You don't have to be bad at math to play the lottery.

I find that the state lottery significantly increases my happiness during low spots. The Arizona Lotto used to (and may still) have the slogan, "You can't win if you don't play." In fact, if I do play, I am able to daydream of what would happen in the exceptionally unlikely event that I won. How that day would go, how successive days would go, how I could be smart with the money, how I could avoid pitfalls, etc. Heck, I can replay the joke over in my head about the guy stuck on his roof in a flood, avoiding all driftwood, boats and even the helicopter because God would save him. He died and demanded of God why he was allowed to die. God wanted to know who he thought sent all the rescuers! During the times I'm dissatisfied with my job, I can really drag down if I can't daydream about that 1 in 5 million chance I'll win the million bucks -- if I never play, the odds get significantly worse.

For about 6 months, I played the lottery in Vermont weekly. I would gamble $2/week, and pretty much every other week, I would win $4. Against the odds, I broke even for about 4 months before hitting "a dry spell". I kept tossing the money in, and ended up winning $50. Not enough to make a profit, but enough to pay for the hobby and to continue to break even.

IBM Model M, a keyboard that you can use to kill a man, then use to type his obituary.

I tried, once. Picked it up and chased someone out the door. Catch was that it was still plugged in. Cord and connector were stronger than my 200 lbs of running inertia. Snapped me back and I lost the guy I was chasing.

In other words 35% of consumers don't care about the product but the social symbol it is and the status they think it confers on them.

Personally, I've enjoyed my iPod Touch for the past two years, but I'm getting tired of only having network when I'm within range of a wifi access point. I'd really like the cellular modem. At this point, it seems stupid to get an iPhone because a new one is just around the corner. No, I don't know what's in it, but I'm 99% sure it'll be better than the iPhone 4.

There is nothing about a diesel that makes it more efficient at being a generator. They're great for cars because we like to drive torque (accelerate) and diesels do very well with power at low RPMs compared to gasoline. As such, given a desired acceleration curve, a car designer can choose a smaller diesel engine, reducing the weight of the vehicle. This smaller engine has fewer losses, and is thusly more efficient when it is accelerating the resultant lighter car. This is why a 100HP diesel can accelerate a Jetta even better than 130HP gas -- but the diesel will struggle more at highway passing.

Diesel fuel itself has more energy density, so it's good for some applications like trains, but the answer to your natural gas question is that it's much less dense, so each cylinder needs to be much bigger for the same power, or the engine will be underpowered for its size when compared to gasoline. Gas turbines are noisy, although you might enjoy reading about the potential benefits of the Wankel.

Problems with series plug-in hybrids include that the generator always wants to run in its peak power band. No matter how fast I'm going, if my gas car is running at 3500-4000 RPMs, it's very noisy, even if I'm cruising at a constant speed and could easily downshift twice. Batteries add to the hybrid equation for acceleration and regenerative breaking and are simply weights for cruising. A series generator would hate the acceleration part of that and would prefer to simply feed the generator directly. Now, we might be onto something if we suggested a way for the generator to cut over to direct drive at constant speeds, but I suspect that would be too heavy to be of value.

My commute is 14 minutes -- in traffic. When I work from home, I have kids who don't respect the sanctity of my work, and while my wife does, she can't help but ask me to do one little thing here and there. Working at home I don't get hallway conversations, I don't run into people in the hallways and catch up on the latest exciting thing they're doing (or advertise for a position in my department).

At work, I have better bandwidth, I'm closer to my lab, and someone else pays the electricity bill. My work desk is big enough to spread out everything I need to work on, while at home my iMac is pushed to the front of my desk so it's easier to see with my feet up.

If they want to offer me 10% more because they don't want to pay the facilities and utilities charges associated with storing my butt, we're within negotiating space, but I would walk away from a 10% "take it or leave it".

I consider myself quite a strong programmer, and I never think in terms of assembly when writing programs. Higher-level languages, in particular functional programming languages, are far closer to my mental model of things. Why not work in a language that represents or helps formulate the problem-space abstractions better?

In a word, performance. In your particular field of expertise, performance and memory footprint may not matter (99% of desktop applications I suspect), but a strong programmer is fully aware of what goes on under the covers when [his|her] program is compiled to the degree that it impacts the product. Until recently, I never thought there was a functional difference between a lone line containing "i++;" "++i;". Of course, for variable assignment it matters, but what's going on under the covers? If you stop and think about it, i++ actually has to return the old value. ++i can destroy that old value and never needs to worry about returning the old value (you can avoid an extra copy). If you're in a high performance loop, either with not much body or with a lot of increments, such things matter. Understanding the impact of caching, the scarcity of registers, the high cost of flushing the cache, all of these can matter, and it's hard to teach these concepts without using at least a pseudocode that looks suspiciously like assembly. If you're paying for compute cycles, or if you're selling something in a market where performance matters, you're going to see a strong advantage in a computer scientist who understands assembly and compiling.

Now, if your main concern is code readability, maintenance and/or moving onto the next product as soon as this one compiles with no errors, higher level languages are undoubtedly far more appropriate.

I didn't even pause at reading it. With Parallels, other VMs and Boot Camp so prolific, I think Windows is much more of a partner and collaborator than it ever was a competitor. There are a lot of Macs out there with purchased Windows installs on them. How could that be viewed as competition?

What metric are you using? Hewlett Packard beats Apple soundly in the Fortune 500.

Market cap. AAPL is over $300B while HPQ is significantly under $100B.

I'll give you that while Apple's revenue may have doubled in the year since your citation, it's still only $76B. HP is currently pulling in nearly twice that. It's also interesting to note that Apple's operating cash flow is twice that of HP.

I can understand wanting to use annual revenue as a metric of company size, and I can even come up with a few justifications. Within the context of companies needing armchair quarterbacking to tell them what industries they need to cater more to, I hope you can see my perspective that the one with the lower operating margin, return on equity and quarterly revenue growth need more help.

OSX doesn't 'need' TRIM, but without it, you'd better have a controller with excellent background garbage collection, or you're going to suffer performance penalties after a few weeks or months. Unless you stick with the SSD that Apple ship with, in which case I believe you're stuck with that poor performance to start with (far better than spinning media, but not as fast as competing SSDs).

And I'm not stating that OSX is so stupid that it prevents the user from manually putting data elsewhere (like iTunes' "copy to iTunes library vs leave it where it is). I'm stating that the ability to use an SSD as an additional level of cache would be a very compelling feature. Suddenly a 30GB SSD would be very useful for a large number of customers instead of a 128+ GB SSD to manually keep everything you think you might notice.

Personally, this is what I plan on doing in May, but not offering TRIM this many years after Microsoft began support is ... embarrassing.

Honestly killing the Xserve and not letting OSX server be installed on another vendors server hardware is brain dead.

I'm certain your arm chair quarterbacking the largest computer company in the world, and the second largest US based corporation is beyond reproach, but it would be kind to the Apple stockholders (including me) if you'd share some of your data.

Name one advantage Apple gains by sharing their operating system. You want it, but you want the lower prices that multiple vendors imply and the exceptionally low volume enterprise level features that are missing. Let's say that adding redundant power supplies, hot swappable memory and all that jazz costs $50M in R&D. Can you state that they would recoup that investment in the first year? Could they command a $1k premium per box, and amortize it over 50k boxes they would not have otherwise shipped, and then ship another 30k boxes beyond that to count as margin? First, you're going to balk at paying three times as much for Apple hardware as you would for other brands', and the conversation goes down from there.

Features like Time Machine seem to scream for servers, but Apple's implementation is nowhere near what a 24/7 75% usage machine needs, or even what a real database needs under any but the most idle loads.

The kind of people who feel MacOSX is good for servers either need a low power Mini (where the hardware, OS and GUI shortfalls are easily overlooked) or a Mac Pro (for number crunching under familiar development tools matter more than the ability to go out and get more MIPS/$ at any random vendor).

Apple isn't branding their server as something that will compete against Power, Sparc (snicker) or Itanium. They're looking for the hobbyist who doesn't really care about all the underpinnings. For them, it's enough of a server, with enough server features.

I was really looking for better SSD support. I'm an avid Mac user, I'd love my iMac to be faster, but today most of my issues are with the lack of SSD support. I'd love TRIM. Some OS integrated ability to use an SSD as a cache for spinning media would be nice -- I don't want to pay for an SSD to store my iTunes or iPhoto database, but I never want to hear the spinning media seek when I'm playing video games or using Firefox. Even file level deduplication would save me some space, but I'll admit I lust for block level without enough data to justify. Wait, did I just start listing features of ZFS after I mentioned TRIM?

My wife has an iPhone. She really benefits from reading e-mail on the go, and the mapping anywhere. She's a doula (professional birth coach) and mother of two young kids, so information on the go is important.

I need to be able to text during the day and place the occasional emergency phone call, rarely even once a month. I don't want to drop more than $50 to buy it, and I want to minimize my monthly fee (currently $15 above my wife's plan). My phone is way more than I need, and it was the freebie that AT&T was offering. I like T9 text entry, that's a nice extra feature. If I could drop games, applications, MediaNet and music and de-clutter the home screen, I'd like my phone even more. Yes, I want fewer features. Of course, I also like my iPod Touch, mostly for Safari and Facebook, but only within WiFi range. My biggest wish, however, is that AT&T would have a separate plan for people who want to actually buy a phone and not get the price amortized over the life of the plan.

What's with all the stupid CSI sunglasses jokes lately? When did slashdot become digg?

Do you really want to grouse about where the Natalie Portman, naked and / or petrified with / without hot grits jokes went?

Judging from all the haters of the new Slashdot redesign, I'm guessing Slashdot became Digg a few weeks ago, since that's when Digg fell from grace. When I joined Slashdot in 2000 (?), it was seemingly centered around hacking the Netpliance iOpener -- a younger coworker and my father both pointed me to Slashdot the same week. I took that to mean I was missing out on something. In the beginning, and even through the early 2000s, there was a hacking culture here. Each Linux update was posted, along with the occasional nifty water cooling setup. We would see case mods regularly. You know, the stuff some kids finishing up college would be interested in.

The audience has shifted. Us old timers don't have time for everything that Slashdot was when it started. Our interests have shifted dramatically. The kinds of news posted to Digg, Reddit and Slashdot overlap some, and I'm betting the audiences overlap significantly. Personally, I needed more contemporary non-tech news than Slashdot could provide, so I was reading Digg more than Slashdot. When they redesigned significantly and went more to a content provider centered approach, I left Digg and found Reddit. I'm still suffering in the news department.

As far as the jokes go, I think CSI: Miami made itself a joke a long time ago. Judging from its Nielson ratings, it's a widely enjoyed joke. From the absurd "take the sunglasses off moment", to the "dramatic Horatio walks out of the scene", down to the 25-30 minutes of script spliced together with stock footage of the Miami area and bikini models, I think it's a joke a lot of people enjoy. If you don't want to read it, maybe that's more of a statement that you're reading Slashdot comments looking for too much serious discussion.

I was going to come to your defense because of the specific /. crowd, but even Catholics cite their quotations in Sunday mass.