Knuth's Volume 4 only got 9/10 recently, obviously because it is soooooooo wordy.

In base Pi, the last digit of Pi is 0. Easy.

I'm waiting for the day when some nutjob fashions a piece of doggie-poo looking substance out of brown-painted C4 with an embedded motion-sensitive detonator.

There, I've said it. Let everyone be scared of any stray pile of poop laying on a city sidewalk. Perhaps then, when we try to ban dogs completely, people may wake up and see that it's just not worth going through life terrified of everything.

Ugh.

While I found Russian Ark technically fascinating, it was otherwise very difficult to sit through because the viewer becomes aware early on that they are watching a visual gimmick unfold. Instead of paying attention to the plot, I was distracted by the single-shot nature of it, and how they were going to pull it off.

I'd liken this to experiments like Timecode which use similar gimmicks and long shots, but are otherwise slightly awkward to view.

No it's not, since it will eventually degenerate into an fully connected graph. Just find one on Wikipedia or Wolfram, and link to that picture instead.

Billy Joel has, since a very early time in his career, a registered trademark on his name for the purpose of music. I'm pretty sure he's not going around suing parents who have the audacity to name their kids William Joel, however.

Look at the album cover of "Billy Joel (R) Greatest Hits" for an example.

I seem to have had excellent luck with durability of the systems I integrate. Either that, or I'm hanging on to computers that are way too old... I've had to replace a CMOS backup battery button-cell in an old Gateway laptop and a Shuttle SFF system last year. My kids still use them to play old DOS games.

asplode: what your head looks like after going through an asplundh

If computers were considered "the revenge of the nerds", I'm curious what the next few years will be called.

Obviously, Revenge of the Nerds II - Nerds in Paradise.

This reminds me of an old joke about a retired Admiral who is responsible for sounding the morning cannon at the naval base, walking past a watchmaker's shop every morning and setting his pocketwatch to the correct time from a reliable old grandfather clock in the store window.

One day, on the walk in, he happens to see the watchmaker cleaning the store windows and mentions how he finds it amazing that the old grandfather clock keeps such flawless time.

"Oh, that old thing?" says the watchmaker. "It drifts horribly, and I have to reset it almost daily."

The Admiral then asks, "Since I've always noticed that it's reliable, from where do you get the time to set it?"

The watchmaker replied, "I use the report from the morning cannon at the naval base. It's always right on time."

The poll asked about running, not sleeping, processes. Most responses should be between 1-5, unless your load average right now is really insane and you're thrashing your system.

Actually, for mobile devices, the most important metric is performance per unit of power instead of just performance per unit time. After a certain speed/throughput has been reached, nobody cares how fast the CPU is, only how long the battery lasts.

For scientific purposes, back when Cray was building systems, you got charged by the second you had access to the computer. So you carefully composed the solution to your problem to make darned sure every whizz-bang aspect of the computer was doing something useful all the time. Today, you just want to play a game for a while, then make a voice call, and don't want the battery to fizzle out before you get home (and maybe have some juice left for watching a show during your train ride home.)

Mobile devices don't try to match the throughput of all parts of the system, because it's not in anybody's interest to keep the I/O subsystem saturated close to capacity 100% of the time you're using your Droid/iPhone... in fact, they turn them off (go into a low power state) and do aggressive power management that is coordinated system-wide.