nrivadeneira

It's worth mentioning since it's integrated. It's the same reason something like Pandora integration would be worth mentioning despite the fact that many people could use Pandora with an FM tuner or 3.5mm to aux input (not to say the Audi A8L has Pandora).

Hint: One of those services has movies and disc mailings.

Bonus Hint: One of those services was released to game consoles and Roku in 2008 while the other was added late 2010, early 2011.

It may be a convenience that many enjoy, myself included, but I'd argue that plenty of Netflix subscribers would have subscribed anyway even if ads were shown from the start. Personally, I signed up for the convenience of movies, so ads weren't even a consideration. I doubt I'm alone in that respect.

In addition, you can easily get the same ad-free content on iTunes, but I never see it compared as a replacement for Netflix. It's just not as convenient.

Netflix is only barely more convenient than pirating for tech-savvy individuals. I'm willing to bet if you were to ask the average person if they know where to get and how to use torrents, you'd find that pirating is not all that convenient for most.

That's exactly the point - sometimes it is about being cool and not about being really useful to a ton of people, evidenced by Facebook's early days.

Advertisements are not the reason they're in decline. People don't sign up for Netflix because it's ad-free, they sign-up for convenience.

The point is that Facebook originally gained it's popularity because it was a "cool hangout". Like the author, I was in college when Facebook first came out. Being restricted to college kids, it wasn't about "being really useful to a ton of people". They developed their product in exactly the way you say they shouldn't.

Of course, that was a long time ago, so this article is obviously far too late. That all changed the day they allowed non-college-students in.

I don't see how fleeing tyranny is more American than standing and fighting it.

If he was a true patriot, he'd have stood his ground and gone to trial. It doesn't seem very American to me to flee the country to avoid the repercussions of breaking the law. Mind you, I support him releasing this information.

Do you always consider people with differing opinions "mindless"?

Everyone has different levels of privacy needs. I imagine you are OK with people seeing your face, knowing your name, or generally overhearing your conversations on the street. This is simply a different level of openness than being OK with people knowing what websites you visit or hearing your telephone conversations remotely.

In the same way that I don't care if some random guy at a coffee shop sees me visiting HackerNews or watching cat videos, I don't really care if the government sees it either. How does that make me mindless?

Just tried accessing this via the HN link but it was dead. It seems this is the new location of the post:

http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/

Going to add that I love the new compose. What makes you say that it's obnoxious?

I think this point isn't made enough. Everyone wants to "make a dent in the universe" and excelling for the simple sake of excelling is almost looked down upon. There's something to be said about the enjoying the process - getting enjoyment out of working to be better. Money is just one of many measurements of "better". I want to make money because I enjoy climbing the god damned mountain.

It's true that we can't speak on how pricing will work for Xbox One games, but we can certainly comment on consumer opinion regarding the inability to lend games out on Xbox One vs. Steam.

I believe this is the real reason that Steam doesn't get flak for it. If Xbox One games saw the same price fluctuations that Steam games do, I don't think anyone would care about lending games out.

Many times with startups, "having to wait" can be equivalent to "can't". Startups have limited runway and the time it takes to hire that A player may just extend past the end of that runway.

At the bottom he mentions that he'd gotten some help from friends, however a lot of this is knowledge gained over time as an engineer and wisdom passed on from more senior engineers. Some engineers have their own metalworking equipment at home, but it's also possible he did this at his place of employment.

That limit seems to have been removed. In fact, you can upload 200mb for a single photo (with no mention of upload rate limits).

To use some poker wisdom, don't get pot-committed. The time you've invested thus far is a sunk cost that you're not getting back regardless of how much longer you stay on. At this point in time you need to assess the probability of future success and base your decision to stay purely on that. If you believe there is no benefit to be had by staying there, you need to get out now before you incur more 'losses'.

"they are otherwise useless" That's simply not the case for the most common mechanical components or engineering constructions. Bridges are fully functional without software. The same goes for buildings (and the majority of components that make up a building including stairs, doors, windows, walls, floors, thermostats, lighting, etc.). Even cars, which have software integrated to regulate many functions are still driven primarily by basic mechanical functions (ignition, combustion, power transmission, suspension, power generation via alternator, etc.).

At a more fundamental level, all components related to mechanical advantage that are so prevalent in our lives, yet mostly forgotten (gears, screws, levers, pulleys, wedges, etc.) are not being replaced by microcontrollers or actuators. You'd be hard pressed to find a better software+electronic component solution to solve the problem that the screw solves.

I assure you, I love software far more than I've ever loved mechanical engineering, but it's naive to think that it will overtake (or even come close to being more critical than) fundamental mechanics. Aside from information and communication, software only serves as a proxy for control over our physical world. I guarantee you that if you were to take a look around, the amount of pure "stuff" derived from basic engineering greatly dwarfs that derived from software.

While we could live in a shittier version of our world without software, we couldn't live in a world without traditional engineering.

You make an excellent point. Though I think that the 'responsibility of an engineer' that is discussed in regards to the Iron Ring relates to it. It's up to the engineer to ensure that his design is sound regardless of any other factors.

"As far as levers and bolts go, a lot of them have sensors monitored by software for stress."

That's in the far minority of situations. As part of my ME curriculum, I've worked with these types of sensors. It's very rare you'll find them monitoring bolts and levers.

It's true that software is extremely pervasive, however I believe you're overestimating the critical nature of it in most applications. Cars, bridges, buildings: Most critical failure points are mechanical. There's certainly a lot of software the goes into regulating a car, but if there's a failure in either the software or mechanics of the car, mechanical failure will most often be the more serious issue.

True, but in the case of startups with limited dev resources, bloat adds to development and maintenance cost. Poor management of resources like that could mean trouble for a startup.

I agree that there is a lot of arrogance in engineering (I can't say I'm innocent either). I think the big difference is that the term "engineer" gets thrown around in software way more than it does in traditional engineering disciplines. The result is that the term "engineer" gets diluted for both software engineers and traditional engineers. That sort of dilution is not common in fields such as mechanical or biomedical engineering.

Having picked up electronics in your spare time, I doubt you'd go around calling yourself an electrical engineer. On the flip side, it happens all the time where self-taught programmers will call themselves software engineers.

Finally, I don't see how you can disagree that software failures don't often result in death. I never said they "never" result in death. It's just that software applications that have life-threatening consequences aren't nearly as common as in traditional engineering. See: cars, bridges, building structure, ropes, pulleys, levers, bolts etc. I'd argue these are more commonplace than missile guidance systems.

I graduated with an ME degree and I now work as a software developer. I find that the traditional engineering coursework is more difficult than what I find with regards to CS. It's pretty easy to become a self-taught developer and even go through the online courses coming from MIT, etc. It's significantly more difficult to do the same for traditional engineering.

In addition, as someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments, the cost of failure in software doesn't often result in death.

"One other interesting dynamic: sales teams always think it's better to add things than to remove things (after all, you can't sell the things you remove), which I now realize is partially the reason many enterprise software packages feel "bloated" over time."

I'm experiencing exactly this. It's like they want to have every feature to be able to whip out for every type of customer. They dread the circumstance where they have to say "Sorry, we don't do that."

Generally I'd agree with you, but not in this case. In the case of something like Retina screens, I don't think there's any good reason to name something that is, as far as I know, simply a step up in a metric that is already commonly measured and unnamed.

"Flat design" and "responsive design" (probably better named "responsive functionality") are specifically different in numerous ways than other design trends and consistent within the trend itself. Naming the trends doesn't have to equate to a 'movement'. However, it does provide a much easier way to refer to and discuss them.

I'll have to add in my vote for the Zenbook Prime UX32VD. I use it as my work laptop and it's awesome. Go for the UX32VD over the UX31A. The UX32VD comes with a 24gb SSD (which I use for my Ubuntu install) and a 500gb HDD (used for a Windows 7 install and the /home directory of my linux install). The benefit is that you can easily swap out the HDD for a SSD and you can also upgrade the RAM to 10gb. The UX31A and Macbook Air both have soldered, non-upgradeable RAM.

I've heard people mention the fan noise but I honestly don't notice it. The one thing I'll say isn't that great is battery life. Due to the discrete GPU, I get about 3 hours of battery life. There are some things you can do to turn off the GPU, such as installing Bumblebee.

Check this out: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AsusZenbookPrime