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User: catbutt

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  1. Aside from Microsoft's history.... on TypeScript: Microsoft's Replacement For JavaScript · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...theirs seems like the right approach. It is certainly a better one than Dart. They've gone out of their way to be as compatible as possible, and really are making it practical for people to adopt the upcoming standards earlier. I really don't see what about this to get so up in arms about. Javascript does need improvements, and this is the best approach to that I've seen so far.

  2. Re:Yes on Online Privacy Worth Less Than Marshmallow Fluff Six Pack · · Score: 1

    I balance my desire to get there faster with the desire to avoid tickets. Conveniently, I can do this fairly accurately because I know the rate I get tickets and the cost of those tickets, based on 20 some years of driving, and getting a ticket once every several years.

    On the other hand, I have no real data on bad things that could happen to me by virtue of giving up personal data to a company like Google. Nothing ever has happened bad, to my knowledge. I doubt the chances of something bad happening are high at all.

    That is a totally different thing than speeding and tickets....one is a well-known risk that can be calculated and balanced against other priorities fairly easily, the other is just a theoretical risk.

  3. Re:Yes on Online Privacy Worth Less Than Marshmallow Fluff Six Pack · · Score: 1

    How is it stupid to not care about privacy, especially if you can't give a single tangible reason it harms them?

    I mean, I guess you could say I value privacy in the sense that I don't go to nudist colonies because I, like many people, consider what I look like naked to be private information. But that doesn't mean I am going to call someone "stupid" because it doesn't bother them if other people see them naked.

  4. "Pink Floyd engineer"? on Pink Floyd Engineer Alan Parsons Rips Audiophiles, YouTube and Jonas Brothers · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, we all know he was engineer for Pink Floyd, but seriously, isn't his name most known for his own stuff? (Eye in the Sky, etc)

  5. Re:Going down in flames on Ask Slashdot: Making JavaScript Tolerable For a Dyed-in-the-Wool C/C++/Java Guy? · · Score: 1

    Ok, so you've basically said Javascript sucks so just get used to it. I think that is excellent advice if the goal is for him to be miserable.

    There is lots of cool stuff in Javascript that isn't in C++, I started with C and then C++ myself, and I find Javascript incredibly liberating. I'm not going to go through all the different things I like about it, others have done that before. My only point is that treating it so negatively is, from a psychological point of view, the worst kind of advice.

  6. Re:Race you to the nearest open spot on Sensor Networks In San Francisco Finds Parking Spots · · Score: 2

    This would be awesome for the first person to use it. They'd have a pretty sweet advantage in finding a spot.

    Once everyone has it, it will doubtfully make a difference.

  7. Re:Not a real competitor to Siri on Siri Competitor Evi Arrives, But Already Overloaded · · Score: 2

    Even if it isn't a competitor now, it could certainly become one. "Built into the OS" isn't so much a good thing, although having access to everything it needs, is. If this service can do the hard part, it isn't that big a deal for Android to add API's to allow apps like this to work as seamlessly as Siri.

  8. Re:You know, I'm normally against quotas on Microsoft Patents Bad Neighborhood Detection · · Score: 1

    I don't agree with the OP, but I also don't agree with calling affirmative action "racist." Racism isn't just treating different races differently, a typical definition (wikipedia) is "the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination".

    Affirmative action is the opposite, it is based on the idea (flawed or not) that 1) groups should be treated the same, 2) the current situation is that they are not, and 3) the most effective way to move things toward equal treatment is to compensate by giving extra advantages to those who are otherwise disadvantaged due to racism.

    Whether or not you agree with this, it is not racist. But it does indeed distort the free market, which often is a bad thing.

  9. This logic doesn't really apply on Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same? · · Score: 2

    You are assuming the supply of each movie is fixed. They can change the supply by modifying the number of theaters each is shown in. Movies that are unpopular play for shorter periods.

    I think it would be smart if theaters did variable pricing, but it wouldn't necessarily mean Mission Impossible would be more expensive (since it would probably play longer). But in the most efficient world, there would be lower prices in play to lessen the number of empty seats, which could be considered waste.

  10. Re:Most Hollywood Movies are a Commodity on Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same? · · Score: 1

    That's absolutely untrue. For it to be a commodity, the consumer should not care which item they buy, they should only care about price. Are you going to see Young Adult simply because it is 50 cents cheaper than Mission Impossible? Probably not. Hence, not commodity.

  11. Re:Your math does not calculate on Samoa and Tokelau Are Skipping December 30th · · Score: 2

    Probably because dec 31, 2011 is in lots of legal contracts. If you eliminate that date, you have a lot more chances for people to try to weasel their way out of contracts, and more work for courts.

  12. Re:As a vegtarian: on FDA Backtracks On Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Proposal · · Score: 1

    For how many thousands of years have there been greater than one billion people on the planet?

    About 0.2 thousand, actually.

  13. Re:Shocked. on Do You Really Need a Smart Phone? · · Score: 1

    Your employer also has the right to give all the raise or bonus money to the guy who is more willing to comply. I'm not saying it is right, but it is reality.

  14. Re:Too much Javascript for non-interactive content on Average Web Page Approaches 1MB · · Score: 2

    Actually that's a really smart thing to do from a bandwidth point of view. There are all kinds of reasons not to do that (some of those are gradually disappearing, since now Google's crawler is starting to run some javascript to build the page as the user will see it), but if you are concerned about bandwidth, having javascript build your page for you is a very good way to do it.

  15. Re:Salvation Army on Ask Slashdot: Most Efficient, Worthwhile Charity? · · Score: 1

    Yeah but you are missing the point. The important thing is, the more donations come in to a particular cause, the more money they should be spending on that particular cause. If they have any credit (which obviously, the Red Cross does), they can do this before the "cash" is technically available.

  16. Re:just move on on How HP and Open Source Can Save WebOS · · Score: 1

    I don't see how you can say that. There are lots of things that could happen. The nice thing about WebOS is that its API is pretty standard Javascript/HTML5 stuff, so people don't have to invest so much in developing for it, as much of their work can apply elsewhere. Also, if it can be easily loaded on hardware sold with Android, it's pretty nice to have a platform that is more open than Android, and arguably, built in a more modern and future-compatible way.

    People might even modify it to work on windows-oriented hardware, such as tablets or even laptops. Who knows. We need something like this.

  17. Re:Awesome for web developers and designers. on Microsoft Upgrading Windows Users To Latest Version of MSIE · · Score: 1

    Are you sure about this? I understand that IE9 is not available for XP NOW, but certainly they could make it work on XP if they wanted to. Maybe certain things would be turned off, or maybe their would be code added to the OS to support those features, or something. But I can't see it being impossible to support the most important things in IE9 on XP. The important thing is to support the features that cause web sites to break, anyway.

  18. Re:Won't hurt either on Google-Funded Study Knocks Firefox Security · · Score: 1

    Microsoft probably knows that would be a waste of money. The people who are likely to put a non-IE browser on their PC's are pretty likely to know how to, and be inclined to, switch the default search engine.

  19. Re:Won't hurt either on Google-Funded Study Knocks Firefox Security · · Score: 1

    I think the implication is, the more the two trash-talk one another, the sooner Google stops writing the checks.

  20. Re:Awesome on HP Making webOS Open Source · · Score: 1

    Far as I know, QT is not portable to browser. And I don't know anyone who recommends doing web apps in C++. And it's not generally appropriate for Android. C++ (minus the qt part) might be ok on iPhone for libraries that don't call directly into the Cocoa API.

    So I'm having trouble seeing how it is so vastly portable to some of the platforms that are most relevant.

  21. Re:Awesome on HP Making webOS Open Source · · Score: 2

    Javascript isn't perfect, but its better than having do use a combination of PHP, Objective-C, Java, and Javascript to reach everyone.

  22. Re:A few billion to acquire it, then open source i on HP Making webOS Open Source · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think that anything HP can do to move people away from platforms controlled by their competitors, the better.

    If webOS has all the right things to take off in a big way, a device maker like HP can really benefit. I don't think HP likes having to pay the microsoft tax on all their PC's (they'd sell a lot more cheap pc's if they could reduce the price by the cost of windows), so if the next generation of devices are built on open standards like javascript and html5 take off, all the better for HP.

    Yes it would have been great for them if the world embraced webOS while it remaining fully owned by HP, but that just wasn't going to happen. The only possibility of getting people really interested -- given the head start both Android and iOS have -- was to set it free. It may turn out to be the smartest decision HP ever made.

  23. Awesome on HP Making webOS Open Source · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is excellent news. The best thing about WebOS is that it is built on things that people are standardizing on elsewhere. Javascript, html5 etc. WebOS even has node.js built in, which really is a start at tying all these things together -- client side web development, server side development, and "native" app development.

    This is clearly the direction things are heading, and like or hate Javascript, it's going to become the lingua franca for everything but system level or the most computationally intensive stuff. People get tired of reimplementing things they've already done in different languages. There are a lot of things converging right now, and this just might be something that pushes things over the top.

  24. Re:Free market for the win on Will Firefox Lose Google Funding? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Problem there, though. This happened before. IE4 was clearly better than Netscape. Once Netscape became irrelevant, IE stopped improving.

    Lack of competition is a bad thing.

  25. Re:Terrorism target. on A Floating Home For Tech Start-ups · · Score: 1

    They are certainly hacking the law. It would be way more expensive to set up their business there, than to do so somewhere on land. Why else would they do it if they weren't exploiting a loophole in the law.

    I'm not saying bad nor good, just saying that the sole reason for doing what they are doing is because our immigration laws were designed with the assumption that those outside of the US borders do not have particularly easy access to our major places of business.