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Comment Re:Duration of disconnection (Score 1) 198

Thin of the resources an offline Google Now or Siri would need.

Parts of that wouldn't be feasible (notes coming in about sports scores, news items, what have you), but keeping a local database to correlate locations, time, and all that? Sure, you could do that. Ditto with the voice recognition, especially if it's limited to a certain set of vocabulary that's useful for on-device management of your alarms/calendar/contacts.

but you wouldn't expect to navigate offline, with live traffic data, without a net connection.

I wouldn't? That's what I've got a Garmin with radio traffic updates for. I bought it before I had a smartphone, and it still works as well as it did when I got it.

Or you couldn't cast your IDE from your tablet to your PC without a net connection.

Oh? I can't host an AP from my laptop, run a VNC or RDP server there, and connect from my tablet? Or run VNC on my tablet and access it from the laptop? I'm not sure what you're claiming, because the most direct interpretations of your post have counterexamples.

Comment Alternatives (Score 1) 47

SDL and SFML are both pretty cool and have large development communities. I haven't used Allegro or Clanlib, but Clanlib's features seem especially close to SFML's (based on examining the API). Allegro has been around for over 20 years. SDL for 17, Clanlib for 16, SFML for just about half of that.

It raises a question in my mind: If Clanlib had been out for that long in 2007, providing a C++ game programming library and being well-known enough to be included in at least one book, then why was there a perceived need for SFML? Was it just a marketing/popularizing failure on the part of clanlib's developers, or was there some technical shortcoming in Clanlib at that time? If the latter, has the shortcoming been corrected? In short, why exactly should we be excited about a new release of Clanlib?

Comment Re: only i3/i5 (Score 1) 268

Facebook doesn't know about my trip because I didn't post about it. My credit card knows a fair amount about it because I don't usually conduct all of my business exclusively in cash. Oddly, I hear a lot more people complaining about Facebook than I do about the massive datamining that credit companies do.

Comment Re: They're right you bunch of freetards (Score 1) 612

Really? Then what's going on if someone pays me money to mow their lawn? In that case, they're the customer. They hired me, and they're going to pay me for my work. Ditto if I'm doing maintenance on their computer, or something. I've done both. So, in what way does that mean that I haven't been hired+paid by a customer?

Comment Re: They're right you bunch of freetards (Score 1) 612

Facebook is a middleman for a product. The product is user information, offered by users for sale. Facebook pays their users by providing a service that many of them find useful. There's a trade; if it's a one-sided donation on the user's part, then they got screwed (like in a blood drive, where it's a donation, instead of a trade). If Facebook doesn't provide useful services for trade, then the users will take their product elsewhere.

Of course Facebook translates information into money by analyzing it and selling information to advertisers, so advertisers are the first Facebook customers that actually trade money for a product. So, the users and the ad guys are both customers, just in different senses.

Comment It's not yours (Score 1) 353

When I started working as a salaried employee doing software development, my employment contract included language to the effect that everything I produced using any company resources, or using internal company information, belonged to them. When you're salaried, you don't really have "your own time", and since they're paying you, most companies would say that your time is another "company resource". I'm not sure how well that would hold up in court, but I'd also expect that most companies could grind their employees into the ground if it came to time in a courtroom.

Realistically, they weren't interested in the little hobby game I was writing (my employer produced business software), so it's unlikely that they'll claim copyright on it. Now, if I developed a new plugin for my employer's product, that's a somewhat more danger-fraught proposition.

What you want is probably some time with a lawyer, and to begin negotiations with your employer for an explicit contract stating that you own copyright on the things you're making, but that you're assigning non-exclusive, but unlimited use+distribution+modification rights to your employer (OK, obviously I'm no lawyer, but I'm sure you get the idea).

You may be on good terms with your employer, but they aren't your friend. They're out to make money off of your work. There needs to be a contract outlining who owns what, what they can do with it, etc. Otherwise, you're opening yourself up for bad times.

Comment Re:Most tabs shouldn't be closed (Score 1) 147

Remember, the only information you need is the URL.

Only if the URL makes human-parseable sense, or if I recognize the URL and know what's on the page. The tab title, page layout, colors, etc act as mnemonic devices.

Yet you spend 80MB, valuable screen estate and tab switching space, just to be reminded of that one simple string.

80MB is nothing, and tab groups are great for categorizing open tabs. Firefox and Chrome will both restore previously-open tabs after a crash.

Call it abuse, or not. It works for me.

Comment Re:Such is C (Score 3, Informative) 264

This is a complete and total lie. There may be one "good" way to do something (for values of good), but there are many ways of doing soemthing.

It's not a "complete and total lie." The Zen of Python, "Python Enhancement Proposal #20", states:

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

It's one of the guiding principles of the language's design. Type "import this" into a Python command-line, and PEP20 gets printed out.

Comment Re:Apple chooses not to port Safari (Score 1) 240

#1: Are you going to guarantee that another webkit browser will have the exact behavior of Safari, in all respects?

#2: You sound like you're assuming that there's a "perfectly good Mac" available, when the earlier AC was complaining about having to pay Apple for hardware to test their software on. I'd assume that in their perfect world, they're running a licensed copy of OSX in a virtualized environment on a Windows or Linux machine.

My company's purpose is to virtualize the OS for development; we don't care about Safari itself, but in the case that we did, there isn't any (legal) way to test it without purchasing Apple hardware.

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