I don't like Techcrunch either, but the truth is they're really not that far off from most other tech blogs. Chock full of fanboys without a clue about anything other than the toys they play with, and the only reason they get to post their blogs there is because they can write reasonably grammatically correct bits. I couldn't care less, though, if it was just an ego project for Arrington...innovation happens when someone who is moderately clued in decides they want something better than the current products available on the market and has an idea.
Fusion Garage has done nothing to convince me they're not a disreputable rip-off shop. When you get notoriety for taking someone's idea and repackaging it as your own, especially if there are plenty of other options out on the market already, you better hope your theft pays off or else get ready to put your assets up on eBay and give your property management company a months notice. Companies like Fusion Garage go out of business for pulling stunts like this. Even if Arrington ends up not making a penny in a lawsuit against them.
It sounds like he did take responsibility already. Being denied employment for something trivial isn't "taking responsibility for one's actions," it's being screwed over.
In most years, if an employer turned me down for something like that, I'd laugh it off. I get leads all the time. Then again...
The most common thread I've observed as a long term consultant is that every company out there thinks that their team needs to be "extremely elite" because their product is "extremely important" and therefore their employees need to be "perfect". Every team I've worked with seems to beat their chests with that stuff, mainly because they're so out of touch with the rest of the industry that they don't realize that their little b2b app is run of the mill, that their development team isn't any more skilled than the last team you worked with, and that their management isn't any smarter and their work environment isn't any better than anyone else. When there's a down economy, every company out there thinks they're the best because so many people apply for jobs with them.
My advice to anyone who's turned down for a job in general is to ask as many questions as you can about WHY you were turned down. They'll usually be hesitant to give you any info about it, but they're technically supposed to give you at least a general reason. If you at least know why you're not getting work, you can take that and go after someone who's got something on you up on the net. Asking politely doesn't work, you've got to have your lawyer call that guy to make something like that happen. Asking those questions saved my career...I was beating my head against the wall a couple years back trying to get a job, only to find out that one of my references who told me he would give me a reference, wasn't actually allowed to give them out. I asked every recruiter I had contacted until I found out which reference was screwing me out of work.
Or else they are, and just don't care about the reference enough to bother replying. Doesn't seem like the kinda place for heated discussions about Greek myth.
If a ratings board bans their game, even if it's a derivative piece of movie-spawned crap, it's pure gold for marketing. There's no way that the Australian government is going to block kids from getting the game...they will find a way one way or the other. But they're definitely doing yeoman's work in promoting the game everywhere by giving it a big "bad" rating. All the ratings system does is provide a free benchmark for a particular genre to strive for because they know that's what will turn heads and sell their product.
I know that if I were representing the company for this product, I'd be scheduling a big party to celebrate the rating and ban, not trying to make a political/free speech point out of it. The ratings system is an amazing helping hand to this particular venue.
No, it's just that it's a hot keyword, and a whole lot of people can't be bothered to look up what it really means. And knowing Intel pretty well, their guys most likely know full well what it is, and they took the name as a taunt to anyone who would dare consider distributing workload instead of buying more server hardware and doing it the way that benefits Intel's bottom line.
The real question there is really a matter of user freedom vs. turning your choice over to whomever manages those repositories as a gatekeeper. It's an easier choice to make on a smartphone since people are going to generally use it for the same major reasons, but on a laptop or desktop, it depends more on what you want to get out of it.
Some folks don't mind being given the freedom to determine what is going to be bad for them and what is going to be good for them...and some folks want their hands held for them. Linux does give you both options, it just makes it a PITA for "ordinary folks" to do it one way and thus, guides them into the repos.
Microsoft announcing that they'd be the absolute gatekeeper for software installs would probably be like dropping an atom bomb on a lot of legitimate software companies along with a lot of illegitimate companies that produce badware. They had a little experience with this already, what with Palladium and Trustworthy Computing. Didn't go over too well, did it?
I don't see how vegetarians pointing out that eating meat, either grown in a vat or grown on a farm, is anything different than basically what they're all about. They're about not eating meat as a dietary/health issue, not about an animal rights issue. Of course PETA would make a statement that would make you feel good and you'd agree with, because their concern is whether living animals are being slaughtered, and not necessarily whether or not you're healthier by not eating them.
With your response, I assume that one side agreed with you, and one didn't, so you patted the one who agreed with you on the back, and stupidly stomped the other one for not agreeing with you. And yes, I know it's/., but please, this shouldn't be all about YOU.
Thank whatever you hold dear that you HAVEN'T been subjected to their amazingly annoying, low quality, grating ads. This old guy who supposedly runs the company did all this on purpose to make them seem like they're a small, local-type outfit. He begs you to "try his product" in a way that makes you wish you could slap him for acting so falsely pathetic on television. But the fact is, those commercials have been running on almost every channel INCLUDING radio here in the US for the past 20 years, and that takes a pretty serious advertising budget to pull off, even if they do schedule only the cheapest blocks of air time. And they are shown nationally, as far as I know.
I'm not surprised they're a scam, what with how obviously clumsy their attempt to trick people into thinking they're not some big amorphous corporation they are.
Just saying. Hospitals use it for door handles and other surfaces because it can zap superbugs.
But hey, it's way cooler to pass your hands into some sort of holding tank where they can be spritzed with some sort of crazy atmospheric plasma.
My Pre has an awesome slideout keyboard AND all the gestures and virtual keyboard of the iPhone (if you even wanted to bother with that), and a lot more. You'd be surprised at the difference between emails that I send with my Pre, vs. emails that my coworkers have sent with their iPhones. What it really comes down to is that you're using your phone as a computer while multitasking, and getting something written down quickly equates to getting complete thoughts out. This means that you don't get coworkers emailing you back saying "what do you mean?" because your one line email with abbreviations didn't answer whatever question they had...which means you have to IM them, call them, email them more, and further disrupt whatever it was you were doing.
All that said, I'd be curious as to how tactility and gesture-based interfaces would play together, if at all.
Yeah? Well, if the Mall decided to host it, do you know for certain if they DIDN'T say that they would supply their own security?
Yeah, I know it's/., but please. Think about it a little more. This story isn't giving you all the details. Venues often supply their own security for various events. Talent agencies supply the talent, but frequently, they don't do things like rent a small army of security people, with the exception of their own security guards for their talent. They don't lug in 500 chairs and 175 tables and the people needed to set them all up. It's up to the venue.
Malls host this stuff because it means lots of teenagers are going to show up with their parents in tow, and that means money gets spent. The people responsible for this mess are the people who run that mall, unless they explicitly demanded that the talent bring his own small army of rent-a-cops, posts and ropes, and whatever else they'd need to organize these people. Think about it...malls, rent-a-cops. They usually have them on hand. They probably hold other events as well...you get it?
Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I absolutely despise having a clunky object strapped to my wrist. Unless I'm using it as some sort of male accessory to impress someone by having a shiny object that I can flash at people while talking to them, I'd rather not have something that catches on my sleeve constantly, pinches my wrist, seems to trap sweat right underneath it, etc. There's a reason why I've lost every watch I've ever owned after having it for only a few months. I leave it somewhere because I take it off all the time.
Before wrist watches, there were pocket watches. You fished them out of your pockets back then, just like your cell phone. And hey, there are wrist phones out there if you have some sort of wrist accessory fetish. But my phone does a zillion things more than that pocket watch...which would just be wasting space in my pocket unless I was trying to do some sort of 19th century fashion thing.
As for a phone not being able to tell you what time it was when out of service...do you call your friends to ask them the time?
And my phone is running a linux kernel. I've never owned a watch that did that. I can literally leave my laptop, even my netbook, at home most of the time because my smartphone does everything I'd probably do with my netbook anyway. And I don't need one of those irritating screen filters that you buy and put on your laptop, because the screen is sized just small enough for me to read it, and too difficult for people to read over my shoulder.
Or, you may have created the project with no intention of maintaining it yourself, and had a pretty good idea that a less skilled (read, lower paid) developer would be stuck trying to understand how a moderately complex region of code worked. I know I for one would rather have a company I consulted at not get frustrated with my dev work after I'm gone, rather than write complex stuff that I can "hope" they'll pay me to come back and fix later. I'd rather they feel comfortable to bring me back to work on bigger and better things...which is why I put a little extra meat into my comments to make a new dev feel comfortable enough at getting a handle on things.
What's interesting is that Opera actually has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries, better than both FF and IE (and not just a single version).
I'm not sure why you'd find that more interesting than the fact that Chrome passed Safari or whatever.
The only thing I can think of that means anything in this whole "browser wars" thing, and it doesn't mean as much now as it did 4 years ago, is how vital it is to absolutely stick to web standards as a result of cross browser compliance. Otherwise, it's pretty much irrelevant. My phone has a webkit browser fully integrated into it, so when I hit the web with it, I'm probably being detected as using Safari or whatever...and when I do a search with my Windows desktop through the file explorer, I'm making a hit with IE...and when I fire up Firefox to browse the news...same deal. You can't even detect if people are committed users of a browser anymore (well, unless you install spyware on their router to log their browser usage) because you kind of are stuck using so many different ones over the course of a day these days. And that's why I'm saying the browser wars are pretty much irrelevant, and at the very least, these silly usage stats. And now that OS's have embraced the notion of full browser integration, it's only going to get redundant with OS usage stats.
I've had a Pre since it was released. They're launching it in Canada, and it's supposed to be on other networks here in the US in the next few months. It's a damn good phone, does everything those Android phones do. Easier to program for, too. The hardware looks nicer.
It's a shame though how many people who've never even given them a chance are already calling it dead. The OS on it, webOS, is an exceptionally nice mobile OS to use and develop for, once you wrap your head around the notion that it is a web device, and nothing like those old handhelds running unportable native code like the old Palms were. It's really worth waiting for...I waited for 6 months with a Centro with a broken backlight because I knew the Pre was going to be released this last summer. Turned out that it was cheaper than my old Centro was, too, with all the incentives and such for switching carriers.
From my experience with Android, it's a nice looking mobile OS, but as a user I'd rather use a Pre running webOS. It gives you all the same features with a snappier and better designed interface. I also hate the feel of stock HTC hardware, always have. Almost everything they make feels cheap.
I dunno. Everyone I talk to who tells me "Palm is dead" but hasn't seen the Pre, after playing with mine, really wanted one for their "do-everything" phone.
I kinda agree. From an outside perspective, Symbian is conceptually a solid concept...but once you hunker down and try to do something for it, you find yourself pulling your hair out non-stop. I also have to say, at the time when the Symbian guys came up with them, Active Objects were a pretty cool idea. No one else was doing stuff like that for mobile devices, and if it had been done less insanely, it really would have been like buffed up widgets.
Yeah, it has a goofy API. I totally agree. But I can work with it, and get stuff done...that's fine. I don't mind the microkernel...if you write your code reasonably efficiently, you can deal with that. Memory management, while necessary to make that code efficient, is clumsy and annoying. I didn't really run into the "pay for more access" nonsense, though I certainly hated that sort of stuff about Brew, too. But once you've been stuck jumping over all those hurdles, you never want to deal with it again. A smart company, designing a platform, should put third party developers above everything. Making your platform easy to develop for should always take precedence over anything else, no matter how much temptation it is to try and nickel and dime developers in order to farm cash flow out of them. The more hurdles you put up, the less chance your OS will compete in the application market, and that generates the demand that makes the carriers interested in putting your OS on their phones.
I can think of a number of OS's offhand that greatly outlived their lifetime expectations simply because they're easy to develop for and the toolchain is flexible (and free). I have Symbian development on my resume...even though it's obviously been 5 years since I did it seriously, I still get headhunters contacting me non-stop from all over the place simply because, and no offense if someone reading this does like Symbian development, it's a big time headache to deal with.
Making it open source isn't going to save it. There are too many far better mobile options out there already. webOS, Android, and Moblin are already built on open source, reasonably standardized platforms. There are more on the way. No one is going to want to fight with Symbian weirdness and 1990's style C++ when they could be doing AJAX on webOS or Java on Android.
I second that. What are you doing, hitting riots? I've lived in this country for my whole life, 34 years, and I've never seen a car on the side of the road burning all on its own volition due to it being horribly bad. Maybe if another car hit it or something. We do car recalls over here if someone screwed up at the manufacturing plant. Or maybe you're confusing idiot drivers who never check their oil or water levels and screw up their engines with hapless people who just have crummy cars?
You'd think you'd have logic in the GPU that could determine when a certain load was being achieved, certain 3D functionality was being called, etc., and offload some work to a multicore CPU if it was hitting a certain performance threshold (as long as the CPU itself wasn't being pounded...but most games are mainly picking on the GPU and hardly taking full advantage of a quad core CPU or whatever). That makes a degree of sense...using your resources more effectively is a good thing. If that improves your performance scores, well...so what? It measures the fact that your drivers are better than the other card's drivers. That seems like fair play, from a consumer's standpoint. If the competitors can't be bothered to write drivers that work efficiently, that's their problem. Great card + bad drivers = bad investment, as far as I'm concerned. That's the real point of these benchmarking tests, anyway. It's just product marketing.
But trapping a particular binary name to fix the results? That's being dishonest to customers. They're deliberately trying to trick gamers who just look at the 3DMark benchmarks into buying their hardware, but giving them hardware that won't necessarily perform at the expected level of quality. I generally stick up for Intel, having worked there in the past as a contractor and generally liking the company and people...but this is seriously bad form on their behalf. I'm surprised this stuff got through their validation process...I know I'd have probably choked on my coffee laughing if I were on that team and could see this in their driver code.
I'd still do this stuff, but I'd focus on new platforms, new gadgets, expert systems, and other things that don't immediately make me a reliable salary but are fun and engaging to work on. Either that, or I'd get a degree in something more personally rewarding and go that route. No more working on some business app that has been done a hundred times over that I'm only developing because they figured it was cheaper to do in house, or they needed like 3 features they couldn't get elsewhere.
The network computer was a first stab at conceptualizing all this cloud/web whatever today. None of it was even remotely feasible as a result of what we all had to work with in the mid-90's. Everyone knew this was the direction things were going, but the amount of complexity in the whole concept took decades to really refine. So no, you don't get a witty/. retort.
And as someone who uses a webOS today, it works pretty good for me on my phone.
Microsoft hasn't really done anything groundbreaking in regards to user interface (and even a lot of core functionality) in a pretty long time. The only thing more dated than their desktop and server OS's are their mobile devices. That said, they've got the best toolchain in the business and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't used it, period.
I read this though as "Google is more poised to become a bigger monopoly than Microsoft ever was". Google is a corporation that will inevitably become more and more focused on their shareholders. Since they set the bar that they want to do so many things "for free", all you can expect is that they'll continue to find new and possibly disturbing (in a security/advertising sense) ways to make money off their users if and when they can push Microsoft off the pile.
But Microsoft definitely is pretty vulnerable right now. They haven't been able to generate real excitement about any of their product releases with the masses for many years now. Apple and Google have that mojo, and Microsoft just doesn't. Microsoft seems to be growing into the new IBM in a lot of ways. Hating on Microsoft though just doesn't seem to make sense much anymore...at least not for a developer. The monopolistic stuff they used to be accused of is pretty much being done by everyone now, and Microsoft spends more of its resources on making really nice tools for development at the expense of innovation on their product lines. My hatred grew back when they wanted to squash all competition while providing flakey, inadequate development tools...now they're just trying to keep up with the latest trends while the old underdog companies like Apple and Google have kind of grown into what I really didn't like about Microsoft in the first place.
You probably realized this already, but it hit me awhile back...
In grade school/high school back in the 80's, most schools had Macs. IBM PCs were totally inadequate at the time for educational purposes, they were meant for spreadsheets and business applications. Fast forward to 1998-2000...art departments started getting digital in large numbers, and who were the guys making the real decisions? Art directors and musicians and the like who probably never took a computer course in college and had never touched a PC, and if they had, their mind instantly conjured up images of a DOS command prompt vs. the Mac SE they took that keyboarding class on in high school. It's pretty obvious which direction they were going to go.
I really think those investments in getting Macs in public schools back in the 80's probably kept the whole company afloat. Apple might very well be dead right now if it weren't for that. PCs running Windows or Linux have been fully capable of doing everything that most of them need to do for a very long time now...and much cheaper to boot. But when you talk to these people, it's like they were never really aware of that fact until usually someone comes along and shows them.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like Techcrunch either, but the truth is they're really not that far off from most other tech blogs. Chock full of fanboys without a clue about anything other than the toys they play with, and the only reason they get to post their blogs there is because they can write reasonably grammatically correct bits. I couldn't care less, though, if it was just an ego project for Arrington...innovation happens when someone who is moderately clued in decides they want something better than the current products available on the market and has an idea.
Fusion Garage has done nothing to convince me they're not a disreputable rip-off shop. When you get notoriety for taking someone's idea and repackaging it as your own, especially if there are plenty of other options out on the market already, you better hope your theft pays off or else get ready to put your assets up on eBay and give your property management company a months notice. Companies like Fusion Garage go out of business for pulling stunts like this. Even if Arrington ends up not making a penny in a lawsuit against them.
Cost rarely stops an Apple fan in his tracks.
In most years, if an employer turned me down for something like that, I'd laugh it off. I get leads all the time. Then again...
The most common thread I've observed as a long term consultant is that every company out there thinks that their team needs to be "extremely elite" because their product is "extremely important" and therefore their employees need to be "perfect". Every team I've worked with seems to beat their chests with that stuff, mainly because they're so out of touch with the rest of the industry that they don't realize that their little b2b app is run of the mill, that their development team isn't any more skilled than the last team you worked with, and that their management isn't any smarter and their work environment isn't any better than anyone else. When there's a down economy, every company out there thinks they're the best because so many people apply for jobs with them.
My advice to anyone who's turned down for a job in general is to ask as many questions as you can about WHY you were turned down. They'll usually be hesitant to give you any info about it, but they're technically supposed to give you at least a general reason. If you at least know why you're not getting work, you can take that and go after someone who's got something on you up on the net. Asking politely doesn't work, you've got to have your lawyer call that guy to make something like that happen. Asking those questions saved my career...I was beating my head against the wall a couple years back trying to get a job, only to find out that one of my references who told me he would give me a reference, wasn't actually allowed to give them out. I asked every recruiter I had contacted until I found out which reference was screwing me out of work.
Or else they are, and just don't care about the reference enough to bother replying. Doesn't seem like the kinda place for heated discussions about Greek myth.
If a ratings board bans their game, even if it's a derivative piece of movie-spawned crap, it's pure gold for marketing. There's no way that the Australian government is going to block kids from getting the game...they will find a way one way or the other. But they're definitely doing yeoman's work in promoting the game everywhere by giving it a big "bad" rating. All the ratings system does is provide a free benchmark for a particular genre to strive for because they know that's what will turn heads and sell their product.
I know that if I were representing the company for this product, I'd be scheduling a big party to celebrate the rating and ban, not trying to make a political/free speech point out of it. The ratings system is an amazing helping hand to this particular venue.
No, it's just that it's a hot keyword, and a whole lot of people can't be bothered to look up what it really means. And knowing Intel pretty well, their guys most likely know full well what it is, and they took the name as a taunt to anyone who would dare consider distributing workload instead of buying more server hardware and doing it the way that benefits Intel's bottom line.
The real question there is really a matter of user freedom vs. turning your choice over to whomever manages those repositories as a gatekeeper. It's an easier choice to make on a smartphone since people are going to generally use it for the same major reasons, but on a laptop or desktop, it depends more on what you want to get out of it.
Some folks don't mind being given the freedom to determine what is going to be bad for them and what is going to be good for them...and some folks want their hands held for them. Linux does give you both options, it just makes it a PITA for "ordinary folks" to do it one way and thus, guides them into the repos.
Microsoft announcing that they'd be the absolute gatekeeper for software installs would probably be like dropping an atom bomb on a lot of legitimate software companies along with a lot of illegitimate companies that produce badware. They had a little experience with this already, what with Palladium and Trustworthy Computing. Didn't go over too well, did it?
I don't see how vegetarians pointing out that eating meat, either grown in a vat or grown on a farm, is anything different than basically what they're all about. They're about not eating meat as a dietary/health issue, not about an animal rights issue. Of course PETA would make a statement that would make you feel good and you'd agree with, because their concern is whether living animals are being slaughtered, and not necessarily whether or not you're healthier by not eating them.
/., but please, this shouldn't be all about YOU.
With your response, I assume that one side agreed with you, and one didn't, so you patted the one who agreed with you on the back, and stupidly stomped the other one for not agreeing with you. And yes, I know it's
Thank whatever you hold dear that you HAVEN'T been subjected to their amazingly annoying, low quality, grating ads. This old guy who supposedly runs the company did all this on purpose to make them seem like they're a small, local-type outfit. He begs you to "try his product" in a way that makes you wish you could slap him for acting so falsely pathetic on television. But the fact is, those commercials have been running on almost every channel INCLUDING radio here in the US for the past 20 years, and that takes a pretty serious advertising budget to pull off, even if they do schedule only the cheapest blocks of air time. And they are shown nationally, as far as I know.
I'm not surprised they're a scam, what with how obviously clumsy their attempt to trick people into thinking they're not some big amorphous corporation they are.
Just saying. Hospitals use it for door handles and other surfaces because it can zap superbugs. But hey, it's way cooler to pass your hands into some sort of holding tank where they can be spritzed with some sort of crazy atmospheric plasma.
Well, those who know, shoot for Score:5, Informative. Those who don't, shoot for Score:5, Funny. Guess which one I'm shooting for with THIS reply?
My Pre has an awesome slideout keyboard AND all the gestures and virtual keyboard of the iPhone (if you even wanted to bother with that), and a lot more. You'd be surprised at the difference between emails that I send with my Pre, vs. emails that my coworkers have sent with their iPhones. What it really comes down to is that you're using your phone as a computer while multitasking, and getting something written down quickly equates to getting complete thoughts out. This means that you don't get coworkers emailing you back saying "what do you mean?" because your one line email with abbreviations didn't answer whatever question they had...which means you have to IM them, call them, email them more, and further disrupt whatever it was you were doing.
All that said, I'd be curious as to how tactility and gesture-based interfaces would play together, if at all.
Yeah? Well, if the Mall decided to host it, do you know for certain if they DIDN'T say that they would supply their own security?
/., but please. Think about it a little more. This story isn't giving you all the details. Venues often supply their own security for various events. Talent agencies supply the talent, but frequently, they don't do things like rent a small army of security people, with the exception of their own security guards for their talent. They don't lug in 500 chairs and 175 tables and the people needed to set them all up. It's up to the venue.
Yeah, I know it's
Malls host this stuff because it means lots of teenagers are going to show up with their parents in tow, and that means money gets spent. The people responsible for this mess are the people who run that mall, unless they explicitly demanded that the talent bring his own small army of rent-a-cops, posts and ropes, and whatever else they'd need to organize these people. Think about it...malls, rent-a-cops. They usually have them on hand. They probably hold other events as well...you get it?
Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I absolutely despise having a clunky object strapped to my wrist. Unless I'm using it as some sort of male accessory to impress someone by having a shiny object that I can flash at people while talking to them, I'd rather not have something that catches on my sleeve constantly, pinches my wrist, seems to trap sweat right underneath it, etc. There's a reason why I've lost every watch I've ever owned after having it for only a few months. I leave it somewhere because I take it off all the time.
Before wrist watches, there were pocket watches. You fished them out of your pockets back then, just like your cell phone. And hey, there are wrist phones out there if you have some sort of wrist accessory fetish. But my phone does a zillion things more than that pocket watch...which would just be wasting space in my pocket unless I was trying to do some sort of 19th century fashion thing.
As for a phone not being able to tell you what time it was when out of service...do you call your friends to ask them the time?
And my phone is running a linux kernel. I've never owned a watch that did that. I can literally leave my laptop, even my netbook, at home most of the time because my smartphone does everything I'd probably do with my netbook anyway. And I don't need one of those irritating screen filters that you buy and put on your laptop, because the screen is sized just small enough for me to read it, and too difficult for people to read over my shoulder.
Or, you may have created the project with no intention of maintaining it yourself, and had a pretty good idea that a less skilled (read, lower paid) developer would be stuck trying to understand how a moderately complex region of code worked. I know I for one would rather have a company I consulted at not get frustrated with my dev work after I'm gone, rather than write complex stuff that I can "hope" they'll pay me to come back and fix later. I'd rather they feel comfortable to bring me back to work on bigger and better things...which is why I put a little extra meat into my comments to make a new dev feel comfortable enough at getting a handle on things.
What's interesting is that Opera actually has 40-60% marketshare in CIS countries, better than both FF and IE (and not just a single version).
I'm not sure why you'd find that more interesting than the fact that Chrome passed Safari or whatever.
The only thing I can think of that means anything in this whole "browser wars" thing, and it doesn't mean as much now as it did 4 years ago, is how vital it is to absolutely stick to web standards as a result of cross browser compliance. Otherwise, it's pretty much irrelevant. My phone has a webkit browser fully integrated into it, so when I hit the web with it, I'm probably being detected as using Safari or whatever...and when I do a search with my Windows desktop through the file explorer, I'm making a hit with IE...and when I fire up Firefox to browse the news...same deal. You can't even detect if people are committed users of a browser anymore (well, unless you install spyware on their router to log their browser usage) because you kind of are stuck using so many different ones over the course of a day these days. And that's why I'm saying the browser wars are pretty much irrelevant, and at the very least, these silly usage stats. And now that OS's have embraced the notion of full browser integration, it's only going to get redundant with OS usage stats.
I've had a Pre since it was released. They're launching it in Canada, and it's supposed to be on other networks here in the US in the next few months. It's a damn good phone, does everything those Android phones do. Easier to program for, too. The hardware looks nicer.
It's a shame though how many people who've never even given them a chance are already calling it dead. The OS on it, webOS, is an exceptionally nice mobile OS to use and develop for, once you wrap your head around the notion that it is a web device, and nothing like those old handhelds running unportable native code like the old Palms were. It's really worth waiting for...I waited for 6 months with a Centro with a broken backlight because I knew the Pre was going to be released this last summer. Turned out that it was cheaper than my old Centro was, too, with all the incentives and such for switching carriers.
From my experience with Android, it's a nice looking mobile OS, but as a user I'd rather use a Pre running webOS. It gives you all the same features with a snappier and better designed interface. I also hate the feel of stock HTC hardware, always have. Almost everything they make feels cheap.
I dunno. Everyone I talk to who tells me "Palm is dead" but hasn't seen the Pre, after playing with mine, really wanted one for their "do-everything" phone.
Forget pets, this is going to take a 6 pack of HUMAN babies!
I kinda agree. From an outside perspective, Symbian is conceptually a solid concept...but once you hunker down and try to do something for it, you find yourself pulling your hair out non-stop. I also have to say, at the time when the Symbian guys came up with them, Active Objects were a pretty cool idea. No one else was doing stuff like that for mobile devices, and if it had been done less insanely, it really would have been like buffed up widgets.
Yeah, it has a goofy API. I totally agree. But I can work with it, and get stuff done...that's fine. I don't mind the microkernel...if you write your code reasonably efficiently, you can deal with that. Memory management, while necessary to make that code efficient, is clumsy and annoying. I didn't really run into the "pay for more access" nonsense, though I certainly hated that sort of stuff about Brew, too. But once you've been stuck jumping over all those hurdles, you never want to deal with it again. A smart company, designing a platform, should put third party developers above everything. Making your platform easy to develop for should always take precedence over anything else, no matter how much temptation it is to try and nickel and dime developers in order to farm cash flow out of them. The more hurdles you put up, the less chance your OS will compete in the application market, and that generates the demand that makes the carriers interested in putting your OS on their phones.
I can think of a number of OS's offhand that greatly outlived their lifetime expectations simply because they're easy to develop for and the toolchain is flexible (and free). I have Symbian development on my resume...even though it's obviously been 5 years since I did it seriously, I still get headhunters contacting me non-stop from all over the place simply because, and no offense if someone reading this does like Symbian development, it's a big time headache to deal with.
Making it open source isn't going to save it. There are too many far better mobile options out there already. webOS, Android, and Moblin are already built on open source, reasonably standardized platforms. There are more on the way. No one is going to want to fight with Symbian weirdness and 1990's style C++ when they could be doing AJAX on webOS or Java on Android.
I second that. What are you doing, hitting riots? I've lived in this country for my whole life, 34 years, and I've never seen a car on the side of the road burning all on its own volition due to it being horribly bad. Maybe if another car hit it or something. We do car recalls over here if someone screwed up at the manufacturing plant. Or maybe you're confusing idiot drivers who never check their oil or water levels and screw up their engines with hapless people who just have crummy cars?
You'd think you'd have logic in the GPU that could determine when a certain load was being achieved, certain 3D functionality was being called, etc., and offload some work to a multicore CPU if it was hitting a certain performance threshold (as long as the CPU itself wasn't being pounded...but most games are mainly picking on the GPU and hardly taking full advantage of a quad core CPU or whatever). That makes a degree of sense...using your resources more effectively is a good thing. If that improves your performance scores, well...so what? It measures the fact that your drivers are better than the other card's drivers. That seems like fair play, from a consumer's standpoint. If the competitors can't be bothered to write drivers that work efficiently, that's their problem. Great card + bad drivers = bad investment, as far as I'm concerned. That's the real point of these benchmarking tests, anyway. It's just product marketing.
But trapping a particular binary name to fix the results? That's being dishonest to customers. They're deliberately trying to trick gamers who just look at the 3DMark benchmarks into buying their hardware, but giving them hardware that won't necessarily perform at the expected level of quality. I generally stick up for Intel, having worked there in the past as a contractor and generally liking the company and people...but this is seriously bad form on their behalf. I'm surprised this stuff got through their validation process...I know I'd have probably choked on my coffee laughing if I were on that team and could see this in their driver code.
I'd still do this stuff, but I'd focus on new platforms, new gadgets, expert systems, and other things that don't immediately make me a reliable salary but are fun and engaging to work on. Either that, or I'd get a degree in something more personally rewarding and go that route. No more working on some business app that has been done a hundred times over that I'm only developing because they figured it was cheaper to do in house, or they needed like 3 features they couldn't get elsewhere.
The network computer was a first stab at conceptualizing all this cloud/web whatever today. None of it was even remotely feasible as a result of what we all had to work with in the mid-90's. Everyone knew this was the direction things were going, but the amount of complexity in the whole concept took decades to really refine. So no, you don't get a witty /. retort.
And as someone who uses a webOS today, it works pretty good for me on my phone.
Google ISN'T too far off the mark.
Microsoft hasn't really done anything groundbreaking in regards to user interface (and even a lot of core functionality) in a pretty long time. The only thing more dated than their desktop and server OS's are their mobile devices. That said, they've got the best toolchain in the business and anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't used it, period.
I read this though as "Google is more poised to become a bigger monopoly than Microsoft ever was". Google is a corporation that will inevitably become more and more focused on their shareholders. Since they set the bar that they want to do so many things "for free", all you can expect is that they'll continue to find new and possibly disturbing (in a security/advertising sense) ways to make money off their users if and when they can push Microsoft off the pile.
But Microsoft definitely is pretty vulnerable right now. They haven't been able to generate real excitement about any of their product releases with the masses for many years now. Apple and Google have that mojo, and Microsoft just doesn't. Microsoft seems to be growing into the new IBM in a lot of ways. Hating on Microsoft though just doesn't seem to make sense much anymore...at least not for a developer. The monopolistic stuff they used to be accused of is pretty much being done by everyone now, and Microsoft spends more of its resources on making really nice tools for development at the expense of innovation on their product lines. My hatred grew back when they wanted to squash all competition while providing flakey, inadequate development tools...now they're just trying to keep up with the latest trends while the old underdog companies like Apple and Google have kind of grown into what I really didn't like about Microsoft in the first place.
You probably realized this already, but it hit me awhile back...
In grade school/high school back in the 80's, most schools had Macs. IBM PCs were totally inadequate at the time for educational purposes, they were meant for spreadsheets and business applications. Fast forward to 1998-2000...art departments started getting digital in large numbers, and who were the guys making the real decisions? Art directors and musicians and the like who probably never took a computer course in college and had never touched a PC, and if they had, their mind instantly conjured up images of a DOS command prompt vs. the Mac SE they took that keyboarding class on in high school. It's pretty obvious which direction they were going to go.
I really think those investments in getting Macs in public schools back in the 80's probably kept the whole company afloat. Apple might very well be dead right now if it weren't for that. PCs running Windows or Linux have been fully capable of doing everything that most of them need to do for a very long time now...and much cheaper to boot. But when you talk to these people, it's like they were never really aware of that fact until usually someone comes along and shows them.