Is this one of those ego projects where you decide you're going to do a little bit of everything for no other reason than to get your name plastered on all of it?

No.

My employers bought a couple of the Microsoft "Surface" boxes.

They got passed around, starting with the CEO, proceeding through around ten professional IT staff, and then through business middle management, then through the secretarial staff. Each of these users decided that the surface was not meeting their needs and gave it back, and we gave it to the next starry-eyed patsy.

Now they sit in a drawer in the IT support room, and every time some new hire comes in we ask them if they'd prefer a conventional laptop or the surface. Unless they've already used one, they always ask for the surface and use it for anywhere from one week to three months, then give it back and ask for a cheaper, more powerful laptop. These people come from all kinds of backgrounds but the response is always the same.

I only know of one real live person (as opposed to Internet commentators) who is productive with the Surface and loves it. She is a 20 year old art school student who also has a desktop PC and a windows phone. She proves that there is a niche for the device... but it appears that it's a very small one, and may be restricted to graphic artists.

When I used one for two months I found it to be an awkward compromise between a pad computer and a laptop, providing no real benefit over either one. Personally, I particularly hated the keyboard (although I liked the magnetic attachment schtick).

No idea how the Kindle destoryed the Nook market when you can take both devices side by side and find the Nook to be quite better (in specs and functionality).

The Kindle's lower up-front cost and much longer battery life had a lot to do with it.

But don't discount the way the cheap android pads & phones and the expensive Apple equivalents also cut into the Nook's demographic niche.

The Google Nexus 7 sitting next to me has SIX e-reader applications installed, including Nook and Kindle and FBreader apps. I am a happy Nook owner (flashed with Cyanogenmod and running Torque in my plug-in hybrid car) but for reading books the Nexus 7 was better right out of the box, no reflashing required.

The big achilles heel of Google's device is lack of SD card slot. It's a huge barrier to hackability and upgradeability, essentially they've designated it a throwaway device for its target user. I wish B&N had continued to develop the Nook, and I'd love to know where the original designers are working now.

If you think your example was more readable than the parent, I don't think you're entirely clear on what the word "readable" actually means.

Go home = Very Readable
Go to the Store = Readable
Go to 713 Bond Street = Readable
goto label = Readable

void thing() { a && b && c; } = NOT READABLE!

The idea behind what very experienced programmers call "readability" is to reduce the highly domain-specific knowledge that the reader must study before comprehending your code. The more expertise required in a specific language's structures and idioms, the less readable the code is. Your code may be the greatest thing ever, but frankly its readability sucks.

Over the last 40 years I've frequently encountered code in languages I'd never seen before that was perfectly understandable, because the programmer wrote it with human understanding in mind rather than assuming that humans would spend hours studying abstruse syntactica before reading it.

Elegance in programming is hard. You have to balance the needs of the task, the engine, the user, and the maintenance programmer. Readability is sometimes not achievable without commentry, but truly elegant code is readable.

An example of coding for readability is to be explicit about order of operations; don't make the reader have to look up precedence of operators in your chosen language, use unnecessary parentheses instead... the compiler will not care and the code will not be less efficient, and you'll reduce opportunities for future human errors.

"Brand value is calculated on the basis of the firms' financial performance and their standing among consumers."

Let me translate that for you!

"We are positioned to take advantage of chumps believing Google is more valuable than Apple (a small consumer electronics company that we previously convinced gullible people was the world's most valuable brand). As the chumps sell off Apple and buy Google we will laugh and laugh, and light our cigars with $100 bills."

Of course value is determined by the market, and the market is dominated by the weak and foolish spawn of the ruling classes... so all Millward Brown really has to do is stampede the cattle and collect the carcasses.

Then use that as an example and not a fantasy

Excellent advice! Check out the racial disparity in outcomes of "zero tolerance" school policies, a.k.a. the school-to-prison pipeline. Students of color who commit the exact same infractions of discipline as white students are disproportionately punished starting in pre-school.

> a bunch of thugs (you know who I mean)

No, who do you mean?

KALI WORSHIPPERS!

They want the sacrificial ring, for Swami Clang.

If a modern corporation is going to hire someone 40 or older, they are going to hire someone with at least 20 years of experience.

Why? Simple economics.

Cost of providing healthcare, pension and similar benefits is higher for older workers. They also typically have families (or at least lives) outside of work that require some portion of their attention and enthusiasm that might otherwise be directed towards work. They aren't fresh college grads that will work 38 hour shifts without extra pay and brag about it.

Now, if the older worker has lots of experience, that totally justifies his higher cost. You cannot get decades of real world high tech work experience from somebody only 20 years old. Obviously the older worker also has to be good at the task - a half-assed chucklehead of a young worker might learn to do better (if not, the employer will want to get rid of him before he causes too much damage). But if a 40+ year old isn't already a recognized expert in his or her field, s/he's unlikely to become one any quicker than a younger, cheaper person would.

This is the way the system works. It's not because somebody's trying to discriminate against your age. It's because companies want to make money and they have to work within the framework that exists.

So, if you're over 40 and your heart is totally set on becoming a programmer, you'll need to look for work in fields that you have non-programming experience in. For example, if you spent the last 30 years doing fireproof construction, you can be a programmer for a concrete company or architectural engineering firm, because you can leverage your knowledge of masonry. If you have been building and racing cars for decades as a hobby, you can be a programmer for a racing or car company. But those kind of angles are the only way you'll get a decent programming job as a 40-year-old newbie. You'll have to capitalize on your experience, or some younger person will be able to do the job better for less money than you can survive on.

The correct link for the FSF's high priority project list is

http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/

The chorus of criticism for Richard's willingness to repeat his point of view here is far more repetitive and tiresome than RMS has ever been.

I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Free Software, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

The "the anthropogenic global warming agenda", huh.

I suppose that's opposed by the same heroes who so valiantly oppose the "liberal agenda" and the "homosexual agenda".

It seems weird to me that only right wing pollutocrats ever get copies of these "agendas". What's a regular guy got to do to get on the mailing list? Kill a puppy?

As opposed to our plans for dealing with the waste products of other energy production systems? Or the "adequate" way we deal with say, coal mine fires?

I'm sure you know you've got a logical fallacy there; being bad at one thing doesn't rule out the possibility of being bad at lots of other things.

But the USA could have put out the Centralia coal mine fire any time we wanted to - just divert half the Susquehanna river into the mines for a year.

Nobody's going to do that, though, because the right wing likes pollution and hates bailing out farmers and non-millionaire "little folks", and the left wing is just too cowardly to do anything that necessarily entails large unforeseeable consequences. And there does not appear to be any political representation of the middle view (or middle class, for that matter) any more. So Centralia burns and we will continue to relicense America's aging nuclear plants until they fail.

The trick is that, built into your software will be some extra freebie small feature you can't escape from. Once your users start using that feature, they are hooked and can't escape.

Our users are tricked into using software with features they like and actually make their jobs easier! What a dastardly move by Microsoft in actually making a product that the end user prefers! How dare they compete so unfairly! It's like they think the quality of the product matters.

Sometimes is really is like that, although it happens just as often with non-Microsoft (or even, gasp! free) sorftware as with anything else. The reality is that quality of code and product aren't determined by brand names; IIS and WinXP are both Microsoft products despite their vast differences in quality and user experience.

So, that being said, Microsoft's biggest wedge in corporate settings is Outlook, which incorporates such "features" as training the user to use a semicolon to separate addresses, in violation of all standards and common sense, and egregiously mangling RFC822 email addresses. Users (some of whom may well reply to this post) will insist that this is totally reasonable and desirable - because they are at least as brainwashed as your average emacs user.

Humans want to root for a team and the quality of software products has almost nothing to do with it. It's like Democrats .vs. Republicans, tastes great .vs. less filling, etc.... not evidence-based.

Nice to hear that reverse osmosis has become affordable. Most water sanitizing tech isn't significantly better than just letting it sit around in a brass jug for a day, but RO sure is! Brass only kills pathogens; it won't remove all the other contaminants RO can.

Nope.

There are millions of people who aren't carrying phones. I only carry one when I'm paid to do so (and provided with the phone) and that's only happened twice in the last 20 years.

It's true that smartphones are useful to many people and desirable for even more. But lots of us don't want or need them at all; they'd just be a burden of maintenance and cost, and essentially a lifestyle downgrade.