There used to be a corner store across the street from my house that would rent a VHS tape for $2, or 3 for $5, which was great for a rainy day. One video rental shop in my town had a deal where you could get 7 movies for 7 nights for $7. Currently, There's a grocery store by my house that rents out movies for $2, or there's another store with a RedBox that rents Movies for $1 a night. Still a more expensive than Netflix if you do enough volume, but not bad if you're just rending the odd movie. I never understood how Blockbuster got so popular with such high prices. There was always cheaper options.

As long as the other VOD (Video On Demand) services continue to charge $1.99 an episode or $4.99 for movie rentals, Netflix will continue to be a good value for my money. As long as my family watches about 2 or 3 things as week, it ends up being cheaper than doing the same vs other services. I think that the problem is exactly as you state. charge me 25 cents an hour for watching stuff, and I would gladly pay. Instead, they make it way too expensive. Currently, Netflix is the only service available that you can get down to this price, as long as you watch enough TV.

Yeah, $13.50 a piece for print magazines seems to be quite expensive, especially on a subscription plan. Typically magazines give subscribers big discounts. That doesn't seem to be happening here. For that price, I'll just leaf through it at the book store and only buy it if it has something that particular catches my eye.

I find it a little disingenuous that they are saying that print isn't dying and then go on to say that they only have 3,000 subscribers.

And my biggest problem with print magazines is exactly as you stated. If they have a print and online version, by the time you get your copy in the mail, you could have easily just already read the online version. Unless they purposely delay the online version, which is an equally bad idea. But why stop there. Why even delay individual articles until there's a whole magazine's worth. Why not just publish individual articles online as they become available.

Yeah, especially on tablets and laptops where people generally don't (or can't) update the hardware at all. I would have to say that it's just yet another piece of identifying information. Combine it with all the other pseudo identifiers like user agent strings and font lists and you can narrow down the number of collisions quite quickly. Also, it's probably another thing that varies from time to time, which allows you to double count people and drive up visitor counts to increase your worth to advertisers.

Most likely, by the time 4K becomes popular, h265 will have reached maturity, and you'll be able to fit 4K streams in a 20 Mbps stream. 100 Mbps is still enough to do 5 simultaneous 20 Mbps streams. Also, if we could get away from all this streaming nonsense, and be allowed to download shows before we want to watch them, it would pretty much be a non issue. My computer could download stuff while I'm at work, and have everything ready for the evening when I'm ready to watch.

I personally don't see what the point of Gigabit speeds at home are. I have 30 Mbit/s internet, and that's fast enough to do at least 3 or 4 video streams at the same time. I don't really see many reasons I would need my internet connection to be 33 times faster than it already is. I think 100 would be the most I could ever forsee needing at home. At that rate, you can stream 5 Blu-Ray quality streams using h264. There's other uses such as downloading games, but the servers hosting the games aren't likely to be able to dedicate 1 Gbit to a single downloaded. Maybe in a decade some new thing will come along and I'll need a gigabit connection, but as it stands now, there isn't really any content on the internet that would benefit from having such a fast connection. At least not where I'd be hosting it out of my house.

This is why I'm seriously considering Windows Phone for my next one. I don't like iPhones because they only have 1 model (ok 2 now) and they are really expensive. Plus the fact that they make it hard to do anything that isn't Apple integrated. Android phones have the problem of you never know if they need to be updated. The only flaw I know about the Windows 8 phones is that there is a lack of apps. But as long as it has the apps so I can do what I want to, what does it matter what the total count is?

Not only that, but 8 MP camera is an easy to understand bullet point on the marketing brochure. UI that doesn't suck is harder to qualify, and doesn't really make sense on the marketing brochure. My biggest beef with Android phones is that many of them don't get updates after they leave the factory. This is especially true on many of the cheaper phones. Unfortunately, you don't see any phones marketed with "we promise to provide timely updates to the latest Android OS for the next 2 years" as a marketing point. And even if they did. There isn't much you can do to hold them to that.

I think it has more to do with the fact that I am an English speaker and it has letter groups I'm not accustomed to seeing together. EyjafjallajÃkull has 16 letters. An example of an English word with 16 letters would be "conservationists". It's quite easy to read because my brain breaks it up into letter groups that occur often in English. Groups like con, and tion, and ist occur all over the place and therefore make the word easy to recognize. EyjafjallajÃkull on the other hand doesn't have any common letter groups I would normall see in english. I don't even know how to properly pronounce Eyja or fja. The only part that's really familiar to English speakers is alla, and perhaps kull. Combine that with the j that sounds like y (does that mean y sounds like j?) and it makes the word quite difficult to read for non-native speakers.

I think it's actually quite a good way to get your music/movies/tv shows/books. I think it make the least sense for music because music tends to have a lot of replay value. People will listen to the same song or album over and over again. But for books, movies, and fiction books, you might use them once, twice, maybe even 20 times, but most people are constantly watching/reading new stuff. There's very little point to having a collection of movies you've already seen, or a house full of books you've already read. If they can get the price right, then they stand to make more money, and the person consuming the content will have access to a much larger library then they could every hope to purchase on their own. They are also more likely to branch out and look at other genres they hadn't considered before because they don't have to spend extra money to do so. And for media, it doesn't really matter much if you stop paying the subscription because you lost your job. You just can't watch any movies until you get a job again. Which many people are probably OK with. If it means I could have access to all of (or a large subset of) the media produced, I'm much happier spending $10 a month to have access to everything than spending $10 a month to have only 1 new item every month.

Thanks. That makes it a whole lot easier to pronounce. It's so obvious now.

The computer can only understand you as well as you can express yourself. Sure you could use English if the computer understood it, but English isn't a very good language for writing specifications in. The reason we use programming languages is because the are unambiguous, and have a strictly defined grammar. English and other common spoken languages are nothing of the sort. Not only that, but writing everything out in English would probably create more actual code than just writing the program out in a traditional programming language, as it is quite verbose.

I still think that software development is pretty future proof. Computers aren't going to program themselves any time soon. In the past, I've seen plenty of people flock to it, and plenty of people are still flocking to it. The problem is that most of the people who decide they want to do it have no actual software development skills. If you are a competent software developer, you probably won't have much trouble finding a job. The field is filled with people who can't program a single thing. The problem is that just going and taking a computer science degree isn't going to turn you into a competent software developer. You have to enjoy it and be willing to invest your own spare time into figuring out how things work. All the competent software developers I know have put in their "10,000 hours". You won't get there by simply getting a degree. You have to devote a serious amount of your life to it. If you aren't interested in software development, you probably won't succeed.

This is key. Engineering, computer science (actually, CS was part or the engineering faculty at my university), and other applied science disciplines are flooded with graduates who have no interest in the subject matter and only did the work required to pass the courses. There's so many computer science graduates out there who can't program that it's depressing.