A smart watch only really makes sense as a convenient interface to a more powerful machine. The features important to it are therefore input and output, along with a connection to your phone. So a display, a microphone, and a button are the obvious ones. A smart watch will probably have fewer features than a non-smart watch.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, the president is not elected by the people of the USA, the president is elected by the electoral college.
But how nice would it be to have an XML standard for all GUIs?
Not very. Firefox does this with XUL. Different platforms have different conventions, you don't want the same interface across all of them. For instance, Android apps typically have menus that pop up from the bottom, whereas this isn't the norm on iOS. Sure, you'd have the same interface from the programmer's perspective, but from the user's perspective, your app works differently to all their other apps.
Write an app to sell in an online app store. I've friend who have done very well out of Mac one.
And when did he do that?
From what I've seen, that's so 2009. That "write an app and make $$$" days are well over.
The Mac App Store didn't open until 2011, and it didn't start out so popular at first. The situation for developers targeting it has steadily improved over the past couple of years.
I've looked at freelancing before, and I could probably make more money by working at McDonald's on weekends than that.
Where did you get the idea freelancing paid next to nothing? Are you looking on Craigslist and shitty places like that or something? Freelance iOS developers, for example, can earn in the region of $100/hr quite easily.
Instead Facebook users who were logged in to Facebook (and hence working under the auspices of Facebook)
I think you've misunderstood. By "logged into Facebook", they don't mean they were actually looking at Facebook at the time. It means they had previously logged into Facebook at some point and their browser has a cookie saved which authenticates them to Facebook.
These people were surfing the web normally. They weren't on Facebook. They got to a site that used Facebook for authentication, and the JavaScript that these sites embedded to enable that had a defect in it that noticed they were logged into Facebook and caused the error.
From the end user's perspective, it was simply a case of surfing as normal, and then suddenly a Facebook error message hijacked the website they were trying to visit.
Sure, Unicode has shortcomings with some East Asian languages. But that doesn't mean when Slashdot is serving a page in English it should just give up and show users broken stuff.
we send a friendly, plain-english informational message back to the sender
Please don't do this. One of the problems SPF solves is that spammers pick some random domain then spoof emails from that domain to send to millions of people. If you happen to be one of the unlucky people whose domain is targeted, you get a million bounces in your inbox.
The whole point of SPF is that if an email fails an SPF check, the email may not have come from the purported sender, and you should not treat it as genuine. You're completely undermining what SPF is for by doing this.
WeÃ(TM)ve built the mobile user experience with the future in mind
And yet Slashdot is still incapable of handling nonASCII characters. Unicode is over 20 years old, guys.
Is there any reason why this was done as a separate site and not with a responsive design? Separate mobile sites are the old-fashioned way of doing things.
First off, itâ(TM)s worth noting that the bug only appears to be present in OS X Mountain Lion and is not reproducible in Lion or Snow Leopard. Thatâ(TM)s not exactly good news given that this is the latest release of Appleâ(TM)s operating system, which an increasing number of Mac users are switching to.
Talk about over-egging the pudding. You're talking as if it's a fundamental flaw that ruins the whole operating system. It's a bug. Of course it's not good news, but it's not certain doom for Mountain Lion either.
Apple does not plan to modify their machines and will simply pull them from market in the EU.
In all likelihood it's because they've got a new Mac Pro model ready to launch. The Mac Pro hasn't had a significant update in years, it's the only Mac that doesn't have a Thunderbolt port, for example.
You realise this is the male hormone, just like oestrogen is the female hormone? If it were a woman writing the code, would you be similarly quick to assign blame to her hormones when she fucks up?
If people code this way, it's not because of testosterone, it's not because they are men ruled by their hormones, it's because they are sloppy coders.
Basically, Facebook's lock-in is your social graph, and they will fight tooth and nail to stop competitors from letting you export this from Facebook to elsewhere. It's been in the T&Cs since they first had an API.
I don't think the genre is an excuse, and I don't think it intrinsically leads to the problems I see.
How would design an easy and intuitive interface for a game as complicated as Civ?
I'd hire a usability expert. Let me give you an example.
In Civ V G+K, when you found a religion, you have the ability to rename it. Clicking on the button to do so pops up a dialog box with a text entry field containing the existing name, which you can then edit.
Roughly 100% of the people who trigger this action will subsequently edit that text. Yet it isn't selected by default. You have to trigger the action, then select the text in order to edit it. Once you do so, the text edit box doesn't respond to any of the normal key combos for the platform. It doesn't respect the key delay or repeat rate configured for your preferences.
What's more, the feature itself is a bit odd. A religion is made up of a name, an icon and traits. You have to pick the traits, obviously, that's a game mechanic. But why should you be able to rename the religion? You can't arbitrarily rename the other aspects of the game. You can't rename technologies, or wonders, or unit types. And you can't change the icon. The feature appears to be there because a programmer figured it was easy to add it, not because somebody was thinking about what the user needed.
I'd start by using the standard platform controls for things like text entry. And I'd probably remove this feature altogether and leave it for mods if you want new religion themes.
From a performance point of view, it seems to hit the disk a ridiculous amount, even when it has more RAM than it knows what to do with, and the disk activity seems to block the UI. If you've got something like a time machine automatic backup running in the background, even things as simple as scrolling down a list of items becomes sluggish, which seems to be incomprehensibly daft.
It might seem petty to focus on such small things, but the entire game appears to be haphazardly slapped together from pieces like this, that don't work quite right, without regard for the user, and the cumulative effect of all of it leads to an unpleasant experience. There's no reason for this that I can see; it's not intrinsically impossible for Civ V to be pleasant to use - they just don't seem to try.
Good for you. Perhaps with another couple of decades of using Perl, you can find a way of using it to read past the first line of the comments you reply to, or perhaps just comprehending the first line would be a good start.
How about an execution that isn't awful? I love the Civ game series, but I've always felt let down when I go to play one and it's a buggy piece of crap, or worse, a buggy, incredibly slow piece of crap that appears to have been designed by somebody who hates users.
The EA developers working on this did a Q&A last month. Needless to say, the responses mentioned DRM quite a bit... this person summed a lot of them up nicely. Those are responses only from the Q&A, and he only stopped because Reddit doesn't allow longer comments.
One of Perl's biggest uses was web development. At one point, server-side web development was totally dominated by Perl. These days it's a niche player.
The other biggest use was sysadmin scripting. Again, it is rapidly falling by the wayside as systems like Chef and Puppet automate away a lot of it and Ruby and Python are growing in popularity for the rest.
This isn't about times changing and people needing different things. Perl's getting outpaced in areas where it has traditionally been extremely strong.
The problem, of course, is that Apple has traditionally blocked porn and other adult apps from its App Store. Why hasn't Vine been included among them? Apple hasn't said, but possibly because Vine's expressed purpose isn't porn, but to share generic video.
Possibly? Of course that's the reason. This has been the approach Apple has taken all along. Even Apple's own apps, such as Safari, can show adult content. So long as the rating is appropriate and the primary purpose isn't porn, it's fine.
The only surprising bit here is that Vine managed to get away with a 12+ rating. That could quite possibly change very quickly.
Years ago, however, apps didn't exactly dance around the subject of porn - they satisfied the demand, so to speak.
No, Apple have always been reticent to allow those kinds of apps on the App Store. Their policy hasn't changed.
This is rarely mentioned in these types of stories, but I think it's worth highlighting: jailbreaks are security vulnerabilities. If these guys know about a security vulnerability but are deliberately postponing release so that Apple don't patch it before 6.1 is released, they are deliberately choosing a course of action that harms users. Are there any other situations in which irresponsible disclosure is so accepted, or is it just when Apple are the target?
I think you've misunderstood. A base box is a virtual machine. A digital file. They are run during development. They aren't production servers that other people access, and they aren't physical hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
A smart watch only really makes sense as a convenient interface to a more powerful machine. The features important to it are therefore input and output, along with a connection to your phone. So a display, a microphone, and a button are the obvious ones. A smart watch will probably have fewer features than a non-smart watch.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, the president is not elected by the people of the USA, the president is elected by the electoral college.
Not very. Firefox does this with XUL. Different platforms have different conventions, you don't want the same interface across all of them. For instance, Android apps typically have menus that pop up from the bottom, whereas this isn't the norm on iOS. Sure, you'd have the same interface from the programmer's perspective, but from the user's perspective, your app works differently to all their other apps.
The Mac App Store didn't open until 2011, and it didn't start out so popular at first. The situation for developers targeting it has steadily improved over the past couple of years.
Where did you get the idea freelancing paid next to nothing? Are you looking on Craigslist and shitty places like that or something? Freelance iOS developers, for example, can earn in the region of $100/hr quite easily.
Don't be ridiculous, a 5-line Perl script would do a much better job. I suspect he is a 10 million-line Brainfuck program.
I think you've misunderstood. By "logged into Facebook", they don't mean they were actually looking at Facebook at the time. It means they had previously logged into Facebook at some point and their browser has a cookie saved which authenticates them to Facebook.
These people were surfing the web normally. They weren't on Facebook. They got to a site that used Facebook for authentication, and the JavaScript that these sites embedded to enable that had a defect in it that noticed they were logged into Facebook and caused the error.
From the end user's perspective, it was simply a case of surfing as normal, and then suddenly a Facebook error message hijacked the website they were trying to visit.
Sure, Unicode has shortcomings with some East Asian languages. But that doesn't mean when Slashdot is serving a page in English it should just give up and show users broken stuff.
Please don't do this. One of the problems SPF solves is that spammers pick some random domain then spoof emails from that domain to send to millions of people. If you happen to be one of the unlucky people whose domain is targeted, you get a million bounces in your inbox.
The whole point of SPF is that if an email fails an SPF check, the email may not have come from the purported sender, and you should not treat it as genuine. You're completely undermining what SPF is for by doing this.
And yet Slashdot is still incapable of handling nonASCII characters. Unicode is over 20 years old, guys.
Is there any reason why this was done as a separate site and not with a responsive design? Separate mobile sites are the old-fashioned way of doing things.
Talk about over-egging the pudding. You're talking as if it's a fundamental flaw that ruins the whole operating system. It's a bug. Of course it's not good news, but it's not certain doom for Mountain Lion either.
In all likelihood it's because they've got a new Mac Pro model ready to launch. The Mac Pro hasn't had a significant update in years, it's the only Mac that doesn't have a Thunderbolt port, for example.
A new Mac Pro is being released in 2013, confirmed by Apple.
Have you seen how many buttons a TV remote control has?
You realise this is the male hormone, just like oestrogen is the female hormone? If it were a woman writing the code, would you be similarly quick to assign blame to her hormones when she fucks up?
If people code this way, it's not because of testosterone, it's not because they are men ruled by their hormones, it's because they are sloppy coders.
Get the people with conflicting names to change their name. Problem solved.
The 500px app didn't have the appropriate age rating I mentioned. Funnily enough, 500px is back on the App Store now. The change? The age rating.
Basically, Facebook's lock-in is your social graph, and they will fight tooth and nail to stop competitors from letting you export this from Facebook to elsewhere. It's been in the T&Cs since they first had an API.
I don't think the genre is an excuse, and I don't think it intrinsically leads to the problems I see.
I'd hire a usability expert. Let me give you an example.
In Civ V G+K, when you found a religion, you have the ability to rename it. Clicking on the button to do so pops up a dialog box with a text entry field containing the existing name, which you can then edit.
Roughly 100% of the people who trigger this action will subsequently edit that text. Yet it isn't selected by default. You have to trigger the action, then select the text in order to edit it. Once you do so, the text edit box doesn't respond to any of the normal key combos for the platform. It doesn't respect the key delay or repeat rate configured for your preferences.
What's more, the feature itself is a bit odd. A religion is made up of a name, an icon and traits. You have to pick the traits, obviously, that's a game mechanic. But why should you be able to rename the religion? You can't arbitrarily rename the other aspects of the game. You can't rename technologies, or wonders, or unit types. And you can't change the icon. The feature appears to be there because a programmer figured it was easy to add it, not because somebody was thinking about what the user needed.
I'd start by using the standard platform controls for things like text entry. And I'd probably remove this feature altogether and leave it for mods if you want new religion themes.
From a performance point of view, it seems to hit the disk a ridiculous amount, even when it has more RAM than it knows what to do with, and the disk activity seems to block the UI. If you've got something like a time machine automatic backup running in the background, even things as simple as scrolling down a list of items becomes sluggish, which seems to be incomprehensibly daft.
It might seem petty to focus on such small things, but the entire game appears to be haphazardly slapped together from pieces like this, that don't work quite right, without regard for the user, and the cumulative effect of all of it leads to an unpleasant experience. There's no reason for this that I can see; it's not intrinsically impossible for Civ V to be pleasant to use - they just don't seem to try.
Good for you. Perhaps with another couple of decades of using Perl, you can find a way of using it to read past the first line of the comments you reply to, or perhaps just comprehending the first line would be a good start.
How about an execution that isn't awful? I love the Civ game series, but I've always felt let down when I go to play one and it's a buggy piece of crap, or worse, a buggy, incredibly slow piece of crap that appears to have been designed by somebody who hates users.
The EA developers working on this did a Q&A last month. Needless to say, the responses mentioned DRM quite a bit... this person summed a lot of them up nicely. Those are responses only from the Q&A, and he only stopped because Reddit doesn't allow longer comments.
One of Perl's biggest uses was web development. At one point, server-side web development was totally dominated by Perl. These days it's a niche player.
The other biggest use was sysadmin scripting. Again, it is rapidly falling by the wayside as systems like Chef and Puppet automate away a lot of it and Ruby and Python are growing in popularity for the rest.
This isn't about times changing and people needing different things. Perl's getting outpaced in areas where it has traditionally been extremely strong.
This is business as usual for Apple.
Possibly? Of course that's the reason. This has been the approach Apple has taken all along. Even Apple's own apps, such as Safari, can show adult content. So long as the rating is appropriate and the primary purpose isn't porn, it's fine.
The only surprising bit here is that Vine managed to get away with a 12+ rating. That could quite possibly change very quickly.
No, Apple have always been reticent to allow those kinds of apps on the App Store. Their policy hasn't changed.
This is rarely mentioned in these types of stories, but I think it's worth highlighting: jailbreaks are security vulnerabilities. If these guys know about a security vulnerability but are deliberately postponing release so that Apple don't patch it before 6.1 is released, they are deliberately choosing a course of action that harms users. Are there any other situations in which irresponsible disclosure is so accepted, or is it just when Apple are the target?
I think you've misunderstood. A base box is a virtual machine. A digital file. They are run during development. They aren't production servers that other people access, and they aren't physical hardware.