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Comment Re:StackOverflow is even worse! (Score 1) 218

I would suggest that most of the code on stackoverflow, while answering a question to which the answer probably wasn't easy to find, is often so trivial as to make any license terms realistically unenforceable. Not that it doesn't have that license, but good luck trying to enforce it.

Case in point, anything in this search: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/css

Comment Depends on the cap... (Score 1) 419

Whether I'm actually watching or just have it on as background noise, I consume about 40 hours per week minimum of media, mostly via Hulu and Netflix over my home broadband connection. That comes in at about twice the US national average for TV watching. On top of that, I'm an active online gamer and I work as a software developer (sometimes from home) for a cloud storage company (testing involves a lot of data flying back and forth). I go through about 100GB of bandwidth per month (so far I've maxed out at 120GB). As long as Comcast keeps its cap at the 250GB level I really don't see the average user going anywhere near that...

That being said, I would like to see mobile caps increasing (without an increase in price obviously). At the moment, I just use my phone for email, navigation and some news. If I had a more reasonable cap, I could see myself getting a 4G tablet and using it for Netflix and Skype with family abroad.

Comment Re:How Much Would What Cost? (Score 2) 383

It's not that the server is less likely to go down, it's that it's less likely to get stolen/dropped/otherwise broken than your laptop. Servers typically (in a well managed setup) also have their data replicated somewhere so if they do die, it is recoverable. Do you take daily backups of your code from your desktop? I do, it's called pushing my code to the server's repo :-)

Comment Re:Visual Studio (Score 1) 187

I'm a predominantly Python dev on Linux but when we needed a Windows 8 presence, I built a Metro app. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was using the HTML5/JS setup. The MSDN docs are pretty crap, mostly because the relevant information to get anything done is spread between 3 separate areas of the site for any given thing. However, the overall process of using visual studio and packaging the final product was pretty painless.

Some good things: localization is stupidly simple, the grid and list layouts are very well implemented, lots of caching and paging optimizations with no extra code required.

Some stupid things: Excessive HTML generated by using WinJS.UI stuff, pretty much any JS error crashes the whole application, sometimes I want something to be synchronous but I don't have that option, when doing a file upload (using the Windows.Networking.BackgroundTransfer module) you can get at the headers of the server response, but not the body (seriously... I did a major wtf when I was told that).

Comment Yay! (Score 1) 247

Well done /. I'm doubly pleased because I now have something to buy with the ThinkGeek voucher I've had sitting on my desk for the last year. (I'm not saying ThinkGeek doesn't have lots of cool stuff, I just don't have any more room for cool toys, but I always have a need of more t-shirts)

Comment Metro is a total pos (Score 3, Informative) 558

For those who don't have to write software Metro may seem nice. However, to those that do write software, if they haven't found out already they shortly will, Metro's sandboxing is just a total fuck up. Metro apps can't communicate with non-Metro apps. It's even difficult for them to communicate with other metro apps. Hell, it's even difficult for them to just access files on the hard disk. Want a nice Metro app to browser your downloads? No Sorry, you can't have that, your Downloads folder is off limits to Metro. I've seen some developers that actually had to build a web server into their desktop service so that a Metro UI could communicate with it over a REST api rather than using traditional inter process communication.

To the point one or two people have made about Windows 7 menu search and Metro. Yes you can bring up Metro and start typing to find the application you want. However, it's much less distracting and easier on the eye to have a small menu, with colours that match the rest of your system, pop up over a small area of the screen, rather than Metro where the whole screen flashes and changes colour before you eyes and start to type your search causes the entire interface to change, then selecting your application drops you back out of Metro, more sudden screen changes.

Comment British sense of entitlement (Score 1) 349

Note there is no mention of types of job. As somebody who grew up and went to university (Computing no less) in England and now lives and works in the US, I've commented to friends and family that people in the UK with a degree will look at certain jobs and consider it below them. On the other hand, I've met plenty of people here in the US who couldn't find the job they wanted when they graduated so they took a job as a waiter or in retail to give them an income while they looked for something they actually wanted to have a career in. The unemployment system in the UK makes people feel like they can turn down less than their perfect job even though they are unemployed.

Incidentally I don't know a single person from my university Computing class of ~120 that isn't employed. I've seen some exams from other top 50 universities and they would lead me to believe that for many universities in the UK, the problem with the computing courses is the content (one paper I saw has an essay question "Why do we need programming languages?"), rather than the social ineptitude of your average computing student getting in the way of job interviews (which was my first thought).

Comment Not again... (Score 1) 482

Why is it that people run these numbers and assume that say, efficiency stays stagnant. Heat in almost every use of energy is a by product that is the result of inefficiency in converting all the energy. I'm certain in the next 300 years the efficiency of our appliances/computer/electronics will drastically increase and therefore, drastically lower the heat they output.

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