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?

Yup. And often we have to estimate with very little info. Imagine if you had to do an estimate for software that was as detailed as a professional architect's schematics. That would be waterfall though...which is not as bad as people make it seems for static requirements, but the reality is software requirements evolve way too quickly for that.

I still like the "point" estimation technique. Since it basically boils down to estimating by comparing previous projects that were similar in scope, you end up pretty darn accurate. At my last job where we used it, we ended up accurate at with a 5%~ error margin or so after a few iterations. That's more than good enough.

New job though, we estimate in hours, again. That never works, everything is off, but estimated projects are only allowed to take a certain percentage of your time, and leave everything else as buffer for the unexpected, so it still works out in the end.

No, i'm not. I couldn't stop for the rest of my life. but 10-20 years? probably.

However, this isn't what I mean by equivalent. What I was trying to say, is that you have 1 person, who is beyond imagination, needing to hire thousands of people, all of them expecting a salary that is several times national average, and while not on the same scale, is still away and beyond what is necessary.

Basically, the top 3% arguing with the top 0.1%. For the remaining 97%, its still a freagin joke.

Thats the point i was trying to get across.

Right now Amazon is an extreme heavyweight in retail and multimedia fields, a little like Walmart, Apple (for the later), etc.

These companies have a lot of leverage. For a while, Netflix on the other hand, wasn't doing well at all, losing a lot of content providers under its wings...they ended up on the beggar role, to some extent. If Amazon says "Play by our rules or get out", a lot of companies will play by their rule. If Netflix says "play by our rules or get out", well, we saw what happened. They get out.

Netflix is very likely only trying to check a checkbox on their licensing contract, said contract made with the big movie umbrellas, who themselves represent people who are quite a bit detached from reality and/or sign blanket contracts that don't differentiate between usages. That big chains mean some licensees like Netflix have to fulfill requirements that don't necessarily make sense.

Apple successfully implemented a culture of "upgrading for the sake of upgrading", which Windows wasn't able to be a part of. "Omg, this new device is exactly the same as the previous one, but its BETTER!! BUY BUY BUY!".

So compared to that, Windows is "failing". The sales are exactly as expected between, as you said, machines being powerful "enough" for most users, and desktops/laptops simply not being needed nearly as much anymore in the realm of smartphones and tablets...but for journalists/analysts/investors, thats no longer good enough.

You have to beat sale records after sale records regardless of market conditions. Once people trade in their foodstamps for the next version of Windows the way they do it for an iPhone, people on the internet will say it succeeded. And its totally binary: its either an iphone-like success, or its a failure.

In all seriousness, Windows is definately not going away. It will lose market and mindshare. Competition is good. I don't think it will ever die, at least not in the foreseeable future...it may just go down to a 50%~ marketshare instead of being a near monopoly. Thats still plenty successful, and good for the market. Not good for investors, but..... :)

It may not be dense in the Tokyo sense, but its dense but its probably dense enough to get real internet going by an order of magnitude or two.

The software engineers of the companies talked about in these discussions are not 1%, but they're stretching the definition of "middle class". My wife and I are senior software engineers, and according to any statistics I can find, we're squarely in the top 2-5%, depending on how you look at the data.

Yes, I know the curve there is definitely not linear, but you're still comparing people WAY above average, with other people way above average.

And I've posted this a few time, so someone will probably accuse of having an agenda or something, but whatever: Just look at Kendall square in Cambridge, near Boston. Thats one small area around a subway stop in a metro area, and right around the corner from one of the most famous CS colleges in the world. And yet the amount of positions that are open that will pay 6 figure++ with dream-like benefits and hours is staggering. Its ridiculous honestly. My job is way too fun to be worth nearly 200k total comp, and I sure as hell have a lot less to worry than most of the people who will hire me.

So yes, I'd say, clearly equivalent.