The only alternative to burning money is to burn time.

- Linux: Expect around 2-3 days of hunting for audio and display drivers and tweaking with the configs until it works.
- Windows: Expect around 2-3 days of trying to clean your system of malware and converting your old machine settings to the new one. (or just accept that you have to fight daily battles against the OS to be productive with the computer)

I'm currently using a Linux machine at home. Yet the thought of spending a day or two messing with the OS instead of doing something more interesting/productive makes me dread my next computer hardware upgrade. I had more time on my hands back when I bought my current machine.

It really depends on whether you really want to do self-repair. I have a hard disk with bad sectors, and I'm procrastinating to fix it (running on backup drives now), even though I could easily spend an afternoon to buy a new disk and migrate the data over.

Life is short. Time is precious. To each their own :-/

Think of the young women and girls!! You don't want to dissuade them from pursuing a career in carrying out legalized killings!

Your *government* is a master. (Well, unless you're Obama with a funny slashdot nickname).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rushmore

Deng Xiao-ping would be rolling in his grave to know that Hong Kong, where English is still one of the official languages, is still part of the British Empire.

In other news, it may be a surprise to you that not everyone in Britain speaks English as a first language. Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II would probably object strongly to alienating their status as British subjects.

I guess most Asians don't understand English that well to feel strongly about it. (And on that point, since you're Googling, I suppose if you searched in the native language of the country you're researching you'll have more results)

And generally the expectation of privacy is not so culturally important as in Europe. When some anonymous something far far away across the pacific ocean is alleged to maybe have tapped on your communications, it doesn't register as something to be obviously outraged about.

Perhaps something about Asians living in relatively crowded cities instead of quiet suburbs gives the secure feeling of being in a crowd and not having the feeling of possibly singled out. I just made that up, but I suppose it does make sense.

You first get the government to create a firewall to block your competitors....

So the GFW of China was actually a good idea?

5 steps to "capture the world's imagination":

1. Hype up values of freedom and democracy
2. Fail to live up to what you preach
3. Make glamorous Hollywood films about them
4. Accuse others of acting "against universal human values" when they decide to block you
5. We've captured the world's imagination [smirk]

Yes it is. It means they would have the moral ground to look at what they did and fix things, instead of having to pretend they can't do wrong.

You catch a student cheating. The student puts on a smirk and says: "What's the big deal? Everyone else is doing it -- prove me wrong."

And of course you can't prove a negative.

Larry Page is still in charge of Google.

Way to justify everything with a sentence.

Can anyone honestly believe [accused] isn't [doing something wrong]? People will [do bad things] to try to get a strategic or tactical advantage .... that is what they do, some better than others, [accused] better than most.

Let's try a few examples.

Can anyone honestly believe Enron wasn't cooking the books? Companies will falsify financial information to try to push up their stock price ... that is what they do, some better than others, Enron better than most.

Can anyone honestly believe men aren't out there to rape women? Humans will use force to try to get a strategic or tactical evolutionary advantage. That is what they do, some better than others, this rapist better than most.

Tell me a language or API that were not available 10 years ago. The only ones that come to my mind are web frameworks and mobile computing stuff. And even these built on languages and APIs and protocols that were widely available 10 years ago, that you'd just need a week or so to pick up the new stuff.

Even C++11 wasn't that much of a change. You can still mostly write vintage C++ if you wanted to, just that C++11 makes many things easier.

The so called ever changing landscape in the tech industry is becoming more and more of a myth these days.

I consider that I have a rather formal understanding of a lot of technologies although I almost never read a book from cover to cover and I've had minimal formal education on the subjects. Part of being a good learner is the ability to gather empirical evidence and piece together a good "theoretical framework" to put everything together in a coherent story.

And I'll be using bubble sort for interviews that ask me to write a sorting algorithm. Oh, and I use it for writing programs to keep the CPU busy. Other than that, there's no reason to use bubble sort ever. Your general point holds though. Except for the hipster stuff, most tech in use today are mostly the same as the ones available 10 years ago. The industry is not moving as fast as it were 20 years ago.

Exactly my point. The people designing a language, the OS and the compiler should know something about the hardware, but the programmer only needs to know what the API guarantees.

Look, when I write Javascript, the most I would do is to look at how the 4 major browsers execute the code. I don't think about what the OS would do. Heck, given the ever evolving state of Javascript engines these days, I don't even know what the browser actually does. Does that make 99.99% web developers out there bad programmers?

When I write Java, it could end up running on Windows, Linux, MacOS, or Android, even on other platforms. The heavily optimized JVM handles the hardware/OS level optimizations for me, why should I bother?

Even when I write C, the code is supposed to be portable across different platforms and architectures -- even ones that have not been invented yet.

Linux itself supports dozens of CPU architectures. A proper linux program should be able to run on all of them. Do you understand what the hardware does on all of these architectures? Even if you think you do, you're just guessing.

The hardware level is just the wrong level of abstraction in programming. It's been the case for a LONG time. Just take your blazing fast DOS program and keep it.