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Comment You can probably afford hardware (Score 3, Insightful) 78

You should buy a something like a SBC (Pi or Arduino) and get a breadboard and some motion control chips and a a stepper motor. All of that together will cost about $60. (Breadboard maybe $10, chips maybe another $10, stepper motor maybe another $10, Raspberry Pi maybe $30). You could at least learn the basics of working with the chips and working with a motor.

Comment Re:Too little, too late (Score 5, Insightful) 262

The fact that they ship an improved version every year or so is NOT the issue here. Seriously if the new version is not a big enough improvement over the one you have, you don't need to buy it. You can keep your phone for 2 years, or 3 years, or however long you want. That is hardly "pushing it through the throats of customers". You have to have a major victim mentality to think that. I do agree though that shipping non-equivalent versions of the processor is a big deal. That's not okay.

Comment Gatekeeper (Score 4, Interesting) 66

If a user doesn't know how and can't figure out or google how to bypass Gatekeeper, they shouldn't be bypassing Gatekeeper. I'm a Mac developer and I work on a commercial application that uses a privileged helper tool which the app loads using SMJobBless and that tool is managed by launchd and executed as root. We are an identified developer and we sign our app as such. We don't distribute via the App Store and we are about to ship a new version that adds a kernel extension that I wrote. In recent versions of MacOS X, kernel extensions must be signed and they have to at least by signed by an identified developer who has applied for a kernel extension signing certificate. One of the scenarios that I pay attention to as far as security goes is that our daemon (aka "privileged helper tool") executes other processes and also controls the loading and unloading of our kernel extension. Most of those processes, and our kernel extension, are located in our application bundle. I wanted to avoid making dumb assumptions like that our application is running from a particular path, so the app communicates to the daemon via XPC and tells the daemon where the app bundle is located. The daemon doesn't just trust the app. It verifies that the app is code signed and that it is our app and that it hasn't been modified before it starts executing things or loading kernel extensions from inside the app bundle. I can easily imagine a scenario where an app could call our daemon and tell it some other location and cause us to execute malware if we didn't do this. Since I'm not a security expert, I constantly worry that someone will find a way to do this and I just hope we never become an attack vector. I do not want my product on Slashdot because of a security problem.

Comment Are the reviews useful? (Score 4, Insightful) 206

If I was planning to switch from Android to iOS, I would consider using an app like this. The question is, do the app itself work well for the use case it is advertised for? Does it actually move your data over to iOS? What data does it specifically move? What does it not move?

I don't care what kind of computers other people use. I write MacOS X software for a living. I chose MacOS X as a user and as a developer for a variety of reasons, but I recognize those reasons may no longer be current. I haven't used Windows since Vista - and my use of Vista was doing development on a cross platform Windows/Mac/Linux app I wrote. I have written software for iOS (before it was even called iOS) and some iPhone apps I've written have been commercially quite successful. I thought about writing software for Android, but I haven't because my understanding is that Android users don't (in general) spend money on apps. I don't like "freemium" apps. I prefer to charge up front or else have it free. These days, I'm really more interested in MacOS X software and Linux software.

That said, I don't care what phone you like. I am very glad there are multiple viable phone platforms. I think iOS is cool. I don't like having to ship software through the App Store. That said, I've certainly sold more through the App Store than I ever sold through other channels like Kagi.

Anyway, I'm disappointed that the conversation here isn't focused on whether the reviews are useful. That's what I would care about.

Comment Missing Option: Start projects and abandon them (Score 1) 190

I've started several open source projects. I have one that I started in 2002 and have continued to use myself over the years. Its an xml parser that works the way I think it should work. I wrote it and made it open source because I found myself wanting to use xml in projects at various employers and it was always a hassle finding an xml parser and convincing management to allow me to use it (because open source) and then it never had exactly the right features, etc. Xerces was too big, etc. So, finally I just wrote my own. Since I own the copyright, I can use it and grant the employer a non-exclusive close source license if they want.

Comment Re:just want I wanted! (Score 1) 307

Lots of embedded projects are done on Raspberry Pi. If Windows does not run on the Pi, the company who decides to do a Pi based project will decide to develop under Linux. If Windows is available on the Pi and they have Windows developers available, they might decide to do the project with Windows. Also, its less expensive to hire Windows developers than Linux developers right now. Microsoft likes selling embedded windows because its a great way for them to sell lots of Windows licenses.

Comment VMWare is worth the money (Score 3, Interesting) 288

After struggling with VirtualBox for a while, I broke down and bought VMWare. I use it for running Linux and running other versions of MacOS X on my Mac. I have found it to be well worth the money. In general, I like free software and I don't mind something that is a little harder to use if the non-free alternative is expensive, but at $79 VM Ware has saved me so much time its well worth it.

Comment Re:The solution is obvious (Score 4, Insightful) 579

Apple tries to control as much as they can on their platforms. Other platforms like Android and Windows take an approach of sharing responsibility for the overall quality between several different companies who can each point at each other and say "not it!" when a problem arrises.

Comment Two thoughts (Score 1) 287

Why do we have to assume we can't make any changes to the nature of traffic lights to make them more easily machine readable? Since it requires a car with a lot of cameras to maintain the road information accurate enough for the self driving car, why would lots of cars with fewer cameras do an equally good job? For things like potholes, we can't self driving cars report information about how smooth a particular path along the road is so that pot holes are mapped?

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