Ah, but you missed the point of giving away the OS - Microsoft saw how the Apple's App Store and iTunes became the focus of Apple's growth strategy; by taking a large cut from store sales, it became more important to get the store into people's hands and building store access into the OSes. Microsoft is trying to duplicate that strategy. This is why Windows 10 was given away for free - get Windows 7 (or even XP) users to upgrade to 10 and have that store button right on the task bar. Windows 8 and 8.1 already had it, but users were reluctant to upgrade due to the tablet focus.
Even if corn wasn't subsidized, it'd likely still be cheaper than maple. Lots more ramp up time with trees, a limited amount can be tapped from each, requires a larger growing area, etc. My sugar maple is relatively young (like 3 years old) and is nowhere near thick enough to tap. I'm guessing they need 8-10 years at least.
Not even the first to make fun of it. Pachelbel rant predates it. Pachelbel rant is actually incorrect except for Blues Traveler's Hook, which does in fact use Pachelbel's Canon chords and has lyrics about nobody ever paying attention to the lyrics, just the hook, which is a clever joke about it. It also goes far beyond the songs listed by either, as P!nk, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Nickelback (they keep getting erased from the I-V-vi-IV page, but every time I do chord analysis on their songs that's what I get), Lady Gaga, and pretty much all pop bands you hate use the progression I-V-vi-IV in some form. For instance, the sensitive singer songwriter starts on the vi chord, so goes vi-IV-I-V.
Even if they sway the Senate and get their vote and then persuade the House to do the same, I give Trump 162.671% chance of vetoing it (using Trumpian math, anything else is fake news). After that they need 2/3 majority, and I'm sure Comcast and Verizon can provide enough bribes to keep that from happening.
This happens a lot in politics - like "Reagan" ending the Iran hostage deal, which Carter had all but bottled up when Reagan took office.
The reality is it started years ago. I've even been recruited by TCS over the past couple of years (haven't taken anything - offers weren't good enough), predating Trump taking office by over a year.
Incidentally, few systems even use OSI - it was drawn out in a standards committee for about 7 years and was found difficult to implement. That gave TCP/IP, which was basically hacked together, a massive head start and it became the internet standard. TCP/IP is a 5 layer standard and combines some of the layers used in OSI together. Not that this changes anything you said; I'm not exactly sure how the combined layers in this case relate to TCP/IP.
Personally, I'm more worried about the 2015 model for places with no high speed competition (monopolies that could be regulated under Title II and now can't be). ISPs can theoretically charge more in those areas and undercut prices in areas where they have competition. This is illegal, but the fines are slaps on the wrist compared to putting your competition out of business. See the Wal-Mart growth model they used extensively to dominate retail.
As they said, they were using the cruiser as a decoy to pull the imperial ships away so they wouldn't notice the shuttles and wouldn't have if the hacker didn't clue them in... but how did he know? Its not like those characters were clued in, so you've got me. The plan was for the cruiser to jump as far as they knew. Also Rey teleporting from the imperial ship battle onto the Millennium Falcon somehow... and her going onto that ship in the first place - wtf!? Even if she thought she could turn Kylo Ren, pretty much every dark side baddie was on that ship and it was a suicide mission. Also the bridge explosion force glide back was silly - the second they opened that door they'd be pulled out - its not like that door was an airlock, though they did make an effect that maybe was supposed to be a force field (just briefly and at a bad angle for viewers to see).
That said, I didn't hate it, but shit like that ruins my escapism. The movie is filled with gaping plot holes we can only hope an extended edition fills in. Rogue One and the last one had much tighter scripts with less gaping plot holes.
You're not thinking about this from the right angle - they will never block this website. Why? Because they'd need a good reason or they will be sued by the government. Meanwhile, it is vastly more profitable to throttle them and demand money. They could even throw in extra fees for lost advertising dollars because that company takes away their targeted advertising power. The ISP is entirely in power here to make whatever demands it wants to, and the ISPs don't want to block sites, they want to extort them. Once net neutrality is gone, Comcast-Netflix deals will be the norm. ISPs will be able to pick whatever percentage of the internet is fast lane and slow lane. Money will roll in from both consumers and vendors.
This isn't about controlling the content you see, it is about extorting money. Sure "owned" content will be fast lane, but that isn't seeing the big picture where the ISPs profit at both ends from non-owned content.
But fast reactors potentially burn 99.5 percent of fuel with reprocessing, not.5-5% or about 70% without reprocessing (according to results from Russia's BN800, which uses a once through cycle to avoid proliferation concerns). The US itself gave up on their fast breeder, the Integral Fast Reactor, but private companies are building several designs. They are at worst 12x more fuel efficient and at best 120x. Russia sold the BN800 design to China and China is building one as we speak.
btw, not sure why wiki lists the BN-800 as a Gen III reactor on the BN-800 site and a Gen IV reactor on the list of Gen IV reactors. It is clearly a sodium cooled fast reactor (SFR). I don't remember my wiki edit user/password or I'd complain.
Actually no, they didn't have backup generators for 4 of the 6 reactors protected from flooding, were warned about the problem in advance by the International Atomic Energy Association, and did nothing to fix the problem. They also didn't have proper risk assessment in place, including evacuation plans (required by Japan's nuclear agency). TEPCO admitted to this in 2012 and failed to test some safety procedures for 40 years. In fact, in the wiki timeline the first entry even says TEPCO knew about the earthquake/flooding problem in 2008 and didn't do anything about it.
Fukushima's nuclear reactors actually would've been illegal to operate in the US. The NRC realized that if the gas generators got knocked out due to flooding and electricity got knocked out, operators wouldn't be able to shut down the reactor properly and forced all reactors of this design to have gas generators in buildings that couldn't get flooded. Japan actually passed a similar regulation and reactors 2 and 4 had this and I recall reading that cables were run to the other reactors but the switching stations to switch to these for 1,3,5 and 6 were in the generator rooms that got flooded (and yeah, facepalm). On the positive side, these reactors have negative void coefficients and the reaction started shutting down immediately (but without cold water getting pumped in to cool it, some fuel melted). As DivineKnight says in another comment, Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient and the nuclear reaction raced off uncontrolled.
TFA said the police had it first and handed it to the FBI when they couldn't get into it. There isn't a timeline, so it is possible the FBI was locked out already when they got the phone. Also the article said Texas police were FLYING the phone to Quantico to be cracked, so apparently the FBI doesn't even have the phone yet and they were just called in to consult on cracking it. Even if they drove it to a regional office, there's no telling if there's a competent person there that could help them. The FBI expert in piracy I met in the 1980s was pretty damn incompetent. The only person I know that got caught was turned in and had incompetent Secret Service people collect and confiscate his stuff (FBI investigates, SS confiscates/arrests because it is a financial crime).
If it's an iPhone 6 or higher, they're going to have a lot of fun cracking that. Probably going to have to disassemble it and brute force it. Their goal is to find if there are other collaborators and evidence, but this seems pretty open/shut to me.
Technically T-Mobile did as well, and probably all other carriers (Verizon for sure, I have no idea about Sprint). They all implemented what they called 4G LTE before the spec was finalized and had data rates below the final spec (how off varied by carrier). Verizon then started marketing real 4G as "4G plus" even though it is really 4G. That said, they all implemented 4G LTE as best they could from the draft specification, so it isn't necessarily the carriers fault - they needed to upgrade and the spec took forever to get finalized.
At my previous job developers were required to unit test their code, but integration testing done by QA nearly always found bugs. That didn't stop them from laying off nearly the entire QA team including some like me that have developer skills and shipping the jobs to China. I'm currently looking for a developer job not a QA, but all my years in QA kind of hamper that, even though half my time was a developer role there (automation, customization, technical configuration, compiling code, cloud installs and VMWare administration, etc).
Strangely enough, the Democrats are the most misinformed and regressive party when it comes to nuclear power. Nearly all their concerns about nuclear power are addressed in Generation IV, the exception being proliferation, but if they reprocess at a centralized guarded facility like they previously and put the good fuel back into the reactor that is more a non-issue. And yes, waste is addressed - in a breeder reactor (pretty much all Gen IV) waste is bred to be fuel. I'm not saying Republicans aren't misinformed on nuclear power - they mainly see $$$ and don't understand it, but they are correct in that the US should support it.
Incidentally, Al Franken was completely anti-nuclear until he got on the nuclear committee, got informed, and changed his position. I wish more Democrats would do that, but the Green leaning folk in the party tend to misinform because they honestly believe a reactor is just a controlled bomb. It does not work like that at all, please go educate yourself.
Heh, well I memorized that randomly generated password and still occasionally use it, like on git projects (I have several random passwords like that memorized). I also remember not being able to recover my password on my first account and had to create a new one (if there was email recovery, it didn't help - I changed email addresses and was offline 3 months and changed schools). This user was named after the computer I was on at the time, which I ordered in late September and I picked it up Oct 31 - Halloween - so I named the computer Creepy and the hard disk Spooky. I don't know how much time elapsed between getting that machine and signing up again, though - I think it was a while. I mainly posted as AC in hopes I'd remember the other password.
Mac System 6 had multi-tasking (via MultiFinder), but yeah, 7 was the first to include it by default if I recall correctly - I adopted that thing the instant I discovered it, however and never looked back. That said, it was cooperative multitasking, not preemptive multitasking, which they didn't have until OS X.0. If you want to go way back, the PDP-6 and systems that ran MULTICS (there were a couple) had it in 1964 (I had a computer history class requirement in college and this stuff I don't forget, unlike people's names...). They weren't really PCs, but Amiga wasn't really a mainline PC either - definitely a premium device and even more expensive than all but maybe the very high end macs. A friend of mine paid over $4000 for his, which is over $6000 adjusted for inflation at the time of this posting and his was fairly low end (but that price did include essential add-ons like disk drives I believe). A PC clone was half that and Slackware Linux was released in 1993, so they beat Microsoft to preemptive multitasking on PC hardware. 1995-1997 were the mac clone years, as well, so they could be had cheaper than Apple's versions.
Funny story about Wordstar in a schadenfreude way - my mom bought a mac so she didn't have to use Wordstar anymore, where control-P purges your document without confirmation and control-D means dump to printer. She had lost 6 hours of writing because of that. When I used Wordstar I avoided that by putting the keyboard template over the computer, but what a hassle for something that should be intuitive. Every desktop publishing act except Wordstar used P for print, but I know D for printing comes from the UNIX world (P was not purge in any application I know, however).
Yep. My commercial pro audio software tries to emulate everything my mixing board can do, which is about 25 things for each channel (and the mixing board has 12 channels - small, but it has pro audio power levels and phantom power for my condenser mics). I can only record 2 channels at once though because that is all my interface supports and I haven't dished out for one that can do more. For me that isn't a big deal because I rarely need more than 2 channels at once (the exception is recording a drum kit, so I mix that down on the board and send a stereo in on the amp outs and pipe that into to the recording software).
That is just the mixing interface, though - toss in the 125ish effects the software came with and mix and match each of those per channel and it gets to be quite a mess.
Yeah, not to mention that if the application is running in html5 javascript (i.e. web), it is entirely text probably including programmer comments. Often applications are written in this for the web and the functional parts repackaged as apps. My former job did exactly that - had a React UI (for stuff in the canvas) and AngularJS WebGL application that wrote to a web page canvas with hooks to real application functionality around it. The app I worked on was all native for the device except for the parts in the canvas. React and AngularJS alone can kill older phones (they are decent sized libraries). I'm actually ditching Angular on the app I'm personally working on to reduce overhead (the parts I needed it for can be rewritten fairly easily, I don't really need MVC, and the sorting I need is easy to do in javascript - quicksort will do it). Next up may be Howler.js - it is overkill for the html5 sound I need.
Good luck with the assembly language part. Have you tried optimizing in assembly language in a modern processor? Out of order execution and compiler optimizations for it make compilers often more efficient than good assembly coders.
The real reason apps are bloating is that apps are never finished and the creators keep adding on features. Look at the traditional game market (pre-DLC) - in the game world, the game was written, sent out the door, and was finished. If the developer wanted to add more features to the game, they'd write a sequel. In the app market, that was never the case. Facebook wants to be the be-all, end-all application people use, so they added bloated features like Messenger. On mobile that was forked out into a separate app, but the web version has it built in.
Consider yourself fortunate. I can get DSL through CenturyLink as competition to Comcast (other than wireless, which has its own issues - mainly low thresholds for throttled bandwidth or restricted or no unlimited plans). CenturyLink and Comcast compete for who can provide the worst service in my area. Before CenturyLink, I had Qwest and before that US West, which I called Qworst and US Worst. Honestly, CenturyLink was a HUGE step above Qworst and US Worst, but I still hear horror stories that rival my Comcast one (which is 20 years old now - basically couldn't get them to cancel, and my sister-in-law had the same problem with CenturyLink).
Depends on how you look at it... given the current FCC definition of broadband being 25 down/3 up, that leaves Comcast for fixed line service, but my mobile phone can do 4G LTE (Advanced, though that is just a marketing term because the original marketed "4G" didn't meet the spec requirements), which does. I only get 5GB of that and get throttled service after 100GB, which is why I haven't considered upping that to unlimited and cutting the cord (which is probably expensive, but cheaper than paying for another service).
That would be nice... but the VPN software I use to access work from home is only free to me for Windows:\
They actually have mac and Linux clients, but I have to pay $300+ for them (I know some Linux and mac diehards that did). Screw that, I can run Windows in a VM for far cheaper.
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Ah, but you missed the point of giving away the OS - Microsoft saw how the Apple's App Store and iTunes became the focus of Apple's growth strategy; by taking a large cut from store sales, it became more important to get the store into people's hands and building store access into the OSes. Microsoft is trying to duplicate that strategy. This is why Windows 10 was given away for free - get Windows 7 (or even XP) users to upgrade to 10 and have that store button right on the task bar. Windows 8 and 8.1 already had it, but users were reluctant to upgrade due to the tablet focus.
Even if corn wasn't subsidized, it'd likely still be cheaper than maple. Lots more ramp up time with trees, a limited amount can be tapped from each, requires a larger growing area, etc. My sugar maple is relatively young (like 3 years old) and is nowhere near thick enough to tap. I'm guessing they need 8-10 years at least.
Not even the first to make fun of it. Pachelbel rant predates it. Pachelbel rant is actually incorrect except for Blues Traveler's Hook, which does in fact use Pachelbel's Canon chords and has lyrics about nobody ever paying attention to the lyrics, just the hook, which is a clever joke about it. It also goes far beyond the songs listed by either, as P!nk, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Nickelback (they keep getting erased from the I-V-vi-IV page, but every time I do chord analysis on their songs that's what I get), Lady Gaga, and pretty much all pop bands you hate use the progression I-V-vi-IV in some form. For instance, the sensitive singer songwriter starts on the vi chord, so goes vi-IV-I-V.
Even if they sway the Senate and get their vote and then persuade the House to do the same, I give Trump 162.671% chance of vetoing it (using Trumpian math, anything else is fake news). After that they need 2/3 majority, and I'm sure Comcast and Verizon can provide enough bribes to keep that from happening.
He made it harder to get H1-B visas, but the insourcing trend actually started around the time of the 2008 market crash recovery (2010-2011).
This happens a lot in politics - like "Reagan" ending the Iran hostage deal, which Carter had all but bottled up when Reagan took office.
The reality is it started years ago. I've even been recruited by TCS over the past couple of years (haven't taken anything - offers weren't good enough), predating Trump taking office by over a year.
Incidentally, few systems even use OSI - it was drawn out in a standards committee for about 7 years and was found difficult to implement. That gave TCP/IP, which was basically hacked together, a massive head start and it became the internet standard. TCP/IP is a 5 layer standard and combines some of the layers used in OSI together. Not that this changes anything you said; I'm not exactly sure how the combined layers in this case relate to TCP/IP.
Personally, I'm more worried about the 2015 model for places with no high speed competition (monopolies that could be regulated under Title II and now can't be). ISPs can theoretically charge more in those areas and undercut prices in areas where they have competition. This is illegal, but the fines are slaps on the wrist compared to putting your competition out of business. See the Wal-Mart growth model they used extensively to dominate retail.
As they said, they were using the cruiser as a decoy to pull the imperial ships away so they wouldn't notice the shuttles and wouldn't have if the hacker didn't clue them in... but how did he know? Its not like those characters were clued in, so you've got me. The plan was for the cruiser to jump as far as they knew. Also Rey teleporting from the imperial ship battle onto the Millennium Falcon somehow... and her going onto that ship in the first place - wtf!? Even if she thought she could turn Kylo Ren, pretty much every dark side baddie was on that ship and it was a suicide mission. Also the bridge explosion force glide back was silly - the second they opened that door they'd be pulled out - its not like that door was an airlock, though they did make an effect that maybe was supposed to be a force field (just briefly and at a bad angle for viewers to see).
That said, I didn't hate it, but shit like that ruins my escapism. The movie is filled with gaping plot holes we can only hope an extended edition fills in. Rogue One and the last one had much tighter scripts with less gaping plot holes.
You're not thinking about this from the right angle - they will never block this website. Why? Because they'd need a good reason or they will be sued by the government. Meanwhile, it is vastly more profitable to throttle them and demand money. They could even throw in extra fees for lost advertising dollars because that company takes away their targeted advertising power. The ISP is entirely in power here to make whatever demands it wants to, and the ISPs don't want to block sites, they want to extort them. Once net neutrality is gone, Comcast-Netflix deals will be the norm. ISPs will be able to pick whatever percentage of the internet is fast lane and slow lane. Money will roll in from both consumers and vendors.
This isn't about controlling the content you see, it is about extorting money. Sure "owned" content will be fast lane, but that isn't seeing the big picture where the ISPs profit at both ends from non-owned content.
But fast reactors potentially burn 99.5 percent of fuel with reprocessing, not .5-5% or about 70% without reprocessing (according to results from Russia's BN800, which uses a once through cycle to avoid proliferation concerns). The US itself gave up on their fast breeder, the Integral Fast Reactor, but private companies are building several designs. They are at worst 12x more fuel efficient and at best 120x. Russia sold the BN800 design to China and China is building one as we speak.
btw, not sure why wiki lists the BN-800 as a Gen III reactor on the BN-800 site and a Gen IV reactor on the list of Gen IV reactors. It is clearly a sodium cooled fast reactor (SFR). I don't remember my wiki edit user/password or I'd complain.
Actually no, they didn't have backup generators for 4 of the 6 reactors protected from flooding, were warned about the problem in advance by the International Atomic Energy Association, and did nothing to fix the problem. They also didn't have proper risk assessment in place, including evacuation plans (required by Japan's nuclear agency). TEPCO admitted to this in 2012 and failed to test some safety procedures for 40 years. In fact, in the wiki timeline the first entry even says TEPCO knew about the earthquake/flooding problem in 2008 and didn't do anything about it.
Fukushima's nuclear reactors actually would've been illegal to operate in the US. The NRC realized that if the gas generators got knocked out due to flooding and electricity got knocked out, operators wouldn't be able to shut down the reactor properly and forced all reactors of this design to have gas generators in buildings that couldn't get flooded. Japan actually passed a similar regulation and reactors 2 and 4 had this and I recall reading that cables were run to the other reactors but the switching stations to switch to these for 1,3,5 and 6 were in the generator rooms that got flooded (and yeah, facepalm). On the positive side, these reactors have negative void coefficients and the reaction started shutting down immediately (but without cold water getting pumped in to cool it, some fuel melted). As DivineKnight says in another comment, Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient and the nuclear reaction raced off uncontrolled.
TFA said the police had it first and handed it to the FBI when they couldn't get into it. There isn't a timeline, so it is possible the FBI was locked out already when they got the phone. Also the article said Texas police were FLYING the phone to Quantico to be cracked, so apparently the FBI doesn't even have the phone yet and they were just called in to consult on cracking it. Even if they drove it to a regional office, there's no telling if there's a competent person there that could help them. The FBI expert in piracy I met in the 1980s was pretty damn incompetent. The only person I know that got caught was turned in and had incompetent Secret Service people collect and confiscate his stuff (FBI investigates, SS confiscates/arrests because it is a financial crime).
If it's an iPhone 6 or higher, they're going to have a lot of fun cracking that. Probably going to have to disassemble it and brute force it. Their goal is to find if there are other collaborators and evidence, but this seems pretty open/shut to me.
Technically T-Mobile did as well, and probably all other carriers (Verizon for sure, I have no idea about Sprint). They all implemented what they called 4G LTE before the spec was finalized and had data rates below the final spec (how off varied by carrier). Verizon then started marketing real 4G as "4G plus" even though it is really 4G. That said, they all implemented 4G LTE as best they could from the draft specification, so it isn't necessarily the carriers fault - they needed to upgrade and the spec took forever to get finalized.
At my previous job developers were required to unit test their code, but integration testing done by QA nearly always found bugs. That didn't stop them from laying off nearly the entire QA team including some like me that have developer skills and shipping the jobs to China. I'm currently looking for a developer job not a QA, but all my years in QA kind of hamper that, even though half my time was a developer role there (automation, customization, technical configuration, compiling code, cloud installs and VMWare administration, etc).
Strangely enough, the Democrats are the most misinformed and regressive party when it comes to nuclear power. Nearly all their concerns about nuclear power are addressed in Generation IV, the exception being proliferation, but if they reprocess at a centralized guarded facility like they previously and put the good fuel back into the reactor that is more a non-issue. And yes, waste is addressed - in a breeder reactor (pretty much all Gen IV) waste is bred to be fuel. I'm not saying Republicans aren't misinformed on nuclear power - they mainly see $$$ and don't understand it, but they are correct in that the US should support it.
Incidentally, Al Franken was completely anti-nuclear until he got on the nuclear committee, got informed, and changed his position. I wish more Democrats would do that, but the Green leaning folk in the party tend to misinform because they honestly believe a reactor is just a controlled bomb. It does not work like that at all, please go educate yourself.
That is actually my favorite April Fools prank ever, with Angry Nerds a close second.
Heh, well I memorized that randomly generated password and still occasionally use it, like on git projects (I have several random passwords like that memorized). I also remember not being able to recover my password on my first account and had to create a new one (if there was email recovery, it didn't help - I changed email addresses and was offline 3 months and changed schools). This user was named after the computer I was on at the time, which I ordered in late September and I picked it up Oct 31 - Halloween - so I named the computer Creepy and the hard disk Spooky. I don't know how much time elapsed between getting that machine and signing up again, though - I think it was a while. I mainly posted as AC in hopes I'd remember the other password.
Mac System 6 had multi-tasking (via MultiFinder), but yeah, 7 was the first to include it by default if I recall correctly - I adopted that thing the instant I discovered it, however and never looked back. That said, it was cooperative multitasking, not preemptive multitasking, which they didn't have until OS X.0. If you want to go way back, the PDP-6 and systems that ran MULTICS (there were a couple) had it in 1964 (I had a computer history class requirement in college and this stuff I don't forget, unlike people's names...). They weren't really PCs, but Amiga wasn't really a mainline PC either - definitely a premium device and even more expensive than all but maybe the very high end macs. A friend of mine paid over $4000 for his, which is over $6000 adjusted for inflation at the time of this posting and his was fairly low end (but that price did include essential add-ons like disk drives I believe). A PC clone was half that and Slackware Linux was released in 1993, so they beat Microsoft to preemptive multitasking on PC hardware. 1995-1997 were the mac clone years, as well, so they could be had cheaper than Apple's versions.
Funny story about Wordstar in a schadenfreude way - my mom bought a mac so she didn't have to use Wordstar anymore, where control-P purges your document without confirmation and control-D means dump to printer. She had lost 6 hours of writing because of that. When I used Wordstar I avoided that by putting the keyboard template over the computer, but what a hassle for something that should be intuitive. Every desktop publishing act except Wordstar used P for print, but I know D for printing comes from the UNIX world (P was not purge in any application I know, however).
Yep. My commercial pro audio software tries to emulate everything my mixing board can do, which is about 25 things for each channel (and the mixing board has 12 channels - small, but it has pro audio power levels and phantom power for my condenser mics). I can only record 2 channels at once though because that is all my interface supports and I haven't dished out for one that can do more. For me that isn't a big deal because I rarely need more than 2 channels at once (the exception is recording a drum kit, so I mix that down on the board and send a stereo in on the amp outs and pipe that into to the recording software).
That is just the mixing interface, though - toss in the 125ish effects the software came with and mix and match each of those per channel and it gets to be quite a mess.
Yeah, not to mention that if the application is running in html5 javascript (i.e. web), it is entirely text probably including programmer comments. Often applications are written in this for the web and the functional parts repackaged as apps. My former job did exactly that - had a React UI (for stuff in the canvas) and AngularJS WebGL application that wrote to a web page canvas with hooks to real application functionality around it. The app I worked on was all native for the device except for the parts in the canvas. React and AngularJS alone can kill older phones (they are decent sized libraries). I'm actually ditching Angular on the app I'm personally working on to reduce overhead (the parts I needed it for can be rewritten fairly easily, I don't really need MVC, and the sorting I need is easy to do in javascript - quicksort will do it). Next up may be Howler.js - it is overkill for the html5 sound I need.
Good luck with the assembly language part. Have you tried optimizing in assembly language in a modern processor? Out of order execution and compiler optimizations for it make compilers often more efficient than good assembly coders.
The real reason apps are bloating is that apps are never finished and the creators keep adding on features. Look at the traditional game market (pre-DLC) - in the game world, the game was written, sent out the door, and was finished. If the developer wanted to add more features to the game, they'd write a sequel. In the app market, that was never the case. Facebook wants to be the be-all, end-all application people use, so they added bloated features like Messenger. On mobile that was forked out into a separate app, but the web version has it built in.
Consider yourself fortunate. I can get DSL through CenturyLink as competition to Comcast (other than wireless, which has its own issues - mainly low thresholds for throttled bandwidth or restricted or no unlimited plans). CenturyLink and Comcast compete for who can provide the worst service in my area. Before CenturyLink, I had Qwest and before that US West, which I called Qworst and US Worst. Honestly, CenturyLink was a HUGE step above Qworst and US Worst, but I still hear horror stories that rival my Comcast one (which is 20 years old now - basically couldn't get them to cancel, and my sister-in-law had the same problem with CenturyLink).
Depends on how you look at it... given the current FCC definition of broadband being 25 down/3 up, that leaves Comcast for fixed line service, but my mobile phone can do 4G LTE (Advanced, though that is just a marketing term because the original marketed "4G" didn't meet the spec requirements), which does. I only get 5GB of that and get throttled service after 100GB, which is why I haven't considered upping that to unlimited and cutting the cord (which is probably expensive, but cheaper than paying for another service).
That would be nice... but the VPN software I use to access work from home is only free to me for Windows :\
They actually have mac and Linux clients, but I have to pay $300+ for them (I know some Linux and mac diehards that did). Screw that, I can run Windows in a VM for far cheaper.