... while generating very little usable power. Practical cat-based renewable energy is at least 30 years away from commercial use.

I'm curious whether it will be exposed via OLAP - when I was doing some proteomics work with MS OLAP some years back, the retrieval speed was stellar, but the math libraries were pathetic, which seemed pretty sad for something allegedly aimed at analytics. (Yes, I know, most people assumed business analytics, but there's an awful lot of potential for scientific analysis, especially with large, messy datasets.)

Hmm, can you give some example brand names or links? I googled around, and all I could find was this article on the evolution of workstations, which only lists the new Mac Pro and some (unnamed) souped-up Windows/Intel PCs as the modern equivalent of a Unix workstation.

Because rehabilitating a criminal saves society money. A rehabilitated criminal can be released into society and (by definition) won't commit any more crimes. He/she may even contribute productively to society. An unrehabilitated criminal, OTOH, must either be kept in prison indefinitely (which costs society around $60,000 per year per criminal), or gets released and commits more crimes (the costs of which will depend on the crimes, but can easily be more than $60,000 per year).

Just out of curiosity, what these days would be considered a not-so-cheap UNIX workstation? Does anyone still sell such a thing?

I came of age in the late '70s and early '80s, and my musical tastes reflect that.

There have been some new discoveries along the way. I adore Sheryl Crow, and thought Lady Gaga was a breath of fresh air. With those exceptions (and a few others) I haven't heard much of interest since the early '90s.

I remain baffled by rap.

...laura

If I saw somebody with an aol.com email I'd wonder if they were a tech dinosaur, a total hipster, or somebody who had simply stuck with something that worked.

I've had my Hotmail email address since 1996, prior to Microsoft taking it over. I've stuck with it because it works. It does exactly what Hotmail promised from the start, providing email that is independent of my ISP or employer.

...laura

I wonder if it would be at all practical to take Rust's innovations regarding memory-safety and apply them to C++? (Obviously some finessing would be necessary to do that without breaking backwards compatibility, and existing C++ code might not be able to benefit, but then new C++ code could be written with stronger safety guarantees, while still retaining the compatibility and familiarity advantages of C++)

Of course, the wrench technique only works if the attackers have physical access to your body. Most Internet hackers aren't going to be located physically near you (and hopefully most of them wouldn't have the stomach for that either).

Yes, they do.

An early example of getting it wrong was the City & South London Railway, the first deep-level underground rail line in London. The designers of the rolling stock didn't bother with windows because there was, supposedly, nothing to see. Passengers hated the "padded cells". Even if all you see is tunnel walls rushing by, people need to see outside.

I could see the utility of an airliner with no windows but cameras and viewing screens - it would solve some engineering problems - but for a car, the simplest is still the best. Windows.

...laura

The biggest challenge is putting up the miles of anti-gyrocopter netting to keep the event pest-free.

Of course, there is also the Chevy Bolt, scheduled to be released around the same time, for a similar price. I agree with you about the downward pricing pressure these will have on EVs with shorter ranges.

I see lots of announcements - not just this one - shouting about their new microarchitectures, how cool they are, the amazing benefits, and so on. But documentation of exactly what the new microarchitecture is, exactly what it does, seems thin-to-non-existent. Maybe I'm not looking in the right place.

All "big" processors nowadays have fancy pipelines, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, multiple cores, and so on. Fine. But how is Zen different from past microarchitectures? What makes it revolutionary?

Details, please.

...laura

... may well be a police officer.

Ideally you'd bring to court the camera footage -- either the camera footage that your camera was transmitting to a separate storage device the cop wasn't aware of, or the camera footage from a second camera that the cop wasn't aware of.

Not commonly done these days, but there's no technical reason why it couldn't be done.

(btw I'm not sure I'd consider a cop who perjures himself under oath to be a "decent cop" -- it sounds like standards for decency aren't what they used to be!)