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.

Plumbing is already at the point where you can buy most of the stuff at your local plumbing/hardware store, and do it yourself. But most people can't be bothered. Same way that most people could easily change their own oil, or even make their own meals, but many people don't.

Personally, I kind of agree. Until I can read a book, watch a movie, or play video games while my car drives me around, all this car automation stuff is really just gimmicks that make the car more expensive, while not really providing me tangible day-to-day benefits Sure it will lower accident rates, but accident rates have already been going down for quite a while, even without automation technologies.

We're not even at the point where most people have photo quality printers at home. And for many of those who do have one, it's currently out of ink, and hasn't been turned on in years. Why do you think the average Joe would own a 3D printer? For the two or three times a year you need something printed up, it's much easier to go to a shop that owns one and have them print out the part. I know people who print out lots of pictures, but almost nobody I know owns a photo printer. It's much easier and cheaper to bring your SD card into Walmart or Costco and have them print them while you're shopping. Even if you're going to print stuff off once a month, which I think would be quite high for most people, it would still be way more convenient to just go to a shop and have it done.

Why not just install the app as well? Then you don't need the USB cable. You just load up you database, and opt to view the password. Then type it in manually. Just be on the lookout for people looking over your shoulder or cameras that could read the screen.

I think the problem that people run into is that it's somewhere in the middle of where they want a device to be. For people who want true low power computing, Arduino is the way to go. Some people want to be able to run an actual desktop operating systems, hook up standard off the shelf peripherals and run a home server, or hook it up to their TV. This is what Mini ITX or Intel NUC machines do pretty well.

The problem is that the Raspberry Pi looks like the second kind of device, because you can install Linux on it, plug in USB devices, hook it up to your TV, and do many other desktop / media centric things. However, due to certain constraints like the slow processor, small amount of RAM, slow I/O, and insufficient power for USB, it seems to fall short of what many people envision using it for. I guess you can blame the customers because they bought something that wasn't really meant to fulfill their needs. But you also have to look at the way the device is marketed and designed. Why put all these USB ports if you can't actually hook up a bunch of USB peripherals? Why put an HDMI port on the thing if you don't have the power to drive a 1080 desktop environment? Why run full Linux when you don't have enough power to run most Linux applications?

Don't get me wrong, I think the RPi is a great little machine, but I think that many people get disappointed with it because from the person who's inexperienced with it, it looks very much like it's trying to be a full desktop replacement, but then get disappointed when they find out that it's really just great for running embedded machines.

I'd love one with an Ethernet interface that wasn't tied the USB bus. I'd also like the ability to have some kind of storage that supports DMA, be it SATA or IDE to Compact Flash I tried using the Raspberry Pi as a Torrent download device. Saving the files to the SD Card caused so much overload that the whole thing froze up. Using USB allowed me to run without the thing freezing up, but the download speeds were still pretty slow, and the slowdowns seemed to be from waiting for writing to the disk rather than waiting for the network. The I/O on both the USB and the SD Card causes way too much CPU activity.

Cases have always been problem with the Raspberry Pi. They didn't really think about cases when they designed it. It's almost as if they just expected people to have the board sitting unprotected on the desk. I like that they actually have mounting holes now, which should help things out a lot.

Perhaps. But personally I find that Amazon has made books way more accessible to me than 20 years ago. The town I grew up in didn't even have a book store. The closest thing was the mass market paperbacks you could find at the department stores and pharmacies. Now you can get just about any book you want delivered to your door in a few days. And often below cover price. If publishers want to compete with piracy, they need to make it more convenient for people to get the books they want, at the price they want.

This. When I was shopping for a tablet last Christmas, there were a lot of reviews saying that the 2048x1536, tablets were slower than their predecessors at many tasks even though the processor was faster, because it took so much computation just to run the screen. For a 10 inch tablet, 1080p seems to be good enough. And trying to cram more pixels in there just for the sake of it, at the expense of battery life and framerates seems be a bad idea.