I don't think that's a really valid argument, 99% of media players that aren't the iPod support more music and video formats than the iPod does by default.
It's generally the iPod/iPhone/iPad you have to convert media for, hence why things like handbrake are so popular in the Apple fan's toolkit.
Yes, in part because it also uses proportional representation so is far more democratic than even national institutions like the British parliament where a party with 30% support can get effective 100% of power, and where 60% of voters votes don't even count.
For many Europeans such as those Brits stuck under the fucked up first past the post system, they actually have more of a vote in the European Parliament than they do in their national parliaments because the proportional system much more fairly recognises their vote. 1 vote in 400,000 people or whatever under a proportional system is still worth more than 1 vote in a 30,000 person safe seat under FPTP.
Calling the European Parliament undemocratic is rather amusing in the context of most Western democracies.
Meh, not sure what you're used to but Eclipse is always slow, no matter how few plugins you use.
I don't disagree with the original comments- that Java being slow is a 90s argument, but Eclipse is a particularly poorly written piece of software that really doesn't demonstrate Java very well.
The GP pointed out why Eclipse is slow though, and why it's not a Java issue, but a poor design issue.
Compare Eclipse to other IDEs like NetBeans, JDeveloper, or Visual Studio and you can see how much of a joke it is. It's not even just initial boot up, even intellisense in it is too slow to be of much use a lot of the time really.
If Jobs has high standards, and doesn't tolerate crap, then why the fuck is iTunes so terrible, and why was Safari for Windows probably the biggest fail of a browser release in existence?
I'm not sure Jobs was that intolerance of crap, he just knew a smooth marketable piece of hardware when he saw one.
But what if Apple then start suing open systems out of existing, getting bans on sales in large markets like Europe? This has the implication that maker of said closed system doesn't want to compete, it wants to dominate without having to compete fairly on it's merits.
You're dead right, but we must make sure things like patents don't prevent a fair playing field.
Many users don't really understand what it says it's going to do, because the concept of syncing, which, may include deleting content on their local drive, is utterly alien to most computer users.
The idea that software most people believe you use to get content on your device will actually end up deleting local content is completely odd to many users. A quick bit of Googling will show how many thousands of users have fallen foul of this concept through the years.
Really, if it "just works" then it would work as users expect it to work, not do things they didn't expect it to do, even if it warns. Warning it's going to do something you'd never expect it to can't be classed as "just works" by any measure.
I don't think his mother is in a minority. I see any number of people curse iTunes. It really is the biggest weakness in Apple's ecosystem- it just doesn't fit well with the Windows concepts most users are used to.
They deal with it because they want the shiny Apple device, but most would be much comfier with being able to just copy in explorer or My Computer as that's the concept they're used to, and have to use for other devices like their digital cameras, and their USB memory sticks.
The iTunes paradigm works well on Apple computers because it fits with the way Apple works, but it's so painfully awkward and out of place on Windows systems that the majority of people use, and it's not helped by the countless bugs in iTunes, some even related to syncing. Allowing users to just copy in explorer would fix all that but Apple also wants to force people through the store to move their content across, in the hope they'll buy more.
This isn't true, average consumers do also, but only when it's too late.
I've known a number of ordinary people who have found it to be quite the issue years back when they found that they couldn't easily move their content from iTunes to their new non-Apple device, and so had to basically lose it, or break the law to get it back.
This is really the problem with it, people don't know it's a problem until it's too late. So yes, they may not care whilst they're oblivious to the issue, but they start to care when it inevitably bites them.
What makes you think it's fragile? the example I saw recently was a fully working spanner. That's not something frangile because it must face a lot of forces when tightening and losening nuts and bolts.
I'm not sure why you think it'll be a fad. It's already seeing a lot of use in companies that can afford the kit as is right now. That implies it's already past the fad stage.
Of course, these things only ever get better with time too. So when it's consumer affordable it should be quite impressive technology.
Even if it doesn't improve and the current tech just comes down in price then it's already good enough to produce every day objects people might want to produce from drink cups/mugs, to plant pots, to hole punches, to key racks, to storage boxes, to lego pieces. There's just so many things it can already do that people will find useful.
Just more self-defeatingly bureaucratic that's all.
It's really what happened to Rome when it started to fall amongst other empires and civilisations and so forth too to an extent.
It's also why other countries are flying ahead of the West where bureaucracy isn't such an issue.
Those who don't learn from the past, are doomed to repeat it's mistakes and all that. Really, so much of the Western economy is built on what basically just amounts to bullshit now. I'm not convinced that bullshit is really a viable economic plan, growing the amount of bullshit in your economy doesn't seem to grow your economy like many bureaucrats seem to think it does. Quite the opposite.
Historically Java with something like Spring has been the best bet, but in recent years C# is taking the helm really. With things like ASP.NET MVC being designed for testability, and modularity from the outset and the languages themselves from day 1 have pretty much been designed with the ability to scale in mind.
Ruby on Rails brings better practice development to the web, but it doesn't really solve the scalability issues, so it's really just an alternative to PHP rather than something designed to grow. Twitter has managed it with RoR but it's fallen over about a thousand times in the process, and I'm not even sure they're exclusively using RoR now anyway.
Many Slashdotters nowadays bemoan Java and C# but frankly it's because Slashdot has lost an awful lot of professionals and the professionals are far outweighed by what can only be described as script kiddies. In the real world though Java has proven itself in places like eBay and Google. Many FOSS zealots will decry.NET, pointing to the London stock exchange failure with.NET, but a bad system will fail whatever tools you use- the Linux system that has replaced it has equally suffered a number of issues causing downtime. A quick look at the job listings on pretty much any job site will give a good illustration of how prominent.NET has become.
I wont lie, good Java is hard- it's requires much more investment in learning than PHP, you can't just jump into something like Spring, but the payoff is simply better software. C# is easier but you're then pretty much forced to host on Microsoft's platform which is generally much more expensive. These two points are themselves some of the cons of Java and.NET but should be balanced against the pros- they're just better languages for writing good software that is highly scalable, highly maintainable, and have much better support for maximising the security of your application.
Yep, under the authoritarian Brown government in the UK it was always the European courts that I, as a British citizen living in the UK, had to rely on to protect my freedoms and liberties from my own government.
They may not be perfect but the EU judicial and legislative branches certainly seem to be a much better choice than their respective British, French, German, American, or Australian counterparts to live under. It's really only the Canadians that seem to do a much better job and even that seems somewhat under threat with the Conservative majority rule there now.
I'm still more worried about what my own government will do than what the EU will do. I find myself happy that the EU has once against overturned or blocked a stupid decision by my own government far more often than I find myself happy that my government has made a smart legislative decision.
The problem is that whilst poverty and unemployment might well have been a cause, they were not an excuse.
The North of England has long seen much higher levels of poverty and unemployment yet these riots didn't get much further north than Birmingham bar Manchester. Yorkshire was fair quiet, as were the likes of Newcastle and Scotland- places generally known for having rather prominent chavish underclass yet for some reason- even when all their police had been sent down to London meaning it would be even easier in the North, they didn't engage in it.
Of course, you can theorise that it was the spoilt southerners, being used to getting the moon on a stick, because there's so much money down there, and not being able to cope when things go tits up and some of their lovely council estate support and benefits are cut. But really, whether it's something like that or not, the GP's point that the riots were not an acceptable form of political protest, especially if you haven't attempted peaceful protest like a rally to parliament square first.
Of course, there's also another problem with the theory that the riots were a form of political protest- some of those apprehended do not even face issues such as unemployment, low standards of living, educational dead end and so forth- in fact, the first person at all that went to trial of all the possible people that could have was a teacher and teachers enjoy pay well above the national average, they enjoy very long holidays, they're decent educated, and have strong job security. It wasn't just teachers of course- we had many people caught from decent backgrounds.
No, the riots weren't political, they were an orgy of gang led violence that was widespread enough that others thought they could get away with destroying, and stealing shit who might not otherwise have been able to.
"Gaddafi's son Khamis and a group of 10,000 well-trained troops happened to "just disappear" when the rebels got to Tripoli"
That's because most of them were friends, and families of the general population in Tripoli and hence supported the rebel cause, and so when the rebels arrived, it became easy to defect without fear of being shot or having reprisals against their families.
This isn't to say there aren't a lot of Gaddaffi troops left, there are, but they're mostly the handful of ultra-loyalists and mercenairies. Certainly not a full blown standing army however.
It's worth noting that the NTC (the rebel leadership) had an agreement in place as well, that if Tripoli fell, then the presidential guard would defect to the rebels. It seems that this actually happened for the most part.
If the troops had all stayed loyal and just backed off and hidden somewhere then Nato would've easily been able to spot that kind of movement.
"and I'm sure most people that aren't his cronies would love to see him gone."
What I found quite telling was to see the pro-Gaddaffi rallies, they weren't particularly numerous, and those that were there often seem to be very well dressed, with an impressive amount of expensive looking jewellery on.
I have a feeling the only ones supporting Gaddaffi pretty much are the ones who, like him, are rich through exploiting the people and the country. Those who Gaddaffi has allowed to similarly exploit these resources seem to be, for the most part, the only ones backing him.
Even his military seems comprised primarily of mercenairies now.
If companies couldn't lock down their bootloaders then the Android project might not be at a point where anyone cares about it anyway because some of the more popular phone manufacturers who have grown the Android platform may not have bothered to invest in it.
I'm afraid commercial reality is always going to trump FOSS fantasy for a company like Google. It's the only way they can stay in business, but it's better to have companies that pay lip service to FOSS like Google, than it is those who just wanted to destroy it like Microsoft.
"It's almost like the people who build PHP aren't even interested in maintaining it."
It's not really that, it's just the PHP ethos, PHP has never really been about good software development and that flows not just through the language itself but development of the language. It's not that PHP is inherently bad- rather than focus on good practice, it focuses on just getting things done, and this kind of works, but it also means that you'll more frequently see things like this when you throw best practice out the window.
Like every other language, PHP has it's pros and cons- it's good for getting things done quickly, it's easy for beginners and is forgiving, but for professionals who want to write solid software it has many weaknesses. Without a doubt it's done well- look at Facebook, but similarly look what Facebook had to do with it- mangle it down to C++, and then look at the amount of bugs Facebook has suffered- anyone who uses it regularly will be well aware of features that randomly just break on some days, like chat, the ability to comment and so forth.
A lot of developers think best practice is just fantasy, but these are developers who have never worked on large scale systems and it is precisely these scenarios where you want something that supports best practice development well. The issue Facebook has had in terms of bugs and performance, leading to difficulties with scalability are issues that arise precisely from failing to ensure you're software is well developed. It hasn't hindered Facebook, but it doesn't particularly look good for such a company either, and for more serious applications where such bugs have real repercussions it's unacceptable.
If you want to get somethnig done ASAP and there's little accountability required if things go wrong then PHP is absolutely brilliant. But if you're developing something where there's a lot of accountability required, you can spend a bit longer developing it to produce a more solid, more futureproof (scalable, maintainable) system, then PHP is not the right tool for the job.
So in that context although bugs are bad, I really find it hard to slag the PHP team off- they're producing a tool that people want, but it's a tool where you should expect these kind of issues. If you want a solid, trustworthy tool, then PHP isn't the right tool for the problem you're trying to solve. The only issue really surrounding PHP is that as a tool that prioritises speed over quality, is that because it's so easy to learn, too many developers when they've become good with it having learnt it as their first language, they continue to use it even where it's not fit- they don't dare venture on to anything else and so they genuinely believe it's the right tool for every job. That's wrong, no language is.
Um, you might want to look at HTC's growth before slagging them off.
Whatever you think of their business plan, it works, and it's giving them growth on a rather impressive scale. Handset growth has been around 230% over last year, and profits are a similar success story.
So to answer your question- "and who will want to buy a cell phone maker with the only future of making me too phones like HTC does"
Well, anyone with even the slightest bit of basic investment sense would be my guess.
For what it's worth, I was a single male flying on a return ticket to Canada and I was held and interrogated by Canadian customs for 3 hours.
I don't think it really matters on the country too much, give people power to be bullies and many will use it.
Perhaps somewhat ironically, for all the bad rap the TSA gets I've actually had much better experience with US customs and immigration than I have Canada- US customs officers have always been far more courteous and friendly with me.
This isn't to say I haven't had some good experiences in Canada- certainly the customs officers at Toronto airport have always been nice, but at Ottawa they've universally been complete and utter jackasses. Even my partner who is actually Canadian got bitched at by them for leaving on her Canadian passport and entering on holiday in the queue with me on her British passport as if she was supposed to know it really mattered which she used when. Some customs officers wanted to bring us through passport control together at the same time and told me to step forward and not wait to come through separately, and another bitched at me and sent me back to the queue when we both went through together. You really can't win, if they're dickheads, then they'll act like dickheads whatever you do. I guess judging whether someone will be a bullying fuckwad when given even the slightest bit of power isn't something that's easy to judge in interviews, so it's inevitable customs will end up with them, but certainly some airports even within the same country- a country generally renowned for it's hospitality can have issues recruiting anything other than jackasses.
Still, nothing beats landing in Narvik, Northern Norway. Off the plane, and out the airport, no passport check, no luggage check! I guess they assumed if I got through security at Heathrow though that there's not much for them to worry about. They really just had no care whatsoever for any security checks up there, but then I guess, the arctic circle isn't one of the most popular destinations for immigrants and terrorists either, so perhaps that played a factor too.
I'm British FWIW, not really sure how much nationality factors in to how you're treated though if I'm honest. It's easy to theorise that some of the issues I had at Ottawa were due to the high levels of French Canadian customs officers who may hold a cultural resentment of the British, but it's just theory so who knows- elsewhere in Quebec French Canadians were friendly and courteous enough.
"No. I don't believe in them. Why would I? There's no evidence where evidence should be present."
Ah right, but it's okay that there's no evidence that people were rioting for a specific cause?
Look, you're trying to use logic to pedantically prove someone is wrong. I'm making the point to you that so pedantically abusing logic to try and make out you have a point is meaningless.
The fact is, there was no justification to the riots, it was mindless violence, and greed driven theft. If someone wants to pretend there was some kind of cause behind it that's fine, but it's also bollocks. There is no cause in wrecking your own community for a bit of fun and greed, which is what it really came down to.
As others have said it doesn't really matter if there were one or two deluded individuals amongst the thousands of rioters who genuinely felt they were changing something in their own minds. The fact is they weren't, they were wrong, and they were no better than those doing it for kicks and free shit. What they did simply cannot be justified by any false cause they may wish to proclaim.
"However if the prices are cheaper, what do you think people will do with the money they saved? Chances are they will just buy something else, so the total VAT works out much the same."
Well there's also the point that it means less money going out of the country to foreign firms too, so I agree, but the issue is most governments are afraid to tackle it in case it doesn't quite go as planned and people do start saving more, do start paying off debt, meaning less profits for financial institutions and so forth. Their view is that it works, so leave it alone.
You still pay tax on imports in the UK, so importing doesn't save you that, however it's certainly often better because even with the tax on it often works out cheaper still. Most consumers don't bother with this though.
Cheers for pointing to that! It wasn't visible on my main page feed, so missed it due to the equally retarded fact that they've removed the view more button from the bottom of the main page now so that if I don't catch a story, it seems I can't catch a story.
I like how it's been known for at least 4 hours now that HP, the biggest producer of PCs in the world is dropping it's PC and tablet division and moving to focus entirely on software.
Yet, rather than post that news, Slashdot has posted this.
Thank you editors, obviously your ability to ensure Slashdot is a relevant source of IT news goes well beyond anything anyone else could imagine.
It's okay though, at least we'll be prepared if aliens attack I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that's a really valid argument, 99% of media players that aren't the iPod support more music and video formats than the iPod does by default.
It's generally the iPod/iPhone/iPad you have to convert media for, hence why things like handbrake are so popular in the Apple fan's toolkit.
Yes, in part because it also uses proportional representation so is far more democratic than even national institutions like the British parliament where a party with 30% support can get effective 100% of power, and where 60% of voters votes don't even count.
For many Europeans such as those Brits stuck under the fucked up first past the post system, they actually have more of a vote in the European Parliament than they do in their national parliaments because the proportional system much more fairly recognises their vote. 1 vote in 400,000 people or whatever under a proportional system is still worth more than 1 vote in a 30,000 person safe seat under FPTP.
Calling the European Parliament undemocratic is rather amusing in the context of most Western democracies.
Meh, not sure what you're used to but Eclipse is always slow, no matter how few plugins you use.
I don't disagree with the original comments- that Java being slow is a 90s argument, but Eclipse is a particularly poorly written piece of software that really doesn't demonstrate Java very well.
The GP pointed out why Eclipse is slow though, and why it's not a Java issue, but a poor design issue.
Compare Eclipse to other IDEs like NetBeans, JDeveloper, or Visual Studio and you can see how much of a joke it is. It's not even just initial boot up, even intellisense in it is too slow to be of much use a lot of the time really.
If Jobs has high standards, and doesn't tolerate crap, then why the fuck is iTunes so terrible, and why was Safari for Windows probably the biggest fail of a browser release in existence?
I'm not sure Jobs was that intolerance of crap, he just knew a smooth marketable piece of hardware when he saw one.
I agree, assuming competition is fair.
But what if Apple then start suing open systems out of existing, getting bans on sales in large markets like Europe? This has the implication that maker of said closed system doesn't want to compete, it wants to dominate without having to compete fairly on it's merits.
You're dead right, but we must make sure things like patents don't prevent a fair playing field.
Many users don't really understand what it says it's going to do, because the concept of syncing, which, may include deleting content on their local drive, is utterly alien to most computer users.
The idea that software most people believe you use to get content on your device will actually end up deleting local content is completely odd to many users. A quick bit of Googling will show how many thousands of users have fallen foul of this concept through the years.
Really, if it "just works" then it would work as users expect it to work, not do things they didn't expect it to do, even if it warns. Warning it's going to do something you'd never expect it to can't be classed as "just works" by any measure.
I don't think his mother is in a minority. I see any number of people curse iTunes. It really is the biggest weakness in Apple's ecosystem- it just doesn't fit well with the Windows concepts most users are used to.
They deal with it because they want the shiny Apple device, but most would be much comfier with being able to just copy in explorer or My Computer as that's the concept they're used to, and have to use for other devices like their digital cameras, and their USB memory sticks.
The iTunes paradigm works well on Apple computers because it fits with the way Apple works, but it's so painfully awkward and out of place on Windows systems that the majority of people use, and it's not helped by the countless bugs in iTunes, some even related to syncing. Allowing users to just copy in explorer would fix all that but Apple also wants to force people through the store to move their content across, in the hope they'll buy more.
This isn't true, average consumers do also, but only when it's too late.
I've known a number of ordinary people who have found it to be quite the issue years back when they found that they couldn't easily move their content from iTunes to their new non-Apple device, and so had to basically lose it, or break the law to get it back.
This is really the problem with it, people don't know it's a problem until it's too late. So yes, they may not care whilst they're oblivious to the issue, but they start to care when it inevitably bites them.
What makes you think it's fragile? the example I saw recently was a fully working spanner. That's not something frangile because it must face a lot of forces when tightening and losening nuts and bolts.
I'm not sure why you think it'll be a fad. It's already seeing a lot of use in companies that can afford the kit as is right now. That implies it's already past the fad stage.
Of course, these things only ever get better with time too. So when it's consumer affordable it should be quite impressive technology.
Even if it doesn't improve and the current tech just comes down in price then it's already good enough to produce every day objects people might want to produce from drink cups/mugs, to plant pots, to hole punches, to key racks, to storage boxes, to lego pieces. There's just so many things it can already do that people will find useful.
"Maybe society is getting dumber."
Just more self-defeatingly bureaucratic that's all.
It's really what happened to Rome when it started to fall amongst other empires and civilisations and so forth too to an extent.
It's also why other countries are flying ahead of the West where bureaucracy isn't such an issue.
Those who don't learn from the past, are doomed to repeat it's mistakes and all that. Really, so much of the Western economy is built on what basically just amounts to bullshit now. I'm not convinced that bullshit is really a viable economic plan, growing the amount of bullshit in your economy doesn't seem to grow your economy like many bureaucrats seem to think it does. Quite the opposite.
I like how when Steve Jobs copies something he was "inspired by it" but if anyone else copies something from Apple they "stole it".
Historically Java with something like Spring has been the best bet, but in recent years C# is taking the helm really. With things like ASP.NET MVC being designed for testability, and modularity from the outset and the languages themselves from day 1 have pretty much been designed with the ability to scale in mind.
Ruby on Rails brings better practice development to the web, but it doesn't really solve the scalability issues, so it's really just an alternative to PHP rather than something designed to grow. Twitter has managed it with RoR but it's fallen over about a thousand times in the process, and I'm not even sure they're exclusively using RoR now anyway.
Many Slashdotters nowadays bemoan Java and C# but frankly it's because Slashdot has lost an awful lot of professionals and the professionals are far outweighed by what can only be described as script kiddies. In the real world though Java has proven itself in places like eBay and Google. Many FOSS zealots will decry .NET, pointing to the London stock exchange failure with .NET, but a bad system will fail whatever tools you use- the Linux system that has replaced it has equally suffered a number of issues causing downtime. A quick look at the job listings on pretty much any job site will give a good illustration of how prominent .NET has become.
I wont lie, good Java is hard- it's requires much more investment in learning than PHP, you can't just jump into something like Spring, but the payoff is simply better software. C# is easier but you're then pretty much forced to host on Microsoft's platform which is generally much more expensive. These two points are themselves some of the cons of Java and .NET but should be balanced against the pros- they're just better languages for writing good software that is highly scalable, highly maintainable, and have much better support for maximising the security of your application.
Yep, under the authoritarian Brown government in the UK it was always the European courts that I, as a British citizen living in the UK, had to rely on to protect my freedoms and liberties from my own government.
They may not be perfect but the EU judicial and legislative branches certainly seem to be a much better choice than their respective British, French, German, American, or Australian counterparts to live under. It's really only the Canadians that seem to do a much better job and even that seems somewhat under threat with the Conservative majority rule there now.
I'm still more worried about what my own government will do than what the EU will do. I find myself happy that the EU has once against overturned or blocked a stupid decision by my own government far more often than I find myself happy that my government has made a smart legislative decision.
The problem is that whilst poverty and unemployment might well have been a cause, they were not an excuse.
The North of England has long seen much higher levels of poverty and unemployment yet these riots didn't get much further north than Birmingham bar Manchester. Yorkshire was fair quiet, as were the likes of Newcastle and Scotland- places generally known for having rather prominent chavish underclass yet for some reason- even when all their police had been sent down to London meaning it would be even easier in the North, they didn't engage in it.
Of course, you can theorise that it was the spoilt southerners, being used to getting the moon on a stick, because there's so much money down there, and not being able to cope when things go tits up and some of their lovely council estate support and benefits are cut. But really, whether it's something like that or not, the GP's point that the riots were not an acceptable form of political protest, especially if you haven't attempted peaceful protest like a rally to parliament square first.
Of course, there's also another problem with the theory that the riots were a form of political protest- some of those apprehended do not even face issues such as unemployment, low standards of living, educational dead end and so forth- in fact, the first person at all that went to trial of all the possible people that could have was a teacher and teachers enjoy pay well above the national average, they enjoy very long holidays, they're decent educated, and have strong job security. It wasn't just teachers of course- we had many people caught from decent backgrounds.
No, the riots weren't political, they were an orgy of gang led violence that was widespread enough that others thought they could get away with destroying, and stealing shit who might not otherwise have been able to.
"Gaddafi's son Khamis and a group of 10,000 well-trained troops happened to "just disappear" when the rebels got to Tripoli"
That's because most of them were friends, and families of the general population in Tripoli and hence supported the rebel cause, and so when the rebels arrived, it became easy to defect without fear of being shot or having reprisals against their families.
This isn't to say there aren't a lot of Gaddaffi troops left, there are, but they're mostly the handful of ultra-loyalists and mercenairies. Certainly not a full blown standing army however.
It's worth noting that the NTC (the rebel leadership) had an agreement in place as well, that if Tripoli fell, then the presidential guard would defect to the rebels. It seems that this actually happened for the most part.
If the troops had all stayed loyal and just backed off and hidden somewhere then Nato would've easily been able to spot that kind of movement.
"and I'm sure most people that aren't his cronies would love to see him gone."
What I found quite telling was to see the pro-Gaddaffi rallies, they weren't particularly numerous, and those that were there often seem to be very well dressed, with an impressive amount of expensive looking jewellery on.
I have a feeling the only ones supporting Gaddaffi pretty much are the ones who, like him, are rich through exploiting the people and the country. Those who Gaddaffi has allowed to similarly exploit these resources seem to be, for the most part, the only ones backing him.
Even his military seems comprised primarily of mercenairies now.
If companies couldn't lock down their bootloaders then the Android project might not be at a point where anyone cares about it anyway because some of the more popular phone manufacturers who have grown the Android platform may not have bothered to invest in it.
I'm afraid commercial reality is always going to trump FOSS fantasy for a company like Google. It's the only way they can stay in business, but it's better to have companies that pay lip service to FOSS like Google, than it is those who just wanted to destroy it like Microsoft.
"It's almost like the people who build PHP aren't even interested in maintaining it."
It's not really that, it's just the PHP ethos, PHP has never really been about good software development and that flows not just through the language itself but development of the language. It's not that PHP is inherently bad- rather than focus on good practice, it focuses on just getting things done, and this kind of works, but it also means that you'll more frequently see things like this when you throw best practice out the window.
Like every other language, PHP has it's pros and cons- it's good for getting things done quickly, it's easy for beginners and is forgiving, but for professionals who want to write solid software it has many weaknesses. Without a doubt it's done well- look at Facebook, but similarly look what Facebook had to do with it- mangle it down to C++, and then look at the amount of bugs Facebook has suffered- anyone who uses it regularly will be well aware of features that randomly just break on some days, like chat, the ability to comment and so forth.
A lot of developers think best practice is just fantasy, but these are developers who have never worked on large scale systems and it is precisely these scenarios where you want something that supports best practice development well. The issue Facebook has had in terms of bugs and performance, leading to difficulties with scalability are issues that arise precisely from failing to ensure you're software is well developed. It hasn't hindered Facebook, but it doesn't particularly look good for such a company either, and for more serious applications where such bugs have real repercussions it's unacceptable.
If you want to get somethnig done ASAP and there's little accountability required if things go wrong then PHP is absolutely brilliant. But if you're developing something where there's a lot of accountability required, you can spend a bit longer developing it to produce a more solid, more futureproof (scalable, maintainable) system, then PHP is not the right tool for the job.
So in that context although bugs are bad, I really find it hard to slag the PHP team off- they're producing a tool that people want, but it's a tool where you should expect these kind of issues. If you want a solid, trustworthy tool, then PHP isn't the right tool for the problem you're trying to solve. The only issue really surrounding PHP is that as a tool that prioritises speed over quality, is that because it's so easy to learn, too many developers when they've become good with it having learnt it as their first language, they continue to use it even where it's not fit- they don't dare venture on to anything else and so they genuinely believe it's the right tool for every job. That's wrong, no language is.
Um, you might want to look at HTC's growth before slagging them off.
Whatever you think of their business plan, it works, and it's giving them growth on a rather impressive scale. Handset growth has been around 230% over last year, and profits are a similar success story.
So to answer your question- "and who will want to buy a cell phone maker with the only future of making me too phones like HTC does"
Well, anyone with even the slightest bit of basic investment sense would be my guess.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14041085
Clearly making "me too" phones as you call them is a fucking good business to be in.
For what it's worth, I was a single male flying on a return ticket to Canada and I was held and interrogated by Canadian customs for 3 hours.
I don't think it really matters on the country too much, give people power to be bullies and many will use it.
Perhaps somewhat ironically, for all the bad rap the TSA gets I've actually had much better experience with US customs and immigration than I have Canada- US customs officers have always been far more courteous and friendly with me.
This isn't to say I haven't had some good experiences in Canada- certainly the customs officers at Toronto airport have always been nice, but at Ottawa they've universally been complete and utter jackasses. Even my partner who is actually Canadian got bitched at by them for leaving on her Canadian passport and entering on holiday in the queue with me on her British passport as if she was supposed to know it really mattered which she used when. Some customs officers wanted to bring us through passport control together at the same time and told me to step forward and not wait to come through separately, and another bitched at me and sent me back to the queue when we both went through together. You really can't win, if they're dickheads, then they'll act like dickheads whatever you do. I guess judging whether someone will be a bullying fuckwad when given even the slightest bit of power isn't something that's easy to judge in interviews, so it's inevitable customs will end up with them, but certainly some airports even within the same country- a country generally renowned for it's hospitality can have issues recruiting anything other than jackasses.
Still, nothing beats landing in Narvik, Northern Norway. Off the plane, and out the airport, no passport check, no luggage check! I guess they assumed if I got through security at Heathrow though that there's not much for them to worry about. They really just had no care whatsoever for any security checks up there, but then I guess, the arctic circle isn't one of the most popular destinations for immigrants and terrorists either, so perhaps that played a factor too.
I'm British FWIW, not really sure how much nationality factors in to how you're treated though if I'm honest. It's easy to theorise that some of the issues I had at Ottawa were due to the high levels of French Canadian customs officers who may hold a cultural resentment of the British, but it's just theory so who knows- elsewhere in Quebec French Canadians were friendly and courteous enough.
Oh no, you're one of those cyber stalkers who stalks people and tries to troll them when you get owned in a prior conversation.
If only you knew how sad that made your life look to the rest of us :(
Sucks to be you I guess.
"No. I don't believe in them. Why would I? There's no evidence where evidence should be present."
Ah right, but it's okay that there's no evidence that people were rioting for a specific cause?
Look, you're trying to use logic to pedantically prove someone is wrong. I'm making the point to you that so pedantically abusing logic to try and make out you have a point is meaningless.
The fact is, there was no justification to the riots, it was mindless violence, and greed driven theft. If someone wants to pretend there was some kind of cause behind it that's fine, but it's also bollocks. There is no cause in wrecking your own community for a bit of fun and greed, which is what it really came down to.
As others have said it doesn't really matter if there were one or two deluded individuals amongst the thousands of rioters who genuinely felt they were changing something in their own minds. The fact is they weren't, they were wrong, and they were no better than those doing it for kicks and free shit. What they did simply cannot be justified by any false cause they may wish to proclaim.
"However if the prices are cheaper, what do you think people will do with the money they saved? Chances are they will just buy something else, so the total VAT works out much the same."
Well there's also the point that it means less money going out of the country to foreign firms too, so I agree, but the issue is most governments are afraid to tackle it in case it doesn't quite go as planned and people do start saving more, do start paying off debt, meaning less profits for financial institutions and so forth. Their view is that it works, so leave it alone.
You still pay tax on imports in the UK, so importing doesn't save you that, however it's certainly often better because even with the tax on it often works out cheaper still. Most consumers don't bother with this though.
Cheers for pointing to that! It wasn't visible on my main page feed, so missed it due to the equally retarded fact that they've removed the view more button from the bottom of the main page now so that if I don't catch a story, it seems I can't catch a story.
I like how it's been known for at least 4 hours now that HP, the biggest producer of PCs in the world is dropping it's PC and tablet division and moving to focus entirely on software.
Yet, rather than post that news, Slashdot has posted this.
Thank you editors, obviously your ability to ensure Slashdot is a relevant source of IT news goes well beyond anything anyone else could imagine.
It's okay though, at least we'll be prepared if aliens attack I guess.