Same here: Peets coffee, bagels on mondays, fresh fruit on tuesdays and wednesdays. They did cut down on the travel and bumped up the teleconferencing. Except for getting to travel a few of the nicer European offices, that's actually kind of a bonus.

Just keeping the loyalty of a handful of critical engineers can really make or break a tech company that depends on actual innovation and research. They'd be stupid to drop any of these small perks.

For me it's not so much the mockery as the snarky self-righteousness mixed with credulity. There's a big list of folks who I'd like to keep from propagating their kind of stupidity, and the people who click "forward" on every "Darwin Award" announcement are way up there on it.

Slashdot editors: Take Darwin's picture off this. He deserves better.

The first digit in an nvidia model number is the generation, the second denotes how hopped-up the card is. The 6800 Ultra had some pretty decent memory bandwidth that isn't even matched by a mid-range 8600, but an 8800 will blow it out of the water. Suffice to say that the difference between the 8600 and the 8800 is way more than it was between the 6600 and the 6800. Your 8600 supports shader model 4 however, while your 6800 does not, so that would come in useful to newer games that take advantage of it (which is unfortunately not all that many).

Fact is though, a game like Frets on Fire shouldn't choke, and I suspect your problem is driver-related. NVidia's 19x series of drivers frankly just suck, and I would downgrade to the 18x series if you can. If you're on Linux, there's a utility that makes it easy to switch to older versions, but its name escapes me.

> Maybe The Truman Show is the last unique storyline I can think of.

What about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?

Funny thing, Jim Carrey is actually pretty good in serious roles.

My favorite thing about the 3D in Up was that they didn't overuse it. There were about two "stuff coming out of the screen" scenes in the movie, and one of them was even sort of appropriate.

I thought it was all right -- it certainly struck a poignant note other Pixar films didn't, and it gave the elderly protagonist some real dignity. Still, I place Wall-E at the very top, and it's going to take something really amazing to displace that.

> Sherlock Holmes looks like a chick-flick period piece

Guy Ritchie hasn't done a chick flick since Swept Away. Downey isn't exactly beefcake, and the guy he was fighting in that scene certainly isn't. Here's a hint: bare knuckle boxing usually means it's not a chick flick.

It was a nice period piece and a daring take on the character, but I still think of Jeremy Brett as Holmes the same way I think of Tom Baker as Doctor Who.

The REF device is really meant for debugging or rendering static screens. Windows 7 comes with a fairly serious software renderer for DX10, called "Warp10". But even a quad-core i7 (warp10 does use multiple cores) will struggle to keep up with something as puny as Intel integrated graphics.

I've had this effect on some calls I've made recently. I think what goes through most peoples minds when this happens to them is "oh my god do I really sound that high-pitched and flat and nasally?" Really gets the self-consciousness going.

(And apparently the answer is no, because I'm told at all other times I have quite a deep voice. I think the missing subharmonics in a low quality recording just get mentally filled in by everyone but yourself.)

> I may be wrong, but I don't even remember MS having TV ads before the incomprehensible Seinfeld ads

Were you in a coma through the entire year 1995?

Then there's the fact that my girifriend still refers to Madonna's "Ray of Light" as "The Windows XP Song".

> the XBox division just hermorhages money left and right.

Entertainment and Devices started turning a profit since Q1 2008, starting with a $500M profit. That is massive. Now consider how many Xboxes they've sold and their high attach rate.

They posted a $31M loss earlier this year, citing expenses from WinMo 6.5, still a complete albatross. I don't know why they don't just dump WinMo and run with Embedded XP, which is actually pretty decent.

> When I play with Windows 7 and the new Office Beta, I see dozens of my pet peeves fixed

That's because Windows 7 was your idea! ;)

You're definitely looking for a future then -- lazy evaluation wouldn't bother to even start calculating til the result was required, and it would block until the calculation was done.

I still don't see either mechanism making it into elisp, but futures are probably more feasible to implement.

I want lazy evaluation. I want to be able to do this:
(setq some-variable (lazy (some-function foo bar)))
And then I want the next thing after that to go ahead and be evaluated. I don't want execution to pause and wait for some-function to complete until some computation actually needs the value of some-variable.

I can't tell from just one small example using metasyntax, but that looks more like you want a future. Those would be nice, but I don't see emacs doing those anytime soon. If you don't want to compute something right away, wrap it up in a lambda and bind it to a symbol. Emacs's brand of lisp lets you funcall a symbol through as many layers of indirection as you want. I think you can even get closures from the cl package, even if they're not implemented terribly nicely.

Selective lazy evaluation is more of an occasional syntax convenience for specific problems like streams, but outside of those areas, it's one of the leakiest abstractions you can get -- you end up having to sprinkle laziness declarations all over unrelated code to maintain the laziness you want.

Much as I love emacs, I think you can be reasonably sure that the emacs lisp environment is purely in maintenance mode and will never see significant architectural changes. You want an editor with a pervasively lazy extension language, try Yi.

I lucidly remember the time when RMS forked it away

I see what you did there.

Maybe a hierarchy of "funny". Funny-Haha, Funny-Serious, Funny-I-Laugh-Lest-I-Cry ...