emil10001

From the article:

"Apple had asked the F.B.I. to issue its application for the tool under seal. But the government made it public, prompting Mr. Cook to go into bunker mode to draft a response, according to people privy to the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The result was the letter that Mr. Cook signed on Tuesday, where he argued that it set a “dangerous precedent” for a company to be forced to build tools for the government that weaken security."

I would qualify, I've done both servers and Android at Talkray. It's been a while since I have done both in the same day, but basically, if something broke on our Android client or server, I could jump in and get a fix, same goes for new features, and handle the server deployments.

That said, I'm happy that I don't have to do both. Oh, and right now, nobody's going to poach me. =)

That's interesting, I had not come across CompletableFuture yet, I'll need to dig in more, but the JavaDoc looks promising (if confusing). It sounds like RxJava may also handle the backpressure issue, where you provide threadpools for the execution and handling of an observable.

I haven't played with Guava, but I have used Otto a bit, and at one point wrote my own simple observer framework (which is slightly less work than implementing a Java Observer). As I wrote in the disclaimer, there are lots of ways of doing this. =)

I remember visiting the #coffee IRC channel years ago, and really enjoying being able to converse with people real-time on roasting, espresso, and everything coffee (or off-topic stuff). While the IRC channel still exists, I sort of figured that a Slack community for coffee was inevitable, and was a bit surprised that there wasn't one already. Anyways, I hope that some of you will come join me there.

Reads more like satire to me.

Slimming down Play Services just punts on the problem for a while. My view is that Google needs to do two things with this:

1) Split up the Play Services client libraries. 2) Figure out some solution for developers hitting the 65K limit.

I'm sort of assuming that the solution would come in the form of a framework or tooling that we'd have to implement. Such a solution should allow us to build fully working apps with multiple dex files, with some decent documentation. It should also work fine for debug builds without proguard, and also without bumping build times up beyond a two minutes. What's more, we should be able to split off pieces that are defined in the manifest into secondary dex files, and fire intents at them.

That, to me, seems like a reasonable response to this problem by Google. The company I work for has been hitting the limit for the last few months, and some of our other dependencies are becoming more and more expensive with newer releases (things that our users actually like.) So far, we've been able to build with a stripped down Play Services jar, but I'm not terribly happy about that approach.

Regardless, I'm not going to blame Facebook for a problem that Google caused. If Facebook can find a solution, and tell the community how they did it, I'm all ears.

I disagree. Amateurs don't necessarily need pro tools, they need tools that help them do the job that they want to do better than either no tools, or poor tools. They also might get confused and put off by the steep learning curve offered by some pro tools. E.g. PhotoShop (I don't think I need to say more).

Just because something isn't a good fit for the pro or power user, doesn't mean that it doesn't have a place in the market, or couldn't be considered good or useful.

You're correct I was very disappointed about this experience, and it was mainly with the support. I will send you an email.

I'd also like to stop real quick and let you know that I do think that you have a great service with tons of potential. The technology is really cool, and I don't even know of anyone at this point who would come in as a close second. I've also been following your company since you won some startup competition a couple years ago, and was anxiously awaiting the service. I backed the project very quickly after getting the email from you guys that it was available.

The "scam" is that in their upgrade offer, they're claiming to own my device, and then trying to sell it to me a second time. I think that "scam" is a fair word to describe this particular situation.

I have read their comments as to how it's a lease, but they did not make that clear in the Kickstarter campaign. They are relying on some things that may have been implied by what was written as opposed to any sort of explicit statement that the hardware was being leased. I also believe that it was an honest mistake on their part, but that it was a mistake. I think that they're relying on gullibility, and the actual discounts that come with the upgrade to sneak this by people.

I felt like it was important to point this out, since I don't think that there is any sense in which Space Monkey could be considered to be in the right here.

This is not a philosophical issue. The 'scam' in question is them trying to sell me a device that I already own, and is already in my possession. To me, that is a scam!

Right, none of those things are explicitly stating that the hardware was a lease in the flow of someone backing the Kickstarter.

As far as my questions to your staff, there was a consistent back and forth until that point. I'm completely sick of dealing with this issue, and it was pretty clear that I was not getting anywhere. I also didn't want to be dealing with this over the holiday, but I didn't set the upgraded deadline as the end of December! It is pretty frustrating and stressful going back and forth and getting absolutely nowhere. I was hoping to get some perspective by posting it. I think that I've gained that perspective, and have decided to ask for a refund. I didn't want it to come to this, as I had previously been very excited about your company and product.

I feel that the "public attack" is more pointing out to people the sleazy thing that you did in inserting a new claim of ownership into an upgrade offer. I felt like this was something that your company was completely unwilling to acknowledge and that it needed to be pointed out.

Yep, at this point, I'm wondering about my ability to wipe the device before I send it back for a refund.

Nope. There was no lease or contract. I asked them about that too, they ignored that question.

What is your definition of 'responding positively'? Does that mean taking the offer? Because for some people, they might take the offer, but still be annoyed about it. They might also not have realized the issue that I'm pointing out.

I'm also leaning towards getting a refund at this point. I spent a fair amount of time going back and forth with your CS, hoping that the situation would improve, but instead of admitting that you screwed up on Kickstarter and didn't make your intentions clear, your CS reps dug in their heels and are claiming something that is simply not true - that you own these devices.

I didn't post the correspondence because it's extremely long. I've been back and forth with them over 13 very long emails. My prodding them for some evidence that what they're saying lines up with reality, and them rationalizing it without providing any evidence. I really wanted to work this out with their customer service, but instead, they dug in their heels and made the situation worse.

I waited a while after my last round of questions before writing this up. It was pretty clear that they had no intention of responding, or at least not within their own deadline.

Please have a read and then help me out by giving me some advice, because I’m completely sick of thinking about this:

* Who owns the device?

* Is the offer reasonable?

* Should I be upset about this?

* Should I just send it back and ask for a refund?

* What should I do???

Total real time was under a week, since I did it on the side. I didn't keep track of the number of hours.