But once one has taken over the market, it's only more reason for the others to band together to create an alternative. It took iOS to make Android.

What, you believe in the waterfall development model? An iterative process is the only way to go.

Developing software is not like building a skyscraper. You can very easily turn your design upside down at any time, and you're going to miss opportunities for better features if you blindly follow some original plan. Of course it can come at the cost of time, but it's the manager's job to make these business decisions.

So far all our alternatives suck at traversing rough terrain. The wise move is to copy nature, because natural selection has already tried so many designs for us.

Once we get better at re-making nature new options might appear, but not yet.

My wife is Chinese, and I've visited her family who live around Shanghai.

Her parents and grandparents only speak Shanghainese, and thus can't read or write. This isn't because Mandarin is "too hard", but because their generation never had a proper education, and they don't really encourage the elderly to reeducate themselves.

My wife's generation grew up speaking Shanghainese, but then learnt Mandarin at school.

The new generation of kids know enough Shanghainese to understand their grandparents, but they don't want to speak it. Their parents commonly speak Mandarin, and they're being taught Mandarin from the earliest levels of school. Within a couple generations it wouldn't surprise me if Shanghainese becomes an endangered language.

The government seems to have a very successful campaign to move everyone to Mandarin, and they are also actively trying to prevent English from penetrating too deep into Chinese culture. If China can maintain its position as a superpower then Mandarin will definitely become a necessary language for international business.

Big endian makes a lot of sense when sorting in left-to-right languages. You need to look at the most significant bits first, and then finally sort on the smallest.

There's nothing wrong with writing numbers from most-significant to least, but English is inconsistent with how it writes everything else. Addresses are little endian, and dates are either little endian D/M/Y or the bonkers American M/D/Y.

I'm learning Chinese, and its beautifully consistent. Numbers, dates, addresses are all written (and spoken) in largest-to-smallest order. Even peoples names are big-endian because they put the surname first. You can't get better than this for sorting data.

I think you miss the point of the original article. A blind user will find it impossible to register on your website.

For my sign-up page, I replaced the image CAPTCHA with a text box labelled "Enter the text 'I am not a spammer'". This solved my spam problems, but neither of our solutions would work if our websites became popular and spammers decided to specifically target us.

No, I don't think so. But this wasn't a very highly selling game :-) I'm pretty sure the cracker was one of the first two purchasers, and once it was out, nobody bothered to come back and fix it up. Some people seem to have more fun breaking a game than playing it.

That probably wasn't me. I made my game almost a decade ago, and this sort of copy protection idea was already floating around in the indie game community back then.

Most amusing (and effective) DRM I ever saw was actually a fairly loose and easily broken copy protection scheme

I did this with my game. The code that checked the cd-key was easily bypassed, but that code also fixed a critical bug that happened on level 10. It was funny that we had people coming to our support forum asking for help, and we could easily call them out as pirates!

We actually manage to convince one of them to buy the game properly.

I agree, I love the way RAII works with exceptions in C++. It's just a shame most people still learn C++ as "C with classes".

C#'s IDisposable and using statement are probably the best you're going to get in a nondeterministic garbage collected language though, so I wouldn't complain about that.

Java can go die in a fire.

You say "with short attention spans", I say "who must speak succinctly". And although you can just use it like a crippled RSS feed, it's also a little bit like a public chat room for people to discuss issues. There's a lot of political discussion going on over Twitter, and I do think this overlaps with educated trendy people with too much money.

What I mean by "socialising" is all about leaving your group and understanding and respecting alternative views. If you only accept news from a single source then you are only likely to become more bigoted, and so much easier to be manipulated by a politician/advertiser.

So much of American politics is driven by emotionally-charged ignorance. Information means nothing when people are unwilling to hear it.

-1

I wouldn't expect higher education to change people to vote more like the "educated" people. Do you hate how extreme christians vote? If you force them all into college they'll just make their own college which will amplify their prejudices.

If you want a more informed society, get them to socialise. BSc/BAs are completely unrelated to this.

If exercise alone is boring then you should try combining it with a mental activity (eg studying flashcards), or doing it in a social environment (martial arts groups, riding with friends, Wii gaming, etc). When you're distracted you'll be amazed how much physical 'work' you can do.

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc