Interesting assertion. Too bad reality begs to differ. 10 years ago (per the wayback machine), dell's website was advertising its dimension 4500, a desktop machine featuring maximum specs of: a (UP) 2.8GHz pentium 4 with a 533MHz memory bus, memory expandable to 1GB (with then-impossible to find dimms), AGP 4X, and a PCI expansion bus. Today you'd be hard pressed to find a machine with less than 1GB offered as a minimum configuration, a far faster processor with 2-4 times as many cores, faster memory and expansion busses, and a far faster graphics interface. And let's not forget how much PATA sucked, let alone the availability of SSD disks now. What is fundamentally different about today's software compared to that of 10 years ago that makes you think it's dramatically outpaced this?

I'm not aware of any dramatic improvements to the kinds of things people do at the OS level during that time frame. Just because most hardware specs aren't growing exponentially any more doesn't mean they aren't growing at a significant clip.

makes think does?

this guy's offer sucks. if you give ME $10 million today, i GUARANTEE YOU that i WILL have my first test launch of a mission to jupiter. so what if it's made of rubber bands and has no chance of making it! then on to my next problem: what to do with $9,999,997 =)

my phone has a couple of gyroscopes. is the error from these so bad that it can't keep track of my position while i'm inside a mall? if so, why is it there at all?

[[citaiton needed]]

I have my problems with Gnome, but I've never experienced this bug.

Much more likely, you have some sort of hardware problem that happens to manifest itself with gnome but not KDE.

Sounds a lot less dramatic that way.

Interesting idea ... but what happens when one of your engines produces less output than another, or god forbid, fails? Like in an aircraft, you have some serious sideways pointing motion in your vehicle. Unlike in an aircraft, you don't have gobs of room to react to the situation. That can be addressed with electronics, but that adds to complexity, cost, and weight.

A drive train presents a solution that has many years of safety testing behind it. Eventually we may move to a system like you propose, but it won't be any time soon. There are lower hanging fruit.

Despite what the author of this article might have you believe, the B-52 is not magical. "The B-52's feat of longevity reflects both regular maintenance and timely upgrades"? Bull.

The B-52's feat of longevity reflects two things: 1) the shift to ICBMs as primary mechanism to ensure mutually assured destruction in the cold war 2) the miserable failure of the USAF to solicit new bomber designs that don't cost orders of magnitude more than the B-52.

If the USAF had ever solicited designs to replace the B-52 with something *modestly* better, using cost as a priority, the B-52 would be long gone, and there would be a more capable aircraft in it's place. The fact that there's no need for such a plane does not make the B-52 magical. It's a pustule that's lanced regularly, that's all.

/. causes the Android browser (is it not Chrome as well?) to crash on limited and cheap Android tablets.

I've logged in and posted to /. on my ICS phone, and read /. many many times on my gingerbread phone. I believe what you meant to say is that things crash on cheap Android tablets (or cheap anything else).

Actually, it won't. Read the article - getting rid of the likes of tar is what LTFS is all about.

Serious question: what do people need a beefy GPU for on a machine with an alternative OS? You already can't run the latest PC/windows games, and you don't need a spec-tastic GPU for running 99% of other applications. Am I missing something, or is this just hardware lust?

MAD may be outdated, but the new doctrine is pretty similar. If you launch nukes at another country, the rest of the world will turn against you. Whether that would involve nukes or not is an open question, but the point remains the same: If you nuke someone, you're going to get destroyed yourself.

This new evil is *way* more evil than any evil we have seen before, so the old rules do not apply.

Now get back to your cubicles and build me some more dual-use technologies, whee!

Americuh, fuck yeah!

It's unrealistic to expect everything to just work smoothly under a new person after 5 years working (I presume) mostly by yourself. It's not laziness or incompetence for the FNG to consult the person who architected the system when the documentation inevitably falls short. Grow up, be a professional, and help the new guy out.

Breaking news: The guy who tries to upsell you at the car dealership has a tenuous grip in economics.

subject says it all, really. it's nice to have it for chrome and firefox, but where it's really needed is in ie.