binaryfinery

Yes: Don't force me to log in with facebook.

No: Don't force me to make another fucking password.

I have a whole shitload of passwords. I use an independent (not in the browser) password tool. I'd really like to be able to generate a password and login automatically: i.e. for my tool and the website to automatically hook up.

Oh, yeah that's called OpenID: http://openid.net/get-an-openid/

And no jokes about my tool please.

The problem is the prisoners dilemma. It is in businesses own best interests to manufacture, design, etc, in the USA, but only if their competitors also do so. Instead they are engaging in destroying the purchasing power of their own customers (direct or indirect).

As a result, the only way this could be achieved would be by government intervention, but big business has that in their pocket, and the populace firmly convinced that globalization is good for them.

"New" as in "having recently come into existence", yes. Love it.

"New" as in "new to me" but actually created in 1986, no, not so much.

Except that doesnt work, because that just changes the hash of the submodule (as stored by the supermodule) again. The problem is that the supermodule just stores the hash of the submodule. The only way I found of fixing it was to:

1. Create a new repo.

2. Get the branched submodule.

3. Check that in as head: Note, now HEAD will NOT compile - I've committed broken code.

4. Go back to the original repo.

5. Get HEAD: this pulls the hash I need.

6. Do the merge. The submodule doesn merge, because it has the right hash.

Surely there must be some way to just modify the hash. But I don't know where to change it. I found it in several locations, but I don't know how it works, and hacking my VCS isnt my idea of good sense.

Well, I've spent the last six months learning the shitiest language and libraries with the most backwards arse tools. What a total waste of my time.

Can't decide whether I'm furious at this loss of time and destruction of my competitive advantage, or deliriously happy at the thought of being able to use proper tools like Resharper and IDEA.

I suppose the fact is I still have a competitive advantage. I have one client purely because they tried middleware and it ran like ass, so they wanted a native app.

Time to get Java installed on the iPhone. I'd prefer Monotouch, but the editors on OSX suck compared to Resharper.

In the UK we said, "We don't need manufacturing, we have our scientists and R&D".

Then when our Universities and our R&D started to decline, we said "We don't need our Universities and R&D, we have our Service Economy".

Then when our Service Economy went offshore, we said "We dont need all our Service Economy, we have our Financial Services Economy".

Everything outside London is a wasteland. The average wage is subsistence living, if you make one at all. But the Alphas live in a magical city, where cocaine and girls are all easily affordable on multi-million pound salaries.

The UK once ruled the world. The US couldn't be following us down to ruin better if we'd given them a map.

Until you have merge conflict. If someone could explain to me which file contains the conflict markers so I can fix them I'd be really happy. Its not the .gitmodules file.

Reads like "industry experience" to me.

RTFA.

But no, he's arguing that even if you had the best armor in the world, an international agreement that all tanks must park at the top of the nearest hill would be Bad for the life expectancy of the crew.

So bored intel ops can play spot-the-difference between natural and IR images?

That was the paragraph that jumped out at me too, because he got that exactly wrong. The iPhone designers clearly did understand their users, all 120 million of them. My wife is a total technophobe and the iPhone has finally connected her to her friends online.

I still deal with this issue working with techies who have iPhones and develop on iPhones. There are 100,000 iOS developers. 120 million iOS devices. So Mr Platt may be correct about developers in general, but he certainly got it wrong about Apple.

I must disagree that the best designers are like their users. The best designer is someone who can design a user interface for 120 million. Yet most iPhone users can't. It takes a different mindset to design a UI than to use it.

I agree, with a caveat:

Distribution involves an endpoint: me+device. Netflix has me, and millions like me. On any device. I watch on my PC, my Mac, my Wii, my iPad. My 5 yr browses for shows on the Wii and the iPad. So Netflix has the advantage of customers and devices.

I spend $20/month on netflix. I have spent a total of $10 for TV shows on iTunes.

Doesn't happen on the Wii, PS3, Xbox, iPad, iPhone and I'm guessing not on the new apple tv either.

FTLA: "Those results are not definitive, and might be wrong, but so far they're better than anything Grove serves up."

If they are wrong, how are they better exactly?

Fact: the Global Market makes a ton of money for the ultra rich, and screws the poor. That this is happening is simply because they now have the anti-personel weapons to defeat a civilian population should it try to revolt.

I have been responsible for patents at a tech startup. My job was not only to find patents that we might infringe upon, but to find patents that a troll could use to extort money out of us, even though they did not apply, and then assign risk. I worked with an excellent patent lawyer.

It is impossible to do anything today without infringing on somebody's bullshit patent. However, one can identify patents that can be demonstrated to be bullshit for a reasonable cost.

There is also an element of poker. If someone has a bullshit patent, but they have successfully used it, or think they can, then they risk losing that revenue if it is struck down as invalid. They do have something to lose, in addition to legal fees.

Trolls live on fear. Don't be afraid.

So back to these particular patents: They are bullshit. They are obviously bullshit. I would represent myself if hit with them. I think Google might be able to find a few people better than me to prove it.

>They're about as different as any two VMs are.

I suggest that these differences are what makes them different as applies to patents. Patents are usually either so broad as to have prior art, or so narrow as to not apply to even "similar" implementations.

6,192,476: Too broad. Applies to any OS since the 70's. 6,125,447: as above. 5,966,702: Too specific (.NET doesnt need to optimize data it creates properly in the first place) and too broad at the same time: it simply describes data normalization. 7,426,720: Unix forks. Either way, .NET does not do this. RE38,104: Not applicable at all. .NET is always fully JITed. 6,910,205: See above. 6,061,520: Specific to JVM implementation detail.

OP: "I'm pretty sure the Mono people are worried. "

You are saying that Miguel de Icaza is not one of these Mono people, nor is he representative of them.

Hierarchy of needs: air, food, shelter. If you live in the USA and want food and shelter, you cannot get it without paying the man taxes. Even if you own your own land, you must pay taxes on it.

The counter argument (that one could be a homeless person), is no more useful than pointing out that a slave could choose to die: yes a hard choice, but a choice non the less.

So the creation of a tax system, whereby a person is forced to pay taxes, a percentage of which goes to the rich that hold government debt, is a system where everyone is forced to work by men with guns. That's slavery.

But you can believe that you're not a slave just because there are slaves, or have been slaves, who have even less choices than you do.

Why the markdown? Objective-C is shitty with shitty tools. Ellison is Jobs' friend. Ellison owns Java. Android is iPhone's rival.

I shouldn't still be surprised by this shit, but the claims of patent 5,966,702 are basically "There was some data and we normalized it". Seriously. WTF?

Can we start putting questions like these on 1st year bachelors exams, so we can finally prove that someone "reasonably skilled in the arts" can figure it out?

And in evidence for the "Pretty Sure They Aren't" statement, here's Miguel de Icaza shitting his pants (not):

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Aug-13.html

In some ways the Dalvik VM is more different. Its register based for a start.

I know. I also hope they are using process level security, not class level security, which will completely bypass patent #1. Google people aren't stupid.

You've not looked at them have you (the VMs)? The JVM is entirely a class-focused JVM. The CLR is a general purpose VM. I can access arbitrary memory in the CLR, but cannot on the JVM. I write as someone who has attempted to build a byte-code assembly file that would allow direct manipulation of binary arrays for the purpose of efficiently loading OpenGL vertex buffers that mix floats and ints. Cant be done in Java or in Dalvik (at least in 2.1). Easily done in CLR. Also, the handling of security and exceptions is different. I've also read all the JSRs with respect to this problem, related problems, generics, stack-based variables etc, and I'm also aware of the optimizations for stack-based elimination in 1.6 and 1.7.

Also, I admit I only read the first patent, but I believe it doesn't apply to Android simply because the Dalvik VM does not apply its security at the object level but the process level, thereby nuking the patent. As for mono, I doubt they would worry since they would simply point out that "class" and "object" have been used for determining security access since at least Windows NT. Or mono can simply turn off object level security and rely on the OS to do it. The whole list is replete with holes and workarounds.

Please oh please let it be a Java-based iOS SDK instead of the archaic shit we have to use now.

And needless to say, at least patent 6,125,447 has prior art.

No I'm pretty sure they aren't. The CLR is totally different to the JVM.

The JVM bytecode is shitty. It cannot support dynamic languages at the VM level (yet: http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=292), the support for the C# equivalent of structs has been pushed back, and that makes any kind of hardware acceleration painful. Then theres type erasure - a total hack to get generics.

I think Oracle is being beyond stupid here. If anyone has the power to come up with a language and toolchain to make Java utterly irrelevant, its Google.

What to do? Read paper or hit next months deadline...

So far, to fight "Special Interest Groups" we have:

The Bulldawg Nation.

The No Kill Nation (human treatment of pets)

Drunk Nation

LGBTQ Nation

Netroorts Nation

Outdoor Nation

A Woman's Nation

Elevation Nation

Basically Sean has created Facebook, but you give him money for his political campaign fund first.

That said, at least he's trying something.