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Comment: Screw whitespace, it's about maintainability (Score 1) 430

by MichaelJ (#42365887) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Do Coding Standards Make a Difference?
I'll give you a coding standard that's worth having: use a prefix to clearly identify your module statics and globals. If in an OO language, your class statics and member variables, too. If I'm looking at your code and I see an assignment to a nonlocal variable, I shouldn't have to go off analyzing the entire source tree to find out what it is.

Comment: HelveticaNeue is awful (Score 1) 295

by MichaelJ (#42164281) Attached to: Apple Declutters, Speeds Up iTunes With Major Upgrade
The change of font is horrible. On both my 11" MacBook air and my big 1920x1200 cinema display it looks blurry, hard to read, and is too large. I've read that it looks nice on a retina display, but for the rest of us it's illegible crap with no way to correct it except by manually editing the plist file and crossing your fingers you don't screw it up.

Comment: Re:Do Not Want (Score 3, Informative) 376

by MichaelJ (#41664309) Attached to: FCC To Allow Cable Companies To Encrypt Over-the-Air Channels
It's not just the cable company. It's the production company, too. I have Verizon Fios, and on my TiVo, an hour of a 1080i AMC show like The Walking Dead is 3.25GB, while an hour of the ABC show Once Upon a Time is 5.86GB. It's very obvious, too, The Walking Dead looks blotchy, full of glitches and artifacts.

Comment: Re:Fuck Apple. (Score 1) 543

by MichaelJ (#41342627) Attached to: iPhone 5 Scorns Standards Promise To European Commission
iPod Out was a special feature that allowed the iPod to generate a display on, say, a car's video screen. It has nothing to do with the audio stream or with being able to control song play. It goes away because the analog video out signal goes away. I think only BMW and Mini actually used the feature.

Comment: Re:secure you say? (Score 3, Informative) 175

by MichaelJ (#41221487) Attached to: Xen-Based Secure OS Qubes Hits 1.0
You are correct about Zones. They're even lighter-weight than paravirtualized VMs, which in turn makes them ideal for some things, and not others. Solaris also has Logical Domains (LDOMs) which are very much like VMs. They see only the hardware that has been mapped into them. If you need something to be visible to multiple LDOMs (like your network interface) you have to have a control LDOM which owns that particular piece of a hardware and virtualizes it for any other LDOMs that want to see it. They're not the easiest thing in the world to set up, but work well (on larger hardware) and are nicely isolated.

Comment: Re:RTFA (Score 2) 406

by MichaelJ (#40998339) Attached to: GCC Switches From C to C++
Maybe not a big deal on a Linux system with an older G++ already installed, but this could be a serious issue for bootstrapping GCC on non-Linux platforms. Where you might have only needed the native C compiler before, now you will need the native C++ compiler, which may be an expensive product.

Unless they're going to make it a multi-step bootstrap where the first pass is only C code. I highly doubt that.

Comment: Phone app doesn't require interaction with phone? (Score 1) 145

by MichaelJ (#40918675) Attached to: Starbucks Partners With Square
“Pay With Square, Square’s cellphone app, which eliminates even having to take the phone out of your pocket or sign a receipt.” Okay, so how does the cell phone app work if I don't actually unlock the phone or run the app? And while you're at it, if I'm inside a shopping mall, the GPS location is going to be completely wonky and it will have no idea what store I'm actually in.

"A dirty mind is a joy forever." -- Randy Kunkee

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