I wouldn't use MS Office if it were free.

Statistically this statement is meaningless in the context of the point you are trying to make. Go look up the difference between mean and median. Then go learn about income inequality.

Students are the ones who are to gain from IT in the class room, not professors. Easily accessible and detailed syllabus online? Professor already has it memorized. Easy access to slides and notes from classes? Doesn't help the professor. Online study material? Again, does nothing for the professor. Online submission of coursework? Professor might actually take longer to grade it or even have to print it out to hardcopy, or else learn to use a software solution to mark the paper. Professors aren't motivated to use it because it means changing their existing process and they see no direct benefit to themselves.

Are you suggesting phones with powerful processors that perform countless background processes that rival computers for five years ago use a lot of power on a regular basis? Madness. Nobody gives a shit that your non smart phone has a long battery life. Do you know how long it takes a rock to lose 50% of it's charge? Fucking never. You should swap out your phone for a rock, it's clearly superior. At a certain point people decided the trade off was worth it, or everyone would have switched back. You and every other annoying person on /. need to realize this and stop bringing up your god damn "dumb" phones in every one of these articles.

They're naming the process after the original concept that demonstrates it's not an an original or novel concept and they still got the fucking patent approved? What does it take to get a patent request rejected these days?

You're still talking about sending an http request per guess. If there is no parallelisation then that's waiting at least 100ms there and back per guess, if you got an optimistic 10 guesses per second, you're still looking at around a year to crack a moderately secure password. You should not be giving your data to anyone that can't detect that and most physical media encryption should have enough built in delay to prevent more than a few guesses per second to prevent timely brute force attacks.

EA is a publisher, not a developer. As a publisher they don't give two shits about how long lived a player base is or the health of their developers. They don't care about big the modding community is for their games they don't care about making third party tools to allow the community around a game to extend it and make it better. In fact, what they want is for you to pay 60 bucks, consume the game's content and in two weeks be ready to buy another one of their titles because they want the fastest ROI possible to funnel that money into a another developer and churn out another half finished piece of crap. Not only do they not care about the popularity of a single title in a franchise or the value they are giving players in terms of replayability and quantity and quality of content, they don't care about the developers. The usual deal is EA buys up a popular developer who just released a great title that was very popular and profitable. Then they push them to release a sequel as quickly as possible. When the game is released, initial sales are high, then as people realize who awful the game is, sales drop off, excitement for the next title drops off and the developer collapses as their recent portfolio is terrible and all their goodwill is depleted. EA then buys up a new developer, rinse and repeat. When you buy EA games, you make gaming a little bit worse. Support independent developers not tied to a publisher

Coding standards are important. What you're describing is much more code formatting, most decent IDE's can accept coding templates that will allow the auto format feature to conform to your company's formatting standards. When I think coding standards I think, defensively checking for null values, not chaining method calls, always using braces with if statements for java users and keeping code complexity as low as possible while meeting the requirements. The goals of coding standards are to keep code human readable and avoid common pitfalls of bad coding habits. Besides, you should take pride in your written code and make it as presentable as possible.

I do not support the notion that physical medium for an intellectual property is valid as a resellable product. It worked when it was difficult to produce such mediums, but such challenges have all but disappeared. I refuse to buy a piece of IP as a physical medium, have it treated like a license to use, and then be forced to rebuy if it is damaged.

Take Redbox for example. It is insane that we have vending machines selling pieces of plastic and aluminium that we are valuing so much that people are stealing them. Imagine if you had to retake your driving test if your license was lost or destroyed or reapply for citizenship if you lost your green card. I will not be shafted by the use of a physical medium as a license agreement.

The law has to do with export control. The purpose of it is to enforce trade sanctions, embargoes and to prevent commodities that may have a dual military use(tons of electronic devices fall into this category for one reason or another and the iPhone probably does too.). Violating export law is a big deal, penalties can be up to a $500,000 or 10 years in prison. If you're working in the Apple Store at the mall you probably don't want to risk those penalties by selling to someone you have a reasonable suspicion is going to try to export those phones.

Congrats you're an edge case! Most people recognize that your code should be written to meet the requirements of the system and yeah, if you're writing code that needs to loop over a million tuples of structured data then writing logic from scratch to deal with the error handling cleanly and efficiently is a good idea. If the error is with complex data such as "the file uploaded was not a recognized image format" then you're not really going to find a much less expensive way, both in developer time and computational time than catching the exception from the method that was used to parse the file expected to be an image. While people like you working in such problem domains are greatly appreciated, yours is not the only space.

This. It's not difficult to write good defensive programs that check for nulls before performing operations and can fairly consistently never raise an exception. However, most programs need to handle inputs from other applications that the program cannot guarantee are valid, a lot of complex inputs cannot be verified by simply null checks. Additionally any developer who writes code that touches the internet(i.e. most of us) have to cope with unreliable services, deployment engineers, or worse the lack thereof setting up applications with incorrect configurations, bad inputs and network failures.

What a try catch block should really be used for, is a conscious decision point to identify where a valid program might meet an error conditions and deal with the implications of that error. Maybe the error is not finding crucial initialization parameters and all you can do is log an error, set a pretty error message for the user and kill the program. Maybe you can flush the current parameters and try again with some defaults. Maybe you can still run but with impaired functionality. Maybe you are a secondary function and it's ok if you fail but you need to let the user know.

The author's arguments boil down to "try catch blocks make my code look ugly." There is no valid solution to error handling that doesn't involve developers proactively identifying and addressing unreliable operations. Any valid solution that isn't current exception handling is going to look a lot like it because error handling is not some boilerplate task that you can wave a magic wand at and make disappear.

Good luck finding any Java or C libraries that handle network traffic that won't occasionally throw an exception from an inherently unreliable service.

For a lot of people who are serious gamers and actually computer literate, Windows is very grudgingly tolerated simply because it is the platform with the most titles. It has zero other redeeming features. It's less stable, poorer memory management and the core OS been demonstrated time and again to be about 25% more bloated than the Linux kernel. There are a lot of people who live and work in Linux and do not want to have to split their time between two OSes to have a non shitty work environment at home and be able to game as well. People also want the developers to have powerful tools. Directx is a bloated piece of proprietary shit that developers cannot look through to debug their code, most of it is guess work and trial and error to figure out what the most optimal means of doing something with it is. Opensource graphics libraries and opensource graphics drivers will make better faster games. Less black boxes means better understanding means better code means better code.

It also always seems to be the US and the third world where people frequently die of treatable diseases.