I strongly encourage you to actually read the article before you assume it's a fully electric or fossil fuel powered processor.
It's a bioprocessor. Thermodynamics be damned here. They're using yeast and other biologically engineered critters to break down trash and such into fuels that are used to power a motor that produces electricity.
The real problem here is that the poster did a lousy job of deriving a title and quoting the real meat of the story, giving the "I have no time to RTFA" crowd a moment to think it over before thumping the 2nd Law.
Not exactly a situation where anyone "hates" Symbian, secretly or otherwise, more a situation where certain platforms work out better for certain companies.
Oh, I'm sure there are plenty of execs who don't "hate" Symbian. That's because they usually don't have to write any code for it. I do, and I hate it. A lot of Symbian programmers hate it. But, it's a job.
For those of you Java and C# developers out there...don't even try it. You'll be pulling your hair out at the ridiculousness of how things were implemented within the first 15 minutes. Probably beforehand when you're setting up the environment. The writer of the article knows what he's talking about. I once sat on the phone with a guy for 5 hours explaining how to get a "hello world" compiling properly.
Still, it's a mobile OS that works reasonably well from the user's perspective. UIQ is attractive as a smartphone UI, even if the Symbian "kernel" is goofy and outdated.
Well, the best team I ever worked on for a project was configured like this: We had one guy (me) doing all the network, security, and glue code, one guy doing the xml serialization, general management stuff, and UI hookups, and another guy working on the video stuff, making a broadband media player for a customer. We got our stuff at a usable beta state by the best possible deadline (We had a few...an unrealistic one, and a realistic one. We met the realistic one). They just took all of us and put us in an executive office, and we had very clear boundaries and responsibilities.
I've worked pretty well on a lot of projects where I was the only guy, but that one combined three and did an excellent job. So maybe it's not that there are too many cooks in the kitchen, but rather, it's having too many cooks who don't know their boundaries and get in each other's way.
It's kind of funny that so many people give up because some silly piece of proprietary software (like Exchange) won't work with Linux. Duh! It's closed source and Microsoft has no intention of letting Linux work with Exchange. Interoperability only goes as far as the bean counters, it's pure and simple.
To be quite honest, I hate Exchange server. IF you really wanted to make Linux work, you'd wean your company off it. There is plenty of groupware available for Linux, and Exchange isn't the end all of sending a freaking email. It's far from it. It's still relatively a big time newcomer in that field.
Seriously. I mean, it's nice and all to know a really, really inefficient and underproducing way to produce gasoline, but malaria's really not related to that, is it?
That's like if my boss hired me to write a web service for internet transactions, and I show him after 4 months that I wrote a VR simulation with a floating head that spouted out daily horoscopes. I'm sure there's a market for it, but I'm certain my boss would be pretty confused.
KOffice ported to Windows is an ongoing project, as far as I know. OO runs fine on 512KB of memory and has for me for the past couple years. The difference in startup time between OO and MS Office is negligible. MS Office has just gotten slower and slower over the years, and it's funny that a piece of software written in native code actually sometimes seems like it takes longer to start up than something that requires a VM.
OO is essentially a finished product, and is at revision 2.1. KOffice, on the other hand, as far as I know, isn't there yet for Windows users.
However, that logic strangely enough doesn't apply to telecommuters.
You really do get forgotten. I telecommute quite a bit of my own work, and oftentimes, when I show up, coworkers are shocked and think that I had quit the company some time before. When that becomes the prevailing thought, then generally, no, in meetings people aren't going to be thinking about you and your great accomplishments.
Yeah, I shouldn't be replying to my own post, but to further elaborate on the value of checking references...
Do it. If a guy was able to hack it at a job for at least several months, and was let go for lack of work (as opposed to being officially fired for whatever reason), or if a professor states that he was able to get the coursework done, then chances are, he probably knows how to code. Yes, employers aren't allowed to tear apart their old employees, and the length of time spent at various companies really isn't a clear indicator any longer (I take quite a few short term contracts). But employers will tend to give a good recommendation for those who were able enough to get the job done, and if a guy worked for a company for, say, 11 months, chances are he was able to get his work done to some degree (a manager will fire or demote a guy in 3 or 4 at the longest, if they can't get ANYTHING done).
Too many interviewers don't place enough value on references and recommendations. While a lot of coders still have their friends pretend to be ex-coworkers as an attempt to fudge good references, you have to check up on the references themselves. Usually it just takes a quick web search, a call made to the front desk of a company, or something of that nature. If you're serious about finding the best talent, you have to do these things.
You know what works even better than a "lets stare at the poor guy as he tries to scribble some code clear enough for us to understand, then begin to nitpick like a bunch of chest thumping, thirtysomething, 'I'm an experienced coder and should be the manager'" orgy? Checking references. It doesn't take that long to do. If you can't get anyone, you contact the guy and ask them for someone else, and make sure it's either a college professor or the actual manager/supervisor. Doing that, in conjunction with sending the guy a short project and having him do it over the weekend, is as good as anything else.
Seriously, how much of your project will this potential employee be doing on the whiteboard? NO one codes that way. Once in awhile, you stand in front of someone else and scribble out a flowchart or a diagram to clarify something. That's it. Just because the guy forgot a semicolon somewhere on a whiteboard scrawl doesn't mean he'll take 5 times longer to get something done working within an IDE that has built in context checking, has a help system loaded with code samples, and an internet connection that allows him to go out and find snippets made free to everyone when he's stuck on something.
In fact, I'd greatly prefer employing someone that resourceful over someone who will sit there and bang their head over some problem for days or weeks. If you have someone who can find code, understand it well enough to incorporate it, and is detail oriented enough to refactor it clean, that's worth a heck of a lot more than some altruistic chump who thinks it's better to rewrite the wheel for everything. Resourceful people get the work done on time.
There are occasionally situations where a coder has to solve a problem that hasn't been solved before, or where there isn't a solution readily available. However, those situations are really, in this day and age, few and far between...and if a coder can understand and incorporate a snippet of code into a project and make it work, he probably understands enough to write code on his own.
As the original Fallout or Fallout 2. It's basically a pure moneymaking scheme by Interplay to capitalize on the cult status of the Fallout franchise. Basically, all the stuff that made Fallout really fun and entertaining, probably won't be there. Instead, you'll probably see some weak attempts at trying to recreate the humor and the experience...but ultimately it will be toned down in an attempt to appeal to a broader base of users.
In any case, expecting Betheseda, who now holds the Fallout single player license, to produce a decent Fallout 3 is probably an even bigger stretch. Just because Elder Scrolls was popular, doesn't mean they're up to the task of creating something that will live up to the original. They're two totally different games, being developed by entirely different people.
Basically, if you're a fan of Fallout like me, don't get your hopes up any time soon. You'll be let down.
You mean, older "software", right? Because Win 98, ME, and OSX are not exactly hardware, per se.
In any case, it's probably not a big deal except for the Mac folks. If I were still running OSX 10.2 or earlier, and didn't want to upgrade, I'd probably be a little irate. Other than that, as far as the MS operating systems go, those aren't even supported by Microsoft in any kind of real capacity any longer...and ME just plain sucks. If you're using it and somehow manage to be productive, congrats. But just to let you know, if you bought it, you probably WERE ripped off.
If you DID mean hardware, then yes, I do understand that upgrading your graphics card does kind of suck. However, vector based rendering is definitely worth paying literally a few bucks for a card that supports decent 2D rendering...though if you're running OSX, Win32, KDE, or Gnome, if you don't have a decent 2D card, I'd wonder why exactly you want a state of the art web browser on your file server.;)
At a company I worked at years ago, my boss hired a young CS phD and put him to work on a secure wireless file exchange system for PDAs. After months of toiling on it, he proudly held up his work, which ended up working exactly the same as OBEX, only a little slower. And not secure at all. Basically, he ended up rewriting OBEX. At least he was able to keep his paychecks coming in. I don't know why he didn't invent his own encrypted object envelope or something that probably would have done the job.
Just because you hire a phD doesn't always mean that they're not hard at work "innovating" technology that already exists in some form. In fact, that seems to happen quite a bit. It's when you have a problem that you really can't surmount with current technology that you end up coming up with a new system. What having a phD really means is that you have a guy who had the financial means to obtain said phD, and one willing to work hard enough over the course of 7-8 years to gain said phD. While other engineers with 4 year degrees are hard at work on many other projects out in the real world at the same time, you can be sure that your phD is the absolute expert on something that he spent years writing a thesis for.
Google the term "Sony UX-50 Palm". Check out the images too.;)
Yeah, there's a market for personal flash storage computers. Unfortunately, it's small and crowded. However, when it comes to handheld industrial PDAs, the market becomes a lot bigger.
Is to keep your manager essentially from freaking out about the project. From experience, it's easier to tell a non-technical manager that a particular component will take more time (then you research how to get around a problem) than it is to tell a technical manager that you need to spend some time researching a problem. Technical managers often freak about their deadline, and will go hire some temp to try and "speed things up". Even worse, they'll try and second guess the engineer and feel that there's a "really simple way" to fix the problem. Technically-oriented managers almost NEVER can resist going either route when they start sweating about their job possibly being on the line. And usually, when they go either route, all they end up doing is fouling things up worse.
Xenophobia begets xenophobia. A lot of Americans also know that they're not exactly well liked around the world, so to be honest, a lot of them also think "if they don't like us, then why should we trust/respect/listen to them?"
Not saying that's my bag, but when I listen to "average folk" types that comprise a large segment of the US voting population, I hear a lot of that type of sentiment. I find it sad, but somewhat amusing, that many people seem to think those types live in a completely closed environment...however, many of them have traveled around, have met a lot of people, and have seen enough to make that kind of bad judgement. But, the rest of the world is somewhat foolishly having way too much fun at their expense, all the while fearing WWIII...so it probably won't end anytime soon.
I must just be lucky. I've been working contracts generally less than 1 year my whole career, so I've worked at a number of places. Only one corporation I've worked for gave me that business. The current corporation I havebeen working for had my boss call me 2 weeks in advance to let me know he had to lay off his contractors, and in about an hour, I'm heading down there to have a going away lunch at a Hawaiian place with my coworkers on the company tab.
But it's not like this incarnation of Amiga is built to run on desktops and compete against Linux and Windows. This is probably targeting multimedia handhelds and other multimedia devices. Even though/.ers generally think the handheld world is already controlled by WinMob/Linux/Java, I do handheld stuff for a major corporation, and I have to be proficient on about 4-5 different platforms (and none of them have to do with Blackberries!). There's plenty of room for competition in the handheld market, and I'd be happy to see Amiga get in there and...I pray...allow me to forget everything I know about BREW, Java, and/or Windows Mobile.:)
In fact, according to the docs/usenet posts I've read, the old PalmOS emulator was chock full of, if not based on, old Amiga code. If this incarnation of AmigaOS is as well designed, and adds features that allow it to compete with Windows Mobile, it'd be great for anyone that uses a smartphone. Generally, with every platform I develop for, there are strengths and weaknesses, and none of them are clearly the best for everything (or in some cases, anything).
You're kidding, right? Mozilla incorporated a long time ago. It helps to fund the ongoing development and maintenance of its products by selling merchandise. It has been doing so for years now.
Someone mod this guy up for funny.
Also, I call total bullshit on this. These machines are either bad, or not. You can't have it both ways. I'm surprised at how many are now coming up with justifications to still vilify only the Republicans in this process, regardless of whether they want - or want to get rid of - e-voting.
It's obviously not a matter of whether machines are evil, and you should be kicking yourself for saying that. You're on Slashdot, you should know that computers aren't inheritly evil. It's the bureaucratic types that run those machines. However, if the machines themselves are so much crap that they can be tinkered with really easily and discreetly, then it simply emboldens those evil people to try and get away with it.
These people in Maryland probably don't see a problem because either they have been using them correctly all along and have no intention of tampering with them to alter election results, or they have been messing with elections results. If they're truly a bipartisan group like the GP stated, then they wouldn't have any reason to use them incorrectly.
You can still find a Tapwave Zodiac 2 on eBay, well, sometimes anyway. They had wider screens, and I've used ssh/irc/etc. on mine quite effectively for some time now. It's a hobbyist's toy at this point, but it's a fun hobby if you know where to look for all the old 3d APIs built for it.
I'll still use my old trusty Tapwave Zodiac II for my combo music/gaming handheld. Even if there aren't going to be any new games for it anymore, it still plays music great, I can surf the web with it, IM, play games, and whatever else I feel like doing with it without having to hack the crap out of it to do so.
I almost got in a fist fight with a Best Buy employee who was wearing a Geek Squad shirt once, years ago. The guy was hard selling one of the HP Journadas on some old duffer who kept repeatedly asking to look at one of the Palm m500 series...the salesman tried to tell the old guy that all Palm had were "games" on it. Needless to say, I couldn't go back to that particular Best Buy store for awhile.
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I strongly encourage you to actually read the article before you assume it's a fully electric or fossil fuel powered processor.
It's a bioprocessor. Thermodynamics be damned here. They're using yeast and other biologically engineered critters to break down trash and such into fuels that are used to power a motor that produces electricity.
The real problem here is that the poster did a lousy job of deriving a title and quoting the real meat of the story, giving the "I have no time to RTFA" crowd a moment to think it over before thumping the 2nd Law.
For those of you Java and C# developers out there...don't even try it. You'll be pulling your hair out at the ridiculousness of how things were implemented within the first 15 minutes. Probably beforehand when you're setting up the environment. The writer of the article knows what he's talking about. I once sat on the phone with a guy for 5 hours explaining how to get a "hello world" compiling properly.
Still, it's a mobile OS that works reasonably well from the user's perspective. UIQ is attractive as a smartphone UI, even if the Symbian "kernel" is goofy and outdated.
Well, the best team I ever worked on for a project was configured like this: We had one guy (me) doing all the network, security, and glue code, one guy doing the xml serialization, general management stuff, and UI hookups, and another guy working on the video stuff, making a broadband media player for a customer. We got our stuff at a usable beta state by the best possible deadline (We had a few...an unrealistic one, and a realistic one. We met the realistic one). They just took all of us and put us in an executive office, and we had very clear boundaries and responsibilities.
I've worked pretty well on a lot of projects where I was the only guy, but that one combined three and did an excellent job. So maybe it's not that there are too many cooks in the kitchen, but rather, it's having too many cooks who don't know their boundaries and get in each other's way.
It's kind of funny that so many people give up because some silly piece of proprietary software (like Exchange) won't work with Linux. Duh! It's closed source and Microsoft has no intention of letting Linux work with Exchange. Interoperability only goes as far as the bean counters, it's pure and simple.
To be quite honest, I hate Exchange server. IF you really wanted to make Linux work, you'd wean your company off it. There is plenty of groupware available for Linux, and Exchange isn't the end all of sending a freaking email. It's far from it. It's still relatively a big time newcomer in that field.
Seriously. I mean, it's nice and all to know a really, really inefficient and underproducing way to produce gasoline, but malaria's really not related to that, is it?
That's like if my boss hired me to write a web service for internet transactions, and I show him after 4 months that I wrote a VR simulation with a floating head that spouted out daily horoscopes. I'm sure there's a market for it, but I'm certain my boss would be pretty confused.
KOffice ported to Windows is an ongoing project, as far as I know. OO runs fine on 512KB of memory and has for me for the past couple years. The difference in startup time between OO and MS Office is negligible. MS Office has just gotten slower and slower over the years, and it's funny that a piece of software written in native code actually sometimes seems like it takes longer to start up than something that requires a VM.
OO is essentially a finished product, and is at revision 2.1. KOffice, on the other hand, as far as I know, isn't there yet for Windows users.
However, that logic strangely enough doesn't apply to telecommuters.
You really do get forgotten. I telecommute quite a bit of my own work, and oftentimes, when I show up, coworkers are shocked and think that I had quit the company some time before. When that becomes the prevailing thought, then generally, no, in meetings people aren't going to be thinking about you and your great accomplishments.
Yeah, I shouldn't be replying to my own post, but to further elaborate on the value of checking references... Do it. If a guy was able to hack it at a job for at least several months, and was let go for lack of work (as opposed to being officially fired for whatever reason), or if a professor states that he was able to get the coursework done, then chances are, he probably knows how to code. Yes, employers aren't allowed to tear apart their old employees, and the length of time spent at various companies really isn't a clear indicator any longer (I take quite a few short term contracts). But employers will tend to give a good recommendation for those who were able enough to get the job done, and if a guy worked for a company for, say, 11 months, chances are he was able to get his work done to some degree (a manager will fire or demote a guy in 3 or 4 at the longest, if they can't get ANYTHING done). Too many interviewers don't place enough value on references and recommendations. While a lot of coders still have their friends pretend to be ex-coworkers as an attempt to fudge good references, you have to check up on the references themselves. Usually it just takes a quick web search, a call made to the front desk of a company, or something of that nature. If you're serious about finding the best talent, you have to do these things.
You know what works even better than a "lets stare at the poor guy as he tries to scribble some code clear enough for us to understand, then begin to nitpick like a bunch of chest thumping, thirtysomething, 'I'm an experienced coder and should be the manager'" orgy? Checking references. It doesn't take that long to do. If you can't get anyone, you contact the guy and ask them for someone else, and make sure it's either a college professor or the actual manager/supervisor. Doing that, in conjunction with sending the guy a short project and having him do it over the weekend, is as good as anything else.
Seriously, how much of your project will this potential employee be doing on the whiteboard? NO one codes that way. Once in awhile, you stand in front of someone else and scribble out a flowchart or a diagram to clarify something. That's it. Just because the guy forgot a semicolon somewhere on a whiteboard scrawl doesn't mean he'll take 5 times longer to get something done working within an IDE that has built in context checking, has a help system loaded with code samples, and an internet connection that allows him to go out and find snippets made free to everyone when he's stuck on something.
In fact, I'd greatly prefer employing someone that resourceful over someone who will sit there and bang their head over some problem for days or weeks. If you have someone who can find code, understand it well enough to incorporate it, and is detail oriented enough to refactor it clean, that's worth a heck of a lot more than some altruistic chump who thinks it's better to rewrite the wheel for everything. Resourceful people get the work done on time.
There are occasionally situations where a coder has to solve a problem that hasn't been solved before, or where there isn't a solution readily available. However, those situations are really, in this day and age, few and far between...and if a coder can understand and incorporate a snippet of code into a project and make it work, he probably understands enough to write code on his own.
As the original Fallout or Fallout 2. It's basically a pure moneymaking scheme by Interplay to capitalize on the cult status of the Fallout franchise. Basically, all the stuff that made Fallout really fun and entertaining, probably won't be there. Instead, you'll probably see some weak attempts at trying to recreate the humor and the experience...but ultimately it will be toned down in an attempt to appeal to a broader base of users.
In any case, expecting Betheseda, who now holds the Fallout single player license, to produce a decent Fallout 3 is probably an even bigger stretch. Just because Elder Scrolls was popular, doesn't mean they're up to the task of creating something that will live up to the original. They're two totally different games, being developed by entirely different people.
Basically, if you're a fan of Fallout like me, don't get your hopes up any time soon. You'll be let down.
You mean, older "software", right? Because Win 98, ME, and OSX are not exactly hardware, per se.
;)
In any case, it's probably not a big deal except for the Mac folks. If I were still running OSX 10.2 or earlier, and didn't want to upgrade, I'd probably be a little irate. Other than that, as far as the MS operating systems go, those aren't even supported by Microsoft in any kind of real capacity any longer...and ME just plain sucks. If you're using it and somehow manage to be productive, congrats. But just to let you know, if you bought it, you probably WERE ripped off.
If you DID mean hardware, then yes, I do understand that upgrading your graphics card does kind of suck. However, vector based rendering is definitely worth paying literally a few bucks for a card that supports decent 2D rendering...though if you're running OSX, Win32, KDE, or Gnome, if you don't have a decent 2D card, I'd wonder why exactly you want a state of the art web browser on your file server.
At a company I worked at years ago, my boss hired a young CS phD and put him to work on a secure wireless file exchange system for PDAs. After months of toiling on it, he proudly held up his work, which ended up working exactly the same as OBEX, only a little slower. And not secure at all. Basically, he ended up rewriting OBEX. At least he was able to keep his paychecks coming in. I don't know why he didn't invent his own encrypted object envelope or something that probably would have done the job. Just because you hire a phD doesn't always mean that they're not hard at work "innovating" technology that already exists in some form. In fact, that seems to happen quite a bit. It's when you have a problem that you really can't surmount with current technology that you end up coming up with a new system. What having a phD really means is that you have a guy who had the financial means to obtain said phD, and one willing to work hard enough over the course of 7-8 years to gain said phD. While other engineers with 4 year degrees are hard at work on many other projects out in the real world at the same time, you can be sure that your phD is the absolute expert on something that he spent years writing a thesis for.
Google the term "Sony UX-50 Palm". Check out the images too. ;)
Yeah, there's a market for personal flash storage computers. Unfortunately, it's small and crowded. However, when it comes to handheld industrial PDAs, the market becomes a lot bigger.
So sad. And my company was about to send 5,000 high paying tech jobs over there. Oh wait...no. That's right, the thought never crossed our minds.
Is to keep your manager essentially from freaking out about the project. From experience, it's easier to tell a non-technical manager that a particular component will take more time (then you research how to get around a problem) than it is to tell a technical manager that you need to spend some time researching a problem. Technical managers often freak about their deadline, and will go hire some temp to try and "speed things up". Even worse, they'll try and second guess the engineer and feel that there's a "really simple way" to fix the problem. Technically-oriented managers almost NEVER can resist going either route when they start sweating about their job possibly being on the line. And usually, when they go either route, all they end up doing is fouling things up worse.
Xenophobia begets xenophobia. A lot of Americans also know that they're not exactly well liked around the world, so to be honest, a lot of them also think "if they don't like us, then why should we trust/respect/listen to them?"
Not saying that's my bag, but when I listen to "average folk" types that comprise a large segment of the US voting population, I hear a lot of that type of sentiment. I find it sad, but somewhat amusing, that many people seem to think those types live in a completely closed environment...however, many of them have traveled around, have met a lot of people, and have seen enough to make that kind of bad judgement. But, the rest of the world is somewhat foolishly having way too much fun at their expense, all the while fearing WWIII...so it probably won't end anytime soon.
Stupidity is a problem the world over.
I must just be lucky. I've been working contracts generally less than 1 year my whole career, so I've worked at a number of places. Only one corporation I've worked for gave me that business. The current corporation I havebeen working for had my boss call me 2 weeks in advance to let me know he had to lay off his contractors, and in about an hour, I'm heading down there to have a going away lunch at a Hawaiian place with my coworkers on the company tab.
But it's not like this incarnation of Amiga is built to run on desktops and compete against Linux and Windows. This is probably targeting multimedia handhelds and other multimedia devices. Even though /.ers generally think the handheld world is already controlled by WinMob/Linux/Java, I do handheld stuff for a major corporation, and I have to be proficient on about 4-5 different platforms (and none of them have to do with Blackberries!). There's plenty of room for competition in the handheld market, and I'd be happy to see Amiga get in there and...I pray...allow me to forget everything I know about BREW, Java, and/or Windows Mobile. :)
In fact, according to the docs/usenet posts I've read, the old PalmOS emulator was chock full of, if not based on, old Amiga code. If this incarnation of AmigaOS is as well designed, and adds features that allow it to compete with Windows Mobile, it'd be great for anyone that uses a smartphone. Generally, with every platform I develop for, there are strengths and weaknesses, and none of them are clearly the best for everything (or in some cases, anything).
You're kidding, right? Mozilla incorporated a long time ago. It helps to fund the ongoing development and maintenance of its products by selling merchandise. It has been doing so for years now. Someone mod this guy up for funny.
Comprise graduating Computer Science and Software Engineering classes from universities.
You can still find a Tapwave Zodiac 2 on eBay, well, sometimes anyway. They had wider screens, and I've used ssh/irc/etc. on mine quite effectively for some time now. It's a hobbyist's toy at this point, but it's a fun hobby if you know where to look for all the old 3d APIs built for it.
I'll still use my old trusty Tapwave Zodiac II for my combo music/gaming handheld. Even if there aren't going to be any new games for it anymore, it still plays music great, I can surf the web with it, IM, play games, and whatever else I feel like doing with it without having to hack the crap out of it to do so.
I almost got in a fist fight with a Best Buy employee who was wearing a Geek Squad shirt once, years ago. The guy was hard selling one of the HP Journadas on some old duffer who kept repeatedly asking to look at one of the Palm m500 series...the salesman tried to tell the old guy that all Palm had were "games" on it. Needless to say, I couldn't go back to that particular Best Buy store for awhile.
To building the big force field around the Earth that we've all wanted since Spaceballs.