praetorian84

Which would you recommend? ShadyDOM?

Have the polyfills got any better recently? Last I looked, they had a list of performance issues or only partially supported the spec. Made it really hard to consider them for a serious production app.

The unhealthy fascination with burn down charts and Scrum in general continually amazes me. I have witnessed the same debates about what Scrum points system to use so many times and witnessed teams of intelligent people waste days of developer time earnestly discussing relative point values.

Interesting comment below the article regarding a government-run programme in Brazil trying something similar: "However, there is a trend of the part of these persons become dependent of this benefit and do not strive to change this situation..."

That was my immediate reaction after reading this. What about after the twelve years, when the donors ride off into the sunset? There are some encouraging stories there of participants using the money wisely, but not all will do so. You could argue that nobody is forcing them to participate, but it does seem at least a little ethically questionable. Particularly given the targeted demographic of a rural Kenyan community with (presumably - I could be wrong) low education levels.

I've been using React for a side project for a while. Generally it's been pretty easy to understand the concepts behind it and get productive. A couple of things that have confused/irked me a little:

- Having to figure out babel, browserify and/or webpack before you can write hello world isn't a great first experience. I'm glad to see much of this has been moved to a separate page outside of the getting started guide now.

- The main React page emphasises that JSX is optional. Even looking at the trivial examples, nesting createElement statements looks horrific. Does anyone use this approach in a large-scale project? If your components are fine-grained enough, perhaps it's passable, but it looks far from ideal. Having used other frameworks, even building up a template in JSX in a return statement feels dirty. I see there are some suggestions around on splitting out JSX, but it would be great if this was the default.

- I wasn't really sure what to do with CSS. There's a brief comment on inline-styles at https://facebook.github.io/react/tips/inline-styles.html. For a library for building user interfaces, it seems like this deserves more attention. I would've expected the CSS (styling), javascript (logic and state management) and JSX (layout) to be a little less interwoven.

I remain pretty dubious about generalisations about the populations of countries as a whole. In my experience, these sorts of differences are more local. People in city centres are less friendly, because it's an intimidating environment. Walk your dog out in the 'burbs or a park somewhere and people are far more likely to be relaxed and say hi.

Thanks for posting. Haven't laughed out loud that much in a while.

Yes, still play AoE 3 occasionally.

Under editors, I'd include Brackets. Really enjoying it.

Can we get an AoE 4 already?

Only if you use some of the old-school widgets (e.g. Horizontal Panel). I think standard practice these days is to use HTML as far as possible in views.

There are some good changes in the works for GWT, it just needs a little more love to get them done. GWT 2.8 (currently in beta) is a good step in the right direction, and hopefully after that it'll see a bit of a reincarnation to strip out dead wood.

E-book pricing has become a lot less attractive than it once was. Aside from the convenience of an e-book being easier to travel with and not taking up much space, there's little incentive if they are the same price.

Check out https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-price-list-api/

Not really. Based on a vague recollection of working with previous model eye trackers, the margin for error is enough to make precise selection annoying. Attempts at using eye-tracking in normal GUIs generally require some form of compensation for the inaccuracy, or redesigning the UI to require less precise selection.

I use both Firefox and Chrome pretty heavily at work. I still prefer the web dev experience in Chrome. The general browsing experience gap has definitely narrowed. Flash + Firefox used to be painful, but I'm not noticing that anymore.

This is my experience too. Most people are still on Facebook, but they are less and less active. And nothing gets me closing the page faster than seeing a bunch of advertising.

It's something you see a lot of, especially from non-frontend developers that don't really think twice about downloading an extra 80-90kb of JavaScript. I do find the support for events in JQuery quite convenient, especially for projects that still require IE8 support. Although if that's all you're using it for, there are probably better ways.

As someone who has thus far only used with Angular for smaller projects, seeing performance raised as a concern is a bit of a concern for ever using it in a serious project. Would still like to see some numbers to back up the anecdotal evidence.

It's also hard to motivate starting a potentially large project in Angular right now, knowing that v2 is on the way that is basically a new framework.

Reminds me of Windows RG http://www.cs.umd.edu/~meou/Flashes/WINRG/WINRG.html (not sure of original source).

Research about research. Always seems like the time would have been better spent on actual research.

The most useful thing Microsoft ever made (OK, funded) was Age of Empires. Now if only they'd make another.

Anybody know if this has a gyro sensor? The gsmarena page claims so, but I don't know how reliable that is as I don't see any mention of it elsewhere. I find it a little annoying when the manufacturer's web page has a dumbed-down version of the specs.

I saw a motorola support replied to someone on Twitter to say it's "TFT LCD". I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the verge describe it as AMOLED, but I think they have it wrong.

This is the year Linux makes it big on the desktop.

The lawyers feel like the only ones winning out of patent disputes.

Definitely a promising little language. Might make it big in the enterprise.

Half the problem is that every single mall where I live has basically the same shops. I find that often new malls seem to be built largely as speculative investments by property developers, rather than to fulfill an actual need. All that happens is that that the new mall is either a disaster, or gradually replaces an older one, simply because the demand doesn't exist for yet another collection of the same chain stores.

Boy, that 2 in J2ME (and J2EE for that matter) just never goes away.