I do not have to use the Google app store and can bypass it, however, I agree that the 30% fees are too high. The one benefit I'll give Google is that they tend to be much better at supporting standards, i.e. USB-C vs Lightning. Some years ago my father designed a very well-known product and had to figure out why all headphones worked except Apple's. He found out that Apple required a 30V pulse to be sent to activate the headphones (and then there's the fact that Apple decided to have their own TRRS standard). Hell, Apple even had their own USB charging standard, which was quite irritating when trying to find chargers that followed the USB standard. Pre-USB-C the device would connect the two data lines together with a 100 ohm or smaller resistor in order to draw more than 500ma. I remember having to open up several chargers and short the pins together to follow the standard rather than do the Apple thing.

This is ridiculous. Apple has been throwing their weight around for years and crap like this just proves it. The Apple 30% tax is criminal IMHO. Every transaction through IOS includes this 30% tax. Of course, they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep their monopoly and they don't give a damn about who gets hurt or caught in the crossfire.

So was I, until grandpa beat me to it ...

I would think that Blizzard on your resume is more valuable than Blizzard as your employer (for those low-level, anyone can do it, "fry cook" jobs).

Got get a better job and stop bitching about the crap pay you are making now. This is the IT field. There are literally 1,000's of open positions that pay better than what you are probably making right now as a customer support person or tester or whatever. Hell! Move out of California where the cost of living is what's killing you!

I don't even care about the cross-platform aspect. I refuse to use GTK for anything GUI-related under Linux not do I use the Glib for anything either. Qt (GPL or not) handles everything I need and it does so in a clean and elegant manner.

That, in a nutshell, is the very reason why Qt is popular. It is a very good C++ framework that supports those projects that require something solid and dependable, either GUI or back-end, and just works.

Plus, it's all C++ and is pretty damn easy to read. All of those GTK/Glib C-structs-as-objects crap gets VERY messy after a short while.

You are not wrong.

We had a bunch of "greenhorns" who graduated from Galvanize who only knew node and Javascript. Some of them thought go was a good idea. It took us two years to clean up their mess and, yes, we used Java. All back-end stuff was rewritten in Java (where needed) and React for front end access where needed. Java was chosen because those of us with years of experience wanted to standardize on something stable that could leverage the largest available resource base to just get the work done.

And here in the USA ... "The government is not coming after your guns!"

And yet ... every left-leaning Democrat running for office has come out and stated, clearly, plainly, that they are, indeed, coming after your guns.

How's that PATRIOT act's expiration coming along?

How's the effectiveness of the TSA?

Should we blame Congress of gross incompetence or unbridled malevolence?

As an automation engineer, it is my job to do, essentially, what Cringley is stating. We are trying to reduce staffing due to overlap of duties and automation of mundane and tedious processes. There are, however, a few roadblocks with even this small goal:

1. Management has no clue what they are actually asking for with automation
2. There exists no solid definition of what those processes entail that require automation

The first point is addressable but not without a great deal of politics and empathy where managers and their staff see automation as their own career demise. For what it's worth, I personally feel that many of these people and entire teams SHOULD be replaced with automation. Sometimes I ask myself, "how did this person ever get hired for their job?"

The second point ties into the first one and represents an uphill battle to have the same people who are afraid of being "automated away" define what their processes are and how we can remove the burden of a tedious and repeatable process from their plate.

Regardless or Cringley's beliefs, automation is going to take a very long time to cull the nerd herd.

I think pthfdr was referring to "customizing" it. Configuration, using default settings, takes seconds (if that).

Customizing YOUR desktop for the perfect experience takes a bit longer ... I'm currently going on 15+ years :D

Hm .. by that measure I can call both of you kids.

Now shut up and get off my lawn!

YouTube and Facebook already have taken down dozens of hunting videos and groups.

I beg to differ. I know several highly intelligent people who drive for Lyft. A friend of mine drives part-time in his Bolt for extra income when he has time.

And KHTML predates Safari by years as well. Safari basically took KDE's KHTML and forked it to remove the dependency on QT. KHTML was fairly standards compliant and the code was quite clean. I used to use Konqueror quite a bit back in the day since it didn't suffer many of the issues that Firefox did (i.e. single threaded Javascript and horrendous memory leaks).

What about Jared Kushner using private email accounts after being told not to for official business? Or how about dear Trump frequently using a non-secure phone for his communications? Then there's Ivanka Trump's private email usage. Of course, nobody says anything about Colin Powell using AOL for official email, which was deleted.

Anything the liberals have done pales in comparison to Trump. Hell, even Nixon was a lightweight compared to Trump. How about bribing Putin with a $50M penthouse in order to build a tower, something he even admitted to, to be financed by a Russian bank currently under sanctions? That's not to mention the number of witches who have currently plead guilty and been indicted, all by a Republican prosecutor (who was approved 98-0 as director of the FBI under a Republican president).

Let me see, my deep blue state produces far more food than it uses and exports it to the rest of the country. We export 1/3 of the entire country's vegetables and 2/3's of the nation's fruit and nuts are grown here. California leads the nation in farm receipts by far.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdfa.ca.gov%2Fstatis...

California's agricultural value is around double that of Texas.

http://beef2live.com/story-sta...

Oh, and we legalized pot.