Nokia bought TrollTech some years ago and while they didn't fire a bunch of employees after their switch to Windows Mobile, I'm guessing with this move TrollTech's development efforts will be harder to justify. It's unfortunate really.

On the positive side, unemployment here in Norway is below 4% at the moment. And maybe the strategic direction of Qt will go back to...devices people actually have.

I recently got a new job and have definitely seen a lot of this. It ranges from the esoterically retarded ("Can you call a destructor in C++ directly?" (The answer is yes, but it's a terrible idea -- so is there any difference in practice between never doing something and thinking you can't? Why not quiz me on goto syntax -- that's at least useful sometimes)) to one company I really liked that sat me down for 3 hours with a Linux box and said "Solve these 3 problems as efficiently as you can" -- all of which were fair and managed to solve all of them quickly, correctly, and I thought the resulting code was beautiful in its simplicity, efficiency, and readability. I also had fun doing it (hey, some people write entire kernels for this reason;)). I've also failed one of these so-called online tests for reasons of the above. Their loss. But why would I want to work for anyone who thinks some incredibly stupid test means anything?

The job I ended up taking? I sat down with their lead dev and we talked shop for an hour. He wanted to know what I did and how I went about doing it and we talked about how they're using CUDA to develop higher level APIs to make it easier to use the GPU for computationally expensive operations. And then we ate really good Indian food with the rest of the team.

So if you're in charge of hiring, remember, that good programmers are a scarce resource, and we usually have more than one offer on the table. Don't waste our time and we won't waste yours.

The best practice right now is to rip lossless but then convert to lossy for portable devices -- since they're space limited. Otherwise, like someone eluded to, you'll have the issue of lossy-to-lossy conversion which can eventually make music sound like crud. Otherwise, you're completely right...and I say this as someone who's played 1st clarinet in various ensembles in college as well as guitar for 10 years.

I don't get it. Someone finally built the phone you've always wanted and you refuse to even touch the device because you're not sure if Nokia will be behind it in a year or two? Either go at least try the darn thing, or I'd like to hear people complain less than no one has made an OSS phone. They did. Now it's up to us to see if it's popular -- not Nokia, not Microsoft, not AT&T. Doing otherwise is like a bunch of people not going to a party because they think no one will show up.

After playing Portal 2 on PS3, the multiplatform experience was a breath of fresh air. The PSN is not a money-maker for Sony -- just a reason to buy their console.

Steam already works on PS3 -- no more porting needed. Merging two large communities of players gives you a huge competitive advantage in the market over Microsoft and studios could publish truly cross-platform titles (competitive FPSes? Probably not. RPGs, strategy, racing, rhythm, fighting games? Sign me up!)

Lastly, Steam already owns the online PC market -- with the notable exception of Blizzard -- and they have something to gain here too. In the 10 years of its existence, I have never seen Steam down for more than a few hours and it'd give a chance for Sony to rebrand its online experience to something that's more reliable than the XBox live and still free.

Will Sony do it? Snowball's chance in hell. Would it be revolutionary to have a console/PC agnostic matchmaking/gameplay system? Yes. Do gamers want it? Every review I have seen about Steam on PS3 has been glowing or at the very least, having no complaints. The engineering's been done. All Sony would have to do is show some leadership.

Not that Anonymous are terrorists -- far from it.

But one of the challenges in making peace with loose organizations like Hamas, Mahdi Militia, or the IRA -- just to give a few examples -- and while the leadership of the organization legitimately wants a cease fire, they're not in control of their members. If some guy becomes disillusioned by a peace deal and wants to bomb something, he's going to and the organization he or she is part of can't stop them.

I wouldn't put it past them to be the same thing here. And again, regardless of what the 'leadership' does, until they start turning over members of their community to law enforcement when someone violates their code of ethics (in addition to the law), the acts being engaged in may continue to go more extreme.

That said, Sony's screwed if they think they can work this out without "negotiating with the enemy" or else seriously beefing up security.

It's probably a good thing that there's at least two different groups working on the same thing. Competition creates incentives for those within it to write better code so that it's more widely adopted and they get more funding. Why do we have Chrome and Firefox?

This happens in private companies too. I heard a story about a private company that hired two different offshore contractors to write the same software independently of one another -- they were on a tight deadline and had actually read the Mythical Man Month. So when one of them was terribly buggy by deadline, they had something that worked.

I've written software for too long to believe that any one approach works for everyone, and that by not putting your eggs in one basket, the investor (in this case, the American people) comes out ahead.

It depends on what you mean by "cost". Setting up an airport in some remote area will surely be cheaper for the precise reasons you mentioned. But let's take DC to NYC as an example. This is a hugely traveled route. The more frequently a route is run, the more the costs go up but trains scale much better with it than air travel. It's also extremely inefficient as a means of cargo transport (all early rail had both passenger and cargo trains -- no reason you couldn't do a 1-day fedex route over high speed rail today). Airplane fuel is extremely expensive relative to train fuel, so it's just a matter of number of runs before the price of jet fuel (costs ~$27.50 per mile according to Google) vs the negligible ($2.50 per gallon of fuel which gives you fifty miles so $0.05 a mile) become more expensive than the infrastructure investment difference.

Plus, the cost of planes is more expensive and maintenance is higher, since safety margins are necessarily higher for air travel (train engine failing vs airplane engine failing -- which is worse?) There's also the professional pat-down squad, air traffic controllers, pilots (who must be higher skilled than a train operator thus cost more), the list goes on.

So while you're reasoning is correct for up-front cost, once you have sufficient passengers that the cost can be amortized across, rail becomes a much cheaper option...which is why the communist known as "Warren Buffet" who made his fortune on the Soviet Blat market bought Union Pacific: as fuel prices go up as supply steadily dwindles, the "tipping point" for train profitability gets higher and higher.

Interesting. Should have posted the article;) The idea that eating healthier is better for you seems like a no-brainer and why children ought to be able to skip vegetables because they don't like them makes about as much sense as a child being able to skip math class because they don't like that. School is for teaching good habits after all.

Yeah, I could make my own. In fact I did this morning. I typically walk in the morning to pick up breakfast (banana at the gas station or a veggie sandwich from Jimmy John's), but while there's numerous teas in the gas station, there's no unsweetened. And I live in Houston (I don't consider it the deep south...we do have an openly lesbian mayor after all). As I stated in my original comment, if our soft drink dispensers had the same stuff the Japanese ones did (cold unsweetened green tea, hot green tea...two carbonated beverage options -- never diet), I'd be happier. We're talking about going from putting quarters in the machine to driving to a store to buy tea, boiling water, letting the tea steep, refrigerating it, and then viola, an hour later, I have tea. Maybe I am a lazy American, but I just don't have the energy to do that in the morning;)