I do miss your point. Software engineering is mostly about concentrating on a higher level (architecture, design, how pieces fit together, a bit of project management, requirements engineering, reliability models, etc.) than not programming. You want to outsource to code monkeys for that, nowadays. As a master student in software engineering, I barely wrote any code at all up to now (and I don't foresee any of that in the future). I think you are confusing a software engineer for a software developer. They are different jobs and they have a very different salary too.

...and yet another platform for App developers to target. It won't work.

From a marketing perspective it's suicide. Everyone wants iOS or Android nowadays, because it's sexy, it's all the rage, and because of the huge number of Apps you can get from their stores. And with Microsoft entering the arena, I very much doubt there is space for anyone else.

I predict a painful death like for Symbian, only quick instead of slow.

These sites support the rapid free sharing of information, thus reducing the ability of authors to profit from the books they write, of singers to profit from the songs they sing, of directors to profit from the films they create. In turn, this reduces their motivation to create such works, and this reduced motivation might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.

Piracy helps these people stay alive, even if they don't realize it. It allows authors for a nice route to make themselves known, and many "pirates" then buy their work. I've bought more than one album I downloaded, and the same with movies, but I would have never done so if I could not have evaluated it beforehand. Also, I don't buy "shitty" content anymore: blockbuster movies and the likes stay on the shelves as far as I'm concerned. I buy things that I can pass down to my children. Perhaps the industry is scared they can't push heavily-marketed, utterly-hollow movies/books/music on us anymore?

Also, you are forgetting that 95% of the revenue from sells go to labels, publishers, and the likes; not to the authors. If they really want to cut on the piracy, they should jump over the middle man and start selling eBooks or digital content themselves at low prices (3-4 € for a book, for example). Many are doing that and profiting from it.

And yes, the main point is not "quite simple", man. You said it: These sites support the rapid free sharing of information.. Try going into a shop and asking for a copy of Metropolis with the '80s restoration, of an album by Gianluigi Trovesi, a live from Area, or "The Year of the Angry Rabbit". And explain to me why Jamendo, Free Software and many other free as in speech and as in beer community work and produce a huge amount of material without any hinder on creativity.

I don't want to live in a Fahranheit 451-like world, where DRM and power drunk people can decide what I can read and what not. *All* information should be free. I wish we could educate children from elementary school that the right way to support authors is through donations.

Btw, my advice is to read some books from Lawrence Lessig. It may prove interesting.

You want something that allows you to search upon semantic data, for example for authors, title or other content.

I use Tracker for that, and it works fine.

The whole point is to make it annoying, so that the easily-scared father of a family will feel ill at ease when confronted with a big warning he is doing something illegal (--> deterrent, it makes you feel a criminal), or give up because he has to find a crack through a website full of pr0n, or call in a kiddie next door. I'm not saying it works very well, just that the rationale is that for the 1% that fall for it.

In other words: having to input a key, legit or fake, makes you acquire *conscience* of what you are doing, either legal or illegal. Clicking on the "next" button when confronted with the EULA doesn't, since you to it mechanically and never read through it anyway.

Oh, c'mon! XHTML main rule: you opened a tag, you close that tag. It can be so "elitist"!

I remember back in 1997 wondering why not all tags were being closed.
I started leaving them open just for sloppiness, or because others did that too.

It'd probably be more easier for people to understand in a well-structured way like HTML than leaving them looking why that freakin' div doesn't display correctly and then realising they have closed a "li" element outside a "div" element or other crap like that.

PS. given that, I totally agree with you that people should be encouraged to create web pages, and all that "only people who have a master degree in CS should touch the web" nonsense should go away.

C'mon, first rule of PR: everything they'll give you to sell will suck. Solution: lie about it. This guy doesn't even try. A good PR boy is one that can smile while he says "...and this service is soooo fantastic, 'cause it enables you to replenish your ice-cube stock while you're on holidays at the Arctic pole. Oh, and it also make a wonderful coffee with nothing more than water, electricity and some beans!" Never read Dilbert?

AMD says will result in 'dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains.'

Okay, that's marketing talk. I think that at virtually *ANY* presentation of a new CPU in the last twenty years someone had said that.

Me, I just have a 6-yrs-old P4 laptop which, compared to nowadays new models w/ Core Duo, isn't much different.

This because there are other bottlenecks: hd speed, RAM, etc.

So, why upgrade, for a desktop user? Even for middle business servers, we live with two 8-yrs-old Sun machines which are more than adequate for keeping up all the services we need internally. We never have CPU spikes.

Sometimes I just wonder if all this isn't just a grab at customer pockets.