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Comment Re:The good old days (Score 1) 466

I can make my Makefile just as simple by targeting Linux + gcc.

Want to make it work on Clang? Oh my Makefile needs to be bigger.
Want to make it work on BSD? Oh my Makefile needs to be bigger.
Want to make it work on Solaris? Oh my Makefile needs to be bigger.
Want to make it work on Windows? Oh my Makefile needs to be huge.

Autotools exist for a reason.

Comment Re:Not native (Score 5, Informative) 81

Unfortunately - on platforms where Qt isn't the native UI already - Qt just emulates (draws) the native UI, it doesn't actually use the native UI controls.

On Windows, Qt does a very good job of emulating the native UI. But then again I'd argue that Windows has few truly native UIs. You always notice small differences in how controls behave between different apps. I guess all the different versions of MFC, WPF, VCL, WinForms and whatever implement controls slightly differently from what the Win32 API offers and even between different versions of itself. But users are used to these inconsistencies, so no big deal.

On OS X, the situation is unfortunately a lot worse, probably because Cocoa is so different from everything else that it's hard to emulate properly using primitives from other toolkits. For example you can notice that Qt draws the focus border around buttons differently than Cocoa does. The biggest difference being that Qt buttons are focusable but Cocoa buttons are not. Toolbars also look different: in Cocoa they blend in with the window title bar. Qt doesn't do this - the toolbars look very much Windows-like. The border spacings and alignment are also off. Developers often don't take time to align and space all the controls properly to give them a Cocoa look.

Comment Re:A true story (Score 1) 439

Using self-signed certs for these sorts of things is more secure.. theoretically. In practice, I'm not so sure, the grandparent has a good point. By using self-signed certs you rule out MITM, but that's only when the following assumptions are also true:

* The device has the self-signed cert installed.
* The device recognized the aforementioned certificate as the *only* valid certificate for a given website.

In practice, many (most?) phones do not support installing arbitrary certificates. I've never encountered even a desktop browser that allows me to configure a cert as being the only valid certificate for a given website. For these reasons, using self-signed certificates actually trains your user to always click 'Yes' when they see a certificate warning, and they were already clueless about security to begin with. Even if the device supports installing self-signed certificates, without enforcement one can hack into a CA, create a false certificate, poison the user's DNS and redirect traffic to his MITM website.

Comment Re:What Google doesn't like, it replaces... (Score 2) 63

No, it's about the cost of the bugs vs the cost of fixing the bugs. Suppose that a smartphone costs $400 in its current state. It has a few bugs here and there, not always noticeable, and when they show up they're annoying, but in general the device works fine. Now suppose that fixing those bugs and preventing new bugs from occurring costs the company $700 million in additional developer expenses (training, hiring ever better developers, improving Q&A) etc which causes the price of the device to jump to $1400. Would you buy the $400 device and take the bugs for granted, or would you buy the $1400?

Comment Re:Clang/LLVM in FreeBSD (Score 1) 418

Uh, yeah, so? My point is that the filesystem installed on the device is what the OS sees and your post says nothing to refute that assertion. Your flash device is not going to emulate an FAT filesystem when there is in fact an ext2 filesystem on it.

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