skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is probably the best analysis of the situation I've seen. I really do think that this is a wedding, and thus nokia is probably going to go the way of microsoft.

In short, I bet in 10 years both companies will be less relevant than they are now. (though I do have an open mind about phone 7, I just don't think either company has competent management.)
This comment seems to miss the fact that MeeGo development is probably doomed anyway.
because ... well ... you're uninformed and obj-c is not a horror?
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Stop A/B Testing and Make Out Like a Bandit
The actual project announcement:

http://www.jroller.com/neugens/entry/introducing_icedrobot
I think it is about the developer/apps/market place "ecosystem". Elop mentioned that in the burning platform memo. I'd give Microsoft some credit in their developer relationship machine that's already in place.

The deal makes sense to me in terms of economies of scale ... more popular OS = more developers/apps.
Django and Rails are pretty much equivalent.

Use whatever tool that will make you the most productive.
Yes. If you know what you want, can explain it simply, and it can be done simply and repeatedly, offshoring works quite well. It's far cheaper than doing it in-house.

However, if you miss any of the above, it's going to be a nightmare. The 'repeatedly' part is the key to making it cheap. 1-off solutions are cheaper in-house because of all the design work. Things that can be done repeatedly (like webscraping different sites) can be off-shored with great success, especially if you do the first couple in-house and create a good framework, and then just ask the offshore-company to repeat your success with like tasks.
It would mean Microsoft has realized that competing for Flash's position is not worth the fight, effort or money as Flash and its position in general (plugin-based web-solutions) is losing grounds every single day. They are not willing to fight a battle which will eventually be lost anyway.

They are simply refocusing their efforts to get Silverlight (which is a pretty good piece of engineering IMO) put to use elsewhere.

As far as I can see, that is a pretty good strategic decision.
You'd better consult a lawyer I if you're planning on running anything other than GPL software on a phone, because I'm pretty sure the classpath exception doesn't apply on mobile platforms, meaning that anything you run on the GPL JVM must itself be GPL.
And still actively developed! But don't tell anyone...
Any frameworks/libraries that implement these algorithms yet?
Progressive Enhancement 101: Overview and Best Practices
Im very sorry, I have no idea what you are trying to say.
> It's about the attention to detail and ruthless application of quality in hardware build, software and UI.

Nokia is traditionally a leader in those fields for the low end market.
me too. kindly accept my flattery : )
I think it is quality as you say, but also having a vision.

The iPhone comes from a perspective on the "right way to interact with touch computers" and everything follows out of that.

All the other attempts to replicate the iPhone are focused on replicating the iphone, not on understanding the iphone's vision and attempting to come up with "the best way to interact with touch computers". This is why android, for instance, is such a lower quality experience.

I think google engineers may not focus on fit and finish as much as apple engineers, but they probably are as good in terms of code quality. But even with quality code you can't have the level or quality of interaction when the hardware maker is some random company that downloaded the source from the net and then built a phone. Even when that company is a big one like HTC. Maybe especially.
There are numerous sites that already cater to that sort of thing. LifeHacker and the Unclutterer's Workspace Flickr pools are rather large. Usesthis goes into greater detail about specific setups.

While I find that stuff interesting, that's not the show they are doing. It's MTV Cribs for startups. And that really didn't exist before this.
> I know, "apple doesn't license their OS dummy!". But think about this:

> 1. Android is selling more phones right now.

> 2. Apple is unable to manufacture enough phones, and has admitted in conference calls that they have lost sales for this reason.

On the other hand, Apple made 51% of all profits in mobile devices last quarter. With 4% marketshare. They've got tons of cash on-hand. If they want to start making a play for cheaper devices or somehow throw money at increasing production volume, they can do that rather than become a software OEM.

The reason Apple can a high quality integrated experience is cause they control the whole thing. If they license to Nokia, then they don't control the whole thing - there's another, fairly powerful party there who will throw whatever weight they have around to get things that favor them.

You also entirely ignore the problems. It's harder to develop for multiple hardware configurations. Apple and it's 3rd party developers have 2-3 iPhones that they develop for at one time (plus a few iTouches and the iPad). Limited hardware sets, fairly similar capabilities. That's a good thing for producing consistent, high quality user experiences and keeping support costs in-line.

Maybe it would've been great for Nokia to license iOS, but there's nothing in it for Apple, whatever you say, and a bunch of unacceptable downsides.
I was first a PHP developer (I still can be), but I'm working with python+django for 2 years now.
The reason why I began to user django is the time-winning.
In my opinion it's faster to make a webapp in python+django than PHP+(Kohana, Codigniter, Zend)

And what yuvadam sais: Django and Rails are pretty much equivalent.
On several occasions I've had feature phones built by nokia, including one I just happened to pick up a few weeks ago.

I find that the UIs have become less intuitive and ever more maddening over the years, with the latest one being a good example.

Build quality is fine for a plastic phone. Screen resulution- well it is a feature phone. But look of the UI is poor, and the discoverability of the UI is extremely poor.

All that said, you may well be right - they may still be a leader for the feature phone market, and thus that means the others are much worse.
Yeah right. They still have the largest market share for smartphones:37% and mobile phones: 31%. And made a profit of €2billion 2010.
2. On #2, so if you want to harass someone without putting yourself on the line, generate "evidence" about them and provide it to law enforcement, but don't file a police report. Good to know!
I neglected to give more than a cursory glance at Obj-C back when the iPhone 3G and app store first came out. I hugely regret it now, but I was doing C++ at the time and thought it was the cat's pajamas.

If you can think abstractly and use/like languages like Ruby and Lisp (and their reflection/metaprogramming features), I think you'll be surprised by the amount of stuff you can do at runtime in native code. I started doing Obj-C a week ago and am about to submit my first free, 90% custom-drawn control app to Apple for approval.

Yes, the syntax is initially unappealing, but you get over it after about a day. On top of that, Xcode + Interface Builder is the best GUI dev environment I've used yet.
Learning moment: developers can't be wedded to a particular technology. Qt is fantastic but it's not the business. We can't invest ourselves in companies that are floundering and Nokia has been floundering for a number of years.

If you find yourself investing your talents in a company that has multiple directional changes you need to consider the likelihood that the company will ever return to good times.
Nokia’s Suicide Note
Qt Android port: http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/
Ask HN: What user support/feedback system do you use?
I'm developing a web service that can capture a snapshot of a web page when a user is filling in a support/feedback form. The idea being that it's much easier to help someone when you can see exactly what their page looked like. (Even if they are logged into some non-public app page that uses lots of ajax.)

So far my service is capturing the snapshot and returning a generated URL for it. You can log in to browse the snapshots (along with date, user-agent info, etc).

Should I enhance my service into a fully fledged support system, like Zendesk for example? Or are you already happy with your user support solution and would just like a simple way to integrate something like my service? I'm trying to gauge what I need for an MVP.

What support systems are you currently using? Do you prefer to roll your own?

Thanks for any feedback you can provide.

(You can join the launch mailing list here: http://www.jooplicate.com/ )
Android Lighthouse: Android Qt Port
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I'm sorry but this mentality is everything that is wrong with software development. How is bloat not an issue now? We expect that hardware is getting better and better, but it is ok for software to become worse and worse just because it can sort of get away with it?

In this case Firefox has even managed to outperform Moore's law. It managed to become slower in a faster rate than computers get faster.
Being Original - staying clear of trends
I may have got it.

The problem is that there is no gradient with computers.

I either control my computer, or I dont. There is no middle ground.

I can either surf the internet and post anonymously, or I cannot.

Nobody in power is fighting for my right to do those things.

Everybody is more concerned about their own petty little secrets than about the freedom that I care about.

'Mob Rule' has a bad name, but the simple truth is that democracy and freedom is based around it. Warlords and Dictators, oppressive governments and totalitarian states dont exist because of 'Mob Rule', they exist because of the absence of it.

Eqypt is just now fighting for 'Mob Rule', and it is doing so with a mob.

'Mob Rule' is just another name for democracy.

Sometimes the mob can be ugly, when they hang witches or crucify innocent people, but it can also be awesomely constructive.

Freedom is like that.
Well, I don't see any platform restrictions in the text of the classpath exception here: http://openjdk.java.net/legal/gplv2+ce.html

I know they require that an alternative implementation have platform restrictions before they'll let it run the TCK (which was the problem with Apache Harmony), but I don't see any in the license for OpenJDK itself. Is there some other source I should be looking at?

Full text, from there (applying only to source files that specifically say "subject to the 'Classpath' exception" in the header):

Linking this library statically or dynamically with other modules is making
a combined work based on this library. Thus, the terms and conditions of
the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.

As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you
permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an
executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules,
and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your
choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module,
the terms and conditions of the license of that module. An independent
module is a module which is not derived from or based on this library. If
you modify this library, you may extend this exception to your version of
the library, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do
so, delete this exception statement from your version.
Nokia used to have levels of consumer satisfaction and devotion similar to what Apple have.

Consistently, for about a decade (from the mid-nineties), they made the most desirable phones, with the best combination of hardware and user experience. But the user experience just didn't keep up as phones developed more features.

To continue the Apple analogy, the current Nokia smartphone experience is as though Apple had continued to push OS9 while the rest of the world moved on around them. Symbian is Mac OS classic in 2011.
I don't think it's the same at all.

All I use on my Android phone is e-mail, maps, the browser, and general phone stuff - honestly, I would trade the entire app store for a little more reliability and a better touch screen.
It works very well if you establish a true partnership.

Our local employees do the design, strategy, and thought leadership. An on-site team from our partner sit face-to-face with us to be sure we have mutual understandings and good communication. The offshore teams do a variety of work, from coding, to system administration, to basic tech support.

I would not try to offshore just one project, or just one task. It took a couple years to smooth out how we work together... in the end, it works well for us.
Please have a way to follow people like on twitter. People want to know where their idols (the kind of people you follow on Twitter) are going to be. Expose your thoughts on twitter; expose your social geo info on socl.in.
Best HGH is http://www.hghforsale.org/genf20.php
Yes, I used QtJambi for a large project in the past. (I was including Java when I said that I prefer Qt for high-level languages.)

QtJambi is great, but I do not know if I would use it for a new project. Since Qt 4.5, QtJambi is no longer supported by Nokia.

Source: http://qt.nokia.com/about/news/preview-of-final-qt-jambi-rel...
I completely disagree with the article. He treats both Nokia and Microsoft as though they have no idea what they are doing. Microsoft has decades of experience in coming up from behind place and crushing the competition. As for Nokia, they make really good hardware. They got caught up in selling cheap handsets because it was great business for a while but that does not mean they cannot make great hardware. I think this is a great move for both companies and even better for consumers.
Word to the wise: When you're flailing, that's when self awareness is the hardest. It's also when it's most valuable.
Unless you have a ten-line† program or one hell of a suite of unit tests documenting every single interaction with the world your system ever performs‡, you can never be sure that a first-day employee 'fixing' a bug hasn't introduced a new obscure one somewhere.

It's not like being told to put together your computer or your desk, where the only environment you'd be changing is your own.

> We'll have to disagree then.

About which part? Do you deny that this test is trivial to game for those who want to game it? Or do you claim that just passing this test, at whatever motivation, is a useful signal? If so, what does it signal, other than not being philosophically opposed to meaningless tests?

† hyperbole; ‡ most real world brownfield projects don't
If you had no idea it was classified before you distributed it, you probably wouldn't have broken any laws. Given the way classified documents are labeled, that's an incredibly unlikely scenario: classified documents are marked with the classification level on every page and paragraph (individual paragraphs may be classified at a lower level than the overall document), and have cover sheets explaining exactly what the classification level means, which includes a statement warning the reader that anyone can be prosecuted for unauthorized distribution, not just people who have agreed to protect it. So your understanding is wrong: the prohibition extends to everyone. There are also directions for what to do with it if you aren't supposed to have it (e.g. "Return to nearest office of [appropriate federal department or agency].")

If the hypothetical piece of paper on the street were a single page marked with a classification level, but without the cover sheet and its explanation, you might be able to argue that you didn't think that you were legally prohibited from distributing that information. Then again, "I didn't know that was illegal, your honor," generally doesn't play well in the courts. IANAL, so I can't tell you what would happen in this situation, but I can tell you that even if you were to avoid conviction the overall experience would probably be time consuming, expensive, and generally unpleasant.
Its depend; sometime it works and sometime it won't.
In 2009-2010 India has done somewhere around $75 billion business with 18% growth and these numbers say it works for some people.

There are certain downsize of offshore development like communication, cultural differences etc.
"The downside is huge."

Compared to what? I don't think the downside is greater than the downside of maintaining their own incredibly expensive and increasingly obsolete platform(s). This gives them their only hope of delivering a stable smartphones with a modern UI in the first half of this year (bonus: without spending tens-of-thousands of developer hours). I consider that "upside".
Silverlight is competing internally with Windows Azure. (Some potential synergy there as well.)
It takes a _long_ time to get back from Mars. I think the trip itself would count as sufficient quarantine that any symptoms would become apparent.
Yeah, I've encountered those as well. "Hi, I'd like to go to Madrid, from Copenhagen, utilizing only local trains, and going through Vienna - can you tell me the connections?"
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I think the main thing people have an issue with is partnering with MS and using their platform rather than buddying up with Android or persevering with their own stuff. As you point out, and as they have publicly admitted, sticking with their current platform is proving to not be a viable way forward.

The apparent indignation at them choosing MS is, in many cases, a bit of fanboy-ism. The average man in the street won't care, and those of us who would particularly prefer Android over Windows just won't be buying a Nokia phone in the near future, which depending on how big a demographic we are they may not care about.

I think going with MS makes more sense for them than following the Android path, despite my vague allegiance with the Android camp. If they went that way they would just be another Android phone manufacturer which could work well if the hardware is good and competitively priced, but by going Windows which is a small part of the market now they have a chance of being the leader of that pack if it grows to be the preferred alternative to Apple's output. And it may yet manage to become a bigger player than Android - the Windows phone platform has the advantage of not having any association with the many cheap and grotty devices that are being shipped with Android (this association could tarnish the public view of Android devices on the whole).

> It's like those people still using Windows XP because it's the best.

But always remember that there are people like me who are still using XP because they have no particular reason to spend money on an upgrade. No DX10/11? Not a problem, the games I do play (including those released in recent months) seem fine and if it became a problem (games requiring later versions of DX) then I'd just find something else to do with my time. IE9 won't work? No problem - the only thing I use IE for VMWare Server's console (which has issues with FF and C) and for is downloading Firefox or Chrome.

I'll have to upgrade in a while because security updates will stop. But until that time I'm unlikely to have reason to spend money and time on changing OS.
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More at http://www.hghforsale.org/
Here's what is happening. Microsoft wants to buy Nokia, but not with all those buildings full of people. The announcements mean than Nokia can now get to work laying off tens of thousands of people. They don't need 120,000 employees anymore. Everybody involved in Symbian can go. Most of the Meego staff, too, as well as lots of middle and upper management. It won't cost Microsoft a cent in severance pay.

Once it's all cleaned up, Microsoft can complete the purchase. The stock price should be lower too, reducing the total cost further.
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Layoffs have been announced. Sorry, I only have a reference from a spanish newspaper:

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2011/02/11/economia/1297426004...

Not only in Finland, but world wide.

Edit, from the same source, quoting Nokia's CEO: the reduction will be "substantial".
yes I agree with you. Its very effective
Microsoft will help a lot in the marketing department for the new devices, with money and with mind-share. One important point in this deal is the US markets, it would be impossible marketing effort for Nokia to gain ground on with Symbian and MeeGo, even if they succeeded in making them technically superior.
I like HGh
I left a critical comment, but I don't know if it will be approved or not, so I'll repost it here as well.

This is nice, Carey. Your main problem however was not your cut on small purchases. You real problem is that most tech savvy users don’t trust you. PayPal has arbitrarily frozen accounts countless times, so much so that some people immediately withdraw funds as soon as they reach their PayPal accounts.

Yes, PayPal is not a bank, but it fundamentally acts as one, and my real bank would never freeze an account withholding my funds because I suddenly deposit more frequently than in the past.

Unfreezing an account is very complicated and often a lost cause. Dealing with your customer care department is a reminder that the Turing Test should probably be used for hiring purposes as well.

That’s a big PR problem you have when you are claiming to be “The Best Way to Buy and Sell Digital Goods”.

I appreciate your new features, and the fact that you are trying to enable not-quite-micro payments online.

I would suggest however a change to your policies when it comes to freezing and unfreezing accounts. Aim for transparency and clear rules, and make an announcement about these new customer friendly policies. Include a heartfelt apology to the community for the past “miscommunication”. Have your customer care team actually pay attention to what the customer is saying, rather than just copying and pasting boilerplate answers that don’t fit the customer’s scenario.

Until you do those things, PayPal will just be a necessary evil for those doing business online.
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Security flaw bypasses iPhone lock screen
Interesting. Apparently, this project on puts self-contained full-screen Qt apps onto Android machines via NDK [1].
However, I find nothing about Android integration on the level of Intents and Activities, not even whether that's planned.

1. http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/wiki/QADK
Yes. VS, amongst other tools, is used to develop "Windows." (Where "Windows" is amalgamated thousands of separate projects with their own bits.)

This is the Microsoft. The company with an almost fanatical commitment to dogfooding.
Sytropin is the best as per the reviews I have read and I will be buying it today.
The Bingo Card Generator is not the part of BCC that is technically sophisticated.
Nokia to developers: no Qt for Windows Phone development as posted on another HN thread.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/11/nokia-notifies-developers...

Linux(KDE) has a lot of Qt stuff. Will the Nokia Microsoft marriage hurt Linux badly in some way?