At any rate, in 2014 when I bought the MBP, my choices for a Mini were either a used 2012 or a hobbled current model. I wanted smoetihng I wouldn't have to replace for the froeseeable future and I'm guessing your Mini is from before "the hobbling".
Yep, I bought 2012s when the nerfing was known. Refurbs are fine, too. I got the cheapest i7 quad configurations I could get, SSD replacements and more RAM made them quite useful, and they're quiet and pretty cool, which is important when you're sitting right next to them.
Viewport as in the piel dimensions at which the page is rendered.
Viewport, canvas, same thing. Yes, the browser's display space is always smaller than the screen resolution, on everything.
Because Safari on iOS doesn't generate click events in some cases, so one must be able to test in order to know where a tap or drag event might be needed. Literally only iOS has this problem.
And because Safari rendering engines differ between iOS and macOS which, of course, necessitates having an iOS device for each viewport you wish to target with a responsive design, as each device has a fixed (by the OS) viewport. This is less of a problem on Android, where Chrome and Firefox use their own engines and typically match what the desktop version does. Another reason I prefer Android, to be quite honest.
OK, that's some new Interesting data. I have not run across the Safari click events issue in iOS. I have run into the Android GUI select control swallowing clicks, and the only way around that one is write your own or do some outright stupid hackery. Regarding the underlying engines, I was under the impression they were all different for mobile, primarily because of what you're limited to in the mobile realm. If you're referring to the ability to be "pixel perfect" I truly feel your pain. It's just not going to happen across all those browsers.
1 year 8 months if you really want to nit-pick, but they didn't throw out everything they had; they were already building on a 2.6-series Linux kernel and using their in-house Java implementation (see your first reference) for codename "Sooner" before the iPhone was announced; they simply added touch screen support to that.
I think you may be right, and in that case, that fully explains why the first Android phones were so lackluster. That's even more depressing, btw, that means they took 20 months to add touch screen support.
Regarding your personal challenges to using a mac mini, you can screen share with them and run them headless. For initial setup/configuration, just about any reasonably modern TV would have functioned as the monitor.
When I started talking about viewport sizes, it should perhaps have been a giveaway that I wasn't talking about the desktop; for that, you just resize the window.
You were talking about viewport being important from the standpoint of safari running within it, or did I misunderstand? TBH, unless you're doing mobile / tablet development, I don't know why you'd need a specific set of devices.
After working for two years on Sooner, which was supposed to ship in late 2007... and whose launch was pushed back to fall 2008.
Seems like more than a few weeks to me, and that's assuming they didn't change course until the official iPhone announcement on January 9, 2007. They spent over a year reworking what they reworked. Well over a year, nearly two. Again, assuming they didn't start before the public announcement.
Something like 1.5 years. IIRC the iPhone was in development for over 3 years. But yes, they rushed to attempt to build it out. From 0 to their first Android phone was pretty quick, far quicker than they would preferred from everything I recall reading at the time. And what they released then was truly underwhelming. It's why they relinquished as much control as they did, because they needed to gain as much market as possible or it could have been them, not MS, that buckled and disappeared.
I guess a $400 mini wouldn't satisfy your Safari needs?
Not when I need to test against the larger viewport of the larger iPad Pro. No, it would not. Before that, I bought an Air because it was the newer device and would be supported longer (a new Mini model came out some time after that purchase). The Mini (and Ari) present a 1024x768 viewport, compared to the Pro's 1366x1024. That matters.
I have no idea what you're talking about there. My mini runs just fine on my 2K monitor. It's whatever you plug it into, or what you size the display for in VMs, if you're wanting to match a specific video size, open the Displays preference pane, select scaled, and resize your VM window. It takes at most a couple of minutes to setup. I just double checked and I definitely can create a 1366x1024 window, among many other sizes. This is running OSX 10.10 in a Parallels 10 VM (yeah, haven't needed to upgrade that particular machine in a while) Need to check multiple sizes at once? I can run 5 VMs without an issue simultaneously and view them side by side.
A widget is always there displaying your information or waiting for your interaction, while an app must be located, opened, and navigated through. Opening an app can take anywhere from almost no time, up to several seconds, depending on the app, and navigation can also be nontrivial.
I guess we really operate differently. I unlock, look at mail, done. My home screen is organized to have the apps I'm interested in 1 tap away, so generally, unlock, tap, look, done. Home, tap, look for another app. As the phone is more than capable of appearing to be running all my apps all the time, it's not an issue. Oh, and background processing is turned off pretty much across the board.
Google basically did a "how fast can we rip off and write a clone of iOS with what we have" rush job, and they've been bandaiding it ever since.
Do you honestly believe that? Like, really? You think they put together a full operating system and hardware to run it on, build a handful of test units, got FCC approval, got it into manufacturing, and moved it onto store shelves in a matter of weeks? If they did, they should sell logistics as a service; just getting FCC approval for a device takes longer than people making that claim seem to think the entire R&D, testing, approval, manufacture, and shipping process took Google.
Actually, they did. They had a phone in development for a couple of years, and when they discovered what the iPhone really was, they scrapped their design and whipped up a clone as fast as they could.
What's the average, though, and did you have to buy them all at once? That was my point. With the exception of the $600 iPad Pro, the remaining $3900 outlay in Apple gear, just for web browsers, was all bought at once. You don't know pain, as it relates to testing gear, until you spend $2300 for a copy of Safari.
I guess a $400 mini wouldn't satisfy your Safari needs?
I never argued otherwise; but if you're buying a device for testing, you're going to buy the one that will be supported for the longest period of time, which means you're buying the newest device in most cases, so the $129 SE isn't really relevant here.
Actually, I had to buy an SE, and some lower level Android devices, specifically to ensure that our apps worked properly on them. It wasn't at all about whether the phones would be supported, but that our user base was supported.
And this is why Android's home screen (e.g. where your icons are, not visible while locked) widgets are better.
I guess I don't get it. Generally the apps are fine for me, a widget is like Tom, in Office Space.
That is truly an understatement.
I don't think Slashdot will let me fit enough text into the 50 posts I get each day to properly elaborate.
Thanks for the laugh. I need those daily, keeps the frustration in its place.
A lot of Apple's architectural decisions leave me scratching my head. Then again, so do a lot of Google's... and Microsoft's... and don't get me started on Linux; if more VPS providers supported BSD, that's what I'd run my servers on.
NetBSD is pretty decent, but yes, mostly we're running either RedHat or CentOS for our linux deployments.
As for architectural decisions, Apple I get on the desktop, after thinking about it. I do hope they're successful with what I believe their goal is. On iOS, they just need to get it together and fix what they broke. It's the same goal, it's just worse with some of the earlier GUI architecture they have. CoreData, like EJBs, sounds great as a concept, the implementation is so poor its unusable. However, Apple did do one thing that no other vendor has yet been able to accomplish well: they created a usable user-friendly non-lagging desktop on top of BSD.
Google basically did a "how fast can we rip off and write a clone of iOS with what we have" rush job, and they've been bandaiding it ever since. Oh, and we'll take our internal team's Java VM and use that. IOW, no real decisions were made with anything other than a view to how fast they could get out the door.
As for MS.... well, think 1M monkeys in a warehouse, design by committee, and technical decisions by inept individuals, and you get all the wonders of MS APIs and designs. MS was never about creating technically superior products, it was about how do we own a market and what do we need to do it.
At least you can get your hands on the Android devices you need for (relatively) cheap, though.
My Android phones range from $130 to $800, they're not exactly cheap. The $130 units are the newer LG K-20s that we just picked up. The whole range of Galaxy Sn phones were all relatively pricey. iPhones are surprisingly competitive, I can pick up a brand spanking new 64GB iPhone 8 for $649, and an SE for $129 (IIRC - otherwise $199 at Apple), so it really depends upon what you're shooting for there, but from my experiences you can grab either side of the mobile OS coin for similar money, with the exception of the Apple side all being on the latest OS version.
Yes, Apple has a handful of lock screen widgets...Of course, they'd also be worse because nobody I hand my phone to (or who takes it from me) would have to unlock to see them, either.
This is why I don't get the whole widgets thing. Usually the things I need to see are things I don't want joe random to be able to see merely by picking up my phone. Things I don't need to see don't need to be on the lock screen, qed.
But, even as a user, if you borrow or try to help someone with their phone, it's like randomly picking up a version of windows NT from 2000 through Win10 and being asked to help connect to a wireless access point.
That's a caveat of customization. I'll agree that manufacturers have been given too long of a leash for their own customization, but it's really a side effect of giving the user that level of control. It's one that Google should have foreseen and handled contractually, and they're taking steps to reel it in; they have to boil the frog, so to speak, making subtle changes over time so as not to run afoul of existing licensing agreements. Even if this was handled correctly from day one, there would still be nothing technically preventing a manufacturer from modifying the OS, though, as that's really one of the points of Android: to be able to be modified.
I know that they're trying to improve it recently by removing some customization abilities. I have yet to see the results which should be a more consistent experience.
On the vast majority of devices, it's POWER+HOME just like iOS. I'll grand you that, though, for the handful of devices (including my Yoga Book) where it is not. Screen grabs have always appeared in the photos app for me; that same Photos app (provided by Google, so it's the same on every device) has a Device Folders menu item, you can find pretty much everything there. You can also the ( i ) icon while viewing an image to get a whole slew of information about it, including its location on the device. There should never be a reason to have to look that up; even the vendor-provided and aftermarket viewers I've seen show all media by default and provide this info, because the vast majority of them use the Photos API in the first place.
On the LG K20, for example, it's in the Capture+ folder, because how you get a screen capture there is via the pull-down screen, and there's a check mark on the left, you tap the check mark and you get a screen capture. It's not in the Photos app and, in fact, I'm not even sure that particular phone has the Photos app. On older LGs, it's volume down + power, which is a royal pain as that's a single triple rocker button in the middle of the back side of the phone. A few of the Samsungs also use the volume down and power button, and you have to long press them. You know, just like you're turning off your phone? Awesome UX decision there. Other samsungs are power+home as you note. The Asus uses photos, I believe, I can't really remember.
Indeed. You think it sucks because all mobile operating systems suck to some degree.
That is truly an understatement.
Well, without knowing why you have nearly 7x as many Android devices, it sure seems like you prefer Android. Somehow, I don't think that's the case so, no, it really doesn't.
Among other things, I develop apps for mobile. That's the requirements for Android support at this time. Another reason I truly dislike Android. My view is admittedly colored by the pain of having to constantly swap phones and figure out what's going on in each version/vendor/hardware release combination. I really love it when APIs behave as consistently as the rest of the Android ecosystem. But, to be fair, iOS's APIs are sometimes just as inconsistent. CoreData, I don't think I'll ever use you again, anywhere. It's a shining example of how not to do a data store. Then again, basing CoreData on SQLite says all you need to know about that, except SQLite itself is actually far better and more reliable than CoreData.
I feel the same way when I have a ton of notifications....if you prefer notifications (or nags as I often call them), I can't really argue with that and iOS is the clear winner for you.
Actually, I turn 99+% of those off. I can glance at my calendar if I need to see what's happening, my todo list if I need to see what's due next, etc (I guess those would be widgets?:) Mail is absolutely 0 notifications, or I'd never be able to focus on anything. This goes for all my systems. Do I occasionally miss an "important" message sent via email or IM? No, because if it was truly important, there'd be a call. Does this mean you sometimes have to train a new boss? If you have one, absolutely. So far it's not actually been a problem.
Ah, what luxury, being "away from work". What I wouldn't give to know that concept....When you live that life, you minimize distractions, and persistent notifications are distractions; if my phone is notifying me of something, I need it to be something important.
We both wish to avoid distractions. You may have some special needs/requirements for reaching you or have chosen a method I have not. Whatever works. And yes, I know all about the always "on" situation. Work-life balance still needs to be maintained as much as possible. 3am call need to be rare.
For example, virtual desktops
just fucking suck. But I can tell from the rest of your comment that we agree on that.
In short, it's like having Tom (Office Space) with the "important" job of delivery the requirements from the business to the programmers. An unneeded useless if not detrimental extra layer.
In any case, if you're finding yourself having to keep setting Android up over and over, you're doing something unusual;
Yes, I admitted as much. But, even as a user, if you borrow or try to help someone with their phone, it's like randomly picking up a version of windows NT from 2000 through Win10 and being asked to help connect to a wireless access point. You kind of know where to go and how to do it, but it varies on just about every single version. And if a vendor chose to install their own wireless "driver" along with its not so helpful application... (if you're unlucky enough to have that situation, grab a double shot) And that's the crux of my issues with Android, just because you get something with "Android" on it doesn't mean you actually know how it works nor what's available, because it varies so much. I'm running devices from Asus, LG, and Samsung with OS versions from 4.4 through 7 and can definitely state that about the only single consistent things are the login screen and the fact that somewhere there is at least 1 "settings" app, although what you get when you open it varies.
Actually, here's something you have to look up: screen captures. There's at least 7 possible ways to accomplish a screen capture. Your guess is as good as mine which one applies to a specific device/OS version. What's even better was when I was trying to figure it out on an LG phone (which wasn't in anything I searched BTW) I came across it by accident, and it's completely different than any other phone I have. It's a pull down menu feature. Now, next fun fact, where are these screen grabs stored? That also varies by device/vendor/OS version.
By now, you should see why I think Android sucks. Android is the Windows of the phone world. There's just no consistency and you have to relearn just about everything every time you grab a new device/version. I do readily admit that if you pick up a single Android device and only work with it, then it's a wholly different experience for you and many of these issues will never crop up. I have roughly 20 different android devices on my desk. That fact alone, as compared to 3 iDevices, says everything.
Not everything works as a notification, my friend. RSS feeds sort-of work, but the notifications tend to disappear once you've interscted with thime, while the widgets remain there for later reference. Slicky notes and lists are other useful widgets that just don't exist on iOS. If those aren't useful to you, so be it, enjoy iOS, there's nothing wrong with that. It really isn't my fault that you can't fathom someone having different usage patterns than you, but, well, I do. iOS doesn't work for my as a phone OS and that's that.
I tried sticky notes, they drove me crazy. We obviously have different usage patterns. For me, I prefer a laptop, then a tablet, then a phone, in that order. I am over-connected (is that a valid condition?) enough that I absolutely don't want RSS feeds, for example, on my phone. Disconnecting when I'm away from work is something of a goal for me, and I'd leave my phone in my drawer in a different house if I could get away with it.
This would be a worthy discussion had I not already tried it and if I weren't already a daily user of iOS, but I have and I am. You aren't introducing me to a better way or whatever you think it is you're doing, I'm already quite familiar with iOS, thanks. Familiar enough to know it's not what I want on my phone.
I'm just genuinely curious why you stated what you stated. I've tried similar things, and they at best just annoyed me, at worst made me want to throw a device in the trash. For example, virtual desktops are something people swear they'd die without. Conceptually it sounded interesting, and I've tried multiple different approaches to make them work, but what I wind up with is a huge set of common apps across all of them and then 1 or 2 specific apps in each desktop. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong? Or maybe my usage patterns just don't fit within those paradigms. I'm thinking the latter. Apparently my work habits don't seem to lead me to suffer the issues that people say virtual desktops fix for them.
I'll be 100% honest - on the surface I fully agree with Android's approach - let the user do what they want. In execution, I find it terrible. iOS, OTOH, does what I need it to 99% of the time and, as a bonus, I almost never have to futz with anything to fix it or even pay any attention to iOS at all. This suits me as I just don't have the extra time to deal with such a distraction.
The easiest way to locate info on a phone is to have a widget displaying it when you unlock the phone. Last I checked, iOS doesn't support home screen widgets.
There's equivalent - I generally use notifications for that. You can configure those to show even without unlocking the phone.
Allrighty, let's dig into it - I wish to find where on the phone a particular app data file is.
How do you do that on iOS? I'm genuinely asking as, last time I checked, you could not.
In iOS, you don't, at least until iOS 11 (I heard some snippet about viewing the filesystem, maybe it's not correct) However, it's easy enough to see files via Imazing or, yick, iTunes. And those don't magically appear/disappear either, unlike Android's external viewing options.
Not a chance. Every one with less than 1 year of official updates. We'll see about the S7.
You must be referring to one year from when you bought it, in which case people get hit with that on iOS as well if they buy an older model. The S7 is already past the 1 year mark (and was when I upgraded to the S8 the day it came out) and is still receiving updates.
Depends on your vendor. I'd check the S7, but it was shipped out last week. As soon as I get it back, I'll see when the last update was. BTW, support doesn't mean some firmware gets a minor tweak, but the OS gets its version updates. So when I buy a phone, and it's OS 3.2, and 6 months down the road OS 4.0 comes out, if I can't install OS 4.0, then that phone is effectively unsupported under the OS, especially given that OS updates on a given version appear to stop within 6 months of the next full version release. (3.x -> 4.x -> 5.x... which happens yearly)
The S6, released in in April of 2015, saw an update just last week, as did the S5, released in April of 2014. The S4, released in April of 2013, saw its most recent update in February of this year, a whole whopping two months shy of 4 years.
I do have an S4 at hand. I charged it purely for this conversation, as it's been shelved since Jan because it's stuck on 4.4.4, with ATT. So, you are partially correct, I think, in that a camera firmware update was installed on start up, without a prompt mind you. However, I'm still stuck on the "latest" 4.4.4 OS. Unless there's someplace that I haven't found, there is no official means for updating to a newer Android release. The Note 4, Note 2, and the S6 I have somewhere all are similarly unsupported, at least as of Jan. Failing to release the current OS for a 6 month old phone that is perfectly capable of running it means that the phone is unsupported. And for your info, Kies doesn't offer any updates to those phones beyond what's now installed either. In fact, I got 1 point revision on the Note 4 via Kies that wasn't available via the phone itself. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement.
Yes, other manufacturers get it wrong, but the one who consistently outsells Apple, the one who is most statistically significant for that reason, seems to have been getting it right for a while now. Let's confirm by looking at the S3: released May of 2012, last update April of 2014, 23 months of support; that must be where you're getting the "less than 2 years of support" meme from, but it hasn't been true for a while.
My S4 came with 4.2, and stopped at 4.4.4. Where's the 5.x or newer updates? (4.2->4.4.4 was about 12 months, IIRC) The Note 4, same story. Note 2 actually had more than 12 months support, came with 4.1, and stopped at 4.3, I think. I can't be bothered to see if that one will even hold a charge, it's in the to be recycled bin after all. IIRC, the S6 has 5.1, no 6.x for it, even though Samsung released a build but Kies says there's nothing available.
I pull my phone out for quick access to some bit of information, or to bang out a quick reply to a message. Android allows me to customize this interaction a lot more, so I can optimize for the tasks I do most often and get them done in 2 seconds rather than 5; that time adds up a lot more than you might think.
Interesting. A message is a message, and I see no effective difference between entering one in Android vs iOS. Ditto for browsing. As for locating info on the phone, the iOS search feature is pretty damn quick, and works within various apps (mail, contacts) as well. I'm not sure what specific thing you think takes more than twice as long on iOS.
As for your frequently having to look up how to do things on various versions of Android, that speaks a lot more about you than it does about Android. Having owned phones and tablets from Motorola, HTC, L
What's true is that a degree doesn't fully prepare you, but it does get you most of the way there. What's also true is that a degree isn't the only way to get prepared.
I'd argue that for many degree based careers, a degree opens the door more easily and certainly smooths your path after getting in the door, provided you develop all the skills you need to learn post degree. This is true across quite a few technically based career paths, and is why a PE requires (or rather strongly promotes) an apprenticeship.
You'd think that. The reality is, most coming out of schools for the past 15 years know Java and JS, or, for the really unfortunately ones, C# and JS. They know next to nothing about how to design and build real solutions, because that means you know more than some fancy academic software design methodology, which they also often don't understand. So most of them, if they're good for anything at all, is being a coder. Maybe after a few years they'll be promotable, but many aren't.
Been through the mill in all stages of nothing to government contracts. If you're building real software for a growing business, you're better off writing specs at some point after the startup phase, and sometimes during it. Yes, it costs more and takes a little longer, but that's a whole lot better than having the house of cards come crashing down at an inopportune time, like when you're about to go public and people check out out because of the buzz.
"You don't need to become a PE in the US. In fact, it is highly unusual unless you are signing off on certain documents."
Maybe for computer related work, however, in many traditional engineering professions, a PE is expected, if not required. The difference is often related to work that affects the public.
As for NSPE, they wanted more members and saw an opportunity with computers, through hardware design, to capture a new field, as did engineering schools.
I can attest that a PE is not required unless you're signing documents certifying them and the work they represent for certain entities. Construction and related industries are really the primary driver for PEs, and the majority of engineers working in those industries are not PEs. You only need 1 PE within a company, as long as they have the ability to review and approve the designs, etc. I don't recall running into many PEs in automotive or aerospace related industries, although I am sure there were a few, just given the era that occurred in.
Most coders are not engineers, whatever their title may say. Most software architects aren't engineers either. And no, having a CS degree definitely doesn't make you an engineer.
It's obvious you lack the experience and vocabulary to speak in this domain, and are only concerned with your own niche, much like a JS web developer calling themselves "fullstack" yet having no clue how to handle continuous levels of 20K transactions a second in a secure guaranteed fashion. (it's irrelevant whether you do, btw) When/if you graduate to large distributed heterogeneous enterprise systems, we may talk again. You won't be running QtCreator then.
Work on enterprise software. The details I can share involve past system projects which included up to 60 library and component projects which built out up to 10 separate servers, clients, and web applications. These were usually installed on sets of servers in HA/HR/HP configurations. When you're working across such projects and need to re-architect some base service definitions and functionality, yes, you absolutely do want that many projects open at once.
QtCreator makes no assumptions about what you will work on, so there are no open projects when launched. Btw, having 5M LoC of interdependent projects open automatically isn't a feature I want.
It may be something you need to work efficiently. So you're really comparing apples and oranges there. How long when you open QtCreator does it take to open your project, be able to view the opened codebase for errors, and have it running a debug test session? With Eclipse, generally, once its done with its 10s opening, you're good to go with 1 click. And remember, you have a lot of code open, static analysis done, toolsets initialized, etc, it's not just a "open project now please" state.
When that one well-supported device outsells any individual model of iPhone (be fair, compare a single model to a single model)
what model is that? Every single Samsung (who owns the Android market) is unsupported in less than 2 years, AFAIK. I have 4 of them on my desk, between 2 and 4 years old, none are officially supported. Jailbroken, sure. But official support? Not a chance. Every one with less than 1 year of official updates. We'll see about the S7.
and iOS is better than Android for locking you into Apple's ecosystem.
Capt. Obvious today?;)
Also, and I've never been able to put my finger on it, iOS just really clashes with how I use my phone;... Of course, the same can be said about Android when it comes to tablet use, which is why I have an iPad Pro and not a Galaxy Tab.
There's so much to talk about in those 2 sentences.
Other than phone calls and potentially cellular data app use, exactly how does your phone usage vary from tablet usage enough to make that statement? (Note, this is only relation to the functions that a phone supports that are on a tablet) I can see there are use cases and apps on the tablet that just aren't available or usuable on a phone's small screen, but anything on a phone can pretty much be done on a tablet.
With that out of the way, I actually have trouble understanding the Android use case on a phone. (Note I have a bunch of them, and probably the singular thing I hate about Android is the total lack of standardized core functionality across various revisions, each one and version having its own way of accessing files, viewing settings, and dealing with internals.
Now, I'll grant you that what I do with a phone is probably in the sub 1% grouping. If you're doing email, phone calls, messaging and web browsing, I guess the apps are pretty consistent (I wouldn't know since I might use any of those features on anything approaching even a monthly basis on any of those phones) but from an accessing systems, apps, data, media, logs, etc, Android absolutely SUCKS and is so inconsistent that I frequently have to lookup how to do a particular function on that version of Android from that particular vendor if I haven't touched that device/version/vendor in a couple of weeks. That's not a statement to the quality of my memory but rather how stupidly varied the approaches are on something I may do once every few months on a given device/version/vendor and maybe have done once or twice previously. By comparison, Apple devices have at most 2 approaches across all devices and up to 4 versions of iOS back. Although the versions back don't really matter because in what I support roughly 95% are on the latest version of iOS, meaning there's exactly 1 way I need to deal with everything. Perhaps that's another reason why developers choose to support Apple, despite everything else, and Android is a distant second.
I hear you, however, my point was don't have BT on unless you need it. In my case, that's very very very seldom with anything except my HTPC. I admit I skimmed TFS and didn't believe the severity that was stated. I was under the impression that computers and laptops were "ok" but devices attached to them weren't. That's probably some misinformation from some responses I also read across the couple of days, so what I read probably got shoved aside by other concerns, as I'm not a big BT user (ie, I didn't pay as much attention as I would have if, say, SSDs had been the problem device) That said, if this truly is as bad as BadUSB with effectively you plugging in every single USB device you pass, then its a really huge problem.
Case in point, the woman in front of me in the Target customer service line about a year and a half ago, returning a bluetooth speaker, ranting about how she's a security researcher with a Masters in CS and how she's "appalled that it wants to act as an input device and read her phone book which, of course, I did not allow -- and, by the way, the play and skip buttons don't work."
Quite honestly, I get the input device for play/skip buttons, but phone book? And input device seems overly generic and broad for "audio input device" functionality, which would only have limited input functionality, no general keyboard.
Finally, I agree, you can't fix stupid. And stupid is what a large segment of the consumer base is when it comes to these devices, and when it comes to security, well, it's like finding a needle in all the haystacks in a country. Sadly, that not just related to computers. An astoundingly small percentage of people can fix their own brakes, change their own oil, repair a sprinkler head, replace a faucet, sharpen a mower blade, or even hammer a nail to hold a fence board it seems, never mind working on anything connected to an electrical power source of any sort.
EJB is probably the most singular reason people hate Java so much. You just ruined my appetite for just mentioning it:)
That's like hating C because of Windows. EJBs are an abomination in implementation, although the concept itself is egalitarian. I'm just not sure it can be handled in Java, at least not with the loose constraints they used. CORBA is a much better implementation as it succeeds where EJBs fail, in providing usable service APIs behind which you can do what's needed. It's no panacea, but at least it is serviceable.
Whatever you might think of Uber as a company, the tech it uses is a fundamentally better way of arranging a ride than standing outside in the rain yelling ay cars.
Yes, being able to "order online" anything is potentially better than calling it in (which has existed for decades, btw) but it merely is an improved handshake mechanism for ordering that removes a lot of potential of human (usually customer) error. In the case of a ride, there's only a few extra details that I'm sure are on the uber and lyft apps.
We also use the STL data structures and algorithms, which have excellent performance. C++14 and C++17 are better than Java in pretty much every way.
The STL, and the horrid namespaces as implemented in C++. The 2 truly terrible decisions that made Java, even with its lower performance look like eden in comparison. Now, it's been a a while, obviously, but a pure algorithm written in C++ utilizing linkages across 3 libraries with STL is what made me decide C++ just wasn't up to snuff. Why? Because when you compile the algorithm on NT or OS/2 (yes, it was a while ago) it worked fine, but compile it on Solaris or Irix, you'd get different results. Now why was this? Because the length of the pointer name in the compiler exceeded the maximum length by 1 byte in certain link orders on Solaris and Irix and you wound up with some interesting pointer ambiguity. There were no errors thrown. It was absolutely wonderful to try to figure out why that happened, and the hap-hazard inconsistent results with exact same starting data occurred in what should have been a constrained algorithm. OTOH, helping someone else out with a similar issue with fortran later on was cake.
I had the distinct nausea of having to deal with the STL relatively recently and what it reminds me of is that other pile of crap I won't touch: EJBs
Slashdot Mirror
At any rate, in 2014 when I bought the MBP, my choices for a Mini were either a used 2012 or a hobbled current model. I wanted smoetihng I wouldn't have to replace for the froeseeable future and I'm guessing your Mini is from before "the hobbling".
Yep, I bought 2012s when the nerfing was known. Refurbs are fine, too. I got the cheapest i7 quad configurations I could get, SSD replacements and more RAM made them quite useful, and they're quiet and pretty cool, which is important when you're sitting right next to them.
Viewport as in the piel dimensions at which the page is rendered.
Viewport, canvas, same thing. Yes, the browser's display space is always smaller than the screen resolution, on everything.
Because Safari on iOS doesn't generate click events in some cases, so one must be able to test in order to know where a tap or drag event might be needed. Literally only iOS has this problem. And because Safari rendering engines differ between iOS and macOS which, of course, necessitates having an iOS device for each viewport you wish to target with a responsive design, as each device has a fixed (by the OS) viewport. This is less of a problem on Android, where Chrome and Firefox use their own engines and typically match what the desktop version does. Another reason I prefer Android, to be quite honest.
OK, that's some new Interesting data. I have not run across the Safari click events issue in iOS. I have run into the Android GUI select control swallowing clicks, and the only way around that one is write your own or do some outright stupid hackery. Regarding the underlying engines, I was under the impression they were all different for mobile, primarily because of what you're limited to in the mobile realm. If you're referring to the ability to be "pixel perfect" I truly feel your pain. It's just not going to happen across all those browsers.
1 year 8 months if you really want to nit-pick, but they didn't throw out everything they had; they were already building on a 2.6-series Linux kernel and using their in-house Java implementation (see your first reference) for codename "Sooner" before the iPhone was announced; they simply added touch screen support to that.
I think you may be right, and in that case, that fully explains why the first Android phones were so lackluster. That's even more depressing, btw, that means they took 20 months to add touch screen support.
Regarding your personal challenges to using a mac mini, you can screen share with them and run them headless. For initial setup/configuration, just about any reasonably modern TV would have functioned as the monitor.
When I started talking about viewport sizes, it should perhaps have been a giveaway that I wasn't talking about the desktop; for that, you just resize the window.
You were talking about viewport being important from the standpoint of safari running within it, or did I misunderstand? TBH, unless you're doing mobile / tablet development, I don't know why you'd need a specific set of devices.
Oh? From your last reference:
After working for two years on Sooner, which was supposed to ship in late 2007 ... and whose launch was pushed back to fall 2008.
Seems like more than a few weeks to me, and that's assuming they didn't change course until the official iPhone announcement on January 9, 2007. They spent over a year reworking what they reworked. Well over a year, nearly two. Again, assuming they didn't start before the public announcement.
Something like 1.5 years. IIRC the iPhone was in development for over 3 years. But yes, they rushed to attempt to build it out. From 0 to their first Android phone was pretty quick, far quicker than they would preferred from everything I recall reading at the time. And what they released then was truly underwhelming. It's why they relinquished as much control as they did, because they needed to gain as much market as possible or it could have been them, not MS, that buckled and disappeared.
I guess a $400 mini wouldn't satisfy your Safari needs?
Not when I need to test against the larger viewport of the larger iPad Pro. No, it would not. Before that, I bought an Air because it was the newer device and would be supported longer (a new Mini model came out some time after that purchase). The Mini (and Ari) present a 1024x768 viewport, compared to the Pro's 1366x1024. That matters.
I have no idea what you're talking about there. My mini runs just fine on my 2K monitor. It's whatever you plug it into, or what you size the display for in VMs, if you're wanting to match a specific video size, open the Displays preference pane, select scaled, and resize your VM window. It takes at most a couple of minutes to setup. I just double checked and I definitely can create a 1366x1024 window, among many other sizes. This is running OSX 10.10 in a Parallels 10 VM (yeah, haven't needed to upgrade that particular machine in a while) Need to check multiple sizes at once? I can run 5 VMs without an issue simultaneously and view them side by side.
A widget is always there displaying your information or waiting for your interaction, while an app must be located, opened, and navigated through. Opening an app can take anywhere from almost no time, up to several seconds, depending on the app, and navigation can also be nontrivial.
I guess we really operate differently. I unlock, look at mail, done. My home screen is organized to have the apps I'm interested in 1 tap away, so generally, unlock, tap, look, done. Home, tap, look for another app. As the phone is more than capable of appearing to be running all my apps all the time, it's not an issue. Oh, and background processing is turned off pretty much across the board.
Google basically did a "how fast can we rip off and write a clone of iOS with what we have" rush job, and they've been bandaiding it ever since.
Do you honestly believe that? Like, really? You think they put together a full operating system and hardware to run it on, build a handful of test units, got FCC approval, got it into manufacturing, and moved it onto store shelves in a matter of weeks? If they did, they should sell logistics as a service; just getting FCC approval for a device takes longer than people making that claim seem to think the entire R&D, testing, approval, manufacture, and shipping process took Google.
Actually, they did. They had a phone in development for a couple of years, and when they discovered what the iPhone really was, they scrapped their design and whipped up a clone as fast as they could.
What's the average, though, and did you have to buy them all at once? That was my point. With the exception of the $600 iPad Pro, the remaining $3900 outlay in Apple gear, just for web browsers, was all bought at once. You don't know pain, as it relates to testing gear, until you spend $2300 for a copy of Safari.
I guess a $400 mini wouldn't satisfy your Safari needs?
I never argued otherwise; but if you're buying a device for testing, you're going to buy the one that will be supported for the longest period of time, which means you're buying the newest device in most cases, so the $129 SE isn't really relevant here.
Actually, I had to buy an SE, and some lower level Android devices, specifically to ensure that our apps worked properly on them. It wasn't at all about whether the phones would be supported, but that our user base was supported.
And this is why Android's home screen (e.g. where your icons are, not visible while locked) widgets are better.
I guess I don't get it. Generally the apps are fine for me, a widget is like Tom, in Office Space.
That is truly an understatement.
I don't think Slashdot will let me fit enough text into the 50 posts I get each day to properly elaborate.
Thanks for the laugh. I need those daily, keeps the frustration in its place.
A lot of Apple's architectural decisions leave me scratching my head. Then again, so do a lot of Google's... and Microsoft's... and don't get me started on Linux; if more VPS providers supported BSD, that's what I'd run my servers on.
NetBSD is pretty decent, but yes, mostly we're running either RedHat or CentOS for our linux deployments.
As for architectural decisions, Apple I get on the desktop, after thinking about it. I do hope they're successful with what I believe their goal is. On iOS, they just need to get it together and fix what they broke. It's the same goal, it's just worse with some of the earlier GUI architecture they have. CoreData, like EJBs, sounds great as a concept, the implementation is so poor its unusable. However, Apple did do one thing that no other vendor has yet been able to accomplish well: they created a usable user-friendly non-lagging desktop on top of BSD.
Google basically did a "how fast can we rip off and write a clone of iOS with what we have" rush job, and they've been bandaiding it ever since. Oh, and we'll take our internal team's Java VM and use that. IOW, no real decisions were made with anything other than a view to how fast they could get out the door.
As for MS.... well, think 1M monkeys in a warehouse, design by committee, and technical decisions by inept individuals, and you get all the wonders of MS APIs and designs. MS was never about creating technically superior products, it was about how do we own a market and what do we need to do it.
At least you can get your hands on the Android devices you need for (relatively) cheap, though.
My Android phones range from $130 to $800, they're not exactly cheap. The $130 units are the newer LG K-20s that we just picked up. The whole range of Galaxy Sn phones were all relatively pricey. iPhones are surprisingly competitive, I can pick up a brand spanking new 64GB iPhone 8 for $649, and an SE for $129 (IIRC - otherwise $199 at Apple), so it really depends upon what you're shooting for there, but from my experiences you can grab either side of the mobile OS coin for similar money, with the exception of the Apple side all being on the latest OS version.
Yes, Apple has a handful of lock screen widgets ...Of course, they'd also be worse because nobody I hand my phone to (or who takes it from me) would have to unlock to see them, either.
This is why I don't get the whole widgets thing. Usually the things I need to see are things I don't want joe random to be able to see merely by picking up my phone. Things I don't need to see don't need to be on the lock screen, qed.
But, even as a user, if you borrow or try to help someone with their phone, it's like randomly picking up a version of windows NT from 2000 through Win10 and being asked to help connect to a wireless access point.
That's a caveat of customization. I'll agree that manufacturers have been given too long of a leash for their own customization, but it's really a side effect of giving the user that level of control. It's one that Google should have foreseen and handled contractually, and they're taking steps to reel it in; they have to boil the frog, so to speak, making subtle changes over time so as not to run afoul of existing licensing agreements. Even if this was handled correctly from day one, there would still be nothing technically preventing a manufacturer from modifying the OS, though, as that's really one of the points of Android: to be able to be modified.
I know that they're trying to improve it recently by removing some customization abilities. I have yet to see the results which should be a more consistent experience.
On the vast majority of devices, it's POWER+HOME just like iOS. I'll grand you that, though, for the handful of devices (including my Yoga Book) where it is not. Screen grabs have always appeared in the photos app for me; that same Photos app (provided by Google, so it's the same on every device) has a Device Folders menu item, you can find pretty much everything there. You can also the ( i ) icon while viewing an image to get a whole slew of information about it, including its location on the device. There should never be a reason to have to look that up; even the vendor-provided and aftermarket viewers I've seen show all media by default and provide this info, because the vast majority of them use the Photos API in the first place.
On the LG K20, for example, it's in the Capture+ folder, because how you get a screen capture there is via the pull-down screen, and there's a check mark on the left, you tap the check mark and you get a screen capture. It's not in the Photos app and, in fact, I'm not even sure that particular phone has the Photos app. On older LGs, it's volume down + power, which is a royal pain as that's a single triple rocker button in the middle of the back side of the phone. A few of the Samsungs also use the volume down and power button, and you have to long press them. You know, just like you're turning off your phone? Awesome UX decision there. Other samsungs are power+home as you note. The Asus uses photos, I believe, I can't really remember.
Indeed. You think it sucks because all mobile operating systems suck to some degree.
That is truly an understatement.
Well, without knowing why you have nearly 7x as many Android devices, it sure seems like you prefer Android. Somehow, I don't think that's the case so, no, it really doesn't.
Among other things, I develop apps for mobile. That's the requirements for Android support at this time. Another reason I truly dislike Android. My view is admittedly colored by the pain of having to constantly swap phones and figure out what's going on in each version/vendor/hardware release combination. I really love it when APIs behave as consistently as the rest of the Android ecosystem. But, to be fair, iOS's APIs are sometimes just as inconsistent. CoreData, I don't think I'll ever use you again, anywhere. It's a shining example of how not to do a data store. Then again, basing CoreData on SQLite says all you need to know about that, except SQLite itself is actually far better and more reliable than CoreData.
I feel the same way when I have a ton of notifications....if you prefer notifications (or nags as I often call them), I can't really argue with that and iOS is the clear winner for you.
Actually, I turn 99+% of those off. I can glance at my calendar if I need to see what's happening, my todo list if I need to see what's due next, etc (I guess those would be widgets? :) Mail is absolutely 0 notifications, or I'd never be able to focus on anything. This goes for all my systems. Do I occasionally miss an "important" message sent via email or IM? No, because if it was truly important, there'd be a call. Does this mean you sometimes have to train a new boss? If you have one, absolutely. So far it's not actually been a problem.
Ah, what luxury, being "away from work". What I wouldn't give to know that concept. ...When you live that life, you minimize distractions, and persistent notifications are distractions; if my phone is notifying me of something, I need it to be something important.
We both wish to avoid distractions. You may have some special needs/requirements for reaching you or have chosen a method I have not. Whatever works. And yes, I know all about the always "on" situation. Work-life balance still needs to be maintained as much as possible. 3am call need to be rare.
For example, virtual desktops
just fucking suck. But I can tell from the rest of your comment that we agree on that.
In short, it's like having Tom (Office Space) with the "important" job of delivery the requirements from the business to the programmers. An unneeded useless if not detrimental extra layer.
In any case, if you're finding yourself having to keep setting Android up over and over, you're doing something unusual;
Yes, I admitted as much. But, even as a user, if you borrow or try to help someone with their phone, it's like randomly picking up a version of windows NT from 2000 through Win10 and being asked to help connect to a wireless access point. You kind of know where to go and how to do it, but it varies on just about every single version. And if a vendor chose to install their own wireless "driver" along with its not so helpful application... (if you're unlucky enough to have that situation, grab a double shot) And that's the crux of my issues with Android, just because you get something with "Android" on it doesn't mean you actually know how it works nor what's available, because it varies so much. I'm running devices from Asus, LG, and Samsung with OS versions from 4.4 through 7 and can definitely state that about the only single consistent things are the login screen and the fact that somewhere there is at least 1 "settings" app, although what you get when you open it varies.
Actually, here's something you have to look up: screen captures. There's at least 7 possible ways to accomplish a screen capture. Your guess is as good as mine which one applies to a specific device/OS version. What's even better was when I was trying to figure it out on an LG phone (which wasn't in anything I searched BTW) I came across it by accident, and it's completely different than any other phone I have. It's a pull down menu feature. Now, next fun fact, where are these screen grabs stored? That also varies by device/vendor/OS version.
By now, you should see why I think Android sucks. Android is the Windows of the phone world. There's just no consistency and you have to relearn just about everything every time you grab a new device/version. I do readily admit that if you pick up a single Android device and only work with it, then it's a wholly different experience for you and many of these issues will never crop up. I have roughly 20 different android devices on my desk. That fact alone, as compared to 3 iDevices, says everything.
Not everything works as a notification, my friend. RSS feeds sort-of work, but the notifications tend to disappear once you've interscted with thime, while the widgets remain there for later reference. Slicky notes and lists are other useful widgets that just don't exist on iOS. If those aren't useful to you, so be it, enjoy iOS, there's nothing wrong with that. It really isn't my fault that you can't fathom someone having different usage patterns than you, but, well, I do. iOS doesn't work for my as a phone OS and that's that.
I tried sticky notes, they drove me crazy. We obviously have different usage patterns. For me, I prefer a laptop, then a tablet, then a phone, in that order. I am over-connected (is that a valid condition?) enough that I absolutely don't want RSS feeds, for example, on my phone. Disconnecting when I'm away from work is something of a goal for me, and I'd leave my phone in my drawer in a different house if I could get away with it.
This would be a worthy discussion had I not already tried it and if I weren't already a daily user of iOS, but I have and I am. You aren't introducing me to a better way or whatever you think it is you're doing, I'm already quite familiar with iOS, thanks. Familiar enough to know it's not what I want on my phone.
I'm just genuinely curious why you stated what you stated. I've tried similar things, and they at best just annoyed me, at worst made me want to throw a device in the trash. For example, virtual desktops are something people swear they'd die without. Conceptually it sounded interesting, and I've tried multiple different approaches to make them work, but what I wind up with is a huge set of common apps across all of them and then 1 or 2 specific apps in each desktop. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong? Or maybe my usage patterns just don't fit within those paradigms. I'm thinking the latter. Apparently my work habits don't seem to lead me to suffer the issues that people say virtual desktops fix for them.
I'll be 100% honest - on the surface I fully agree with Android's approach - let the user do what they want. In execution, I find it terrible. iOS, OTOH, does what I need it to 99% of the time and, as a bonus, I almost never have to futz with anything to fix it or even pay any attention to iOS at all. This suits me as I just don't have the extra time to deal with such a distraction.
The easiest way to locate info on a phone is to have a widget displaying it when you unlock the phone. Last I checked, iOS doesn't support home screen widgets.
There's equivalent - I generally use notifications for that. You can configure those to show even without unlocking the phone.
Allrighty, let's dig into it - I wish to find where on the phone a particular app data file is.
How do you do that on iOS? I'm genuinely asking as, last time I checked, you could not.
In iOS, you don't, at least until iOS 11 (I heard some snippet about viewing the filesystem, maybe it's not correct) However, it's easy enough to see files via Imazing or, yick, iTunes. And those don't magically appear/disappear either, unlike Android's external viewing options.
Not a chance. Every one with less than 1 year of official updates. We'll see about the S7.
You must be referring to one year from when you bought it, in which case people get hit with that on iOS as well if they buy an older model. The S7 is already past the 1 year mark (and was when I upgraded to the S8 the day it came out) and is still receiving updates.
Depends on your vendor. I'd check the S7, but it was shipped out last week. As soon as I get it back, I'll see when the last update was. BTW, support doesn't mean some firmware gets a minor tweak, but the OS gets its version updates. So when I buy a phone, and it's OS 3.2, and 6 months down the road OS 4.0 comes out, if I can't install OS 4.0, then that phone is effectively unsupported under the OS, especially given that OS updates on a given version appear to stop within 6 months of the next full version release. (3.x -> 4.x -> 5.x ... which happens yearly)
The S6, released in in April of 2015, saw an update just last week, as did the S5, released in April of 2014. The S4, released in April of 2013, saw its most recent update in February of this year, a whole whopping two months shy of 4 years.
I do have an S4 at hand. I charged it purely for this conversation, as it's been shelved since Jan because it's stuck on 4.4.4, with ATT. So, you are partially correct, I think, in that a camera firmware update was installed on start up, without a prompt mind you. However, I'm still stuck on the "latest" 4.4.4 OS. Unless there's someplace that I haven't found, there is no official means for updating to a newer Android release. The Note 4, Note 2, and the S6 I have somewhere all are similarly unsupported, at least as of Jan. Failing to release the current OS for a 6 month old phone that is perfectly capable of running it means that the phone is unsupported. And for your info, Kies doesn't offer any updates to those phones beyond what's now installed either. In fact, I got 1 point revision on the Note 4 via Kies that wasn't available via the phone itself. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement.
Yes, other manufacturers get it wrong, but the one who consistently outsells Apple, the one who is most statistically significant for that reason, seems to have been getting it right for a while now. Let's confirm by looking at the S3: released May of 2012, last update April of 2014, 23 months of support; that must be where you're getting the "less than 2 years of support" meme from, but it hasn't been true for a while.
My S4 came with 4.2, and stopped at 4.4.4. Where's the 5.x or newer updates? (4.2->4.4.4 was about 12 months, IIRC) The Note 4, same story. Note 2 actually had more than 12 months support, came with 4.1, and stopped at 4.3, I think. I can't be bothered to see if that one will even hold a charge, it's in the to be recycled bin after all. IIRC, the S6 has 5.1, no 6.x for it, even though Samsung released a build but Kies says there's nothing available.
I pull my phone out for quick access to some bit of information, or to bang out a quick reply to a message. Android allows me to customize this interaction a lot more, so I can optimize for the tasks I do most often and get them done in 2 seconds rather than 5; that time adds up a lot more than you might think.
Interesting. A message is a message, and I see no effective difference between entering one in Android vs iOS. Ditto for browsing. As for locating info on the phone, the iOS search feature is pretty damn quick, and works within various apps (mail, contacts) as well. I'm not sure what specific thing you think takes more than twice as long on iOS.
As for your frequently having to look up how to do things on various versions of Android, that speaks a lot more about you than it does about Android. Having owned phones and tablets from Motorola, HTC, L
What's true is that a degree doesn't fully prepare you, but it does get you most of the way there. What's also true is that a degree isn't the only way to get prepared.
I'd argue that for many degree based careers, a degree opens the door more easily and certainly smooths your path after getting in the door, provided you develop all the skills you need to learn post degree. This is true across quite a few technically based career paths, and is why a PE requires (or rather strongly promotes) an apprenticeship.
You'd think that. The reality is, most coming out of schools for the past 15 years know Java and JS, or, for the really unfortunately ones, C# and JS. They know next to nothing about how to design and build real solutions, because that means you know more than some fancy academic software design methodology, which they also often don't understand. So most of them, if they're good for anything at all, is being a coder. Maybe after a few years they'll be promotable, but many aren't.
Been through the mill in all stages of nothing to government contracts. If you're building real software for a growing business, you're better off writing specs at some point after the startup phase, and sometimes during it. Yes, it costs more and takes a little longer, but that's a whole lot better than having the house of cards come crashing down at an inopportune time, like when you're about to go public and people check out out because of the buzz.
"You don't need to become a PE in the US. In fact, it is highly unusual unless you are signing off on certain documents."
Maybe for computer related work, however, in many traditional engineering professions, a PE is expected, if not required. The difference is often related to work that affects the public.
As for NSPE, they wanted more members and saw an opportunity with computers, through hardware design, to capture a new field, as did engineering schools.
I can attest that a PE is not required unless you're signing documents certifying them and the work they represent for certain entities. Construction and related industries are really the primary driver for PEs, and the majority of engineers working in those industries are not PEs. You only need 1 PE within a company, as long as they have the ability to review and approve the designs, etc. I don't recall running into many PEs in automotive or aerospace related industries, although I am sure there were a few, just given the era that occurred in.
Most coders are not engineers, whatever their title may say. Most software architects aren't engineers either. And no, having a CS degree definitely doesn't make you an engineer.
It's obvious you lack the experience and vocabulary to speak in this domain, and are only concerned with your own niche, much like a JS web developer calling themselves "fullstack" yet having no clue how to handle continuous levels of 20K transactions a second in a secure guaranteed fashion. (it's irrelevant whether you do, btw) When/if you graduate to large distributed heterogeneous enterprise systems, we may talk again. You won't be running QtCreator then.
Work on enterprise software. The details I can share involve past system projects which included up to 60 library and component projects which built out up to 10 separate servers, clients, and web applications. These were usually installed on sets of servers in HA/HR/HP configurations. When you're working across such projects and need to re-architect some base service definitions and functionality, yes, you absolutely do want that many projects open at once.
QtCreator makes no assumptions about what you will work on, so there are no open projects when launched. Btw, having 5M LoC of interdependent projects open automatically isn't a feature I want.
It may be something you need to work efficiently. So you're really comparing apples and oranges there. How long when you open QtCreator does it take to open your project, be able to view the opened codebase for errors, and have it running a debug test session? With Eclipse, generally, once its done with its 10s opening, you're good to go with 1 click. And remember, you have a lot of code open, static analysis done, toolsets initialized, etc, it's not just a "open project now please" state.
When that one well-supported device outsells any individual model of iPhone (be fair, compare a single model to a single model)
what model is that? Every single Samsung (who owns the Android market) is unsupported in less than 2 years, AFAIK. I have 4 of them on my desk, between 2 and 4 years old, none are officially supported. Jailbroken, sure. But official support? Not a chance. Every one with less than 1 year of official updates. We'll see about the S7.
and iOS is better than Android for locking you into Apple's ecosystem.
Capt. Obvious today? ;)
Also, and I've never been able to put my finger on it, iOS just really clashes with how I use my phone; ... Of course, the same can be said about Android when it comes to tablet use, which is why I have an iPad Pro and not a Galaxy Tab.
There's so much to talk about in those 2 sentences.
Other than phone calls and potentially cellular data app use, exactly how does your phone usage vary from tablet usage enough to make that statement? (Note, this is only relation to the functions that a phone supports that are on a tablet) I can see there are use cases and apps on the tablet that just aren't available or usuable on a phone's small screen, but anything on a phone can pretty much be done on a tablet.
With that out of the way, I actually have trouble understanding the Android use case on a phone. (Note I have a bunch of them, and probably the singular thing I hate about Android is the total lack of standardized core functionality across various revisions, each one and version having its own way of accessing files, viewing settings, and dealing with internals.
Now, I'll grant you that what I do with a phone is probably in the sub 1% grouping. If you're doing email, phone calls, messaging and web browsing, I guess the apps are pretty consistent (I wouldn't know since I might use any of those features on anything approaching even a monthly basis on any of those phones) but from an accessing systems, apps, data, media, logs, etc, Android absolutely SUCKS and is so inconsistent that I frequently have to lookup how to do a particular function on that version of Android from that particular vendor if I haven't touched that device/version/vendor in a couple of weeks. That's not a statement to the quality of my memory but rather how stupidly varied the approaches are on something I may do once every few months on a given device/version/vendor and maybe have done once or twice previously. By comparison, Apple devices have at most 2 approaches across all devices and up to 4 versions of iOS back. Although the versions back don't really matter because in what I support roughly 95% are on the latest version of iOS, meaning there's exactly 1 way I need to deal with everything. Perhaps that's another reason why developers choose to support Apple, despite everything else, and Android is a distant second.
Case in point, the woman in front of me in the Target customer service line about a year and a half ago, returning a bluetooth speaker, ranting about how she's a security researcher with a Masters in CS and how she's "appalled that it wants to act as an input device and read her phone book which, of course, I did not allow -- and, by the way, the play and skip buttons don't work."
Quite honestly, I get the input device for play/skip buttons, but phone book? And input device seems overly generic and broad for "audio input device" functionality, which would only have limited input functionality, no general keyboard.
Finally, I agree, you can't fix stupid. And stupid is what a large segment of the consumer base is when it comes to these devices, and when it comes to security, well, it's like finding a needle in all the haystacks in a country. Sadly, that not just related to computers. An astoundingly small percentage of people can fix their own brakes, change their own oil, repair a sprinkler head, replace a faucet, sharpen a mower blade, or even hammer a nail to hold a fence board it seems, never mind working on anything connected to an electrical power source of any sort.
EJB is probably the most singular reason people hate Java so much. You just ruined my appetite for just mentioning it :)
That's like hating C because of Windows. EJBs are an abomination in implementation, although the concept itself is egalitarian. I'm just not sure it can be handled in Java, at least not with the loose constraints they used. CORBA is a much better implementation as it succeeds where EJBs fail, in providing usable service APIs behind which you can do what's needed. It's no panacea, but at least it is serviceable.
ROFL... 1000 LoC in the project code it's loading up at startup.
Whatever you might think of Uber as a company, the tech it uses is a fundamentally better way of arranging a ride than standing outside in the rain yelling ay cars.
Yes, being able to "order online" anything is potentially better than calling it in (which has existed for decades, btw) but it merely is an improved handshake mechanism for ordering that removes a lot of potential of human (usually customer) error. In the case of a ride, there's only a few extra details that I'm sure are on the uber and lyft apps.
I'll bet that QtCreator opening up in < 1s has maybe 1000 lines of code, not 5+ million across multiple cross-dependent projects.
Is it used for Word?
If it was, it might work in less than 4GB and save empty documents of less than 100KB.
We also use the STL data structures and algorithms, which have excellent performance. C++14 and C++17 are better than Java in pretty much every way.
The STL, and the horrid namespaces as implemented in C++. The 2 truly terrible decisions that made Java, even with its lower performance look like eden in comparison. Now, it's been a a while, obviously, but a pure algorithm written in C++ utilizing linkages across 3 libraries with STL is what made me decide C++ just wasn't up to snuff. Why? Because when you compile the algorithm on NT or OS/2 (yes, it was a while ago) it worked fine, but compile it on Solaris or Irix, you'd get different results. Now why was this? Because the length of the pointer name in the compiler exceeded the maximum length by 1 byte in certain link orders on Solaris and Irix and you wound up with some interesting pointer ambiguity. There were no errors thrown. It was absolutely wonderful to try to figure out why that happened, and the hap-hazard inconsistent results with exact same starting data occurred in what should have been a constrained algorithm. OTOH, helping someone else out with a similar issue with fortran later on was cake.
I had the distinct nausea of having to deal with the STL relatively recently and what it reminds me of is that other pile of crap I won't touch: EJBs