fab13n

106 ms·

391.
by fab13n 17y ago
> But you can lower tariffs unilateral. Let's say we have 10 countries, with an identical GDP of 100 billion, and 10% flat tax rate. Let's say they agree on what's the minimum decent level of public services (health care, education, roa
392.
by fab13n 17y ago
> Could you please explain your argument about inflation? > Couldn't each country decide on its own inflation, without harmonization nor a common currency? Without a common currency you can handle your own inflation. But if there ar
393.
by fab13n 17y ago
Without harmonisation: * We can't decide anything about inflation, interest rates, at monetary policies. * There's an incentive for fiscal dumping: you set your tax rates for mobile capital so low that you drain wealth from the 26 other cou
394.
by fab13n 17y ago
I always thought that the dictatorial(1) attitude towards what can go on an iPhone was temporary: long enough for a healthy development ecosystem to establish itself, basically. Once competitors become credible, and openness becomes a relev
395.
by fab13n 17y ago
Yep, Europe has set itself up in a situation where sooner or later, it'll have to get a unified economic policy. But it doesn't look like a bad thing to me: * European countries are too small to be meaningful in worldwide economic (or milit
396.
by fab13n 17y ago
> equivalent to [...] photos of a "hot" celebrity they obtained via some sleezy paparazzi hiding in the bushes Not hiding in the bushes: detaining the photographed subject illegally for weeks. It would have been equivalent if pictures h
397.
by fab13n 17y ago
As a developer, I might prefer to write local apps. As a user, the zero install + security guarantees make web apps much preferable. Plus, given that cross-platform toolkits only offer the lowest common denominator, the resulting applicatio
398.
by fab13n 17y ago
Once 3G will be reliable and truly unlimited, what would cross-platform apps offer that web app don't anyway? There is already a cross-platform, 100% uncensored dev framework, with excellent distribution channels, and it's called HTML5. I'm
399.
by fab13n 17y ago
> They're hurting themselves (...) but they're hurting other mobile platforms far more. That's true today because they're the main platform. This might change if, say, Android becomes much more widespread than iPhoneOS. When this happen
400.
by fab13n 17y ago
> I think Apple feared that more third-party toolkits are on the way, and that they'll become more popular. I guess Apple has been surprised by apps popularity. Their original policy was that 3rd party applications ought to be web apps
401.
by fab13n 17y ago
Agreed, Apple doesn't need any reasons to kill an app. Conversely, they have the ability to "save" an app that doesn't respect TOS. Yet the TOS are useful, as a good set of guidelines: TOS compliance is very strongly correlated with chances
402.
by fab13n 17y ago
These companies have never been nor tried to be emotionally appreciated. Their success had nothing to do with appreciation. IBM has been swept because, as a big hardware vending corporation, they refused to see that hardware was doomed to c
403.
by fab13n 17y ago
Apple is of course conscious of this trade-off (attractiveness of the platform+customer base vs. unattractiveness of being treated like shit by Apple). The thing is, they can easily back off when they will have to : today, most app develop
404.
by fab13n 17y ago
It seems that it can be summed up as "Neko is pissed that the niche it targeted is totally taken by Lua". The Neko/Lua comparison is mostly about implementation details and unsubstantiated efficiency claims (even before LuaJIT, the proper w
405.
by fab13n 17y ago
Becoming a software engineer at Infosys or Tata is likely to make you several times wealthier than other "reasonable" jobs in India (and BTW, working in those huge CMMI-crippled corporations must be boring as hell: I don't think that fun of
406.
by fab13n 17y ago
Most people aren't afraid of postal services, whereas many get totally frightened by the idea of servicing a computer-like thingie, software or hardware. Those computer-unenthousiasts are iPad's primary target; besides, they probably repres
407.
by fab13n 17y ago
It's consistent with the iPad's central concept: it's about simple, zero-hassle access to media, online or stored. It has to be much more hassle-free than a laptop, to justify its purchase and create the niche netbooks tried and failed to
408.
by fab13n 17y ago
My brother (not a twin, physically very different from me) once came with an HP laptop with fingertip unlock, and my finger unlocks it ~ 50% of time. I suspect those system to be set with an extremely high level of tolerance; if they aren't
409.
by fab13n 17y ago
Metalua comes out-of-the-box with a short lambda syntax: "function (x, y, ...) return foobar end" is shortened as "|x,y,...| foobar". And it comes with macro capabilities, plus syntax extension facilities to make them more user friendly.
410.
by fab13n 17y ago
You'd lose the syntax for real literals, though. And although you're technically true, the lack of a library implementing reals as userdata let me guess that few people have found this approach practical. Unless I missed it? I guess people
411.
by fab13n 17y ago
Kind of similar to using Lisp macros to have infix operators: because you can do it doesn't mean it's a good idea.
412.
by fab13n 17y ago
Lua shines at interfacing with C; it's useful when you've got a high-performance engine in C or C++, and want a friendly programming interface to control it. That's obviously the case for games and their 3D / physics engines, but Lua is ste
413.
by fab13n 17y ago
So, should I make sure that my kids aren't black hat before trusting them? :)
414.
by fab13n 17y ago
I see a key difference between driving cars and interacting on Internet, besides the nature of the dangers: it is important to know how to act on Internet without censorship, whereas I don't see the point of knowing how to drive without a s
415.
by fab13n 17y ago
- tight email / reader integration, of course. For non-geeks, one communication center is enough, and GMail is the right place: most won't setup a combined IM + Mail + Twitter + FB + RSS desktop tool. - lower barrier to entry: many people d
416.
by fab13n 17y ago
Sales figures are not relevant. What matter are: - proportion of devices currently subscribed to a data plan; - time spent online / number of pageviews per device; - for businesses who don't plan to be profitable in the next couple of month
417.
by fab13n 17y ago
Great analysis; however, I'm not sure it's a brand-building ad. It sums up to "Google was at the heart of all the good things that happened to that guy, and it unobtrusively helped it to happen right". That's more of a "we really are not ev
418.
by fab13n 17y ago
House prices also raise because we have more unaffected money: - food represents a smaller and smaller proportion of our expenses; - manufactured goods also became more affordable, as they're produced either by robots or by 3rd world worker
419.
by fab13n 17y ago
Granted, core language designers are very careful about what they add; but I don't think it is the main cause of the issue you mention (proliferation of incomplete and incompatible variants of useful libraries). De facto standards could hav
420.
by fab13n 17y ago
I moved on to an interesting job about a year ago, and there's only so much meaningful code you can write in a day... I'm still working on metalua, but there are few things which are worth being published yet. Promising works in progress in

More ›