phones. And they tend to be cheap. eBay is your friend.

I was encouraged by multiple counselors at both the high school and university level to go into literature. Their answer to your question was, "The great thing about a degree in literature is that you can do literally anything with it. It's great preparation for a law degree, so you could become a judge, or to teach, so you could become a professor. And since it teaches critical thinking skills, grad schools will be pursuing students like you if you want to go into math or physics or any other kind of science; you'll have a strong advantage because you'll be better-rounded with more thinking skills. It's the most flexible degree there is."

I didn't take them up on their advice, but I sure got a lot of it, and I'm sure other kids did as well.

You are going to their house and doing what you do, and they're just making note of what you did in their living room.

departments. I used to be a prof at a large university. One of the reasons I left academics was that I got tired of fighting the battle about textbooks in courses that I was required to teach (faculty divvied up the 100/200 courses, everyone had to do some).

I started out as a starry-eyed young prof trying to help my students by putting alternate sources of inexpensive textbooks on syllabi. We're talking textbooks at $2 vs. $120 on the used market. Saving students a lot of dough. But that go no-noed.

So I pulled it off the syllabus and started just making verbal announcements. That also got no-noed.

So I started just requiring an office hours visit first week of semester and telling students in office hours. That also got no-noed.

So I stopped requiring the textbook and sent them to the library for optional textbook reading. That also got no-noed.

I had serious ethical qualms about forcing students—about half of whom really oughtn't find a way to "afford" it—to spend $hundreds on things that were $nearly free and being forbidden from making it $totally free by just sending them to the library.

Everyone must buy the book, I was told. There's departmental and institutional revenue at stake, I was told. Nevermind that first-year college students from underprivileged backgrounds whose entire extended families were pulling together to help them through were dropping $1k a semester on $50-75 worth of books from used booksellers.

It's just one factor in the decisions that led me out of academics, but it's a very concrete one. It felt like a slimy industry after a while, more about conning money out of people (students, taxpayers, donors and endowers) than caring about the topics at hand.

But yeah, don't blame the profs.

that there aren't fundamental differences between men and women and what they *like to do* with their time.

If you want to create a completely fair, team-oriented place to work where nobody falls through the cracks, hire a woman.

If you want to build a kick-ass video gaming rig from the ground up in the middle of a hot warzone, hire a man. The woman will tell you that if you want to do this, your priorities are misplaced, and will focus on saving lives, not optimizing gameplay between bullets.

Guess what? Tech on the open market basically amounts to building kick-ass video gaming rigs in the middle of a warzone.

The basic note-taking functionality has gone backward. Harder to make notes, harder to find notes, harder to scroll through and read notes, harder to export notes.

A lot of other stuff that I don't care about has been added. Apparently a lot of people don't care about it.

You have a captive audience of millions with their data in your platform. Hard to screw that up, but Evernote did, and they continue to get worse.

because I want so badly to love it.

In 2008, it was still a killer app. In 2018, it has squandered its position.

The app has gained zero new killer functionality, which itself isn't disqualifying, but the UI hasn't even bothered to remain stagnant—it's gone backward. Evernote is far less usable and user-friendly for its core purposes than it was back when I started using it. Compare:

https://mediafrenzy.files.word...
https://i0.wp.com/thenerdystud...

I hate all the wasted screen real estate. The lock-in to the same idiosyncratic and clashing colors. The way in which basic information organization have been buried in favor of a "just use the search box" mentality, requiring extra clicks for anything. The fact that data is incredibly difficult to get out in bulk (you can export it to a kind of soup that can be sorted out if you're willing to spent a month of your time doing development on your own). It used to be a pleasure to use, for what it was. Now it just sucks.

Even all of this would have been okay if basic features hadn't been gradually migrating behind a paywall even as prices continued to increase—but both things are true.

In short, Evernote started way ahead as a product that was great relative to everything else and very useful. It just needed some polish and iteration. Not only did they stagnate, they went backward, while jacking up the price. The one and only reason to stick with Evernote now is that it supports the five major platforms—Browser, Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS—and syncs between them relatively seamlessly.

Evernote reminds me in a lot of ways of Livescribe. A company with a great idea out the gate that then stumbled and ran in reverse, creating the impression that they hold their most committed users in deep contempt. Which is fitting, because the two partnered together for some time, so they deserve each other. Most of all, Evernote, like Livescribe, is a company that in no way needs—for the functionality that they ought to deliver—the corporate bloat they seem to have developed.

The moment something else comes along that (1) creates rich notes and (2) can sync to always-up-to-date status on all of the platforms mentioned above, I'll jump ship right away. I'll even pay more, just to spite Evernote for holding my data (practically speaking) hostage.

I work remotely for a company that works with large volumes of data. I routinely have to pass gigabytes back and forth—and having gigabit fiber enables me to do that very quickly, in just a few minutes, rather than having to plan ahead for hours of transfer time.

As far as the interface goes—the fiber.google.com interface is very simple BUT the router itself has a web-based interface on its internal IP address. At least mine does. Did you check yours while you had the service?

and I've posted this on Slashdot before, but I'll post it again.

This article is spot on.

Before Google Fiber came to town, getting and using broadband in this area was painful. It was the "telephone company utility" model. Everything had to be done by phone, with tons of time on hold. Installation was workmen with a clipboard, scheduled weeks out. You'd get 5mbps for $$ or 10mbps for $$$ or 50mbps for $$$$, no higher tier than 50mbps without paying for "business service" at the level of $500-$1k monthly. And those were your choices from every carrier. You never reached more than 25-40% of advertised speed up or down. Service was terrible and unreliable and if there was an outage you could be offline for weeks waiting for a service appointment. Account changes or cancellations were a by-telephone nightmare that were virtually destined to go wrong each time. And technical questions about configuration, blocked ports, etc.? Good luck. It was all a black box to the customer service lines. Far easier to figure such things out empirically yourself.

Then, Google Fiber came to down. Installations scheduled online. Accounts administered online, everything from payment to plan selection and changes. Transparency in equipment and documentation. And either 5mbps for FREE, 100mbps for $ or 1gb for $$, what had previously been the 5 or 10mbps cost with other carriers. Installations done in just days, rather than weeks out, by friendly people in branded vans. You get 100% of advertised speed, 24 hours a day, sustained. Outages are virtually unheard of, but if a tree does come down and knock out a line, it's fixed in a couple hours, not weeks. A walk-in Google Fiber store where you can actually talk tech details and they understand everything you're saying. It was like we jumped from 1995 to the present in a single month.

And within weeks, every other carrier had boosted their minimum residential offering to 50mbps and were suddenly offering and deploying gigabit residential fast as they possibly could, at (interestingly enough) exactly the same price as Google. Service improved drastically and they suddenly started to talk tech in their ads.

It does basically feel like Google was tired of seeing their growth limited by a bunch of small timers trying to pick the pockets of the public, so they came in and said "OYA? We're Google. FU." and got everyone gigabit. And for the other carriers it became a case of "either play fair or get fucked." So they played fair and then Google was happy to back off. If they hadn't, I wonder if Google would have continued and just put them all out of business. My impression is that Google doesn't necessarily want to be in the broadband business, but that they want to make damn sure the public has access to legitimate contemporary "broadband" pipes.

I understand that Google has an interest in this, but I don't mind at all. I'm happy to let Google profit if I get rock-solid up/down gigabit fiber with online administration for what was previously the cost of flaky 10 megabit down/768k up copper administered by an idiot bureaucracy behind a 2 hour telephone wait.

The value just isn't there. Instead, I have always bought phones one or two years behind the retail cycle, when they start to come off contract and be unlocked. You can have last year's flagship, which is usually still pretty damned good, for pennies on the dollar—under $200 for the phone with just a year of use on it, then a SIM (or before that, phoning in the numbers from the beneath the battery to the carrier) plan for cheap.

Carriers like TPO and Net10 in the US offer plans with a few gigs of data and unlimited everything else for just $25-$35 a month right now. Extra gigs run $10 a gig or so, refillable anytime, and I rarely end up using it.

I would not like to be locked into a contract, nor would I like to be limited in when I can upgrade or replace if something goes wrong.

Of course, this doesn't work so well with Apple phones, which hold their value too well. Which is one of the many reasons I don't use iOS. (The other being because I really don't like the OS experience at all, though I do like some of the apps better than the Android equivalents—but not $1k for a phone better).

Listen, going to a movie is *going*.

As in, effort. Yes, money, but also time.

- You have to drive or take a train
- You have to stay out late if you're a working person
- You have to commit 1.5-2.5 hours
- You have to deal with significantly increased costs for the comforts of refreshments, even a simple drink if you get thirsty
- It's actually quite a pain in the ass
- And of course the ticket cost

With TV?

- "Can't find anything good to watch" means a waste of a few minutes at most
- There's no transit time or other significant preparation
- You can pause at any time and return; there is no set time commitment
- Food and drink = cheap
- You can multi-task with that time
- If you "abort" a show, you can immediately do something else, and you've not lost an investment of time, money, whatever

Basically, you're investing a lot (time, money, effort, lost convenience) to go see a movie. So you want to know if it's going to suck so that you're not stuck wasting all of that investment or having to sit through something you don't enjoy just so you *don't* waste all of that investment.

In combined costs if you have, say, a spouse and a kid and the kid gets thirsty or wants a snack, it's going to cost something like $50-$60 minimum, more if you have to pay to park, which is, like, half a year of Netflix.

People don't care about TV ratings but they do care about movie ratings for the same reason they don't bother to research pencils before they buy a 10-pack at the store but they do research fountain pens before they buy one. Anytime something costs an order of magnitude more, and involves significant additional investments beyond that, people are going to want value for money.

Make new releases $1.00 PPV and show them via streaming in living rooms and people will stop caring about reviews for movies, too.

People have been saying "programming should be easier" forever.

Many have tried, all have failed.

And the task keeps getting bigger because the uses and requirements keep expanding. From one simple input (keyboard) from one source (user) to a variable domain of many complex inputs from many sources. From one simple output (answer) to a variable domain of many complex outputs to many destinations. And the core tasks, too, aside from input and output, are far more complex than they were.

If you have one hex nut to loosen and tighten, you can make a simple wrench to do it. If you have to be able to work on an infinite number fasteners—hex nuts, machine screws, torx screws, allen bolts, grommets, flip latches, tumbler locks, screw-down locks, snap fittings, adhesive strips, magnetic plates, snap rings, cotter pins, etc. and the domain of tasks goes from loosen and tighten to loosen, tighten, open, close, diverge, converge, adjust left, adjust right, increase weight, decrease weight, etc. and the number of possible surfaces increases from two adjoined flat surfaces to be bolted together to N surfaces of M possible shapes... Well, you're going to end up with a shed full of tools, each one of them reliant on a different kind of knowledge and experience.

Life is complicated. Programming is approaching use in virtually every domain of life. Ergo, programming will be complicated.

You want programming to be simple, you may as well start off by trying to make life simple—that's the root of the problem.

trying to help people who'd bought them to make use of them. One each from Acer, Lenovo, and HP.

Things:

1) The screens are absolute crap, hard to look at. They remind me of the very first active matrix color LCD panels. Fuzzy, sparkly, unclear, low-viewing-angle, low-contrast terrible.

2) You can do three things with them, as far as I can tell. Web, email, and Google Docs. Need to open a file someone sent you? Good luck. Need to print it out? Good luck. Need to share the things that you create with someone else who's not using a Chromebook and Google's ecosystem? Good luck.

3) Mac OS does web apps better, ironically. The web apps in Chrome OS are fragile. Renderbugs, whyd-it-crashes, oh-no-a-glitches galore.

4) And there aren't very many apps of any kind that are useful in any way. As I said, basically web, email, and Google Docs.

I think you get more apps, and better mileage, and better portability, and better battery life, and a better screen, and a better experience overall, out of an Android tablet.

There is a big difference between "I don't support the racist bits" and "erase all of that from history."

The former is perfectly justifiable. The latter deserves the guillotine.

"rightly"

There is no reason to block Mark Twain.

Listen here, I"m no right-winger, but facts are FACTS:

1) People were racist in the past
2) a lot of people
3) and they tortured and they maimed and they killed and they raped
4) and they wrote fiction, nonfiction, history, and philosophy about it

This is our inheritance as human beings. Any notion of "rightly blocking" racism, violence, sexism, etc. is nothing more or less than book burning.

If a politician today says something racist, by all means don't vote for them.

But if Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson says something racist, and you decide that this means that we have to erase Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson from history, all I have to say is: human history belongs to all of us, and it's both unpleasant and educational. So a big fuck you to the book burners.