sequence7

Not available yet, but soon the Nokia lumia 620 looks like what you're after

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/mobile-phone/3415168/noki...

plain/text gives you JSON in MVC 4. I understood what you were saying, the default in MVC 4 is now to return JSON unless you specify otherwise.

By default MVC 4 will return JSON so you don't need to specify the content-type unless you want something that isn't JSON.

Really this is worth getting worked up over. Honestly it looks a bit like an iMac, who cares, it's clearly not an iMac and the HP logo is an extra big giveaway for anyone who might be confused.

The aluminium iMac design has been around for 5 years now it's hardly surprising that what is obviously a good design is going to be copied by its competitors. Why all the wailing and gnashing of teeth?

I'd like to agree with you but nope it clearly does lack detail, looking at that page I've a few instant questions

* If I'm a business how do I get my VAT right?

* What goods/services are VAT exempt

Now they're a little specific because I deal with VAT regularly but the fact that the VAT rate is 20% is easy to show and it's a headline piece of information. However tax and everything else involving government is always complicated and presenting it simply is incredibly difficult. The questions that a user landing on that page will want answering are diverse and as much as I'd like it to be as simple as showing a simple table with some data I doubt whether that's going to answer the question the average user has. The current directgov page is full of links to and information that might help, the new snazzy page - nope nothing.

I don't think this is purely political I honestly believe there are people trying to make government sites more simple but I also don't think just throwing away whatever information you don't need is not particularly helpful. The reason most gov websites are hugely complicated/confusing is because gov is hugely confusing/complicated and while I applaud any effort to simplify the presentation simply dropping a bunch of information and claiming you've solved the problem doesn't cut it.

"If you miss any live or in-person event, you can return to this site to find archives of all materials."

So yes.

If I write a blog a post about how I got 50 billionaires to attend my hackathon then the techniques for attracting those billionaires might be considered useful, the fact I was restricting my hackathon to mainly billionaires doesn't negate the benefit of those techniques. So I can have two titles 'How I got 50 billionaires to attend my hackathon' or 'It's easy to get 50 billionaires to attend a hackathon just refuse anyone who isn't a billionaire'. The trick here isn't to limit attendees, that's easy, the trick is to encourage the attendees you would like to attend. If it's billionaires then you should definitely check out my upcoming series of blog posts on how I got 50 billionaires to attend my hackathon (possibly fictional), if it's women (who are massively underrepresented at hackathons, much like billionaires) then perhaps the linked article would be valuable.

Top Gear's gender balance is specific to the studio audience. If you check you might notice that neither the contributors (presenters, production staff) nor the audience are anyway near as balanced so I don't really see your point.

The limit of 50/50 doesn't guarantee an attendance of 50 women it just limits the attendance to 50 men, although it obviously doesn't guarantee that either. Personally I think it's a pretty useful message to say 'here are a number of ways that you can make your hackathon more appealing to women' but that's a very boring headline and it would never have hit the front page so I can understand why it wasn't used. The number of frankly misogynist (I don't mean yours or the parent posters) only heightens my belief that articles like this are useful. There are well known ways to entice men who spend time hacking to your hackathon such as beer, pizza etc. but if we want to broaden the appeal of coding/hacking/programming we need to broaden the appeal of the events that nurture such creativity.

I'm sorry I don't understand. Your example does nothing and has very opaque variable names. As soon as you have some code and variable names that are helpful the language clutter seems pretty irrelevant. I agree that libraries are useful but they exist in non dynamic languages. You can Meta program in C#. I'm not denying that dynamic languages are neat but I still don't see how you can simply define them as fundamentally better rather than your preferred choice.

So if I want add a year to a date and time I just have to add the number of seconds in a year which sounds ludicrously easy I agree. I want to know the exact date and time one year from February the 29th at 12:00 hours 2012. I want the answer to be consistent so what is the date and how many seconds do I add? I would also like to know the exact date and time one year from February the 28th at 12:00 hours 2011. I want the answer to be consistent so what is the date and how many seconds do I add?

Although I think point 1 is valid point 2 seems somewhat hyperbolic. Could you clarify why dynamic languages are more productive than C#?

If you read the errata of that post you'll see that the author could have got to 390 requests a second by turning off debug mode. No ugly optimisations necessary.

Yes, I actually got two and am liking them a lot more than I expected to.

UK at home swab program:

http://www.anthonynolan.org/What-you-can-do/save-a-life/Onli...

If you're in the UK you can register with the Anthony Nolan trust as a donor. The whole process is incredibly simple, so please do.

http://www.anthonynolan.org/What-you-can-do/save-a-life/Onli...

Wouldn't a better (read less link baiting) title be. What one country got right in one example of funding start-ups? The article basically describes a bunch of different business models and then hails the Yozma program. I don't know anything about it and maybe it's been immensely successful but I would have thought it would be far more interesting if it told me why and how it had been successful. To be honest I would have thought a better explanation of the success of entrepreneurs in Israel would be the large number of highly skilled/motivated first/second/third generation immigrants moving into the country.

Exactly, and what does 'checking' even mean in this case. If you're not parameterizing your SQL queries and relying on your home baked string/regex/etc. checks then you've already lost.

I am honestly baffled by developers who think they can sanitize input enough to happily send it to SQL without parameters. Can anyone explain why this would ever be a good idea?

On a side note I also don't understand why anyone would give an app permission to do anything other than read/update data. Honestly if your app can drop tables then isn't it a bit broken from a security standpoint anyway?

When I used to play with code I could build anything I wanted and it was fun. Now I have a job I have to build what the people who pay me need or want, fortunately that can be fun too but often it isn't. That's why I call it work, not play. I enjoy the satisfaction of making stuff happen via code and I don't care whether I wrote the clever bit or not I care about whether my client is happy.

If all you want to do is be a creative then that's easy, accept that you can make anything you want but no-one will necessarily pay you for it. I think at that point you're an artist and you get all the benefits and drawbacks that the title entails. The main benefit being total freedom and the main drawback being probable poverty.

Well it's not a framework but asp.net mvc can actually do pretty much exactly this with data annotations.

http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/mvc-music-store-part-6

Apple Mail's Organize by Thread feature is retarded. It considers any messages that have the same subject to be in the same thread. Gmail's Conversations identify the actual threads/conversations instead.

True, performance on older mobile hardware's not great, my old htc hero runs the demos at a pretty glacial pace. But it wasn't so long ago that javascript performance was apparently so poor that web apps would never catch on and remember this is an alpha version so it's going to get quicker.

I do agree native apps are going to be more appropriate in a number of situations though.

Shocking as it may sound not all mobile devices are iOS, in fact most aren't. jQuery mobile lets you target a huge number of devices. See the supported browsers page for a list:

http://jquerymobile.com/gbs/

A little anecdote on being an Apple consumer but first some caveats:

1) I own a lot of Apple kit and I love my iMac so don't take this as some weird fanboy thing

2) I hate Apple mice and I hate the Apple store, my story may explain why

My story

The introduction:

So I've bought an iMac it's awesome and I love it but I have a MightyMouse which although it sounds great is fundamentally flawed. The flaw is quite simple, if you use it then it will no longer work. What, I hear you say, that doesn't sound very Apple after all their products are both beautiful and functional. I know I'm honestly as shocked as you are, I only buy Apple computers and to be honest if someone asks me what kind of computer they should buy the answer is simple, an Apple. So anyway here I am with an Apple MightyMouse, it looks beautiful and it works for a while but then all of a sudden the scrolly ball thing doesn't scroll in the right direction. I can scroll up, yay, but down, boo, that's not allowed and I am disappointed that my beautiful iMac is now a bit shit.

Oh dear something's not working, at least I have Apple's legendary customer service to fall back on (yay - possibly):

So I do what any sensible geek does (did I mention I'm a geek, in case you're curious I am), check the apple site and the internet in general to see what might be wrong. Yay once again it turns out this is a common problem with people who don't work in a clean room environment. Apparently if the MightyMouse is exposed to any kind of dirt/skin/life then after a while its sensitive little scrolly ball stops working. This sounds bad but it's OK you just have to turn the MightyMouse upside down and rub it forcefully against a piece of clean paper until it starts working again (I believe this is called cleaning in human circles but I imagine in the world of Apple it's called, removing the reality from perfection). My MightyMouse works again for a while ...

A temporary solution turns out to not be permanent:

Oh dear, I've used the turn upside down and rub against a clean piece of paper technique once too much. No matter how many times I try I can only scroll in one direction. Never mind I think I'll pop down to my local Apple store and they'll help (oh how I love that legendary Apple service).

And so off to the Apple store I go:

Fortunately I live in a large UK conurbation, this means my Apple store is only a few miles away. On arrival I'm greeted by a security guard, then some guy in a blue shirt appears and tries to sell me an iPhone. 'Hello there I say I've got a bit of a problem in that my mouse doesn't work' (offering the MightyMouse to him), this turns out to be an error blue shirts cannot do anything but sell oops. He backs away in fear and tells me that I must go upstairs to talk to the tech people ... It's ok I'm used to dealing with sales people so I smile and amble upstairs to shat seems to be some kind of indoctrination centre flanked by desks called 'Genius bars', seriously who the hell calls tech support geniuses, but hey if it makes them happy ...

I try and get someone to fix my mouse:

So I amble up to the nearest official looking person and explain the issue to the (mouse doesn't work seems simple to me) and they helpfully inform me that I need to talk to a genius. I'm not convinced a genius is required, after all a broken mouse is simply fixed by replacing it, but this guy seems convinced and he says that I need a pre-booked slot to talk to one of these geniuses so I ask if he could maybe fit me in, what with my problem being only a broken mouse surely it's simple replace mouse make customer happy. He is so helpful he offers to allow me onto a special genius bar waiver. I just have to wait about a half hour to talk to one.

I get to talk to a genius:

I wander around the Apple store, make some phone calls, consider buying some stuff then think better of it. After killing plenty of time my name appears on the pretty screens and some 'genius' accepts my communication. 'So what seems to be the problem', this is not what I expected from a genius but hey, I explain that my mouse doesn't work (I should point out that I've already explained this to every Apple employee I've experienced so far, as well as showing them the mouse and telling them exactly what I'd done to try and fix the problem). I explain the problem again ... he takes my MightyMouse picks up a clean piece of paper and rubs the mouse against the paper. I am shocked to observe that this doesn't fix the problem, more worryingly so is he ...

I try and get a replacement mouse (you know like you would with any company if the thing they'd sold you didn't work):

My personal genius is shocked, apparently the mouse doesn't work. I am not so shocked and ask if he can replace it, what with us being in an Apple store full of Apple goodness. Oh no says my personal genius, this is an OEM mouse, comes with the iMac you bought and we don't have any of them. hmmmmm How about the Apple MightyMouse I can see in a box just over there that you'll happily sell me? Oh no we can't possibly give you that it's not the right product says he ... I am I admit at this point a little disillusioned. I turned up with a broken mouse and thought I could just replace it, turns out that's not the Apple way.

I'm palmed off with the offer of an replacement:

So the genius can't replace my mouse, he needs to put in a special order. But I don't need to worry because their next delivery is imminent and he'll have a new mouse ready for me in a few days. I thought I just needed a new mouse, turns out I need a very specific new mouse but that's ok I'm a patient man. Apparently someone will contact me the moment my new mouse is available, then I can enjoy the Apple experience once more by returning to the shop and picking it up.

I wait:

No one calls

I wait some more:

No one calls (seriously this is two weeks after I was told I'd have the mouse in a few days)

I lose patience:

So I march to the Apple store, someone tries to sell me an iPhone and I ignore them. I find someone in an orange shirt (these seem to be the be the power brokers in Apple stores) and explain my situation (I am very annoyed). Fortunately because of Apple's legendary support I am fast tracked to a genius bar appointment. I repeat my experience in a surprisingly light hearted manner (see above) and offer the offending mouse to him. I am not joking when I say that his reaction was to take a piece of clean paper and rub the ball thing against the clean paper for fully thirty seconds before uttering the immortal words 'Seems like it's broken'. I didn't kill him or anyone in the near vicinity, he did however explain that they had no OEM parts available to replace my mouse. I explained my story so far and he, I imagine breaking company policy, gave me a new mouse. I wasn't happy but at least I had a mouse that worked.

I get annoying phonecalls:

So I have a mouse that works (for now, god knows what I'm going to do when this one fails due to the fact I don't live in a reality free zone) and all of sudden I start getting messages from my local Apple store. 'Hi mister blah we've just got your apple mouse in stock we'd love it if you could make an appointment to come and pick it up' Argh, I have my mouse. It was a nightmare getting it and you don't even know that I've got it ...

I hate apple:

I used to love apple. Seriously I still love the hardware but the customer service sucks. I remember when apple would collect and return your laptops, now you're lucky if they spit in your face and tell you their mice are shit.

Seriously do I seem bitter:

I know it's only a mouse but for the love of god why not just replace it ....

This is to comments what the Fox network is to news: hyperbolic, uninformative and yet bizarrely popular

Really, the biggest flaw with a monarchy is the difficulty of succession? Not that the whole concept is based on subjugation of the populace and nepotism? A benevolent dictatorship seems a great idea if you're the dictator I would have thought that most people here would have realised that you won't be, and even if you were you shouldn't be. Yes it is a hard problem to solve but the first step is to abolish or disempower the monarch not to try and plan a more effective succession strategy.

What about option 5:

Learn while doing, or more specifically while someone else does and teaches you. You're clearly highly skilled in your technical niche why don't you find someone else with complimentary skills (mechanics, electronics and computer science) and partner with them. You can start building your business immediately in the time that you have and as part of the partnership each teach the other. I know that as a hacker having the opportunity to work with a real specialist in another field and for us both to teach each other would be a massively satisfying experience.

You get two benefits the way I see it 1) You can start building your startup now 2) You get the two skilled specialists to work on it and share the excitement

I see the only drawback is that you don't get to go and spend a few years learning a new thing without any commercial pressure. If this is about learning how to be a hacker that's bad but if you're really into the startup thing then you save yourself a lot of time.

That's a valid point for a business, but for a user it seems like google's focus is crystal clear. The interesting thing is, I think, that they focus on their real customers more than who people perceive to be their customers. The real customer for google is the billions who use their search, that's where all their money comes from. If you're paying for google checkout, or apps for your domain or one of their other services the truth is that you contribute next to nothing to their bottom line. I'd like all their paid services to be better but I understand why fundamentally they don't look after those customers as much as the ones who really pay their bills. In short, google makes their real money from people who don't pay them, that's who they care about.