We have a couple of Wii's at the house [ mostly relegated to Netflix now, but every now and again it is fun to break out the Lego game or Free Running] and a Wii U [ XMAS present with Zombie U ]. The Wii had a lot in its favor, it introduced a compelling new paradigm in its controller and really appealed to families with some very innovative and fun games. It was almost as if the Wii was an appliance more than a gaming console. The WII U on other hand has none of that going for it. For those that have Wii's already, why upgrade unless you want to play specific games? The price point is also expensive for this economy, I think more people are playing games on their smart phones via free or cheap apps or their computers via flash. Another thing that is also telling to me at least is when I visit my local Costco. It used to be that Costco had a reasonable amount of shelf space devoted to gaming hardware and games. Now, it is almost non-existent and as far as I've seen there are is nothing at all for the Wii U.

Sigh, it is just TV/Movies, and Netflix has a decent price, and so far enough content that we find enough stuff to watch, and it works at work and at home, which was why I started when they finally added a streaming service. Heck, we did have the 1 DVD + Streaming and after about 5 DVDs in we had one DVD sit for several months, was glad to finally have a reason to send it back. If Netflix gets too expensive, then fine, there is enough other things to do. There is still hulu and youtube which are supposedly legit and then maybe not watching is a reasonable idea. Netflix is hardly comparable to the cable, electric, cellphone and internet costs...

Hmm...it all makes sense now. When I look at some code that I know I had to have written and say, 'What was I thinking?'. Now I know it must have been sleep-coding and my alter ego must have taken the reigns.

College is expensive, and there is a large question about what a college education is really worth to the students who get it (I'm sure it varies widely dependent upon the college as well as the student). For me it was the experience of going from top of the class (big fish in small pond) to barely middle of the road, learning how to problem solve very difficult problems and dealing with failure more often than not, and also having a strong college placement center with lots of opportunities to interview with many great companies in my field. Right now we are saving money in case my son will want to go to college, but we aren't touching the 529 plans or college only plans so that this money could be used for something else if we/he decides there is something else in his future that is more compelling. I like the statement about not everyone should go to college. It seems in the US we grab onto a whim and ride it till it falters under its own weight, housing and higher education come to mind.

My gripes are less about GUI vs Command Line but more on the designs for these tools. I have used excellent CLIs and terribly horrible CLIs and the same goes for GUIs. If they are done well for their particular purpose then no argument from me, I'll use them. My concern is the # of GUI and CLI interfaces that make me pull my hair out when I go to use them. So often designers and testers are seem to not be testing real world scenarios nor real world scales and some designers seem to not have a clue when a GUI or a CLI is more appropriate. CLIs that are interactive only, don't use return codes effectively, and don't provide easy to understand outputs (where it takes a natural language parser to understand the output for example.) GUIs can offer a whole different set of frustrations.