I thought of the Mac Pro when I saw this design, and thought "this is more what the Mac Pro should have been". Maybe not from the aesthetic perspective (maybe a bigger trash can than the current model?), but the things this system can do are far more akin to what the old cheese grater Mac Pros could do:

- accept GPU cards of the maker you choose, and upgrade them as new models come out. Or, more accurately, more PCI devices.
- accept more storage devices in the bays, or a mix of SSD and disk technologies to give a price/performance mix for people who need it.

The new Mac Pro's exterior and technological designs have a lot of high points. What is misses was that the people who were shelling out the money for the "Pro" model were probably populating a lot of the drive bays, maxing out the RAM, adding additional GPUs and making use of the dual processors or putting in add-in cards that connected to storage or other specialized equipment. They might also be upgrading the GPUs during the 3-4 years they held onto the machine, as the GPU power has been appreciating pretty quickly.

So the new model misses the use case that those people had and replaces it with a throwaway all-in-one box whose only expansion potential skips the PCI bus and takes it down several speed steps to the Thunderbolt devices that you string together like Christmas lights with wall warts, which is going to turn into a dusty rat's nest of cables. I suspect PCs like this one might be appealing to the people who bought the cheese graters.

The only major complaint I had about the cheese grater was that you couldn't put in a 19" rack without resorting to the use of a saw to hack off the handles. We have several of them in our test lab and I was hoping to consolidate them from shelves into a rack so they would look nicer and be easier to maintain but it was kind of a pain in the rear. I'd have been perfectly happy if they had not gone with the trash can design and just come up with a new motherboard that supported newer Xeon processors, had PCI 3 and the latest SATA speeds (which we get all day long for our Windows and Linux servers -- using the same hardware!), but instead we get the trash can.

Or just bring back the freaking XServe.

Ours is not to reason why, just divide and multiply.

There are still a lot of situations where the automatic controls would not know what to do without a second thought. I live in a part of the country where it snows. Evidently when road markings are covered by snow, the automatic controls don't know what to do. I am expected to be at work on days when it snows, and I can drive on a snowy road without much of a problem -- I just need to take into account the variables as they present themselves. Another situation that pops up occasionally is that I need to park the car in a field or other unpaved surface -- there are no lines and no dedicated spaces, and I'm often directed where to park by a human. I can't imagine the self-driving car knows how to do that yet.

Not to undermine in any way the fantastic work that's been done by Google and other people working in this field. For many conditions that are well-understood (e.g. long distance freeway driving on a clear day), it seems like a lot of this technology is nearly ready to come together in existing automobiles, where you put the GPS, lane departure and adaptive cruise control together and pretty much drive the car. I even saw a video of some guy letting his Acura pretty drive itself with these technologies enabled. He was a total flippin idiot for actually getting out of the driver's seat, but the car did everything right. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It is the universal operating system, after all
(this comment and the original one typed into a machine running Debian)

Microsoft forcing things was the cause of a little legal trouble they got into a while ago. Be careful what you wish for.

Also, if you buy from the "Business" side of many Windows PC retailers, you will get exactly what you describe -- a bare Windows install with no additional software / trialware / bloatware / etc. Or you can just buy a retail/OEM Windows license and DIY on a system you built yourself. I did this a few years back for my family's desktop machine, saved a pile of money and was able to configure the PC pretty much exactly how I wanted with a SSD, more RAM and so on.

I hadn't known about the "Signature" thing mentioned in the other replies, but I know where I'm buying from next.

I'll also note that Linux is by no means free of crappy packages. There are some great ones out there, to be sure -- but many distros bundle some substandard crap with them as part of the default install. I'll spend time on pretty much any Linux install I've set up pruning useless packages and replacing them with better alternatives. It's nowhere near as annoying as some of the crap that's bundled with many retail installations of Windows, as it won't pop up a nagware screen in a month, but it can definitely be present.

It's a perfectly cromulent buzzword

Let's hit that lab with a high explosive, exposing the pathogen to the environment and letting it leave whatever containment it might be inside in a completely uncontrolled manner. What could possibly go wrong?

If there was military intervention, I'd hope it was a bit more thought out than an air strike.

Local team games are always broadcast OTA when they are on NFL Network or ESPN. IIRC it's a FCC rule that they have to do it.

Of course that has little to do with the public funding of private enterprises that are wildly profitable and make millions of dollars. I enjoy watching football, but there are many better things to spend public money on. Roads, bridges, schools, universities, libraries, etc. are all for more generally useful than a stadium that stays vacant the majority of the year.

When I was in college, I applied for an internship during my freshman year. I got it. Why? Because I applied, had a resume with a list of relevant skills and was eager and impressive in the interview. I ended up working that internship part time during the school year and full time in the summers, and graduated with "three years" of industry experience. I use the quotes because if I was really pedantic, it would be less because some of it was part time.

There were other internships available when I was applying that I didn't get for one reason or another, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that if I had never applied, I'd never have gotten the job.

You could also look for contract work opportunities, but the internship comes with a built in knowledge that you are in college and side-steps the scheduling problems you would run into otherwise and sets an expectation that you will be returning to school, so if things don't exactly work out and don't come back, it's no huge deal.

I am turning forty this year, and already have two school aged kids. They can feed themselves, wipe their own asses, go to bed on their own and bathe themselves. They also can clearly communicate (sometimes too clearly!) their needs, wishes, desires, aches, pains, etc. Even still, they are damned tiring to have around and suck up a lot of time, too. I can only imagine the sheer living hell that would be having an infant at this point in my life. I'd either need the mom to be some twenty something trophy wife with a pile of twenty something energy, or someone who made a pile of money so we could hire a nanny, because I can't imagine a forty something woman who works a full day and is a high achiever coming home and being Super Mom. I know I barely scrape by some days on the parenting scale after a big day at work.

I do keep in shape (which helps keep the energy up) and I do love my kids, but I see people with infants and it makes my vasectomy turn into a happy memory. You have to pick priorities in life, and I know by making the choice to have kids, I've likely shut more than a couple doors career-wise since things like business travel, relocation and ability to take "risky" (e.g. startup) opportunities are kind of off the table now, or there is a whole bunch more at stake than before.

When I was younger and unmarried, I always did my taxes myself. For the first few years of married life, I did them as well. Even after buying the house and having the first kid I still did them -- me, TurboTax and a lot of frustration. Then came The Year Of The Thick IRS Envelope. Usually when you get a job offer or accepted to college, the thick envelope means "winning". Not so when you get a thick envelope from the IRS. That generally means Something Is Wrong. What came to pass was that my wife's employer at the time had reported a stock option sale incorrectly, and the manner in which it was reported made it look like we owed $12K more. It was sorted out correctly, but I'd officially had enough of the nonsense. I'm generally a DIY type in all other aspects of my life, from the server room to home renovations and fixing my own car -- but this one I gladly farm out. I throw a few hundred bucks at the problem and I don't have to deal with any of it. Our return is also more complex since my wife runs her own business, too -- so I'm just happy to have it taken care of so I can work on other projects and spend time with my kids.

I would really like the US to have a better tax code, but honestly I'm going to be in the grave before that happens.

I actually parsed it as "Port-A-John" first. A whole new meaning to open source hardware.

This card isn't marketed at the HPC crowd. The Tesla line is the one that's marketed at HPC, and the Tesla line has the better double precision performance.

From reading the announcement, they are using the fact that the Titan supercomputer runs nVidia GPUs and they want to pick up a little "halo effect" from that. In reality, it's kinda like the "stock" cars that run in NASCAR. The car may purport to be a Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge or Toyota, but there's no option to pick one up at your local dealer that is truly the same as you might see on the track. In other words, it looks to be be a lot more of a marketing name than anything relating to the Titan supercomputer, other than they share the underlying Kepler technology. It's also been the case that nVidia will roll out the consumer/gaming products first and then follow them up with the compute upgrades. So it wouldn't surprise me to senn an announcement in a few months of some sort of upgrade to the Kepler-based Tesla line offering more double precision compute power.

My wife worked there for several years. One friend commented when she started that it was a great place to have on your resume, since you'd be looking for a job after the layoff came. Sure enough, layoff comes, she gets a package, and now people are impressed that she worked there. The culture was best described as "macho", her management was from the "mushroom management" school, and the outsourcing stories hilarious. I'm amazed the place stays open.

He just finished high school. He has a couple months till college. Why not do something enjoyable together? If you are really set on programming, maybe you can do a family web site of some kind? I do hate to break it to you, but online tutorials and samples are the way a lot of stuff gets learned nowadays. Or just by letting the kid run and go do stuff he finds "cool".

You could also work on college life skills like laundry and cooking.

But really, it's probably the last significant break he's going to have until he graduates. It's highly possible that next summer he will be doing an internship somewhere, then back to school, then off to work.