another iteration of "Here's a nice small fast OS and toolset that does only a few things but does them really, really well."

that'll be either systemd or FreeBSD, depending on your ideology :-)

reminds me of an article by a progressive liberal feminist who had kids, she said that even though she kept all misogynistic toys from her boy and ensured he had a full suite of acceptable role models and no violent media.... he still played guns with the cardboard inner from toilet rolls.

Embrace our equality by all means, but understand our differences.

Once upon a time in the stock market on America there was a bit of a tech bubble, everybody wanted tech stocks like Yahoo and other powerhouses of future technological change.

At this time a new company emerged amongst all these internet giants, it was called NetJ.com and whilst it had the magic of "Net" "J" and ".com" in its name, it had little else. In fact, its filing to the stock market said:

The sharemarket rewarded NetJ.com with a $100 million valuation.

I guess inflation and QE means $100m is now equal to $40bn in stock-market terms.

No, I understand them completely.

A library will do the hard work for a limited section of what you need, like a XML parser library will give you functions you can use to manipulate your own XML, or a SSL library that will manage the hard work of encryption. Nice and easy, neatly compartmentalized to do 1 thing (hopefully well).

A framework bundles a load of these in, and then also provides you with a load of "boilerplate" that helps you do things the framework is designed to do - eg a web site framework that adds routes and templates for you - so all you need to do is put application logic in the spaces marked "todo".

The problem is that most frameworks do far more than I like, so if you want to step outside what they do, or the way they do it, you're SOL. Similarly, I find that I can more easily create the same functionality using libraries.

I agree, web dev is getting so good even Microsoft is not only embracing stuff like Cordova but is saying its a great way to write Metro apps!

Personally, I just like the way it forces people to design their programs into client and server sides, hopefully making a good, reusable API on the latter.

Staying ahead of the kinds means understanding the fundamentals and teaching them that - the kids may know Ruby or Scala or whatever the current fad is, but if they don't understand when to use an array or a list we'll continue to get shockingly crap programming from them.

You're not correct there - computer science is a serious subject, but if you took one of them you'd find it remarkable devoid of "computing" - you'd have a lot of maths and statistics instead.

When I was at university statistical job analysis, algorithms and mathematical modelling were the kind of modules you took, which at the time I thought was pointless, but when you start sizing networks you realise what its all about. For the majority of computing work, its all irrelevant, but fortunately for those of us who just "work in computers", someone else has done the hard work to make the underlying stuff work properly.

My mate did electrical engineering, he did a lot more "computing" than I did.

so what, why would they? I doubt 1 in 20 executives bothers to read the quoted text nor do we ask them to.

In C++ you just don;t want a framework, you want libraries that do the heard work for you as you provide the application logic.

For web servers/services, there are a lot of "embedded" libraries that are brilliant. Mongoose or NxWeb come to mind, best thing about them is that they are really easy to use and you don't need to learn a huge amount of "magic" ways that a framework has decided that you'll work in.

Win95 is twenty years old, not 20 months like Google is complaining of supporting.

(and to be fair to Microsoft, they only recently stopped supporting XP which is 12 years old or so)

No, I think you don't get the point - Samsung *cannot* push the patch out because .... there is no patch.

If there was a patch made by Google, then at least Samsung *might* pushed it out, you never know, maybe some marketing gimmick where they can say "look at us, we support 2 year old phones with security updates, buy our stuff because we're better than the competition", but no... Samsung has no choice in the matter, Google decided for them, and us.

Thanks Google - keep "doing no evil" because obviously a $50 billion pile of cash just isn't enough for you.

I think you should look up the term "quantitative easing". At least a cryptocurrency has some limits on arbitrary creation of coins.

and yes, the USD does fall in value when they do this - increase the money supply and although you won't notice much difference in domestic goods, you will as the exchange rate falls. Fortunately, most other governments are also 'printing' money too so their exchange rates fall at the same time making things even out.

So the net result (currently) is that interest rates fall providing smaller yields for investors (as the new money is used to buy government-issued loans which can pay less as they have an very unfussy buyer), and pushing them to other asset types, thus pushing their prices up (eg property) which ends up in the usual bubbles and disasters (again).

In the big scheme of things these cryptocurrencies introduce such a tiny amount to the overall economy, they're insignificant. To put it in perspective $100B dollars is less than half the interest payments for the USA per year on its debt.

I suppose we can feed it to farmed animals in great quantities instead of the usual antibiotics we feed them in great quantities.

(note there are strict withdrawal periods for all animals coming up to slaughter to ensure the antibiotics used in their feed is not present in the meat)

there's poor quality and then there's poor quality - you can compress it a bit too much after all, but assuming anything other than that there's little to no difference in sound quality.

I used to know a sound engineer and he told me about these frequency response levels that high-end audiophiles keep on about, expecting perfect reproduction at 10 or 10,000 Hz and he said that is was all a bit useless - the studio microphones weren't that sensitive so cutting off the top and bottom isn't cutting anything that's not already present... and then couple that to human hearing and you're trying sooo hard to reproduce nothing audible.

128kbps is enough for practically everyone, and even those who are able to tell the difference between it and 256 are only going to notice if you compare the same track side by side.

I do not recall any intelligence agency stopping a DDoS attack, ever

they'll be the DDoS attacks that were stopped, no wonder you didn't hear of them.