Re: Nokia?
Yes, but not for very much longer.
557 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010
It was kind of amusing at first, watch Microsoft stumbling about trying to find a replacement name, all the while trying (and pathetically failing) to make it look like it was all part of the plan. But now it's getting kind of depressing, seeing how a grown-up company who should know better cannot come up with a good moniker for its most important technology in years.
Please Microsoft, just admit that you screwed up, give away some cash for the rights to use "Metro" and move on. This has got embarrassing enough already.
I don't really care about people, living or otherwise; I often go to Wikipedia for programming references (the articles on the multilayer perceptron and the Shunting-yard algorithm are very good) and the odd science article. I took a look into H2G2 and it doesn't have near the same depth in either; so you can keep your "Wikipedia done right", I'll have Jimbo's Wonderland over it any day.
It is better to choose people on the basis of their technical ability than their ability to deal with aggressive people because their technical ability is ultimately what you want from them.
Agreed. However, having to put up with unpleasant work conditions, unreasonable people, overblown position requirements etc. is a recurrent problem for most IT workers. Why it's such a disaster only when women are involved? It's not that we don't all get our own share of crap – and we don't give up and blame it for failure.
If you find that the environment makes something unrelated to technical ability a factor - e.g. ability to put up with prejudice, then better to change the environment so that it is no longer a factor.
I'd love to, but I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future – not for IT, and not for any field of human activity. Technically talented people still have to cope with stressful and unreasonable situations if they want to build a career, be it in IT or elsewhere.
Do you really think it is efficient to filter out technically gifted applicants because they don't want to put up with sexual inequality or prejudice?
No, I don't. Actually I'm asking for the opposite: instead of whining at the sidelines, how about enduring through and promote change from within? Landing my first IT job wasn't easy either, regardless of prejudice. I'd love it if we could work only with agreeable people, but I still want to work in IT even if that's not the case.
I'll get flamed up the *** for this, but what the hell.
Back in the previous century, when women decided they wanted a more active role in society, they fought nail and tooth for the rights to vote and work outside of home, rebelled against unfair laws that placed men (particularly in the role of husband) above them, and forced their way upwards in society.
But for some reason, when it comes to women in IT, they are always portrayed as defenseless victims of us Evil Men © and our prejudicial ways. "Oh, if only IT pros weren't so sexist", the people who purport to talk in their name whine. Never mind that men aren't exactly free from abuse from managers, clients and the like...
And now I hear that job ads are the problem? WTF?
Dear women, if you really do want a career in IT, and if people like me really do make the industry so women-unfriendly, feel free to push your way through. Who knows, I might not even be so hard to change, if you just give it some heart. But don't expect me to extend the red carpet and ask pretty please with sugar on top for you to come – IT is a ruthless industry, no matter who you are; the weak and fickle need not apply.
As her one and only e-mail account. No, really.
Actually there's a lot of people who got a Hotmail account so they could sign in to MSN Messenger * and kinda stuck to it, even long after instant messaging lost its cool. So I guess tying services together really does work?
* I know, you don't really need a Hotmail account to get to Messenger, but MS does everything it can to make it look like you do.
Actually there's something that has got me thinking. How much of this ruse's success was due to the fake article putting up a convincing impersonation of Keller's writing style and opinions, and how much could be attributed to people's unwitting trust of online services?
Did people fall for it because the article really sounded like Keller's, or just because it was linked from a credible Twitter account? Had the naming of the fake Twitter account not been as clever, would people still have fallen for it? Had fake Keller written in l33tsp34k, praised the deep philosophical insights imparted by My Little Pony cartoons, or announced his conversion to Islam, would people still believe he wrote that? How far can you mangle an author's style before readers notice something's amiss?
The guy retweeted an article attributed to himself that he didn't write?
And he didn't notice anything wrong with it until a while later?
Some little detail such, as, oh I don't know... "Hey I don't remember ever writing that!"?
Are all NYT journalists as clever as Mr. Keller? Because that would explain a lot.
The Turbo Hyper Fighting SNES version was the definitive SFII for me. I spent countless afternoons on that game, sharpening my skills until I could finish the one-player "story" mode on the maximum difficulty and speed levels without losing a single round (a special screen would appear then, congratulating the player for having "mastered" the character he played with).
Contrary to most SFII players I knew, who tended to gravitate towards Ken or Ryu, I specialized in controlling Guile. I would jump over their fire balls from just the right distance, teasing them into delivering a Dragon Punch - and when they missed, I would greet them back with a hard punch, followed by a lowered hard kick (Guile was unusual in that his "lowered hard kick" consisted of two consecutive attacks, so many a player would block the first kick, then get up in an attempt to counter-attack and unwittingly get hit by the second swing), a Sonic Boom (which most experienced players blocked, but served to keep them on check) and another lower hard kick. At this point the bloke usually tried to jump over Guile's head, only to be sent back by a Flash Kick.
After the SNES phased out I pretty much stopped playing games, so in my mind SFII remains the apex of the fighting genre. I still replay it on emulators from time to time, and I always get amazed at how easily my reflexes return, even after so many years. The mind may have moved on, but the hands never forget.
Has it been made ABSOLUTELY CLEAR to them that by 'fixing bugs', it is meant that the bugs should be corrected so that they do not occur, as opposed to improving the bugs so that they do more?
You mean them hacks could actually correct bugs if only management told them in clear terms that's what's wanted?
Either way it's hopeless.
Early Java programmers were kind of over-excited with this inheritance thing, and tended to overuse it, as evidenced in many books and frameworks from the time. Today the Java community favors composition and interfaces (which enable much more flexible architectures) over class inheritance – but I guess that for those who haven't kept up, the damage is already done.
I agree that Enterprise Java is hopelessly cluttered with buzzwords and decrepit FUBAR frameworks (hello TIBCO), but I have always found the Java language and its base API very straightforward. In terms of ease of use it runs rings around C++; performance might not be as good, but as in the case of scripting languages, it's often good enough that having something that works now trumps having something perfect later.
Black is functional. It maximizes contrast to key glyphs, indicator lights and the like.
Colored kit look like toys. I loved netbooks when they were black and square; now that they're all smooth textures, curved lines and sissy colors I can't stand looking at the things.
But if you're really pissed with the prevalence of black kit, don't worry: for better or (in my opinion) worse the market always oscillates between all-black and all-white kit, so sooner or later it should swing around.
Political infighting... Substituting executives for engineers... Languishing in stagnancy while the world at large soldiers on. No wonder they've been driven off their own market by the likes of Apple and Google.
I have been critical of the "dump pipe" vision for data networks on technical grounds (I'd rather have Quality of Service than over-provisioning), but the more I have of the carriers' utter incompetence, the more I feel it serves them right.
I have been skimming through this discussion, and it's not like I agree to h4rm0ny's every point – but damn it boy, are you even paying attention? The opening sentence of that NYT article reads:
The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.
So while it may not confirm the point about refueling jets, it does confirm the bomb shipments, which is just as damning.
I have to say that your tendency to mockingly disregard contrary arguments as "fail" whenever they don't address your every single little point is rather unnerving. So now it's all down to whether the US refueled Israeli jets or not? And when that is confirmed by some not-easily-disregarded source, what else?
I agree to h4rm0ny's main point that were Israel to get itself into a war (and by that I mean a proper war, not a three-week skirmish) with a major Middle East country, be it Iran or whoever else, it would be hard for the US to not be dragged into it – not out of any particular love for the nation, but rather due to economical, political and yes, military ties. You can point that it never happened, but then again, I don't know that Russia had ever come into any war in order to support France before 1914 – but when it did it set the world in flames.
I'm curious. Just *when* did you try i++ and see it fail?
When I tried it on Python, which is not C, and therefore has no obligation to support it. And indeed, it doesn't.
So, realizing that i++ was not possible (on Python), I never bothered to try ++i either (on Python), and therefore never stumbled on whatever baffling results it produces (on Python).
On C / C++ I don't do much ++i either, because the kind of one-liners where it makes a difference are often too obscure and error-prone, and by the time I break them down into something safer and more readable, the relative order of the read and increment operations make no difference any longer.
I have used Python for both personal and in-company projects for the last four years, and I don't know a think about what you guys are talking.
I have known C/C++ for much longer than Python; the first time I tried i++ and it failed, I switched to i += 1 and never looked back. I don't remember ever trying ++i, playing with the order of increment and read operations is bad form anyway – for God's sake, that extra line of code you're trying to avoid isn't going to break the Internet.
It's also nice to know that integration with C/C++ is possible and not that hard to achieve, particularly if you rely on wrapping tools such as SWIG; though I've yet to use it myself, the interpreter's performance being good enough for my needs so far.
I've heard there are Python zealots somewhere, but have yet to meet any. Then again I'm not a very social coder, most of the advice I need can be found on reference docs, tutorials and forum threads (mostly from Stack Overflow) started by people other than me.
As for "dick-waving"-prone features, I've used some of them here and there, but "basic" Python is almost always enough – and I do a lot with it, from text file processing to COM interfacing with Windows applications, web pages and AI research on NumPy / SciPy. It's a matter of good-sense, knowing that just because you can do something, not necessarily you should do it every single time.
Overall what I enjoy most about Python is how it encourages writing clean, concise code (though of course you can mess it up if you really want); the speed with which you can slap together a proof-of-concept and then rework it into a practical solution; and the variety of packages and projects that make it a readily-available option for most things one might want to do. That you almost never have to do any changes to run programs on different platforms doesn't hurt either.
While it's hard to take much pitty on people who'd think they could get something for nothing, governments exist largely to protect people from themselves and each other, so Facebook, NASDAQ and the mafia underwriters shouldn't really be allowed to just walk away from this either.
Unfortunately punishing the crooks almost necessarily means providing some sort of compensation to their victims, so you end up, if not rewarding stupidity, then at least softening its effects...
> The Nokia Asha range has a future.
Those kinds of handsets may very well have a future, but not inside Nokia I think.
Asha is the Symbian platform's last breath, before it's <del>cemented to a concrete block and thrown into the sea</del> outsourced to Accenture.
Perhaps its feature/price balance may live on, in some other manufacturer, through some other platform – Boot2Gecko maybe? – but for Nokia it's too late, for better or (more likely) worse they're headed towards being a bloatphone-only company; for how long it's anybody's guess.
Of course, there already is a web technologies-based platform with which to fight Apple's iron grip and Google's fragmentation. It's called the Wholesale Application Community (WAC): it's got a Javascript API, a W3C-compatible application packaging model, an infrastructure for operator-local app stores, the support of a string of carriers, model manufacturers and IT companies – and is going nowhere but down.
Did you know that Android is, on paper, the product of the Open Handset Alliance? That's a consortium of more than 80 companies – yet Google seems to be the only one actually working for its progress, while the others do little more than port the software to half-baked reference hardware and slap their logos on top of the things.
Technology is not the problem, lack of compromise is. Players in the mobile industry will gather to draw up (and sometimes even implement) standards all the time; getting any one of them to promote its use afterwards is another matter entirely. The whole mobile industry is terribly inertial: that's how they got driven off to the borders of their own market by Apple and Google to begin with. That's why WAP languished for years until being crushed under the rise of the mobile web, why WAC is stillborn, and why IMS will ultimately prove irrelevant.
The reason Boot2Gecko just might succeed is not technology, Telefonica's support or the increasing marginalization of carriers. The best thing it's got going for it is Mozilla's role as the driving force behind the platform. Just as with Android and Google, they've got the will to keep promoting it long after other involved parties have lost interest (which if experience is any guide, will happen within seconds of the 1.0 release).
If Mozilla can attract developer mindshare and drag the carriers and product manufacturers to provide consistent support, then Boot2Gecko may realize that vision of a web application platform which goes back all the way to WAP. But I'd not bet a penny on it, I've seen such promises made many times over and so far it's always ended in abject failure.
But there it is.
Funny thing is, in my teens I'd get saddened by the thought that we'd never get the Internet to be called "cyberspace" – but now that IT and security pundits can't stop their traps from blurting "cyber" every other second, I can't stand hearing it being called that. Guess we should really be careful with what we wish for...
The "walled garden" scenario I came up with was just a thought experiment on how Internet censorship / "parental control" could ever be made to work, and what the consequences might be; I don't in any way promote or support it. I thought the "Big Brother" icon would be enough indication of this – perhaps I should have gone with "Joke Alert" or "Black Helicopters"?
Bur anyway, since you've mentioned the likes of Google and Facebook: ISP's would just love to sideline them, what with the ISP's paying for the data pipes and ad-brokers raking in all the money. In fact mobile carriers have been trying to do that for a while, only their approach is technological. So far it hasn't worked – but perhaps if the heavy arm of law gave it a little push...?
The only way I can see censorship controls of this kind working is by the use of a whitelist – in other words, everything is pr0n until proved otherwise.
It wouldn't be too hard for the ISP's to compile a list of the 1,000 or so top-access sites, decide which ones are "safe", and block access to anything not in this list unless requested otherwise by customers.
The long tail could be covered by an online form for people to suggest additions to that list; this could grow into a service where, if you wanted your site to "whitelisted", you'd pay your ISP for continued certification of its contents' safety.
What about Facebook, blogs and the like, you ask? Why, the ISP's could just spin their own versions of those services, all continually reviewed for guaranteed family-values-compliance.
And there you go, your sanitized Internet in a nice and tight package. It's not unimaginable that the ISP's could spin it as a "service" – I can already hear the ads about "a leaner, cleaner, better Internet", safe for work & play, and free of any harmful images or contradictory truths...
How does that compare to a billion dollar for a photoshop filter and assorted commodity hardware?
I made the same point on the earlier story about this deal. It boggles the mind that real tech like Cray's interconnect architecture can command at best a bunch tens of millions, while the dullest fanboi start-ups can sell themselves off for far more.
The test plane has to be launched from a rocket but, so what?
So... It hasn't brought anything new to the table, as far as escaping the gravity well is concerned.
And if what you want to do is just send stuff around the Earth real fast, sub-orbital rockets can already do that; why don't go the extra sub-orbital step, if you're going to use a rocket anyway? What bothering with "gliding" on the higher atmosphere and all related problems (heat etc.) buys you?
This is an honest question. If there are economical / tactic advantages to gliders over sub-orbital launchers, I'd like someone to enlighten me.
Last year I read 7 books on my 3.2 in smartphone, all part of the Dune saga. Other than having to "flip" pages more frequently than I'd do on a physical book, I didn't have any problem with it.
In the end, the best e-reader, like the best camera, is the one you have on you when the opportunity arises.