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Comment Re:Well, duh (Score 2) 290

Which is why I really *love* the "data usage" feature of android 4. I get to know exactly what has been using my bandwidth as well as set limits at which I should be warned or the internet turned off. Also, it's possible to prevent apps from using background data. Given that I have a cap of 100MB/mo + 0.1$/MB once I'm over that, this is *really* useful(I'm in a 3rd world country if you find the cap appalling, now you know why). This way, I get to use my connection for things like googling stuff + wikipedia + mail without running the risk of a high bill or getting cut off due to some app that decides to suck away all my bandwidth.

Comment Re:What about Google driverless car? (Score 1) 603

How do you mitigate someone going the wrong way on a highway at 80km/h(about 50mph) in what is, to you, the fast lane(he's driving on the right side of the road from his perspective, which, in two way roads makes sense but not on a highway). Yes, that happened to me and I almost died that day. I saw him when he was barely 40m away while I was coming out of a left turn, I swerved right and lost control of my car for what was probably the scariest 2s of my life. I managed to stop without hitting anything eventually and thank God there weren't any other cars around so nobody slammed into me, but there really wasn't anything I could do.

For the record, I live in a 3rd world country(Lebanon), such incidents aren't common, but they happen. In this particular case there was a lot of people in downtown Beirut(2 year memorial for the assassination of Rafic el Hariri) and I was driving the highway into Beirut from the east(known as the road to Damascus). There was a lot of traffic at the endpoint of that highway and some dumb idiot decided to U-turn and go the other way so as not to wait in traffic.

You can be a good driver but sometimes there's simply nothing you can do. My example is a pretty drastic one but there are countless drunk drivers out there who do sometimes stupider stuff and that can get you in an accident even when you're driving perfectly well.

Comment Re:Think ahead, move sideways, not up.... (Score 1) 473

Well yes, his name is in Arabic and given that Arabic has quite a few sounds that do not exist in English it's quite hard to spell his name in English. Particularly the first letter in his second/middle name, which is usually written as 'kh' in Latin letters. I've never seen an English speaker(or most non-Arabs for that matter) pronounce that one correctly. German has something close but it's not the same.

(I'm Lebanese, same nationality as that writer)

Comment Re:It's not age - it's money and misogyny. (Score 1) 473

~15 years ago, I was an outsider brought in to observe a startup. In one all-programmers meeting, the only female employee sat there silently while the guys engaged in what can only be called "p*ssing contests." Afterwards, I asked her why she didn't say anything even though she was by far the smartest of the bunch and I *knew* she had the answers; she felt that she couldn't. It was obvious that speaking up would have been taken as challenging their "combination dominance game and mutual admiration society". It was just as obvious that they were totally oblivious to the effect they were having.

Well, I don't know about IT but I think this is a problem everywhere where a significant part of the team is made up of men. I spent a year doing social/missionary work after I graduated from college. There were 3 other men and 4 women(a 50/50 split). Now, we were all friends and had good personal(non-work) relationships with each other, so when such situations occurred in planning meetings we could simply talk things over with each other afterwards, aside, one on one(to avoid pissing contest situations). I learned a lot about differences in psychology between genders during that year.

Apparently, men and women simply have different ways to debate things and argue about them. Each has their problems, and if the differences aren't specifically pointed out to someone at some point they are usually oblivious to it. Men appear to women very aggressive when giving their opinion about something although they may not be trying to intimidate anyone(I know that I was told that's how I come across a lot of the times and to me I'd just be talking normally, I progressively learned to recognize what things give this impression and change them accordingly). Women tend to over-think what the other party would think of them or label them as to the point of usually not speaking up(when, generally, nobody would have been bother by them speaking up or tagged them as anything negative).

I really don't know how these issues apply to the business world and when company politics kick in(I'm still only 24 and have had a job for barely a year), but they were an issue even in a tight-knit group of 8 friends doing social work for a year together. But from my (limited) experience they're usually a misunderstanding problem that would usually be fixed by talking things over calmly aside and pointing to the things in a person's way of talking/acting that cause this impression of being overly aggressive/sexist(by not listening to a women's opinion/argument about something). I know that in the beginning we were constantly told by the women in the team that they felt they had to be 10x as aggressive as us to get their point in and that we wouldn't listen to them and we couldn't figure out why they felt that way until patterns in our actions were pointed out to us and clearly identified then acted upon and changed. Likewise, they learned that certain things were just personality traits in a way a person expressed themselves and definitely not meant as trying to drown someone out/sexism/etc... and became less sensitive to them.

Another thing that helps is the existence of someone who is clearly in a leading position and who can moderate such meetings and who can arbitrate and decide on tough decisions. We didn't have that since we were all pretty much the same age, but having worked on other projects with a subset of that team where there was a clear leader it made a world of difference.

Comment Re:Outside of the code, all documentation is worth (Score 1) 312

One other useful source of documentation is version control software. If used correctly that is(small commits that do one thing with a proper commit message). I recently joined a team working on a project that has been underway for quite a while and whenever I find myself wondering what a certain piece of code does or why it was written the answer is usually easy to obtain by going "svn blame [codefile]" then "svn log -r[version of last change]" as well as "svn diff -c [version of last change]" if I want to know what that commit did as a whole.

Comment Re:You know why Apple's winning? It's not about sp (Score 1) 390

' I think it's pretty telling that the "touch" event in the Android API is called "click" '

Not true, a quick look at the reference for the View class from which all UI elements derive in android(you can find it here: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html) will tell you that there are two different events you can handle, onTouchEvent and onClickEvent. A touch event is what you would use if you want the raw touch event(for a game for example). The click event is what you use for things like buttons, or tabs, a more appropriate naming would possibly be 'onTapEvent', maybe. But I don't see anything wrong with onClickEvent personally.

Comment Re:DOM-Interface for byte code (Score 3, Interesting) 234

How is what we have now with things like minified js any different than bytecode? Have a look at the source for gmail, or the minified version of jquery. You need analysis software to have any hope of making any sense of it and it's exactly the same then as a bytecode decompiler.

jQuery is open source, which means you can get the non-minified version and read that to know how it works, but I would dare anyone to make sense of the 100s of KBs of obfuscated js that is the gmail interface(or quite a few other popular products and services for that matter).

Comment Re:DOM-Interface for byte code (Score 1) 234

Yes, but what is different about what the first poster in this thread was suggesting is for that bytecode to have DOM bindings. Java applets were self-contained applications that ran in a window within the page and touched nothing outside of that(and had to do all the drawing themselves and were completely inconsistent with the rest of the page with regards to look and feel as a result).

What is being suggested here is something that would replace javascript that would interact with and modify the whole page through a DOM interface, completely unlike an applet and much more useful.

Comment Re:It's change for the sake of change (Score 1) 1040

I don't know what distro you're on, I personally use arch linux. They have an answer to both those problems(the power management solution is generic but the network management is an arch-only thing, I think):

Power management:
    1) http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpufreqd/ A nifty little tool that allows you to define profiles and switch to them depending on a few variables(with plugins to extend the built in variables). Handles things like AC on/off of course, but also cpu temperatures, battery percentage, etc...
    2) install acpid and modify /etc/handler.sh to react to specific acpi events(like ac on/off)

Network management: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Netcfg The nice things about netcfg is that it's easy to use and cli-based. This means you can have wifi up and running from the terminal without fooling around with wpa_supplicant. This is really useful for me because my laptop has switchable graphics and I've been experimenting with automatically detecting which card has been selected from the bios and loading the appropriate drivers(it so happens that the catalyst and intel driver packages are mutually exclusive on arch). This leaves me without any graphics on boot quite a few times and it's nice to still have internet access when that happens.

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