What the Internet is, was, and is supposed to be was laid out a long time ago and in a very non-ambiguous way and it's worked famously for a long, long, LONG time.

It's wonderfully working as it was supposed to do.

I came here to say this, mostly.

I *know* that there are plenty of places in our software that I could spend an hour or two, and rewrite an algorithm to run in 1/5th the time. And I don't care at all, because the cost is too low to measure, and usually, performance bottlenecks are elsewhere.

Who really cares if I can get a loop to run in 800ns instead of 1500ns, when the real bottleneck is a complex SQL query 11 lines up that joins 11 tables together and takes 3 full seconds to run?

I'm an employer. I've interviewed nearly everybody we employ at my company. And treating a hiring interview like a rote memory exam is a terrible way to qualify a potential developer hire!

What do programmers actually do? Try testing that!

We do "whiteboard style" for part of our interviews, but only to cover basic comprehension of algorithms. More than anything, we look for basic familiarity with logic structure, and the demonstrated ability to solve problems. Our coding section of our interview process is in the subject's language of choice, including pseudo code, and is "open book" - we want to see what happens when the dev runs into a problem they don't already know! (Critical test: can they come up with a working, supportable algorithm for a problem they don't yet already know an answer for?)

After 20 years of programming experience, I STILL routinely look up the order of arguments for function calls via Google. Who cares to remember when Google has the answer in 0.10 seconds?

Test what the devs will actually DO in an anticipated normal work day and make your decisions based on that.

I think your facts need updating. As a Verizon customer, I can use data during calls and have been able to do so for years. It's true that you can't use data during a voice call if you're on a 3G tower, but the only place I see those anymore is while at government offices.

Not at all. The whole dark matter thing was based on the presumption that there is mass that we can't see and this matter that we can't see was called "dark matter".

Others may have read more into it, but the name itself betrays the real, original intent behind describing this matter that we can't see or identify.

A browser cell phone doesn't need to be a calculator, a word processor, a typing instructor, a device manager, etc.

A browser/cell phone/Desktop Environment/etc doesn't need to be anything but what people want it to be. I want my cell phone to be a calculator, word processor, typing instructor, etc. And I'm perfectly happy with my browser extensions that share screens and do other stuff that is useful.

People don't buy minimalism, they buy features.

Describing them as "death traps" is hardly fair. In truth, they are approximately as safe as driving a car. A certificated aircraft flying in VFR conditions has a death rate per hour of flight a little less than twice the death rate per hour of driving a car, and a death rate per mile of flight slightly better a car. This makes sense; they go significantly faster than a car.

And that compares a fleet of aircraft with an average age of 30 years or more, to cars with an average age of perhaps 5 years. And even on newer aircraft, very little has been changed in the last 30 years except perhaps instrumentation.

Flying cars you say? Oh, yeah, of course we don't have those! What a silly idea!

Because nobody is doing flying cars. And, nobody else is, either.

I wonder how many people reading this have no qualms about using an Android phone with "Google Now" that do essentially all of these "telemetry" things and much more.

LOL, came here to say this. Isn't it nice to be "on the spectrum" ?

If you value reliability, you want ZFS and RAIDZ.

Odd, but I see no sign that this is true. PC Ports of console games typically require far more "firepower" than would be implied by the original console. Case in point: GTA IV/V.

FYI It's normal and customary for companies or individuals who are compelled to perform a significant task to be paid for their time and effort. I had an employer once get subpoena'd in a law suit and I was the admin and the compelling party (a private party) had to pay for the administrative cost for me to do a data recovery from a backup.

I have little doubt that gmail SPAM filtering is Postini SPAM filtering with a few tweaks.

Right now, today, I have a P3 desktop running CentOS6/32 as a network monitor. It's old as the hills. My phone beats it handily in performance. But it runs on about 15 watts, and does the job so reliably that, in 10 years, it's never skipped a beat. It started with the original RedHat 6.1. (before RHEL was a thing)

I know it won't actually make any records, but I'm sure it's one of the oldest 0.01%, maybe even 0.001% of computers in terms of durability. It would be a remarkable machine if it wasn't otherwise so unremarkable.