cliveowen

Not working on Chrome on Mac OS X 10.9.5, either.

Lollipop is just a bad, bad update. Tap the square button and close two apps at the same time. If you did everything right, now your phone says that Android UI failed. This has been going on since day one. Day one. Which was sometime in November.

Their Hangouts app sucks. I don't know how people in the U.S. use it, but here people use it only for SMS, and they crammed everything in that so it's hard to do the main function. But not to worry, they made Messenger too. So, if you're a sane person, you disable Hangouts, install Messenger and all is good, right? Of course not. Because since the 5.1 update, every few minutes you get a nice message that says "Hangouts has stopped unexpectedly". You know, the app that you supposedly disabled because you have no use for. So you enable it again, and the message goes away, and the app just stands there, unused, taking up space and memory. And by the way, why do they feel the need to make two or three different apps for doing the same thing? Photos and Gallery? Why not. What about Email, Gmail and Inbox? Sure, my app drawer was a bit too empty anyway...

There's so much more that could be said about Google "products" (I hate this word) and their problems, but my blood pressure is already acting up, so I better leave it for another day.

It's what I did at the time, and I did it again now, but it doesn't work. I can change password as many times as I want, but the account is still blocked for no reason.

More than a year ago I skipped the page that asked me to enable the two-factor authentication, as I didn't want to give Microsoft my phone number. One day I found myself completely locked out of my account. Long story short, I've never been able to access my email account again, since that day. The instructions to unblock the account [1], say, I shit you not:

"To unblock your account go to https://account.live.com and sign in to your blocked account."

If I try to enter my number, I get an unspecified error and I'm still locked out. Obviously. But not to worry, the page says:

"If you can’t unblock your account with the security code and changing your password, customer support can still help you get your account back. To contact customer support, you’ll need to sign in to your account, and fill out an online form."

...

I really don't know what kind of brain-dead monkeys they put in charge of these things. And while it's hard to believe that a functioning human being could ever come up with such a bullet-proof procedure to unblock an account blocked for "security reasons", what really baffles me is that this has been going on for almost two years. This should give you an idea of how much Microsoft cares about their consumer products.

So, consider yourself lucky to have gone past the login, which, apparently, isn't something to take for granted with Microsoft.

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/account-t...

Curtis Green was at home, greeting the morning with 64 ounces of Coca-Cola and powdered mini doughnuts. Fingers frosted synthetic white[...]

Green waddled to the door, his two Chihuahuas, Max and Sammy, following attentively.

How do the authors know any of these (useless) details? They weren't there. Is this a factual recount or fiction?

I hate it when these failed novelists try to make a run-of-the-mill story sound like an Hollywood movie. Next time, just stick to the facts and save me a couple of pointless pages of unsubstantiated claims. Is is that hard to do?

I don’t see Go as something that is going to serve as a “better C”, so I’m waiting for something new.

This surprised me a bit. I think most people who tried Go would agree that it is, in fact, a better version of the C programming language. It follows many of the same UNIX-y principles and it's a pleasure to work with, mostly because the syntax just gets out of the way. I'd like to know more about his point of view if he's reading here :)

And while I'm at it, I want to thank Salvatore for giving us redis, which is also a pleasure to work with.

Talk about serendipity, I was just reading this article from September 6th:

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21615029-...

"One of these, Genia, is commercialising a process called nanopore sequencing that Dr Church first devised in 1988. Distinct polymer tags are attached to each of the four nucleotides poised to contribute to a single molecule of replicating DNA. As they react, the tags are released near a protein layer full of tiny holes called nanopores. Each tag blocks the flow of electrical ions across the layer in a different way. Because it relies on electronics rather than optics, nanopore sequencing promises faster, cheaper sequencing. Dr Church holds up a fingernail-sized chip containing 128,000 nanopores that he reckons will bring the cost of sequencing down to $100. In June, Genia was acquired by Roche, a Swiss pharmaceuticals giant."

The language isn't everything, in fact, it's the least important part of the package. Android has horrible online documentation, iOS has stacks of nicely formatted PDFs and a great online reference. Android tools (Eclipse/Android Studio) are simply horrible, while XCode and related tools are really great. Add to this the performance hit you have from having your code run on a vm and the bloat that comes from using Java itself, and you have yet another reason as to why Android developers are few and far between.

http://evernote.com/clearly/ I've been using this for years, now I can't read an article without it.

I never heard of this game, but a quick search shows it's an 80s looking video game with very basic graphics (maybe there's another game with the same name?). Anyway, I can't understand what could possibly justify that price.

Well, it's not that impressive, it says the guy ran 3 seconds faster, how is that useful in any context?

I think sooner or later it had to happen, there's a time when everyone realizes they're not so special after all and all those idiots working 9-to-5 like drones are actually people like you and me who also thought their life would be an amazing journey, but then reality came knocking and yanked the rug from under their feet. I guess it's good you realized this now instead of later.

Looks like in the end the weak link is always human.

I haven't been following on this matter, it was or it wasn't Apple's fault?

You're not supposed to put in real answer anyway.

Anyone else wonders who are these people that answered their survey? I don't know about you, but Facebook never asked me anything, let alone to compile a survey. My guess is that these people are Facebook employees. What is wrong with that, you ask? It's simple, Facebook is used by 1B+ people, so the results from a survey answered by a few thousand doesn't tell you anything about the general consensus. Even worse, you're only seeing what a very specific niche wants: the American, mostly white, tech-minded portion of the userbase. It's good dogfooding your products to root out bugs, but it's downright reckless to use your own people to make assumptions over the needs of the real user base.

Exactly, I wonder if there's really an innovative algorithm behind, or it's just a bunch of code that maximizes revenue with the simplex algorithm. Media are always quick in bringing up algorithms, yet I've never seen a single company release a paper with one of these algorithms, even when they're tangential to their business and not an advantage over competitors.

The site isn't served by a CDN so, for most people outside the US, every click takes anywhere more than 5 seconds (according to Chrome dev tools) to show any given page. Clicking threads and finding nothing new is a monumental waste of time, notifications would improve things a bit.

I don't consider the microprocessor in my smart phone with its billions of transistors, and the ever-faster global internet and wireless systems that enable nearly instant (certainly to human perception it's nearly instant) global communication to billions of people at any time, to be low hanging fruit.

BUt it is, proof is that even after we invested tens of billions in funding basic research in cancer and other areas of biology we still know so little of practical value. Even the simplest organism is infinitely more complex than the most intricate human made object (which might very well be the microprocessor). We solved the fast computing and global communication problems first because they're way easier, and there's no denying it.

You should always put a break statement at the end of a default branch. The default case is put at the end as a convention but no one (certainly not the C standard) prevents you from adding a new case after, which will be promptly executed even though probably it's what you want. I think this is mentioned a best practice in the K&R.

BBC's articles often report direct quotes from average Joes, it's part of their style. I don't like it either.

From the article: "The creators will also have the option of making their algorithms open source, so developers will be able to integrate them directly into their own applications"

Am I the only one who see this working backwards? If I move towards 2007 everything gets more detailed.

If I hadn't seen this submission I wouldn't have even noticed it.

Frankly I don't get all the hate. I remember being in middle school and ringing my friends just once and wait for them to ring back, it was a common thing to do. This is the modern version, nothing more.

Am I the only one who finds the layout of the Android app extremely complicated? Folders upon folders, how can you make your head around the various parts?

in a quite short time

Almost 10 years, the same as YouTube.

I can only imagine what the next dozen new categories will be invented in the next 15 years.

I don't think 15 years will make that much difference, the economics have changed and have been turned on the head. Today we have this handful of mega corporations with billions of cash in their coffers that are responsible for much of the services used by most of the world everyday and they also reap most of the revenue. Every new entrant even remotely successful it's either squashed or bought out, so I don't think there's there's the potential for a new company to reach the same heights. In fact, I think the market will be exactly the same, if there will be a bunch of new big companies out there, they will likely be started by the same entrepreneurs responsible for today's major ventures, they are the ones with the loads of cash, remember.

I'm pretty sure they count every single minor interaction as a log-in. You receive a notification on your phone and then swipe it away? That's an interaction.

Also, Facebook was founded 6 years after Google. I think Facebook is following the same trajectory if not doing better than Google at the time.