Combining the openness of Android with the user experience of a traditional console is pretty revolutionary. Both users and devs no longer being bound to the chains of Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft could have a transformative effect on the industry.

Right now I'd say that Scrum is the biggest source of unnecessary meetings in this industry. I think the principles of agile development are great, but Scrum is a bad way to do it.

Weekly planning meetings, demos, retrospectives, and worst of all: daily standups at a rigid morning time. Not good for night owl engineers who want to sleep in or for early birds who get to work too soon before the meeting because it introduces a big context switch.

Instead of all these meetings, why aren't there more companies that just solve their accountability problems with tooling? My solution: Git + Bugzilla eliminates the need for all these meetings except the occasional demo.

Here's how:

Want to put a feature on the release calendar? File a bug. Want to prioritize features/bugs for an upcoming release? Fiddle with the bug priorities. Need input from an engineer about whether or not the priorities make sense based on dependencies? Meet with one or two senior engineers privately just on that topic. There goes all those massive planning meetings.

Want to know what someone is working on? Make all developers work in their own git branches. Ask developers to name their branches after the bug number they're working on. Ask the developer to commit their code daily, whether it's finished or not. That way anyone can check on their progress. When the developer finishes his task, merge the branch into master and close the bug. There goes all those redundant daily standups.

Cordova's API is the spec. When you target Cordova's API, you're targeting what will eventually be native browser APIs. Have a look here for more info: http://phonegap.com/2012/05/09/phonegap-beliefs-goals-and-philosophy/

Wow your videos hit a bit too close to home for me! I drive down that road in your first video all the time. I've also been considering getting a dashcam for the same reason you have one. My only concern is finding one that doesn't require a lot of fuss. I'm looking for something that auto-activates when the car is on and shuts itself off when the car is off. Ideally it'd roll over the video too, only keeping a memory of the last X hours. That way I only have to do anything with the dashcam when I actually want to permanently archive some video when something notable happens.

It's not a nearby "solar system." The term Solar System is a proper noun, not a generic term. It's a nearby planetary system. I wish people (especially journalists) would stop getting this wrong.

The term "Solar System" is a proper noun, not a generic term. The term the article was looking for is "planetary system."

"Rate hike! Rate hike! Tra, la, la!"
- Palmer, Final Fantasy 7. Steve Ballmer's alter ego.

Perhaps they don't bother because the cost of entering an arms race would be too high. If any major site were to block adblock users, you would expect the plugin to quickly route around their attempts.

If I wanted to sabotage ad blockers, I'd just host my ads from the same servers as my content, since ad blockers don't really do anything aside from block ad servers. How would you route around that?

All ad blockers do is block common ad servers. They don't generally work on websites where the ads are hosted on the same server as the content because if the content and the ads are both coming from the same server then there's no reliable way to distinguish between the content you requested and the content you didn't.

Sometimes it can be done on a case by case basis by visibly blocking out regions of the page where ads normally appear, but that too can be easily thwarted by randomizing the placement of the ads.

All things considered, preventing ad blockers from working properly is far from impossible. It's trivially easy.

Yep, exactly. Preventing ad block from working is quite easy to do. Most sites don't bother because only a small minority does it and that small minority tends to be disproportionately made up of the kooky anti-consumerist crowd anyway, who aren't worth advertising to due to their hatred of advertising in general. If ad blocking ever went mainstream you'd see more sites tying content to ads explicitly.

I don't know about anyone else, but I think that the size of the Nexus 4 is too big at 4.7". I was hoping for a 4" to 4.3" screen, but Google have really pushed for that extra big handset.

Glad I'm not the only one.

To me it's just silly to call a 4.7" phone the Nexus 4. They should round to the closest whole number and call it the Nexus 5 instead.

How many of those articles are about vapid pop culture topics, like Pokemon or Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

What you find vapid, millions of other people find notable.

You *still* believe pirating is stealing, even after spending time on slashdot?

(If you didn't mean to say loot, that's cool, we all make mistakes, just say so)

Tell people here that you use GPL-licensed code in a closed-source product and see how fast you'll be accused of stealing.

Pirating a song has no commercial profit motive. Violating the GPL (in most cases) does.