you'd have to code for when it's unavailable anyway.
This is PRECISELY what FRAGMENTATION is ALL ABOUT!
No it's not, and stop shouting.
You have to code everything that relies on the network on mobile devices to handle cases where it is unavailable because they frequently lose connectivity. Is an iPhone going through a tunnel fragmenting the platform because it doesn't have Facetime while an iPhone that isn't going through a tunnel does have Facetime? Of course not.
Spending development time on stuff that SOME of your users WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE.
Let me give you an example. Today, I was working on an app that had a button to make a phone call in it. Oh no! This terribly fragmented platform includes devices that can't make phone calls. What a disaster! Oh wait, no it isn't. I just hid the button when making calls is not available. A grand total of three lines of code, including one line that was nothing more than a curly brace. Took me less than five minutes to code and test.
There are probably fewer than a dozen features like this that I've ever had to handle like that in four years of developing for iOS. It's incredibly trivial.
in practice developers do not support iOS versions more than three versions ago (at this point nothing older than iOS 4).
The latest version of the SDK can't target anything below iOS 4.3, which ARMv6 devices can't upgrade to (the farthest they go is iOS 4.2). At this point, ARMv6 devices (anything older than an iPhone 3GS) are unsupported by Apple's developer tools. In practice though, it's very difficult to make a case for supporting anything below iOS 5 for most applications these days, people upgrade iOS devices very quickly, at least the ones that use apps on a regular basis do.
Most of these are things that iOS developers don't care about. For instance, Facetime over cellular: developers don't care about that, it's an Apple app, not an API, and evenif it was an API, you'd have to code for when it's unavailable anyway.
There are variations between the different models that developers have to be aware of, but they aren't covered in this chart. For instance, background modes are only available for ARMv7 devices. By and large, Apple have done a good job of shielding developers from these differences. I'm an iOS developer, and I very rarely have to even think about different device support. The two main ones are display size and display density - and Apple have only just announced the third display size ever, and they've only used two display densities ever. I can't really think of any platform outside of games consoles that are so homogenous.
Look, the guy's on stage halfway through the presentation. There will undoubtedly be more announced than what's been mentioned so far. What's the point in publishing half a story? Just wait half an hour for them to get through the presentation and then publish the story when you actually have the full story.
Difficulties editing old Word and PowerPoint documents, transferring work to and from the device without USB sticks, and problems with projecting the iPad's display to the classroom â" bizarrely, using an Apple TV â" have led to staff once again reaching for their Windows laptops.
The general idea - that you get computer-illiterate staff away from general-purpose computers and onto more appliance-like systems is a good one. More flexibility in the end-users' hands means more difficulties supporting them and more spaghetti work practices.
The problem though, is that it sounds like they thought they could just dump the product on them and their problems would be solved. These people will have had deeply-ingrained workflows that frequently include all manner of hacks and workarounds that have glommed together over the years. If you're going to move them away from that, you need to move their workflows and content too, otherwise they are stuck trying to do the old thing with products that aren't designed for it.
I'm not sure what's so bizarre about using an AppleTV in that way though - it's designed for that purpose and it works great in that kind of situation.
T-Mobile block SIP, and if I remember correctly, Orange block SMTP that doesn't go through their mail servers. Does anybody know what the situation is with EE?
Trading survey answers for content is not micropayments. It's missing the micro part and the payment part. It's something that only the very young, very poor, or very bored will do, and as such, it's a) not going to get a representative segment of the market, and b) going to turn away a lot of your visitors. People tried this back in the 90s and nobody was interested.
This isn't an accidental security vulnerability, they deliberately designed their system this way. They obviously already knew their system works this way.
A few months back I saw people having trouble editing the page for a court case. The citation they had provided was the actual court findings as published by the court. There were a couple of Wikipedia moderators that didn't like the topic at hand, so they slapped a big banner saying something to the effect of "Warning: this is all unsubstantiated hokum and will burn down your house if you read it" at the top of the page. They said that the court findings as published by the court were not good enough, that you actually needed an article written about the court case published by a journal instead. They supplied an article published by a journal. This was then also rejected because it was published by a law firm. Kafka would have been rolling his eyes at this point.
People seem to have lost sight of the fact that a wiki is effective because it drastically lowers the barrier to editing. Wikipedia now fetishises process and is about as far away from the spirit in which wikis were conceived as possible. It's not a wiki if bureaucracy makes it impossible to contribute without reading hundreds of pages on process and you have to fight somebody who seemingly devotes all of their time to controlling their favourite subjects.
The risk of false positive isn't that meaningful unless they plan to convict solely on DNA evidence, which they never do.
I think you're being a tad optimistic to think that a false positive is unlikely to lead to a wrongful conviction.
There has to be other factors, like they knew the victim, or live close by, or someone saw someone that looked like them, etc.
Yes, and in this case, they are only sweeping the people living in a 5km radius, meaning everybody fits the additional factor of "lives close by" and greatly increases the probability of knowing the victim.
This is a good article on the problems with fishing expeditions like this. Basically, the farther you cast the net, the greater the chance of false positives. What's worse, if there's just one false positive, it becomes next to impossible to argue your innocence because people look at the improbability of a single person being a false positive instead of the probability that there are false positives.
But if you are using them continually all day, they are horrible, mainly because you have to stand.
No you don't. Just get a stool. When your legs feel tired, switch to the stool. When you get restless, stand back up. Just because it's a standing desk, it doesn't mean there's a law against sitting down occasionally.
I've been using a standing desk for about a year now. I like it. With a chair, it's all too easy to be glued in place without moving a muscle for hours at a time. With a standing desk, you do tend to shift your weight around a bit from time to time. I don't tend to stand up all day. I have a stool that I sit on for about a quarter of the time, so I alternate between standing and sitting every so often. When I've been standing for a while, it feels good to change to sitting, and when I've been sitting down for a while, it feels good to change to standing. I don't get sore legs or feet. Chances are, if you get sore from standing around for a couple of hours, you could do with exercising those muscles more anyway.
the lack of cursor control (touching to move the cursor is just down to luck as to where exactly it goes)
Hold down your finger. A magnifying glass pops up giving you a zoomed in view of the cursor location for accurate cursor control. Or, if you want to select a particular word, just double tap.
Look, I'm an iOS & web developer. I use an iPad all day long, often off-site. If anybody is the target market for this, it's me. And I think developing on an iPad is an awful idea. It's a case of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should". Is it possible to pull up a code editor on the iPad? Of course. But that doesn't make it a better choice than, well, just about any other option. The only redeeming aspect of this is if you already have an iPad with you, it's better than nothing at all. But really, how often is it that you need to do some coding unexpectedly and you only have your iPad with you? This is what laptops are for.
With that in mind, Amazon will definitely be selling more Kindle Fires, however, the next one you'll be able to buy will probably have a "2 at the end of the name. Jeff Bezos said that the Kindle Fire is Amazon's most successful product launch so far and that there's 'an exciting roadmap ahead.' He also confirmed Amazon will continue to offer hardware, but there's no detail beyond that."
Huh. I don't really think that an Amazon Kindle Fire 2 at the end of the name. Jeff Bezos said that the Kindle Fire is Amazon's most successful product launch so far and that there's 'an exciting roadmap ahead.' He also confirmed Amazon will continue to offer hardware, but there's no detail beyond that. is a particularly catchy name for a tablet, but I'm sure Amazon have done their market research and focus groups.
As a developer, I totally understand the problems with holding software developers liable for security vulnerabilities. But when it comes to cases like this, I can't help but think there should be some legal liability for mega-corporations knowingly distributing vulnerable products.
It used to be the case that even a desktop Linux system was absolutely rock solid. The quality started plummeting years ago though. I don't know why, but distros stopped caring about desktop stability. I switched not long after the KDE 4 fiasco. I tried a few different desktop distributions and things were crashing out of the box. One of the distros, the Live CD installer had a background process that crashed on startup. You had to literally click through a crash report just to get to the installer. How the hell does something like that make it into production? If you can't even boot up a clean install without things crashing, something has gone very, very wrong with your QA process. And just because I know it's going to come up otherwise: no, it wasn't hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
No it's not, and stop shouting.
You have to code everything that relies on the network on mobile devices to handle cases where it is unavailable because they frequently lose connectivity. Is an iPhone going through a tunnel fragmenting the platform because it doesn't have Facetime while an iPhone that isn't going through a tunnel does have Facetime? Of course not.
Let me give you an example. Today, I was working on an app that had a button to make a phone call in it. Oh no! This terribly fragmented platform includes devices that can't make phone calls. What a disaster! Oh wait, no it isn't. I just hid the button when making calls is not available. A grand total of three lines of code, including one line that was nothing more than a curly brace. Took me less than five minutes to code and test.
There are probably fewer than a dozen features like this that I've ever had to handle like that in four years of developing for iOS. It's incredibly trivial.
The latest version of the SDK can't target anything below iOS 4.3, which ARMv6 devices can't upgrade to (the farthest they go is iOS 4.2). At this point, ARMv6 devices (anything older than an iPhone 3GS) are unsupported by Apple's developer tools. In practice though, it's very difficult to make a case for supporting anything below iOS 5 for most applications these days, people upgrade iOS devices very quickly, at least the ones that use apps on a regular basis do.
Most of these are things that iOS developers don't care about. For instance, Facetime over cellular: developers don't care about that, it's an Apple app, not an API, and evenif it was an API, you'd have to code for when it's unavailable anyway.
There are variations between the different models that developers have to be aware of, but they aren't covered in this chart. For instance, background modes are only available for ARMv7 devices. By and large, Apple have done a good job of shielding developers from these differences. I'm an iOS developer, and I very rarely have to even think about different device support. The two main ones are display size and display density - and Apple have only just announced the third display size ever, and they've only used two display densities ever. I can't really think of any platform outside of games consoles that are so homogenous.
If anybody hasn't seen it yet, there's a photo here.
Look, the guy's on stage halfway through the presentation. There will undoubtedly be more announced than what's been mentioned so far. What's the point in publishing half a story? Just wait half an hour for them to get through the presentation and then publish the story when you actually have the full story.
The general idea - that you get computer-illiterate staff away from general-purpose computers and onto more appliance-like systems is a good one. More flexibility in the end-users' hands means more difficulties supporting them and more spaghetti work practices.
The problem though, is that it sounds like they thought they could just dump the product on them and their problems would be solved. These people will have had deeply-ingrained workflows that frequently include all manner of hacks and workarounds that have glommed together over the years. If you're going to move them away from that, you need to move their workflows and content too, otherwise they are stuck trying to do the old thing with products that aren't designed for it.
I'm not sure what's so bizarre about using an AppleTV in that way though - it's designed for that purpose and it works great in that kind of situation.
T-Mobile block SIP, and if I remember correctly, Orange block SMTP that doesn't go through their mail servers. Does anybody know what the situation is with EE?
Trading survey answers for content is not micropayments. It's missing the micro part and the payment part. It's something that only the very young, very poor, or very bored will do, and as such, it's a) not going to get a representative segment of the market, and b) going to turn away a lot of your visitors. People tried this back in the 90s and nobody was interested.
This isn't an accidental security vulnerability, they deliberately designed their system this way. They obviously already knew their system works this way.
A few months back I saw people having trouble editing the page for a court case. The citation they had provided was the actual court findings as published by the court. There were a couple of Wikipedia moderators that didn't like the topic at hand, so they slapped a big banner saying something to the effect of "Warning: this is all unsubstantiated hokum and will burn down your house if you read it" at the top of the page. They said that the court findings as published by the court were not good enough, that you actually needed an article written about the court case published by a journal instead. They supplied an article published by a journal. This was then also rejected because it was published by a law firm. Kafka would have been rolling his eyes at this point.
People seem to have lost sight of the fact that a wiki is effective because it drastically lowers the barrier to editing. Wikipedia now fetishises process and is about as far away from the spirit in which wikis were conceived as possible. It's not a wiki if bureaucracy makes it impossible to contribute without reading hundreds of pages on process and you have to fight somebody who seemingly devotes all of their time to controlling their favourite subjects.
Only permanent US residents paid through a US bank account are eligible for Kickstarter. Why does the Finnish government think it can dictate the terms of a project where a US company is paying a US resident to do stuff?
If your aim is to make something more visible, don't pick a yellow-on-white colour scheme.
I think you're being a tad optimistic to think that a false positive is unlikely to lead to a wrongful conviction.
Yes, and in this case, they are only sweeping the people living in a 5km radius, meaning everybody fits the additional factor of "lives close by" and greatly increases the probability of knowing the victim.
This is a good article on the problems with fishing expeditions like this. Basically, the farther you cast the net, the greater the chance of false positives. What's worse, if there's just one false positive, it becomes next to impossible to argue your innocence because people look at the improbability of a single person being a false positive instead of the probability that there are false positives.
No you don't. Just get a stool. When your legs feel tired, switch to the stool. When you get restless, stand back up. Just because it's a standing desk, it doesn't mean there's a law against sitting down occasionally.
There's lots of talk of standing desks and posture-related discussion in this previous discussion. My own comment:
The UDID is separate to the serial number; there's no reason to use the UDID for this purpose.
Hold down your finger. A magnifying glass pops up giving you a zoomed in view of the cursor location for accurate cursor control. Or, if you want to select a particular word, just double tap.
In other words, no, you haven't actually used an iPad to type anything.
I have an Apple keyboard and an iPad right here. I'm looking right at them. In landscape mode, the keys on both keyboards are the same size.
Your keyboard is bigger because it's got more keys on it, not because the keys are bigger.
Yes, they are the same size as Apple keyboard keys. Have you ever actually used an iPad to type anything?
Look, I'm an iOS & web developer. I use an iPad all day long, often off-site. If anybody is the target market for this, it's me. And I think developing on an iPad is an awful idea. It's a case of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should". Is it possible to pull up a code editor on the iPad? Of course. But that doesn't make it a better choice than, well, just about any other option. The only redeeming aspect of this is if you already have an iPad with you, it's better than nothing at all. But really, how often is it that you need to do some coding unexpectedly and you only have your iPad with you? This is what laptops are for.
Huh. I don't really think that an Amazon Kindle Fire 2 at the end of the name. Jeff Bezos said that the Kindle Fire is Amazon's most successful product launch so far and that there's 'an exciting roadmap ahead.' He also confirmed Amazon will continue to offer hardware, but there's no detail beyond that. is a particularly catchy name for a tablet, but I'm sure Amazon have done their market research and focus groups.
As a developer, I totally understand the problems with holding software developers liable for security vulnerabilities. But when it comes to cases like this, I can't help but think there should be some legal liability for mega-corporations knowingly distributing vulnerable products.
It used to be the case that even a desktop Linux system was absolutely rock solid. The quality started plummeting years ago though. I don't know why, but distros stopped caring about desktop stability. I switched not long after the KDE 4 fiasco. I tried a few different desktop distributions and things were crashing out of the box. One of the distros, the Live CD installer had a background process that crashed on startup. You had to literally click through a crash report just to get to the installer. How the hell does something like that make it into production? If you can't even boot up a clean install without things crashing, something has gone very, very wrong with your QA process. And just because I know it's going to come up otherwise: no, it wasn't hardware.
They do. You can use Google's Authenticator mobile app to authenticate yourself with Dropbox.