heresy's comments

All I see is that users get a Dropbox app pre-installed, with 25GB of storage.

iCloud gives the user transparent storage of data, apps can use the same APIs on all iOS devices (where is the Android Dropbox API?) to store information there. Backups occur to it trivially. Photos are automatically synced there. iTunes Match runs off it.

iTunes Match only takes up 2GB of storage for my 15,000 songs (~80GB), because the majority are in the iTunes music store, so this deal would already be worse for me.

iCloud wins because it is backed by the ecosystem. Where is the corresponding ecosystem in the Android world?

How does a bundled Dropbox app + storage bundle compete if it requires the user to manually do file management to ensure "cloud syncing" happens?

Even funnier, the military used it in the Iraq war to communicate.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/battlefield_pr.html

"We'll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes."

Page views?

It installs a "gcc" command-line wrapper which actually calls the LLVM compiler.

The new XCode 4.2 and presumably the next versions of it do not ship with a real GCC, which is one of the things mentioned in the article.

This causes problems for software that doesn't compile right with LLVM yet (arguably bugs in the software, but tell that to someone who can't use the LLVM compiled binaries any more).

Eventually, the version of Xcode that includes GCC will be too old to do anything useful with.

So then you wouldn't be able to "just install XCode", unfortunately.

Right, so we have to rely on leaks in the future to get visibility on how our rights are being stripped away, this is the democratic process our predecessors shed blood for?

Am reminded of this passage from HHGTTG.

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display ..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a flashlight."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

I agree, though I'd probably suggest working from a simple zshrc for starters ("man zshall" is also your friend).

I just spent a bit of time yesterday tweaking information in my prompt just so:

http://imgur.com/OSEB3

And it's made a huge quality of life difference to what I had before.

Worth spending a bit of time making your shell environment optimized for yourself though, and not just copying someone else's setup, in my opinion.

You spend a lot of time there, programming for UNIX, why not make it rock?

It's fairly obvious what they should do: apologise publicly and to the people who they misrepresented themselves to.

Not in the Anglosphere where the actual people affected will never know of their wrongdoing.

Not throw their hands up in the air and blame human nature, sorry for the inconvenience.

Every act like this where they do not take a principled stand, dilutes the value of that Don't Be Evil motto a little more, until one day it will essentially be meaningless.

Were you running old versions of iOS? Personal Hotspot has been in it since March, seems odd that iPhone users would not be running at least 4.3 by now.

SAP deployments must work in some cases, surely.

I read somewhere that a large part of Apple's supply chain management is built on SAP, as well as being the system of record for iTunes/App Store transactions.

I can't find a reliable citation, since this will probably not be something they broadcast, due to their secrecy.

But then, they have the capital to massively spend on heavyweight internal systems.

> There has been some slight work done towards visual development, where you create 'circuit-diagram software': wire up logical components with visual control flow (or visual data flow, perhaps). It never seems to catch on.

We've done this in the past. You can blame implementation, perhaps, but we've found that in our use case (3D graphics processing workflows), it starts to get too hard to understand what is occuring for any non-trivial "program", since you're bound by the constraints of how much information we decided to display visually, whereas with a general purpose domain-specific programming language you can choose how much information to surface, by being able to choose the level of abstraction you want (or not, as the case may be).

The reason we chose to go visually in the first place, is because someone has the bright idea that "anyone" should be able to create these workflows, but it ends up that a technically minded 3D graphics engineer does it anyway, and they just get frustrated by not being able to write a proper program/script :)

I love spelunking problems like this, it's quite the rush when you finally crack it.

iTunes, however, is available in my country. I'm sure we'd get the stock answer claiming they're working as hard as they can to bring it. In a year or three.

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but even after reading the instructions & watching the video I'm getting odd results which don't match what is in the video at all.

I realize there is a disclaimer that it may not necessarily be accurate, but it varies between 0 and some wildly innacurate value like 30 cm when I'm holding it 1 or 2cm away.

Not available outside of the US (except for the crippled non-touch version).

Poor, poor strategy.

That's essentially gifting the market to iOS/Android.

I sure as hell won't wait until Amazon deigns to offer one outside.

Robocopy, while useful, does not have very many of the features of rsync, apart from retries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync

This is not the pricing model used in African countries. So the price of the handset does matter.

As I understand it, most mobile phones in Africa are pre-paid, using per-second billing.

I hate it when people do this.

If you look at the script it's only three freaking commands, one of them a git clone.

We're not bumbling idiots who can't type (or copy & paste) into a terminal.

Or they just want to test that they can reduce a fraction? This was a common requirement when I was in primary school.

Agreed with (2).

I actively create patches and submit it to them whenever I run into a problem, and I will keep doing so, because it's typically only a few days until it gets merged.

How I got into it, was the nifty searching of Github issues that Homebrew does for existing issues when you have a compilation error. One way to get people to report bugs is to show them you care..