The Desktop PC is dead, but the PDA will not be able to take its place for at least another 10 years.
I think what we'll see is more and more use of smaller and smaller laptops. The current standard size for a small laptop is 12", but you could easily scale that down further to 8" or 9", small enough to fit in a largeish handbag. With ubiquitous wi-fi and bluetooth, there's not as much need for the profusely-cabled desktop pc, so you can have most of the portability of a pda and most of the power of a desktop. Once smaller-scale components reach a certain threshold of power compared to their full-size desktop cousins, I think the desktop environment will vanish for all but a few applications (e.g. computer labs). In fact, if you look at the way computer sales are going, you might even say it's already happening.
Re:On any UNIX box vi is always there for you
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 1
At least one version of vi I've used insisted on writing something to/tmp, and would quit if it couldn't. Once I had to boot from a CD-ROM and/tmp was read-nly. Thank god for ed.
They cheat and plagiarize mostly at an undergraduate level; i.e., these are the kids who are stupid and hate doing schoolwork but go to college anyway "because that's what everyone does". They do little but party and drink for four years, and then get skill-less jobs in marketing, sales, or business administration, never setting foot into an academic setting again for the rest of their lives. The ones who like studying and learning go on to graduate school, become PhDs and write articles for journals. They *like* writing papers, and consequently would derive no satisfaction from cheating or stealing work.
So, basically, the people who publish journal articles and the people who plagiarize are mutually self-excluding.
I wouldn't worry so much about the polarity-changing aspect of the situation, but rather the inevitable increase in the Earth's magnetic field once it occurs. Greater field strength -> more E-M interference for digital equipment. I suppose it will be possible to shield everything in the 2000+ years it will take for the reversal, but it's nevertheless an interesting thought.
Decaffeinated doesn't mean "no caffeine"; it just means "less caffeine". That's why it's called "Decaffeinated" instead of "Caffeine Free". The process for removing the caffeine gets out most of it, but not quite all. So if you're quitting America's (second?) most popular addictive stimulant imported from Colombia, don't look for decaf, look for caffeine free.
No, probation is for when the prosecution needs to look like tough guys who can handle the case, in spite of the fact that a) they don't have a legal leg to stand on; and/or b) someone higher-up in the process for making these decisions tells them not to hurt a defendant who has close ties with said higher-up. If you offer to settle for probation, the prosecution doesn't have to admit they fucked up and look like jackasses, and nine defendants out of ten will settle for it because it means no prison time.
Innocent until proven guilty? More like, "Only slightly guilty until proven really guilty."
I suppose your courses on American Constitutional Law left out that bit about the Tenth Amendment. You know, that whole bit about
he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
As in, the listing of powers and authorities for the Federal government and its three branches is meant to be a complete listing. Anything not mentioned as being permitted for a given office in the Constitution or the twenty-six Amendments ratified and not repealed, is reserved for the people and states.
but do you really want to? The perspective on problem-solving gained through computer programming is useful for virtually any task repeated more than a couple of times. I worked in an industrial-strength kitchen popping things in and out of the oven, and knowledge of things like modularity, latency, pipelining, and resource locking made me an incredibly efficient baker. Using the idea of symmetric multi-processing made me faster when working as a cashier because I used both hands to wave things past the bar code scanner. Knowing how sorting algorithms made me really good at a desk job moving papers around based on index numbers.
The government of "the Good China" (a.k.a. Taiwan) should fund some money for Chinese (both simplified and traditional) versions of Wikipedia, and encourage people all over the world to leech content off of it, so that places that are let through the Great Firewall can send the data through.
The way I see it, they'd have a freely-redistributable CGI program that downloads the wikipedia page and then serves it to the end user over the local http server. Basically, allow everyone to roll their own version of a Chinese Answers.com on the fly. Then, the Chinese government will go nuts trying to block everyone on the internet from coming into China, and ultimately either a) give up, or b) block connections from outside the nation entirely, which might piss people off enough to do something about it.
That way, they can fight back against the people who want to invade them, increase dramatically the number of people aware of the new Chinese wikipedia project, and help spread Chinese language and culture all over the world, at all once! It's like a threefer!
since the PS3 is so expensive, gamers might as well get an Xbox 360 and a Wii for the cost of one Sony console.
It means:
The PS3 comes loaded down with hardware firepower, so If you're going to buy the awesome new system, the Nintendo Wii, that everyone's already saying they've just gotta have, you'll still have enough money left over compared to buying a PS3 that you might as well an XBox 360..... Please? It's also a gotta have, as in, "We've gotta have sold 10 million of these by the time the PS3 ships or we'll lose the console war, look like chumps and get dumped by all our investors."
Linux = trendy buzzword in IT. Businesses and large IT firms care about Linux for exactly two reasons: it's free/gratis, and everyone is doing it so they'd look like chumps if they didn't do it too. Remember some time ago someone offered Linus a huge chunk of change to release a version of the Linux kernel under a BSD license? What on Earth would anyone need a BSD-licensed version of Linux for, other than buzzword-compliance, when there were already *three* high-quality, stable, server-class kernels released under a BSD license? People only care about this whole "Open Source thing" because that trendy new OS Linux is certified as being "Open Source." Other than that, they don't give a rusty fuck.
No, no, no, no, no! Don't do "re-makes" of old games. Why? Because it will never be the wonderful first time you played it again, no matter how hard you try. Remember Star Wars, and the absolute fuck-up job revamping those turned out to be.
Far better to let Square work hard to create a new, wonderful game than to chase the ghosts of RPGs past. In fact, it wouldn't even have to be Square; as long as *someone* does it, that will be good enough.
Oh, please. The BSD name has been attached to the free software since before GNU was a glimmer in RMS's eye. Heck, it was free software since before "free software" meant anything. There was Berkeley Unix and if you wanted it, you could get it, along with CSRG source code and all the redistribution rights you could handle. By comparison with the longevity "BSD," "Linux" is just a trendy buzzword.
I think the idea is to take advantage of the way most people play car-racing games: by tilting their whole bodies to the right or left when they make a turn. This way, smart games can say to themsleves, "Oh shit, the player is leaning way over to the left, that means he wants to make a REALLy sharp turn!" and adjust its motion simulation accordingly.
No, it just means you have really lousy implementors. Is it gravity's fault that you eventually reach a terminal velocity? Then why is it the software's fault when you can't write good code?
The BSA also strong-arms people who have MS licenses, but not enough of them to cover their total number of employees. I don't know if they've actually filed any lawsuits, but they quite frequently threaten to.
Latin isn't really open-source; there's an open specification, but the widely-used reference implementation (The Holy See's Vatican 2.0) is property of the Catholic Church.
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The Desktop PC is dead, but the PDA will not be able to take its place for at least another 10 years.
I think what we'll see is more and more use of smaller and smaller laptops. The current standard size for a small laptop is 12", but you could easily scale that down further to 8" or 9", small enough to fit in a largeish handbag. With ubiquitous wi-fi and bluetooth, there's not as much need for the profusely-cabled desktop pc, so you can have most of the portability of a pda and most of the power of a desktop. Once smaller-scale components reach a certain threshold of power compared to their full-size desktop cousins, I think the desktop environment will vanish for all but a few applications (e.g. computer labs). In fact, if you look at the way computer sales are going, you might even say it's already happening.
At least one version of vi I've used insisted on writing something to /tmp, and would quit if it couldn't. Once I had to boot from a CD-ROM and /tmp was read-nly. Thank god for ed.
They cheat and plagiarize mostly at an undergraduate level; i.e., these are the kids who are stupid and hate doing schoolwork but go to college anyway "because that's what everyone does". They do little but party and drink for four years, and then get skill-less jobs in marketing, sales, or business administration, never setting foot into an academic setting again for the rest of their lives. The ones who like studying and learning go on to graduate school, become PhDs and write articles for journals. They *like* writing papers, and consequently would derive no satisfaction from cheating or stealing work.
So, basically, the people who publish journal articles and the people who plagiarize are mutually self-excluding.
I wouldn't worry so much about the polarity-changing aspect of the situation, but rather the inevitable increase in the Earth's magnetic field once it occurs. Greater field strength -> more E-M interference for digital equipment. I suppose it will be possible to shield everything in the 2000+ years it will take for the reversal, but it's nevertheless an interesting thought.
Decaffeinated doesn't mean "no caffeine"; it just means "less caffeine". That's why it's called "Decaffeinated" instead of "Caffeine Free". The process for removing the caffeine gets out most of it, but not quite all. So if you're quitting America's (second?) most popular addictive stimulant imported from Colombia, don't look for decaf, look for caffeine free.
No, probation is for when the prosecution needs to look like tough guys who can handle the case, in spite of the fact that a) they don't have a legal leg to stand on; and/or b) someone higher-up in the process for making these decisions tells them not to hurt a defendant who has close ties with said higher-up. If you offer to settle for probation, the prosecution doesn't have to admit they fucked up and look like jackasses, and nine defendants out of ten will settle for it because it means no prison time.
Innocent until proven guilty? More like, "Only slightly guilty until proven really guilty."
As in, the listing of powers and authorities for the Federal government and its three branches is meant to be a complete listing. Anything not mentioned as being permitted for a given office in the Constitution or the twenty-six Amendments ratified and not repealed, is reserved for the people and states.
but do you really want to? The perspective on problem-solving gained through computer programming is useful for virtually any task repeated more than a couple of times. I worked in an industrial-strength kitchen popping things in and out of the oven, and knowledge of things like modularity, latency, pipelining, and resource locking made me an incredibly efficient baker. Using the idea of symmetric multi-processing made me faster when working as a cashier because I used both hands to wave things past the bar code scanner. Knowing how sorting algorithms made me really good at a desk job moving papers around based on index numbers.
DDT is better! You can't use Malaria for a shell AFAIK.
[Not an original PDP-10 hacker, just a poseur.]
The government of "the Good China" (a.k.a. Taiwan) should fund some money for Chinese (both simplified and traditional) versions of Wikipedia, and encourage people all over the world to leech content off of it, so that places that are let through the Great Firewall can send the data through.
The way I see it, they'd have a freely-redistributable CGI program that downloads the wikipedia page and then serves it to the end user over the local http server. Basically, allow everyone to roll their own version of a Chinese Answers.com on the fly. Then, the Chinese government will go nuts trying to block everyone on the internet from coming into China, and ultimately either a) give up, or b) block connections from outside the nation entirely, which might piss people off enough to do something about it.
That way, they can fight back against the people who want to invade them, increase dramatically the number of people aware of the new Chinese wikipedia project, and help spread Chinese language and culture all over the world, at all once! It's like a threefer!
Here's a multiple choice test:
1: Which one of the following people advocates firms paying dividends?
a) This A.C. poster
b) Warren Buffet
2: Which one of the following people has a greater net worth?
a) This A.C. poster
b) Warren Buffet
All in all, it pretty much speaks for itself.
Linux = trendy buzzword in IT. Businesses and large IT firms care about Linux for exactly two reasons: it's free/gratis, and everyone is doing it so they'd look like chumps if they didn't do it too. Remember some time ago someone offered Linus a huge chunk of change to release a version of the Linux kernel under a BSD license? What on Earth would anyone need a BSD-licensed version of Linux for, other than buzzword-compliance, when there were already *three* high-quality, stable, server-class kernels released under a BSD license? People only care about this whole "Open Source thing" because that trendy new OS Linux is certified as being "Open Source." Other than that, they don't give a rusty fuck.
No, it's only man-ga if it has at least 10000 panels.
Yeah! Great things like the Linux kernel, OpenBSD, Python, OpenOffice.... Americans 4-ever!
No, no, no, no, no! Don't do "re-makes" of old games. Why? Because it will never be the wonderful first time you played it again, no matter how hard you try. Remember Star Wars, and the absolute fuck-up job revamping those turned out to be.
Far better to let Square work hard to create a new, wonderful game than to chase the ghosts of RPGs past. In fact, it wouldn't even have to be Square; as long as *someone* does it, that will be good enough.
If Gibsons come back, they need to change the default password from something other than "God", "sex", or "password" to keep people from hacking them.
Oh, please. The BSD name has been attached to the free software since before GNU was a glimmer in RMS's eye. Heck, it was free software since before "free software" meant anything. There was Berkeley Unix and if you wanted it, you could get it, along with CSRG source code and all the redistribution rights you could handle. By comparison with the longevity "BSD," "Linux" is just a trendy buzzword.
I think the idea is to take advantage of the way most people play car-racing games: by tilting their whole bodies to the right or left when they make a turn. This way, smart games can say to themsleves, "Oh shit, the player is leaning way over to the left, that means he wants to make a REALLy sharp turn!" and adjust its motion simulation accordingly.
Don't worry... be litigious....
No, it just means you have really lousy implementors. Is it gravity's fault that you eventually reach a terminal velocity? Then why is it the software's fault when you can't write good code?
Hey, it beats the short-lived "Opteron Mythologies" that AMD has planned.
The BSA also strong-arms people who have MS licenses, but not enough of them to cover their total number of employees. I don't know if they've actually filed any lawsuits, but they quite frequently threaten to.
Latin isn't really open-source; there's an open specification, but the widely-used reference implementation (The Holy See's Vatican 2.0) is property of the Catholic Church.
Feh, I have more cases than you've had years of schooling.
-- Finnish