rodh257

I'm glad that someone has finally wrote this article. This is what I first thought when MS bought Skype - they are buying into the future of telephony. It's silly to think we'd still be using voice networks and SMS in 5-10 years time when VOIP and similar services are as widespread as they are. It's a clever move if they execute correctly.

Pinta is another great open source mono app

"Google likes this. Excel screws up? Perfect, just use Google Docs. Mission accomplished. People are surprisingly flexible if you throw up a barrier. An hour or so of pissing off a customer is a exchange Google is willing to make if it give them a shot at a new Docs user."

I'm not sure I understand this, what he was saying is that someone sends you an excel document and all you can open it with is Google Docs then he'll run into issues. Believe me, it is definitely not going to make them want to use Google Docs more. We're not talking about Microsoft Excel screwing up, to the consumer it'll look like Google Docs is crap and not compatible with their friends documents.

why not just do that now to help them get that market share, and some profits from the app store sales to boot?

StayFocusd for Chrome Users - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfm...

latest version has a neat feature which tracks links from blocked pages. Ie if I give myself 15 mins of HN a day, but end up wasting 2 hours because I only spend 10 secs on HN opening up tabs to read, it now tracks that. Any links you click from HN will count towards your time limit.

I hope that this is just a marketing campaign and doesn't reflect their internal R&D, or they may find themselves left behind once again.

Still more of a pain than it should be - and also voids warranty. I wonder if they'll lock it down so you can't turn off the advertising on the cheaper model (the screen savers are advertising aren't they?)

I'm interested to hear why solutions such as this: http://monotouch.net/ aren't an option? Price barrier, or are they not up to scratch?

is this available worldwide? Google Voice isn't so that could be a reason

I recently bought a 2011 MBP 13" and did this. SSD with Win7 in the cd bay, 7200rpm drive with OSX in main bay.

Boy is the 'no boot from USB' thing on the new Macbooks a giant pain in the ass! Installing it is one thing, but last night for some reason Windows wouldn't boot so I needed to to startup repair, had to unscrew the whole thing and put the superdrive back in to do it. Should have been a 5 min operation, wasted a days work (superdrive was at home).

I wonder if I can make a 5gb partition on my main drive to be a windows install disk in case it happens again?

While the ideas for projects is a good one, do you ever get sick of hearing peoples complaints in social situations? Nothing is more annoying than when you are having a few Friday beers and all people want to do is tell you how crap their computer is expecting you to promise them a new one by Monday.

It's funny, people lather praise for Vic when he is presenting Android and what not, but he was really out of his depth with Conan.

Very relevant to mobile applications/websites with 3g connectivity. I recall seeing an interesting talk from Google about how the Google Maps team optimised the latest Maps API to send larger tiles less frequently to perform better among other enhancements.

Just found a video that talks about this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rcvx5QHTJ5U

replacing the HDD with an SSD doesn't void the warranty, however replacing the DVD drive with one (like I did) does.

Applications start faster, loading any files from disk start faster. It depends on your usage scenario, but for .NET development in Windows I can vouch for it's value.

$200 for an SSD is a far better use of money for the average programmer than say the upgrade from I5 to I7 on a 13" MBP. There are many parts of your computer which you'd spend $200 on that get you less of a general every day performance boost than a SSD.

A vertex 2 is around $200 from what I can see: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227...

If you buy a sony or apple laptop, replace the drive yourself. I just bought a 13" MBP and bought a $25 caddy to put my Vertex 2 in the DVD bay. That way I have Windows 7 booting from that SSD, OSX on the normal HDD with extra storage available there. Of course you could just replace the HDD with an SSD and not void your warranty.

Sounds like Samsung are going to have a tough job defending this. I imported a Galaxy S to Australia before they were release here and I had many people asking me if it was an iPhone, or just assuming I had an iPhone when they saw it. That's changed a bit now as they have been heavily marketed by all the phone carriers so more people know what they are.

Of course, if you inspect it closer, you'll notice the device is thinner, and the screen is larger and has more vibrant colours (particularly compared to the 3gs that it looks like), but on a quick glance you'd think it could be an iPhone.

whenever I'd seen this book mentioned in 'best programming books' lists, on Stack Overflow and the like I'd figured it was a cutely named book to do with Perl and skipped over it.

http://teuxdeux.com/ is quite handy for simple short term tasks

I Liked comment karma as when I'm just taking a quick HN break I can skim down and read the best comments based on how many votes they got. Now I often just don't bother.

On my Galaxy S, Samsung has baked in Home+Back Button as a way of taking screenshots... though needless to say this combination is prone to error. It also doesn't seem to work on certain views.

From the article "Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (a.k.a. "the Winklevii")"

To be honest, I've never liked the screensavers on my Kindle (probably makes me uncultured, but I read programming books almost exclusively.) Always wondered why I couldn't change it easily - guess this is the reason. $25 isn't a great deal of a saving, 30-40 seems like a better saving, but I'd still choose it, I'd actually prefer to see advertising which may interest me on the main screen, especially if it uses Amazons recommendation engine to show me books that I would like.

I guess the main advantage of this is that Amazon can say things like "starting from $114!" even though many people will choose the ad-free upgrade. I'd also imagine that down the track they'll move it down to $99 ad-supported, which would be great for marketing.

When I first heard of this, I thought it would be something like seti@home where it uses your PC power to do jobs, and people would pay for those jobs to put onto the nextwork, if you were running it on your PC, you'd get some of that money.

But from what I read, all it does is do complex calculations that don't actually get used for anything? Just uses electricity in return for 'bitcoins'?

Does anyone know if there is such a thing as my original idea? Companies could buy distributed computing time that is sourced from home users idle clock cycles.

I don't like presentations like this. What suggestions or solutions were offered? Perhaps the audio mentioned some good resources to use to learn how to properly architect a complex, Javascript/JQuery heavy application, or perhaps I just missed it in the slides, but to me it just seemed like a rant. Sure it's identifying an issue but it would be a whole lot more useful if it gave some links to books/articles/etc with details on how to layout your code in a maintainable manner.

doesn't change the original point

Have you used Resharper with Visual Studio? Made by Jetbrains who make Intellij, it brings a lot of the same refactorings and other features across. No serious .NET developer should be without it, though Visual Studio 2010 has added a lot of new features that previously were only available through Resharper.

There sure is: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Default.aspx

I think the main advantage here is the designer doesn't need to learn git, they just work away on a Dropbox folder without knowing it's a git repository. Additionally, the main git repository doesn't need to be in dropbox, just the designers remote.

They could be good, but I think the user experience isn't quite there. I know on Android you have to download a barcode scanner app, which is easy enough, but until this starts being a standard feature, perhaps part of the camera application, or at the very least a pre-installed application, your average joe just won't get it.