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cygwin98on Technology Change: .Net to Scala

I was being snarky in my another comment and was downvoted as hell. Oh well, I am OK with that. However, I can't help thinking of the failure of Scala at Yammer, which caused a big buzz two years ago [1] and [2]. From the blog posts I've read about Scala and Yammer, they planed the transition to Scala carefully and with passion, and they switched away from Scala in merely one year.

Has the situation changed totally? I don't know. Maybe Scala has improved significantly since then and all the pain points back then have been addressed nowadays. I'd like to be enlightened on these factors.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3297750 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3292555

cygwin98on Technology Change: .Net to Scala

And one year later, a blog post titled "Why we moved to Java from Scala" or "Why we moved back to .NET" appeared on HN and havested hundreds of votes.

Just kidding.

cygwin98on LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

> It would have been an easier sell if you could do the IMAP proxying on the local device somehow.

This should be easy to run an background proxy under Android. Not sure if this is possible under iOS7 though.

cygwin98on LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

Unless LinkedIn open sources it and I host my own copy, there is no way for me to hand all my emails to LinkedIn.

cygwin98on Why Apple Wants Its Software to Be Free

Even for the same method each version of Mac OS X can behave slightly different, which causes pains for the users due to crashes and the developers to scratch their heads to reproduce. I've read quite a number of blog posts that the developers tried to reproduce a bug only happens to Snow Leopard. Extra code had to be written only for that. You can imagine how the code will smell if extra efforts need to be made for each version. That's the fragmentation issue I talked about and had concerns with.

cygwin98on Why Apple Wants Its Software to Be Free

So just target Lion and above, that's 54%, which might sound small, but it's tens of millions of users. Mac software houses thrived in 2005 with 1/4 the user base that what that 54% represents.

That's true. Though it's still way better to support 72% in one API than 54% in two slightly different APIs.

That said, I highly doubt SL is 35% still.

I think you're right. Those 32bit Intel iMacs are probably on their last legs at this moment. In one year, I predict Mavericks may have 80% or even higher market share, comparable to its remote cousin iOS7's share on iOS devices.

cygwin98on Why Apple Wants Its Software to Be Free

The fragmentation issue in Mac OS X [1] is the hurdle that has been holding me off from writing apps for Macs. According to [1] (published about half a year ago), the Mac OS X market share breakdown:

26.8% Mountain Lion 10.8

28.0% Lion 10.7

35.1% Snow Leopard 10.6

10.0% Leopard 10.5 and Tiger 10.4

If we assume that half of the macs running Snow Leopard (10.6) are pre-2007 and ineligible for 10.9, we have about 72.3% macs that can upgrade to the free Mavericks, which is great news for Mac App developers.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/ad-network-os-x-is-becoming-fragmented-...

cygwin98on Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

That maybe a while ago, like when Ubuntu was 9.0 and you had to compile from source code in order to get sgen? Things are much better now. Since early this year, I've been running a web service written in C# serving one of my iOS apps. That piece of service has been running happily in a tiny VPS for half a year now. Installation of the Mono runtime was an easy apt-get.

cygwin98on Startup School 2013 Doodles

Yeah, the picture linked above kinds of creepy. I like the one currently being used better. By the way, it's a really impressive piece. Job well done!

cygwin98on Startup School 2013 Doodles

How did you get the pictures to each person at the bottom of the page? Photoshop over their genuine pictures?

cygwin98on The World Wants to Break Up with America's Internet

I get what you're saying. I do notice that myself is getting more cynical nowadays. On the positive side though you can push changes to your own government, while there is nothing you can do to the USA.

cygwin98on The World Wants to Break Up with America's Internet

This is not impossible though.

China has done this with their Great Firewall and web firms such as Baidu (search engine), QQ (like Facebook), Weibo (like Twitter), etc. I believe EU and Russia also have the capability to do the same if they want to. For the rest of the world, they can license a copy from one of the three and host their own server farms.

This is not a bright future to have though: the Internet would become an actual inter-net among a few huge LANs.

cygwin98on Scala: sharp and gets things cut

Sounds like what C++ shops used to do: enforcing a subset of C++, prohibition on anything else. However, each shop has its own subset.

cygwin98on Sustainability and the Mac App Store

The audience on the Mac App Store is not yet large enough to sustain low prices (like the iPhone can, sometimes) – it’s just not feasible.

This is also true for niches iOS apps in the app store.

cygwin98on What I learned from turning my ‘Out of Office’ auto-replies on for a month

If your Exchange server is 2007SP1 and up, you can specify your OOF to only send to external users who are on your contacts list. That should resolve the mailing list spamming issue here.

cygwin98on China to launch space station by 2023

I agree. This is the tragic commons of the human beings.

cygwin98on China to launch space station by 2023

And meanwhile Fukushima has been dumping huge volumes of radioactive waste water into Pacific for the past two years, the western world seems to be OK with that. Maybe space is more valuable than oceans.

cygwin98on China to launch space station by 2023

It's only a bit hypocritical. There are actual degrees of hypocrisy!

I don't get this. Did you mean there are 50% hypocrites and 90% hypocrites? And the 50% hypocrites can always laugh it out at the 90% hypocrites, because he/she may think he/she has a moral high ground due to less hypocrisy. Heck, that's mouthful.

cygwin98on China to launch space station by 2023

So blame the picture itself then. The last number is colored nearly black on a dark background.

Also the number is a bit misleading. Most of the China's debris were probably generated by the ASAT test in 2007, which is not a common case.

cygwin98on China to launch space station by 2023

Flaming remarks. Removed

cygwin98on China to launch space station by 2023

This is hypocritical. US and the whole Western world is not any better on this.

cygwin98on The shittiest project I ever worked on

If you billed those 900 hours for doing RFP for the customer, it doesn't sound too bad.

cygwin98on Linux is the best shot at a granny proof OS in 2013

Don't know why you got downvoted. An old iMac has worked wonders for my parents.

cygwin98on Apple Updates iMac

If I were you, I would cancel that order and re-purchase the new model.

cygwin98on How I Make A Living Using GameMaker

Html5 sounds a perfect fit for the use cases you talked about.

cygwin98on Life of a Tech-nomad.

There's also the school of thought that you should be using the hardware configuration you expect most users will be running and make sure your product runs acceptable on it.

This might have been true for desktop software development, but not in this case. In the context of mobile apps, it's the testing devices might as well be low-end ones, not the development machines.

cygwin98on Life of a Tech-nomad.

Well, I have a 2012 Macbook Air that I bought last fall and am really happy with. Before that, my main gear was an iMac late 2006, which was slow as hell, especially when compiling reasonably sized projects.

An 2008 Macbook might be sufficiently faster. Good for you.

cygwin98on Life of a Tech-nomad.

My “office” is a small corner of one of the bedrooms and consists of a 5yr old MacbookPro with a broken fan.

I don't get this piece. If you're a developer, you should have the best development gears you can afford. Why have it so miserable to make it more of a punishment than a happy environment to work in.

cygwin98on Microsoft’s best hope after Ballmer? A break up

Don't be silly. We're having a world war in the IT scene at this moment among a number of monstrous companies: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and their allies. This proposal is like suggesting of partitioning the Soviet Union in 1942.