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Comment Re:I agree .. BUT .... (Score 2) 232

The answer is simple and consists of two questions:
1. How stable is the entity behind what you are going to learn? (Protip: Google and Apple are going to be around for a bit longer than most loosely associated groups of hipster developers)
2. Which of the choices has the most answered questions online (yes, probably on stackoverflow)?

(1) can alternatively be written as 'how stable is the framework/language you are learning?'
(2) can also be seen as 'Which of the choices has the most supportive and/or largest community?'
They boil down to the same, though.

My advice: do it native. Android and iOS devving is really quite easy if you don't want to do anything fancy and do it properly. If you do want to do anything fancy, you're going to have to go pretty deep anyway and hybrid frameworks are just going to get in your way.

I (single handedly) spent about 5-6 months creating a PHP backend and a native Android app, whilst the specs were changing. I had to design and implement the structure of the app and that of the backend, etc. I've started working on the iOS version 1 month ago and it is about done (maybe two more weeks). Mind you: this is not because iOS development is easier than Android development (they both have their quirks), but already having a stable backend and a proven structure of the app code allows me to basically translate the Android code to Objective C without much thinking. The core issues in the system design have already been dealt with. It's just implementing a stable design based on stable specs, which we all know is the easiest part of software development.

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 209

Maybe that's true for a lot of people, but the frustration, general bad temper inducing, sheer passive-aggressive baulkiness of the damn thing made me very glad I don't have to deal with it regularly.

Maybe there will never be much understanding either way, but the silly finger-pointing name-calling from one camp to the other is childish, tribal and idiotic.

Comment Re:Not just Apple laptops, No drivers for new lapt (Score 2) 209

Developing complex drivers can cost millions, but the testing isn't nearly as costly. Much of it is automated. Do you think that Intel, AMD and Nvidia spend millions of dollars a month just on testing?

No, they just release them as betas and wait for the bug reports to roll in. Why pay for testers if so many people will test for you for free?

I started writing this post going for funny, but this actually sounds pretty insightful.

Comment Re:Popup messages are completely ineffective (Score 1) 79

#1: De managing company should have made sure that the "failure" messages would reach them without the intervention of a human. Maybe by just emailing them.

Exactly, if you need to rely on end users for receiving failure messages for an absolutely essential service, you have failed horribly.

Comment Re:What kind of person did they study? (Score 1) 79

There are more answers: https://github.com/M66B/XPriva...

I've also used PDroid and LBE Privacy Guard: https://play.google.com/store/...
The latter seems to have gone to shit, though. It always was ran at a layer too high to allow it to catch everything reliably anyway.

PDroid was great if your ROM supported it. The original version isn't maintained anymore, but replacements seem to have popped up:
https://play.google.com/store/...

In general though, using a CyanogenMod ROM with privacy features is definitely the easiest route. Which is what I do.

Comment Re: Internal (Score 0) 215

the multiplayer fad

This is a 'fad' that has been going strong for (at least!) two decades. If you want to limit it to the FPS-genre, the multiplayer aspect has been extremely popular ever since it was an option. If you take Quake (1996) as the start of (serious) multiplayer FPS-gaming and Wolfenstein 3D (1992) as the start of the FPS-genre, multiplayer FPS-gaming has been (again: extremely) popular for the last 19 years out of the 23 years of existence of the FPS-genre.

I have to work for a living and I have a wife & kids.... which means I don't hide in my Mommy's basement every night

Such a mature thing to say.
You've really added to this discussion by generalizing and deriding everybody who plays multiplayer FPSs and the concept of multiplayer FPS in general.

Go be a complaining old asshole somewhere else.

Comment Re:Logitech K750 (solar) (Score 1) 452

Very weird, either my memory is failing me hard (although I can vividly remember the setting in which I typed on the keyboard), or I'm mixing up the K750 with another solar powered Logitech keyboard, or the K750 has changed over the years.

The K750 I can find on the web does seem to have the (awesome) incurve keys and the 'PerfectStroke' mechanism. The keys also seem to be of the slightly soft smooth plastic I was talking about. If that is indeed the case, then I guess we've been lauding the same sort of keyboard from the start of this thread (although the key separation and key size seem slightly different between the K750 and the K800).

Comment Re:Logitech K750 (solar) (Score 1) 452

I've typed on the K750 and its keys are absolutely dreadful compared to the ones on the K800, and I'm not exaggerating here.

The keys on the K750 are completely flat, save for a little bit of microrelief, and made of hard plastic. That combination makes it very easy for your fingers to slide off them and onto keys you don't want to press or just tilting them if you don't hit them in the middle. The keys of the K800 are much more forgiving: I can jab at them at a ridiculously acute angle and/or hit them on the corners and still have accurate keystrokes.

I will add a disclaimer, though: I don't bash the keys very hard as some people like to do (what are they trying to accomplish?) and I don't (often) play any high-stress games that make me apply a large amount of force to the keys. I could imagine that the K800 wouldn't survive such treatment for long (although many keyboards wouldn't, I guess).

Comment Re:Logitech K750 (solar) (Score 2) 452

The Logitech K800 is an absolutely awesome keyboard.
- Wireless, but charges via microUSB.
- Accepts regular rechargeable NiMH AA batteries.
- Has a proper numeric keypad
- Has just the right set of media keys
- The keys are low-profile, slightly curved inwards and slightly soft, making for very pleasant, silent, light and accurate strokes.
- Proximity activated variable intensity backlight
- Bog-standard layout (large enter key, 2x3 normally sized insert, del, etc.)

But again, mainly: the typing experience is the best I've ever experienced, including my experiences with the IBM Model M.

Mine has been going strong since 2011 and looks and feels like I just bought it, even though I use it intensively for 12h+ a workday (working from home as a programmer).

Comment Re:What would the combined accuracy be? (Score 1) 97

Accuracy tells us very, very little, without information on the number of false positives. In short, we need to know what the chance is that you have cancer if the dog indicates you do, which is TP / (TP + FP). It's easy to see that the number of FPs has a big influence.

Explained further here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
This is one of the best visualizations of it: http://ampp3d.mirror.co.uk/201...

See also this Wikipedia page for a good overview of different measures like accuracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Comment Re:Fix gameplay related issues first (Score 1) 225

You should see it more in terms of power. Let me provide you with a car analogy:
1080p is like 1080hp and 200p is like 200hp.

Now do you understand why resolution is so important?! POWERRRR!
An Xbox game with 720hp is obviously inferior to a Playstation game with 900hp!

On a serious note: in an FPS, the difference between 320x200 and 1920x1080 does make for a difference in the ability to play the game (remember going back to Quake in 320x200 after having played GLQuake?). The same can be said for interface-heavy games or games where a high 'depth of field' (overview with details visible) is required, such as an RTS or (MMO)RPG. I agree that a high resolution is not necessary to make a good game, but some good games do require or benefit from a high resolution.

Comment Re:Nothing to see here (Score 4, Interesting) 144

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that learning Visual Basic and 'programming' in Excel will actually give you an edge on your business professional peers.

Last time I checked, Excel was the hammer of choice for most businesses (maybe combined with SPSS), not R (I'm not sure if any business even uses it).

Ironically, if you focus on Google Spreadsheets, learning Javascript (and the Google APIs) is what is required if you want to do more advanced stuff.

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