They are very clumsily introduced but except for my NASs I almost never actually browse file paths anymore for my own files.

I tried writing a Windows Store application recently and despised the file management experience at the time. Now I'm writing a regular desktop app and am missing the sandboxed storage system that I so loathed.

Another nice side-effect of the library system is that you can use the same file system for both Phone and Desktop. OSX and IOS have completely different file structures. Which makes porting harder.

What Microsoft needs to do though is start piling on features and demonstrating the advantages of a 'virtual' folder structure. It was a shame that they deprecated the more exotic and powerful virtual folders.

Considering every petrol burning vehicle in the US uses far more than $10k in gas subsidies over its lifespan I don't have a problem with electric getting a substitute subsidy.

...is that our selfies are safer.

So a man who was born in and lived in England until he was 27 (2005) is as English as George Bush. I see. So what makes you English and not him?

Well as an American guy I have to say that's not a good analogy. As much as the rest of the US thinks Florida is backwards, Florida was not another country rich with their own traditions when the US acquired it. Texas would be a better analogy. Also an English guy, I don't think you understand that you've not exactly treated Scotland very well and that's one of the reasons it wants to leave. Another reason is that much of oil England is harvesting is Scottish and they do not get what they think is a proportional amount from it.

Here's another view from another Englishman, John Oliver.

It's not as cut and dry as one is more expensive than the other either. Let's not forget that Boeing has not participated in the COTS funding to nearly the degree that SpaceX has.

It's true that CTS-100 hasn't flown yet. But the only reason Dragon has flown has been because NASA funded the COTS missions. SpaceX received $396M from that program alone. The ISS CRS missions have awarded SpaceX another $1.6B in contracts. So it makes sense that there will be a lot of overlap in that $2B. After all the cargo requirement was for pressurized cargo delivery--it was pretty easy for SpaceX to cover both contracts with one design.

The Dreamchaser can still be awarded a contract. NASA described several "On Ramps" where if they finish their paperwork and do a little but of 'make-up' work they can still pass. ;)

It makes sense. Dreamchaser just wasn't ready for this round. But it's good that NASA has a contingency for projects that are farther behind but still long term viably good competition.

1) File Systems already hide the inner workings of how files and folders are stored. Also having a very linear folder structure where data is stored in specific places is extremely outdated and limiting. Imagine you want a folder of data but you want some of it fast and on an SSD but some of it can be slow. Also you often want data in more than one place this notion that Data should be in one folder which is in another folder runs counter to how people actually interact with data. Data should be like a database, "I want all of the files that are tagged "John Brown Project" and were created in January 2013 that are .doc files.

3) Don't be patronizing but be helpful. If your tablet doesn't play a ProRes file, offer to transcode it automatically on-copy as an option.

4) Agreed.

5) Stores are a much better way to deploy software. When I install a new PC I now click "Re-Install" to all of my metro apps and then have to go hunting through the internet for everything else I use on the desktop. I also then inevitably end up with 20 updater apps each sucking up power. I also lose my settings in between computers and have to spend another couple hours configuring things to the way I like them. Or alternately if it's like Chrome I have to log-in to my google account to get my chrome settings. And then I have to log into EA Games to get my origin settings. And then I have to log into steam to get my steam settings. I would much rather have a single account which links all of them.

I've come full circle on Libraries. Libraries are brilliant. They are an abstracted storage system which separates your metal from your data. At first it was terrifying but now I fully embrace it. Using HDD\Folder\Folder is rediculous. If I want to move all of that folder over to HDD2\ suddenly the whole OS breaks. With libraries I move the library location to my external drive and everything still works because it's an environment variable not a specific path.

And since the OS knows it as an environment variable it can sync it easily and consistently between workstations and devices. In fact it can even mix and match between data that's stored physically on the drive and just meta data that's a link to cloud data.

I leave documentation open on one screen and work on the other. I can alt-tab between docs and the window I'm working in but I find it far slower. Physical screens let you compare two sets of data as well. I also then have to remember which virtual desktop something is on. With physical monitors I can literally see everything all at once. I can find it from my peripheral vision.

I keep thinking that if an ISP really wanted to cut costs, they could proactively monitor their network for problems:

• Provide the CPE preconfigured, at no additional cost to the customer. (Build the hardware cost into the price of service.)
• Ensure that the CPE keeps a persistent capacitor-backed log across reboots. If the reboot was caused by anything other than the customer yanking the cord out of the wall or a power outage, send that failure info upstream. Upon multiple failures in less than a few weeks, assume that the customer's CPE is failing, and call the customer with a robocall to tell them that you're mailing them new CPE to improve the quality of their service.
• Detect frequent disconnects and reconnects, monitor the line for high error rates, etc. and when you see this happening, treat it the same way you treat a CPE failure.
• If the new hardware behaves the same way, silently schedule a truck roll to fix the lines.

If done correctly (and if clearly advertised by the ISP so that users would know that they didn't need to call to report any outages), it would eliminate the need for all customer service except for billing, and a decent online billing system could significantly reduce the need for that as well.

They won't see people switching to Swift uniformly. There are trillions of lines of code written in Objective-C, and programmers already know it and are comfortable with it. There are no tools for migrating code from Objective-C to Swift, much less the hodgepodge of mixed C, Objective-C, and sometimes C++ that quite frequently occurs in real-world apps, so for the foreseeable future, you'd end up just adding Swift to your existing apps, which means you now have three or four languages mixed in one app instead of two or three, and now one of them looks completely different than the others. I just don't see very many developers seriously considering adopting Swift without a robust translator tool in place.

I do, however, expect to see Swift become the language of choice for new programmers who are coming from scripting languages like Python and Ruby, because it is more like what they're used to. In the long term, they'll outnumber the Objective-C developers, but the big, expensive apps will still mostly be written in Objective-C, simply because most of them will be new versions of apps that already exist.

BTW, Apple never really treated Java like a first-class citizen; it was always a half-hearted bolt-on language. My gut says that they added Java support under the belief that more developers knew Java than Objective-C, so it would attract developers to the platform faster. In practice, however, almost nobody ever really adopted it, so it withered on the vine. Since then, they have shipped and subsequently dropped bridges for both Ruby and Python.

Any implication that Swift will supplant Objective-C like Objective-C supplanted Java requires revisionist history. Objective-C supplanted C, not Java. Java was never even in the running. And Objective-C still hasn't supplanted C. You'll still find tons of application code for OS X written in C even after nearly a decade and a half of Apple encouraging developers to move away from C and towards Objective-C. (Mind you, most of the UI code is in Objective-C at this point.) And that's when moving to a language that's close enough to C that you don't have to retrain all your programmers.

Compared with the C to Objective-C transition, any transition from Objective-C to Swift is likely to occur at a speed that can only be described as glacial. IMO, unless Apple miraculously makes the translation process nearly painless, they'll be lucky to be able to get rid of Objective C significantly before the dawn of the next century. I just don't see it happening, for precisely the same reason that nine years after Rails, there are still a couple orders of magnitude more websites built with PHP. If a language doesn't cause insane amounts of pain (e.g. Perl), people are reluctant to leave it and rewrite everything in another language just to obtain a marginal improvement in programmer comfort.

Obj-C isn't any better than C in my opinion. But, to each their own.

It is if you're doing any nontrivial amount of string manipulation.