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Comment Re:It Remains a Journalism Scandal. Deal With It. (Score 1) 255

The SVU episode

I had been a long-time fan of Law & Order in general, following SVU more-or-less (I preferred the original, mainly due to the characters of Jack McCoy and Lennie Briscoe). I knew that they were not exact on police procedure, and would often spin current events with extra drama to create episode plots, but I thought that was horrible. They portrayed the "Gamergate" side utterly unrealistically: as foul as some claiming to be part of the movement have been, including threats of kidnapping and rape, I have zero expectation that any would rise to the actual actions. There was no mention of journalistic ethics in the episode. Then, they end the episode with the moral "If you actually go out and beat women up, you can get them to quit even if you are found guilty/killed on a rooftop while apparently under some psychological delusion."

It was bad writing, bad characters, bad memes/references ("redchan", some completely made up terms), and bad outcomes. The whole thing was character assassination no matter which side you are on, if any, and made me stop watching SVU. (Not a hard decision, as it's mainly become the Olivia Benson Show; while I like Mariska Hargitay, they are relying on her character to carry the series at this point. If I find myself hoping that Ice T's character would get more development/screentime, something has gone wrong...)

Comment Monocoque (Score 1) 128

Bellini plans to use a lightweight, indestructible floating capsules, or "personal safety systems" made from aircraft-grade aluminum in what's called a continuous monocoque structure

So a giant ball... made out of a monocoque? Unless I'm mistaken, the emphasis should be on the monoball, since monocoques are the most common variant, while monoballs are somewhat of an exception.

And sometimes you have bivalves or whatnot, and a monocoque just isn't sufficient. Sometimes what's required is a bicoque. I think the engineers might be relying on false information if they believe the motion of the ocean is going to compensate.

Comment Re:why not a web page? (Score 1) 161

So if you need a framework so you can pretend to have a native version of the application

No, you need a framework so you don't need to reinvent the wheel for every project you work on. With Sencha's frameworks, I can write a pretty slick-looking responsive site in a few hours (or days, for something larger) that would take literally months to roll on my own (and for the record, yes, I can and have rolled my own, back in the dark ages).


why not just focus on having a webpage instead of a shitty application which is just a web page?

Two reasons. First, it increasingly doesn't make sense to force your end users to download and install potentially untrusted code - never mind needing to maintain separate versions for every major platform you target (oh, you want this on iOS and Android and Windows and Linux and OS X, etc?), when you can accomplish the same result in one nice tidy webapp. Second (and you can fairly call this a matter of personal preference), IMO just about everything looks like crap in a browser on a phone, and even that assumes the browser handles it correctly (yeah, like I want to support Chrome and FireFox and *shudder* MSIE and Dolphin and Safari and Opera, etc - Going right back to all the joys of supporting multiple OSs, woo hoo!).

The concept of a "webpage" hasn't limited itself to some statically published version of a document-with-markup in over 20 years; that model lost so thoroughly that pining for it doesn't even count as beating a dead horse anymore, more like trying to clone a mammoth from frozen DNA.


This sounds like lazy people who want to claim they have an app, when all they're doing is pointing to a web page.

It really doesn't matter to me what you want to call it, whether an app or a webpage or a widget or a three-handled family gredunza, if it accomplishes the intended goal... All just a matter of using the right tool in your box for each task - Sure, you can hammer in a screw, but sometimes a plain ol' nail will do the job just as well.

Comment Re:Least common denominator (Score 2, Interesting) 161

If only it were that easy. The problems with cross-platform development are myriad. The LCD experience has already been outlined, so here are the others:

1) It's write once, TEST everywhere, and you can't debug the code you actually wrote -- only the specific translation of that code into native code. And that sucks beyond words. It can be incredibly time consuming to the point where it easily erases any time you saved in development. And the longer the lifecycle, the more of your budget this is going to consume.

2) On a related note, profiling and performance tuning is a bear. If you do anything that requires performance, cross-platform is the wrong way to do it.

3) The potential for bugs is twice as high, because now you don't just have to worry about bugs in the native SDK, but also in the abstraction as well. While the OEM can generally afford to test the hell out of their SDKs, cross-platform suites have much less resources at their disposal. And it shows.

4) You are always playing catchup. New features take longer to implement, because you have to wait for the third party to either implement the new feature, or to implement it right.

5) You're needlessly adding another layer of dependence. None of the "popular" third party platforms are anywhere close to guaranteed that they'll be around in a month, or 6 months, let alone 2 years from now. If your favorite library goes away, you find a new one and make a few changes. If your entire SDK goes away, you're fscked.

If your software doesn't matter at all, if it's just a hobby, has no business case, and you have no plans (or potential) for going commercial, then by all means, use whatever development tool strikes your fancy. Personally, I would never recommend that anyone use cross-platform tools for anything they plan to support indefinitely. Even for a prototype or an MVP -- too often the prototype becomes the codebase for the final software, despite prior assurances to the contrary. Don't waste effort developing something you can't build on, unless you have no other choice.

Comment Re:danger vs taste (Score 1) 630

It has RDA of calories, and if you're drinking soda, then 100% of the calories are from sugar (or corn syrup, for most soda in the US). There is no RDA for sugar specifically because there are no scientific guidelines, not because the FDA is part of some grand conspiracy to keep it a secret.

Comment Re:Until it actually happens, I don't care. (Score 2) 486

Remember hydrogen cars? They even built a hydrogen gas station near where I live. Cool right?... not really... basically no cars use it, the station is not economical, and I believe they may have only built one of these fucking things on the entire planet.

There's a handful of them on the left coast, and they're putting in another handful on the right coast. Statistically nobody in the middle of the country buys interesting vehicles anyway. Toyota is about to start selling a FCV finally, and they're licensing their fuel cell to BMW and it will probably make it into an i5 in a year or two.

The real problem with hydrogen is that it is horribly annoying at best. It's just dumb on every level.

Comment Re:"although not with bug-free results" (Score 2) 160

The Kindle app, for example, now likes to hang up so I have to kill it.

Amazon is probably doing something bad and stupid as usual. I had to remove their store app from my devices because it made them unusable. All of them. Locks, hangs, FCs, even in other apps. Amazon can't code their way out of a nutsack. You can see this in their site, too. They break it every few months.

Comment Re:No mention of iPad in the summary? (Score 0) 160

I don't want some device I have to build in a kit every couple of months. I'm beyond the point where I want to endlessly fiddle with technology

That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about installing a bootloader and using it to install a community-tested, community-developed replacement for the OS. Something you can't do on iOS, even when you need to, because Apple has shit it up.

I have no interest in tracking my own CyanogemMod version, building it from a kit, hand bombing my install.

So like I said, you have no idea what you're on about. You just download it and install it. You don't build anything.

I like vanilla Android out of the box. I've seen the junk Samsung and others put on, and I have no interest in it.

So again, like I said, you get a well-supported device and then you install AOSP (I'm running SOKP on my Moto G XT1063) and then you don't have to dick with it. Maybe eventually I'll check back to see if there's an update. Usually you can dirty flash those, so there's not much hassle involved.

All you did was demonstrate your ignorance.

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