Over the last few years, whenever I looked at a changelog for a new release of Qt, I noticed quite a bit of of work was being done to support Symbian or Meego. When I went to their annual conference a couple of years ago, some of the stuff they were showing off (namely, basic UI control widgets for QML) seemed to be focused on Symbian or Meego first and maybe other platforms later. Meanwhile, I noticed that some releases of Qt (especially around 4.6.2) had some surprisingly bad bugs that I wouldn't have expected in the past. I wasn't alone. A friend of mine at Nokia doing Mac development with Qt admitted as much. The whole thing made me think that far more resources was going into getting Qt support for Nokia's platforms at the expense of Qt's traditional desktop platforms. That's an uncomfortable feeIing to have when you're a software firm and you're paying Nokia (and now Digia) for commercial support for the toolkit. I'm hoping that what's going on now will refocus Qt development.
I haven't been keeping up on this subject the last couple of months, but I was under the impression that the operations at the drive manufacturing plants were going to return to normal sooner rather than later. I would think that would cause prices to drop, even with the consolidation of the vendors. Otherwise, I'd suspect price-fixing.
I have worked at two major tech companies where they've tried this. At my last company, the COO used to be a senior exec at an outsourcing firm. Regardless, the results in both cases were the same: a waste of time and money.
If you're going to pay an outsourcing firm peanuts, you're going to get engineers who lack the necessary skills. You and your managers will spend an inordinate amount of time hand-holding these contractors. If you don't, you'll get really poorly written code. It may work, but it'll be completely unmaintainable spaghetti.
That's assuming you'll get a finished product. The turnover rate for outsourced engineers is ridiculously high. The moment these guys hear about some other firm that pays another dollar an hour, they'll jump ship. Every 6 to 12 months, you'll be training new people to replace the old ones.
There's also the question of logistics. It's hard to communicate with people who live on the opposite side of the world. It's bad enough that things get lost in translation, but when two groups get together for a conference call when one of the parties should be in bed, that's just not productive.
Your logic is seriously flawed, just as is your reaction to my previous post. Just because you claim Comcast's prices are "more or less" the same in different regions doesn't make the pricing "competitive." Competitive pricing suggests that there's competition that gives you a basis for comparison. There is next to no such thing in most broadband markets when communities grant official monopolies. You also should consider backing-up your claim about the Comcast pricing with some facts. I can just as easily claim that Comcast's pricing in one region is 15% more than in another region.
You're kidding, right? Comcast has no competition where I live, and neither do many providers around the country. There's no incentive to be competitive. Why do you think ISPs have gone so far as to sue whenever a city or town even whispers the words "municipal wifi"?
"and of the 1% who "need" more bandwidth, 99% of them probably aren't using it for legitimate downloads. "
That stat may have been true a few years ago, but I strongly suspect, if it hasn't changed already, it'll be different over the next few years. Video streaming services are becoming very popular, and it's gotten to the point where many Netflix users prefer the Watch Instantly option over receiving DVDs in the mail. The bitrate for HD Netflix content on the Roku box is 3.5 Mbit/sec. Let's suppose that some people keep increasing their usage of streaming services to the point where it replaces their usage of broadcast TV. Hell, why not? Netflix and Apple TV are cheaper than standard or premium cable. Let's then consider the statistic from http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/3134/283/ that the average person spends about 142 hours in front of a TV per month. That means downloading over 218 GB in one month just from watching TV through a streaming service.
Last month, I had a broken Verizon phone and a year left on my contract. I really wanted an Android-based phone as a replacement, but I figured that would happen later rather than sooner with Verizon given how they like to take their time qualifying new phones (i.e. removing features), so I paid the early termination fee to jump-ship to T-Mobile. With this agreement, it seems even less likely we'll see an Android phone on their network. Even if we did, it'd be amusing to see how they'd try to make MS Live Search the default search engine for it.
When a guy at Defcon gave a talk on this in August he even mentioned then that it was essentially old news. However, it is interesting that not everybody knows about this and that browsers can't just clear this data out more trivially.
Jindal will do any phony act to make the extreme-right happy, and they have been dumb enough to eat it up. It worked for GWB and his faith-based initiatives, so why not for Jindal?
You're assuming that there's really an argument where evolution is pitted against intelligent design. This is a manufactured "controversy" from an organization called the Discovery Institute. They purposely created a campaign called "Teach the Controversy" to create this confusion. ID is NOT science and does not belong in a public class room. If you really think it does, then we should allow the FSM to be taught as well. It's just as valid as ID.
So instead of focusing on rebuilding your hurricaine-damaged homes, you decide to damage your education system and make it an even greater laughing stock than the Kansas Board of Education. I would normally applaud this because it opens the door for teachings about His Noodley Appendage, but of course, do you really think those right-wing nut jobs are going to let the FSM be taught along-side ID?
If you want to know more about the modern form of ID, read up on the main proponents and creators of this "theory": the Discovery Institute. You'll find that they aren't really a scientific body so much as a political group founded by Reagan-administration bureacrats that are propping up phony scientists. You'll also find about their manifesto, known as the Wedge. Their agenda is really just to force the Christian God upon all of us. Also, read up on the Dover trial, where one of their main "scientists" had to admit under oath that for ID to be considered science, the definition of science would have to be changed to allow astrology to be considered science as well. Wikipedia's good for all of this.
This guy must be missing the point of having different programming languages and environments - parallel or not. He lists ZPL, which is, first and foremost in my opinion, a really cool array-based language. There are certain things you're going to want to do in ZPL as opposed to non-array based languages, such as image processing (which lends itself really well to parallel processing IMHO). For things that don't require non-multi-dimensional array processing, you wouldn't want to use ZPL.
In the end, they aren't helping anybody. They are, in effect, affirming all the FUD that MS has generated about Linux violating their software patents. The community can potentially get screwed over because anyone not using Novell or Xandros are then subject to lawsuits.
These deals with MS go against the spirit of GPL. Attempting to provide protection for unspecified patent claims puts open source projects under undue clouds of FUD - exactly what MS wants. Novell and Xandros have played right into MS' hands and are rightfully being chastised. Seriously, I could see how one linux distributor might fall for this, but Xandros had to know that there would be damaging backlash. Just how dumb could they be?
Changing the GPL is the only defense available to the community. Besides, how do you propose that the open source community find out what MS patents, if any, are being violated? Until MS provides proof, there is no other recourse.
Slashdot Mirror
Over the last few years, whenever I looked at a changelog for a new release of Qt, I noticed quite a bit of of work was being done to support Symbian or Meego. When I went to their annual conference a couple of years ago, some of the stuff they were showing off (namely, basic UI control widgets for QML) seemed to be focused on Symbian or Meego first and maybe other platforms later. Meanwhile, I noticed that some releases of Qt (especially around 4.6.2) had some surprisingly bad bugs that I wouldn't have expected in the past. I wasn't alone. A friend of mine at Nokia doing Mac development with Qt admitted as much. The whole thing made me think that far more resources was going into getting Qt support for Nokia's platforms at the expense of Qt's traditional desktop platforms. That's an uncomfortable feeIing to have when you're a software firm and you're paying Nokia (and now Digia) for commercial support for the toolkit. I'm hoping that what's going on now will refocus Qt development.
I haven't been keeping up on this subject the last couple of months, but I was under the impression that the operations at the drive manufacturing plants were going to return to normal sooner rather than later. I would think that would cause prices to drop, even with the consolidation of the vendors. Otherwise, I'd suspect price-fixing.
I have worked at two major tech companies where they've tried this. At my last company, the COO used to be a senior exec at an outsourcing firm. Regardless, the results in both cases were the same: a waste of time and money.
If you're going to pay an outsourcing firm peanuts, you're going to get engineers who lack the necessary skills. You and your managers will spend an inordinate amount of time hand-holding these contractors. If you don't, you'll get really poorly written code. It may work, but it'll be completely unmaintainable spaghetti.
That's assuming you'll get a finished product. The turnover rate for outsourced engineers is ridiculously high. The moment these guys hear about some other firm that pays another dollar an hour, they'll jump ship. Every 6 to 12 months, you'll be training new people to replace the old ones.
There's also the question of logistics. It's hard to communicate with people who live on the opposite side of the world. It's bad enough that things get lost in translation, but when two groups get together for a conference call when one of the parties should be in bed, that's just not productive.
Think of Apple as the rebel Borg and Steve Jobs as Hugh.
sudo apt-get purge cli-common mono-runtime
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
It is fitting then that at the random quote machine at the bottom of slashdot currently says:
"It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington." -- Admiral Grace Hopper
sudo apt-get purge libmono* libgdiplus cli-common
Your logic is seriously flawed, just as is your reaction to my previous post. Just because you claim Comcast's prices are "more or less" the same in different regions doesn't make the pricing "competitive." Competitive pricing suggests that there's competition that gives you a basis for comparison. There is next to no such thing in most broadband markets when communities grant official monopolies. You also should consider backing-up your claim about the Comcast pricing with some facts. I can just as easily claim that Comcast's pricing in one region is 15% more than in another region.
"They price their offerings to be competetive."
You're kidding, right? Comcast has no competition where I live, and neither do many providers around the country. There's no incentive to be competitive. Why do you think ISPs have gone so far as to sue whenever a city or town even whispers the words "municipal wifi"?
"and of the 1% who "need" more bandwidth, 99% of them probably aren't using it for legitimate downloads. "
That stat may have been true a few years ago, but I strongly suspect, if it hasn't changed already, it'll be different over the next few years. Video streaming services are becoming very popular, and it's gotten to the point where many Netflix users prefer the Watch Instantly option over receiving DVDs in the mail. The bitrate for HD Netflix content on the Roku box is 3.5 Mbit/sec. Let's suppose that some people keep increasing their usage of streaming services to the point where it replaces their usage of broadcast TV. Hell, why not? Netflix and Apple TV are cheaper than standard or premium cable. Let's then consider the statistic from http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/3134/283/ that the average person spends about 142 hours in front of a TV per month. That means downloading over 218 GB in one month just from watching TV through a streaming service.
Last month, I had a broken Verizon phone and a year left on my contract. I really wanted an Android-based phone as a replacement, but I figured that would happen later rather than sooner with Verizon given how they like to take their time qualifying new phones (i.e. removing features), so I paid the early termination fee to jump-ship to T-Mobile. With this agreement, it seems even less likely we'll see an Android phone on their network. Even if we did, it'd be amusing to see how they'd try to make MS Live Search the default search engine for it.
He's wondering why it's so cold down there.
When a guy at Defcon gave a talk on this in August he even mentioned then that it was essentially old news. However, it is interesting that not everybody knows about this and that browsers can't just clear this data out more trivially.
Jindal will do any phony act to make the extreme-right happy, and they have been dumb enough to eat it up. It worked for GWB and his faith-based initiatives, so why not for Jindal?
You're assuming that there's really an argument where evolution is pitted against intelligent design. This is a manufactured "controversy" from an organization called the Discovery Institute. They purposely created a campaign called "Teach the Controversy" to create this confusion. ID is NOT science and does not belong in a public class room. If you really think it does, then we should allow the FSM to be taught as well. It's just as valid as ID.
So instead of focusing on rebuilding your hurricaine-damaged homes, you decide to damage your education system and make it an even greater laughing stock than the Kansas Board of Education. I would normally applaud this because it opens the door for teachings about His Noodley Appendage, but of course, do you really think those right-wing nut jobs are going to let the FSM be taught along-side ID?
If you want to know more about the modern form of ID, read up on the main proponents and creators of this "theory": the Discovery Institute. You'll find that they aren't really a scientific body so much as a political group founded by Reagan-administration bureacrats that are propping up phony scientists.
You'll also find about their manifesto, known as the Wedge. Their agenda is really just to force the Christian God upon all of us. Also, read up on the Dover trial, where one of their main "scientists" had to admit under oath that for ID to be considered science, the definition of science would have to be changed to allow astrology to be considered science as well. Wikipedia's good for all of this.
um you must be new here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsFfBB2W7IA
so what would you give for the flying car?
Dvorak's Law: If John C. Dvorak makes a prediction, expect the complete opposite.
And I say that as an agnostic.
This guy must be missing the point of having different programming languages and environments - parallel or not. He lists ZPL, which is, first and foremost in my opinion, a really cool array-based language. There are certain things you're going to want to do in ZPL as opposed to non-array based languages, such as image processing (which lends itself really well to parallel processing IMHO). For things that don't require non-multi-dimensional array processing, you wouldn't want to use ZPL.
They were Cardiassians, actually.
In the end, they aren't helping anybody. They are, in effect, affirming all the FUD that MS has generated about Linux violating their software patents. The community can potentially get screwed over because anyone not using Novell or Xandros are then subject to lawsuits.
These deals with MS go against the spirit of GPL. Attempting to provide protection for unspecified patent claims puts open source projects under undue clouds of FUD - exactly what MS wants. Novell and Xandros have played right into MS' hands and are rightfully being chastised. Seriously, I could see how one linux distributor might fall for this, but Xandros had to know that there would be damaging backlash. Just how dumb could they be?
Changing the GPL is the only defense available to the community. Besides, how do you propose that the open source community find out what MS patents, if any, are being violated? Until MS provides proof, there is no other recourse.
When I go to linuxworld at SF in August, I'm going to have so much fun taunting the people running the Novell and Xandros booths.
Sim City: XXX = Sin City? ;-)