rodh257

One way they might improve on this could be that it takes 3 pictures and makes sure that there was some slight movement in the person being ID'ed.

It's still wouldn't be secure, but it'd mean attackers would need a video of you instead of a simple facebook photo.

Main concern would be slowing down the user.

Check out this video: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/19/ice-cream-sandwich-face-u...

It seems quicker than swiping an unlock code.

As a fellow Galaxy S owner, install a custom rom, darkkys or similar, it makes it a new phone, much zippier and they'll have ice cream sandwhich going not long after the source is released (and it is being released)

Doesn't look like there's a way to simulate two NFC devices with android beam, which is a bit of a bummer, Android Beam support fits the intended use case of my iPhone app I'm about to port to Android (http://convoyapp.net) but as an independent developer I've already spent enough money on gadgets, can't afford to buy TWO NFC enabled ICS devices for testing purposes.

On that note, is there any service that lets you hire devices for dev/testing purposes? Would be great to get access to a lab with 20 different Android devices (for debugging obscure device specific bugs/screen size differences) along with all ipads, iphones, iPod touches and some WP7 devices.

I'd guess that the main issue is that it's probably heavily coupled to the rest of Google's services. Their index, web crawler and general infrastructure would be vital to this product. If Google were to spin it off it would be useless without all these things.

I currently work full time and do full time uni, so my time is stretched as far as it can go. I've sat down an analysed my productivity over the day and noted that from when I finish work at 5 or 6 until after I finish having dinner at around 8-8.30 I rarely get anything done, I try, but end up being distracted. So I decided to write that time off, and go do exercise to refresh myself for the late night stint.

I always used the excuse that if I'm going to be up really late tonight working, how can I justify half an hour of exercise, but once you sit down and be honest with yourself you'll realize that you waste many half-hours being distracted/on HN/Facebook etc, and those half-hours don't have the benefits that exercise does.

under Windows they perform really well, no noticeable difference between them and the main screen, on OSX they aren't quite as good in certain applications because their drivers aren't as solid for OpenGL but I barely notice it

Also, anyone suffering from wrist pain, mine went away after I bought one of these for use in the office: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/p/natural-ergonomic-...

I don't have one at home (they aren't that good for games so I haven't bothered to change my home setup) but just using it for the 8 hrs in the office a day was enough to get rid of the constant pain. Take a little getting used to , but really the way your hands sit on the keyboard make more sense than twisting them in to sit properly on a flat keyboard.

3 monitors is absolutely the sweet spot. On my MBP I use 2 USB display adapters and shut the lid to give me 3 external monitors running, works really well for a number of workflows. To main screen setups I find most useful are Web Dev: Web Page - Code - Documentation/Google/command line and TDD: Test Code - Code under test - test runner

Thanks Dekz, I've attended a few different meetups in the past (including JS) but haven't had time this year due to a heavy uni workload, will definitely be heading to the various ones around the place. Unfortunately the .NET one (QMSDNUG) is more geared to hearing about new Microsoft products than improving programming skills, but I'll definitely be getting stuck into some meetups around the place.

A lot of talk here about the types of businesses that normally do .NET work and how they aren't very good to work for, so I figure here's a good place to ask for some advice.

I've been working full time as a .NET dev and doing my degree part time for the last 5 years, graduating next month hopefully around the top of my class. I enjoy .NET, particularly ASP.NET MVC, and my current job has let me have full control over the development workflow, I use TDD,Git,MVC,Jquery etc. Looking at what I should do next if I was to change jobs it kind of feels like russian roulette trying to find a company here in Brisbane, Australia that hires good devs to do interesting .NET (or any development work) while paying well and without being a sweat shop.

My question is, where should I branch to if not in .NET? Java seems like the other big area around here but its all enterprise stuff as well. I've done some mobile development in my own time, got a couple of apps on the iOS app store and some Android on the way. One of which uses a NodeJS/MongoDB back end, but I'm not sure there's that many jobs around here for that (iOS/Android development may be a good option, though I do like web dev). I'll be looking to relocate in a few years, but for now, does anyone have any suggestions for what framework/language I should learn next?

To all the people here who said they moved away from .NET due to the kinds of employers and fellow developers that use it, where did you move into and how did that work out for you?

out of interest, what language/framework are you working with now?

I've got an app that does real time location sharing: http://convoyapp.net/ aimed at people driving in groups. I wonder how well this location sharing feature will compete against it, and if it makes it obsolete?

Is there any legislation proposed to ensure cars make at least a certain amount of noise while driving, for safety reasons? The new Prius will have a noise generated so that blind people/distracted people will be aware of the car coming around the corner, is there any plans to require this sort of thing by law? Seems to me that once these types of almost silent cars start to become popular we'll see an increase in pedestrian injuries.

This may be a little off-topic, and it's not a dig at the Tesla which looks like a great car, I was just struck by how silent it was (I haven't seen a fully electric car in person here in Australia yet)

"I am sure Assistant be like most Apple features. Fairly impressive, a bit more detail oriented than the competition, but ultimately not that much better. If anything, I think it will be the new Facetime. Good demo, good for ads, some people will use it a bunch, but mostly a showy feature that will get used once and then ignored by the vast majority of users."

To me, this is exactly what it will be. Even if it does work a lot better than Android and Windows Phone 7, I can't imagine too many times where I'd be using it. I haven't used the voice features on my Android/WP7 devices very often, not because it doesn't work well enough, but because 99% of the time I use my phone I'm somewhere that I don't want to be saying commands out loud into my phone. They may solve the technical problem, but the social one will hold it back.

he's responded here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3065098 with the same attitude he displayed in his original blog post. Not sure there's much point entering a dialog with him.

-TweetDeck (best twitter client IMO)

-Hacker News Reader (HN client, I have a few installed as they regularly start/stop working)

-Reddit is fun (reddit client)

-Hanging with friends free (hangman game)

-Google listen (podcasts)

-Amazon Kindle (books)

-Google Authenticator (two factor auth for google services)

-Alarm Clock Plus (alarm clock app, has a feature that makes you do math before you can turn alarm clock off - only way I can get up after late night coding )

-Google Reader

-Pulse Reader

-ESPNCricinfo (cricket scores)

-Beautiful Widgets (weather widget, changes background based on weather)

-Robo defense (tower defense game)

I love this quote "Now we need to make sure that those simulations and reality agree, because generally when they don't reality wins."

I don't think this is completely Amazons fault. The device is heavily centered around Amazon Prime and the various streaming content services they have. Most of these services are U.S. only thanks to requirements of the publishers. I'm sure Amazon would love to ship it worldwide, but it wouldn't be nearly as useful without the cloud services behind it.

10 inch model is rumored next year. Also Amazon hinted that one will be coming.

Is there a live video feed of this Kindle event at all?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Windows_and_Linux... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/behind-the-idc-data-wind... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system... http://microsoft-news.com/idc-windows-server-dominates-serve...

Estimates of between 40-75% of all servers are Windows based. While Linux is ahead in Web servers (71% market share), they aren't the only type of server going around...

These stats are hard to measure as they can't really account for people who just install free linux distros, but in terms of sold Linux based licenses, Microsoft is ahead. At the very least it shows the that the assertion "no one uses Windows as a server OS" is far from the truth. 5-6 billion dollars revenue a quarter is hardly 'no one'.

Yes tech blogs went nuts over it, but I don't remember seeing any actual organized Google marketing push on it. If that were to happen, Google would likely be targeting people outside of the tech community.

We get it, this has been discussed over and over, Android 3.0 is not open source because the source was not released, can we move on now? Google will be releasing the source code to Ice Cream Sandwich, but for now, Android 3.0 is not open source. We didn't need Richard Stallman to tell us that.

The headline is sensationalist and wrong. Think of it this way, Metro is their tablet/iPad mode. The iPad has no flash/silverlight in the browser, and neither does Metro IE. This in order to get the best tablet experience, battery life etc. The difference is, you can hit a button and open up full Windows desktop mode and get the full browsing experience, while accepting a tradeoff in battery life.

They aren't abandoning it, they're just optimizing for the use case. In fact, Silverlight developers should be happy - with some simple namespace changes, they demonstrated converting a silverlight program to a Metro UI on stage in the keynote. Sure your program may not run in the browser unless they swap to full desktop mode, but it will be easy for you to make it a proper installed application if you desire.

It's a good decision in my book, and will result in a better tablet experience. Frankly all the misinformation and hyperbole around this is getting exhausting. They've really not pulled the rug from under anyone at all.

What technologies are you talking about in particular? I have been working with Microsoft technologies for 6 years or so, so by your estimation I should have had to relearn everything twice now, but I'm still able to write things with C#, Winforms, ASP.NET etc just as I was 6 years ago.

Keep in mind the headline is sensationalist, the article itself says that Silverlight code is easily run as an actual Metro application. It's just to get it in the browser, you'll need to switch to 'full' desktop mode.

An interesting point of reflection this poses to developers is 'am I doing something that other people would care to watch?'.

I like the motivational factors a site like this poses, challenges you to become an expert at something, and when you are coding live, forces you to stay focused on the task at hand. Looking forward to the launch.

If it's anything like my Galaxy S in recent firmware updates, it doesn't act in the same way that the unnecessary task killing apps do, it only lets you close things that are actually active and using CPU, not ones that have been suspended in the background by android. It's come in handy on a number of occasions, mainly because it shows when an app has gone nuts and lets you kill it.

keep in mind he said active users, there's probably a number of inactive users who paid the initial fee but now don't add to server workload.

I'd love to see an online conference like http://www.mvcconf.com/ with the speakers who were signed up giving their prepared talks