addicted44

Unless you're using something like .Net remoting (or the Java equivalent), and now suddenly everything breaks.

Or you have a larger codebase split up into multiple .Net solutions and DLLs where code is referenced through the generated DLLs.

The refactor looks great, until it starts breaking things for the many consumers of your code.

In fact, the latter is a situation where simple text tools will make life a lot safer and easier than whatever the IDE does (which pretty much will be limited to the bounds of the .sln file, whereas a simple text tool operating over files in the entire codebase will alert you to the fact that this is being used elsewhere).

My argument isn't to claim that simple text tools are better at refactoring. They aren't. However, I've run across several situations where we've had issues in a massive codebase because developers believed that refactoring was as easy as hitting the Refactor button in Visual Studio, and everything will work magically.

The belief in programming 'magic' (whether through IDEs or frameworks that abstract a ton) without understanding what those tools actually do is what I'm worried about. Use IDEs to do what you need to by all means, but it's much better when you actually understand what it's doing before doing something with it.

They have some experimental features enabled there which they don't in other channels.

For example, I'm running Nightly, and the Dev Tools>What's New tab says the "Debug Variables with Watchpoints" (break when a property is read/written) feature is in Developer Edition (and presumably not in Nightly or the Release channel).

I agree. When I first heard of it, IFTTT was basically Pipes done right for me.

In many ways Pipes was far too ahead of its time. The Web simply did not have as much computation and reason for integrating data between different web apps at the time.

The "headless" UI concepts promoted at this website feel to me like an attempt to shoehorn separation of templates and business logic which React has strongly resisted.

Any thoughts on whether this impression is right or wrong?

The average user, by Google's own studies, wants a faster experience.

By far.

Is there any evidence that web apps of today are faster in achieving what equivalent non appy web pages of the past managed? Despite the fact that those older "apps" were running on computers which were orders of magnitude slower than our cell phones today.

I've worked with 2 companies now where their users (and both these companies have users who pay 4 digit annual fees per user) have refused to migrate to the new Web 2.0 apps these companies have tried to foist on them.

The difference in these cases is that the users, by virtue of paying, actually have a say and so have required the companies to provide parity with the older and newer applications, and usage continues to not just be higher, but grow faster on the older versions (despite having a larger base).

Regular users have no such option. Google changes GMail, but its users still insist on using the older versions of the app, which is why they provide HTML mode, etc. However, it's users do not pay Google, and are forced to go with whatever Google wants to do, which is constantly hiding the older version and making it progressively worse to use.

It's not evident to me at all that regular users "want" to use these new web 2.0 apps, as much as they don't have a choice.

WMT is written off way too easily on these forums.

It makes more in profits per year than AMZN probably has it's entire history.

And I certainly think it's gonna be a lot harder for AMZN to replicate WMT's network of retail stores (which double up as warehouses) than it would be for WMT to replicate any of AMZN's online efforts.

In addition, by being a "retailer" WMT also avoids getting into competitive fights with the likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft, all major platform owners, and can instead better partner with them.

if those pesky engineers are looking for a job after getting fired from VW, I heard there is a young intern position available with the Donald Trump campaign.

Agreed. They named it Internet.org but the service is diametrically opposed to the basic principles that make up the Internet as we know it.

A far more appropriate name would have been AOL.org. But that wouldn't have been as good PR and the NYTimss would not be writing about their good intentions if the name of the service was more descriptive of what it actually did.

Even if you don't get open borders, the fact that we have all these treaties which force free flow of capital across but do nothing to allow easier flow of labor across borders is a huge problem. It allows nations with crappy social and political systems to undermine labor welfare and protection policies in better political systems without facing repercussions for it. Unsurprisingly, the asymmetric flows of capital and labor forced by trade agreements play right into the hands of benefitting capital owners across the world at the expense of ordinary workers.

I don't believe completely open borders are necessary or even possible, but every trade agreement that forces free flow of capital (and prevents duties on imports, etc) needs to come with equivalent labor protections as well (massively increased flow of people across borders, and not in a "you're a second class resident who can be deported at your employer's whim" way, or alternatively, removing import duties only as long as laborer a on both sides of the border receive equal labor protections of the law. So if country A offers a minimum wage, it is allowed to impose duties as long as the wages being offered to the workers in country B is less than the cost of living adjusted equivalent salary in that country. )

It's not feeding any fears.

It's telling us the simple fact that our food consists of plants and trees selected for taste and appearance. This article specifically is discussing how this has led to diminishing nutrition in those plants.

This is not controversial. A different article could have talked about the same issue but presented a different effect which is that nearly the entire banana crop in the world is at risk of being wiped out because we've pretty much eliminated any variety in order to get the sweetest and best looking bananas.

Firefox is my primary browser everywhere but on iOS. It would be nice if I could have the passwords, history and bookmarks available to me on all my other OSes on iOS as well.

This is a huge gap for Firefox IMO.

I would have hoped that as web devs we would have learned our lessons from the IE6 fiasco. The only browser web devs should be supporting and evangelizing is Firefox. Admittedly Firefox isn't always the best browser, but it has always been good enough, and if the people spending time, money and effort improving WebKit or Blink spent that effort on Gecko and Firefox instead, it would be a better than it is now.

Personally, Firefox has become my only browser on every platform but iOS and it isn't even for ideological reasons but simply when combined with extensions it is the best browser around. Once it (finally!) incorporates isolated processes for tabs, it's gonna be head and shoulders above its competition IMO.

Opera went out of its way to ensure non-standard stuff targeted towards specific IE versions also worked in Opera. The downsides of being a browser no one cares about.

Something working in opera doesn't mean it is standards compliant.

There were also the facts that IE was deeply integrated with the OS to the point where r was impossible to remove and MS had anti-competitive agreements with OEMs preventing them from providing Netscape bundled.

If you are using $ signs all over your code, they'd better refer to jquery and nothing else.

jQuery has, for better or worse, become such an integral part of web development, the $ namespace is pretty much owned by it at this point.

If you do want to use it for not-jquery, it should be something that is drastically different so someone new trying to patch a bug on prod doesn't run around in circles wondering why their code that should be working is not.

The bling.js project by repurposing $ into something that looks like it might be jquery but isn't, is just a bad idea.

After lying that they would hold it in the summer by having air conditioned stadiums during their bid.

None of the major professional leagues are happy about this. If the world cup remains in Qatar it's going to be a fiasco.

http://www.businessinsider.com/qatar-world-cup-disaster-2015...

Great point...

I have worked, in order, in a no WFH open office, yes WFH with private cubicles in the office, and yes WFH open office.

#1 was terrible. In the case of #2 while I could WFH, I would deliberately make it to the office at least 4 days a week because I was so much more productive. And #3 has me staying at home when I want to work, and showing up in the office when I want others to know that I am working.

Take away the nonsensical open office system (which may work great for jobs which are almost completely collaborative at all times, but are terrible for most jobs) and an office which provides some privacy is actually pretty awesome.

You get to control your interactions with coworkers, and are far more efficient interacting when you really need to.

Is anyone surprised that examples of this power being used currently and in the past includes an oil company complaining that environmental regulations hamper its profits and a tobacco company trying to prevent plain packaging?

Most democracies do not create laws which scare away multinationals. There really is absolutely no incentive for it. Even corrupt politicians don't want to scare away multinationals because the bribes from those companies are their largest source of income.

This law effectively neutralizes democracy. It's also hilarious in a macabre way to see supposedly nationalist Americans railing against Agenda 21 which is non-binding, while treaties such as TPP which allow an international tribunal which override national laws to be pushed forward by their govt.

Why would Chinese hacktivists want to attack a project which increases their ability to get past the GFW?

Its not just Github though. There are a bunch of other companies who will take away the message that you don't mess with the Chinese gov't.

Github is powerful and funded enough that they won't succumb. Its all the smaller websites who might male changes because of this.

How does my taking a company's advertising at its word and treating the unlimited service they provide as unlimited make me an asshole?

The real problem is these companies want to eat their cake and have it too. They want to be able to advertise as unlimited, but not actually provide unlimited.

I think the problem is that the word unionization encapsulates many different things which should not necessarily be tied together. Collective bargaining, employees having a voice on the running of the business, legal and advisory services provided by someone on your side as opposed to someone with interests diametrically opposed to yours (the CEOs, not the companies), elections of representatives, etc.

As a whole these (as the data conclusively proves) were better for workers and probably the companies as well at the expense of the C-level suits. But it is probably true that some of ideas implemented by unions did work against workers. The solution is not to throw the baby out with the bath water but to analyze and experiment with different union structures which reduce the negative effects and enhance the positive ones.

Unfortunately, Americans have decide to wholesale reject and vilify the only structure that empowers non-owners even slightly which despite all its faults was still better for most Americans, instead of trying to separate the effective ones from the ineffective ones, and are reaping the unequal society they have sowed.

Gotta give credit to our wealthy overlords who have done an impressive job of getting people to vote against their own interests by splitting people along various social dividing lines as well as magnifying limited failures of systems as endemic to them.

It is less secure than 2 factor auth (since it is 1 factor) but they picked the more secure 1 factor than what is popular right now.

Hopefully they are smart enough to format the txt such that the password doesn't show up in the preview, and if so, in practice, there is almost no downside to this for the vast majority if people (since if the person who now has your phone can log into the phone, the odds are they can already access your email).

The Air came out at a time when optical disks were actually pretty necessary. In fact, Apple released the air with the ability to use the optical drive on a desktop or laptop connected to your network.

Apple's abandoning of the optical drive played a huge role in ensuring everyone provided a non optical disk way of getting their software or media content.

Explorer does disclosure triangles (well, pluses in Windows's case) in the Folder tree side panel. It works better than incorporating it in the main view, IMO, but your mileage may vary.

It's a list of groups of people who are traditionally ignored by most companies, but are hired by this one. If Harvard grads were traditionally unemployable, but employed by this bakery, they would also be on the list along with felons, immigrants and addicts.

And keep in mind that 40% SAY they will hire. As seen in polls about racism (even anonymous polls) the actual number is probably a lot lower.

It may not be successful, but I really think Pebble has the right idea with smartwatches.

I really hope that the smartwatch industry doesn't devolve into the monoculture that is the smartphone industry (well, technically a 2 platform culture, but Android and iOS are basically 2 sides of the same coin now. Neither one offers anything the other doesn't).

They want people to develop their apps using C#/Xamarin, because that greatly reduces the friction in developing Windows Apps.

I am not learning new Keyboard shortcuts only for Gmail.

Thunderbird (and other decent desktop packages) allow me to reuse the over a decade worth of training I have with my OS's KB shortcut semantics.

In addition, using the keyboard in a browser is a mess. It is very easy to not have the current context set to a different application, and Gmail's non-standard K/B shortcuts can lead to unpredictable (and destructive) changes in other applications (for example, accidentally entering random text in a document open in my text editor). Using standard OS K/B shortcuts means that if I am doing a search, and even if my current app is not the one I think it is, it's likely to still do a search, and not enter random characters.