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Comment Obvious alternative (Score 1) 711

I am a mobile developer that has worked on android mostly but my company is considering a product that would be cross platform or even tablet based. The initial design meetings centered around providing rich native apps for each platform but after seeing how much code would have to be duplicated, our design has turned to a webservice with the clients on each of the mobile platforms (android, iphone, RIM, Symbian) being a dumb html/javascript ui. It will still be marketed as an app through Itunes/android market or whatever the native delivery mechanism is, but the the app will do not more that fire a series of webservice calls and load the content into a local webpage that we load from the local app resource folders (so we don't have to download the page from the internet). This kind of vendor lockin might prompt more developers to do the same. Imagine if all the apps you downloaded were basically mobile safari/chrome running a locally served html file. Its not bad, it just doesn't encourage developers to really take advantage of the more powerful features of the frameworks/languages. I think this approach could actually lower the quality of cross-platform apps as developers look for the simplest way to deliver a consistent look and feel.

Comment Terrible product names (Score 1) 397

NO MORE PADS!!!!!!!!

*Tab is a terrible name. For a company who is lauded for their marketing genius, every time I hear the name of their product, I think about menstruation. IPad is just a terrible name. iTab isn't terrible but really Steve, try a new letter or even a whole new word. Not everything in the product line has to start with "i". Google would do well to avoid this trap altogether.

Comment Re:I've.never.used.groovy.so.I.have.a.question. (Score 1) 667

oh yeah. this problem is solved real elegantly by providing a namespace feature of classes. you simply import the class with its full package and classname and then you can use it everywhere in that class by only referencing the simple classname. come to think of it, this feature is part of java too. if you ware worried about having to type all those import statements don't sweat it. All modern IDEs have a key combo that automatically imports missing fully qualified classnames. In Eclipse, for example, the combo is ctrl + o.

if.you.stop.using.notepad.as.your.ide.your.problem.GoesAway

Earth

Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic 807

DJRumpy writes "The Danish political scientist Bjørn Lomborg won fame and fans by arguing that many of the alarms sounded by environmental activists and scientists — that species are going extinct at a dangerous rate, that forests are disappearing, that climate change could be catastrophic — are bogus. A big reason Lomborg was taken seriously is that both of his books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (in 2001) and Cool It (in 2007), have extensive references, giving a seemingly authoritative source for every one of his controversial assertions. So in a display of altruistic masochism that we should all be grateful for (just as we're grateful that some people are willing to be dairy farmers), author Howard Friel has checked every single citation in Cool It. The result is The Lomborg Deception, which is being published by Yale University Press next month. It reveals that Lomborg's work is 'a mirage,' writes biologist Thomas Lovejoy in the foreword. '[I]t is a house of cards. Friel has used real scholarship to reveal the flimsy nature' of Lomborg's work."

Comment Real worth (Score 1) 188

Here's the formula:

Real worth = (abs(cost_of_game)+(hours_spent_playing * player's_normal_hourly_wage)) * (-1)

Think about that the next time you are boasting to your friends how you are a level 69 dark elf and you just completed your 98th Quest for the Golden Eye of Ramos (or some other such nonsense)

Comment I'll do it. (Score 1) 773

My site gets about 10 hits per week. Of course, I have not done anything specific to increase my googleablity but if he gives me a million dollars I'll sell my domain to him he can do what he likes. If he gives me 500k I'll go index my site in bing. shit I'll do it for 100K. No takers? 50 K? going once....

Comment Re:Stop buying from Apple. (Score 1) 656

Apple is not the villian here. Apple sells a device that plays music. Apple gives away a program to manage music libraries and download music from the internet. If you happen to own Apple's music device it will also autmatically sync between the program and the device. If you don't, then you just have to sync your device and your music library manually. I don't get why palm is leveraging apple's work instead of building a better program. Why doesn't palm take an opensource media library and build a plugin or better yet contribute a patch that adds palm sync? With a little honesty and ingenuity, palm could get ahead of apple instead of being asshats and trying to crack itunes (which sucks anyways).

Comment before we get our panties all twisted (Score 1) 1124

this minimal menu system is actually pretty pervasive in the web browser world. ie7 and chrom* browsers do this and it doesn't mean that any functionality is lost. While I hade the idea of style over function, if done correctly, minimizing the menu could result in more screen real estate for webpage rendering. I don't know about you but I spend 99% of my time in web browsers looking at content not jacking around with the menu. So what if the menu is an extra click away. As long as not configuration options are sacrificed and as long as it doesn't take any extra resources, I could go for this change 100%

Comment tron fantasies (Score 1) 320

I saw the headline and I was really hoping to see that guy who always posts how linux is used to host tron fantasies. For once, that post would have been marginally relevant.

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