On top of that, the CUDA tools are still much better than OpenCL. OpenCL is basically equivalent to CUDA's low-level "driver" interface, but it has no equivalent to the high-level interface that lets you combine host/device code in a single source, etc. CUDA also supports a subset of C++ for device code (e.g. templates), which I don't believe is the case for OpenCL. CUDA also has a debugger (of sorts), profiler, and in version 3 apparently a memory checker. But I haven't been following OpenCL that closely lately -- it may be catching up on the tool front.

If you're developing an in-house project where you have control over the hardware you're going to run on, or you know that most of your customers have Nvidia cards anyway, there are still good reasons to go with CUDA.

I've never had performance issues running X11 over a LAN. VNC, on the other hand, is noticeably sluggish (RDP seems to work well though). I don't run apps over a WAN very often, except for the occasional emacs session (which is a bit laggy but useable).

But more importantly, the X style of remote access is much, much more useful than VNC/RDP. Remote apps integrate seamlessly into my desktop, instead of being stuck in a separate window. And multiple people can run remote apps on the same machine, without interfering with each other or a user who's physically sitting at the machine.

VNC and RDP are useful hacks for systems that weren't designed for remote access, but they're no replacement for real network transparency.

Apparently it can go 3-5 miles on a charge, so it can skip stops. With that much range, I'd imagine only a few stops on the route even have charging stations.

In practice, memory addresses on a given architecture have a fixed size (usually 32 or 64 bits), and the hardware can look at all the address bits in parallel, thus allowing O(1) access to any location in RAM. It's the same reason that you can add two integers in constant time.

The newest Nvidia cards (compute capability 1.3) have double support. Memory is still a problem, though. The cards have a 32-bit address space with no paging/virtual memory, so I don't think they can go over 4GB, and in practice they aren't even up to that limit yet.

They are very fast if you can deal with the limitations, though. At my company we're seeing 2-3x speedup on various image processing tasks with a modest amount of optimization. And that's compared to highly-tuned code running on quad-core CPUs.

Yes, emacs has a steep learning curve. I don't think even emacs fanatics will dispute that point. Ease of use and discoverability just aren't major priorities. The menus and toolbars are terrible -- I think most serious emacs users turn them off to save screen space. :)

On the other hand, if you take the time to learn it, emacs is an incredibly powerful tool for editing text, and the more you use it, the more power you discover. For some people, it's worth the investment, for others not so much. I've been using emacs for 10 years and I still have lots to learn. If you like the idea of a text editor that takes a lifetime to master, emacs might be for you.

I recommend O'Reilly's "Learning GNU Emacs" as an introduction. The edition I have is kind of out of date (I don't know if it's been updated since), but it's still a good primer for the basics.

The car may be parked, but the door is moving. ;-)
If someone opens a door 3 feet in front of you when you're traveling 20-25mph, you don't have time to even apply the brakes in any vehicle. The difference is that roads with on-street parking are usually designed so that traffic is a safe difference from parked cars. But that's often not the case for bikes -- in many places marked bike lanes are right in the "door zone".

In Massachusetts we recently passed a bike law that, among other things, makes it a ticketable offense to open your door in the path of a cyclist. On the other hand, there are some states where it's illegal for a bike to ride within 3 feet of parked cars.

I personally try to avoid the door zone unless I'm moving very slowly, even though the law is on my side here.

If it was a good idea, the government wouldn't need to be involved.

Exactly! I mean, you don't see the government getting involved in building airports or the interstate highway system, do you?

Under the Bush administration, the media was not allowed to show footage of dead soldiers *even with the consent of the families*. Obama has lifted the ban, but family consent is still required.

It seems like the real benefit is not performance, but the ability to reuse existing C/C++ code bases on the web. A lot of people are looking at making web versions of well-established desktop apps (look at photoshop.com, for example). Currently you have to do this in Javascript/DHTML or Flash, which means throwing out all the code from your desktop app and writing something new from the ground up, which hopefully ends up looking more or less like the original system. It's a huge amount of work, and you end up with two completely separate code bases to maintain.

If you could just recompile all your C code and dump it in the browser, it's a huge win. Of course you'll still need to write a browser-friendly UI (and I'm not sure how that works in NaCl currently), but all your back-end code (like the filters in Photoshop) could be reused.

Out of curiosity, what do you use for ripping Hulu videos? I've tried a couple of the Firefox extensions for downloading FLVs, but never had much luck.
My home system is on the old side, and although it can play DVDs, etc just fine with MPlayer, it often chokes on low-res flash videos.

Copyright is a monopoly granted to authors *by the government*. So to argue that they should have no involvement is nonsensical. Without government involvement, there would be no such thing as copyright. Everyone would be free to copy your work without consequences (unless you forced everyone who received a copy to sign a contract first, and even then enforcement would be pretty difficult).

Society grants copyrights as an incentive to create. Their purpose is to serve the greater good by encouraging creativity. Making money for the authors is just a means to that end.