Android started in much the same way, to avoid telcos getting control over the content people access on their phones. While the base OS of Android is still free, a lot of the standard applications are now licensed from Google and the terms for licensing them are becoming more strict. Google's fiber is neutral today, but that doesn't mean it will stay neutral forever.

They tried to go for the infotainment market with the ARM-based Windows RT, but it found very few customers, mainly because there are not many apps for it. A "Surface Mini" would only have a chance if it runs on x86 and I don't know how feasible it is to produce a small light x86 tablet that gets a decent battery life, while also being affordable and powerful enough to run Windows 8.

So I don't know if I would call this a long-term strategy or just facing the realities of today.

I would like to spend more of my time creating new things rather than fighting to make existing things work together.

Yesterday there was a headline saying 300,000 servers remain vulnerable to Heartbleed. So the bug is still (ab)usable even after it has been published.

A quick search turns up this product description which points to the Freescale i.MX6Q specs.

Does anyone know what he means with "VPU"?

The GPU is a Vivante GC2000, which has been partially reverse engineered already; support is being added to etnaviv, which is a user-space driver -- the part connecting Mesa + Gallium to the kernel driver -- for the Vivante graphics cores (support older cores like the GC860 is good enough for everyday use). The kernel driver itself (galcore) is available under GPL, although it could use a cleanup. So there is no need to reverse engineer everything from scratch, but the etnaviv project could certainly use more contributors.

There is also a video decoding acceleration block in the i.MX6, but like all things H.264 that is likely a patent minefield, so I'm not sure it would be worth spending a lot of resources on reverse engineering that.

Optical discs aren't a proper backup either unless you store them offsite: they are easily destroyed in a fire or taken by a burglar.

I think encrypted online backup is a far more convenient solution than optical discs: it can run as a background process instead of requiring the user to insert a blank disc regularly.

Well, I'd argue that a library that needs a single global init call is itself a poorly implemented singleton with all the associated problems. It is unfortunately a common occurrence and wrapping it in a singleton class is a way to deal with it. But in my opinion that is making the best of a bad situation rather than a pattern that I'd recommend if you have anything to say about the library interface.

I have seen a lot of singleton use in C++ unrelated to libraries and most of those uses became problematic at some point. In C++ in particular, the fact that with a singleton you can't control the moment it destructs can be a problem if the destructor needs to do more than free memory.

If you like Dijkstra's style, I can recommend Programming: The Derivation of Algorithms by Kaldewaij. For details, see my favorites list in a later post.

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy & Patterson

Helps you understand what goes on inside a computer at the hardware and OS level, as well as illustrating how you can reason about the performance of a system before you actually build it.

Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley & van Dam

A good starting point for learning about computer graphics. Not all of it is still relevant, but even if you skip the chapters about vector displays and user interfaces there is still plenty of useful material in there.

Programming: The Derivation of Algorithms by Kaldewaij

Teaches a way of constructing algorithms that are provably correct. Although I rarely follow this approach to the letter (it is very time consuming), elements of it are extremely valuable in everyday programming. For example, thinking in terms of preconditions, postconditions and invariants (design by contract) helps in designing good interfaces, finding bugs, placing useful asserts etc. Even just thinking to yourself "could I prove this program?" without actually doing it is useful, since if the answer is negative, the program is too complex and probably incorrect.

If you don't read the book until you have lots of experience, you will probably have reinvented most patterns, but using different names for them which will only confuse other people reading your code. Overuse of design patterns may be a necessary developmental phase ;)

By the way, while it is in the GoF book, I'd argue that Singleton is actually an anti-pattern.

Analog broadcast radio would be relatively easy to pick up on a faraway planet and identify as a signal. But how much longer will we be using that? If all communication is compressed and/or encrypted digital point-to-point, if something leaks into space at all it will look like a weak noise. I think that if the radio search picks something up, it would be because an alien civilization is deliberately sending out a signal to be noticed, not because we picked up their normal means of communication.

I don't think asymmetric bandwidth is the problem: even with user-generated content, there will be more downloads than uploads: you post on a forum, multiple people read it, you share a photo, multiple people see it. Unless you advocate everyone to run home servers or a massive switch from client-server to peer-to-peer, having asymmetric bandwidth is not a bad idea.

One problem is that the big ISPs don't want to be in the business of moving network packets; they want to be in the content business, because they see more potential profit there. They see the internet as a way of delivering that content: like you said, as a broadcast medium.

Another problem is closed services. For example, every social network has their own private/instance message system, instead of using standard protocols like IMAP and XMPP. This means you have to use the same service as your friends to be able to communicate with them. So even for non-broadcast use, power is becoming concentrated. The internet is moving further and further away from its decentralized roots.

If you pay attention to recent events, you'll see what happens in practice:

• Netflix subscribers complain high resolution streams don't play well.
• Comcast refuses to do anything about that problem unless they're paid by Netflix.
• After some protest, Netflix caves in and pays Comcast.
• Soon after, high resolution streams play fine.
• Netflix announces they will raise their subscription rates.

So in the end, Netflix subscribers end up paying more and Comcast receives more money.

And switching from Netflix to a smaller content provider has the problem that "smaller" doesn't just mean they have fewer subscribers, it means they have fewer content to choose from as well.

This research was about making biofuel from cellulose, which means that stems, leaves etc are used as well. But apparently even that is not sustainable because corn takes a lot of its carbon from the soil instead of from the air.

The main VAT rate went up from 17.5% to 21% iirc, but food falls under a special VAT rate of 6% that has stayed at the same level afaik. There is a new "packaging tax" which was supposedly introduced to discourage unnecessary packaging material, but I don't think it actually changed anything except the price.

We had something like 5% inflation for several years in a row around 2000. Many people blame this price increase on the switch to the Euro in 2002, but there were significant price increases in the years before that as well. I don't know the reasons behind those increases. In the years after, we had a "supermarket war" where the supermarkets lowered their prices one after another to attract more customers, which has reduced their profit margins significantly. So that's probably not where the high cost is either.

Even so, there are plenty of tasty dishes you can make from cheap ingredients like carrots, onions and cabbage. Meat is the most expensive ingredient, but you need hardly any meat at all from a nutricional point of view (provided you get sufficient proteins from other sources), so if we're talking about starving students then meat is optional.