to become increasingly flashy while breaking down in functionality. (Yes, I still have to use them to deliver Windows-based versions of my Qt-based applications that I develop nearly solely under Linux.)
>It's not as simple as you'd think...
Right. The default in embryonic development in humans is female. You can be XYY, and if you do not react to the various androgens, you are a fully functioning female. Remember that in normal XX females. one or the two X chromosomes in each cell is deactivated (the Barr body.) Only one functioning X chromosome is required to be female.
They may look fully functional female; but they won't be as they are typically unable to conceive children for various reasons - that is, they're infertile. Fully functional in most other respects yes.
That said, many with androgen insensitivity can still build muscle like normal males do. So they still would have an advantage over a normal female.
"The problem with that" is the very reason gender segregation in sports exists in the first place - that women wouldn't be able to compete with men and would thus be effectively removed from higher-level sports competitions. By making that you're standard, you're letting men into women's sports. All of the top results would go to men who lucked into being XX.
That's only an issue if you eliminate gender segregation; not if you do what several of the GPs proposed.
Quicken and Quickbooks is the only application I know of to have survived a full-on Microsoft assault on their business. Microsoft Money has folded. It's something to be proud of, I guess - for now.
So have PeachTree and a number of other solutions. Good to see Microsoft Money gone; it what pure shiite.
I disagree. As long as your books are kept correctly, the accountant only needs three things:
1) Profit and Loss 2) Balance Sheet 3) Depreciation Schedule
Gnucash does all of those. Print them out. Hand it to your account. And you're done.
As a small business owner using GnuCash, it's not quite that simple. Accountants like using tools like QuickBooks that they are very familiar with, and they don't want to have to re-enter all the data. So printing out the information is useless for them. You really need to export it to a format that both support.
Sadly, GnuCash does not support exporting Quicken/QuickBooks formats. It will important them with some extra file filters, but no export capability. My solution is to export to CVS which QuickBooks can import as well. Haven't tried it yet, but my accountant & I will be working through it when the time comes.