NetMonkey

Simply select 2000 18 year olds and give them BI for life. That isn't all that expensive even in worst case and would actually show if BI could work.

I always wondered if the art galleries in my high tax country were used for money laundering.

It seems pretty obvious: Individual A buys a piece of art for, lets says $10,000. A couple of years goes by, and the individual puts it up for sale at an art gallery. Individual B's company buys the painting for $100,000 - Voila, $90,000 laundered completely legally as private sale of art isn't taxed.

All that is required is a small group of friends with companies they control. Why the art gallery - to make it seem more legit that they are facilitating the sale.

I know many like me, who also just prefers the application language to be in English. From decades of using English I have no idea what many terms are in my native language, native terms are much harder to google, and many applications are also poorly translated. But that doesn't mean I want everything in English, especially not date/time formats.

I build Danish self service web applications, and from my perspective I would always want to control that date formats fits the displayed language.

Why must it then be in Danish? Because we would rather optimize for Danish users who for some reason have gotten the wrong browser version / localization settings and don't know how to change it.

An English speaking user would be much better served with a dedicated English version than just the date format being correct - if they can overcome the language barrier, surely they can overcome the date format.

Not only that - judging from used car websites in Denmark around the time, quite a few people seemed to have bought Teslas with expectation that they could sell them at a higher price after the tax increase. If I remember correctly it was initially rumored that the tax increase would not have been gradual.

Business folks: So instead of new features we have sold to customers we have to spend X weeks on this feature which was working perfectly fine?

I have been the victim of this tactic, and yes it is terrible. But it's also completely understandable. It's an extremely easy way for a company with deep pockets to bury a smaller company.

When you understand why someone does something - you can hate that they're doing it, but you also accept it in a weird way, because they're simply using the rules of the game.

And while you hope you would do better if you ever got to be in that situation the truth is probably, that most of the people getting suid in these situations would do the exact same things if the roles were reversed.

It seems far more likely that the universe is a computer game rather than a simulation. A simulation implies that it tries to simulate everything accurately - if it's a computer game, we can expect that the creators cheated in multiple ways to keep computations way down.

Obvious ways to cheat:

- Only the things you are directly experiencing and seeing is simulated to a high degree.

- If you ever came close to discovering the true state of the universe, the game might simply erase those thoughts or twists things to make them fit again.

- People who really study physics and have access to detecting whether the universe is a simulation are all NPCs :)

But why wouldn't the callcenter approach work? That's where I see many other industries going. Cut the workers, use a callcenter instead through telepresence. Even if it's only 95% selfdriving, that's massive savings compared to having a driver in there 100% of the time.

IANAL either, but from experience everything that can be seen as shady is very dangerous if it comes to a court case. It makes you look like the bad guy, and can easily be used by a good lawyer to remove focus from what should really matter.

You want everything to be as clear as possible, and with no obvious points that can be called into doubt. Even if you end up winning, you don't want a court case that drags out for multiple years, with devastating legal costs to cover while its going on.

And as I have learned the very hard way, a judge can just decide it doesn't matter and the appeals court probably won't care.

Please don't ever rely on how it's supposed to be - always, always put in clarifying statements and examples in any contract. Everything should be extremely clear and readable by layman, otherwise even things that should be obvious can be devastating.

It probably takes many different forms, but the ones I know about go something like this:

1) Government identifies some area that needs focus, usually so they can say they're doing something.

2) A fund is created with whatever the government thinks is enough to sound like they're doing something.

3) Request for proposals on how to spend the money within said area is sent out.

4) Interested parties figure out how to get their hands on the money in the fund.

Examples of who will apply:

a) Existing companies who try to spin something they already have into something that can give them free money for whatever they were already doing.

b) Scammers who have no intention of doing anything of value and simply try to do the minimum to say they tried (like some Kickstarter scams).

In best cases the winners are picked based on superficial evaluation of who lives up the criteria and who can bullshit most on paperwork. In worst case winners are picked based on who can provide the best kickbacks, ranging from just professional relations or dinners to actual kickbacks.

The time dilation was really quite fascinating. However, I assume that the entire planet would not behave as if it had the same time dilation all the time?

Considering the massive dilation (1 hour -> 7 years, a factor of 1 : 61320), wouldn't even relatively small distances on the planet surface create different dilation effects depending on an objects/individuals distance to the black hole?

I'm just wondering if there would not only be noticable effects from a distance (orbit -> planet), but also within visible distance on the surface itself.

If the dilation could act on scales such as the 200 meter wave, I'm having trouble imagining how it would look / behave, if for example the top of the wave was moving "slower" compared to the bottom of the wave.

It was 7 years from XP to Vista - and 9 years to Windows 7.

Now it has just been 5 years since Windows 7 and apparently it's already completely outdated. It's only 2 years since Windows 8.0, and it's already out!

If this is the way Microsoft is going, then it's a huge change for anybody dealing with enterprise. I used to be able to develop on the same system using the same techs as my customers - now I may sit on Windows 8.1, but I can't use any new shiny features as my customers are still on Windows 7. Many of them just upgraded.

Sure, this may be the way others are doing it. It may be the new normal. But I still think Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot big time regarding anything related to businesses.

In this case I'm actively researching an OCR solution. Tesseract is annoying compared to a nicely integrated .NET solution. But I'm not able to choose the solution from Microsoft. It will be at least 5 years until our customers have upgraded again, and by then - well, we're probably not going to switch OCR tech.

Instead we will be relying on third parties, open source projects - things that are not tied as much to Microsoft or the .NET ecosystem. I didn't mind being tightly tied to MS tech, I often preferred it as it was easier and worked great - but in this case I don't even have a choice. Basically I just wish Microsoft would stay Microsoft instead of trying to be Apple.

-- And regarding following MSDN. I develop WPF/C#, and I don't follow anything at all. I don't care about hype or news. I care about solid techs that are mature and sticking around for a long time. Most of the stuff being announced will significantly change or be cancelled anyway. When a product has stuck around for 3 versions and is having a pretty good following, then I might be interested. If my customers are actually able to run it of course.

Ah, don't know how I missed that. Thanks.

Crazy that it's limited to 8.1, and not even working on 8.0.

I really wonder if there is a valid technical reason, or they just use it to push upgrades.

This is really one of my big frustrations with Microsoft.

On one hand, they really try to push everybody to upgrade to their newest and shiniest, by making a lot of stuff (like this) only available on Windows 8+.

On the other hand, they don't even bother to put in a box with "What operating systems will this work on", so you don't have to do trial/error, research WinRT, and then be disappointed when you realize this will apparently never work on Windows 7. And maybe only in Metro apps? What is Windows Runtime and am I just supposed to know this?

I really enjoy coding C# and working in .NET. Microsoft has some really great stable techs which work well for years and years - but increasingly if you want anything new and shiny from them, you have to run the newest OS. Which if you work with anything related to enterprise, good luck only targetting Windows 8.

And honestly, despite working almost exclusively with MS tech, I just don't really trust any platform from them that doesn't have significant traction and track record as they all too often just give up and try something new - and sometimes without real replacements available.

I think this actually went pretty well.

- Internet crime is reported

- Police IT team tracks it to specific IP and address

- Contacts owner, she says (incorrectly) the WIFI is secured with only the two people at the address having access

- Regular police is sent to collect all computers at the address

- When the police IT team realizes the computers weren't connected to the scam, they are returned within two weeks.

The only thing that really went a bit bad is the reported attitude of the regular police officers sent to the address.

Of course it would have been better to have sent someone better at both IT and english. If either of those had been different they might never have taken the computers, but the two weeks to clear things up are pretty good as government organizations goes.

I think that your "What am I wrong about?" approach is going too far in the opposite direction.

I usually use "That shouldn't be possible" - whether it is possible or if it's user error then often depends on the maturity of the system.

On a new system pretty much anything is possible. On a system battle-tested for years by thousands of users the possibility of encountering program bugs drops dramatically.

This is where good supporters become very valuable. They will be able to learn the solutions to common problems that users face and determine if it´s user error, other errors like OS problems or if it's something new that should be investigated by the developers.

Of course if the bug is reproducible then it's a different matter. But any developer who doesn't take a well-described and reproducible bug report seriously should probable find a different job.

It's now (finally) possible to inline with newest actionscript compiler and it's included in the recently released FlashBuilder 4.7: http://www.bytearray.org/?p=4789

Just compile with the -inline argument. The compiler sometimes chokes in some rare cases where it can't inline, and it makes debugging much harder as the line offsets don't match the source code anymore. But the performance gains can be huge as function calls are rather expensive in Flash, and you can just debug without the -inline argument.

Basic types are optionally nullable. int? is nullable, int is not.

It is a fantastic tool in many cases where a null is much clearer than something like -1 to denote a missing value.

However, I can see the issue with some developers using nullable types for everything. But any sufficiently powerful/flexible tool is always going to be misused by some.

Linus knows that and says so as well. But that's okay, because that works. Starting down that very same path again without a huge reason to do so would be very painful for any mature product.

Everything in life is a trade-off. And the 30 x 1 years quote nicely illustrates why you should always strive to learn new things.

However, if you already know how to do something well in one particular stack, then you should just stick with that if the objective is to ship.

The operative word is of course that you know you can do it well in that stack. If you start thinking "there has to be a better way" then you should seriously look into alternative stacks or whether you are using your current one correctly.

It worked pretty well with an animation from an old project: Html5: http://enwire.dk/Wallaby/Html5/ Flash: http://enwire.dk/Wallaby/Flash/

At least it works in Chrome but it looks kinda funny in IE9. For basic animations it could probably be useful.

I really doubt anybody would accept that. The solution in many cases are simply to reboot the servers every night.

Sure, we would all love to fix the bugs, but if there are no easy clues and a regular reboot fixes it - who really cares when there are features to build?

My take is that the two are different simple because Apple matters and Facebook does not :)

If you have a product or service and want an additional presence on iOS it is to provide a better service to your customers and thereby increasing your value to them.

When Apple makes that hard/impossible they are decreasing your value to customers which is a problem to a lot of businesses.

The same is obviously not the case for Facebook except for a limited number of cases.

And if all Apple wants is to have shiny games for their platform it is the perfect strategy.

We have an online platform that resells content which is how we make our living. Low margins means that we would take a loss on everything we sold through the App store since we cannot charge more in the Apple garden.

Combine that with having to learn a new platform or hire new developers, it's making a HTML(5) solution for mobile devices look much more interesting for us. It won't look and feel as nice, but at least it will be cheaper to develop, we will get presence on Android/WinPhone7 and we won't take a loss on every item sold.

I agree that for a game developer the Apple solution is pretty good - I wouldn't mind it myself. But when reselling content it's simply a much different proposition - and I'm pretty there are many other companies having the same considerations that we are.

Copenhagen, Denmark

- Looking for full-time iPhone/iPad developer.

You must have good experience with the platforms as you will initially be responsible for creating the app from scratch without any in-house expertise. Some decent knowledge of networking and possibly C is also necessary as the app will interface with an extensive backend.

- UX designer

If you are capable of making great looking vector graphics and know / can quickly learn to draw in Flash then we may have a full time position available.

- Info

Remoting is not an option currently. We are willing to look into helping with relocation for the right person, but we prefer locals at this stage.

Send an email to jonas at enwire dot dk with a short info about yourself.

It's a fair point, but I think that has mainly to do with the developers Microsoft are targeting. Buying new hardware every two years costs next to nothing compared to the salary of developers almost anywhere in the world.

Could you give some examples of why Microsoft's stack is so bad and which ones are better?

I often see these things thrown around but very seldomly with any good examples. We use Visual Studio + .NET + MSSql/SqlAzure and from time to time I take a look at what else is out there but I have a hard time seeing how any of it could make us more productive.