Absolutely. I was just saying that it was basically the only time anything other than UTF8 matters (especially since in the time when it matters, switching from one to the other is HELL).

My wife used to work on a faceted search system made to handle a few petabyte of data... the difference was pretty huge.

Since I personally never did something like that, I never had issues just using UTF8 :)

for ease of use and storage efficiency with flexibility, yeah, UTF-8 is always best.

For certain type of work with specific performance characteristics however, not so. Thats usually the problem.

Because I'm too busy "reading the source" and fixing shit in a bunch of other projects. One person can only do so much.

If a big part of the service is actually manipulating your data (email, database, charts, data analysis, etc...), then it needs to get decrypted somewhere at some point. The data can be intercepted then.

Ever worked in an office, and one day someone reports their expensive headphones got stolen by the cleaning staff? Then _IF_ you are lucky, someone looked at the security tapes and found them out? Usually the camera's not pointing in that direction though...

Now, thats easy to see on camera, someone running away with something big. Someone clipping a tiny little device to a lap-top thats barely in sight, while cleaning? Even rewatching the security tape 10x, you may not notice it. You also may not realize the computer got owned until after the security tapes got rolled over.

Someone picking a lap-top, flipping it over, opening it up, and messing in it...thats easy to see, but this isn't. Thats the big difference to me.

There's other things they should do first though.

Not everyone is fit to go get a bachelor degrees. Some people don't have the aptitude for it. Some are just not interested. Some don't have the patience. Some made mistakes and are stuck with kids and can't commit that far. Some just don't feel like it.

The US is messed up in that its a country where if people don't recognize the college you went to, they make you feel like you're a nobody. That leaves a significant portion of the population feeling like they have no meaningful option. A lot of people seriously beleive you're better off with an barely passing grade in liberal art at Harvard and working at McDonald's with insane debts than being a successful carpenter who owns his/her own business.

Thats ridiculous. Yes, virtually all other first world countries have free upper education. But they also have a LOT more respected (I stress that word) options for people who don't want to go that route. Apprenticeship, useful lower level degrees, adult continual education... Sure, you can do an Associate degree in the US, but its barely worth the paper its printed on. And even if you are successful, no one respects you for it.

So IMO, the first step is to have more _respected_ options. Thats a lot harder though, because it requires a culture shift. Stop making fun of the guy who choose to become a plumber or repair rooftops because he didn't go to MIT. Encourage people with non-academic, yet useful skills. Yeah, they're not going to buy a 5 million dollar penthouse. But they're going to be able to feed their family and save for retirement with money to spare, AND their job is hard to outsource.

Once that happens, then you can start looking at how to elevate the average.

It could be argued that the debt is so high because they didnt do this first.

A lot of issues in the US are not the result of spending too much. Its that they spend at the wrong place. If you end up with millions over millions of uneducated people, you then need safety nets and programs to pick them up, as well as spending millions in law enforcement and all that garbage when crime rate goes up.

Its one of those things where if you don't put the money there, it costs you way more later.

Most of the useful home automation things have "dumb" interfaces. That thermostat is still only playing with the same 4-6 wires as any other thermostat does. If shit happens, I can pull my Nest (its not screwed in, you just hook it up to its base). If the A/C or heat was on when I pulled it out, all I need to do is have the 2 correct wires touch each other to turn it off. Or i can just flick the breaker.

The critical thing is that the "smart" piece be easily replaceable/serviceable. Now an issue with the Nest is that if someone malicious get physical access to it, they can root it and you'll never know any better. I need a way to easily checksum its content. and ideally, everything should be on a chip I can easily replace for cheap.

If I have a fridge thats smart, the "computer" should be replaceable. I should be able to push a physical button in the back and the thing should just pop out so I can replace it/upgrade it without replacing the whole fridge. That also mean we need some kind of standard for that (thermostats are nice because there IS a standard...)

The thing here is you have a chicken and egg situation. For these things to be useful, they need to integrate with each other. A few pieces are useful as is (ie: the wifi thermostats, or the automated blinds), but a lot of them are useless without integration (if I have a fridge keeping track of my groceries, if it doesn't integrate with something that lets me carry that shopping list around, its useless. The smart smoke detectors are worthless if they don't integrate with the alarm system, etc).

So stuff has to be built to hit a point where there's enough pieces available, and that are proven to work well, to do something meaningful.

So the only reasonable thing to do is to push them out to early adopters to play with as guinea pigs, get burnt, and repeat until things are solid.

So really, its best feature is its marketing. I have both a macbook and a windows 8 machine... the procedure to setup and use backup is basically the same, using similar terminology.

Plug a device in. Oh look at that, the system asks me if I want to use it for backup. Click yes!

DONE.

My grandma could have done it.

you say that as if the other major operating systems didn't have that feature for years in various form, and as near clones in their latest iterations...

Thats just moving things around. At one point in your program, you'll have to pick which class to instantiate, probably from a Person factory of some kind, that will create a new Student, Teacher or Principal. This may be abstracted away with some magic in the ORM that is loading it from your database, it may be a factory you wrote yourself, but that "switch" will exist somewhere. Maybe you're going to use some kind of reflection to do it without a switch, maybe you'll have a lookup table of types, but somewhere that decision has to be made.

Now, if that decision is made somewhere, the same place could configure the behaviors by composition. So you could, at that point, simply have Persons, and have a constructor or setter method that take a move strategy as an argument and saved as a private member. Then the move method would simply invoke it.

This way, a Person can move in any way they need to, without any tight coupling. Here you only have "move", but there could be countless of things people can do, and putting them in distinct buckets falls apart once your system gets any kind of reasonable complexity.

That is when you see insane inheritance hierarchy that get refactored every other day because people forgot that transfer students and transfer teachers have things in common but someone made them inherit from student instead of a class between person and teacher/student.

Composition, mixin, strategies, and other loose coupling patterns that don't associate actions with "is a" relationships are so, so much more flexible for systems you have to maintain for a significant amount of time... Its kind of ironic that out of all languages, Javascript got it right, and did so by accident.

Now that Uber's there, a lot of people choose not to own cars, or people who used to depend on buses and subways go out to certain places that were not convenient before, more often.

So if it goes away, they'll just go back to their old routine, which is fine. Point is, taxi cabs are NOT worth the trouble. If I have the choice between going to restaurant A by subway, or B by Uber, it may just come down to which restaurant I like most. If my choice is A by subway or B by Taxi, its going to be A, no contest.

You are right about the primary reason for this, but its not the only reason. Medias are regulated in a lot of countries, and regulations are different from one to the other. If they didn't go through the legal red time in a given country, they can't necessarily license it. Sometimes the contracts could simply be tied to some marketing campaign, or licensing is delayed to avoid conflicting with something else.

Sometimes...just sometimes...there's even good reasons for it.

Except the reason people are jump hopping has nothing to do with money. It used to be that way during the dotcom recovery, but today? Its been quite a few years since I honestly heard someone hop for money reason. And yes, there's always the occasional exception... Oracle has a low turnover rate in some of their offices. Mainly because its the only big name company that will hire some of these people, so they don't dare leaving.

But in the bay area? Most people hopping are doing it from startup to startup. Not for money reasons, but because they got bored of their previous job, and because honestly, they can. Lately, its almost a given for a lot of people that they'll hop after 1-3 years, regardless of how things are going, just for some change. Loyalty? Its a lot more personal now. Devs are not loyal to their company, they're loyal to the people they work with. These people hop, they hop with one of them.

Now thats not everyone, so of course you'll find exceptions...but even the best places to work for still see the same turnover rate. Most of the ones with low turnover are the places you DONT want to work at.