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Comment Re:Too Bad (Score 2) 106

I agree,
but I think overall as the characters mature in the show, they become less awkward over time.
With the exception of Sheldon, where I kinda wish they would just come out and state that the character is autistic at some level. Instead of just making him a super scientist who needs to make all these trade-offs in his personal life to be there.
While I do not fall on the recorded Autism spectrum. The way they make Sheldon would be very insulting to people with these problems.

Comment So what. (Score 1) 385

I am curious on why Tovalds opinion on systemd really matters.
I congratulate him for his work on the Linux Kernel, He made a really good OS, and put enough effort and skill to keep a strong team of developers focused.
However that doesn't make him an expert in all thing. Even all things related to the OS he had pivotal to create.

The systemd argument is about methodology not technology. It is the same as most political redirect. Two groups with a different vision of an end goal, taking different approaches to get there.

Comment Re:If there was only one viable choice ... (Score 1) 159

I switched to DuckDuckGo and haven't looked back. They used to be noticeably worse in results quality, but Google has gone a long way downhill. Occasionally I don't find things with DDG and try Google. When I do, I have to wade through pages of totally irrelevant stuff to find that there are no matches, whereas at least DDG tells me straight away that it can only find half a dozen possibly-relevant things. I especially like the way DDG integrates with a number of domain-specific search engines.

Comment Re:Translation... (Score 1) 200

The Government Bidding process for services is corrupt by design.
You can make bid for service.
Then you have stipulations which weigh it in a companies favor, not because they are required for the job, but to write the contract for the company.

I have seen State Bids for services for a Web Site. Which has odd requirements, such as 20+ years in COBOL, 10+ Years in RPG, 3 Years of HTML, 2 Years of ASP.NET
When you see these contracts you know they are for a particular person they want to keep on board.

Comment Re:What I like ... errrm, respect about Apples Swi (Score 1) 183

My main issue is we are entering a post desktop world. (No the desktop isn't dyeing, but it isn't the center of our computing world)
So we need the following.
1. A platform to create moble apps.
2. Being able to create these apps on different systems.

It is actually very lame to have to have a Mac to build an iOS app. You really should be able to do it on at least the Big three OS Windows,Mac,Linux. Because we are not desktop centrist anymore and people will go around with different Desktops and OS's freely.

Comment Writing code isn't always fun. (Score 4, Interesting) 54

The biggest issue with a lot of of the home grown Open Source Apps, is getting past the dreaded 80% complete mark.
This is the point in the program where all the interesting proof of concepts and interesting algorithms are all set. However that last 20% is a lot of the detail fine tuning that really puts all the pieces in play.
This last 20% mark when it no longer becomes fun, is where the project looses steam and sometimes dies off.
Having a company putting money towards development with management and direction and all those MBA Buzzwords basically means we push the developers to get that last 20% done.
But of course if they are pushing to get that set done, and are putting in resources to help that, it is going to be their vision of 20% not necessary yours.

I know a lot of the Open Source people have this Anti-Corporate everything mind set... However to make it in the world there needs other sources of motivation other then just feeling good.

Comment Re:What for? (Score 5, Interesting) 183

I maintain the GNUstep / Clang Objective-C stack. Most people who use it now do so in Android applications. A lot of popular apps have a core in Objective-C with the Foundation framework (sometimes they use GNUstep's on Android, more often they'll use one of the proprietary versions that includes code from libFoundation, GNUstep and Cocotron, but they almost all use clang and the GNUstep Objective-C runtime). Amusingly, there are actually more devices deployed with my Objective-C stack than Apple's. The advantage for developers is that their core logic is portable everywhere, but the GUIs can be in Objective-C with UIKit on iOS or Java on Android (or, commonly for games, GLES with a little tiny bit of platform-specific setup code). I suspect that one of the big reasons why the app situation on Windows Phone sucks is that you can't do this with a Windows port.

It would be great for these people to have an open source Swift that integrated cleanly with open source Objective-C stacks. Let's not forget that that's exactly what Swift is: a higher-level language designed for dealing with Objective-C libraries (not specifically Apple libraries).

Objective-C is a good language for mid-1990s development. Swift looks like a nice language for early 2000s development. Hopefully someone will come up with a good language for late 2010s development soon...

Comment Re:If there was only one viable choice ... (Score 2) 159

It wasn't just about interface. People tend to forget how search engines did an absolutely horrible job of intelligently ranking the sites you wanted to see.

I find it pretty easy to remember - I go to Google today.

The UI was what made me switch both to Google originally and from it some years later. When I started using Google - and when Google started gaining significant market share - most users were on 56Kb/s or slower modem connections. AltaVista was the market leader and they'd put so much crap in their front page that it took 30 seconds to load (and then another 20 or so to show the results). Google loaded in 2-3 seconds. The AltaVista search results had to be a lot better to be faster. I switched away when they made the up and down arrow keys in their search box behave differently to every other text field in the system.

Comment Re: Government s a crappy investor (Score 2) 64

My 'precious electronic toys' use about a tenth of the power that the ones I was using a decade ago for the same purpose did. Even lighting power consumption has dropped. My fridge, freezer and washing machine are the big electricity consumers in my home - efficiency has improved there, but nowhere near as fast as for gadgets.

Comment Re:Tricky proposition (Score 1) 64

There's a lot more to government than military intelligence gathering and law enforcement (although it would be a good idea for someone to remind most current governments that those are two things, not one). And most government projects end up spending insane budgets. This isn't limited to the US. It amazes me how often government projects to build databases to store a few million records with a few tens to thousands of queries per second (i.e. the kind of workload that you could run with off-the-shelf software on a relatively low-spec server) end up costing millions. Even with someone designing a pretty web-based GUI, people paid to manually enter all of the data from existing paper records, and 10 years of off-site redundancy, I often can't see where the money could have gone. Large companies often manage to do the same sort of thing.

The one thing that the US does well in terms of tech spending is mandate that the big company that wins the project should subcontract a certain percentage to small businesses. A lot of tech startups have got their big breaks from this rule.

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