Oracle's licenses are straight up and clear. You either buy per named user or per CPU. If you buy per CPU you can have as many users as you want connected to that machine. Need more Horsepower then you license another CPU.
If you just want to teach yourself Oracle, if you just want to set a system up for a client to do a proof of concept, hell if you want to just TAKE their software with no support, you can download everything they have for FREE all you have to do is sign up.
Oracle Standard Edition One is 180.00 per named user. Annual Support is 39.00
Oracle Standard Edition One is 5800.00 per CPU ( as many users as the machine can handle ) annual support is 1276.00.
There is nothing hidden it is perfectly straight forward. You pay for the product then you pay ( or not ) annual support
If you are at a place in a business when you need the power of Oracle then you know what the cost is really insignificant. If you don't need that kind of horsepower then there are plenty of other options, PostGres, MySQL, MS-SQL, DB2 etc. etc..
Oracle support is 2nd to none and yes it is not free ( what a surprise ) but when it comes down to it, the support is world wide, 24/7/365 and when you pick up the phone you get an actual engineer not some script reader.
You can piss and moan and say whatever you want about LE but when you need massive scalability, rock solid stability and support that is there, when you call for it, nothing beats Oracle.
Android is a significant improvement over the iOS in many areas -- the iOS bar was not all that high.
Gotta disagree with you there. I had used most every smart phone / PDA until the iPhone hot the market and was so relieved, one single interface standard, on set of controls to learn how to deal with and it is slick, its pro, it's coherent and the paradigm is enforced.
WebOS also trumps the iOS in most areas, its just unfortunate that Palm was in no position to really see it successful. Hopefully HP will do better.
Web OS in its current incarnation is not that great. It is pretty slow and the off screen controls don't make a lot of sense. I think it has potential, but it needs to have some serious standards built around the apps since like Android, there is nothing remotely close to standards and you can end up with apps that have UI insanity, not good for the greater market. This is fun for geeks but for the average user it just sucks.
iOS is "slick" in many little details, in a way that Android isn't, but that doesn't really add much to its usefulness. Meanwhile, iOS is still rooted in desktop metaphors for things like notifications... do you really need a pop up notification, which has to be answered, on a device that could have a few dozen interesting things happening while its in your pocket?
Again it is all those little details that make the difference. And yes pop-ups are good since if you don;t have them the notifications get buried in the mass of icons that can and do build up on the main screen. I can understand people who don't like them and it would be nice if there was a small notification area that informed one of pending notifications and popped up the list of them like OpenSuse does. Perhaps it should be an option ( shrug ). The problem with having a few dozen things happening in the background is it will eat your battery rather quickly, not something I am personaly fond of.
Of course, that wasn't even possible until iOS 4... they're still largely thinking single tasking. And Apple's iron hand is still there -- only Apple can create daemons, even if apps can now more or less get background messages.
In short, this last year had Apple playing catch up. iOS and the iPhone had fallen far behind Android and the available devices. They haven't fully caught up yet, though iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 certainly helped.
Apple is being very careful with the advancement of the iPhone and iOS. They are maintaining performance while figuring out ways to make it do more simultaneously. So many other phones have been a complete drag because when you turn on all those goodies either things get slow and clunky or the battery life just goes to hell. I applaud Apple ( and any other mobile OS manufacturer ) because they take the time and make it work and make it work well and seamlessly in a package that, and I hate to sound like a broken record here, once you have used it once, you know it on all other devices using that OS / Interface. As to Apple falling far behind Android and the others? I think you are looking at it with geek eyes instead of consumer eyes because if you were you would not make that statement. When Apple gets off the AT&T hook here soon I think you are going to see Android getting pulled back in and Apple beginning to eat it's lunch. This does not take into consideration Win Mobile 7 which even off to a slow start will get traction and will be a market driver of some sort.
But mark this -- this is the pattern we're going to see every year from now on: Apple catches up a little, Android + Devices push farther ahead than they did last year. Just as on the MacOS, at some point Apple won't even be trying to catch up in some areas.
Of course, Apple fans will accept that, since Steve says it ain't so.
You really do under estimate Apple. I can tell you are an open source guy so again I thi
He represents all that is wrong with Microsoft, perceived or true, he represents it. He represents MS from the bad old days when competition meant using cash to wreck other companies by stealing their talent because they might or in fact have come out with software that was better then the stuff you were thinking of doing or were actually doing.
He has been utterly, completely and publicly flat out wrong about so many things and in the context of Windows Mobile you have but only to see his public comments dismissing the iPhone.
Microsoft has development teams that other companies and many governments only dream of having. Imagine what Microsoft could do if those teams were not played against each other, not held back by his myopic vision, not restricted by utterly insane S & M strategies. Just imagine what they could do if they teamed up with some of the best development minds outside their campus. Imagine what the Windows OS could be like if it was combined with best of Linux or what Linux could be like combined with best of Windows.
The real problem is that in all this is simple. And that is people.
People need to eat, people need to have a place to live, people need to thrive, period.
Automation saves you from the drudgery of being:
Putting a door on a Chevy 322 times a day.
Using a pick and shovel to mine with
Watching the 80 odd gauges showing engine performance in an airliner
Walking or riding a house 20 miles to get anywhere.
Using Carbon paper to have more then one copy of a document
Stuffing components into circuit board.
Going to every server and checking how much disk space is left.
Hauling trays of bread in and out of an oven.
Pushing ore out of a mine one wheel barrel at a time.
So the problem comes down to too many workers and not enough jobs because it no longer takes 500 guys to work in an auto plant it takes about 100 once all the automation machinery is up and running. Engine plants are almost all robotic now almost nothing is done by hand.
We keep finding more and more ways to remove workers from manufacturing, except where the automation equipment is far more expensive then hiring 1000 pennies per hour workers.
The problem is that we don't find other things for them to do. How many miners are there in the USA these days, how many in vehicle assembly plants, how many of them in anything we manufacture. We do our best to keep them out because that way someone makes more profit.
Profit is not bad, but the demands for higher and higher profits irrespective of the true costs are. How many times have you read about CEO X gets fat bonus because he reduced the workforce. How many times have you watched what you though was a good investment in the market turn to shit because some pencil neck analyst screamed SELL as loudly as he could because some company missed his profit estimate by a penny a share and all the big industrial investors unloaded everything overnight and your investment is now worth half of what is was.
Short term gains that is all anyone ever thinks about and that is killing our economy.
The right wing says "Pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get a job". memo to the right wing... "Uhmm love to, can't really do it though because you are to busy either setting things up to make it easier for company X to ship all it's jobs to India or setting things up so that company X can import more and more people from other countries because "You can't find Qualified Workers in the USA".
People flock to the cities because that's where people find jobs but they cannot afford to live in those cities, well unless you live in a part of the city where carrying a side arm is pretty much mandatory.
People can't even opt out because every square inch of the USA has a no trespassing sign on it. It is either owned by a corporation, an individual the federal or state government. I would love to just go move into rural Wyoming or someplace like that and live off the land. Go ahead and try it sometime, you will be in court real soon.
We are, in point of fact, on a collision course with civil war. The haves build bigger and bigger places to lock the great unwashed masses out and eventually someone is going to metaphorically say "Let them eat cake" and the end result is going to make the French Revolution look like a school yard dust up.
I don't want that to happen but I don't see how we are going to avoid it either. There are about 300 million people in the USA and the unemployment rate is pushing 10 percent. Yup that is 30 million people that can't find jobs. The vast majority of these people are not sick/lame/lazy or crazy. They are people who have been down-sized, right-sized, had their jobs sent to foreign countries or the technology is changing SO fast it is a practical impossibility for them to keep up.
Everything is in this country, the space to grow food, the raw materials to build things, the labor, the talent it is just that it is being abandoned at a staggering rate in search of greater profit, not greater quality, just greater profit and that will be our undoing.
Well as I sit here and stare into my crystal ball here is what I see.
Andriod will be a player, but it won't be a Win-7 mobile killer or an iOS killer.
The source of its biggest problem will be its biggest advantage and that is it is wide open.
The user experience on the iPhone / iPad / i[whatever] that iOS delivers has set only set the bar, it has set the bar insanely high becuase like Apple or think that they are evil, the iOS UI is as close to perfect as you can get right now and the apps reflect that.
Win7 Mobile will be there but right now they are confusing the hell out of everyone who is finally getting comfortable with desktop Windows 7 because in their efforts to me more iPhone like their interface is confused and muddled.
So Android with it's amazing lack of a coherent set of suggestions much less standards is facing UI fracture hell because nothing looks the same app to app unless it is core phone functions.
You play with one iOS device you have played with them all and you know how to maximize what you have, not so with Andriod and not yet so with Win-7 Mobile.
The jury is still out on a lot of things, but the one verdict that has been rendered unquestionably is that the iPhone pardigm is the one to emulate and beat if you can, but I really doubt that anyone can do that.
No I understood you just fine, you just want the Telco's to be wrong and be the bad guy in all this because you have dropped calls and places where there is spotty service.
Those people aren't trying to fix the companies problem at all, they are trying to fix their own particular problems, because they could give a shit about the Telco's problems.
You need to read some of the other posts in this thread to get some cluage on how cells work and the problems that active transmitters can cause.
I fly airplanes for fun and guess what over populated areas I get fantastic cell coverage, the problem is I tie up many channels on many cell towers because my broadcast radius is now perfectly line of site to dozens of towers and that is why the carriers don't want me doing that.
The reason people are stepping up to the plate is..... wait for it...
Is that they are not regulated like the telco's are. What part of "it is extremely difficult for them to get a cell tower up and operating" didn't you understand? The telco's are catching hell form their customers and then the telco's try to fix the problem only to have some "tin foil hat" moron with a few bucks start filing law suits claiming that they might get brain cancer because of a 1 to 10 watt transmitter a quarter of a mile from their house and yet have no problem with the FM station banging out 100 KW only 10 miles from their home.
You would not believe the lengths the Telco's go to satisfy people. They have towers custom built ( at a huge cost mind you ) to look like fucking tree's because some bonehead doesn't want a "tower" because it is not organic to it's surroundings.
One of my wife's buildings has a cell site on it but they had to get special paint formulated that would match the existing paint and not affect antenna performance because the people across the street wanted the antenna's hidden as much as humanly possible. Guess what Sherlock, cell phones transmit at most around 300 miliwatts at frequencies in the gigahertz band, any idea how much a single layer of paint can attenuate that? Look it up.
Telco's are in business to make money and they lose money when they have spotty coverage and want to build new towers but are quite often blocked by stupid sheeple who don;t have a clue that they abosrb 1000 times more RF from the local television or radio broadcast towers or from their damn microwave ovens or their "Handy Talks" or whatever other kind of RF generating appliances they have.
Yes telco's can be greedy assholes, but trust me they are not stupid.
You and the other clueless people who mod'd you +5 just don't get it.
I live in the SF Bay Area and if there ever was a "TechnoLand" this is it, well in the US anyway.
You obviously don't have a clue about what it takes to put in one (1) cell tower. The average time from application to tower turn up in San Francisco is 3 to 5 Years! There are so many hearings and reviews you have to go through it is beyond ridiculous. My wife is a commercial property manager and she has said YES to every cell carrier who has ever asked to put a tower on one of her buildings because the carriers pay on average around 10K a month to have them there. She even brokered a deal to get Verizon, AT&T & Sprint to all erect ONE tower on a building that would have filled a lot of shadow zones and made everyones life a lot easier. The city was even on board, but then the loonies came out of the word work and start litigating because they think it is going to give them brain cancer or some such shite. The legal costs were going through the roof and they all just abandoned the plan
I live in a place that is in a shadow zone and you have practically stand on one foot in one of the two places in the house were we can get reception. I have a HUGE tree ( close to 80 feet tall ) that would support the antenna's with ease and they could park the dam box in a corner of my lot because it would pay my mortgage, and then some, but NO the fucking neighbors would go nuts because they might get cancer of the brain of some shit.
If not for crap like this the carriers would instantly be popping in towers where their was demand.
Here I am with MOD Points but they wont do me any good because a bunch of idiots mod'd you +5 insightful.
Old People? I mean, really, OLD people? Good grief I would love to meet you some time so this OLD person kick your ass right up into the space the should be holding your brain since I doubt you would miss it.
If this phone did not drop calls, lasted weeks on stand-by, gave me 24 hours of talk time and had decent ergonomics I would gladly beat my iPhone AND my wife's Android phone into silicon dust because neither of them is a good phone.
Old People.. The better part of you ran down the crack of your mothers ass.
Well you can call yourself a troll if you like, that is up to you and you alone, as I certainly won't label you as such.
I am neither threatened by the inclusion or lack of curly braces.
I have tried Python and I find the language a derivative of C, which it is and that is not an insult it is simply stating fact, nothing more nothing less.
If anything my observations and comments about Python were simply that I find that:
1. The lack of a visual block closure annoying since I am a visual creature and find it much easier to identify block closures in complex code when they are clearly visible by a definitive marker rather then by indentation wheich can be defined to be as many spaces as one likes.
2. That the level of hubris exhibited by the language designer by requiring someone who uses an otherwise quite utilitarian language to conform to his notion of good indentation style to quite over the top.
And your presumption that I do not indent my code or are somehow incapable of embracing a new idea is completely without merit since I do in fact indent the code that I write in a manner which I choose. If I am working in a shop that has a shop wide standard and then I follow that paradigm. But to be forced to accept someone elses notion of coding style simply because they believe that theirs is somehow superior to all others that have ever been devised is just really unacceptable.
Additionally I don't know of any other language or language subset that does not use a block closure character. Even XML which is pretty loose in terms of syntax closes a block with </[lable]>.
So please feel free to attempt to heap upon me whatever sorts of insults, false assumptions or other attacks upon my lineage you can come up with but it makes you look rather silly in the currrent thread of discussion in which I both agree and disagree with others who have replied and we seem to be able to do so in a civilized manner.
I understand and in C you could just macro out the '}' with a tab, then adjust your tabbing in your editor. Python could win a hell of a lot more converts if they were to make using a '}' for a block closure an option. For me at least, being the visual creature that I am, I quite like having that visible block closure -v- an invisible one.
All the dogma about dynamic languages giving the programmer the freedom to build like their imagination wants to goes right down the drain when the language designer imposes their layout style on the people who would use the language.
I wonder how many lines of cruft could be removed from the parser if it did not have to manage indentation?
Python is no more nor no less elegant then C since it is just a C clone. I like you have been doing this shit for too damn long but I gotta say I have never really had a problem returning to well written and well commented C code.
You cringe? Interesting... It is ONE char and only one.
When I am coding I there are times when I just drop a quick test into the left hand margin because it is visually a "sore thumb" that sticks out and is unmistakable as something that should not be there and if it IS there then it requires immediate attention.
While Python is a very nice C Clone they really fucked it up with this bit of stupidity.
Re:There's no such thing as shrinking job market
on
Which Language To Learn?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well said; however, the problem is the HR weenies who write job descriptions and then do all the "box checking" before you even see a resume more then likely.
Someone who has programed in several languages for a long time can figure out pretty much any of the C clones that keep popping up like so many mushrooms on the lawn after the rain starts
The best way I have found to just sus someone out is to take them to a conference room with a big white board and ask them to logically block diagram a system that has a database and a front end that imports raw data from outside sources, parses it into a standardized data model, manipulate the data and render it back in a form that is intelligible to Frank over in accounting. Making someone write actual code on a white board does have some value but the logic process that someone displays is far more important.
Just as soon as someone forks Python and replaces Nazi Indentation requirements and puts is a block closure char like oh say a "}" I will be all over it! Until then, please see my sig!
The iPad is really the best platform for doctors on rounds.
It is small, light weight, can display hi-res images therefor great for viewing radiology images and can have lots and lots of other things built right in.
While I really like the iPad Apples needs to change one thing. They need to get rid of that fragile connector. It is way to thin for the amount of average that can be applied by the cable. I promise a Doctor will break the damn thing in a heartbeat.
Apple needs to make the connections inductive since everything running through that connection oscillates it should be very simple. They only other thing they need to do is either make the recharge inductive as well or make the power connector the same as the laptops then make so that when sleepy tired doctor grabs the thing it will simply pop loose without them noticing.
I agree GOOD S&M people are a dream, they know how to sell, they know how to translate the concept of whatever you are building into words and phrases that get potential customers to pay attention, and they know how to close a sale and get the check.
The problem inevitably comes when sales are going great and then they start thinking "if it wasn't for me..." and then they start thinking they know better then the person who came up with the product / service. Now at times, and those are very few and far between they sometimes do but more likely then not it is simply ego and greed rearing its ugly head.
The guy I referenced was not a/.'r not a fan of Dilbert, he was/is a very reasonable guy who came up with a great product that filled a need and is still going strong today; however, I wish I could say the same for the S&M idiot since he was let go as he supremely demonstrated the worst qualities of S&M people.
A. Do not under any circumstances connect this thing to the internet. no if, ands or buts about it.
B. If outside access is required it is by call-back ONLY.
C. EVERYTHING is logged, 100% no exceptions. Every keystroke, every entry, every response, every everything, and the logging is hard connected and encrypted.
D. Nothing is interconnected to your main business network. Place secure terminals that boot from the SCADA network that have NO media devices in them, no USB, No DVD/CD drives, no serial ports etc. in places where they are needed and the are hardwired back to the SCADA network.
The stuff above is a starting point and it needs more from there.
I have worked in and managed shops where change was THE constant. Now having said that even those changes that had to be put in "Like Yesterday" were reviewed by the VP of development and then s/he would decide on going to war with the S&M Idiot or just simply going over his head.
Call it a sprint, call it whatever you want but the ONLY change that needs to go in "Like Yesterday" is the dreaded TSSB aka "The Show Stopping Bug".
Lightweight processes are fine, nothing wrong with them, the problem stems from those very processes being abused to the point of absurdity and ending up with a very "Agile" pile of crap.
The other problem is management and mostly it has to do with avarice. Good software is a process, it is design, it is thought out and well planed before a single line of code is even typed into whatever language you care to imagine.
A good CEO does not allow the S&M idiots drive development. A good CEO sits in on meetings whenever the development lead and the S&M lead are in the same room and moderates the whole thing, because in the end if the S&M idiot has her or his way being Agile wont save your job, but what will save your job is a well defined spec that has realistic time lines that set delivery for a given date and ANY change changes the delivery date and the Development lead has to stick to their guns and fight for the dev team because if they don;t the S&M idiot will drive you into 20 hour days which will lead to developers leaving the second a better job comes to pass and there won't be a product, just a lot of wasted dev time and money.
YADW - Pronounced , Yad-Wha or, "Yet Another Buzz Word"
This is perceived by a great many people to simply give the marketing idiots an excuse to simply just keep changing everything continuously while spewing forth to the customer "We Are Agile we can get those changes in no problem, have em for ya next week."
It has lead to unsound programming practices, unsound design methods and has given the term "Code Bloat" a whole new meaning.
The marketing idiot walks in and wants feature X added like yesterday since he will be doing a demo day after tomorrow and it simply has to be there because he saw it on a competitors product. Programming Manager fearing for his job desperately Googles like a madman looking for feature X and finds it in a 100,000 line framework and tells the troops to "Put it in" since even if they dropped EVERYTHING and ALL the programmers immediately started trying to implements feature X it would take a month to do it right. In doing so, they implement feature X and introduce 30 more critical bugs which now have to be tracked down in code that no one in the shop is familiar with and have bloated their code base by 50% because they are "Agile".
The ability to rapidly change the code is not something to take lightly or use in a reckless manner but sales & marketing idiots never have and never will understand this and that includes former coders that are now sales & marketing idiots because once the sales & marketing mind set removes from your brain any semblance of intelligence it is just over.
I was once in a meeting in Silicon Valley of a startup with the Sales & marketing idiot, the CEO and the VP of Development. The S & M idiot starting spouting about how they needed to add that feature and this feature and do this and do that and the other. The CEO listened patiently then when he had a belly full of this idiot he stopped the meeting and said these simple words" "You are here to sell the product we build, so sell it or I will find someone who can.".
In the world of O/S frameworks Android is pretty much still a toddler and it is trying to run like a 16 year old with a bright future in track so please don't act surprised, bugs happen. Although i gotta say a "use after Free" is pretty bush league.
(1) a derogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment. (2) An insult implying that someone is incompetent, stupid, etc. Can also be used to imply that the person is uncool or can't/won't do what everyone else is doing. (3) A sex slave or submissive, usually male, as popularlized by the movie Pulp Fiction.
Look at that gimp in the wheelchair
Dude, quit being a gimp and take a hit!
Bring out the gimp!
Need I say more?
Needing more then 65535 rows. In a word, "Excel".
Yes indeed a database would be far more suitable for a large collection of data. Have you ever worked for or with real finance geeks? They don't know what the word database means. To them Excel IS a database that you can do all sorts of equations with and sums and lookups to other spreadsheets with, and you can pivot data and all sorts of things and Excel 2007 can handle up to a million rows.
So while I much prefer to your OO Calc there are times when I have to grab my wifes laptop, and export a spreadsheet that some finance geek has e-mailed to me to put into a database.
OO DB...
You cannot directly import data, lack of native driver support ( to talk to MySQL you either have to use JDBC or ODBC neither of which are particularly stable on Linux and a few other things that just make it not so much fun to deal with.
Personally I think the entire OO -v- Libre is pretty much over reaction. Sorta reminds me a little of the entire MySQL fiasco.
Mostly because these zealots have not a damned clue about marketing, hence GIMP.
There are MANY MANY words they could have used to denote "Free with few or no restrictions.
Given the knee jerk reaction of the more radical of the FOSS community this does not really surprise me.
I really want to love Open Office but parts of it are really bad like why is there a 65535 ( a 16 bit number ) row limit in spreadsheets? Why does the database program really suck? Why do word forms not translate correctly? Lots of other things too but they are too numerous to go into here.
I use OO as much as I possibly can but when I can't I can't and that saddens me.
Ok so I am not saying MS didn't do something non-standard hell they did everything their own way, but they did what their customers wanted at the time, you know those folks, the ones that write checks that pay your salary and other things.
Like it or not, MS provides a highly compatible ( with itself ) solution from end to end. What they built into to IE6 was the ability to seamlessly integrate with Windows Services. ActiveX like it or not, and security issues asside, was perfect within the Windows ecosystem. It allowed the designer to take advantage of almost all of the Windows API and that allowed IE6 based applications to run very smoothly and that is what people ultimately want.
Like it or not no other browser could provide those capabilities. Things like real data aware grid components and fields that actually did data validation when you tried to move from one field to the next. Lets face it, HTML / CSS does not do that , even in HTML 5 in which no error checking is done until the onSubmit() event, and trying to do it in JavaScript is kludgey as hell because of the way scan codes are handle from the various OS's.
If a lot of the things MS did with IE6 had been published as open source I bet a lot of us would be using it today.
I don't like MS for many many reasons, but to say that IE6 was a mistake, in as much as functionality, is simply to ignore what the market wanted and that was a tool that they could easily develop web applications for business with and their overriding desire was NOT watching movies or playing video games.
In my personal opinion it is high time to develop a Application Browser that supports all the native UI components of Linux (KDE/Gnome), Windows and OSX and that is what I am doing to make things work for business. I have no problem with people wanting to watch movies and play video games and argue about JavaScript implementations and the like but business needs a tool that can run on all platforms, be simple and easy to develop with without having to worry about the utter insanity of the mashup of HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT/DOM that we currently find ourselves in.
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I don't know of any "new" business that chooses Oracle.
Really! Ever heard of SalesForce?
Ohh bullshit!
Oracle's licenses are straight up and clear. You either buy per named user or per CPU. If you buy per CPU you can have as many users as you want connected to that machine. Need more Horsepower then you license another CPU.
If you just want to teach yourself Oracle, if you just want to set a system up for a client to do a proof of concept, hell if you want to just TAKE their software with no support, you can download everything they have for FREE all you have to do is sign up.
Oracle Standard Edition One is 180.00 per named user. Annual Support is 39.00
Oracle Standard Edition One is 5800.00 per CPU ( as many users as the machine can handle ) annual support is 1276.00.
There is nothing hidden it is perfectly straight forward. You pay for the product then you pay ( or not ) annual support
If you are at a place in a business when you need the power of Oracle then you know what the cost is really insignificant. If you don't need that kind of horsepower then there are plenty of other options, PostGres, MySQL, MS-SQL, DB2 etc. etc..
Oracle support is 2nd to none and yes it is not free ( what a surprise ) but when it comes down to it, the support is world wide, 24/7/365 and when you pick up the phone you get an actual engineer not some script reader.
You can piss and moan and say whatever you want about LE but when you need massive scalability, rock solid stability and support that is there, when you call for it, nothing beats Oracle.
Android is a significant improvement over the iOS in many areas -- the iOS bar was not all that high.
Gotta disagree with you there. I had used most every smart phone / PDA until the iPhone hot the market and was so relieved, one single interface standard, on set of controls to learn how to deal with and it is slick, its pro, it's coherent and the paradigm is enforced.
WebOS also trumps the iOS in most areas, its just unfortunate that Palm was in no position to really see it successful. Hopefully HP will do better.
Web OS in its current incarnation is not that great. It is pretty slow and the off screen controls don't make a lot of sense. I think it has potential, but it needs to have some serious standards built around the apps since like Android, there is nothing remotely close to standards and you can end up with apps that have UI insanity, not good for the greater market. This is fun for geeks but for the average user it just sucks.
iOS is "slick" in many little details, in a way that Android isn't, but that doesn't really add much to its usefulness. Meanwhile, iOS is still rooted in desktop metaphors for things like notifications... do you really need a pop up notification, which has to be answered, on a device that could have a few dozen interesting things happening while its in your pocket?
Again it is all those little details that make the difference. And yes pop-ups are good since if you don;t have them the notifications get buried in the mass of icons that can and do build up on the main screen. I can understand people who don't like them and it would be nice if there was a small notification area that informed one of pending notifications and popped up the list of them like OpenSuse does. Perhaps it should be an option ( shrug ). The problem with having a few dozen things happening in the background is it will eat your battery rather quickly, not something I am personaly fond of.
Of course, that wasn't even possible until iOS 4... they're still largely thinking single tasking. And Apple's iron hand is still there -- only Apple can create daemons, even if apps can now more or less get background messages.
In short, this last year had Apple playing catch up. iOS and the iPhone had fallen far behind Android and the available devices. They haven't fully caught up yet, though iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 certainly helped.
Apple is being very careful with the advancement of the iPhone and iOS. They are maintaining performance while figuring out ways to make it do more simultaneously. So many other phones have been a complete drag because when you turn on all those goodies either things get slow and clunky or the battery life just goes to hell. I applaud Apple ( and any other mobile OS manufacturer ) because they take the time and make it work and make it work well and seamlessly in a package that, and I hate to sound like a broken record here, once you have used it once, you know it on all other devices using that OS / Interface. As to Apple falling far behind Android and the others? I think you are looking at it with geek eyes instead of consumer eyes because if you were you would not make that statement. When Apple gets off the AT&T hook here soon I think you are going to see Android getting pulled back in and Apple beginning to eat it's lunch. This does not take into consideration Win Mobile 7 which even off to a slow start will get traction and will be a market driver of some sort.
But mark this -- this is the pattern we're going to see every year from now on: Apple catches up a little, Android + Devices push farther ahead than they did last year. Just as on the MacOS, at some point Apple won't even be trying to catch up in some areas.
Of course, Apple fans will accept that, since Steve says it ain't so.
You really do under estimate Apple. I can tell you are an open source guy so again I thi
Memo to Microsoft Board of Directors
He has to go, period.
He represents all that is wrong with Microsoft, perceived or true, he represents it. He represents MS from the bad old days when competition meant using cash to wreck other companies by stealing their talent because they might or in fact have come out with software that was better then the stuff you were thinking of doing or were actually doing.
He has been utterly, completely and publicly flat out wrong about so many things and in the context of Windows Mobile you have but only to see his public comments dismissing the iPhone.
Microsoft has development teams that other companies and many governments only dream of having. Imagine what Microsoft could do if those teams were not played against each other, not held back by his myopic vision, not restricted by utterly insane S & M strategies. Just imagine what they could do if they teamed up with some of the best development minds outside their campus. Imagine what the Windows OS could be like if it was combined with best of Linux or what Linux could be like combined with best of Windows.
The real problem is that in all this is simple. And that is people.
People need to eat, people need to have a place to live, people need to thrive, period.
Automation saves you from the drudgery of being:
So the problem comes down to too many workers and not enough jobs because it no longer takes 500 guys to work in an auto plant it takes about 100 once all the automation machinery is up and running. Engine plants are almost all robotic now almost nothing is done by hand.
We keep finding more and more ways to remove workers from manufacturing, except where the automation equipment is far more expensive then hiring 1000 pennies per hour workers.
The problem is that we don't find other things for them to do. How many miners are there in the USA these days, how many in vehicle assembly plants, how many of them in anything we manufacture. We do our best to keep them out because that way someone makes more profit.
Profit is not bad, but the demands for higher and higher profits irrespective of the true costs are. How many times have you read about CEO X gets fat bonus because he reduced the workforce. How many times have you watched what you though was a good investment in the market turn to shit because some pencil neck analyst screamed SELL as loudly as he could because some company missed his profit estimate by a penny a share and all the big industrial investors unloaded everything overnight and your investment is now worth half of what is was.
Short term gains that is all anyone ever thinks about and that is killing our economy.
The right wing says "Pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get a job". memo to the right wing... "Uhmm love to, can't really do it though because you are to busy either setting things up to make it easier for company X to ship all it's jobs to India or setting things up so that company X can import more and more people from other countries because "You can't find Qualified Workers in the USA".
People flock to the cities because that's where people find jobs but they cannot afford to live in those cities, well unless you live in a part of the city where carrying a side arm is pretty much mandatory.
People can't even opt out because every square inch of the USA has a no trespassing sign on it. It is either owned by a corporation, an individual the federal or state government. I would love to just go move into rural Wyoming or someplace like that and live off the land. Go ahead and try it sometime, you will be in court real soon.
We are, in point of fact, on a collision course with civil war. The haves build bigger and bigger places to lock the great unwashed masses out and eventually someone is going to metaphorically say "Let them eat cake" and the end result is going to make the French Revolution look like a school yard dust up.
I don't want that to happen but I don't see how we are going to avoid it either. There are about 300 million people in the USA and the unemployment rate is pushing 10 percent. Yup that is 30 million people that can't find jobs. The vast majority of these people are not sick/lame/lazy or crazy. They are people who have been down-sized, right-sized, had their jobs sent to foreign countries or the technology is changing SO fast it is a practical impossibility for them to keep up.
Everything is in this country, the space to grow food, the raw materials to build things, the labor, the talent it is just that it is being abandoned at a staggering rate in search of greater profit, not greater quality, just greater profit and that will be our undoing.
Well as I sit here and stare into my crystal ball here is what I see.
Andriod will be a player, but it won't be a Win-7 mobile killer or an iOS killer.
The source of its biggest problem will be its biggest advantage and that is it is wide open.
The user experience on the iPhone / iPad / i[whatever] that iOS delivers has set only set the bar, it has set the bar insanely high becuase like Apple or think that they are evil, the iOS UI is as close to perfect as you can get right now and the apps reflect that.
Win7 Mobile will be there but right now they are confusing the hell out of everyone who is finally getting comfortable with desktop Windows 7 because in their efforts to me more iPhone like their interface is confused and muddled.
So Android with it's amazing lack of a coherent set of suggestions much less standards is facing UI fracture hell because nothing looks the same app to app unless it is core phone functions.
You play with one iOS device you have played with them all and you know how to maximize what you have, not so with Andriod and not yet so with Win-7 Mobile.
The jury is still out on a lot of things, but the one verdict that has been rendered unquestionably is that the iPhone pardigm is the one to emulate and beat if you can, but I really doubt that anyone can do that.
No I understood you just fine, you just want the Telco's to be wrong and be the bad guy in all this because you have dropped calls and places where there is spotty service.
Those people aren't trying to fix the companies problem at all, they are trying to fix their own particular problems, because they could give a shit about the Telco's problems.
Later
You need to read some of the other posts in this thread to get some cluage on how cells work and the problems that active transmitters can cause.
I fly airplanes for fun and guess what over populated areas I get fantastic cell coverage, the problem is I tie up many channels on many cell towers because my broadcast radius is now perfectly line of site to dozens of towers and that is why the carriers don't want me doing that.
The reason people are stepping up to the plate is..... wait for it...
Is that they are not regulated like the telco's are. What part of "it is extremely difficult for them to get a cell tower up and operating" didn't you understand? The telco's are catching hell form their customers and then the telco's try to fix the problem only to have some "tin foil hat" moron with a few bucks start filing law suits claiming that they might get brain cancer because of a 1 to 10 watt transmitter a quarter of a mile from their house and yet have no problem with the FM station banging out 100 KW only 10 miles from their home.
You would not believe the lengths the Telco's go to satisfy people. They have towers custom built ( at a huge cost mind you ) to look like fucking tree's because some bonehead doesn't want a "tower" because it is not organic to it's surroundings.
One of my wife's buildings has a cell site on it but they had to get special paint formulated that would match the existing paint and not affect antenna performance because the people across the street wanted the antenna's hidden as much as humanly possible. Guess what Sherlock, cell phones transmit at most around 300 miliwatts at frequencies in the gigahertz band, any idea how much a single layer of paint can attenuate that? Look it up.
Telco's are in business to make money and they lose money when they have spotty coverage and want to build new towers but are quite often blocked by stupid sheeple who don;t have a clue that they abosrb 1000 times more RF from the local television or radio broadcast towers or from their damn microwave ovens or their "Handy Talks" or whatever other kind of RF generating appliances they have.
Yes telco's can be greedy assholes, but trust me they are not stupid.
You and the other clueless people who mod'd you +5 just don't get it.
I live in the SF Bay Area and if there ever was a "TechnoLand" this is it, well in the US anyway.
You obviously don't have a clue about what it takes to put in one (1) cell tower. The average time from application to tower turn up in San Francisco is 3 to 5 Years! There are so many hearings and reviews you have to go through it is beyond ridiculous. My wife is a commercial property manager and she has said YES to every cell carrier who has ever asked to put a tower on one of her buildings because the carriers pay on average around 10K a month to have them there. She even brokered a deal to get Verizon, AT&T & Sprint to all erect ONE tower on a building that would have filled a lot of shadow zones and made everyones life a lot easier. The city was even on board, but then the loonies came out of the word work and start litigating because they think it is going to give them brain cancer or some such shite. The legal costs were going through the roof and they all just abandoned the plan
I live in a place that is in a shadow zone and you have practically stand on one foot in one of the two places in the house were we can get reception. I have a HUGE tree ( close to 80 feet tall ) that would support the antenna's with ease and they could park the dam box in a corner of my lot because it would pay my mortgage, and then some, but NO the fucking neighbors would go nuts because they might get cancer of the brain of some shit.
If not for crap like this the carriers would instantly be popping in towers where their was demand.
Here I am with MOD Points but they wont do me any good because a bunch of idiots mod'd you +5 insightful.
Old People? I mean, really, OLD people? Good grief I would love to meet you some time so this OLD person kick your ass right up into the space the should be holding your brain since I doubt you would miss it.
If this phone did not drop calls, lasted weeks on stand-by, gave me 24 hours of talk time and had decent ergonomics I would gladly beat my iPhone AND my wife's Android phone into silicon dust because neither of them is a good phone.
Old People.. The better part of you ran down the crack of your mothers ass.
Well you can call yourself a troll if you like, that is up to you and you alone, as I certainly won't label you as such.
I am neither threatened by the inclusion or lack of curly braces.
I have tried Python and I find the language a derivative of C, which it is and that is not an insult it is simply stating fact, nothing more nothing less.
If anything my observations and comments about Python were simply that I find that:
And your presumption that I do not indent my code or are somehow incapable of embracing a new idea is completely without merit since I do in fact indent the code that I write in a manner which I choose. If I am working in a shop that has a shop wide standard and then I follow that paradigm. But to be forced to accept someone elses notion of coding style simply because they believe that theirs is somehow superior to all others that have ever been devised is just really unacceptable.
Additionally I don't know of any other language or language subset that does not use a block closure character. Even XML which is pretty loose in terms of syntax closes a block with </[lable]>.
So please feel free to attempt to heap upon me whatever sorts of insults, false assumptions or other attacks upon my lineage you can come up with but it makes you look rather silly in the currrent thread of discussion in which I both agree and disagree with others who have replied and we seem to be able to do so in a civilized manner.
Kindest Regards
I understand and in C you could just macro out the '}' with a tab, then adjust your tabbing in your editor. Python could win a hell of a lot more converts if they were to make using a '}' for a block closure an option. For me at least, being the visual creature that I am, I quite like having that visible block closure -v- an invisible one.
...despite not strictly needing to!
Hit the nail right on the head my friend.
All the dogma about dynamic languages giving the programmer the freedom to build like their imagination wants to goes right down the drain when the language designer imposes their layout style on the people who would use the language.
I wonder how many lines of cruft could be removed from the parser if it did not have to manage indentation?
Python is no more nor no less elegant then C since it is just a C clone. I like you have been doing this shit for too damn long but I gotta say I have never really had a problem returning to well written and well commented C code.
You cringe? Interesting... It is ONE char and only one.
When I am coding I there are times when I just drop a quick test into the left hand margin because it is visually a "sore thumb" that sticks out and is unmistakable as something that should not be there and if it IS there then it requires immediate attention.
While Python is a very nice C Clone they really fucked it up with this bit of stupidity.
Well said; however, the problem is the HR weenies who write job descriptions and then do all the "box checking" before you even see a resume more then likely.
Someone who has programed in several languages for a long time can figure out pretty much any of the C clones that keep popping up like so many mushrooms on the lawn after the rain starts
The best way I have found to just sus someone out is to take them to a conference room with a big white board and ask them to logically block diagram a system that has a database and a front end that imports raw data from outside sources, parses it into a standardized data model, manipulate the data and render it back in a form that is intelligible to Frank over in accounting. Making someone write actual code on a white board does have some value but the logic process that someone displays is far more important.
Just as soon as someone forks Python and replaces Nazi Indentation requirements and puts is a block closure char like oh say a "}" I will be all over it! Until then, please see my sig!
The iPad is really the best platform for doctors on rounds.
It is small, light weight, can display hi-res images therefor great for viewing radiology images and can have lots and lots of other things built right in.
While I really like the iPad Apples needs to change one thing. They need to get rid of that fragile connector. It is way to thin for the amount of average that can be applied by the cable. I promise a Doctor will break the damn thing in a heartbeat.
Apple needs to make the connections inductive since everything running through that connection oscillates it should be very simple. They only other thing they need to do is either make the recharge inductive as well or make the power connector the same as the laptops then make so that when sleepy tired doctor grabs the thing it will simply pop loose without them noticing.
I agree GOOD S&M people are a dream, they know how to sell, they know how to translate the concept of whatever you are building into words and phrases that get potential customers to pay attention, and they know how to close a sale and get the check.
The problem inevitably comes when sales are going great and then they start thinking "if it wasn't for me..." and then they start thinking they know better then the person who came up with the product / service. Now at times, and those are very few and far between they sometimes do but more likely then not it is simply ego and greed rearing its ugly head.
The guy I referenced was not a /.'r not a fan of Dilbert, he was/is a very reasonable guy who came up with a great product that filled a need and is still going strong today; however, I wish I could say the same for the S&M idiot since he was let go as he supremely demonstrated the worst qualities of S&M people.
Simply put..
A. Do not under any circumstances connect this thing to the internet. no if, ands or buts about it.
B. If outside access is required it is by call-back ONLY.
C. EVERYTHING is logged, 100% no exceptions. Every keystroke, every entry, every response, every everything, and the logging is hard connected and encrypted.
D. Nothing is interconnected to your main business network. Place secure terminals that boot from the SCADA network that have NO media devices in them, no USB, No DVD/CD drives, no serial ports etc. in places where they are needed and the are hardwired back to the SCADA network.
The stuff above is a starting point and it needs more from there.
Where to start....
I have worked in and managed shops where change was THE constant. Now having said that even those changes that had to be put in "Like Yesterday" were reviewed by the VP of development and then s/he would decide on going to war with the S&M Idiot or just simply going over his head.
Call it a sprint, call it whatever you want but the ONLY change that needs to go in "Like Yesterday" is the dreaded TSSB aka "The Show Stopping Bug".
Lightweight processes are fine, nothing wrong with them, the problem stems from those very processes being abused to the point of absurdity and ending up with a very "Agile" pile of crap.
The other problem is management and mostly it has to do with avarice. Good software is a process, it is design, it is thought out and well planed before a single line of code is even typed into whatever language you care to imagine.
A good CEO does not allow the S&M idiots drive development. A good CEO sits in on meetings whenever the development lead and the S&M lead are in the same room and moderates the whole thing, because in the end if the S&M idiot has her or his way being Agile wont save your job, but what will save your job is a well defined spec that has realistic time lines that set delivery for a given date and ANY change changes the delivery date and the Development lead has to stick to their guns and fight for the dev team because if they don;t the S&M idiot will drive you into 20 hour days which will lead to developers leaving the second a better job comes to pass and there won't be a product, just a lot of wasted dev time and money.
YADW - Pronounced , Yad-Wha or, "Yet Another Buzz Word"
This is perceived by a great many people to simply give the marketing idiots an excuse to simply just keep changing everything continuously while spewing forth to the customer "We Are Agile we can get those changes in no problem, have em for ya next week."
It has lead to unsound programming practices, unsound design methods and has given the term "Code Bloat" a whole new meaning.
The marketing idiot walks in and wants feature X added like yesterday since he will be doing a demo day after tomorrow and it simply has to be there because he saw it on a competitors product. Programming Manager fearing for his job desperately Googles like a madman looking for feature X and finds it in a 100,000 line framework and tells the troops to "Put it in" since even if they dropped EVERYTHING and ALL the programmers immediately started trying to implements feature X it would take a month to do it right. In doing so, they implement feature X and introduce 30 more critical bugs which now have to be tracked down in code that no one in the shop is familiar with and have bloated their code base by 50% because they are "Agile".
The ability to rapidly change the code is not something to take lightly or use in a reckless manner but sales & marketing idiots never have and never will understand this and that includes former coders that are now sales & marketing idiots because once the sales & marketing mind set removes from your brain any semblance of intelligence it is just over.
I was once in a meeting in Silicon Valley of a startup with the Sales & marketing idiot, the CEO and the VP of Development. The S & M idiot starting spouting about how they needed to add that feature and this feature and do this and do that and the other. The CEO listened patiently then when he had a belly full of this idiot he stopped the meeting and said these simple words" "You are here to sell the product we build, so sell it or I will find someone who can.".
In the world of O/S frameworks Android is pretty much still a toddler and it is trying to run like a 16 year old with a bright future in track so please don't act surprised, bugs happen. Although i gotta say a "use after Free" is pretty bush league.
So you are kidding? Ok here we go:
From the Urban Dictionary
(1) a derogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medicial problem that results in physical impairment. (2) An insult implying that someone is incompetent, stupid, etc. Can also be used to imply that the person is uncool or can't/won't do what everyone else is doing. (3) A sex slave or submissive, usually male, as popularlized by the movie Pulp Fiction. Look at that gimp in the wheelchair
Dude, quit being a gimp and take a hit!
Bring out the gimp!
Need I say more?
Needing more then 65535 rows. In a word, "Excel".
Yes indeed a database would be far more suitable for a large collection of data. Have you ever worked for or with real finance geeks? They don't know what the word database means. To them Excel IS a database that you can do all sorts of equations with and sums and lookups to other spreadsheets with, and you can pivot data and all sorts of things and Excel 2007 can handle up to a million rows.
So while I much prefer to your OO Calc there are times when I have to grab my wifes laptop, and export a spreadsheet that some finance geek has e-mailed to me to put into a database.
OO DB...
You cannot directly import data, lack of native driver support ( to talk to MySQL you either have to use JDBC or ODBC neither of which are particularly stable on Linux and a few other things that just make it not so much fun to deal with.
Personally I think the entire OO -v- Libre is pretty much over reaction. Sorta reminds me a little of the entire MySQL fiasco.
Mostly because these zealots have not a damned clue about marketing, hence GIMP.
There are MANY MANY words they could have used to denote "Free with few or no restrictions.
Given the knee jerk reaction of the more radical of the FOSS community this does not really surprise me.
I really want to love Open Office but parts of it are really bad like why is there a 65535 ( a 16 bit number ) row limit in spreadsheets? Why does the database program really suck? Why do word forms not translate correctly? Lots of other things too but they are too numerous to go into here.
I use OO as much as I possibly can but when I can't I can't and that saddens me.
You all really just don't get it...
Ok so I am not saying MS didn't do something non-standard hell they did everything their own way, but they did what their customers wanted at the time, you know those folks, the ones that write checks that pay your salary and other things.
Like it or not, MS provides a highly compatible ( with itself ) solution from end to end. What they built into to IE6 was the ability to seamlessly integrate with Windows Services. ActiveX like it or not, and security issues asside, was perfect within the Windows ecosystem. It allowed the designer to take advantage of almost all of the Windows API and that allowed IE6 based applications to run very smoothly and that is what people ultimately want.
Like it or not no other browser could provide those capabilities. Things like real data aware grid components and fields that actually did data validation when you tried to move from one field to the next. Lets face it, HTML / CSS does not do that , even in HTML 5 in which no error checking is done until the onSubmit() event, and trying to do it in JavaScript is kludgey as hell because of the way scan codes are handle from the various OS's.
If a lot of the things MS did with IE6 had been published as open source I bet a lot of us would be using it today.
I don't like MS for many many reasons, but to say that IE6 was a mistake, in as much as functionality, is simply to ignore what the market wanted and that was a tool that they could easily develop web applications for business with and their overriding desire was NOT watching movies or playing video games.
In my personal opinion it is high time to develop a Application Browser that supports all the native UI components of Linux (KDE/Gnome), Windows and OSX and that is what I am doing to make things work for business. I have no problem with people wanting to watch movies and play video games and argue about JavaScript implementations and the like but business needs a tool that can run on all platforms, be simple and easy to develop with without having to worry about the utter insanity of the mashup of HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT/DOM that we currently find ourselves in.