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User: WarwickRyan

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  1. Re:Gee, you think? on Forbes Likens Instagram Purchase To Myspace Deal · · Score: 1

    It isn't worth 1000 million dollars. They bought it for 1000 million MOON-dollars: i.e. $1000 million of Facebook stock valued at $38. By the time they'll be able to sell said stock it'll be convertible to closer to $100m than $1000m.

  2. Metro / Windows 8? on The Ugly, Profitable Details About Xbox Live Advertising · · Score: 1

    Since the change I've hardly used my Xbox, and have moved pretty much to the PC. I'm sensitive to this kind crap.

    This is my biggest worry is that they're going to pull the same trick with Metro. It's the advertiser's dream, and the one way they'll beat Google. They control the platform, they control the ads.

  3. Faraday Cage? on Data Safety In a Time of Natural Disasters · · Score: 1

    ..and if it's electronic then it can't hurt to put it in a Faraday cage...

  4. Re:Shame... on New BBC Sports Website Makes Heavy Use of RDF · · Score: 2

    > On the plus side, it's one of the few actively maintained sites that doesn't have advertising.

    They run advertising for users outside of the UK. Users in the UK don't see any advertising.

    More information is in the BBC Online FAQ:

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/faq/

  5. Re:Not a bill; Congress was never asked. on Thousands Take To the Streets To Protest ACTA · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Douglas Adams was right all along with his post of Galactic President: "a role that involves no power whatsoever, and merely requires the incumbent to attract attention so no one wonders who's really in charge"

  6. Ironic.. on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace To Google: Don't Be Evil · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ..considering reports the Google's entire motivation for creating Google+ was that so much content was moving to social networks such as Facebook and that said social networks were pushing against Google's attempts to index the content on their services.

  7. Re:supply and demand on Nano-Scale Terahertz Antenna May Make Tricorders Real · · Score: 1

    > The whole prescription thing is a racket, and both doctors and pharmacies are profitting handsomely.

    They've solved that in The Netherlands by letting the insurance companies dictate the exact drugs to be used by their patients. They make deals directly with the drugs companies for the prices, and the pharmacists have to provide their choice in drugs.

    The result: bottom line drug costs have increased substantially, forcing an inflation-busting increase in our monthly health insurance costs. At the same time, certain subsidiaries of said insurance companies are reporting massive profits thanks to large "management fees" from drugs companies.

    In the meantime the ex-health ministers who made this possible have taken up cushy consultancy / board positions at the largest insurance companies here.

    Oh, and the pharmacists have to stock a dozen makes of a drug to cover all of the insurance companies. Which has lead to a slew of pharmacy closures due to the increase in operating costs (and massive reduction in income - in the past each individual pharmacy had their own drug deals which subsidised their service - being on a smaller scale the final impact was less than what the massive insurance companies can achieve).

  8. Re:Et tu, Netherlands part 2 on Dutch Court Forces ISPs To Block the Pirate Bay · · Score: 1

    > They've been doing stuff like that since forever. There aren't many companies that would do such a thing. That's the main reason I won't be easily persuaded to leave their service.

    It's the reason why I pay more to stay on their service, instead of switching over to a faster connection with "we lie about our monthly fees" UPC.

  9. Blame the Automation on Are Programmers Ruining the Design of eBooks? · · Score: 1

    The reason that so many ebooks are bad is that there are a lot of lazy publishers out there who simply run (for example) Amazon's Word-to-Kindle scripts and upload the output.

    Without ever reading it.

    Or even worse, that use OCR to generate the ebook and then don't bother reading it.

  10. The REAL reason on Why Developers Still Prefer iOS To Android · · Score: 5, Funny

    Come on, we all know that the REAL reason devs prefer to code for iOS is because it's the only way we can convince the wife that we NEED that shiny overpriced MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.

    The Wife Acceptance Factor.

  11. Re:I used to work in IT and.... on Why Everyone Hates the IT Department · · Score: 1

    > Then you look at a developer who instead of contacting IT and asking for support, had admin access and
    > changed the .net version of the app pool on their IIS instance from 2.x to 4.x

    Why did the developer have admin access to a production server?

    Us developers should only have access to test/qualification/staging, never to production. Unless we're the DevOp, in which case we're responsible for production and capable enough not to f**k it up.

  12. Re:Reflections on Why Everyone Hates the IT Department · · Score: 1

    It'd probably be easier to just buy a desktop PC and use that as the build server. If you need to store the results of builds permanently then just copy that over to a file share.

    Want backup? Buy two of them.

    That's better than having IT buy a production-capable server with all that that entails when a consumer-level box is fit for purpose.

  13. Re:Reflections on Why Everyone Hates the IT Department · · Score: 1

    > You are of course talking about window devs. Linux devs, fkiing write the software they use.

    Ahem, so do decent "Windows" developers..

  14. Lets me guess, Paris Hilton returns.. on Microsoft Patenting Celebrity-Shaped Bing'ing · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..nothing?

  15. Trouble with Lichen on What Happens When the Average Lifespan is 150 Years? · · Score: 1

    "The plot concerns a young woman biochemist, who discovers that a chemical extracted from an unusual strain of lichen (hence the title), can be used to retard the ageing process, enabling people to live to around 200–300 years. Wyndham speculates how society would deal with this prospect."

  16. Some sites do this already for the iPad.. on Opera Proposes Switching Browser Scrolling For 'Pages' · · Score: 1

    ..and it works really well. For the iPad. That's because swiping your fingers horizontally is more natural than continually moving from the bottom to the top to scroll through a document.

  17. Re:I don't like digital-only periodical subs on Linux Journal Goes — Surprise! — Digital · · Score: 1

    +1

  18. Fall Of The Empire on The Dark Side of the Tech Patent Wars · · Score: 1

    Between the best minds in the US being sucked up by the parasites in Wall Street and massive numbers increase in the number of law students (*) it really does look like the Empire is in the middle of its last greed-fuelled explosion, close to the point of spectacularly imploding in upon itself. Only the decay will likely be slower more insidious than that.

    Time to move to Brazil.

    (*) http://blueprintprep.com/lsatblog/law-school-admissions/big-law-we-have-a-problem/

  19. Re:Extra work required on How To Ruin Your Game's PC Port · · Score: 1

    > because all the selectable configurations in the Xbox made it so that
    > you had to move your thumb off the jump button to do a grind

    Welcome to the joys of Southpaw gaming.

  20. Better to focus on the big fish on British Tax System Uses Web Robots To Find Cheats · · Score: 1

    This just sounds like another game where they're focussing on the little guys whilst ignoring the big tax avoiders.

    Like this guy, who's a member of the House of Lords (comparable to the Senate, except half of the members get inn through birthright): http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/04/lord-ashcroft-vat-conservative-polls

  21. Re:its built on .net and CLR people ! on Silverlight Developers Rally Against Windows 8 · · Score: 1

    I always assumed so because the Office inter-op code I occasionally have to work with is COM-based mess, and I can't ever remember having issues with Office and .NET framework updates.

    Examining Excel in ProcessExplorer proves that a silly assumption.

  22. Re:Writing one model for ObjC++ and .NET platforms on Silverlight Developers Rally Against Windows 8 · · Score: 1

    The article you posted is suffering from semantic leak. The words "layered" and "tiered" have many, subtly different meanings depending on who you're talking to. I, personally use a broad definition: a layer or tier says nothing about where the code is running.

    The main benefit is that by having your state, interface and actions split up it becomes simple to change the way each of those are executed or handled. Data could be read directly from a database, with the actions running on a remote machine communicating with the client via RPC. Plus when separated it's generally easier to use codegen for each part targeting various platforms (ideal for implementing client-side validation!).

    For LOB or data-driven applications (which I'm assuming is the standard use-case for Silverlight compare to JS/HTML) you would be advised to implement a service layer over your domain-entities. That gives you platform-level separation. Or at least it should, as that's kind of the whole point :)

    With a service-layer in place, you have some kind of translation on the boundaries. For example you access your domain via a webservice, which serializes to XML, JSON, whatever, which is then reconstituted on the frontend.

    These conversions should be totally automated and preferably nicely wrapped on the platforms supporting each layer.

    Depending on your exact problem, you could even approach something such as Modal Driven Architecture. There you define an application as a model (usually UML), and then use that as input to your multiple, target-platform-specific compilers. This is particularly suitable to for CRUD systems: from one UML model you can generate a complete database, object model, winforms and web frontends. Though, to be honest, I'm not sure if there are many examples where the resulting interface can be described as "high quality". Oh, and from what I've seen the motivation for using such an architecture has been more to do with technical deficiencies of the modellers than any benefit over other methods. Though, as with everything, that's far from a rule. If your problem is easier to user-stand when it's modelled visually, and it's worth trading potential UI quality for it, then that's great.

  23. Re:I am a Silverlight Developer on Silverlight Developers Rally Against Windows 8 · · Score: 2

    It's also exactly the reason why you should choose a layered architecture, and preferably MVC/MVP or MVVM. They all make platform switching much easier as the frontend is a very think layer.

    Silverlight in particular has a really nice MVVM framework called Caliburn (http://caliburn.codeplex.com/). If you've built your app using that, then it shouldn't be a huge amount of work to switch to html5/js for the frontend.

    Hey, you might even be able to use a.net to js compiler to do the body of the work: http://jsc.sourceforge.net/

  24. Re:its built on .net and CLR people ! on Silverlight Developers Rally Against Windows 8 · · Score: 1

    > the only reason why they can port office is because of .NET and the CLR

    I'm pretty sure that Office is still written in native code.

  25. Re:Confused and incomplete on Too Much Data? Then 'Good Enough' Is Good Enough · · Score: 1

    You can search inside video files and pictures with your email client? Where do I sign up?