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Comment This won't work (Score 1) 107

Google, Apple and Microsoft have the luxury of putting their own voice search directly into the UI of their respective operating system. If Microsoft produce a Cortana app then chances are they'll have to make do with wherever they can stick it in iOS / Android and whatever limitations it imposes on how it interacts with the rest of the system. e.g. setting reminders or whatever. I suppose Microsoft could write their own launcher for Android and integrate Cortana but they'd have to make their launcher pretty damned functional to attract people and at that point they're basically cannibalizing their own market.

Comment Re:HOWTO (Score 1) 1081

Belief in Heaven and Hell is besides the point. There are certain people whom society must either to suffer to live in prison their entire life or execute them. They decide one or the other and needn't have anything to do with an afterlife or retribution therein.

Personally I see absolutely nothing wrong with executing people providing their crimes, guilt and standard of evidence merit the ultimate sanction. That doesn't mean I see the US system as a role model for this because it is clear to even a casual observer that it is not.

Comment Re:I must be missing something. (Score 1) 240

You can close tasks in several ways. 1 - you swipe the task from the left and then down (although this is a horribly clumsy), 2 - you can go to your desktop and rightmouse / long press the tray icon and choose close, 3 - if you have a mouse you can move it to the top edge of the app, a bar will appear and you can click the close button.

So yes there are ways to kill apps although IMO none of them are very good. I would prefer a proper finger-friendly "running apps" screen where I can either flick them away or hit close. And Microsoft need to present apps, executables and services in a unified and coherent way from this screen.

Comment easy (Score 1) 1081

If a state is going to execute people then a firing squad is quite able to perform the task reliably and quickly. Hell, it doesn't even need a firing squad - guns can be preaimed and fired remotely with sufficient redundancy to ensure the outcome.

Comment Re:And Dart? (Score 1) 91

Typescript is balls as a language (for all the reasons JS is) but it's succeeding probably because it's familiar to JS / AS devs and static typing is a good thing. So you can reuse existing JS code and there are TS definition files for most popular JS libs too. So better than JS but still suffering from many of the same issues - strict model, weird binding rules etc.

What is ironic that the two leading JS replacements actually manage to be orthogonal - Typescript adds extra verbiage and Coffeescript attempts to strip out the verbiage.

As for Dart, I think Google spooked devs by intending to add a Dart VM to Chrome. Even if it could compile into JS, it sent the message that their intention was to replace JS with this other thing or run the two side by side. It's not the first time a company has tried to do this - VBscript in IE was another example.

Comment Re:JavaScript framework du jour (Score 1) 91

It's not a complete loss. Virtually all of these frameworks are doing the same damned thing and implementing the same damned patterns just with different code. And underneath Angular or WhateverReplacesIt will be the usual heap of JS libs - JQuery, Underscore, Backbone et al. So knowledge is transferable even if AngularJS stops being fashionable.

Comment Re:Let me guess (Score 1) 166

In the X Window System core protocol, only four kinds of packets are sent, asynchronously, over the network: requests, replies, events, and errors.

That whole request / reply bit sailed over your head I see. The wire might be asynchronous but Xlib, the library that virtually all client code uses is filled with synchronous code that sends the request and waits for the reply. e.g. call XGetWindowAttributes and it will block until the response comes back.

There have been attempts to use xcb instead which is an async API but it turns out writing async code is hard, particularly when dealing with legacy code and an arcane windowing system that sends out a storm of messages. It's not hard to find xcb backend projects that have floundered.

It is called a pixmap.

A pixmap is not a surface. A surface is a texture under the management of a GPU (or software emulation of a GPU). X has no concept of surface. It is damage based windowing system. Hence the reason for extensions to work through this.

I am not crying. In fact, I am happy with X. I just point out that I don't see how Wayland has *anything* to offer for a desktop user. Not even performance. But it has disadvantages: And breaking compatibility is most serious one. XWayland only solves one direction (running X clients on Wayland) and not the other (running Wayland clients on X). Finally, there are already mobile devices with Wayland without XWayland, e.g. Jolla. It breaks compatibility with the excellent N9, which is really stupid.

If you don't see why it has anything to offer I suggest you look at the Wayland website where it explains in detail why X is broken. If virtually every X developer can see the need then I don't see why others can't.

Comment Re:Yeah but..... (Score 1) 172

the "space" it's eating is completely unusable for any other purpose. the binary exists in /system which is a read-only partition. that's why you can't physically remove the APK.

The point is that partition would be 30MB smaller if it didn't contain the Facebook in the first place. Throw in twitter, some crappy mobile office suite, some antivirus software, some cloud save service and a bunch of other junk and it might be closer to 100MB of wasted space.

no you don't see above.

Yes it does. 30MB masked out and another 30MB+ for the replacement. That's just one app that I assume most people would keep.

the existence of an APK installed into /system has zero impact on your manufacturer's ability to roll an updated ROM. it has everything to do with the customizations they make to the firmware itself.

Of course it does. The network operator (or whomever they contract to support their phones) have to receive a (tested) firmware update image from the manufacturer, extract it, throw in all their own changes & apps, compress it, test it again, and roll it out. That could add weeks or months to the process. It quite obviously requires more effort to test, and it reduces the chances that you'll get updates at all - perhaps Vodafone or whoever only supports a phone for 18 months even if the manufacturer is pushing out more updates or security fixes.

Comment Re:Let me guess (Score 1) 166

First, one can extend X11 fairly easily, this has been done in the past. Second, X11 already has asynchronous IPC.

First, you don't extend X, you work around it and leave one more bit of dead code to be maintained forever. Second, it is not async.

Again: bullshit. X11 can do take advantage of the hardware in exactly the same way as Wayland

Sorry you're lying. X11 has no concept of surfaces. The only way of taking advantage of the hardware is to write an extension that composites the scene for X11 and hands it back to X11 to page flip. So X11 is just a 3rd wheel that involves extra context switches for no reason at all.

I don't want RDP. RDP is not compatible with X. RDP is also a propriertary protocol fron Microsoft with a core standardized by the ITU. I sure hell to not want this as a replacement for X.

Oh boo hoo then implement something else.

Yes, implement X. Then come back.

Run X over wayland if you're so desperate for some crappy broken network protocol. VNC, RDP and others are more efficient.

I am not playing games. I want my new applications to work with old display servers and old applications to work with new servers.

And Wayland stops you how? Run X11 over wayland and stop crying.

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