No, they are again. During the Pentium 4 era, they were behind on pretty much every metric. They only survived because of name recognition and AMD not having the production capacity to take more than about 20% of the market share. At the mid to low end, an Athlon system with the same performance was cheaper than anything Intel sold. At the high end, Opterons were roundly trouncing Xeons in absolute performance and performance per dollar.

The Pentium M was when it started to turn around for Intel - the laptop market started to grow rapidly and AMD was only just competitive on performance per Watt, but didn't have the laptop motherboard makers onboard. With the Core 2, Intel retook the performance crown.

Depends a lot on the ticket type. I just checked and advance singles (specific train, booked in advance) start at £39.70 each way. That works out at about $61 each way. Off-peak singles (any train, not at peak commuter times at each end) are £60 ($90) each way.

Except that, just before the invasion, they had announced that they would switch from selling the oil in US Dollars and use Euros as the currency for defining the price. This provided a strong economic incentive for the US to change the regime.

Data loss in flash cells is probabilisitic, but the standard for wear levelling software is to mark a cell as dead if it can't guarantee holding its contents for a year. There have been some interesting proposals to expose this to the OS - there's a lot of data where even holding it for one day would be fine (e.g. browser caches, swap, other temporary files), so the more worn cells could be productively used for this data.

I think that depends on which concourse you're on. I had a similar experience (trapped for about 7 hours), but the saving grace of La Guardia was that on the flight side of security there was a really nice pizza place (as well as a number of others). No lounges or comfy seating though, which meant that I was quite cranky by the time my flight did eventually leave...

Assuming that you're starting near Paddington. From Kings Cross (i.e. where anyone coming from north of London will arrive), between the Tube and the waiting time, it takes about the same time to get the Tube to Paddington and change to the Heathrow Express as it does to take the Tube directly from Kings Cross to Heathrow. There were plans to extend the Heathrow Express, at least to Liverpool Street, and possibly to Kings Cross, but they seem to have been lost somewhere.

You probably don't need to wait. There are lots of parts of the US and Europe where the cost of living is much lower than the big tech hubs. I was freelancing for about five years in one of them. One day of consulting per month covered my cost of living, everything else went either on savings or luxuries. A lot of the big companies are very happy to employ people on this basis (Red Hat had several people living near me, for example). They're paid a bit less than a Valley salary, so the company saves a reasonable amount, they work from home (so the company doesn't have to provide an office - if there are a cluster of them then they might rent somewhere, but it's a lot cheaper than in a tech hub), and the employees have a lot more disposable income because the cost of living is so much lower. Everyone wins.

You're not really avoiding offshoring though, you're just benefitting from the same economic conditions that make it beneficial. The number one problem with offshoring to India for tech companies is employee retention - the good ones don't stay around very long. A lot of companies are very happy to save a bit on office space and salary and have a known-competent employee who will stick around for a while.

Clearly you've not done much UNIX shell scripting, if you've not been bitten by the issues with having to escape strings multiple times.

Do they? I've had to download complete games for both Windows and Mac for the updates. As long as they keep both, I'm happy. I'd hate to go back to the era of installing a game and then having to install all of the updates. With the speed of Internet connections now, even a 10-20GB download is not really a bottleneck for enjoyment.

The main fail with Diakatana was expectation management. Prior to launch it had so much hype about how it would totally redefine gaming. And then they released a game that was... okay. Not particularly good, not particularly bad, and with a few issues that, if fixed, could have made it much better.

Iain M. Banks had the notion of a 'mind state abstract', where you'd send a copy of (part of) your mind and then either discard it or reintegrate. It would either be downloaded into a drone or biological construct, or just used in VR. It made a lot more sense to me than the transporter, as long as you solve the reintegration problem. Especially on a dangerous mission, I'd prefer to send a copy down and then merge their memories into mine if they survived...

Apparently I've not had enough coffee yet (or have spent too long staring at MIPS CPU traces to spot the error) and thought that you said the exact opposite of what you said.

More general hint: The principle of minimum scope exists for a reason. Declare your variables at the point where they can be initialised, not at some arbitrary point and you make life easier for people trying to understand the lifetime of the variable.

The issue is only when you pass standard library objects across a library boundary between two libraries compiled for different standard library implementations. It's perfectly safe to pass C and Objective-C values between libraries that use libc++ and libstdc++ internally.

This isn't even a good troll. If you don't know one actor-model programming language and one pure functional programming language, then you have no business describing yourself as a programmer. You certainly don't get to use your ignorance as the benchmark for others.