with a small perl script.

Really, because I just make my XCode panel as big as which ever screen I'm using. I've not really seen much of advantage of going into "full screen mode" as far as screen real estate is concerned vs just dragging the corner and making the panel bigger.

And I have a 15" MBP with a 27" Acer monitor next to it connected via thunderbolt to HDMI adaptor. The difference in screen real estate on the 27" monitor is barely noticeable vs the enlarged panel to me. Then I keep Mail and iMessage up on the 15" screen.

Guess to each their own...

And it also opens up opportunity. I have one friend who elected to do Amazon self-publishing. Ended up on Good Reads and got some glowing reviews, about 30 last I checked, and has sold 6k of his first book. He just released his second book and a collection of short stories and talking with him over memorial day he's made about $16k so far this year. Much better than the $5,000 advance the publisher offered and he would have had to do his own marketing anyway. That doesn't sound like much, but his wife makes $30k a year and he makes around $50k. An extra $16k with two young kids makes a difference.

This is what a friend of mine is doing. He's released 3 books and a collection of short stories ranging in price from $.99 - $2.99. He's sold about 8K copies thus far this year. When I asked him about it he said if he had accepted an advance from a publisher, about $3,500 since he was a new author, he'd still have to do all the marketing and promotion work himself. He figured if that was the case he'd rather do it all himself and cut out the publisher entirely. As he said the 70% Amazon gives him is a better deal.

An an extra $16k in his pocket really helps his family as that's about half what his wife earns per year. He enjoys writing and is hoping in a couple years that his wife will be able to afford to stay home with the kids. Which is rather important because one has special needs.

Case in point, this past week my business partner has spent roughly 20 hours upgrading to windows 8 and trying to get Office 2013 to work on her PC. That's 20 hours not spent working on client projects. And we have projects to work on so Windows 8 + Office 2013 have cost us $2000. Meanwhile this week I've worked 20+ hours on projects on my Mac. Just as I have for 10 years now. Yes I know I pay premium upfront for Apple products, but they've stayed out of my way and let me get work done.

We need a new +1 Scary for comments around here.

Really? I thought they used the immense power of the cluster that powers this site to mine bitcoins.

My dad would order disks and little booklets from computer shopper for me that would contain BASIC programs. Plus he taught me what he knew from work, although I think he used a language called JCL there in the limited capacities his job required.

Then I picked up Perl in middle and high school.

The Apple App Store is not immune to malware, but does offer some level of protection and once a threat is spotted in the wild corrective action can be taken by the platform. I know a lot of people who went to droid and bragged about how "open" the platform was and not limited to any one store and that it was 1985 with Windows vs Mac again only this time with Android playing the Windows role. And I agreed with them. Android will become the windows of mobile devices. Complete with the viruses and malware windows users have come to know and love.

I still love BSD. 15 years ago FreeBSD in particular had some advantages with its ports system over linux. It was also in that time that FreeBSD often time ran software faster using its linux emulation mode than linux itself back then. We still use FreeBSD to this day running many of our core web servers & PostgreSQL database cluster. The argument could be made today that Linux would be better suited for the task as it's far more common and you can find enterprise support. But frankly, our system ain't broke. It does its job, doesn't get in our way, and we use it in a few area like our network switches & routers are Juniper and we're using FreeNAS for our storage area.

Not sure about shops, but you can buy discs from several online vendors if you don't have the bandwidth to download: http://www.netbsd.org/sites/cdroms.html

Furthermore, I don't really see the difference between delivery via streaming packets vs delivery via post of a physical item from a logical viewpoint.

Now I only have to be fluent in Javascript and leave Klingon to Bing!

Recently I needed to find a plugin for a certain feature and remembered one for FF4 I used a while back. When to down load it on this new computer to find out the developer had stopped updating the plugin. The reason: these frequent updates didn't leave him enough time to continuously test and make sure it still worked with each version every few weeks. I searched for similar plugins and everyone I saw the author pretty much said the same thing. They had all discontinued development for FireFox because the release cycle was too quick.

Instead I ended up finding a plugin for Chrome and went with it. Frankly other than to test against FF and certain debugging. I don't use it that much anymore.

As a 4g hotspot user let me tell you that even now the limiting factor for me is only the allowed bandwidth on my plan (12GB per month). The 4G speed is plenty fast to do pretty much all the work I need and will even run games if they aren't absolutely latency dependent (basically anything but FPS). Even with four or five devices connected 4G is fast enough for most business uses and I would say for most people's internet use. In fact oftentimes the limits on the download speed is the server on the other side.

I have the hotspot to connect my WiFi tablet and laptop when I'm out on the road or in meetings, especially meetings where the client has a secured wifi and either doesn't know the password or can't grant guest access, etc..

I mean hell, we have a 100MB/s line into our office and we are only tapping a fraction of that on a daily basis.

So 1Gb/s sounds cool, but device and access speed now isn't my problem. Bandwidth cap is the problem.

I played a couple MMO's, BSGO during it's open beta phase when it was really fun, and STO until it got grindy. In the case of both games I could grind a couple hours a week and then earn enough resources to do what I wanted. Well when that ended I ironically went back to playing Battlefied 3 because if I took off two months and then picked it up for an hour, I wasn't out that much. It seemed like in the other games if I took time off and came back you were so far "behind" it would be an endless grind trying to catch up.

What got me more than anything in STO was the new starbase system and the fact you needed a guild/fleet about twice to three times our size to really complete it in any decent amount of time. And we had a fun group of about 10 - 15 active players. Trying to expand that beyond 15 started to cause problems. I know STO has a new expansion coming out with the new movie and I looked at it and pretty much went "meh".