I'm no fan of Windows myself, but the company I work for creates software for Windows and has clients in mainland China; I've checked my work MSDN account however and there's nothing there. Is this actually available yet?

It'd be quite handy to be able to test against this, especially considering how wonky oldskool Windows software stacks can be sometimes with varying versions of Windows and character sets (the company I work for is only just now in the process of migrating away from depending on MediaView for our primary product, which is what Encarta was based on, and let me tell you there are some strange interactions sometimes . . .)

While I got a chuckle out of the burn against Apple, it does just seem in general like they aren't working on cross-platform support at all anymore.

Someone made one for the Jolla, since there's a modular back to that phone designed for people to add electronics to it, and a lot of Jolla folks come from the N900 user/developer community so missed landscape slider QWERTY keyboards. https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

I rather like mine, although unfortunately just like the Fairphone 2 here, it doesn't support the frequencies my wireless carrier uses and as such is completely useless to me as a cellphone. Alas!

And of course, especially when it's colder out, tons of assholes---sorry, I mean "people"---leave their cars running when they go into a store or such.

Well, for example Meld crashes when you run a comparison if you use any of a half-dozen classic styles that often still ship with distributions, due to changes in the underlying GTK libraries. And that's just ridiculous; a GUI toolkit that is so incapable of handling older then-valid styles that it crashes applications? That's not a very confidence-inducing GUI toolkit.

That's the only really recent one I can think of, but that's largely because the issues I've run into peaked about 2 years ago, at which point I largely culled GTK applications from my list of applications that I commonly use (GParted persisted for a while longer, but these days the KDE Partition Manager is on par, in fact I believe it has slightly surpassed GParted although admittedly not for anything I actually use so I can't remember the details). I've forgotten a lot of the issues since then, although they did largely come down to crashes and interface layout and iconography glitches.

Not to mention that most office workers will reflexively click through each and every click-to-play popup.

Sorry for being troll-ish, but I've had increasing issues with GTK+ over the years and have been broadly relieved that developers seem to be generally switching over to Qt.

With Google's switch from Apache Harmony-based runtime libraries to GPL-with-Classpath-exception-based code, we have an ever-so-slight uptick in the copyleft nature of AOSP. True, the Classpath exception is a huge exception that makes it arguably lesser than the LGPL (Bradley Kuhn apparently half-seriously argued at the time of its creation for it to be called the "Least GPL"), but even if it's a slight shift, at least it's in the right direction. And it shows that Google at very least isn't actively working to diminish any further the usage of GPL code in Android.

But, yeah. The use of a new software stack rather than a standard glibc-based one has seriously rather counterproductively bifurcated the Linux world.

I'd assume you were purely joking, in which case it's kindof funny, but with the way these comments threads go I'm worried that you might actually think "haha but really what are women good for otherwise?". So I don't know quite how to respond to that, and instead I'm going to harp on the other clearly ridiculous thing you said, ie. the part where you seem to be equating the rather great scheme of "sudo" with the vastly inferior "UAC". For shame!

...is that the company they bought (ie. Nokia) did a far better job of hiring women in their offices around the world than Microsoft does in America, and thus when they went ahead and starting laying off the ex-Nokia employees that was enough to make a multi-percentage difference in employee gender composition? That doesn't really seem to let Microsoft off at all, it just changes the rote details of what they're on the hook for.

It's still a very heavy IDE, and I don't know about you but it's the heavy IDE nature of Eclipse tended to be what I experienced friction with personally. That being said, Android Studio (at least prior versions, haven't tried this one yet) is lighter and better organized than Eclipse, if still generally following the same paradigms, and is generally more tuned to specifically developing for Android than their copy of Eclipse was (although it's worth mentioning that Android Studio is also based on an existing IDE, in its case IntelliJ IDEA).

So, I'd say that compared to Eclipse, Android Studio is an improvement, but not a categorical one.

Working at a software development firm where the programmers are almost all folks with engineering degrees, I not only feel your pain, but experience it nearly-daily. We'll have cases in our bugtracker that say "fix {programname}", then the commit will say "fixed" and the case will be marked closed without going to anyone for testing. Then I'll run into a bug that traces back to that commit.

I rebel by being extremely verbose in commit messages and emails and such whenever the fancy strikes me, and when the engineers get upset I just retort that I'm averaging things the fuck out to what they should be!

The funniest part is when they complain about some since-departed programmer's code being so mysterious and unreadable and hard to figure out why it was written the way it was. If only they had documented it, you say? Sigh.

Use it for what? It's a random string of binary digits. I guess you'd know exactly what the random string of binary digits was on the other end. However that is not useful information.

Since you could have a pair of random and shifting strings that nonetheless stayed in sync with eachother, well, that seems like with a bit of effort it could be pretty damn great for certain cryptographic uses.

Alas, Google takes the exact same 30% on apps and IAPs.

Well, that's kindof true; note the exact wording though, "applications and in-app products that you sell on Google Play". If an app uses a non-Google Play mechanism for in-app purchases, it doesn't apply, and unlike Apple they don't (last time I checked) have a policy for their app store against publishing apps that offer non-"official" methods of IAP. Apple does have such a policy, though, so app developers can't opt out of the 30% overhead.

This is why the Android Kindle app allows purchasing directly within the app, but on iOS you have to use the web browser to buy books. Amazon isn't willing to pay a 30% overhead, and on Android they can choose to forgo the provided APIs and use their own infrastructure for purchasing within apps, but they can't on iOS.

It's not the cost I have the issue with. It is the 100 different interfaces. It's the "is this on Netflix? Hulu? HBO? Damn I can't remember."

The recent update to the Chromecast remote app for Android includes universal search, so you can just search there and then click on whatever comes up and it'll launch that over on your TV or whatnot. I can't really go into any more details than that because for some dumb reason (and this is sadly routinely the case, for example with the YouTube subscription service being talked about here) it isn't available in Canada. You're in luck if you live in the US or UK, though, or happen to live in the part of North America above the main bulk of the United States that's labeled "Alaska".