arien

Perhaps that is already happening, with a select few manufacturers. But consider that many marketplace sellers are third parties (e.g. an electronics shop). Or other manufacturers with different costs (many factors affect this... location, workforce..). What happens with these?

I do wonder if Amazon are making any kind of profit on these items. With their long term strategy they can very well afford to make a loss just to undercut the competition and put their products out there, make a name.

Lots of those are manufactured by the same companies that make the branded ones. So they can still get their cut.

This. I usually make a list of things I know I want in a job and use those few "ask me anything" minutes to make sure a company ticks all these boxes (or as many as possible).

I mean, if we're lucky enough to work in a sector with lots of offers available, better make the best of it by finding a place we truly enjoy.

Maybe it ends up being one that pays you a bit less but has an amazing crew or great benefits or work/life balance. Find out what matters the most to you and make sure you get an acceptable answer (from several sources if possible) before committing to a company.

Exactly, I do agree with what you said.

But, this is true whether you commit a few irrelevant lines manually or automatically. So if you're going to do it just for the sake of showing off, at least make it efficient, no? :P

But in this particular case, doing cool stuff is the actual reward of computer science. In other words, it's the endless sea of things you can achieve through it, not the fact that you can be cool while doing it :)

Or a little cronjob that commits harmless changes later in the week? :P

I don't care about the contribution streak, but do have friends who comment on theirs on Twitter now and then. I suppose it's just another thing to be proud of...

I think it made for a very strong and touching point when Nadella said they want technology to bring the best of people, not the worst. So they were able to use it in a way, even if it didn't go exactly as planned.

Well, it's fun nowadays... Before 2008 the fun entries were still novelty rather than the norm (it had pretty much been only Lordi until then - and I would consider them awesome rather than fun :)).

Here's a entertaining/embarrassing story from Spain, related to this.

A few years ago (2008), the Spanish organisers of the Eurovision contest thought it would be a great idea to allow the public to decide who should represent the country in the Eurovision contest. Amongst all songs entered was this silly parody from a comedian, playing a fake musician called Chikilicuatre [0].

So well... After some heavy campaigning/trolling by the TV channel that 'created' this character and song, it came out as the winner. You can imagine the organisers' face after this! But they sullenly accepted it and let him join the contest [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodolfo_Chikilicuatre

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRQhZtbm97I

P.S. They learned their lesson and changed the voting system so it could not be exploited again.

We're most likely to care about what is/feels closer to us, what we can relate to, what we know. You'd feel more if your neighbour whom you greet every day on the foyer died in a car crash that if it were a random person you didn't know at all, right? It's the same principle.

I also think that there is not just empathy at play, but fear. Because the closer an event is to us or the people we know/relate to, the more we realise it could also happen to us.

Just like mobile developers don't bother making Windows Apps because they consider the % of users is too low.

In other words, this manufacturer probably didn't care because the % of users who would use it for something other than the standard config is too small to justify the time spent outside that standard.

I don't think this specific case can be called monopoly. You can install Linux and other stuff fine in most laptops, this looks like an isolated case. I mean, you can even install Ubuntu on a Surface Pro and Surface Book (proprietary MS hardware).

I don't think that would be a smart move. Considering Steam is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) gaming hubs for Windows and other platforms, if they blocked this and somehow forced people to use the Store/XBox instead, it could backfire and lead gamers en masse to the Steam OS and hardware, for example.

These "migrations" of users from one service to another should happen naturally to be successful. Not enforced because of platform restrictions, but based on these new platforms being actually better and more desirable for the end user.

The thing is, you can ask Cortana or Google Now or Siri about the weather, shopping (at least Cortana has reminders, not sure about the other two) and the other things you mention.

So, at the moment it's feels like a redundant device that one has to purchase in order to do the same thing I can do with the phone and/or computer that I already own.

I mean, I find it kind of cool (except for the creepy "I'm listening to what you say", which applies to all assistants anyway), but I find it hard to find its place in the world as things are right now. Perhaps is that I do live in a small studio and my laptop or phone or tablet are always at hand.

Almost. More specifically, we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with a corporation that wants our info to make (more) money. The government option doesn't sound any better, either.

I think they are rather creepy, because it's so obvious there is (or, could be) a hidden agenda.

There are tons of runbooks in DigitalOcean's community, or Webfaction's or whatever else that guide you step by step on how to configure things.

It's a matter of choice, you can spend some extra money and have those things handled for you or you can save it and do it yourself (perhaps just once if you use some config management tool to save your settings).

P.S. It's also worth asking oneself, are these things really required for my small, personal projects? Perhaps they aren't and you can save yourself both time and money.

Exactly, I think DigitalOcean is a great and unexpensive option here. The thing is, you really don't need a whole box for each of your small projects, most likely you will be able to have a few in one box, specially in the beginning with not much traffic.

So, start small and then move onto bigger things if things look promising. Use something like Dokku for easy deployment if Ansible or others are too much work. Every little bit will help when you do need to scale.

I'm a PHP advocate, although I've found Django easy to get up and running for personal web projects. I mostly enjoyed the out of the box admin panel :)

Started dieting near the end of the month and managed to stick to it (3kgs down so far). Will take me about two months to reach my target, but I'm right on track :)

Learnt to read/write around 250 Chinese characters. It was much easier than I thought it would be and quite fun. Walking around Chinatown is a whole different experience, even with the tiny fraction of characters that I know.

Not much on the techie side accomplished this month, but lots of little things started. Looking forward to some results in February.

Congratulations on the marriage :D

Side projects are not mandatory, don't feel bad about not doing any if you can't.

Also, not all learning or your spare time has to be related to programming. Take a hobby that takes your mind off coding completely (I suppose your baby will take care of this :)). You know what they say: "you can't miss something if you never go away". It truly helps to disconnect now and then.

Complex doesn't mean awful. Impractical and slow for our fast-paced life, sure. But the characters are beautiful and the etymology, shape and composition is fascinating.

I'm currently learning Chinese (using Remembering Simplified Hanzi from Heisig [0] for characters and Iknow [1] for words/pronunciation) and I find it a lot easier than I initially thought it would be. It helps a great deal to know that all these characters that look so complicated are mostly made of the same 200-some radicals [2], suddenly it's a lot less daunting and the characters even make sense most of the time. And sure, one might forget characters with lack of use, but the same can be said about other languages. Grammar is a hot topic on the internet, isn't it?

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning...

[1] http://iknow.jp/ (originally for Japanese, but Chinese course is excellent, too)

[2] https://sensiblechinese.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Radic...

Whilst I don't know how's the job market where you are from, 1+ year savings should be more than enough to quit without fear (if it's not then you might want to consider why). You can take a break to regain your love for coding and to think what you want to do next. If you feel restless while on the break you can take courses or do some personal projects. Once you feel more refreshed you can start looking for a job with the right mindset. Don't leave it for the last minute, though.

You can obviously look for another job right now and just swap, that would be fine, too. But consider your current state of mind, which is due to your current job being so horrible. If you interview right now you might be nervous, more focused on getting out of there than finding a job you will really enjoy and thrive in. And that might not end well.

As a disclaimer, I will say that I've been in both situations and the first went better than the second (not that the second was terrible; simply not as good as the first). What I just wrote in the paragraphs above is me looking back and rationalising both outcomes.

Whatever path you choose, good luck!

Is there a list somewhere? I didn't see one in the article.

Vine reviews are marked in green, so you know in advance where you're getting into if you read them. Although most of the ones I've found are actually quite fair and honest and rather in line with the non-Vine ones.

This has been going for years, btw. Why is it now an issue/being brought forward?

I was thinking along the same lines (personal computers = more boys interested in CS). Then I found this in the comments section of the article:

http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n134/im_thatoneguy/CSDegr...

Interesting that there was a dip of both males and females around 1984. So I'm not so sure of the statement above anymore. However, around the year 2000 there's this peak where males do outnumber females by a great deal (even if the number of females joining also increased).

If all these graphs are accurate I'd wonder more about the Y2K rather than 1984...

I don't use PHP on Windows, so I wouldn't know. But looking at php.iis.net and the PHP docs, everything points at IIS7 (or later), so perhaps that's the considered stable/supported version?

I think it's great to point new developers to the right resources. Besides sane frameworks, there are some good starting/best practices guides to help (that are regularly updated), such as:

http://www.phptherightway.com https://phpbestpractices.org

Also, I would encourage them to look at different frameworks, not just one. It'll help if they later move onto other languages, as they'll be already exposed to different ways of doing things :)

This also makes it so that, due to your PoV being validated for (what you think are) bigger numbers, you take on contrary PoVs (less represented in your network) with more confidence, thinking they are wrong and reinforcing your own view. Vicious circle.

I went to the Privacy statement [0], to the "Reasons we share your data" (click on Learn More) and it does not sound scary at all (it' pretty much the same as any internet company that holds customer data). It's very clearly worded and I know exactly how/why my data will be used, so I can decide if I want to go ahead or if I don't.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.asp...

There's also a Data Retention section further down that specifies how long your data is in their servers.

edit: In the top section (Personal Data we collect) it also says: "You have choices about the data we collect. When you are asked to provide personal data, you may decline. But if you choose not to provide data that is necessary to provide a service, you may not be able to use some features or services."

It is a little unsettling when you read these policies.

This is probably for Cortana. She has to understand and process your voice commands, learn your nickname and preferences to be effective. She already works in Windows Phone (very nicely), and I don't think a little phone processor would be enough to power her up. In fact, she doesn't work without an internet connection, at least in WP. What happens is that she takes the information you input to the cloud, processes it there with more than enough horsepower to do her stuff and brings it back to you. I suppose this is how it'll work as well on PCs.

So for all this to work, yes they need to collect our data. Face it, with any smart assistant that we want it's going to be the same, they're all cloud powered. Doesn't Siri also require a internet connection? Probably Alexa too, and any others work exactly the same.

It is a necessary evil to have a useful virtual assistant. Although if we don't want her we can opt out of the MSA account, as someone posted in the comments. Unsure if that removes all the privacy concerns, that would be useful to know. On Windows Phone it did (you can opt out of sending data to MS and Cortana is disabled).

Both things you mention have to do with Google, who happens to own Chrome. Why do you think it is a ridiculous proposition? After all, you gave in and switched to Chrome...

I've actually done the opposite, switched back to Firefox after many years of using Chrome. Was a bit wary, but no issues at all, runs fine in both PC and Mac. Although I don't use hangouts on it.