single-core-hogging
I don't see how that needs to be the case. Everything except IE pre-10 supports Web Workers. Firefox is moving toward the process-per-tab model popularized by Chrome, and the refactoring project is codenamed Electrolysis.
Those "retailer-specific" cards that "don't charge" are the ones I mentioned that used to GIVE you something.
Target gift cards give 5% off. (But so do Target credit cards.)
When gift cards first came out, they used to offer something extra, for your trouble. That something extra was a tip-of-the-icebergian fraction of what they were gaining from the transaction. Now we are all so accepting of, and enamoured with, gifting hunks of plastic that they charge...up to $10...for a "gift" charge card.
For one thing, these new cards with a fee run on the credit card network and can be used at any business that takes credit cards. Retailer-specific gift cards, such as Walmart cards, Target cards, Google Play cards, and the like, still have no transaction fee for a couple reasons. First, the retailer doesn't have to pay a transaction fee every time a shopper uses the gift card, especially when it requires store gift cards to be purchased with cash or EFTPOS (PIN debit), which has a much lower swipe fee than a credit card. Second, the retailer is assured of a return visit and earns interest on the stored value.
has shipping gotten more expensive or are people ordering more stuff?
Both. As wages and fuel prices increase, shipping costs increase. (Much of this ultimately results from cost-push when the U.S. minimum wage and other wages tied to it rise.) And people have been ordering so much stuff from online stores in general that in the fourth quarter of 2013, parcel volume exceeded even UPS's reserve capacity.
Even the cheapest desktop is capable of running a USENET server that could handle a full feed of every text-based newsgroup on the planet. (At its 90s zenith, USENET's text groups were a few gigabytes of transfer per day.)
Unless your satellite, cellular, or Iowa DSL ISP gives you only single-digit gigabytes of transfer per month.
When every ISP had its own NNTP server
I'm guessing there wasn't quite as much CYA mentality as it is now. The problem with edge storage of user-generated content is that ISPs don't want the liability of storing warez and CP on their servers. That or it just became unprofitable to pay an employee to run an NNTP server on behalf of users who aren't paying extra for the NNTP server. This raises the original question: So what business model should an ISP use to cover the IT and legal cost of running a server that caches user-generated content at the edge?
[Web CDNs have tended] to forget about the original lessons of USENET, and to reinvent it, poorly.
A CDN hosts only those files that a subscriber offers, and the CDN can terminate a customer's service if the CDN feels that the customer's actions have created an unacceptable liability risk.
If a platform is sufficiently different from the other platforms then it ought to have programs rewritten for it (because they'll be different and therefore not repeated)
How are you defining "different" in light of the principle of separation of data from its presentation? Desktop, mobile, and web platforms are all equivalent to the same linear bounded automaton and in theory should work with the same data model. In this respect, no computer "is sufficiently different". True, the view should be rewritten to take advantage of each platform's strengths. But because splitting an application such that the model runs on a server and the view on the client precludes offline operation, a copy of at least part of the model has to run on the client.
if it is not sufficiently different from other platforms than it doesn't need to exist (in fact, the platform developers themselves violated the DRY principle)
Unfortunately, in the real world, platforms become popular among users despite having violated DRY for business reasons.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
