Minecraft survived despite how terrible the game engine was. I would probably have been a lot better if it had a good engine behind it. The PC version is for some reason ridiculously slow. The Pocket version for some reason has now problem playing on my 3 year old phone, which only has a Dual-core 1 GHz Tegra 2, and 512 MB of RAM, but the desktop version won't run well on a machine with much higher specs. I used to chock it up to the PC version having an infinite world, but the Pocket version has since been updated and also now has as infinite world. I'm hoping MS does something to fix this issue. Basically have the same game, but fix all the performance issues.

I live in Canada, and while I do see a few people who ride bikes year round, I don't think it's something I'll ever do. For me it's not a question of getting the right tires or being warm enough (no different from cross country skiing in this respect), it's a matter of what to do about the drivers on the road. In the winter, the roads are a lot more narrow, so you basically end up "taking the lane" for your entire ride. This is a sure-fire way to annoy motorists. Also, where I live, cars are not required to have winter tires, and I've seen plenty of motorists lose control even when the road conditions aren't really that bad. For me it's not a matter of not being a wimp, it's more a matter of not tempting fate.

This is where I see things going in the next 10 years. Instead of everyone buying a $700 cell phone, a $1000 ultrabook, and a $500 desktop, most people will just buy a small computer that they can carry around in their pocket that acts as the computer for any screen that you hook it up to. Your phone would still have a screen, but wouldn't really have much of a processor of it's own. It would just use the computer you carry around in your pocket. Hook up that same computer to a 10 inch or 15 inch portable screen and keyboard, and you have a laptop. Use the same computer with a 24 inch monitor and a full size keyboard and mouse, and you have a desktop computer. You probably won't be able to do high end games or video editing on a device that fits in your pocket for a while, but most people would be able to accomplish all their computing needs on a single device. And nobody would have to worry about cloud storage or syncing between devices, because they would only have a single device they use for everything.

I always here that software projects are often late and over budget, but I don't think it's worse than any other industry. I've seen countless examples of construction projects that ran over budget and took longer than expected. Often the reasons for this are the same. Either the requirements changed halfway through, or the project was made more complicated than it needed to be to accomplish the task. There's a few bridges in my area that have been huge boondoggles in the past decade, and they all try to look impressive, where a much more conservative design would have be easier, cheaper, and faster to build, and still would have solved the transportation problem. But everybody wants a bridge that looks pretty.

Projects that deal with a small workload and don't have changing requirements are much more likely to stay on budget and on time. This is how things should be broken up. Build small pieces and deliver the pieces as they become complete. Don't set out to build an entire 5 year task as a single project.

I really don't get how they can report numbers like this and not be called out on it all the time. Just from a quick Google, it looks like there's around 3 billion internet users. I would probably believe that. What they are saying is that almost half of all internet users used their site last month. Considering that Facebook is blocked in China, and China makes up 0.6 billion internet users, it makes the likelihood of them having that many users to be completely ludicrous. I know that there are ways to get around the great firewall of China, but I still don't see how they get that number. I think it has something to do with a lot of duplicate accounts. I know a lot of people who have multiple facebook accounts. Some do it because they have different groups of "friends" they don't want to co-exist, and some people do it for games, so they can gift things to themselves. There's plenty of people with a lot of accounts. I'm sure there's gold farmers in Farmville if you look for it.

I agree that they currently make it way too hard to determine which CPU is better than the other. Currently they have 2 things called i3/i5/i7. The i7 that's used in desktops is not the same i7 that you will see in a standard desktop chip. And they also sell small form factor desktops that use the laptop version of the i3/i5/i7. Then there's the lower end chips like Celeron/Pentium/Atom, that I can't figure how how they are supposed to compare to eachother. It was a lot easier when they actually changed the marketing name of the chip each time they actually made a change to the processor. 386,486, Pentium, Pentium 2, Pentium 3, Pentium 4 and so on. They've had the i3/i5/i7 names since 2008, and it's gone through Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell all without changing the marketing name of the chip. You have to look at stuff like i7-4770 , or even worse, look up the exact model number (BX80646I74770) to try and figure out exactly what you are getting.

It really depends on the kind of watch band you have and how tight you wear it. If it's something like leather, cloth, or rubber then you definitely should take it off daily. If you have a metallic band and it isn't completely tight against your wrist, then there should be enough air flow around the watch band to not have any problems. If you have a full metal watch, and wear it to bed, and wear it in the shower, then it should remain relatively sanitary, and you really don't ever have to take it off.

Really? You think you could get something with the intelligence of a mouse to control a vehicle moving at 80 mph? Because if you could, why not just put a mouse into the car itself, and let the mouse do the driving? Make a neural interface so the mouse can access the proper controls. Even getting something like a chimpanzee with very human like anatomy and a high level of intelligence (compared to other non-human animals) to drive a car with the same skill as a human would be a pretty impossible task. It doesn't take long watching cat videos to realize that animals deal very poorly when presented with unfamiliar situations such as low friction floors. If it really didn't require so much thinking, then we would have solved the problem of having people drive very long ago. You can't even get actual people to remember to use their turn signals most of the time.

But as we move to smaller processes that require less electricity to function, perhaps heat dissipation will become a none issue. I don't think that anybody expects that they will be able to carry the equivalent of the fastest desktop around as a laptop, or that server farms will become obsolete because you can replace an entire rack with a single computer the size of a Mac Mini, but we are very quickly approaching the time where you can do everything that people have traditionally done on desktop machines, the things that people have insisted you always needed a desktop machine for (video editing, compiling C code, playing games), and they are able to do them on laptops, without making compromises in battery life or size of the laptop. The Surface Pro is a very good example of this. It's the thinnest laptop on the market today, but you can use it for almost all your computing needs. The problem is that it's quite expensive right now. But give it a few years, maybe 5, and something in a similar form factor will be much more affordable and will still be able to perform the role of a traditional desktop.

Just about every good programmer I know started doing it on their own in highschool, or earlier. then, many of them took a 4 year degree in computer science or software engineering. I don't think there's a lot of people who could become a good programmer in 2 years. I took software engineering, and by the end of the second year, I don't think I was really that good. Sure there was a bunch of courses that weren't programming related, but you can't just jam everything together into the same semester. There's a reason classes have prerequisites, 2 years does not give you enough time to progress to progress in your knowledge.

If you buy a laptop/computer from the Microsoft Store, I think they all feature Signature Edition, which they state includes the following

Signature Edition PCs are tuned for fast performance from the second you turn them on. They include free anti-virus software that never expires and have no junkware or trialware, ensuring that your new PC is always clean, fast, and protected.

It seems that MS realizes there is a problem with junkware included with their OS. They can't force manufacturers to not install junkware on the computers they sell, but it looks like MS is trying to do something to alleviate the problem. It actually looks like the machines sold on the Microsoft Store are actually quite competitively priced.

I have an LG TV and it has a stupid voice recognition feature. You have to press a button on the remote for it to start listening to you. The feature is pretty much completely useless. I tried it a few times when I first got the TV, but quickly found that it's pretty much worthless. The rest of the TV works really well though, and I have no complaints. I don't see the purpose of even building this feature into the TV. Nobody will use it, and nobody is going to make a TV buying decision based on rather or not it has voice recognition. Except maybe some people who will specifically be looking for a TV that doesn't have the feature.

One of the hosting companies I used a decade ago got hacked, causing every page to contain maláfare. I tried contacting them to get it fixed but nothing worked. I ended up having to switch hosting companies because of that problem. But I learned a good lesson. It's not a good idea to go with bargain basement hosting companies. I wonder if this is a similar issue.

From looking at the article, it doesn't actually state how fast it runs. Maybe it's just a comment, that it actually does run very fast. Like it generates a very large and complex dungeon in .1 seconds, whereas on the machine it was originally written on, it would have taken minutes.

Firstly, I would have to say that part of the problem is user training. When you have people renaming the file "just in case" so it doesn't overwrite the other version, then you have training issues. Any version control system will keep a copy of every single version, so there's no reason to do stuff like this. This needs to be clear to the employees.