It's only "wasted" if you got no value out of it. If you thought it was entertaining (which, presumably people who watched it many times did) then it's no more of a waste than time spent listening to The Beatles or Beethoven, relative merits aside.
Yeah, Apple doesn't really invent stuff, they generally just come out with the same incremental technology improvements as every other company. They're mostly just good at combining components into aesthetically pleasing products, and then claiming to have invented every feature from scratch.
Its like if Mercedes Benz claimed "only we could come up with the idea of a steering wheel, seat belts and a motor" when announcing their new model vehicles every year.
If their performance claims bear out (which, we'll see) I could see this becoming a popular way to deliver apps and games to mobile devices without giving 30% of your income to Apple or whoever.
From a discoverability standpoint they are. There's not really any way to find like-minded people you don't already know and strike up a conversation with e-mail, because everything is private. Which is kind of the definition of "social".
A kids soccer game is different than a competitive league. The point of having your kid join soccer is for them to get exercise, have fun and make friends, not to see what team is the best.
If they were still doing the "everybody plays, everybody gets a participant ribbon" thing on the varsity team, that would be weird.
Even if you don't exercise in your "computer room," it'd be trivially easy to put your laptop or tablet on a chair and do the exercises with it in your field of vision
Yeah, I'm not about to buy Google Glass any time soon, but arguing about it ruining your life is kind of like claiming that having a GPS robs you of all the fun of getting lost and knowing how to fold roadmaps
The thing is that being in the tech industry (I assume based on the fact that you're posting on HN in the middle of the day), you don't really need a smartphone because you're likely at your computer most of the day on most days. I don't have one either, or a tablet because there's no value added for me since I need a "real" computer with a keyboard anyway.
But folks outside the tech industry are dropping PCs completely in favor of these types of consumption-centric devices.
Yeah this is the same thing that happened with the iPad (it's a huge iPhone without the phone part? who would ever buy that?!) and more recently, with Windows 8 (metro is a failure! Microsoft is doomed!).
Google Glass, in its current iteration, will likely never catch on with consumers. But it's a limited availability "preview" for a reason. Something like this is eventually going to get cheap enough and usable enough that consumers will buy it.
I don't understand the point of what he's proposing. Rewriting WordPress as completely as he wants and breaking all existing plugins and themes would surely just result in someone forking the existing code and maintaining a backwards-compatible version.
The ecosystem is the valuable thing, and they'd be insane to throw that away. All the problems he notes are basically just a result of WordPress growing and changing over the decade it's been around, and/or direct results of having originally been written in PHP 4.
Gradual refactoring, as you say, makes more sense. Otherwise you might as well just build an entirely new system from scratch.
A lot of it is due to the fact that it's much easier to sell an end-user on a plugin to their existing site that requires little to no server configuration than a completely separate system.
Whether or not it makes sense as a WordPress add-on is not really taken into account by users, who just see it as easy to set up and manageable from the same dashboard as the rest of their site.
The problem is that this utility defeats the battery life savings which is the main point of the metro "one app at a time" model by breaking the suspend/restore functionality by enabling you to run many concurrent applications.
It's very likely that this utility also breaks some of the sandboxing of metro applications, introducing security vulnerabilities that don't exist in vanilla Windows 8.
That said, this utility looks cool, and I hope Microsoft encourages, rather than discourages, stuff like this going forward. Let the power users customize the environment however they like.
But there are good reasons that they don't enable this out of the box.
Yeah, and other languages certainly don't require a separate server instance per application. I have about 25 .NET apps running on my production server at work and it's humming along quite nicely.
I don't think it's so much that it's considered an upside, but rather that it's basically impossible to displace PHP with something better unless the thing you want to replace it with is equally easy, or easier, to implement.
I agree, and I think that means it will be very difficult for any language that requires more understanding of OOP concepts to get started with will have a hard time competing with PHP in this arena.
This is what the team behind Discourse is attempting to address somewhat, making Ruby software as idiot-proof to set up as PHP applications.
Whether they will end up succeeding is yet to be seen, but this does definitely seem like an area where competition will benefit the greater good, as displacing PHP with any one of the better designed languages out there would benefit the internet as a whole.
I do wonder though: is the procedural nature of PHP equally responsible for it's adoption by inexperienced developers?
Sure, PHP is cheap and widely available, but you also don't need to understand the concepts behind object orientation to hack together a "dynamic" website with a few includes. And at that point you're just familiar enough with PHP to favor it for future development.
Not exactly sure what the "tips" are in these, most of them just look like cruddy PHP code.
In the 2nd part of Example 2, using "else if" instead of several "if" statements to check the same value would result in fewer comparisons having to be done since the way it's written now the second comparison will always run even if the first one was true. It would be even better to use a switch statement if you're comparing the same variable in each case.