If they make it only slightly easier than brain surgery with a butter knife to install a fucking accelerated driver even, that would be super.
Why would they do this? It alientates the community, it doesn't work well, it just doesn't work long term, it's likely breaking copyright and esp. nVidia are screwed long term (both AMD and Intel have their own graphics offerings). With a decent Dell desktop it's even easy to get it configured to take an addon PCIE card, and then buy a supported ATI card. Laptops are going to be harder, but it seems less likely people will want the bigger features... so just going with intel there seems like a sane plan.
The thing that confuses me about this is compounding, even if he started at $40,000 a year (which seems low) four jobs later at a 30% increase each is ~$90,000 (which seems high for someone with 2 years XP). Another 30% is ~$115,000, which seems insane unless he's in the middle of Manhatan.
If you're not going to get a decent job, then don't go to expensive colleges and think to yourself that you can afford it unless you willingly choose to saddle yourself with debt, at which point it's nothing you should be whining about later.
So a good education is only for the rich, or for people who are going to do well at subjects that make them rich? There are a lot of subjects that require degrees (or masters degrees) that do not pay $40k a year to people straight out of college. Maybe you were lucky.
Which doesn't include the ~4k-8k you should be putting in your 401k
If and only if the return on that is greater than the interest on your debt.
Well at any decent company the first ~1k is going to be matched, but it's also probably fair to say that, over a 25-35 year period, putting money in most mutual funds is going to give a better return than paying off a student loan.
A lot of college students already have cars one way or another.
This is far from the case, in my experience, also when they do have one what is useful as a recreational vehicle is different from what is useful for doing an hour or more commute 5 days a week.
Fine dining and luxurious living accommodations are not the key to happiness.
That's not what I said, when you've finnished working you might be "forced" to socialize with your co-workers; you will be restricted in when you can buy food, how long you'll be able to prepare it, how long you have to eat it, etc.; you can easily be restricted to a higher price of groceries.
And for housing it's often the case that you'll be sharing with 1 or 2 other students, which is often not viable after you've graduated. It's also not out of the question for you to want to own a home within the first couple of years at work.
Most people would also say that companionship / love is a key to happiness, which once you've left college might well require a degree more spending.
I'm not like most Americans, and I don't think spending lots of money often accomplishes any useful end above and beyond sustaining myself.
I'm not arguing that you should spend "often", but I do think your idea that most people could pay off an $80,000 education loan "in a couple of years" is highly optimistic. The whole discussion is kind of sureal anyway, as given the student loan rates paying it early is the worst thing to do.
and keep in mind that, from the perspective of most human beings who have ever lived, your accommodations are already luxurious and your dining already fine
That's like saying don't complain if someone breaks your legs because at least you are alive. Yes, it's true, but is mostly meaningless.
Perhaps I have the mentality to escape the debt most Americans constantly find themselves in. It's a pity that they don't.
I understand where you are coming from, and I also have no pity for the people selling their home because they leveraged it's equity to just "buy shit"... but there's a huge gap between that and having to spend a third to a half the price of a home on an education.
You have a $40,000 (gross) a year job, and you expect to have $30,000 in disposable income? I'd like to live in your fantasy land. However for the rest of us, in the real world, $40,000 a year is a pretty decent paying job and assuming no state tax you'll only have $32.5k per. year a actual money. Which doesn't include the ~4k-8k you should be putting in your 401k, and any medical contributiuons. Then you almost certianly need a car, you'll have bigger expenses for work clothing and obviously need rent and food (rent/mortgage is very likely to be higher, food probably is too).
So having a decent job straight from school, spending almost nothing extra, living in the same kind of crappy accomodations you did during school and eating the same kind of crappy food... you might be able to "spend" $10,000 a year on paying down your school debt.
But life just isn't that wonderful, and you'll soon find that the 3-4% student loan isn't worth paying anything more than the minimum on (and you can't afford to anyway).
I was recently asked to host a website for free in return for a lot of advertising
This sounds like this is purely a business thing, at which point I'd seriously question whether the ad revenue will cover the costs. Even if you don't get screwed by the school or parents (need to hire a lawyer, etc.) you are going to be providing x2 the bandwidth of anything they download, and I'd roughly estimate a click through rate of 0% on any adds, if they don't just block them completely, because if they could afford to buy anything they'd be paying for hosting.
Pretend you're God for a minute. And pretend, for the sake of argument, that you used the Big Bang to create the universe and the process of evolution to create mankind.
[..]
Now let's say that you want to explain this to mankind.
Ok, why would I want to explain anything to them? I leave bird food outside and enjoy watching them eat... I feel no need to "explain" to them that they have free food because of me, they don't need to worship me and I don't care if they go down the street and bring enjoyment to someone else. On the other side I might drop a bannana in the forest and mold will grow on it, not only would I not want to explain anything to the mold I am totally indifferent to it's life.
My company does Windows -> Linux/Mac migrations [...] All of my servers, sans a couple of Mac OpenDirectory servers, run FreeBSD.
Ok, I appreciate that all of the above are mostly POSIX and code moves between them about a million times easier than anything else and windows... but I have to ask why are you selling Linux and/or OS-X but using FreeBSD? Don't any of your customers ask the same question?
There has been no need to run telnet for at least 10 years.
That's a significant exageration. Portable openssh was first released Oct. 1999, I remember running various versions of what became the proprietary ssh code before that... but it wasn't common until after the first openssh release (I certainly had to use telnet/ftp occasionaly in 1998-1999). Putty was also first released in 2000.
2. OpenSSL was validated as *source*. All other FIPS 140 validations are of *object code* or devices. This is the first cryptomodule to be validated in source form and contributed to the time taken to validate.
This is very misleading. The OpenSSL code was submitted as source, but the lab still evaluated it as a binary blob (after compiling/installing it using the instructions provided). The lab did not evaluate the source anymore than they did for NSS or the MS crypt libs. etc.
The normal usage of syscall is something that has to transfer control to the system, from your program. Things like accept(), write() and sbrk() but not strcpy() or malloc(). While I haven't done an strace on Apache-httpd I have done it on my own webserver and I find it hard to believe that Apache-httpd is as bad as the graph in the article implies. And given there's no text in the graph it's hard to check.
At it's simplest a HTTP response is: accept(); read(); open(); fstat(); write(); sendfile(); close(); close();. A lot of servers will set options like: FD_CLOEXEC, O_NONBLOCK, TCP_CORK and call shutdown() at the end. You can also easily blow a few more syscalls on config. options which don't do anything for the simplest case, but the graph implies 50-100.
The confusing thing, to me, is that if by "syscall" they meant something like "library calls" then I'd expect much more for Apache-httpd (as large bits of code are in libapr etc.)... but the comparison is worthless then anyway.
The fact you can't always speed the text up, and everyone does that annoying and stupid mumble (which you can't turn off). I assume this was better in Kanji, due to having less symbols.
It's a beautiful art piece, I fire it up just to look at it, but rather a middling game.
Well, to be fair, I thought the game play was better than that. And I'd certainly recommend it to people who play an above average amount of games... but not so much for casual gamers. From the Art POV, I'm also not sure about the Doom like 3d on the trees etc.
Okami is good, but there are some obvious problems with it. The most obvious being the stupid UI for talking with characters... that was just painful, certainly if I hadn't been waiting for the game for 6 months anticipating the things it did differently, and got right, I wouldn't have got past the intro.
While Zelda isn't as original, it's a better complete package... but then I'm playing Link to the past for the first time, on VC, and as a complete package that's better than both, IMO.
For example, if management says that there's $1 million left in the budget, and you can either implement a new customer tracking system that is projected to save $300k per year, or implement a new security technology or process
Security isn't an add-on in this way, and it will (currently) always be bad advice to "invest extra $X in security". Security ROI only really becomes useful when you have decisions like: "We need X security, what is the best ROI solution".
Also consider that there is a large fuzzy middle ground between terrible "uwftpd, old sendmail" and very good "vsftpd, and-httpd"... and even experienced user/developers tend to just group things into "terrible" and "everything else" (see, pretty much all web servers being clasified as "secure" even though a lot of them are poorly coded and Eg. Apahce-httpd and lighttpd have had remote security erratas). So the fact is, unless you fall into the "terrible security" group you are pretty much guaranteed to get a better ROI by doing anything else.
Note that when speaking about a company as against a specific product, this will just make everything even more fuzzy for 99.999999%... so investing in security for ROI is going to be even worse.
And makes the problem much worse the rest of the time. Also note that/., eBay, google and Amazon have almost no required AJAX. And that's one of the big reasons I still buy pretty much everything from Amazon, ignore newegg and don't use firehose etc.
The movie industry woke up to this and started launching things at the same time worldwide
While I agree with most of what you said, this is obviously wrong. US movies still mostly take a few months to get to the UK, and any UK movies often take more than 6 months to get here. Sure a few very big movies have world wide releases, but then that was happening 10 years ago.
Now, anyone can sell a Solaris system as cheaply as they can sell a Linux system.
So who is doing it, with their own support people? With Linux I can easily point to three different "for profit" distributors, and then there are lots of gratis ones CentOS/Debian/etc.... AFAIK OpenSolaris and Solaris still aren't even close to bit compatible, and they are basically it... both owned by Sun. No vendor lock-in, don't look behind the curtain.
Also, in my personal opinion, Sun can "position" Solaris as a better Linux all they want but that won't make it true.
When was the last time I actually saw a music video on MTV, you know, with actual musicians in it?
Go buy a TiVo, not only is it trivial to skip the ads you can easily set it up to record the real music videos playing at 3am-7am (and easily skip songs you don't like).
For example, let's say you have a page where a user has some sort of an inbox from which the user can delete things, like system notifications. Next to each item, you have a delete link. Clicking on the link deletes the item, meaning javascript deletes the node from the DOM, and an AJAX call gets the thing deleted from the DB. Good use of AJAX.
Depends, if you mean "I'm using a web browser as an email application, and with JS is closer to a real application than without" then sure, I can buy that. But here's an even better idea, don't go for a pale shadow of an application and just go with a real application. I hear there might be one or two real email applications available by now, and there might even be a network protocol or two if you want to store your email somewhere else.
And it's very possible to have a low volume "inbox" without JS, and for those cases it's often much more usable than trying to create an almost application... IMNSHO. It also works if you have a web browser that isn't trying to act like an application platform (Ie. JS disabled, for whatever reason).
Consider another example. A shared calendar web application, that builds a table server side, gets all the data, runs security checks on each event to see what the current user can do to each event, and then presents the data. Building the table server-side, then pumping out tons and tons of HTML code will not only tax your web server, but also generate unnecessary network traffic. You could pretty easily refactor this application to build the table client side, and then send the data to the client via a JSON object.
IMO that's one of the last things you need JS for. Instead of a doing a single SQL select for a month range you want ~31 seperate DB calls, HTTP requests (incl. authentication and logging etc.)? And all for what, so you don't have to create the "table" server side?... I totaly fail to see how the server or client would prefer JS from a resource POV. And again... you've totally destroyed the view of the calendar as HTML now, if the user doesn't have a client that happens to be a valid web application platform for your code you are giving out blank pages.
After saying all that I do see some use for JS, but it's entirely as small seasonings on top of the HTML (and I've seen it used to enhance the UI well, when used in that way). But too often I see morons turning simple forms/links into JS dumping grounds, and then wording why everyone buys through Amazon instead.
Last time I checked, over pretty much any timescale there were more exploits found in Linux than in the Windows NT kernel. If you are going to compare all of Windows, then you need to include a set of comparable applications
Then you also need to define exploit. Or look at it objectively, the leading Linux vendor has spent a huge ammount of time integrating SELinux support throughout it's entire distro.... as well as a bunch of other less global security measures (no exec, randomisations, glibc _FORTIFY_SOURCE, etc.). Microsoft have done what? Fixed IE yet... ahh no.
Can you get back to your game at the same place, though?
All the VC games have that feature, in fact you can even go into. "power off" mode and it'll still let you pick up all of your games where you were. The instructions say that it loses that if you unplug the Wii... but I'm not even sure that is acurate (although I've only done that once or twice, so could just be bad testing on my part).
The normal Wii games currently need to be saved though:(.
Actually, there is no typing. You just select from list boxes.
Mini-review:
The weather view itself is very nice and easy to read, it even displays the current weather in the channel selector (so you don't have to go into the channel). However it'll only display the current day, and I'm mostly interested in the 5 day forcast so I'd need to start the channel anyway. It does run the channel fairly quickly (about the same time as the Mii channel, at a guess), faster than TiVo anyway (and much faster than shopping).
Also, I often want to see the weather for a couple of places... but there is only one preset allowed. On the other hand the "global" weather is very nice (gives you a movable/zoomable 3d globe with weather info. on it), and is fast to get at once the weather channel itself is up.
re: cross-plaform compatibility. I do my development on OS X, but most of our developers use Windows. Our dev and staging environments are Linux, and our production boxes are Solaris, although we've recently introduced Linux into that mix as well.
Apart from win32, I've seen the same thing with C multiple times. No one would say that C is cross-platform though. And I have seen cases where apps. seemed suspiciously tied to a particular VM (I'm looking at you Oracle). I've also seen problems when multiple versions of the JRE were involved. I'm Hopeful that with Java going Open next year, these problems will go away for everyone... even if it's just because all relevant OSes will come with a very new Java in a well defined place, so people will be less happy to accept apps. comming with a "install X here, and our Java VM there".
Nor has performance ever been a problem. VM technology has seen amazing improvements over the past ten years, and is now such that for most non-trivial applications it is more performant than the compiled C/C++/Obj C equivalent. The success that Java has seen would not have been so tremendous if this were not true.
This is just not true, you can certainly write bad C and good Java where the Java will win even though it's running on the JVM... but gcj still consistently wins against JVM running applications, AFAIK.
A decent malloc implementation could even allow you to specify that you only wanted memory in the lower 4GB of your address space, allowing small programs to keep 32-bit pointers for that extra tiny bit of speed.
Given that x86-64 runs x86 just fine, and there is a compiler flag to compiler with that, I don't see why you'd hack malloc() in that way.
I think that sums it up nicely. So everyone wants complex things that they have no idea what it does?
While, I do agree that Norman is on crack... the on/off button on the rear view mirror has been around for a while (my "new" car, that I bought used this year, has one). The mirror has an optical sensor and dims the view when someone is tailgating with their huge SUV lights beaming straight into your car.
Older cars have the mechanical switch, which uses two mirrors but: 1) I hate those mechanical things, as I can always see outline in the other mirror. 2) The on/off one works automatically, so when someone isn't beaming a light show into the back of my car I can see everything perfectly. 3) Even when toggled the mechanical ones are often still too bright or too dim (as they basically just have two settings), the auto. one has a lot of range so it's only unusable when someone is right on your tail (and even then you can happily look right at it).
My only complaint is that it automatically comes on whenever the car is turned on (IMO it should remember the setting). But given that it's so much better than the toggle switch, I just leave it on now anyway... and I might have turned it off and left it off, I can somewhat forgive them. I would seriously consider not buying another car if it didn't have one, it's that nice. However this is one of the simplest things in my car (esp. due to the one by default mode), and if I had to manually tweak a knob or something I would have killed it by now.
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Why would they do this? It alientates the community, it doesn't work well, it just doesn't work long term, it's likely breaking copyright and esp. nVidia are screwed long term (both AMD and Intel have their own graphics offerings). With a decent Dell desktop it's even easy to get it configured to take an addon PCIE card, and then buy a supported ATI card. Laptops are going to be harder, but it seems less likely people will want the bigger features ... so just going with intel there seems like a sane plan.
The thing that confuses me about this is compounding, even if he started at $40,000 a year (which seems low) four jobs later at a 30% increase each is ~$90,000 (which seems high for someone with 2 years XP). Another 30% is ~$115,000, which seems insane unless he's in the middle of Manhatan.
So a good education is only for the rich, or for people who are going to do well at subjects that make them rich? There are a lot of subjects that require degrees (or masters degrees) that do not pay $40k a year to people straight out of college. Maybe you were lucky.
Well at any decent company the first ~1k is going to be matched, but it's also probably fair to say that, over a 25-35 year period, putting money in most mutual funds is going to give a better return than paying off a student loan.
This is far from the case, in my experience, also when they do have one what is useful as a recreational vehicle is different from what is useful for doing an hour or more commute 5 days a week.
That's not what I said, when you've finnished working you might be "forced" to socialize with your co-workers; you will be restricted in when you can buy food, how long you'll be able to prepare it, how long you have to eat it, etc.; you can easily be restricted to a higher price of groceries.
And for housing it's often the case that you'll be sharing with 1 or 2 other students, which is often not viable after you've graduated. It's also not out of the question for you to want to own a home within the first couple of years at work.
Most people would also say that companionship / love is a key to happiness, which once you've left college might well require a degree more spending.
I'm not arguing that you should spend "often", but I do think your idea that most people could pay off an $80,000 education loan "in a couple of years" is highly optimistic. The whole discussion is kind of sureal anyway, as given the student loan rates paying it early is the worst thing to do.
That's like saying don't complain if someone breaks your legs because at least you are alive. Yes, it's true, but is mostly meaningless.
I understand where you are coming from, and I also have no pity for the people selling their home because they leveraged it's equity to just "buy shit" ... but there's a huge gap between that and having to spend a third to a half the price of a home on an education.
You have a $40,000 (gross) a year job, and you expect to have $30,000 in disposable income? I'd like to live in your fantasy land. However for the rest of us, in the real world, $40,000 a year is a pretty decent paying job and assuming no state tax you'll only have $32.5k per. year a actual money. Which doesn't include the ~4k-8k you should be putting in your 401k, and any medical contributiuons. Then you almost certianly need a car, you'll have bigger expenses for work clothing and obviously need rent and food (rent/mortgage is very likely to be higher, food probably is too).
So having a decent job straight from school, spending almost nothing extra, living in the same kind of crappy accomodations you did during school and eating the same kind of crappy food ... you might be able to "spend" $10,000 a year on paying down your school debt.
But life just isn't that wonderful, and you'll soon find that the 3-4% student loan isn't worth paying anything more than the minimum on (and you can't afford to anyway).
This sounds like this is purely a business thing, at which point I'd seriously question whether the ad revenue will cover the costs. Even if you don't get screwed by the school or parents (need to hire a lawyer, etc.) you are going to be providing x2 the bandwidth of anything they download, and I'd roughly estimate a click through rate of 0% on any adds, if they don't just block them completely, because if they could afford to buy anything they'd be paying for hosting.
Ok, why would I want to explain anything to them? I leave bird food outside and enjoy watching them eat ... I feel no need to "explain" to them that they have free food because of me, they don't need to worship me and I don't care if they go down the street and bring enjoyment to someone else. On the other side I might drop a bannana in the forest and mold will grow on it, not only would I not want to explain anything to the mold I am totally indifferent to it's life.
Ok, I appreciate that all of the above are mostly POSIX and code moves between them about a million times easier than anything else and windows ... but I have to ask why are you selling Linux and/or OS-X but using FreeBSD? Don't any of your customers ask the same question?
That's a significant exageration. Portable openssh was first released Oct. 1999, I remember running various versions of what became the proprietary ssh code before that ... but it wasn't common until after the first openssh release (I certainly had to use telnet/ftp occasionaly in 1998-1999). Putty was also first released in 2000.
This is very misleading. The OpenSSL code was submitted as source, but the lab still evaluated it as a binary blob (after compiling/installing it using the instructions provided). The lab did not evaluate the source anymore than they did for NSS or the MS crypt libs. etc.
The normal usage of syscall is something that has to transfer control to the system, from your program. Things like accept(), write() and sbrk() but not strcpy() or malloc(). While I haven't done an strace on Apache-httpd I have done it on my own webserver and I find it hard to believe that Apache-httpd is as bad as the graph in the article implies. And given there's no text in the graph it's hard to check.
At it's simplest a HTTP response is: accept(); read(); open(); fstat(); write(); sendfile(); close(); close();. A lot of servers will set options like: FD_CLOEXEC, O_NONBLOCK, TCP_CORK and call shutdown() at the end. You can also easily blow a few more syscalls on config. options which don't do anything for the simplest case, but the graph implies 50-100.
The confusing thing, to me, is that if by "syscall" they meant something like "library calls" then I'd expect much more for Apache-httpd (as large bits of code are in libapr etc.) ... but the comparison is worthless then anyway.
The fact you can't always speed the text up, and everyone does that annoying and stupid mumble (which you can't turn off). I assume this was better in Kanji, due to having less symbols.
Well, to be fair, I thought the game play was better than that. And I'd certainly recommend it to people who play an above average amount of games ... but not so much for casual gamers. From the Art POV, I'm also not sure about the Doom like 3d on the trees etc.
But it was certainly nice on the eyes :).
Okami is good, but there are some obvious problems with it. The most obvious being the stupid UI for talking with characters ... that was just painful, certainly if I hadn't been waiting for the game for 6 months anticipating the things it did differently, and got right, I wouldn't have got past the intro.
While Zelda isn't as original, it's a better complete package ... but then I'm playing Link to the past for the first time, on VC, and as a complete package that's better than both, IMO.
Security isn't an add-on in this way, and it will (currently) always be bad advice to "invest extra $X in security". Security ROI only really becomes useful when you have decisions like: "We need X security, what is the best ROI solution".
Also consider that there is a large fuzzy middle ground between terrible "uwftpd, old sendmail" and very good "vsftpd, and-httpd" ... and even experienced user/developers tend to just group things into "terrible" and "everything else" (see, pretty much all web servers being clasified as "secure" even though a lot of them are poorly coded and Eg. Apahce-httpd and lighttpd have had remote security erratas). So the fact is, unless you fall into the "terrible security" group you are pretty much guaranteed to get a better ROI by doing anything else.
Note that when speaking about a company as against a specific product, this will just make everything even more fuzzy for 99.999999% ... so investing in security for ROI is going to be even worse.
And makes the problem much worse the rest of the time. Also note that /., eBay, google and Amazon have almost no required AJAX. And that's one of the big reasons I still buy pretty much everything from Amazon, ignore newegg and don't use firehose etc.
While I agree with most of what you said, this is obviously wrong. US movies still mostly take a few months to get to the UK, and any UK movies often take more than 6 months to get here. Sure a few very big movies have world wide releases, but then that was happening 10 years ago.
So who is doing it, with their own support people? With Linux I can easily point to three different "for profit" distributors, and then there are lots of gratis ones CentOS/Debian/etc. ... AFAIK OpenSolaris and Solaris still aren't even close to bit compatible, and they are basically it ... both owned by Sun. No vendor lock-in, don't look behind the curtain.
Also, in my personal opinion, Sun can "position" Solaris as a better Linux all they want but that won't make it true.
Go buy a TiVo, not only is it trivial to skip the ads you can easily set it up to record the real music videos playing at 3am-7am (and easily skip songs you don't like).
That's right, it's a well known fact that the price of illegal things tends to be lower. You know, like how prohibition made alcohol so cheap.
Depends, if you mean "I'm using a web browser as an email application, and with JS is closer to a real application than without" then sure, I can buy that. But here's an even better idea, don't go for a pale shadow of an application and just go with a real application. I hear there might be one or two real email applications available by now, and there might even be a network protocol or two if you want to store your email somewhere else.
And it's very possible to have a low volume "inbox" without JS, and for those cases it's often much more usable than trying to create an almost application ... IMNSHO. It also works if you have a web browser that isn't trying to act like an application platform (Ie. JS disabled, for whatever reason).
IMO that's one of the last things you need JS for. Instead of a doing a single SQL select for a month range you want ~31 seperate DB calls, HTTP requests (incl. authentication and logging etc.)? And all for what, so you don't have to create the "table" server side? ... I totaly fail to see how the server or client would prefer JS from a resource POV. And again ... you've totally destroyed the view of the calendar as HTML now, if the user doesn't have a client that happens to be a valid web application platform for your code you are giving out blank pages.
After saying all that I do see some use for JS, but it's entirely as small seasonings on top of the HTML (and I've seen it used to enhance the UI well, when used in that way). But too often I see morons turning simple forms/links into JS dumping grounds, and then wording why everyone buys through Amazon instead.
Then you also need to define exploit. Or look at it objectively, the leading Linux vendor has spent a huge ammount of time integrating SELinux support throughout it's entire distro. ... as well as a bunch of other less global security measures (no exec, randomisations, glibc _FORTIFY_SOURCE, etc.). Microsoft have done what? Fixed IE yet ... ahh no.
All the VC games have that feature, in fact you can even go into. "power off" mode and it'll still let you pick up all of your games where you were. The instructions say that it loses that if you unplug the Wii ... but I'm not even sure that is acurate (although I've only done that once or twice, so could just be bad testing on my part).
The normal Wii games currently need to be saved though :(.
Actually, there is no typing. You just select from list boxes.
Mini-review:
The weather view itself is very nice and easy to read, it even displays the current weather in the channel selector (so you don't have to go into the channel). However it'll only display the current day, and I'm mostly interested in the 5 day forcast so I'd need to start the channel anyway. It does run the channel fairly quickly (about the same time as the Mii channel, at a guess), faster than TiVo anyway (and much faster than shopping).
Also, I often want to see the weather for a couple of places ... but there is only one preset allowed. On the other hand the "global" weather is very nice (gives you a movable/zoomable 3d globe with weather info. on it), and is fast to get at once the weather channel itself is up.
Apart from win32, I've seen the same thing with C multiple times. No one would say that C is cross-platform though. And I have seen cases where apps. seemed suspiciously tied to a particular VM (I'm looking at you Oracle). I've also seen problems when multiple versions of the JRE were involved. I'm Hopeful that with Java going Open next year, these problems will go away for everyone ... even if it's just because all relevant OSes will come with a very new Java in a well defined place, so people will be less happy to accept apps. comming with a "install X here, and our Java VM there".
This is just not true, you can certainly write bad C and good Java where the Java will win even though it's running on the JVM ... but gcj still consistently wins against JVM running applications, AFAIK.
Given that x86-64 runs x86 just fine, and there is a compiler flag to compiler with that, I don't see why you'd hack malloc() in that way.
While, I do agree that Norman is on crack ... the on/off button on the rear view mirror has been around for a while (my "new" car, that I bought used this year, has one). The mirror has an optical sensor and dims the view when someone is tailgating with their huge SUV lights beaming straight into your car.
Older cars have the mechanical switch, which uses two mirrors but: 1) I hate those mechanical things, as I can always see outline in the other mirror. 2) The on/off one works automatically, so when someone isn't beaming a light show into the back of my car I can see everything perfectly. 3) Even when toggled the mechanical ones are often still too bright or too dim (as they basically just have two settings), the auto. one has a lot of range so it's only unusable when someone is right on your tail (and even then you can happily look right at it).
My only complaint is that it automatically comes on whenever the car is turned on (IMO it should remember the setting). But given that it's so much better than the toggle switch, I just leave it on now anyway ... and I might have turned it off and left it off, I can somewhat forgive them. I would seriously consider not buying another car if it didn't have one, it's that nice. However this is one of the simplest things in my car (esp. due to the one by default mode), and if I had to manually tweak a knob or something I would have killed it by now.