DrSprout

You should re-read your links:

>Update: Microsoft wanted us to clarify that enterprise customers will be able to deploy apps to employees outside the consumer-facing Marketplace -- details on that will be released in the future.

So you'll be able to do whatever you want if you're willing to pay, which is pretty much open in the traditional Microsoft sense.

If I go to Australia before this decision gets reversed, I'm going to be sure to pack a lot of porn.

Also make sure I have some time to kill getting into the country. Really, that's the best solution: everyone needs to carry enough porn coming into the country that the customs officials get so bogged down filtering porn (by hand!) that they have no choice to give up. This is a prime opportunity for civil disobedience.

Is there a drop-in open source library that basically does Google-like calculations, including conversions? It's one of those things that Google does so well I don't really feel compelled to do myself, but really feel like I should have a tool for because it's not something you need a massive server farm for.

Flash is an application platform. If it runs out of memory, it's an application that is responsible, and Flash naturally has to compensate.

A couple ambiguous questions. What other dynamic languages have I formally studied? Does that mean weakly typed? In that case none, though obviously I've picked them up here and there.

> What percentage of your work time working on software projects is spent not writing code?

If we're looking at actual time I spend writing code, probably 5%. But then that's not counting reading code and testing code I've just written. So I don't know, it seems like that's a very small sliver of development when it feels like people are wondering how much time one spends in meetings or doing mockups.

It isn't so much the DRM as their choice of a DRM solution that only runs on Windows and Mac desktop systems. (Strictly speaking WinMo 7 as well.)

There's no reason to lock out my Droid like that, or my Linux desktop for that matter.

>It’s interesting that Cockcroft never actually mentions the video capabilities of HTML5, instead he talks about the "advanced user interface features." Still, I think we all know what he means.

He means that he wants to jazz up his sites. The studios won't give them any content for DRM-free HTML5 video.

My favorite way to write is with Emacs running on one of the virtual terminals under Linux. A fullscreened Putty session sshd into a Unix box will also do in a pinch.

My co-workers, by contrast, even paste code into Word documents.

Google may however sue MPEG / MPEG members in retaliation, and that could be an effective deterrent.

>Apple does not deny developers to use high quality technologies for its platforms, apart of the private API, but that's another matter.

No, I'm pretty sure that's exactly the matter. Only Apple apps can multitask.

It's an understandable design decision, but it's certainly a parallel. (And to be completely fair it's changing, but you're being intellectually dishonest.)

I have to say, the Air applications I use regularly (Hulu and Pandora One) both work very well on Linux and Windows. They are kind of resource hogs, but then so is iTunes, so it's really a case of the pot calling the kettle black on the performance front too. When Apple does cross-platform, they're not really that good at it. Google and the FOSS community is fantastic at it, and Adobe is middling.

Really, the primary thing that bothers me about Flash is the way it locks in my content. However, it's clear that I'm not getting the content served via Adobe Air without kill strings attached, so it's a symptom of a larger problem in the market, and not itself the source.

Things I can't live without:

Link Widgets: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2933/

Basically, it studies the source for links like "next" and "previous," and lets you page forward and backward with alt+pageup/down. Works great on xkcd, New York Times, and many others.

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Noscript/Flashblock: 'nuff said.

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Colorzilla: http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/

Color picker. Combined with Firebug, great for web dev.

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Leet key: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/770/

Okay, this one I could live without, but the ability to rot13/hex/morse/octal/binary encode text at will is nice.

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Facepad: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8442/

I don't really use this one that often, but it's a good example of Firefox's superiority.

I've always found the Perl

foo() or die();

idiom to be quite readable. And if you're familiar with that, this is a pretty straightforward extension.

You would be amazed how easy, enjoyable, cheap, and healthy lentils, peas, and a variety of other beans are for replacing meat.

I'm in deep enough shit as it is if my Droid is lost or destroyed. Smartphones are great in that they replace a lot of things I used to have to carry. "Wallet" is not one I want to add to the list.

That's still a fact-based argument. You're saying (and I agree) that data show that the supposition that torture is useful is nonsense. It's only useful as a deterrent tool in morally bankrupt regimes. (But again we come to the moral question of how many innocent people we're willing to harm for deterrence's sake.)

Seems a little more usable for me using text-align right so that if I'm keeping up I don't have to track the next word jumping all over the place.

Obama wasn't ranting against technology. He was making a nuanced argument about our new information society, and being prescriptive about how we should interact with the Internet.

To roughly paraphrase what Obama said, quit dicking around on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. and look for good articles. You also might think about writing some, or even reading a good book. That's not in any way technophobic. He was just doing what any public figure should do at a commencement address, which is tell the graduates to use their education to lead meaningful and productive lives.

What I'd really like to see is some research into how much of the difference between Apple and its competitors is the placebo effect. People expect Apple products to be easy to use, and when they find something that's difficult, "It wasn't designed for that."

You look at Android or Windows or Linux by contrast, and when it's difficult to do something, it's because their design teams are much weaker than Apple's. Sure, the iPad doesn't have to do everything. But if you approach a netbook or a non-Apple tablet with the same "It's an Apple, so it must be good" mentality, is the iPad really worth the price premium?

I'm not sure if it's more or less sinister than Google tracking your searches, but it's also possible it's noting your most frequent email correspondence.

Maybe it takes into account words that show up frequently in your email?

Genius is primarily a learned skill. Yes, some people have more aptitude than others, but the vast majority, if they apply themselves, will do just fine. It's far more a question of a support structure to instill discipline than it is of innate skill. Those who truly cannot learn and maintain discipline are rare.

I suspect they didn't realize how many people, when faced with the mangling of their profiles, replacing all of their interests with poorly and inconsistently guessed 'likes,' would simply get rid of all that data.

It's really interesting looking at Facebook in Spanish, their localization with these roll-outs is pretty slipshod. "Mark as read" showed up in English for over a month after the big PHP-compiling to C++ shift, which otherwise was pretty good.

Likewise, though my profile is written in English, Facebook took it upon itself to guess what everything meant, and translate it into actual books and such. The result was actually remarkably effective, but still imperfect, and plain text is simply a better data model for what should be a simple "here's who I am."

Maybe HTC doesn't need their help?

HTC said when this first showed up that Apple's lawsuit caught them off guard, so it naturally took a bit of time to figure out what patents Apple was infringing on.

I think you just answered your own question. I'd say just about every Unix box on the planet has Perl holding it together somewhere in there. What you've asked is essentially like asking "How does mortar hold buildings together any more than bricks, steel I-beams, or roofing?"

These things are equally important, and yes you could probably find a substitute, but why?

I like my braces ;}.

Also, Perl 5 is feature-stable, and probably always will be. Python is in this 2.x-3.x limbo right now where it's difficult to find libraries that are going to work as-is for much longer. If you write a Perl application well, maintenance will as easy as reasonably possible, which I think is the only real measure of a good language. Most of the 'ease of use' problems disappear once you know what you're doing, and the language learning curve is a relatively small part of a programmer's life-cycle.

I currently code for my day job in a proprietary extension to a proprietary dialect of BASIC from the mid-80's. This language is legitimately broken, and has significant disadvantages at every turn. It has no real functions, no block-level scoping, lists are stored as delimited strings, there are no hashes, and nothing even resembling objects.

Perl has all of these things. If you're coding in Perl and you write bad code, it's your fault. If Perl has a fault, it's that it's easy to write code that you think is done, when you have more work to do if you want to develop a full-scale application. However, you can write incomplete but good-enough code in any language. (And I will always use Perl to write once-off scripts. It's perfect for that task.)

The article still makes an excellent point, which is that the difference between most of the 'newer technologies' and Perl is basically marketing, not any actual superiority of language design. You can write line noise in Perl, but you can also write Python in Perl. It may not be quite as pretty as Python, but as far as use in a production environment it will be equally useful.

I have, generally speaking, three services up:

- GTalk

- Android Keyboard .

- BatteryLife

With these services up, my Droid loses maybe 40% of its battery life in a day (with minimal usage.)

While I sleep, it rarely consumes more than 10%. The counterexamples have been when I've left the Pandora Service running, as well as the Email Sync service.

So, I test it by enabling the service, changing nothing else about my usage, and watching my battery life take a nosedive.

And on the subject of what exactly it's doing, that's roughly the explanation I got from my friends on the Windows side. We have Exchange disabled outside the firewall, so my phone has to hit up OWA to get the data. Is Exchange Web Services an API available from OWA, but separate from the HTML? It's my understanding that my phone is in fact scraping the HTML.

Well, the iPhone solution is basically throw away your phone every 18 months, which should work equally well on Android.

Sure I do. I use it to kill the exchange email sync, because it triples battery usage even when I have it set to not sync (I believe this has something to do with the fact that it's just scraping Outlook Web Access, not actually connecting with Exchange, which is impossible outside of the firewall.)

And I use it for this sort of thing frequently. Most services pull down battery life considerably.