They want to speak with someone over at Zer01, something about "exceeding sane limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum".
An HD movie in 3 minutes? Even if they are calling "480p" HD, there is no way in hell that is transfering wirelessly in 3 minutes to a cellular device.
Trying to sign everyone up as a sales associate just proves it is a scam.
I've found that recently people take a -ton- more pictures because they are digital and really only a handful of them they -really- want.
This has always been true with photographs.
You take a 100 pictures, and hope 5 of them turns out good.
There is a reason people used to pack a large number of film rolls when they went on vacation. At 24 pictures per roll, burn through five or six rolls at minimum, and hope you got a few decent pictures out of it. Digital cameras allow people to take even more photos, so at least in theory there is a greater chance of a few high quality pictures coming out on top.
I do agree that archiving all digital photos is silly, the delete key exists for a reason.
Playing Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, I have a highly customized control scheme, using EASD instead of WASD (it is WASD shifted one to the right), with various weapon bindings surrounding my movement keys.
Not possible on a console.
I happen to own Left 4 Dead on Xbox 360. The game blows massive chunks. All my friends, who happen to own the PC version of the game, keep telling me how much it rocks.
The only advantage consoles have for control is that an analog joypad is superior for movement, but even so a mouse + keyboard comes in close, and blows the hell out of consoles for accuracy in shots.
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI.
It will also increase your metabolism, so that every action to take throughout your day will burn more calories.
EVEN on the nonsense reality TV shows contestants do work hard for the week (and are constantly monitored so cheating is unlikely) and STILL manage to sometimes put on weight.
Given that just the water content of our bodies can vary 3-5 pounds throughout the day, this is not too surprising.
I have a scale that graphs my weight over time (and costs no more than the other overpriced glass digital scales), allowing me to spot any trends in my weight over multiple days.
I can configure the graph to daily, weekly, or monthly. My weight almost always has a +/- 5lb variance within any given noticable trend, upwards or downwards.
In other words, a usual, TV is serves as an excellent example of how not to do math.
Yes, and most of us want to join the freaking army, eat rabbit food and exercise 2-3 hours a day for the rest of our lives. Yeah, that's real sustainable.
Removing all soft drinks and packaged snake food from one's diet IS very doable, as is ensuring all meals throughout the day have more veggies in them than meat.
Likewise, packing lunch everyday and not buying food from restaurants or cafeterias, and not going out to eat more than once or twice a week, and never hitting up fast food joints.
It really is quite easy. After cutting my American addiction to sugar I found that soft drinks are actually pretty nasty. Packaged junk-food snacks are loaded with so salt and fat I wouldn't want to eat anyway, and I happen to like fresh vegetables.
Admitedly it isn't easy since the entire American diet that most of us our used to does not actually have much in the way of vegetables in it, or at least not nearly enough.
It is supposed to drop prices, that is the entire point.
Why does Apple make over $200 in pure profit per iPhone sold? Simple: No decent competitors. When some good competition comes along, Apple will have to drop their price if they want to maintain market share, or they could take the iPhone the same route they took their Desktop machines and make them high-end only.
A 1.6Ghz Atom is not fast enough for my Grandmother.
Seriously, not kidding.
She loves to play games on Pogo.com. As Adobe keeps updating Flash she has to keep getting new computers...
Not to mention just sites like/. bog down my Core2 Duo, (whatever version of Slashcode is live right now isn't too horrible, but some weeks performance is obscene. Nevermind that in IE(6/7/8) there is not much hope of using/. at all.
Normally I hate to feed the trolls but this is so easily corrected...
Obesity is not nearly as rampant in all first world countries as it is in America. Only in England and the US. As someone on my/. friends list put it "In a European airport you can tell which gate is for the UK, it has all the fat people in it".
Although true that developed European countries have a higher rate of obesity on average than third world countries, it is also true that as low price refined food is introduced to many third world countries, that the prevalence of obesity is increasing in portions of the third world as well. A definite disadvantage to trading with more developed nations... importing the garbage we call food.
Indeed in many developing nations (Vietnam for instance) it is not always a lack of food that is the problem, but a lack of clean water throughout the entire food preparation process. The diet is quite healthy, but the intestinal parasites end up killing you. Obesity by Country
Now I have to go read up why Saudi Arabia is the second fattest nation on Earth.
If you're a competent programmer then nothing is unsafe, but obviously there are a lot of stupid programmers out there who make fundamental mistakes fucking with memory when they don't understand what they're doing
Minor correction, if you are a competent programmer who is never tired, stressed out, or pressured to meet deadlines, and who always ensures their code is reviewed by other programmers who are equally blessed, then nothing is unsafe.
Otherwise, as you said, even the best programmers can make mistakes. Even more so when sleep deprived.:)
As someone who recently (~1.5 years ago) graduated from a CS program, let me say that if your book is worth a damn, students will buy it just to keep a copy around.
I could have easily pirated most of my text books online. E-Books are not flippable though, nor can I put post it notes in them. (Actually in good e-book formats you can, but most pirated books are in PDF format and PDFs suck). And then there is the fact that the book is on my monitor screen and not on my desk.
Did I use illicit online copies of books now and then? Sure, when the book was overpriced, of low quality, and not utilizes that for the class. I exactly as much value out of those books as I paid for them, e.g. $0. On the other hand some of the books I paid dearly for I still use today.
Heck there was one text book I originally was planning on using an online copy of, but because it was so good I went out and bought it. (One of Charles Petzold's, that guy rocks as a tech author)
When was the last time you saw a game in comedy genre?
...
Or an actual SF game with a well written story - that is not an FPS? Besides Portal (which is threading the fine line of being an FPS).
Thanks for answering your own question.
Lets see, Sam and Max, Penny Arcade, and to an extent World of Goo are all at least partly in the Comedy genre.
Romance games typically do not get released in the US, they are huge over in Japan and some other Asian countries though. See Otome game.
How about a thriller that doesn't involve shooting?
Most of Silent Hill counts here. Technically there is shooting, but not very much! Mostly it is running and screaming, if you happen across a few bullets while sprinting down the hallway, figure it as good luck and don't count on it being a regular occurrence.
Are adventures games even being made anymore? Or turn-based RTSs?
There is a recent resurgence actually. King's Bounty" is a turn based strategy game, and I have played a few others lately as well. I have also played through a number of point and click adventure games recently, though in doing so I realized how much that genre of game really does suck. Monkey Island was good because of the humor, the game play, not so much.
Most of these games are from independent companies. Of course if they are successful the companies will grow large and no longer be "indie", start publishing more "mainstream titles" and in 10 more years we'll be on/. having this very same discussion again!:-D
The trick is that the ARM instruction set is *WAY* more efficient than the x86. The fact that the current ARM's are basically in order units is less important due to the design of the instruction set.
A minor correction here: The ARM instruction set is simpler and is much less feature rich than x86. This, combined with self imposed limitations (mostly around in-order execution) ARM (the company) is able to design CPUs with a much lower transistor count than x86 chip designers are capable of managing.
Not having a huge instruction decoder, having to do instruction reordering, or basically doing any of the things that makes x86 so damn fast, and staying a generation or two behind on manufacturing techniques to avoid leakage issues, enables ARM CPUs to have their amazing power profile.
The instruction set is kind of a mess really. It has been hacked onto a number of times, with the latest additions really showing signs of having wedged into the existing instruction encoding space. With features like the original (crappy) thumb, and now the fixed "Thumb2" (which we are all supposed to be calling Thumb and ignore the old Thumb, or something like that), and the fark-up that is ARM's floating point support (They have 3 implementations, 2 of which are still in use, and those two versions respond dramatically different to some basic key floating point operations), the ARM instruction set isn't nice per say, but ARM did the right thing and by keeping their eye on power consumption always.
(For those who are getting linguistically confused: ARM the name of the company, the name of their CPU line AND the name of their instruction set. Oh it is also the name of their reference manual, the ARM-ARM.)
He's right, ARM chips are not that performant per Mhz. Their two main weaknesses are in order execution and their RISC instruction set not playing nicely with instruction cache. Although the ARM instruction set is huge for a RISC architecture, it is not nearly as powerful or compact as x86. Variable length x86 instructions end up fitting better in the instruction cache.
Of course it must also be noted that the Dothan had 2MB of Cache, the Cortex A8 Remembering that the Dothan had 2MB of cache Cache misses, the tiny tiny cache L1 and L2 cache, rather ancient CPU design make ARM processors at least 1/2 as fast per mhz as Intel x86 chips. (Speaking in huge generalizations here...)
Pentium M's had a damn nice microarchitecture though.:) My Pentium M laptop was noticably faster than my Pentium 4 desktop...
I can't find how much cache the TI SDP 3430 using the A8 has on it, but the A8 only goes up to 1MB of L2 cache max, and I am guessing most manufacturers opt for less than that for cost and power saving reasons.
If the function of schools is to prepare students to survive in today's world, and Windows/MS software area part of that world, shouldn't schools be teaching kids to use such software.
The function of schools is to each students how to learn.
To accomplish this a basic foundation must be built up, literacy of both language and mathematics, an understanding of the principles of science, and the ability to apply critical thought to problems.
If you are merely aiming for survival, then just pass out billy clubs the first day and send everyone home.
You should have seen the back of my CS classes. A good 50% of the class was playing World of Warcraft on any given day.
Seriously though, Laptops are just one more source of distractions. Could PCs potentially be used to help improve education? Perhaps. Applications such as OneNote are great, I went an entire year without using any paper at all (I emailed my HW in), but I had plenty of trouble paying attention in class and staying off of/.
The current education system in America is by no means perfect, but throwing a bunch of laptops into the mix is not going to help things any. Teachers will still assign busy work, students will still pick on each other, and the majority parents will still be too lazy/busy to ensure their children complete homework assignments.
And I suppose WindowsCE isn't a Windows derivative either for the same reasons stated by that developer's post?
WinCE is not a Windows derivative. It is a completely separate OS kernel that happens to have had a good deal of the Desktop's CRT and other APIs ported over to it some years back.
Is it possible to have very carefully written code cross compile on WinCE and the desktop? Sure. But the same can be said for Windows XP and Linux. Stick to API libraries that exist on both platforms, and make liberal use of IFDEFs to cover any platform differences. E.g. WinCE Windows, your screen size is almost an order of magnitude different, so you'll probably want to redesign the entire UI. Your input options are significantly different, need to take that into account. Your audio output options are different. How your app handles networking is (should be) different.
Heck, the directory where you save user data at is different. The file system is laid out differently (in places).
For both XBox 360 and WinCE Microsoft has taken steps to try and make writing cross platform code as easy as possible, but it is by no means consists of a single "hit recompile" step.
And as apparently demonstrated by Rockstar, companies can screw up cross platform releases really bad.
I got through a 4 year degree without any huge debt quite easily.
How?
2 years at a local community college, and then 2 years at a state college.
Every summer, winter, and spring break I worked. Every time I applied for a job I aimed for higher pay. Going through college my hourly wage progression was $8/hr -> $10/hr -> $15/hr -> $20/hr -> $22/hr.
Some internships and jobs I worked at for more than 3 months. Some I remoted in to after I had resumed school. With the exception of my first job, my work was always related directly to my major (CompSci). By the time I had graduated I had a little over a year worth of experience working in my field, which allowed me to be in a better position when looking for a job.
While in college I never paid for cable TV, I did not buy any computers, and I did not go out to eat. I rented an apartment with my GF, the difference cost for the apartment versus on campus housing was more than made up for by the savings of cooking our own food rather than eating at the campus cafeterias. By spending a good deal of effort in looking for and negotiating housing, we were able to find an apartment complex close enough to campus that we did not have to drive, so the only gas we paid for was the gas used to drive back home to see our families. Extra bonus: No parking permit required, yet another $240 a year saved.
After all of this, do I have a degree on my wall from an Ivy league school? No I do not.
Do I work with people who do have such a degree on their wall? Yes I do.
Do I know as much about my field as they do? Thanks to hard work, dedication, and a passion for my field, yes I do.
College is a place where some one who (hopefully) knows what they are doing tells you what to read and what work to do so that you to can know what you are doing.
No, wait, nix that.
College is a place where you learn how to learn about your field. If you love what you are doing and what you are learning about, it does not matter if you are paying $30k a year or $8k a year for an education. Go interview the faculty at the universities and colleges you plan on attending and find out if their passion and devotion to their chosen field matches your own. Find out if where you plan on going is a good place to learn. Even more importantly, find out if it is a good place to learn how to learn, because if you are going to be successful that is what you will be doing throughout your whole life.
And then, bugger the costs, choose the University or College that you feel fits you best. Then follow up by not being a financial moron. College students who have a $5 a day coffee habit are going to be $1800 more in the hole at the end of the year, and will have spent $7200 at the end of a four year program, then students who just go to bed at some semblance of a reasonable hour.
Finally, remember that the dude who is $80k in debt and works at a retailer (or at Starbucks...) and who tells you that "Dude you've got to party and have fun in college!!!" is not going to be having any fun for the next 8+ years.
In comparison, everyone I know who has followed their passions, but in a financially responsible way, has money coming out of their every orifice.
Sheesh, all in all, just stop being so stupid! Any college student who uses loan money to buy a big screen TV is an idiot. Any college student who flies down to some tropical spring break party is an idiot. I knew a guy who spent well over $10k in loans on Warhammer figures. It wasn't that College was too expensive, he was just stupid!
Their support of fascist-environmentalism (taxes on shopping bags, elimination of free parking)
Taxes on shopping bags are not fascist, in fact they are quite in line with free market capitalistic tendencies.
Capitalism is dependent upon well defined property rights (thus forcing the purchase, rather than the theft of, goods from another). When plastic bags are disposed of, the person disposing them does not pay the true cost of their disposal. A tax on plastic grocery bags is merely forcing consumers to pay for the true cost of their actions. The alternative is having future generations pay the cost, in effect stealing value from them.
Likewise with most environmental tax proposals. When implemented properly, they are not "sin" taxes designed to discourage something (although they may be presented that way), but rather they just charge people the true cost for their actions.
Put another way, if it costs 20 cents to clean up the environmental damage that a plastic bag will do, then you and I, as consumers of plastic bags, should have to pay a 20 cent fee.
An alternative is to have someone else somewhere in the plastic bag's life pay the fee, which will get passed down to you. The problem is ensuring funds from the tax go to the proper destination, it is easier to track the money if it is collected in the final locale.
Slashdot Mirror
They want to speak with someone over at Zer01, something about "exceeding sane limitations of the electromagnetic spectrum".
An HD movie in 3 minutes? Even if they are calling "480p" HD, there is no way in hell that is transfering wirelessly in 3 minutes to a cellular device.
Trying to sign everyone up as a sales associate just proves it is a scam.
Why not just use Picassa or Live Photo or some similar service that is designed for storing photos? It will be easier to find them that way.
My workflow looks like this:
1. Pop in my digital camera's memory card.
2. Import Photo dialog pops up.
3. I give all photos a single descriptive tag using the import photos dialog.
4. I browse through the newly imported photos, deleting the bad ones and queuing good photos for upload to social networking sites.
This has always been true with photographs.
You take a 100 pictures, and hope 5 of them turns out good.
There is a reason people used to pack a large number of film rolls when they went on vacation. At 24 pictures per roll, burn through five or six rolls at minimum, and hope you got a few decent pictures out of it. Digital cameras allow people to take even more photos, so at least in theory there is a greater chance of a few high quality pictures coming out on top.
I do agree that archiving all digital photos is silly, the delete key exists for a reason.
Playing Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, I have a highly customized control scheme, using EASD instead of WASD (it is WASD shifted one to the right), with various weapon bindings surrounding my movement keys.
Not possible on a console.
I happen to own Left 4 Dead on Xbox 360. The game blows massive chunks. All my friends, who happen to own the PC version of the game, keep telling me how much it rocks.
The only advantage consoles have for control is that an analog joypad is superior for movement, but even so a mouse + keyboard comes in close, and blows the hell out of consoles for accuracy in shots.
It will also increase your metabolism, so that every action to take throughout your day will burn more calories.
Given that just the water content of our bodies can vary 3-5 pounds throughout the day, this is not too surprising.
I have a scale that graphs my weight over time (and costs no more than the other overpriced glass digital scales), allowing me to spot any trends in my weight over multiple days.
I can configure the graph to daily, weekly, or monthly. My weight almost always has a +/- 5lb variance within any given noticable trend, upwards or downwards.
In other words, a usual, TV is serves as an excellent example of how not to do math.
Removing all soft drinks and packaged snake food from one's diet IS very doable, as is ensuring all meals throughout the day have more veggies in them than meat.
Likewise, packing lunch everyday and not buying food from restaurants or cafeterias, and not going out to eat more than once or twice a week, and never hitting up fast food joints.
It really is quite easy. After cutting my American addiction to sugar I found that soft drinks are actually pretty nasty. Packaged junk-food snacks are loaded with so salt and fat I wouldn't want to eat anyway, and I happen to like fresh vegetables.
Admitedly it isn't easy since the entire American diet that most of us our used to does not actually have much in the way of vegetables in it, or at least not nearly enough.
A person is proposing this. It is not agreed on (or even commented on from what I can tell) by anyone in the government.
Holy crap. I could propose anything I wanted too, doesn't mean it is going to happen and that doesn't make it a news story!
In the US, their video search does pr0n a lot better than Google's does..
You win some you lose some.
It's called competition.
It is supposed to drop prices, that is the entire point.
Why does Apple make over $200 in pure profit per iPhone sold? Simple: No decent competitors. When some good competition comes along, Apple will have to drop their price if they want to maintain market share, or they could take the iPhone the same route they took their Desktop machines and make them high-end only.
Its called capitalism. Holy crap, its working!
A 1.6Ghz Atom is not fast enough for my Grandmother.
Seriously, not kidding.
She loves to play games on Pogo.com. As Adobe keeps updating Flash she has to keep getting new computers...
Not to mention just sites like /. bog down my Core2 Duo, (whatever version of Slashcode is live right now isn't too horrible, but some weeks performance is obscene. Nevermind that in IE(6/7/8) there is not much hope of using /. at all.
Normally I hate to feed the trolls but this is so easily corrected...
Obesity is not nearly as rampant in all first world countries as it is in America. Only in England and the US. As someone on my /. friends list put it "In a European airport you can tell which gate is for the UK, it has all the fat people in it".
Although true that developed European countries have a higher rate of obesity on average than third world countries, it is also true that as low price refined food is introduced to many third world countries, that the prevalence of obesity is increasing in portions of the third world as well. A definite disadvantage to trading with more developed nations... importing the garbage we call food.
Indeed in many developing nations (Vietnam for instance) it is not always a lack of food that is the problem, but a lack of clean water throughout the entire food preparation process. The diet is quite healthy, but the intestinal parasites end up killing you.
Obesity by Country
Now I have to go read up why Saudi Arabia is the second fattest nation on Earth.
If you're a competent programmer then nothing is unsafe, but obviously there are a lot of stupid programmers out there who make fundamental mistakes fucking with memory when they don't understand what they're doing
Minor correction, if you are a competent programmer who is never tired, stressed out, or pressured to meet deadlines, and who always ensures their code is reviewed by other programmers who are equally blessed, then nothing is unsafe.
Otherwise, as you said, even the best programmers can make mistakes. Even more so when sleep deprived. :)
As someone who recently (~1.5 years ago) graduated from a CS program, let me say that if your book is worth a damn, students will buy it just to keep a copy around.
I could have easily pirated most of my text books online. E-Books are not flippable though, nor can I put post it notes in them. (Actually in good e-book formats you can, but most pirated books are in PDF format and PDFs suck). And then there is the fact that the book is on my monitor screen and not on my desk.
Did I use illicit online copies of books now and then? Sure, when the book was overpriced, of low quality, and not utilizes that for the class. I exactly as much value out of those books as I paid for them, e.g. $0. On the other hand some of the books I paid dearly for I still use today.
Heck there was one text book I originally was planning on using an online copy of, but because it was so good I went out and bought it. (One of Charles Petzold's, that guy rocks as a tech author)
Not at my workplace from within Outlook. :)
You can setup rules for phone calls. Freaking awesome.
if (Status == b0rking_hot_secretary)
{
if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.wife.phonenumber)
call.redirect("/dev/null");
else if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.otherHotSecretary.phoneumber)
Send3WayInvite(caller);
}
But in all seriousness, it'll be nice to have a rule that auto-directs calls to my cell when I'm out of the office.
When was the last time you saw a game in comedy genre?
...
Or an actual SF game with a well written story - that is not an FPS? Besides Portal (which is threading the fine line of being an FPS).
Thanks for answering your own question.
Lets see, Sam and Max, Penny Arcade, and to an extent World of Goo are all at least partly in the Comedy genre.
Romance games typically do not get released in the US, they are huge over in Japan and some other Asian countries though. See Otome game.
How about a thriller that doesn't involve shooting?
Most of Silent Hill counts here. Technically there is shooting, but not very much! Mostly it is running and screaming, if you happen across a few bullets while sprinting down the hallway, figure it as good luck and don't count on it being a regular occurrence.
Are adventures games even being made anymore? Or turn-based RTSs?
There is a recent resurgence actually. King's Bounty" is a turn based strategy game, and I have played a few others lately as well. I have also played through a number of point and click adventure games recently, though in doing so I realized how much that genre of game really does suck. Monkey Island was good because of the humor, the game play, not so much.
Most of these games are from independent companies. Of course if they are successful the companies will grow large and no longer be "indie", start publishing more "mainstream titles" and in 10 more years we'll be on /. having this very same discussion again! :-D
The trick is that the ARM instruction set is *WAY* more efficient than the x86. The fact that the current ARM's are basically in order units is less important due to the design of the instruction set.
A minor correction here: The ARM instruction set is simpler and is much less feature rich than x86. This, combined with self imposed limitations (mostly around in-order execution) ARM (the company) is able to design CPUs with a much lower transistor count than x86 chip designers are capable of managing.
Not having a huge instruction decoder, having to do instruction reordering, or basically doing any of the things that makes x86 so damn fast, and staying a generation or two behind on manufacturing techniques to avoid leakage issues, enables ARM CPUs to have their amazing power profile.
The instruction set is kind of a mess really. It has been hacked onto a number of times, with the latest additions really showing signs of having wedged into the existing instruction encoding space. With features like the original (crappy) thumb, and now the fixed "Thumb2" (which we are all supposed to be calling Thumb and ignore the old Thumb, or something like that), and the fark-up that is ARM's floating point support (They have 3 implementations, 2 of which are still in use, and those two versions respond dramatically different to some basic key floating point operations), the ARM instruction set isn't nice per say, but ARM did the right thing and by keeping their eye on power consumption always.
(For those who are getting linguistically confused: ARM the name of the company, the name of their CPU line AND the name of their instruction set. Oh it is also the name of their reference manual, the ARM-ARM.)
He's right, ARM chips are not that performant per Mhz. Their two main weaknesses are in order execution and their RISC instruction set not playing nicely with instruction cache. Although the ARM instruction set is huge for a RISC architecture, it is not nearly as powerful or compact as x86. Variable length x86 instructions end up fitting better in the instruction cache.
Of course it must also be noted that the Dothan had 2MB of Cache, the Cortex A8 Remembering that the Dothan had 2MB of cache Cache misses, the tiny tiny cache L1 and L2 cache, rather ancient CPU design make ARM processors at least 1/2 as fast per mhz as Intel x86 chips. (Speaking in huge generalizations here...)
Pentium M's had a damn nice microarchitecture though. :) My Pentium M laptop was noticably faster than my Pentium 4 desktop...
I can't find how much cache the TI SDP 3430 using the A8 has on it, but the A8 only goes up to 1MB of L2 cache max, and I am guessing most manufacturers opt for less than that for cost and power saving reasons.
With SilverSprite you can get 2D XNA games running inside of Silverlight as well. :)
See Mark Russinovich Explains MinWin Once and For All.
MinWin is there.
The function of schools is to each students how to learn.
To accomplish this a basic foundation must be built up, literacy of both language and mathematics, an understanding of the principles of science, and the ability to apply critical thought to problems.
If you are merely aiming for survival, then just pass out billy clubs the first day and send everyone home.
You think this is a bad thing?
You should have seen the back of my CS classes. A good 50% of the class was playing World of Warcraft on any given day.
Seriously though, Laptops are just one more source of distractions. Could PCs potentially be used to help improve education? Perhaps. Applications such as OneNote are great, I went an entire year without using any paper at all (I emailed my HW in), but I had plenty of trouble paying attention in class and staying off of /.
The current education system in America is by no means perfect, but throwing a bunch of laptops into the mix is not going to help things any. Teachers will still assign busy work, students will still pick on each other, and the majority parents will still be too lazy/busy to ensure their children complete homework assignments.
WinCE is not a Windows derivative. It is a completely separate OS kernel that happens to have had a good deal of the Desktop's CRT and other APIs ported over to it some years back.
Is it possible to have very carefully written code cross compile on WinCE and the desktop? Sure. But the same can be said for Windows XP and Linux. Stick to API libraries that exist on both platforms, and make liberal use of IFDEFs to cover any platform differences. E.g. WinCE Windows, your screen size is almost an order of magnitude different, so you'll probably want to redesign the entire UI. Your input options are significantly different, need to take that into account. Your audio output options are different. How your app handles networking is (should be) different.
Heck, the directory where you save user data at is different. The file system is laid out differently (in places).
For both XBox 360 and WinCE Microsoft has taken steps to try and make writing cross platform code as easy as possible, but it is by no means consists of a single "hit recompile" step.
And as apparently demonstrated by Rockstar, companies can screw up cross platform releases really bad.
I got through a 4 year degree without any huge debt quite easily.
How?
2 years at a local community college, and then 2 years at a state college.
Every summer, winter, and spring break I worked. Every time I applied for a job I aimed for higher pay. Going through college my hourly wage progression was $8/hr -> $10/hr -> $15/hr -> $20/hr -> $22/hr.
Some internships and jobs I worked at for more than 3 months. Some I remoted in to after I had resumed school. With the exception of my first job, my work was always related directly to my major (CompSci). By the time I had graduated I had a little over a year worth of experience working in my field, which allowed me to be in a better position when looking for a job.
While in college I never paid for cable TV, I did not buy any computers, and I did not go out to eat. I rented an apartment with my GF, the difference cost for the apartment versus on campus housing was more than made up for by the savings of cooking our own food rather than eating at the campus cafeterias. By spending a good deal of effort in looking for and negotiating housing, we were able to find an apartment complex close enough to campus that we did not have to drive, so the only gas we paid for was the gas used to drive back home to see our families. Extra bonus: No parking permit required, yet another $240 a year saved.
After all of this, do I have a degree on my wall from an Ivy league school? No I do not.
Do I work with people who do have such a degree on their wall? Yes I do.
Do I know as much about my field as they do? Thanks to hard work, dedication, and a passion for my field, yes I do.
College is a place where some one who (hopefully) knows what they are doing tells you what to read and what work to do so that you to can know what you are doing.
No, wait, nix that.
College is a place where you learn how to learn about your field. If you love what you are doing and what you are learning about, it does not matter if you are paying $30k a year or $8k a year for an education. Go interview the faculty at the universities and colleges you plan on attending and find out if their passion and devotion to their chosen field matches your own. Find out if where you plan on going is a good place to learn. Even more importantly, find out if it is a good place to learn how to learn, because if you are going to be successful that is what you will be doing throughout your whole life.
And then, bugger the costs, choose the University or College that you feel fits you best. Then follow up by not being a financial moron. College students who have a $5 a day coffee habit are going to be $1800 more in the hole at the end of the year, and will have spent $7200 at the end of a four year program, then students who just go to bed at some semblance of a reasonable hour.
Finally, remember that the dude who is $80k in debt and works at a retailer (or at Starbucks...) and who tells you that "Dude you've got to party and have fun in college!!!" is not going to be having any fun for the next 8+ years.
In comparison, everyone I know who has followed their passions, but in a financially responsible way, has money coming out of their every orifice.
Sheesh, all in all, just stop being so stupid! Any college student who uses loan money to buy a big screen TV is an idiot. Any college student who flies down to some tropical spring break party is an idiot. I knew a guy who spent well over $10k in loans on Warhammer figures. It wasn't that College was too expensive, he was just stupid!
Taxes on shopping bags are not fascist, in fact they are quite in line with free market capitalistic tendencies.
Capitalism is dependent upon well defined property rights (thus forcing the purchase, rather than the theft of, goods from another). When plastic bags are disposed of, the person disposing them does not pay the true cost of their disposal. A tax on plastic grocery bags is merely forcing consumers to pay for the true cost of their actions. The alternative is having future generations pay the cost, in effect stealing value from them.
Likewise with most environmental tax proposals. When implemented properly, they are not "sin" taxes designed to discourage something (although they may be presented that way), but rather they just charge people the true cost for their actions.
Put another way, if it costs 20 cents to clean up the environmental damage that a plastic bag will do, then you and I, as consumers of plastic bags, should have to pay a 20 cent fee.
An alternative is to have someone else somewhere in the plastic bag's life pay the fee, which will get passed down to you. The problem is ensuring funds from the tax go to the proper destination, it is easier to track the money if it is collected in the final locale.