The story said jack crap about Hydrogen storage for fusion, in addition, we don't have a method at the moment for using Hydrogen fusion as an energy source.
I like your bit about nuclear weaponry (sic), the reason we use it as oppose to, I dunno, Lithium, just something out of the air here, is because it is simpler and therefore easier to build a detonation device out of. Not because we feel that we're going to get more bang per buck with Hydrogen. When it comes to leveling cities, cheap and effective is favored more over costly and unsure.
Another thing, even if we used Hydrogen for energy in the fusion way of things, it's still pretty shitty compared to say Helium or Boron, wild guess as to why Einstein,
Finally, basic high school chemistry would have taught you JACK SHIT about fusion since that's not fucking chemistry!!! Please feel free to educate yourself about the difference between nuclear physics and fucking chemistry. You have an awesome rest of your life.
Hydrogen is a very poor storage for energy. It takes a lot of energy to get a small amount of hydrogen and takes a lot of hydrogen just to store a small amount of energy. We are better off with the current system of pumping water up a hill than with anything hydrogen can give us. You need a more energy dense fuel to compete, and using the least dense thing in the universe is the dumbest idea. Pair that with the fact that hydrogen is an atomic whore and binds strongly to everything. Making it that more difficult to get it all by itself.
I'm skeptical that would work. I think it would find its way into perpetual back-burner project. However, that just my subjective $0.02. Some teams are pretty good at keeping themselves out of sand traps, not many though.
The whole point of Wayland, and I could be wrong on this one, is to avoid the mistakes of X. From your solution, we just go back to the days of hack around the core.
The core protocol is flawed and the project shouldn't be afraid to make some sort of shift when there is a pretty good reason for that change. If dude was purposing change for just change sake, yeah I would get it. But the protocol doesn't implement basic window management within the core, and makes it insanely difficult at the plugin level. I, for one, think dude has a point.
That is exactly what happened to X. Everyone was afraid of changing the core protocol, afraid that it would break older stuff. Look where that got it. About a bazillion extensions. At some point backwards compatibility breaks the baker and I know that is hearsay in the OSS community. I know there has been a lot of boneheaded change for change sake forks, but I really don't see this as falling into that category.
Exactly, I think a lot of people here are under the impression that car makers make all of these systems independent. A typical drive by wire system will try to process your request to do something, like switch gears or turn off, based on a set of logical rules. If the accelerator logic is stuck and it is a soft fault that isn't caught and sent to the dispatcher, then the dispatcher is going to process your request for either of those two things (off, neutral) as if nothing is wrong.
Depending on the logic, it may make no sense to the system to go into neutral at 125 MPH or to turn off the system. Worst yet, the whole thing could have just killed over completely. So requests being sent to the dispatcher never even make it. The only thing in these kinds of situations that's going to work is a hard reset, which regrettably they don't tend to build one of those buttons into cabin of a car. So the only solution is to pull the plug... Which is located under the hood.
Maybe someone could pull a Keanu Reeves and slide under the moving vehicle? Unplug it from there?:-)
The transmission is computer controlled. Trying to move it to anything is ignored if it doesn't make sense to the system. In fact that is the key thing, you have a misbehaving computer, however, you have to reason with this crazy machine to get anything to happen, which usually it will tell you, you are the one in the wrong here, hence why a lot of sane sounding things wouldn't work in this case. If the system was completely wonked, there isn't a thing a person could do that this system would respond to, such as turning off or going into a different gear or lack of gear.
It's like your car is saying, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm too busy pushing the accelerator to process your request to shift into neutral, please try again later."
Going into neutral with the gas pedal down is going to trigger an ignore signal from the system and thus the request to switch into neutral will not be dispatched to the transmission. Likewise with ignitions, having forward motion in a non-collision situation will have any request to disengage the engine ignored. Heck, some electronic systems won't care. If the car isn't stopped, collision or not, the system may very well ignore any request to disengage the engine.
The problem is that a lot of these drive by wire systems make a lot of bad assumptions about things and there really isn't a standard guide book on what to make sure does and does not happen, so it varies pretty wildly between systems. Some cars will allow you to switch to neutral, and neutral alone, while the gas pedal is down (never mind that the system is having a fault on requests to accelerate.) Some cars will let you burn through the break pads. The parking brake is always manual, so you'd figure someone would put a kill switch in there. Nope, pulling on the parking brake with the accelerator stuck will just get you some nice brake dust blowing out of your wheels. There are a ton of WTF thinking that goes into some of the programming of these systems.
Stuck accelerators can be cause by any number of faults, some of those faults are checked, some not. The ones that are checked, can try resets or allow you to stop the car safely. The ones that get missed cause this kind of crap where, no matter what you do, your car is now programmed to go as fast as it can in a forward motion and getting under the hood and pulling the plug to the system for a hard reset is the only solution.
There is a serious need for someone to come up with logical standard operating procedures for these types of systems. Airplane manufactures do it for their fly by wire systems so that the pilot always stays in control, even when the system would rather beg to differ on the matter. I haven't the foggiest idea on why this kind of thing eludes car makers.
Sorry to hear that you are entering forms via your mobile device. Our company switched to HTML 5 pages long ago for that kind of thing. Makes entering data a whole lot easier and I've consulted with smaller firms that cannot or will not host their own on third party sites.
It's just too time consuming to find the right spot on an Excel fill it out and even then you might have validation issues. A web system that handles all of that is a much more efficient method for a lot of reasons. Validation, central administration, version control, wide distribution, wide consumption, etc...
However your argument still doesn't change the main thing I covered. You still need your desktop people to make and review your forms you fill out. There still is a whole process for review which is most likely done on desktop, and so on. If your form is genetic enough, which that depends on the level of complexity you have in the sheet, the look is less important that the collection of data. You could easily use some other office suite for your data entry. Again that depends on what you're doing here. However in a lot of the cases I've reviewed mobile Microsoft office could either be replaced with a web based solution or any old office software could be used in it's place, once people understood that the majority of content creation didn't happen on mobile devices.
Again I'm not saying there isn't a need for mobile office, it is just that a lot of the use cases I've come across could be better done sans office considering that mobile users are usually expected to flip something open, enter less than ten kilos of information, and be done for the day for what they are expected to do on a mobile device. If you're a college student and you're on a budget, then yeah if your class requires Microsoft Office that might be something to look into. If you're expected to build an entire Power Point presentation on the go and all you have is your iPad, then yeah if you have to share that file to someone on a PC, that might be another, but if you are the one giving the presentation, just plug the iPad to the projector via wireless. There are plenty of options for this.
Your data shouldn't rely on an underlying presentation platform, if it does, you have an inherent problem with how you store and collect that data that leads you to such vendor lock in as to require Microsoft Office to be a make or brake call in your mobile strategy. Mobile platforms require some sort of liberation of the connections because there are certain calls you can't make in a BYOD environment.
That's a pretty high valuation of MS Office, which I doubt would really pay for itself, ever. Also, I don't see a *mass* migration of Android that Apple should be worry about. Yes, people are moving to Android but people are also moving to Apple. Yes the direction is greater in the Android direction, but that's to be expected in a duopoly. Highs and lows, that kind of stuff wouldn't make a serious company change any kind of course, because it's part of the normal model.
Office doesn't offer a ton in the way of content creation on mobile devices. Trying to use Office RT is just a waste unless you really have the little snappy keyboard and at that point, I rather be using a laptop than a mobile device. Unless something seriously changes in the Office UI department that can make the software more usable on a mobile device, I'll stick to the free stuff on Android (which granted, Google is seriously fucking up on delivering anything above pure shit on the Android platform for office documents) or iWork on Apple devices (which thus far has been the only serious productivity software for mobile devices, which is a shame because it's feature set leaves a ton lacking.)
I'm not saying that there is no need for productivity software on mobile devices, just saying that every vendor thus far has yet to produce something that is really going to be the tipping point that says, Damn it! I've really got to get MS Office/Google's Paid Office/iWork on my phone!!!
The most common thing I see is mobile users relying on desktop users to build the sheets from ground up and mobile users, adding bits of information as they go. If a large amount of information is needed in a read-only environment, convert to PDF is the number one thing I see desktop users do for mobile users. They can markup and annotate the PDF and send back to desktop users for review and change. Because all of this "works," there just isn't the same value for MS Office on Mobile as it has on Desktop. Hence, Apple would be at a serious disadvantage paying Microsoft to port it to iOS, they'd be getting very little in return. Someone at some point has to figure out how to give mobile users enough freedom that they don't have to keep going back to the desktop to build a document, without it taking an act of Congress to actually build.
If you are use to using QWidget and that is what you are comfortable with, then there is absolutely zero need for you to try and pick up Qt Quick. Qt Quick is really good at building one offs that you need for small tasks, think million little widgets here, not database editor. Qt5 is still centered very much around C++ and the people who wrote Qt are very aware that Qt Quick "is not for everyone".
You may find yourself pulling up Qt Quick for implementing a "find dialog" or a "insert criteria dialog", but if you are writing the main window in Qt Quick, you either have a very modular/small project or you are using the wrong tool for the job. The best way I tell others is that Qt Quick is for doing up quick UIs, not complicated UIs. Qt Quick would be excellent for Palsmoids, horrific for an entire email application (unless you have really broken the program down to very small bits.)
As an example, I have a program that we use here in the office to connect to PostgreSQL. The connect to dialog is Qt Quick, the window with all the tables and fields is pure QWidgets. The fill-in-the-form order request window is Qt Quick, the order summary window is QWidgets (mostly because it has all kinds of sort and filter buttons). So keep the Qt Quick stuff small and simple and you will find that it's nice to use for all those one offs that do not need a lot of logic behind the window.
That is not to say that Qt Quick *cannot* do a large application, just that it will be easier to continue to do so with QWidget, and that is the whole point, to make things easier. Also, I strongly encourage you (and for that matter anyone seriously looking at Qt) to pick up some C++11. Qt 5 has been written to make logical use of some of the newer stuff in C++11 and those concepts do very much indeed make your code very, very clean. I will admit that I was quite skeptical at first about that point.
Coal miners, sanitation engineers and police officers get paid a lot more than their skills would demand because of the unpleasantness of their work.
I've not known coal miners to be making that much cash. In these parts they can stand to make $33,600 topped out and starting around $26500. So that's a spread of $12.75 per hour to $16.15 per hour, with the usual pay increase $0.05 to $0.10 per hour per year.
Additionally, I think you place very little value on their skill. Most miners are using pretty advance machinery which have complex displays that show gas concentrations, slurry input/output, core rotor tempature, coolant inflow, rotor RPM, and so forth. Most of the miners go to school for pretty much a two year degree for operations and a four year degree is required for mechanics.
This isn't the pick axe and cart operation that some like to think that is coal mining. Surface mining is a little less complex, but still more demanding that one would expect.
Yes, the people who have their jobs dislike that crap that they put up with day in and day out, but they don't keep going because the pay is super fat. I could tell you, but hell, come on out here to Kentucky, Tennessee, or West Virginia and see for yourself why they go in and out of a mine day in and day out.
There is nothing snake oil about it. This is a real thing. The problem is that a large operation can only squeeze about 300 gallons of fuel out of the air per day. In addition it takes like the energy that thirty or so homes would use in one day to do this. Guy can do whatever he likes with his free time, but the more important thing he is going to have to work on is oxygen separation. The chemical is pretty strongly bonded in water and doubly so in carbon dioxide.
I've found LO spreadsheets to be easier to work with that the Microsoft counterpart. We programs that output information on product, I cannot tell you the number of times I've foamed at the mouth by Excel converting the UPC into scientific notation. LO seems to understand that the column is text, but no matter what we do with Excel, it always wants to turn UPC, EAN, GTIN-14 into a number.
Additionally, we find that working with large documents to be easier and more fluid with LO than Word or Excel. If someone jacks up the formatting in Word it's a weeks worth of recovery just to get things sane again. In LO it is literally minutes at best. LO handles spreadsheets of 500,000 rows plus way better than Excel any day.
"There's as much porn there as anyone would need, I imagine."
You sir have grossly underestimated the Internet porn surfing public. Additionally, if this TLD gets really big and makes good on it's promise, I'm upping the ante to a six monitor configuration as opposed to the current two.
I don't see anything wrong with a desire to categorize information on the Internet. Yes,.com porn will still exist, but if the company that owns.xxx can keep the sites under it in check and make it a safe place to find porn, I think that will attract more people than ever, which in turn draw more to the domain. I like to think of it as the Las Vegas of the Internet. So long as the place can be kept within a certain degree of control, it's all good to let loose.
Why stop at just Google? Why start with Google? I see this feature being more like the search bar in Firefox where you can install and remove search provides as you wish. They just implemented an Amazon one first because they can make money off of it. However, I doubt that Amazon will be the only search lens that gets implemented.
I don't want a third party to be involved in what was a simple transaction between me and the people selling it. Especially not the producers of my OS.
So you either don't use Android/iOS or you don't use Google to search.
Canonical will now know every search you perform, even if you're only searching locally.
Then turn it off, geez, other vendors wouldn't have even given you a choice on the matter.
If I want to be shopping, I know how to get to Amazon.
Again, you either don't shop around or you just loves you some Amazon. Paranoia at it's best. If the feature doesn't fit you, guess what, you can turn the crap off, change it, whatever you like to do with it. Why is this feature suddenly so freaking contentious? And we wondering what all those people who talk about in-fighting are talking about and why that prevents desktop Linux from really taking off.
Justify this all you want, but lets be real. It's about Ubuntu making more money and changing the face of linux forever, and not for the good.
Much like the search bar in Firefox is doing this to innocent users. Please, get real. Making money with Linux is not a sin. Android does it, different router makers have been doing it, server companies have been doing, it's been going on since the kernel's 2.4 days and earlier most likely, but I only have examples that go back to the 2.4 days.
Even if it is about Ubuntu making money, which it is not, why is that a problem? Why does a such a vocal group of people pull the handbrake the second someone talks about making money? How exactly does Linux succeed if there is absolutely zero money? Remember that we're in this as free beer, not this we're going to be penniless chumps. I don't particularly like Canonical, but making money isn't a sticking point for me. RedHat does it all the time, should we go burn their website down too?
Please don't blame Moore's Law for what we can all chalk up to as humanity being very inefficient. I can almost assure you that the majority of people never use the maximum amount of processing that comes from modern hardware. Software takes time to be rewritten for the latest greatest hardware. That's why people scale out as oppose to scale up. You think it is because of cost, to an extent it is, but more so, it is because they figure if their software maxes out on two cores, then setup four VMs on an eight core machine with two cores each.
If software magically kept in step with hardware advancements, then your whole point might have some ground to stand on. However, software doesn't scale like that. It usually take a whole software cycle or two to bring it to modern levels. (Seriously, look how long it took XP to get SATA.)
However all of this isn't even what I was talking about. People make the argument that software updates are important. They are only important when you are talking about hardware that will need to have a longer shelf life. Cell phones and tablets are not made to have that kind of shelf life, therefore, software updates are meaningless to them. That was the point I was making.
Finally, you apparently have no idea what Big Iron means. I won't even bother to try and help you understand what the draw is for Big Iron, but I assure you, it's not to reach umpteen teraflops. Additionally, I have "Big Iron" servers that were built in late 1990 that still schools some of the best modern boxen out there. To the tune of about 1,200,000 inserts per second. The best I've ever seen any Intel with maybe 300k to 400k inserts per second, that's with today's specs. A general processing element just cannot compete with a entire circuit that was built with the specific purpose of inserting rows into a table, and that's just one blade in the box. You understand that and you begin to understand why Big Iron is where it is, in places that have very specific needs.
I don't even know how we got on this whole topic, but humans are super ineffective and they themselves do not keep pace with hardware. Thus software never keeps pace with hardware. Hardware isn't exactly useful without software... Well I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this whole argument.
I know that I am talking to the absolutely wrong crowd here, but here's the deal. This whole update BS is a non-issue. Cell phones are equally disposable as your current Congress critter. The expected life is what two maybe three years.
Now I know everyone here is the uber geek and have their whatever device flashed with the latest OS and side loaded all their favorite apps onto their device, but there aren't many that really care about people like us, people who will do their best to continue the life of the device they purchased long after what a vendor had intended the device they sold you to last.
The computer industry has been banging its head on the wall for the last twenty years trying to figure out how to sucker people into buying a new device every two to three years. When the iPhone hit the market it was "Mission Accomplished" G.W. style for the industry. Us that like to hold on to our precious for five to seven years, don't even factor into the equation for computer vendors anymore, we're so last generation. Yeah, there will still be divisions that pander to us, the desktop ain't going anywhere, but for all intents and purposes, we're just not the tech market anymore.
That's why you see such hard pushes for tablets, and phones, and phablets. Because computer desktop market saturation is so freakishly high in the more developed countries of this world. It's why you see such frenzy in China and Pakistani markets, because technological saturation is still pretty low in those countries and disposable income is on the rise in those countries.
So hopefully I've made my point that the people who are of the mindset that they buy a device and it last six years are not who computer companies are targeting anymore, at least the mainstream ones. They want to sell a new device every two years to you, and that's why this update crap is a load of non-issue.
The majority of people, more than anyone here would like to admit, are going to buy right into this new device every two years crap. For them, every two years they not only get a new device, they get an OS update. Apple people like to spin this whole issue in the terms that, "Oh look our people stand behind us." When in reality, the only reason your getting updates like that, is because you're so freaking vendor locked in, you've got no choice on the matter (again, does not apply to the small group of people here that root their phone and go lone wolf.) Android people like to spin the issue as, "We're at the mercy of carriers." However, you bought into that cycle. You knew you would be at their mercy, you can't use that as an excuse, just wait a couple of more month till you get outside contract and go buy a new one. That's the whole reason their holding the update back from you.
There are so many people (none of them here on Slashdot for heavens sake) that have bought into this "trade my fridge in for a subscription of bags of ice" racket. People are so willing to just give up ownership these days, because they see so little value in ownership. Does anyone think all that crap they post to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, et al that they own it? Of course not.
We're all seeing a total erosion of ownership across the board in the Internet. That's why this update BS is just that, BS. No one really cares about updates. They'll just get a new device, they care so little about ownership that they just see physical devices that connect to all their cloud stuff as just as disposable as razors. The only people who do care about this update shit is the geeks out there that are still hung up on the old model of buy a device to last, and the people around them that are told to care about this shit.
I think everyone is missing the entire fucking planet because we're too focused on fucking trees and forest here. We're still believing that people buy devices to last them, whereas, the reality is, no one gives a shit. They'll just upgrade at the end of the contract. No one
I second Gordonjcp! About 80% of the complaints that I've heard about Unity are just pure bunk. Many of the warehouses that I oversee have Ubuntu 12.04 with the Unity interface for many of the order processing stations and users have had great experiences with Unity. Additionally, I know many of the javascript developers in our IT department to be using Ubuntu 12.04 with the Unity UI. Never have heard a peep from them, more so, they get to choose the OS they want to use and they choose Ubuntu and Unity, that should say something.
Honestly, I think there's just a bunch of old timers that just object to everything that isn't GNOME 2 or KDE 3. To them that was the high point in desktop environments. They simply need to get over themselves.
That's correct and bull shit all at the same time. Yeah, people's vote can be bought, but I know people who eBay their vote willingly. Face it the United States holds so little value to their vote that it goes to the highest bidder.
Identifying mark or not. The core issue the judge ruled on is that there is nothing that assures a secret ballot. There isn't. It's just been mostly tradition, and I believe if everyone on Slashdot spent a fraction of that time talking to their Congress critter, that they've spent so far posting here, we'd start having some bill being written up about the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I'm going to have a fun night with you.
The story said jack crap about Hydrogen storage for fusion, in addition, we don't have a method at the moment for using Hydrogen fusion as an energy source.
I like your bit about nuclear weaponry (sic), the reason we use it as oppose to, I dunno, Lithium, just something out of the air here, is because it is simpler and therefore easier to build a detonation device out of. Not because we feel that we're going to get more bang per buck with Hydrogen. When it comes to leveling cities, cheap and effective is favored more over costly and unsure.
Another thing, even if we used Hydrogen for energy in the fusion way of things, it's still pretty shitty compared to say Helium or Boron, wild guess as to why Einstein,
Finally, basic high school chemistry would have taught you JACK SHIT about fusion since that's not fucking chemistry!!! Please feel free to educate yourself about the difference between nuclear physics and fucking chemistry. You have an awesome rest of your life.
Hydrogen is a very poor storage for energy. It takes a lot of energy to get a small amount of hydrogen and takes a lot of hydrogen just to store a small amount of energy. We are better off with the current system of pumping water up a hill than with anything hydrogen can give us. You need a more energy dense fuel to compete, and using the least dense thing in the universe is the dumbest idea. Pair that with the fact that hydrogen is an atomic whore and binds strongly to everything. Making it that more difficult to get it all by itself.
I'm skeptical that would work. I think it would find its way into perpetual back-burner project. However, that just my subjective $0.02. Some teams are pretty good at keeping themselves out of sand traps, not many though.
Because that solution just sounds silly.
The whole point of Wayland, and I could be wrong on this one, is to avoid the mistakes of X. From your solution, we just go back to the days of hack around the core.
The core protocol is flawed and the project shouldn't be afraid to make some sort of shift when there is a pretty good reason for that change. If dude was purposing change for just change sake, yeah I would get it. But the protocol doesn't implement basic window management within the core, and makes it insanely difficult at the plugin level. I, for one, think dude has a point.
That is exactly what happened to X. Everyone was afraid of changing the core protocol, afraid that it would break older stuff. Look where that got it. About a bazillion extensions. At some point backwards compatibility breaks the baker and I know that is hearsay in the OSS community. I know there has been a lot of boneheaded change for change sake forks, but I really don't see this as falling into that category.
Exactly, I think a lot of people here are under the impression that car makers make all of these systems independent. A typical drive by wire system will try to process your request to do something, like switch gears or turn off, based on a set of logical rules. If the accelerator logic is stuck and it is a soft fault that isn't caught and sent to the dispatcher, then the dispatcher is going to process your request for either of those two things (off, neutral) as if nothing is wrong.
:-)
Depending on the logic, it may make no sense to the system to go into neutral at 125 MPH or to turn off the system. Worst yet, the whole thing could have just killed over completely. So requests being sent to the dispatcher never even make it. The only thing in these kinds of situations that's going to work is a hard reset, which regrettably they don't tend to build one of those buttons into cabin of a car. So the only solution is to pull the plug... Which is located under the hood.
Maybe someone could pull a Keanu Reeves and slide under the moving vehicle? Unplug it from there?
For the same reason that each state in the United States, will issue a drivers license to eighty plus year olds.
The transmission is computer controlled. Trying to move it to anything is ignored if it doesn't make sense to the system. In fact that is the key thing, you have a misbehaving computer, however, you have to reason with this crazy machine to get anything to happen, which usually it will tell you, you are the one in the wrong here, hence why a lot of sane sounding things wouldn't work in this case. If the system was completely wonked, there isn't a thing a person could do that this system would respond to, such as turning off or going into a different gear or lack of gear.
It's like your car is saying, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm too busy pushing the accelerator to process your request to shift into neutral, please try again later."
Going into neutral with the gas pedal down is going to trigger an ignore signal from the system and thus the request to switch into neutral will not be dispatched to the transmission. Likewise with ignitions, having forward motion in a non-collision situation will have any request to disengage the engine ignored. Heck, some electronic systems won't care. If the car isn't stopped, collision or not, the system may very well ignore any request to disengage the engine.
The problem is that a lot of these drive by wire systems make a lot of bad assumptions about things and there really isn't a standard guide book on what to make sure does and does not happen, so it varies pretty wildly between systems. Some cars will allow you to switch to neutral, and neutral alone, while the gas pedal is down (never mind that the system is having a fault on requests to accelerate.) Some cars will let you burn through the break pads. The parking brake is always manual, so you'd figure someone would put a kill switch in there. Nope, pulling on the parking brake with the accelerator stuck will just get you some nice brake dust blowing out of your wheels. There are a ton of WTF thinking that goes into some of the programming of these systems.
Stuck accelerators can be cause by any number of faults, some of those faults are checked, some not. The ones that are checked, can try resets or allow you to stop the car safely. The ones that get missed cause this kind of crap where, no matter what you do, your car is now programmed to go as fast as it can in a forward motion and getting under the hood and pulling the plug to the system for a hard reset is the only solution.
There is a serious need for someone to come up with logical standard operating procedures for these types of systems. Airplane manufactures do it for their fly by wire systems so that the pilot always stays in control, even when the system would rather beg to differ on the matter. I haven't the foggiest idea on why this kind of thing eludes car makers.
Sorry to hear that you are entering forms via your mobile device. Our company switched to HTML 5 pages long ago for that kind of thing. Makes entering data a whole lot easier and I've consulted with smaller firms that cannot or will not host their own on third party sites.
It's just too time consuming to find the right spot on an Excel fill it out and even then you might have validation issues. A web system that handles all of that is a much more efficient method for a lot of reasons. Validation, central administration, version control, wide distribution, wide consumption, etc...
However your argument still doesn't change the main thing I covered. You still need your desktop people to make and review your forms you fill out. There still is a whole process for review which is most likely done on desktop, and so on. If your form is genetic enough, which that depends on the level of complexity you have in the sheet, the look is less important that the collection of data. You could easily use some other office suite for your data entry. Again that depends on what you're doing here. However in a lot of the cases I've reviewed mobile Microsoft office could either be replaced with a web based solution or any old office software could be used in it's place, once people understood that the majority of content creation didn't happen on mobile devices.
Again I'm not saying there isn't a need for mobile office, it is just that a lot of the use cases I've come across could be better done sans office considering that mobile users are usually expected to flip something open, enter less than ten kilos of information, and be done for the day for what they are expected to do on a mobile device. If you're a college student and you're on a budget, then yeah if your class requires Microsoft Office that might be something to look into. If you're expected to build an entire Power Point presentation on the go and all you have is your iPad, then yeah if you have to share that file to someone on a PC, that might be another, but if you are the one giving the presentation, just plug the iPad to the projector via wireless. There are plenty of options for this.
Your data shouldn't rely on an underlying presentation platform, if it does, you have an inherent problem with how you store and collect that data that leads you to such vendor lock in as to require Microsoft Office to be a make or brake call in your mobile strategy. Mobile platforms require some sort of liberation of the connections because there are certain calls you can't make in a BYOD environment.
Dear sir. You win! Thank goodness some people can still think here on Slashdot.
That's a pretty high valuation of MS Office, which I doubt would really pay for itself, ever. Also, I don't see a *mass* migration of Android that Apple should be worry about. Yes, people are moving to Android but people are also moving to Apple. Yes the direction is greater in the Android direction, but that's to be expected in a duopoly. Highs and lows, that kind of stuff wouldn't make a serious company change any kind of course, because it's part of the normal model.
Office doesn't offer a ton in the way of content creation on mobile devices. Trying to use Office RT is just a waste unless you really have the little snappy keyboard and at that point, I rather be using a laptop than a mobile device. Unless something seriously changes in the Office UI department that can make the software more usable on a mobile device, I'll stick to the free stuff on Android (which granted, Google is seriously fucking up on delivering anything above pure shit on the Android platform for office documents) or iWork on Apple devices (which thus far has been the only serious productivity software for mobile devices, which is a shame because it's feature set leaves a ton lacking.)
I'm not saying that there is no need for productivity software on mobile devices, just saying that every vendor thus far has yet to produce something that is really going to be the tipping point that says, Damn it! I've really got to get MS Office/Google's Paid Office/iWork on my phone!!!
The most common thing I see is mobile users relying on desktop users to build the sheets from ground up and mobile users, adding bits of information as they go. If a large amount of information is needed in a read-only environment, convert to PDF is the number one thing I see desktop users do for mobile users. They can markup and annotate the PDF and send back to desktop users for review and change. Because all of this "works," there just isn't the same value for MS Office on Mobile as it has on Desktop. Hence, Apple would be at a serious disadvantage paying Microsoft to port it to iOS, they'd be getting very little in return. Someone at some point has to figure out how to give mobile users enough freedom that they don't have to keep going back to the desktop to build a document, without it taking an act of Congress to actually build.
If you are use to using QWidget and that is what you are comfortable with, then there is absolutely zero need for you to try and pick up Qt Quick. Qt Quick is really good at building one offs that you need for small tasks, think million little widgets here, not database editor. Qt5 is still centered very much around C++ and the people who wrote Qt are very aware that Qt Quick "is not for everyone".
You may find yourself pulling up Qt Quick for implementing a "find dialog" or a "insert criteria dialog", but if you are writing the main window in Qt Quick, you either have a very modular/small project or you are using the wrong tool for the job. The best way I tell others is that Qt Quick is for doing up quick UIs, not complicated UIs. Qt Quick would be excellent for Palsmoids, horrific for an entire email application (unless you have really broken the program down to very small bits.)
As an example, I have a program that we use here in the office to connect to PostgreSQL. The connect to dialog is Qt Quick, the window with all the tables and fields is pure QWidgets. The fill-in-the-form order request window is Qt Quick, the order summary window is QWidgets (mostly because it has all kinds of sort and filter buttons). So keep the Qt Quick stuff small and simple and you will find that it's nice to use for all those one offs that do not need a lot of logic behind the window.
That is not to say that Qt Quick *cannot* do a large application, just that it will be easier to continue to do so with QWidget, and that is the whole point, to make things easier. Also, I strongly encourage you (and for that matter anyone seriously looking at Qt) to pick up some C++11. Qt 5 has been written to make logical use of some of the newer stuff in C++11 and those concepts do very much indeed make your code very, very clean. I will admit that I was quite skeptical at first about that point.
Coal miners, sanitation engineers and police officers get paid a lot more than their skills would demand because of the unpleasantness of their work.
I've not known coal miners to be making that much cash. In these parts they can stand to make $33,600 topped out and starting around $26500. So that's a spread of $12.75 per hour to $16.15 per hour, with the usual pay increase $0.05 to $0.10 per hour per year.
Additionally, I think you place very little value on their skill. Most miners are using pretty advance machinery which have complex displays that show gas concentrations, slurry input/output, core rotor tempature, coolant inflow, rotor RPM, and so forth. Most of the miners go to school for pretty much a two year degree for operations and a four year degree is required for mechanics.
This isn't the pick axe and cart operation that some like to think that is coal mining. Surface mining is a little less complex, but still more demanding that one would expect.
Yes, the people who have their jobs dislike that crap that they put up with day in and day out, but they don't keep going because the pay is super fat. I could tell you, but hell, come on out here to Kentucky, Tennessee, or West Virginia and see for yourself why they go in and out of a mine day in and day out.
I'm sure it will be enlightening.
There is nothing snake oil about it. This is a real thing. The problem is that a large operation can only squeeze about 300 gallons of fuel out of the air per day. In addition it takes like the energy that thirty or so homes would use in one day to do this. Guy can do whatever he likes with his free time, but the more important thing he is going to have to work on is oxygen separation. The chemical is pretty strongly bonded in water and doubly so in carbon dioxide.
I've found LO spreadsheets to be easier to work with that the Microsoft counterpart. We programs that output information on product, I cannot tell you the number of times I've foamed at the mouth by Excel converting the UPC into scientific notation. LO seems to understand that the column is text, but no matter what we do with Excel, it always wants to turn UPC, EAN, GTIN-14 into a number.
Additionally, we find that working with large documents to be easier and more fluid with LO than Word or Excel. If someone jacks up the formatting in Word it's a weeks worth of recovery just to get things sane again. In LO it is literally minutes at best. LO handles spreadsheets of 500,000 rows plus way better than Excel any day.
because there is so much more to life than screwing around.
Like learning what sarcasm is.
"There's as much porn there as anyone would need, I imagine."
You sir have grossly underestimated the Internet porn surfing public. Additionally, if this TLD gets really big and makes good on it's promise, I'm upping the ante to a six monitor configuration as opposed to the current two.
I don't see anything wrong with a desire to categorize information on the Internet. Yes, .com porn will still exist, but if the company that owns .xxx can keep the sites under it in check and make it a safe place to find porn, I think that will attract more people than ever, which in turn draw more to the domain. I like to think of it as the Las Vegas of the Internet. So long as the place can be kept within a certain degree of control, it's all good to let loose.
Why stop at just Google? Why start with Google? I see this feature being more like the search bar in Firefox where you can install and remove search provides as you wish. They just implemented an Amazon one first because they can make money off of it. However, I doubt that Amazon will be the only search lens that gets implemented.
I don't want a third party to be involved in what was a simple transaction between me and the people selling it. Especially not the producers of my OS.
So you either don't use Android/iOS or you don't use Google to search.
Canonical will now know every search you perform, even if you're only searching locally.
Then turn it off, geez, other vendors wouldn't have even given you a choice on the matter.
If I want to be shopping, I know how to get to Amazon.
Again, you either don't shop around or you just loves you some Amazon. Paranoia at it's best. If the feature doesn't fit you, guess what, you can turn the crap off, change it, whatever you like to do with it. Why is this feature suddenly so freaking contentious? And we wondering what all those people who talk about in-fighting are talking about and why that prevents desktop Linux from really taking off.
Justify this all you want, but lets be real. It's about Ubuntu making more money and changing the face of linux forever, and not for the good.
Much like the search bar in Firefox is doing this to innocent users. Please, get real. Making money with Linux is not a sin. Android does it, different router makers have been doing it, server companies have been doing, it's been going on since the kernel's 2.4 days and earlier most likely, but I only have examples that go back to the 2.4 days.
Even if it is about Ubuntu making money, which it is not, why is that a problem? Why does a such a vocal group of people pull the handbrake the second someone talks about making money? How exactly does Linux succeed if there is absolutely zero money? Remember that we're in this as free beer, not this we're going to be penniless chumps. I don't particularly like Canonical, but making money isn't a sticking point for me. RedHat does it all the time, should we go burn their website down too?
Let me just add. The life expectancy of a smartphone is not 2 years. It is 11.5 months.
HA! Best thing I've heard today!
Please don't blame Moore's Law for what we can all chalk up to as humanity being very inefficient. I can almost assure you that the majority of people never use the maximum amount of processing that comes from modern hardware. Software takes time to be rewritten for the latest greatest hardware. That's why people scale out as oppose to scale up. You think it is because of cost, to an extent it is, but more so, it is because they figure if their software maxes out on two cores, then setup four VMs on an eight core machine with two cores each.
If software magically kept in step with hardware advancements, then your whole point might have some ground to stand on. However, software doesn't scale like that. It usually take a whole software cycle or two to bring it to modern levels. (Seriously, look how long it took XP to get SATA.)
However all of this isn't even what I was talking about. People make the argument that software updates are important. They are only important when you are talking about hardware that will need to have a longer shelf life. Cell phones and tablets are not made to have that kind of shelf life, therefore, software updates are meaningless to them. That was the point I was making.
Finally, you apparently have no idea what Big Iron means. I won't even bother to try and help you understand what the draw is for Big Iron, but I assure you, it's not to reach umpteen teraflops. Additionally, I have "Big Iron" servers that were built in late 1990 that still schools some of the best modern boxen out there. To the tune of about 1,200,000 inserts per second. The best I've ever seen any Intel with maybe 300k to 400k inserts per second, that's with today's specs. A general processing element just cannot compete with a entire circuit that was built with the specific purpose of inserting rows into a table, and that's just one blade in the box. You understand that and you begin to understand why Big Iron is where it is, in places that have very specific needs.
I don't even know how we got on this whole topic, but humans are super ineffective and they themselves do not keep pace with hardware. Thus software never keeps pace with hardware. Hardware isn't exactly useful without software... Well I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this whole argument.
I know that I am talking to the absolutely wrong crowd here, but here's the deal. This whole update BS is a non-issue. Cell phones are equally disposable as your current Congress critter. The expected life is what two maybe three years.
Now I know everyone here is the uber geek and have their whatever device flashed with the latest OS and side loaded all their favorite apps onto their device, but there aren't many that really care about people like us, people who will do their best to continue the life of the device they purchased long after what a vendor had intended the device they sold you to last.
The computer industry has been banging its head on the wall for the last twenty years trying to figure out how to sucker people into buying a new device every two to three years. When the iPhone hit the market it was "Mission Accomplished" G.W. style for the industry. Us that like to hold on to our precious for five to seven years, don't even factor into the equation for computer vendors anymore, we're so last generation. Yeah, there will still be divisions that pander to us, the desktop ain't going anywhere, but for all intents and purposes, we're just not the tech market anymore.
That's why you see such hard pushes for tablets, and phones, and phablets. Because computer desktop market saturation is so freakishly high in the more developed countries of this world. It's why you see such frenzy in China and Pakistani markets, because technological saturation is still pretty low in those countries and disposable income is on the rise in those countries.
So hopefully I've made my point that the people who are of the mindset that they buy a device and it last six years are not who computer companies are targeting anymore, at least the mainstream ones. They want to sell a new device every two years to you, and that's why this update crap is a load of non-issue.
The majority of people, more than anyone here would like to admit, are going to buy right into this new device every two years crap. For them, every two years they not only get a new device, they get an OS update. Apple people like to spin this whole issue in the terms that, "Oh look our people stand behind us." When in reality, the only reason your getting updates like that, is because you're so freaking vendor locked in, you've got no choice on the matter (again, does not apply to the small group of people here that root their phone and go lone wolf.) Android people like to spin the issue as, "We're at the mercy of carriers." However, you bought into that cycle. You knew you would be at their mercy, you can't use that as an excuse, just wait a couple of more month till you get outside contract and go buy a new one. That's the whole reason their holding the update back from you.
There are so many people (none of them here on Slashdot for heavens sake) that have bought into this "trade my fridge in for a subscription of bags of ice" racket. People are so willing to just give up ownership these days, because they see so little value in ownership. Does anyone think all that crap they post to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, et al that they own it? Of course not.
We're all seeing a total erosion of ownership across the board in the Internet. That's why this update BS is just that, BS. No one really cares about updates. They'll just get a new device, they care so little about ownership that they just see physical devices that connect to all their cloud stuff as just as disposable as razors. The only people who do care about this update shit is the geeks out there that are still hung up on the old model of buy a device to last, and the people around them that are told to care about this shit.
I think everyone is missing the entire fucking planet because we're too focused on fucking trees and forest here. We're still believing that people buy devices to last them, whereas, the reality is, no one gives a shit. They'll just upgrade at the end of the contract. No one
I second Gordonjcp! About 80% of the complaints that I've heard about Unity are just pure bunk. Many of the warehouses that I oversee have Ubuntu 12.04 with the Unity interface for many of the order processing stations and users have had great experiences with Unity. Additionally, I know many of the javascript developers in our IT department to be using Ubuntu 12.04 with the Unity UI. Never have heard a peep from them, more so, they get to choose the OS they want to use and they choose Ubuntu and Unity, that should say something.
Honestly, I think there's just a bunch of old timers that just object to everything that isn't GNOME 2 or KDE 3. To them that was the high point in desktop environments. They simply need to get over themselves.
That's correct and bull shit all at the same time. Yeah, people's vote can be bought, but I know people who eBay their vote willingly. Face it the United States holds so little value to their vote that it goes to the highest bidder.
Identifying mark or not. The core issue the judge ruled on is that there is nothing that assures a secret ballot. There isn't. It's just been mostly tradition, and I believe if everyone on Slashdot spent a fraction of that time talking to their Congress critter, that they've spent so far posting here, we'd start having some bill being written up about the issue.