Re: I just realized...
Ah. I always thought that the TV series was a way to reuse the Lord of the Rings movie props.
189 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
A bit harsh. At the time EPOC32 was conceived, they had no choice but to use some kind of Embedded C++. But by the time Symbian went into full swing, they should have dumped that old shit and started working with proper C++. The 9.1 binary break would have been the perfect time for it to do. They had exceptions by then, but the cleanup stack was retrofitted on top of it, and that was not smart.
Regarding Nokia, they were quite able to make all kinds of bad software engineering decisions completely by themselves. Just look at the way the did Maemo/MeeGo.
Symbian was one of those companies that was too early in all kinds of ways. EPOC32 was too early. Their build system was from the time before lots of tools were easily available from the Web.
Why on earth would any manufacturer sell the bloody things cheaper if every device they can make sells at the higher price?
The only reason most electronics gets cheaper very quickly is because almost nobody is willing to pay full price. There are always a few, though, so you start selling high to pocket that money.
Apple is an a spot every electronics maker wants to be. Good for them.
This is pathetic. I know TV is now so bad that everything else is more enjoyable, but watching Apple product announcements for entertainment value is worse than a reality show addiction.
Why don't you people pick up a nice hobby? Something with tools that haven't changed for hunderds of years? Woodworking, something like that.
"And they are no exception to this anti-development mentality: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point,” says climate change star Paul Ehrlich, “would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Or, Amory Lovins: “If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.”"
Sigh. Mischief to each other. Have these people heard of knives? Sticks? Stones? Fists?
Maybe, bit a bit of luck, a NEO becomes a HEO (Hitting Earth Object) and they will see some proper mischief.
That's mental. People are free to use the O.S. they want, even in Germany.
And people have choosen Windows, for whatever reason is important to them. So the City Council needs to provide their services in such a way that all the Windows users are happy, because that is almost everybody. And all those people are voters too.
And you might have missed that I was explicitly talking about every file format but Office.
The last paragraph of the article also mentions a couple of other issues
1) everybody else in Munich uses Windows, and that file compatibility is a problem.
2) getting missing functionality programmed is expensive.
Apparently a city council need a lot more than just Word, Excel and PowerPoint compatibility. Just a few examples: CAD files for buildings, financial reports from organizations that are subsidized, databases on all kinds of stuff to keep track off.
So when you try adding the missing functionality, which is possible because you have the source, then you find out that custom programming is expensive. Open Source was invented in organisations where having your own programmers around was the norm. But organisations do not employ their own programmers anymore in general. A city council s probably lucky still to have its own system administrators around, why on earth would they employ programmers then?
So you need to go contracting, and that is expensive.
Lots of people wanting to make music and very few people being able to create attention for that music. Supply and demand.
The only way to get rid if that is to stop making music. Or be so good that everybody wants to listen to you so you can be The Man.
Steady State wasn't that old. People barely had proven that there were other Island Universes (what we now call galaxies) before Hubble showed that galaxies moved away from each other, the further apart, the faster.
More importantly, Steady State is the name for the theory that Hoyle invented in response to the Big Bang theory. So it has moving galaxies too, but in addition spontaneous generation of hydrogen atoms, to make new galaxies from.
Excellent news!
Finally there's a way to make money while you sleep. Not a lot of it, but that is because computing power is not really scarce. And given the fact that FB et al already have downloaded your address book and whatnot, these guys are better than FB. FB didn't give you any money, didn't they?
On a more serious note, maybe the IT people should start to think of a way to have computers for other humans instead of computers for IT people? Companies are the only entities paying for your services, as the numerous complaints on these fora about having to give away free computer support for friends an family show.
Seems to me preventing glassholes to video everybody on the premises is taking one's responsability seriously.
Secondly, he's only looking at the MAC address. He's not peeking into the traffic. Very hard to police for illegal stuff, unless of course certain MAC addresses must be prevented by law or court order from accessing publicly available networks.
You mean, making life-enhancing mistakes like installing some malware that sends premium SMS on your dime? The single experience everybody must have had to feel really, truly and utterly alive?
On this site, most readers think smartphones (computers) are interesting and worth tinkering with. But that is a minority standpoint. Most people want a cheap and reasonable phone, a big minority want to pay more and have a phone that some something extra.
And then there's the status. On this site tinkering with phones is status-enhancing, but that is also a minority view in the wide world. The minority buying iOS devices is a lot bigger. And willing to spend cash.
It was indeed. Open Source was claimed to be safe because everybody had already looked at the code and found nothing wrong. Note the past tense.
Now we know that nobody looked, or only the three-letter agencies looked at said code. And wrote exploits for it.
Now the other claim: everybody can fix it. This is partly true, everybody can run the patch and fix it in that sense. But almost nobody can look at the code, see what is wrong with it and create the patch. What everybody can do is look at the code.
I must say, I love the economics ans sociologics of this. O.S was meant to make the world a better place, and in some parts it did. What it also did was make the world a worse place. The three letter agencies got free and easy access, and all they had to do was look at the code, find the bugs and do nothing about them. And lots of the really smart people who also wanted to make money out of that smartness started serving ads, gathering data and making money, instead of writing closed source and making money.
Who cares how a compound statement is formulated, when the problem is that it exists? Compound statements are actually the root all evil in programming, after the banishment of goto.
In Oberon it was done properly: statement lists. No BEGIN or {, except at the star of a procedure. A couple of keywords terminated a statement list, and END was one of them, next to ELSE and possibly UNTIL (forgot whether Oberon has a REPEAT UNTIL).
Nokia was loosing market share in Europe as soon as iPhone was released there. Look at the Nokia Group Annual accounts at this web page: http://company.nokia.com/en/investors/financial-reports/results-reports.
The interesting section in the reports is the top 10 market bit. Just compare the figures for the European markets year over year.
Nokia was still growing, but their key markets were collapsing as soon as the competition entered. At some point you will then stop growing. Which Nokia did, just before the famous Memo. Obviously, management already knew they were in trouble, and they tried something new. Fully aware that it might not work, as it did not.