_broody
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10 years ago
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on: Apple Introduces the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus
Yes, this is laugh-worthy. It's Apple's sneaky manner of building planned obsolescence into otherwise very competent devices. Just like my 4S, the brand spanking 6S+ will in a few years be choked by iOS updates's climbing RAM requirements. Not updating isn't an option either, as app updates demand the latest OS quickly afterward.
The iPad Pro is much more affected by this because it competes with Wintel devices. When you compare it to the Surface Pro, the later isn't considerably beefier except when it comes to RAM, which is enough on its own to give it double the life span...
_broody
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10 years ago
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on: Inferring Algorithmic Patterns with Stack
That's definitely the best problem ever solved by GP, though given the unfathomably enormous computational resources poured into it, it's still hard to say it was any better than a brute force approach! ;)
_broody
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10 years ago
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on: Material Design Lite
I have to agree-MD isn't "off" by a whole lot but just enough to hinder the user experience. In particular, headers and topbars are oversized beyond what's reasonable, margins are excessive in content elements, and ironically this combination makes interfaces feel very boxed-in AND with poor data density on top of that...
_broody
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10 years ago
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on: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed
Totally agree with you here. Brunch is fantastic for its minimal config requirements and super-fast performance. Oddly enough, in the JS world I've found it best to ignore all the hype around the latest and newest framework, and just go with something that has a small and loyal following and stick with it.
I mean, look at all the people who moved to working with Angular because it was "made by Google, so you could trust it to stick around". Now those people are using React, and soon they'll move to Angular 2. I've found that hyped technologies almost never have a fraction of the robustness and staying power that they claim to...
_broody
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10 years ago
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on: The mystery of the power bank phone taking over Ghana
Upgrading is compulsory for many apps, such as Whatsapp.
_broody
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10 years ago
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on: The mystery of the power bank phone taking over Ghana
> battery life that would probably outlast 3-4 iPhones.
And functional life as well. iOS 8 crippled A5 devices which had previously chugging along quite decently. Planned obsolescence sucks (in iDevices' case, it also affects present performance, i.e. Safari constantly having to reload tabs because the device has little RAM to spare). Unlike a smartphone, a simpler device won't be reduced to be unable to perform its more basic functionality decently a few years down the road...
_broody
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10 years ago
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on: 30 Years Ago They Retired at 35: An Update
That article doesn't actually counter what the OP says. In fact it ends by stating that SS is being more strained and giving diminishing returns as time passes by, which sounds disturbingly like a ponzi scheme. It's unsustainable by design even without free-riders, much less with min-maxers gaming the system to not put anything in.
_broody
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10 years ago
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on: The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall
Cyrus was the name of the traitor in The Matrix. Coincidence...
... Surely.
_broody
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10 years ago
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on: First Firefox OS Smartphones in Africa
As a point of comparison, you can get a Lumia 520 for less. It's a really decent smartphone too from a good brand. It will be interesting to see if Mozilla can yield the combination of quality/value to succeed.
_broody
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10 years ago
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on: First Firefox OS Smartphones in Africa
It's what I've observed as well. Plenty of low-income people get cheap chinese tablets, usually generic-brand entry-level models. No idea about the price but I don't think they're a hair above $100, possibly less than half that.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: Macbook and USB-C Review
I agree. The hybrid touch paradigm is fantastic.
What Windows 8 did wrong was messing with the familiar old-school interface a bit too much, which made many non-tech-savvy users confused and miserable. My dad had a terrible time with Windows 8. But me? The Surface pro is easily among my favorite devices ever.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed
Yes, the app crashed. That was no doubt an app bug. The iPads also crashed. That's eyebrow-raising, and definitely an iPad glitch.
The airline will fix the bug and it won't happen again. But relying on a closed, unauditable platform to keep any sort of safety-critical data in these conditions seems absolutely unconvincing to me.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: SpaceX Plans to Land Next Falcon 9 on Solid Ground
It's the later. Every other possible use of the technology is just speculation at this point.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: Reasons not to buy from Amazon
It's very childish, which is sadly a recurring occurrence with Stallman at times.
All of the tech giants (Apple/Google/MS/Facebook/etc.) are as shady as the Amazon described here on a regular basis even when it's completely unnecessary, unfortunately. Amazon has drawn a lot of bad publicity to itself due to the poor treatment of its blue collar workforce (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641184 ), but I can't imagine the rest of the big players being any better... Only difference is that due to the nature of its operation, Amazon is forced to operate its sweatshops in U.S. soil.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: New York Discovers Wall Street Charges Fees
Yes. The math in the article bothered me greatly. It seems that to the author, two fees will be "nearly the same" if they are within an order of magnitude of each other, which is ridiculous.
Not to mention the condescension dripping from every word. This piece is a good example of how not to write an 'informative' rebuttal.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: 'Silicon Valley Is Coming' Warns JP Morgan CEO
For sure, defeating banks in the matter of customer interaction seems like low-hanging fruit. As the article says, they are too slow, too cumbersome, and I'll add that they are too unfun, and their sales departments are pushy and intrusive.
Do we even need monolithic financial entities in this day and age? Most transactions would be better handled by smaller, specialized and modern service companies. Banks are to financial startups what taxi driver unions are to Uber.
And the financial sector definitely deserves a shakedown, after they essentially plunged the rest of the world into a decade of misery with their securities fraud during the housing crisis, and went unpunished for it.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: Massive, Illicit Bust of Edward Snowden Stuck to a War Monument in Brooklyn
I think it's pretty clear the OP is being downvoted for resorting to character assassination (accusing Snowden of selling/giving intelligence secrets to Russia) without any proof of his claims.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: Ellen Pao Loses Silicon Valley Bias Case Against Kleiner Perkins
It goes further than that. The KP partner that was accused of letting Pao out of company events was described by co-workers as having similar personality traits with her (being pushy and territorial, elbowing others out). He was promoted, she was fired. Sounds like the common pattern that the same sort of behavior will lead a man to be called an "alpha" or somesuch, and a woman, well, a bitch.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: Bubble talk
This. Facebook did really throw startup valuation out of whack starting with the Instagram acquisition and following up to Whatsapp. They appear to have no idea what they're doing with their money, they're in a rather vulnerable spot with their core business, and their demented frenzied spending seems to have infected everyone around them.
_broody
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11 years ago
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on: Ten Years of Kubuntu
How can you take a OSX as an example of how it's done and lambast Gnome after the new Safari redesign throws OSX conventions through the window (much like iTunes and other OSX programs have done already, independently "reimagining" how the OSX title/control bar should work in a way that is not consistent at all).
The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.
The iPad Pro is much more affected by this because it competes with Wintel devices. When you compare it to the Surface Pro, the later isn't considerably beefier except when it comes to RAM, which is enough on its own to give it double the life span...