darshan

My desktop is where I spend the most time, yet it was the last remaining device I use where there were visible, ugly, distracting pixels everywhere. Now I never see pixels in my daily life, and reading and writing on my desktop have become significantly more pleasant. I highly recommend switching to a high-DPI monitor for anyone who spends much time on the computer (which is probably almost everyone here).

Oh, most software works just fine once I manually set the DPI in KDE's system settings. Upgrading to Plasma 5, the only software I use that isn't scaled properly is Chrome. Apparently they're working on it, but I only use Chrome for Netflix, and it's not too bad having tiny browser tabs for that one use.

I watch a great deal of HD video content on both Netflix and YouTube in Chrome on Linux with only HTML5. I have no idea how big Chrome's buffers are, but I can say that both of these sites work better for me with HTML5 video than they did with Flash/Silverlight plugins. And without HTML5, I wasn't able to watch Netflix natively on Linux at all.

So while HTML5 video may certainly have room to mature, it is already significantly improving my experience of video on the web.

  Q: Can I take marijuana into Washington where they also allow recreational marijuana?
  A: No. You can not take marijuana across state lines.

Here's an example: http://youtu.be/5-vZqmdwWSo?t=1m16s

If you differentiate between biological sex and gender as social construct (what you call "made-up"), what is your objection to someone having a "made-up" gender identity that is different from the more common gender identity of others born with their same sex?

Your comment seems to suggest that you don't realize that one's legal gender status can and often does follow one's gender identity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_transsexualism

... he will make arrangements to test out of his classes and work from the Yahoo office in London.

Here's further explanation from the opening poster of that thread:

For the purposes of this thread, it is already a done decision that we aren't going to ship 64-bit Windows Firefox builds in the first half of 2013, and probably not at all in 2013. In the meantime, we aren't going to fix crashes or plugin bugs that only affect 64-bit builds. Those decisions have already been made. The only question to decide here is whether the existing 64-bit Windows nightlies provide any value to the project.

They're not discontinuing 64-bit Firefox on Windows; they haven't even released it yet. They do intend to release it, but probably not until 2014.

The 1.5 cm is a huge difference for most people being able to comfortably hold it the way I and most people I've seen seem to prefer to hold the Nexus 7: in portrait mode, with my thumb on one side and my four fingers on the other. I found a book that is the exact width of the iPad Mini (and it's lighter) and it hurts my hand to try to stretch it that way.

I'm sure some people with large hands will be able to hold it that way, but my opinion (I don't think you're insane if you disagree) is that most people will not be able to do so comfortably.

In short, 15 mm isn't a large difference in the abstract, but it's quite a lot of difference "at the margin," which is what I think we're talking about. I think it takes you from dimensions that maybe 80-90% of people can hold comfortably in the way I've described to ones that perhaps 10-20% of people can.

I hardly ever use NFC to interact with anything other than other devices, but I suppose that's because those other things aren't very prominent in the U.S. yet.

That sounds about right. From the Go FAQ: Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language.

Of course, whether the precise balance that Go comes to works for you is personal. I really like having most of the efficiency of C and much of the expressiveness of Ruby. I'm just getting started, but I haven't had this much fun learning a new language since I learned Ruby six years ago. Go is differently expressive than Ruby and introduces (to me) some powerful, interesting, and fun ideas (goroutines plus channels, for example.)

I think Ruby will still be my go-to language for everyday tasks, but Go definitely looks like it will have its place in my toolbox, likely replacing my occasional use of C++ at the very least. I also plan to use it on App Engine.

I don't think your post was FUD, but I'm guessing it was "I might have another look in about a decade or so" that might have felt dismissive to some people. That's not FUD, though, and it's fair to express your personal opinion like that.

This strikes me as a valid ethical position, though I happen to think things are more complicated than that.

People who pirate Microsoft products don't really hurt Microsoft, they hurt the rest of the competition.

This, on the other hand, doesn't make sense. You seem to be assuming that the invariant is that the user will not be paying Microsoft. And that might be true for you. If you're not going to be sending any money to MS no matter what, then yes, using MS products helps them somewhat.

For the author of the article, however, the invariant is that he will be using MS products. Since he's going to be using their products in any case, when he is fed up with their policies and decides to pirate instead of purchase until they get fixed, of course this hurts them.

If you want to argue that nothing is invariant, and that the best way to hurt MS is to both stop purchasing and stop using, well, of course that's true, but it's not relevant. What the author is talking about is simply stopping paying for something until it gets fixed; whether he still uses it or not is of very minor importance to MS next to whether or not he pays for it. His goal isn't to destroy MS or make them irrelevant; on the contrary, he just wants a better customer experience.

There are several ways to tackle this issue. For example, some browsers that offer silent software updates will install into the user's application data folder and hence do not have this problem. We could do the same, but we chose not to because it can be an administrative headache for some people who manage updates themselves and have to maintain an installation for every user.

What is a user?

Someone with read or write access to one of your private repositories.

It seems that they like to get guest posts from Android team members. Rather than create an account for each guest author every time, when they have guest posts, they just have the author send the article to someone who runs the blog. That's what I've always assumed, anyway, and it makes sense to me.

Is this because so many of the listed articles are not funded by the NIH?

We are introducing a new feature called Buyer’s Currency that lets you set prices for your apps separately in each of the currencies on Android Market. We are deploying this feature country-by-country over the next few months, starting with developers in the U.S. When the feature is available to you, we will notify you by email.

Android is an open-source operating system for smartphones. Some manufacturers have taken this smartphone OS and released tablets using it, and you're certainly free to compare them with the iPad. Any such comparison is likely to demonstrate that Apple did well in getting a usable tablet to market well before the competition, but it's fairly pointless to a discussion of the future of the tablet market, however.

Within the next 2-3 months, Android 2.4 (or maybe 3.0; codenamed Honeycomb, in any case) will be released, and at that point it will be an OS designed for both smartphones AND tablets. We're expecting to find out more about this version of Android (and the Motorola tablet Google engineers are designing it for, possibly called the XOOM) at CES in a few days. What little we know so far makes it look that high-end Android tablets will be very competitive with the iPad once a version of Android exists that is designed for tablets.

In summary: kudos to Apple for getting to market first, but things are about to get interesting once we can compare Android-for-tablets with iOS-for-tablets.