you have to follow director/producers like you do with Hollywood movies. You can be reasonably sure a movie that contains "Spielberg" in the credits will be watchable... Watch Anything by Ken Burns and you won't be sorry. Almost all are available on Amazon Prime Instant video too.

If Gartner is talking about it, you know it is only hype.

It is on a graph so it must be true!

Could you make a heat map or a spider graph to show me more??

DNLA sucks. I can run a DNLA server (plex or windows media, doesn't matter) on a pretty awesome box and it will still suck. Transcode beforehand to h264 aac MP4 and you can play it on lots more devices, and you don't run into problems on the server side with multiple clients like you do with DNLA... but you do have to set up a webserver of some kind (although NAS often comes with a simple http server nowadays, and my router can do it too)
As much as we all hate to admit it, home computers are STILL not really up to transcoding on the fly for multiple clients (or sometimes even single clients).

Plus if you just go ahead and transcode beforehand, you can play the file in a browser, (including xbone), ipad, android, Roku, an ancient PC or whatever.

about 10 years ago I was looking forward to a time when I didn't have to pre-transcode... and I assumed it was 10 years off... now I would guess we are about 10 years off from that point.

Applicant Tracking System - This is the buzzword for an "apply online" type thing. I work for one of the big ones.

Here are some excuses
1) Employers can get sued if it isn't done a certain way. All of the laws are based on horrible paper applications.
2) Employers are scared of "the cloud" so you have to fill out a new application every time you apply to a new job even though the last 10 places you applied were using the same software
3) The perspective employees "candidates" are not the customer, the HR Director is the customer.
4) Statistically, longer, harder application processes result in higher employee retention rates.

that last one is a big one. My software can do all kinds of pre-employment testing for all kinds of things... skills, personality, mental alertness, etc.
The longer the testing process, the more "candidates" quit before completing. HOWEVER, the longer the testing process, the more likely an employee will be successful at their job.... To put it frankly, if you will wade through the shit to get hired, you will wade through it to stay employed. It doesn't even statistically matter what the results of the test were. Simply testing for anything at all will reduce employee turnover. The same can be said for unwieldy applications. If a candidate is not serious about filling out an application, they will not be serious about work either.

That said... I promise our applications are better than most, at least our javascript works, and progress is automatically saved... Still it all sucks (blame the lawyers), we just try to suck less.

it sounds dumb, but I thought FarCry 3 did a really good job in building this kind of "feeling"
it is a psudo-open world which hints that you are on a pacific theater island long forgotten by governments (and since taken over by drug runners) after WW2. You find fortified caves with decayed weaponry, bunkers, etc. You get the feeling you described... except with 'the requisite splosions and video game stuff

I am not meaning to trivialize what you are taking about, but you can get a small taste of what you describe in a fantasy video game, and I enjoyed it coming through that lens.

Software package written in 1998, during a boom, does not need a single patch until it cannot be used for reasons external to the company in 2013, during the tail end of a bust.

I mean, how do you plan for that? Executives in that company had no idea. Software was like "buildings" to them back in 1998, you build a corporate office space, spend 20 million bucks, then you just have to change lightbulbs for 30 years. They never expected the foundation to suddenly change into a different material out from under the building, and why would they, that isn't how engineering works.

I mean, I think they are finally coming around, but honestly, they went from being the only commercial mainframes in the country, to being huge commercial software consumers without changing their working methodologies, and in april they all had to pay for that...

Still it was probably a lot cheaper than "sticking with the times" for 15 years where they essentially were not paying the "cycle cost" of modern software.

I worked for a megolithic bank in 2013... Our budget for migrating away from Windows XP before the april 2014 deadline was $400,000,000. Four hundred million dollars. There wasn't even a line-item for "Windows 7 Licensing." This was all custom, ancient, poorly maintained, poorly written, poorly understood software migration.

You can bet your ass the executive leadership was "nostalgic" about XP.

yeah, you say that, but all I hear is "It is a tablet that can play steam games" The only one on the market.

Oracle can't figure out how to screw over java, and we are complaining?

"Give me a modern responsive look and feel, it must be fast and single-page, and it should work on phones and ipads like the facebooks"... "Oh and half our customers use IE7 and have 512 megs of ram."

I am counting the days until 2016!

flea-bag motels have no free amenities. Motel 6/hilton/whatever will give you wifi and hbo. Expensive hotels have no free amenities.
The few hotels I have stayed in that were nicer than my socio-economic class had shitty wifi that was 20 bucks extra per night. The midrange motels all have shitty wifi that is free. In most cases, tethering to my 4g phone is the best option.

I would love to do that. I beg our management every week. Our customers are Luddites. Email is optional.

take the name part of your gmail address... add this string to it:
+a."b(c)d,e:f;gh>i[j\k]l".a@gmail.com

not only is yourname+a."b(c)d,e:f;gh>i[j\k]l".a@gmail.com a valid email address... but you will actually get email addressed that way. It will fail most email address validation that I have found.

first off, I went down the slippery death defying slope of email address validation recently... Our software had simple regex rules... so I thought I would just implement RFC rules, or find a library that did... wow. RFC is a mess... APIs are worse.
This is a valid email address:
dude"".dude@[192.168.1.1]
so is this:
a@com
also valid:
test+test=gmail.com@test.com
none of those will work in MS Outlook or exchange, none of them will work with jquery validation plug-in, some close to that will work with java mail API. Most funky but standards compliant email addresses will pass Apache commons validation.

In the end, I went with a 2 part validation: 1) Apache Commons Validation (mostly RFC correct), then a second pass on Javax.mail because if I can't send email to it, then what is the point of having it? We still get addresses that pass both validations, and bounce at some SMTP relay due to "invalid address format."

I am sure internationalization will make all this better.

back in my day, an Oscilloscope would be exempt from the DMCA, unless they passed an Analog version.