Indie != Good. Innovative != good. Small != Good. Generally it's nostalgia clouding your judgment. You look back and remember xcom, pacman, supermario, rygar, etc.. and forgot all the dreck.
Wow, you completely missed his point. He didn't say that at all. What he said was that variety was good, and that independant small teams could innovate frequently, and sometimes that innovation struck gold. The whole problem with current day gaming is that triple-A titles are almost never breaking new ground. Innovation isn't always good, but without innovation you have stagnation. Stagnation is bad, and that's where we are at.
Multimillion dollar budgets create stagnation, because nobody wants to fund a stinker. There are very few development houses regularly pushing out innovative titles... and, sadly, they're often being purchased by Microsoft or EA, the goliaths of stagnation. Valve is one of the very few completely independent development houses... and, over the years, they've brought us Half Life, Counterstrike, Portal, and Team Fortress 2; each of these was a major innovation at the time that they moved into the mainstream. Hell, even they don't do their innovating in-house. They encourage independent developers and hire them when they make something really good; that's how they acquired Team Fortress, Counterstrike, and Portal.
But most of the other development houses don't even do that. They keep on making the same things year after year, with tiny little innovations; a new graphical method, a single gameplay element, one new multiplayer mode. Innovation still occurs, but it's surrounded and suffocated by similarity.
If you're tailchasing the car in front of you, you ARE a reckless driver. Just because someone is slow doesn't mean you should be sniffing their trunk with your grill. You won't get there any faster by being that much closer.
I don't mind when people speed... they can go as fast as they like, for all I care. As long as they don't tailgate. Unfortunately, the two are commonly found together. Speeding isn't inherently that dangerous, especially on an open road... tailgating is. And speeders become assholes when they speed have the audacity to be MAD at the people that don't.
I support your desire to go any speed you like. But if you're on my tail, 5 feet from me, gnashing your teeth that I'm not going fast enough for you, by god I'll park myself next to a goddamn semi and see that you don't pass for the next 30 miles.
Thank you. Isolationism is such an ingrained thought in many people that they don't even realize it. It's very rare to see a viewpoint espoused that does not treat free trade (of labor) as a type of evil.
I won't buy a digital organizing device until I can talk to it, with a record button held down, and have it create my appointments based on what I said. "Remember to pickup John from the airport at five pm", "Remind me to call home every tuesday at noon".
The processing doesn't have to be very sophisticated, because it doesn't need to understand the message part... only the time part. "Remember to" or "Remind me to" is an optional intro phrase it can ignore. "pickup John from the airport" and "call home" are the content, and would be played back verbatim when the alarm activated. The hard part would be processing a wide variety of time info. "every Tuesday at noon", "at five pm", etc.
It doesn't even need to process it fast. I can take the recording, then mull it over for half a minute or so, so it doesn't need a fast CPU.
Until I have a PDA that can do that, I don't want a PDA.
I find AdBlock is a far easier way. I don't use lists of adblock rules... I make them up one by one when an ad annoys me. Google has never annoyed me, but if they start, I'll write rules that block the SWF ads. *shrug* It's not that hard to block annoying ads, without blocking ALL ads.
It's not that you can measure which bits were read and which blue, so you set the bits to 10101100. Don't think of it as setting by spin. To use your ball analogy, the results are not read by looking at the bits and seeing 'red blue red blue red red blue blue'.
Instead, the bits are read by seeing which bits were touched, and which were untouched. At the appointed time, you look at the bits, and you see 'viewed entangled viewed entangled viewed viewed entangled entangled'. Of course, when you look at the bits the ones that WERE still entangled become so no longer, so those bits can't be used again. But by having one side leave some bits untouched, and some touched, it is possible for the far side to gain data instantaneously.
Of course, I could be wrong. Those familiar with quantum entanglement are free to tell me where I'm wrong.
Basically, scientists have discovered that people who believe something ignore contradictory evidence, mis-remember contradictions as confirmations, and solidify their beliefs over time. Wow. I mean, wow. And all this time, we believed that the older you get the easier it is to be open minded and learn new tricks. This just turns all of what we knew on its head!
Sarcasm aside, this isn't very surprising. Few people have strong reading comprehension... if you read a sentence and don't really think about it, it quickly gets absorbed into your mind... but your mind absorbs expected ideas better than it absorbs the unexpected, so a little fudging process nudges the meaning of sentences to fit what you expected them to say, not what they actually said.
This is one reason that teachers try to engage their students into debate about the subjects. If you're just reading something, you won't really absorb it accurately, if at all. But if you have to think about it, and discuss it, and you have to pay attention because you're trying to make a point... THEN it's a lot harder for your memory to just imagine that the peg was round so it fits in the round hold of your expectations. You're paying attention, and the square peg stays square when you file it away in your memory. Better, and more accurate retention.
textLikeThis is easier to TYPE than text_like_this. text-like-this might be easier, but most programming languages don't like dashes in identifiers.
"t e x t SHIFT-L i k e SHIFT-T h i s" requires fewer keystrokes, and less movement from the home row, than "t e x t SHIFT-_ l i k e SHIFT-_ t h i s". It's really the lack of leaving the home row that is the big benefit. I prefer camelCase personally. You like underscores. Good for you. I won't impose my preferences on you, if you don't whine about my preferences.
They DON'T fix it. During a resize of both, the seams are not always 8-way connected... pixels already lost from a horizontal resize can make vertical seams disconnect. It still looks fine though.
There are enough quests, in enough different zones, that the only way you could run all the SAME quests when leveling is if you were stupid, and CHOSE to level in the same areas you did before.
I've leveled three characters to 60+, and I know there are still questlines I haven't seen in the 20-40 range. Granted, I've probably hit a lot of them now. I'd really LIKE to see Blizz add more mid-level zones and content (20-40 hasn't really been touched much since the start of the game).
But if I was really tired of the same-old same-old, I could do things like switch to the other side. There's a massive ton of Horde content I've never seen.
In the end though, it's all about the community you're in. If your guild sucks, there's no reason to play WoW. If you are in a great, fun guild it makes all the difference.
Most image formats treat color as a series of discrete values. For example, I could have a black dot (0 red, 0 green, 0 blue), or a white dot (255 red, 255 green, 255 blue, the highest possible values), or any color in between. Well... 'any' color is kind of misleading. The numbers have to go up by a full step each time. While it can be difficult, to the discerning eye you can see the 'line' between a wash of (0,0,0) color and a wash of (1,0,1) color. The color 'jumps', and for certain types of images the jump can be noticeable and ugly. Plus, there is the additional problem of how you represent REALLY bright colors... for example, you can have a white wall, and then next to it the SUN... the sun a hundreds or thousands of times as bright as the wall, but they're both labeled the same... this makes it hard to really show them accurately.
Floating point color means that instead of having a fixed range of color values (0 to 255, or 0 to 65535, or 0 to 16.7 million), you open it up to allow nearly any value, by allowing decimals.
0.1, 15.73332, 2.31 * 10e13 (exponential notation, equivalent to 23100000000000). Floating point values aren't more precise than integers, but they have a wider range. This lets computers represent the range of brightnesses in a sunset shot (bright sun, nearly dark foreground) in a way that allows us to see a lot more detail, and give us far more flexibility in how to expose and display the image.
Actually, I'm not completely certain she committed a crime. How short must a clip be to fall within fair use? A law which prohibits fair use could potentially be overturned on those grounds. Not that it's LIKELY to be overturned.
Perhaps the judge could rule that she is responsible for damages relative to the fraction of the movie she recorded. 20 seconds works out to just over 1/400th of the movie. Fine her 1/400th of $2500, and 1/400th of a year. So, one day, and $6 dollars and change. She's probably already been in jail for a day, and she could pay the fine out of the change in her couch.
That would send an appropriate message to the theatre owners.
This is not symmetrical. On one hand, I can hire a lawyer and pay out my own pocket to attempt to sue the bank for damages, after a long and painful process of proving that they did it willfully or negligently.
On the other hand, they can hand my name to a police department paid for by my tax dollars, who will then arrest me and throw me in jail until I can convince them I'm innocent.
Molly Weasley kills Bellatrix Lestrange. One of the most feared duelers on Voldemort's side is killed by Molly Weasley? Sure, she's a member of the OotP, but the only spells she had shown in the previous books were household charms. It shows JK Rowling's opinion of a mother's love. But that is going too far in my opinion. Made me laugh when I read it.
I got a different impression... she got lucky. It's war, death, and chaos... the worst shot with a gun can kill the best trained sniper in that situation. It makes for dramatic storytelling, and a feel-good for the reader, but I did not come away with the impression that Molly was such a superior fighter... just that in battle, anything can happen. This went against good characters just as often as it went for them in the last book.
Snape's patronus is a doe. I understand that Snape loved Lily, but why does a doe represent Lily? Sure, James (secret!) animagus form was a stag, but that would imply that Snape cared about James. Lily's patronus was a doe, but why would Snape's be the same? I assume Lily's was a doe to represent James (even though a stag would make more sense), but again, that implies that Snape cared about James.
You're making a pretty big assumption... perhaps James became a stag because Lily's patronus was a doe. You're assuming that Lily chose a doe because of James; perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps compatible Patronus animals are an indication of romantic compatibility in the wizarding world... who knows. Who cares. You're assuming the causality goes from James to Lily... it could be the reverse, or neither.
Gryffindor's sword in the Sorting Hat. I thought that Griphook took it? If he cared so much about it, why wouldn't he protect it in some way?
I got the impression that the sorting hat was charmed to be able to summon the sword at need. It's done it before (Chamber of Secrets). However, it seems just as likely to me that the sword returned with Griphook's blessing... he may not be the nicest being, but he was willing to help against Voldemort. Perhaps he just didn't trust the kids to keep the sword safe for when it would be most needed.
The Deathly Hallows. JK Rowling introduces some super powerful items in this book that have never been mentioned before. The Invisibility Cloak was around since the first book, but it was never noticed that it lasted much longer than normal? I'd assume Hermione would read up on it at least. Voldemort made the ring a Horcrux without knowing its abilities? With his quest for power, I'd assume he would have at least heard of the Deathly Hallows. The wand? An unbeatable super weapon was introduced in the last book in order to defeat Voldemort since Harry couldn't outduel him. And the concept of a wand changing owners was introduced to make sure that Harry owned it? None of this was ever mentioned before? Come on.
This is a more valid criticism than the rest. It's not the best way to plot your books... establishing the method to victory a book or two in advance helps lend versimilitude to the world, make it feel more cohesive and solid.
However, Ms Rowling does a better job than most authors. It's a rare author who introduces all the concepts necessary for defeating the big bad monster before the last book in a series. In fact... can you name a few? Can you name a series that introduced all the items and concepts necessary to kill the big bad before the end of the series? The ONLY one I can think of is the Fellowship of the Ring series. That's it. There's a reason it is heralded as having one of the most cohesive fantasy worlds ever created. JK Rowling introduced the cloak 5 books back. She introduced Voldemort's soul containers a book ago, and alluded to them two or three books ago. Out of a dozen or so concepts related to Voldemort's failure, only two (fancy wand, wand ownership) were introduced this book. Most were intr
And you're telling me that the ONLY people who are 'smart and get things done' are in the US? There's NO qualified people that have applied to Google that are excellent coders, but don't happen to be born in the US?
Your argument makes no sense. Of course Google wants to hire people that are smart and get things done... unfortunately, many of those people need an H1B visa.
Bullshit. It doesn't hurt those foreign workers who have lots of talent and want to get paid well for their skills. Nor does it hurt their families who get money home from Azheem.
Oh... wait... to you, evil means 'slightly less good for me personally, or the people I identify with as a nation'. Being against protectionism isn't evil... in fact, if you're for the benefit of the human race as a whole, protectionist policies are evil. Free trade, without tariffs, may hurt some people, but it helps others... you're just whining because you happen to be neighbors with the people who might get hurt in the short term, and don't care about those other-skin-colored people who get a significant benefit in the short and long term from open border policies.
Personally I'm gonna side with Google. I think nasty immigration restrictions are evil, and I support their push to increase H1B visas.
Disclosure: I'm a white, 30ish male who works in IT and lives in flyover country. I won't benefit from H1B visas, nor do I know anyone who would. But I still think they're a good thing.
Desktops serve a different market segment than laptops. To say that desktops will 'disappear' is silly.
Laptops will definitely be more common than desktops, for all the reasons the article discusses. But desktops will not disappear at all... a significant chunk of computer users will always be tinkering with their computer, just like a noticeable chunk of car drivers tinker with their cars. The vastly greater ease with which desktops can be customized will make them a permanent part of the computer lineup.
It's also important to note that the computer media (and the Internet in general) is controlled by these very same geeks. This is a powerful influence on what is advertised out to the consumer.
Additionally, while big mostly-empty generic computer cases may slowly become more and more niche (for the enthusiasts), desktop computers in the form of tiny, difficult-to-upgrade office PC style cases will take their place for the desktop. The desktop PC will be 'consolized'; a non-upgradable box that you just plug into your monitor, keyboard, and mouse. These business desktops will spread to the consumer space, because they'll be tiny and cheap. The desktop won't die, but the big generic box might become marginalized.
If you want to see what programmers can do with a computer if it stops changing for a few years, don't look at computers... check out consoles. Some of the games released nowadays for the PS2 are truly beautiful, better looking than some other games released for the PS3/XBOX 360. Early games for the same system look really bad in comparison. That's the difference several years of practice make.
It simply depends on the number of systems affected. A 'test environment' is a fixed cost; whether you have 100 client computers, or 100,000, the test environment and staff cost the same. If a bad patch causes problems with 100 computers every few years, no big deal... it's cheaper to deal with that. If a bad patch causes problems with 100 THOUSAND computers every few years then you better have a goddamn testing environment before deployment.
It's all about size. For small and medium businesses a testing environment is a wasteful extravagance. For large businesses, NOT testing is the wasteful activity.
This isn't as strained as an analogy as you might think.
As long as the scheduler gives priority to realtime tasks and GUI threads, it's neutral. But if, say, the new scheduler decided to boost the priority of Quicktime threads, and lower the priority of MPEG threads... then we might be arguing for scheduler neutrality too.
It's not about prioritizing a TYPE of service, but about prioritizing a particular VENDOR.
It's nice to hear of a patent, for once, that isn't about a software process or algorithm; encouraging the sharing of inventions like this is the reason the patent system was created.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, you completely missed his point. He didn't say that at all. What he said was that variety was good, and that independant small teams could innovate frequently, and sometimes that innovation struck gold. The whole problem with current day gaming is that triple-A titles are almost never breaking new ground. Innovation isn't always good, but without innovation you have stagnation. Stagnation is bad, and that's where we are at.
Multimillion dollar budgets create stagnation, because nobody wants to fund a stinker. There are very few development houses regularly pushing out innovative titles... and, sadly, they're often being purchased by Microsoft or EA, the goliaths of stagnation. Valve is one of the very few completely independent development houses... and, over the years, they've brought us Half Life, Counterstrike, Portal, and Team Fortress 2; each of these was a major innovation at the time that they moved into the mainstream. Hell, even they don't do their innovating in-house. They encourage independent developers and hire them when they make something really good; that's how they acquired Team Fortress, Counterstrike, and Portal.
But most of the other development houses don't even do that. They keep on making the same things year after year, with tiny little innovations; a new graphical method, a single gameplay element, one new multiplayer mode. Innovation still occurs, but it's surrounded and suffocated by similarity.
If you're tailchasing the car in front of you, you ARE a reckless driver. Just because someone is slow doesn't mean you should be sniffing their trunk with your grill. You won't get there any faster by being that much closer.
I don't mind when people speed... they can go as fast as they like, for all I care. As long as they don't tailgate. Unfortunately, the two are commonly found together. Speeding isn't inherently that dangerous, especially on an open road... tailgating is. And speeders become assholes when they speed have the audacity to be MAD at the people that don't.
I support your desire to go any speed you like. But if you're on my tail, 5 feet from me, gnashing your teeth that I'm not going fast enough for you, by god I'll park myself next to a goddamn semi and see that you don't pass for the next 30 miles.
I think the cause/effect of that little transaction goes the opposite way you imply.
Thank you. Isolationism is such an ingrained thought in many people that they don't even realize it. It's very rare to see a viewpoint espoused that does not treat free trade (of labor) as a type of evil.
I won't buy a digital organizing device until I can talk to it, with a record button held down, and have it create my appointments based on what I said. "Remember to pickup John from the airport at five pm", "Remind me to call home every tuesday at noon".
The processing doesn't have to be very sophisticated, because it doesn't need to understand the message part... only the time part. "Remember to" or "Remind me to" is an optional intro phrase it can ignore. "pickup John from the airport" and "call home" are the content, and would be played back verbatim when the alarm activated. The hard part would be processing a wide variety of time info. "every Tuesday at noon", "at five pm", etc.
It doesn't even need to process it fast. I can take the recording, then mull it over for half a minute or so, so it doesn't need a fast CPU.
Until I have a PDA that can do that, I don't want a PDA.
I find AdBlock is a far easier way. I don't use lists of adblock rules... I make them up one by one when an ad annoys me. Google has never annoyed me, but if they start, I'll write rules that block the SWF ads. *shrug* It's not that hard to block annoying ads, without blocking ALL ads.
Bob knew that licking the reference weight was wrong, but his willpower was weak.
It's not that you can measure which bits were read and which blue, so you set the bits to 10101100. Don't think of it as setting by spin. To use your ball analogy, the results are not read by looking at the bits and seeing 'red blue red blue red red blue blue'.
Instead, the bits are read by seeing which bits were touched, and which were untouched. At the appointed time, you look at the bits, and you see 'viewed entangled viewed entangled viewed viewed entangled entangled'. Of course, when you look at the bits the ones that WERE still entangled become so no longer, so those bits can't be used again. But by having one side leave some bits untouched, and some touched, it is possible for the far side to gain data instantaneously.
Of course, I could be wrong. Those familiar with quantum entanglement are free to tell me where I'm wrong.
Basically, scientists have discovered that people who believe something ignore contradictory evidence, mis-remember contradictions as confirmations, and solidify their beliefs over time. Wow. I mean, wow. And all this time, we believed that the older you get the easier it is to be open minded and learn new tricks. This just turns all of what we knew on its head!
Sarcasm aside, this isn't very surprising. Few people have strong reading comprehension... if you read a sentence and don't really think about it, it quickly gets absorbed into your mind... but your mind absorbs expected ideas better than it absorbs the unexpected, so a little fudging process nudges the meaning of sentences to fit what you expected them to say, not what they actually said.
This is one reason that teachers try to engage their students into debate about the subjects. If you're just reading something, you won't really absorb it accurately, if at all. But if you have to think about it, and discuss it, and you have to pay attention because you're trying to make a point... THEN it's a lot harder for your memory to just imagine that the peg was round so it fits in the round hold of your expectations. You're paying attention, and the square peg stays square when you file it away in your memory. Better, and more accurate retention.
textLikeThis is easier to TYPE than text_like_this. text-like-this might be easier, but most programming languages don't like dashes in identifiers.
"t e x t SHIFT-L i k e SHIFT-T h i s" requires fewer keystrokes, and less movement from the home row, than "t e x t SHIFT-_ l i k e SHIFT-_ t h i s". It's really the lack of leaving the home row that is the big benefit. I prefer camelCase personally. You like underscores. Good for you. I won't impose my preferences on you, if you don't whine about my preferences.
They DON'T fix it. During a resize of both, the seams are not always 8-way connected... pixels already lost from a horizontal resize can make vertical seams disconnect. It still looks fine though.
There are enough quests, in enough different zones, that the only way you could run all the SAME quests when leveling is if you were stupid, and CHOSE to level in the same areas you did before.
I've leveled three characters to 60+, and I know there are still questlines I haven't seen in the 20-40 range. Granted, I've probably hit a lot of them now. I'd really LIKE to see Blizz add more mid-level zones and content (20-40 hasn't really been touched much since the start of the game).
But if I was really tired of the same-old same-old, I could do things like switch to the other side. There's a massive ton of Horde content I've never seen.
In the end though, it's all about the community you're in. If your guild sucks, there's no reason to play WoW. If you are in a great, fun guild it makes all the difference.
A standard Gentoo install turns off atime by default. It's been that way for at least five years, perhaps longer.
Most image formats treat color as a series of discrete values. For example, I could have a black dot (0 red, 0 green, 0 blue), or a white dot (255 red, 255 green, 255 blue, the highest possible values), or any color in between. Well... 'any' color is kind of misleading. The numbers have to go up by a full step each time. While it can be difficult, to the discerning eye you can see the 'line' between a wash of (0,0,0) color and a wash of (1,0,1) color. The color 'jumps', and for certain types of images the jump can be noticeable and ugly. Plus, there is the additional problem of how you represent REALLY bright colors... for example, you can have a white wall, and then next to it the SUN... the sun a hundreds or thousands of times as bright as the wall, but they're both labeled the same... this makes it hard to really show them accurately.
Floating point color means that instead of having a fixed range of color values (0 to 255, or 0 to 65535, or 0 to 16.7 million), you open it up to allow nearly any value, by allowing decimals.
0.1, 15.73332, 2.31 * 10e13 (exponential notation, equivalent to 23100000000000). Floating point values aren't more precise than integers, but they have a wider range. This lets computers represent the range of brightnesses in a sunset shot (bright sun, nearly dark foreground) in a way that allows us to see a lot more detail, and give us far more flexibility in how to expose and display the image.
Actually, I'm not completely certain she committed a crime. How short must a clip be to fall within fair use? A law which prohibits fair use could potentially be overturned on those grounds. Not that it's LIKELY to be overturned.
Perhaps the judge could rule that she is responsible for damages relative to the fraction of the movie she recorded. 20 seconds works out to just over 1/400th of the movie. Fine her 1/400th of $2500, and 1/400th of a year. So, one day, and $6 dollars and change. She's probably already been in jail for a day, and she could pay the fine out of the change in her couch.
That would send an appropriate message to the theatre owners.
This is not symmetrical. On one hand, I can hire a lawyer and pay out my own pocket to attempt to sue the bank for damages, after a long and painful process of proving that they did it willfully or negligently.
On the other hand, they can hand my name to a police department paid for by my tax dollars, who will then arrest me and throw me in jail until I can convince them I'm innocent.
I just wish more places would use djbdns.
I got a different impression... she got lucky. It's war, death, and chaos... the worst shot with a gun can kill the best trained sniper in that situation. It makes for dramatic storytelling, and a feel-good for the reader, but I did not come away with the impression that Molly was such a superior fighter... just that in battle, anything can happen. This went against good characters just as often as it went for them in the last book.
You're making a pretty big assumption... perhaps James became a stag because Lily's patronus was a doe. You're assuming that Lily chose a doe because of James; perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps compatible Patronus animals are an indication of romantic compatibility in the wizarding world... who knows. Who cares. You're assuming the causality goes from James to Lily... it could be the reverse, or neither.
I got the impression that the sorting hat was charmed to be able to summon the sword at need. It's done it before (Chamber of Secrets). However, it seems just as likely to me that the sword returned with Griphook's blessing... he may not be the nicest being, but he was willing to help against Voldemort. Perhaps he just didn't trust the kids to keep the sword safe for when it would be most needed.
This is a more valid criticism than the rest. It's not the best way to plot your books... establishing the method to victory a book or two in advance helps lend versimilitude to the world, make it feel more cohesive and solid.
However, Ms Rowling does a better job than most authors. It's a rare author who introduces all the concepts necessary for defeating the big bad monster before the last book in a series. In fact... can you name a few? Can you name a series that introduced all the items and concepts necessary to kill the big bad before the end of the series? The ONLY one I can think of is the Fellowship of the Ring series. That's it. There's a reason it is heralded as having one of the most cohesive fantasy worlds ever created. JK Rowling introduced the cloak 5 books back. She introduced Voldemort's soul containers a book ago, and alluded to them two or three books ago. Out of a dozen or so concepts related to Voldemort's failure, only two (fancy wand, wand ownership) were introduced this book. Most were intr
And you're telling me that the ONLY people who are 'smart and get things done' are in the US? There's NO qualified people that have applied to Google that are excellent coders, but don't happen to be born in the US?
Your argument makes no sense. Of course Google wants to hire people that are smart and get things done... unfortunately, many of those people need an H1B visa.
Bullshit. It doesn't hurt those foreign workers who have lots of talent and want to get paid well for their skills. Nor does it hurt their families who get money home from Azheem.
Oh... wait... to you, evil means 'slightly less good for me personally, or the people I identify with as a nation'. Being against protectionism isn't evil... in fact, if you're for the benefit of the human race as a whole, protectionist policies are evil. Free trade, without tariffs, may hurt some people, but it helps others... you're just whining because you happen to be neighbors with the people who might get hurt in the short term, and don't care about those other-skin-colored people who get a significant benefit in the short and long term from open border policies.
Personally I'm gonna side with Google. I think nasty immigration restrictions are evil, and I support their push to increase H1B visas.
Disclosure: I'm a white, 30ish male who works in IT and lives in flyover country. I won't benefit from H1B visas, nor do I know anyone who would. But I still think they're a good thing.
Desktops serve a different market segment than laptops. To say that desktops will 'disappear' is silly.
Laptops will definitely be more common than desktops, for all the reasons the article discusses. But desktops will not disappear at all... a significant chunk of computer users will always be tinkering with their computer, just like a noticeable chunk of car drivers tinker with their cars. The vastly greater ease with which desktops can be customized will make them a permanent part of the computer lineup.
It's also important to note that the computer media (and the Internet in general) is controlled by these very same geeks. This is a powerful influence on what is advertised out to the consumer.
Additionally, while big mostly-empty generic computer cases may slowly become more and more niche (for the enthusiasts), desktop computers in the form of tiny, difficult-to-upgrade office PC style cases will take their place for the desktop. The desktop PC will be 'consolized'; a non-upgradable box that you just plug into your monitor, keyboard, and mouse. These business desktops will spread to the consumer space, because they'll be tiny and cheap. The desktop won't die, but the big generic box might become marginalized.
If you want to see what programmers can do with a computer if it stops changing for a few years, don't look at computers... check out consoles. Some of the games released nowadays for the PS2 are truly beautiful, better looking than some other games released for the PS3/XBOX 360. Early games for the same system look really bad in comparison. That's the difference several years of practice make.
It simply depends on the number of systems affected. A 'test environment' is a fixed cost; whether you have 100 client computers, or 100,000, the test environment and staff cost the same. If a bad patch causes problems with 100 computers every few years, no big deal... it's cheaper to deal with that. If a bad patch causes problems with 100 THOUSAND computers every few years then you better have a goddamn testing environment before deployment.
It's all about size. For small and medium businesses a testing environment is a wasteful extravagance. For large businesses, NOT testing is the wasteful activity.
This isn't as strained as an analogy as you might think.
As long as the scheduler gives priority to realtime tasks and GUI threads, it's neutral. But if, say, the new scheduler decided to boost the priority of Quicktime threads, and lower the priority of MPEG threads... then we might be arguing for scheduler neutrality too.
It's not about prioritizing a TYPE of service, but about prioritizing a particular VENDOR.
It's nice to hear of a patent, for once, that isn't about a software process or algorithm; encouraging the sharing of inventions like this is the reason the patent system was created.