wbrendel

The BEKANT is definitely hit-or-miss when it comes to reliability. The motors on mine died just over a month after purchasing it, and some searching at the time revealed it to be a pretty common issue. Luckily IKEA has a generous return policy and I was able to return it with no questions asked. When it did work, however, I agree it generally worked well and was mostly stable enough. I just couldn't risk having to disassemble my desk whenever the motors broke.

This article doesn't come across to me as angry, not at all. I would say Marco is more disappointed than anything, especially knowing how good some of Apple's other cloud services can be: contacts, calendars, push notifications, and photos. I would have vastly preferred a clean break from iTunes (i.e., a simpler "Music" app rather than cramming more into iTunes), similar to the way Apple deprecated iPhoto in favor of Photos. The latter has been rock-solid for me thus far, something I could never say about iPhoto.

  Whatever made you think that was the case?

The new date picker certainly looks better than before, but I think the plus and minus buttons are a little confusing. Not sure what will happen when I click plus above November. I assume it will change to December because 11+1=12, but I could also understand why it might change to October (I expect a list of months to go from January at the top to December at the bottom. I would think clicking the button above the month would go up in that list, to October).

That minor point aside, great job!

I went from HSPA+ on a Galaxy Nexus (AT&T) to LTE on an iPhone 5 (Verizon), and the difference is very noticeable, at least in my area of the US. HSPA+ was alright but still felt like a cellular data connection. LTE feels just like I'm on a fast wifi connection. It's probably the lower latency that makes it seem like wifi, not just the faster data transfer speeds.

The iPhone 5 has LTE and an aluminum back.

Edit: Not being snarky. Just a minor correction.

Those are good arguments, but are those benefits worth the millions of dollars we spend on these obviously flawed machines? It seems like overkill. Print some ballots with larger print and some in whatever languages are common in your area.

If we do have to use electronic voting machines, I like your idea of it printing a paper ballot rather than tabulating the vote inside the machine.

What's wrong with paper ballots again? Serious question.

In my area (northern MA), voters are given a ballot with a bubble next to each of the candidates' names. You use a marker to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to vote for, like 6-year-olds manage to do all the time on multiple choice tests in school. Then it gets read in by a machine, leaving a paper trail just in case.

How are these electronic voting machines any better than that? With all the technical/fraud issues surrounding them, wouldn't it make sense to just use paper?

64GB iPhone 5 here: 57.3GB usable storage (89.5% of advertised).

Sounds like you did have experience: stuff you had done independently. More and more that's becoming a requirement to get a good job out of college, at least in certain fields. Combined with your ability to speak intelligently about that experience, it sounds like the hiring decision was pretty easy. What I've found more common, is recent graduates who expect their degree /alone/ will get them a great job out of college, and that's becoming more and more difficult.

Edit: After reading my comment, I don't think I made it clear enough that I'm agreeing with your point about people not marketing or educating themselves adequately. After spending 4 years in college, I think a lot of people expect to show up at a job interview, show the interviewer their degree, and get a job. The reality is obviously quite different.

First, this looks like a nicely done app.

Serious question though: Who is doing serious development work on their iPad? Is this for the PHP developer on the go who needs to make a quick edit to a file on their remote server while riding in a taxi, or are people expected to use this app to do real* work?

* This bears repeating: This is a serious question, and I'm not trying to sound dismissive or judgmental. If you do serious development work on your iPad, I'd love to hear more about your workflow.

No BBEdit option?

You can force quit the app, and it will relaunch to your list of games.

Counter-Strike was what really got me into programming too, in the form of several small programs that added some neat functionality to CS and other HL mods. As a high school student it was pretty amazing to have tens of thousands of people using the software I was writing.

If you used any of the programs I wrote or know anyone who did, I guess I owe you an apology. One of the programs, Half-Life Sound Selector (HLSS), annoyed countless people by allowing players to blast WAV files over the voice comm system. Really, really annoying. Another program, HLirc, interfaced with HL and mIRC, letting you chat in IRC using the game's console, until VAC started detecting it (incorrectly) as a cheat and banned you that is. The other program was a Winamp plugin called HLamp. It let you control Winamp from inside the game and even tell others what song you were listening to. My favorite feature: automatically turning the volume up/down when you died/respawned. Of course the VAC eventually detected HLamp as a cheat too.

Anyway, sorry if I got your WON/Steam account banned!

Good memories :)

Devil's advocate here. What about all the content producers and services that rely on advertisements for the bulk of their income? I'm afraid the result of this law will be a drop in online advertising, or at least a drastically lower price due to less demographic information about visitors. Less advertising money means more incentive for content producers and service providers to charge users directly, instead of charging advertisers. As much as I value my privacy, I don't want the rest of the web to follow the example set by The New York Times. I realize we'll have to see how things play out, but I don't think my fears are baseless, and I certainly don't think a law is the answer to this problem.

This just doesn't seem like the sort of presentation you should use Prezi for, that's all. The zooming and swooshing and panning and spinning and turning and ... distracts from what I care about: the content. Don't get me wrong, Prezi can be really cool in the right situation, just not this one.

Of course, distracting people from the content is exactly what I'm doing here, so I'll leave it at that :-)

Is this a blog post about Java GC or an excuse to use Prezi? I can't tell.