If they know the concepts behind a relational database, training them to write SQL queries should be easy. If they know the concepts behind the OSI model, training them to use a packet sniffer should be easy. Teaching students narrow topics like SQL queries or how to use a damn sniffer is very limiting, teaching them the theories behind them is useful in many different fields. Refusing to train your employees and expecting them to know very specific topics is very short sighted and limiting. Expecting your employees to know high-level theories and then training them for the specific needs of a particular job gives you much more adaptable employees that will be more beneficial in the long run.

High-level theories and models and UMLs and chess board Java CS projects are most definitely useful to 99.9% of tech employers. High quality employees will apply those concepts to write efficient, maintainable code regardless of the particular language being used on a project at a tech company. Once the students have learned those high-level concepts, learning how to apply them to the syntax of a particular language is the easy part, and the student will also be able to go out an learn multiple other coding languages with ease. Like the file out question you mentioned: they might not know how to do it in a 4-line script, but they will know the general algorithm behind how to do it (or at least they ought to if they've learned high-level theories). Teaching them the syntax for it in a particular scripting language is a minimal investment after they are hired.

Techology evolves, software suites come and go, but the theories will be always be applicable. Unless you want the students to become useless once a particular software suite becomes outdated, you teach the theories that will always be applicable. Tech employers that hire solely based on knowledge of a particular software suite are very short sighted and get what they deserve.

From what I've heard, the companies are legally required to act like separate companies until the merger clears all the regulatory hurdles. So killing this because of the pending merger would look bad from that aspect. IANAL though, so any legal types feel free to correct me.

Really Windows Phone is not a bad OS and if it was not made by Microsoft it would not be soo bashed here.

This is part of it - people associated Microsoft with horrible experiences when locked in to the Windows monopoly. This deters the "just works" folks compared to iOS. Also, it is just as locked down as iOS. This deters the tinkerers and other people likely to develop apps compared to Android. Combine those with the fact that iOS and Android were already pretty entrenched by the time it came out, and no one really had a good reason to choose it over the other two.

Strawman - this isn't about "don't throttle me", this is about "don't throttle me while letting the other guys doing that same thing as me go because they paid you $millions". Capacity is finite (although it would be nice if they put all those profits into improving that), but as long as they don't discriminate based on the source there should be fair competition between startups and entrenched services.

The comment threshold system is fundamentally broken.

This is the part that kills me. As far as I can tell, there is no way to expand/view the parents or children of highly-moderated posts without viewing at -1, at which point the highly-moderated posts get lost in the noise. Lots of "Funny" replies where I can't even open the parent post to get the context of the joke.

Off the top of my head:

• As you mentioned, it's wireless.
• Since it's wireless, it can display even more whateverthefuck on whateverthefuck, as it can receive from all sorts of phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops that don't have HDMI ports. Just need WiFi and an app or program that use this API.
• Since it's wireless, it can display from multiple devices without having to physically connect and disconnect each device
• Since it's wireless, multiple devices can control the display at the same time (YouTube allows multiple devices to queue up videos, for instance).
• In fact, it's not even required that the device that started the video stay in contact. For some streaming, if you start the video with your phone and then need to leave, the video will keep streaming for others even if you take your phone with you.

Basically it's perfect for cord-cutters looking to stream content to their TV, as almost anything you can stream over the web can be redirected to the Chromecast as long as the developers implement the API. And it's pretty cheap too.

You aren't the last person using RSS, but you and all the rest of the people still using RSS are gearheads, and they don't want gearheads. They'd much rather have the type of people that think Twitter can serve the same purpose.

Read the statement from Clem in the summary. Linux Mint updates just as fast as Ubuntu on most things, but has certain updates that could potentially crash otherwise stable machines disabled as a default. If you are really concerned about these to avoid vulnerability, they are easy to enable. Nothing about Linux Mint updates are slow after you enable them.

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu (or Debian). Ubuntu is based on Debian. Gentoo and LFS are an entirely different branch of the distro family tree.

I don't know if this will take off, but if it fails it won't be because it repeated the failure of 3D television. 3D television had one huge drawback that this doesn't: no special glasses needed to watch. Who wants make the centerpeice of the new entertainment system something that takes $150 per person to show off at a Super Bowl party?

I'm reluctant to say current HDTV is good enough, because there was a time I thought SDTV was good enough and HDTV was a waste of money. Now I have two HDTVs and get annoyed when a football game I want to watch is only available in SD. But seeing as most of the early adopters for this type of thing would have relatively recently dropped a lot of money upgrading to pretty good HDTVs that still work great, I'm skeptical it'll take off. But even if the 4K content is limited at first, those 4K early adopters will be able to have large gatherings to show off their purchases.

Google doesn't even try to make money on Android, so that question shows how much you miss the point. Google makes money on web services, and the goal of Android was to have tons of smartphones connected to their services constantly. Android has been very successful at that, along with making sure they aren't beholden to Apple in order to do it. Although I'm sure Google would prefer people used Android over the iPhone, it doesn't really matter to them as long as they are using both platforms to connect to Google services. Platform doesn't matter, profits are still profits.

Potential big difference I see: With Windows 8, you're mostly stuck with the touchscreen interface outside of a few plugins that can hack it into something not completely unusable on desktop. On the other hand, the open source nature of Android makes it possible for OEMs to update the interface to something more like a traditional desktop. We've already multiple OEMs and third-party launchers change the basic interface for Android phones and tablets, it probably wouldn't be that difficult to make a new interface designed for the desktop. Although given the general dislike for OEM skins, it remains to be seen if those interfaces are useful.