Most code written today doesn't need to be 10-50x faster, so interpreted code is perfectly acceptable. For those few routines that need to be blazingly fast, feel free to optimize them in whatever fashion is appropriate -- whether that's writing them as libraries in real languages or even implementing them in hardware.

It's all a matter of economics. I can hire as many developers as I want at $30 to $50/hr that can code in the interpreted languages and then hire only one or two experts at $100 to $150/hr that know real languages. The interpreted language devs and work on things like data validation and pushing data in and out of a database while the lower level devs work on key proprietary routines.

If your system won't let you plan, get a new system.....or build one ground up if your process is that different from industry standards.

I've been in IT for years (early 90s) and have seen plenty of projects who's goal was to eliminate all of these smaller custom technology processes managed by the business and create or implement more robust tools to replace them. Sometimes those were planning tools, sometimes those were data management tools. But in the end, it was an improvement to their process (at a minimum, centralizing the data so that multiple people could work on it at once) and usually, they got a more robust process. Many of these projects were to "get rid of Excel".

Adobe is plenty big enough for an IT department to take on those exact same projects.

Urban legend......

https://www.wired.com/story/al...

This could not have happened as described. Amazonâ(TM)s Echo requires a "wake word" to activate; the default is âoeAlexa,â but you can also customize it to âoeEcho,â âoeAmazon,â or âoeComputer.â And while they can make calls, an Alexa-powered device can only call another Alexa-powered device. Not only that, but it can only call other Alexa devices that have enabled calling, and have been added to your contact list. Most importantly, these exchanges don't take place over the public switched telephone network, the worldwide network that allows wireless or land phones to actually make calls.

Rolling your own doesn't come with all of the ecosystem that the existing products have. Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD. You'd be hard pressed to build something half as good as the Echo Dot or the Google Home Mini for the same price --- not even counting your time.

The biggest reasons?

The Echo/Google Home work for anyone in the room --- even your parents or guests.

The Echo/Google Home doesn't need to be unlocked or swiped or long-pressed or what have you. I don't want my phone in a normally unlocked state -- even when I'm at home or any other "convenient" location. And "OK, Google" doesn't work unless your phone is unlocked.

Those are the two main reasons that I'm interested in one of those devices vs using my phone.

With Visual Studio Enterprise, you can easily build .NET Core apps with a nice web framework (Angular? React? etc.) in front of it. Of course, January 18th isn't very long......

But really with Community Edition or Visual Studio Code (both free), you can build a nice .NET Core app with a web framework (Angular, React, etc.) in front of it.......and you don't have to worry about your environment expiring.

Well, the good news is I have the LG V20 which has a nice DAC in it.....

I'm listening to podcasts more or less all day while I work. Most bluetooth headphones can't last a full day (a few will). The ones that do, I don't find comfortable.

It would be great if in conjunction with removing the headphone jack they were also releasing a bunch of affordable USB-C headphones. My current phone still supports regular headphones, but it also has USB-C. So every once in a while, I look to see if there are any USB-C headphones I can grab --- because I assume the audio quality will be better. But there's hardly anything on Amazon and what is there is more expensive than similar or better headphones that have the traditional plug.

And it's not much better in the Apple space, either.

You'd be surprised at how many computers you can get physical access to without much effort........some of which control or can get access to more things than you realize.

And yet, it's that very "choice" that prevent Linux from ever winning "the desktop". I've been asking for many years for a good resource for me to refer people looking to play with Linux so they can walk through some sort of "wizard" to help them decide which choices are best for their personal needs. It's yet to exist.

Which distro is best for:
Developers
Video Editing
Games
etc.

And then, which window manager is best for:
etc.

Sure, I could just recommend Ubuntu because it's the easy choice, but maybe Mint or Slack are better for a particular person. Should I point them to Gnome, KDE, or something else? Choice is great when you know how or why to make a certain choice, but when you're bringing someone into the fold at the very beginning, making the wrong choice will run them off making it worse than having never brought them over to begin with.

But if it's a responsive design, they use CSS media queries to set magic screen size breakpoints. So even if you get the desktop version, the CSS hides elements such that they aren't available.....even if you get the desktop version. So if the hidden elements are useful controls, there's no easy way to get to them.....

The biggest problem isn't that things resize or move around. It's when things are hidden on smaller screens. It's usually not clear how to get that functionality back in the smaller footprint.

For instance in Bootstrap, hidden-xs on an info box with a short-cut, but that short-cut doesn't appear on a menu. The only way to get to it might be three clicks through "Item" screens to get to the same stuff. The designers do ok with the VISUAL aspects of responsive design, but they do a poor job of the FUNCTIONAL aspects of responsive design.

Unlock by NFC doesn't mean that's the only way to unlock your phone. I would think having an NFC chip tied to certain devices (like your car mount or your office desk or your bedside table) so that it's always unlocked in those locations......that would be how I would probably use it.
  Or maybe put an NFC chip in your safe / bank deposit box so that in the event of your death, your heirs could access your phone.

And, yes, I know Google supports location based unlock, but I hate that implementation because my phone wakes up in my pocket enough as it is......when it's unlocked, it starts doing stuff (deleting icons, making calls, sending text, etc.). So I pretty much keep my phone locked all the time.
  The other day, even with my phone locked in my pocket, it called 911.

I really need to find a good case with a screen cover.

No kidding. I just used FileZilla to download 250GB of weather data samples from the NOAA web site (ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov). It's spread over close to 100,000 files. I just drug the folders I wanted over to my drive and all of the files got queued up. Left it downloading over night and came back to a completed transfer.

I don't see using any sort of HTTP based solution as being able to do that.

It's public data (and very likely not going to be MITM'ed), so unencrypted FTP was the perfect solution for this.