No competitor? hmm? Look around a little. Couches with USB ports in the arms, chairs with sound jacks, tables with eletric and ethernet jacks... They're not exactly common, but they're common enough that random high end european furniture stores in the middle of Boston and NYC have those.

Its not exactly the norm by any mean, but they're common enough that you stumble upon them just walking in a store.

No, but a LOT of people go to college without any interest in it, and then just pick a random degree because its what everyone is doing. Then hate it, they do poorly, then they can't find a job, and their life sucks.

They went to college not because they wanted to, but because there is a social stigma that you HAVE to.

I was in highschool back when IT wasn't all that big. My grades in every honor classes were off the chart (ok, not in english obviously), and decided to go in IT...not computer science, IT. I went to tech college, not even university.

Everyone around me were like "WTF! You should be a doctor!!"

Fast forward to today, and googling numbers around, as a lead software engineer at a well known company, I make about as much as a family practitioner. Well under what an average doctor makes overall, but since I do no overtime at all and the atmosphere is really laid back, if I divided yearly salaries per hour worked (doctors are generally overworked), i probably easily beat many doctor's salaries.

And I'm happier than if I had gone into a field I didn't like that everyone was pushing me into doing, just because it "looked better"

This is basically what the article is saying. Do go to college just because thats what everyone is doing.

Flipping burgers with a liberal art degree sucks.

Pork and beef are also prohibited in certain religions. They're still useful and viable for the rest.

Everyone should know at least the basics of what is part of our daily lives.

Everyone should know how to read and write, even if they're not professional authors (and, like me, are pretty bad at it in general)

Everyone should know basic math, even if they never use it, at least to be able to calculate tip at the restaurant and be able to read their tax report.

Everyone should know enough biology to be able to make a basic informed decision when discussing a problem with their doctor or dentist.

Everyone should know at least basic economics and finance, so that they can at least understand the graphs on their 401k.

And.....everyone should know at least the very very very elementary basics of programming, as it is now part of our everyday lives. No need to know python and APIs or how to compile a linux kernel. Know just enough to understand what a conditional and a loop statement is, why software can crash, and why a single programmer cannot write an entire ERP suite in 2 weeks by themselves.

Why does the client side need the VM? It needs access to the VM.

I worked for a ton of companies that virtualized things like IE6 when dealing with legacy garbage. You just click on a link, the application is executed remotely, and on the client all you get is the window (XWindow-style... Windows Server supports that native now. Before that people used Citrix or whatever else they wanted. There was a bunch).

Works quite well too. Its not ideal, but it "works".

At the time people were locked in, there weren't another less proprietary AND more standard browser. People flocked to IE just so they could use basic CSS.

It only works for top 1% hiring companies...the ones that everyone want to work for (sometimes they're mislead to want to, but hey, supply and demand doesn't always involve rational decisions). The kind of company that has to filter out hundreds or thousands of resumes because they're that popular.

If you're not one of those, then it won't work

While that has nothing to do with the original point the person was trying to make, keep in mind MVC is a very specific pattern, and the fact you have a model, a view and a controller is only a part of it. How you use them is also part of the pattern.

You can have a model, a view, and a "controller" and end up with a MVP, an MVVM, or a variety of other patterns that have these 3 components in one form or another.

There's productivity apps though. You SHOULD be able to find almost anything you need for all iOS, Android and Windows Phone at this point, but the quality differs widely.

On tablets, you have Penultimate for iOS for example. I'm an android user. We have semi-equivalent apps, but none are as good.

Exchange support: On Android, the best one is Touchdown. It works, but it looks like crap, and drains battery like crazy. The Windows Phone support is better (amusingly enough, not as good as Windows Mobile was though).

For scanning documents when i dont have a scanner handy, I use CamScanner. Windows Phone has similar applications, but none are as good. I don't know if iOS has better or not. Probably does.

And for games (do keep in mind that the vast majority of people with smartphones use them outside of work), iOS is king, as virtually all games available for other platforms will have an iOS implementation, but the other way around is often not true. All platforms have Angry Birds, but.....ugh.

Thats just a few examples, but its really important: you have the basics on all platforms, but the "bests" are often not cross platform.

You must not have been a gamer ~30 years ago. In the age of coleco/atari/NES, while it was possible to pirate games, realistically most people didn't. Little kids who wanted a game that their parents wouldn't get them for their birthday did anything they could to round up the cash... Save up gift money, distribute the newspaper (That was the most common one in my area at least), sell off old toys, babysit...

Then they'd buy it.

Today those same kids generally will pirate it, then do the same as above to buy some overly expensive shoes or something.

Except that anyone using whatever is baked in their language of choice these days is already deriving a key from the salt then going from there. My cryptography knowledge is a little rusty, but I fail to see what a separate library can do beyond that?

Besides, if the machines got hosed to the point they could get the salts, they can get the secret from which keys are being derived and go from there anyway.

Who said it was a custom hash/salt scheme? Pretty much all mainstream languages used to make web apps with have built in, very secure ways to create strong hash/salts that are virtually impossible to break.

Most users use the same fucking password for everything!

To be fair, its almost unreasonable to ask an average non-techy user to do anything else. Passwords are simply a flawed system.

I use keypass to autogenerate different passwords and save them in its database. That works great, for someone who takes security a little more at heart. I end up having to use its very convenient search feature to find my passwords, because at this point I have something like 50-80 of them.

Now, anyone who isn't a sophisticated enough user won't do that. You want them to learn 50+ totally distinct passwords? Or you want them to learn a little tricky or mnemonic when picking passwords so they have a way to reverse them from whatever website they're used on while being different?

Yeah, most users will seriously prefer dealing with identity theft than with that at the end of the day. Flawed system is flawed.

As you said, kiosk...conference rooms, presentations, monitors embedded in a desk, designer-style monitor stands (the low, bent ones that let you look at the monitor from overhead), to quickly check your emails in the morning without sitting down...

Basically, to recycle older monitors and give them new purpose, or any situation where touch would be nice, but you wouldnt be willing to pay more than 10 bucks for it. There's a lot of these scenarios.

Wasn't that exactly what XHTML was supposed to become?