Understanding the benefits of a multi-architecture binary depend on first accepting the purpose of pre-compiled binaries.

And, they'd have to start designing the programs to have run-time portability rather than depending on the make process to discover and tailor the program for the target machine.

Well, China is behind an all encompassing firewall.

And the French refuse to install malware written in English.

A key plot point was that the message sending machine was also the receiver, so the earliest time they could send messages to was when the machine was first turned on.

Which is why we must invent the time machine before turning on the earth destroying LHC! Otherwise, how are our future selves going to warn us not to do it?

Several posts suggested David Brin's Startide Rising. That's a great book, but if you want to provoke discussion, I'd pick Glory Season.

Also good would be anything by John Varley.

Monty Python released a 3-sided record album!

Try that with your new-fangled compact discs.

Alien is the scariest movie I've ever seen, hands down.

When I saw it in the theater, there were scenes where I could not watch it -- I had to cover my eyes. Even when it was on TV, I still did that years later. (Specifically, the scene where Dallas is crawling through the ducts and the alien attacks.)

What made Alien so different from previous monster movies is the alien was so fast. Before Alien filmakers thought it heightened the suspense to show the monster slowly approaching the victims. Ridley Scott realized that if the alien moves quickly, the danger is increased because you are never safe; it can get you at any time.

That's not the only groundbreaking part of the movie. (Spoiler alert!)

Remember when Ripley set the Nostromo to self destruct, but then the alien is blocking her path to the escape pod, so she goes back to cancel the self destruct. How many times have we seen this before? It is such a cliche. So it was astounding when the timer ran down and she could not stop it! I've never seen that before. And I can't think of many movies that have done that since.

The post you are referring to was referring to mainframes years ago. And he is correct: the first computers (there were no such thing as microcomputers or minicomputers back then) could only run a single "job" at a time, and the data had to be fed in through punch cards, paper tape, etc.

But the fact is that System/360 mainframes were multitasked at least since the introduction of OS/360 in 1966.

However, let's talk about the most commonly used MVS transaction server: CICS. CICS was introduced in 1969, and is still in use today; it is much more popular than any other MVS transaction server. CICS is single tasking! It does use cooperative multitasking to switch between all of the applications running in one CICS region. It is amazing that CICS still has so much market share compared to IMS. CICS is to IMS as Windows 3.1 is to Windows Vista (or Mac OS 9 is to OS X).

Point of order: OS/400 runs on minicomputers, not mainframes.

However, it is try that IBM is still releasing updates to the mainframe operating systems.

In COBOL you would code it as: compute total = units * cost And you could define "total" as having 2 decimal places in binary coded decimal, "cost" was something like 1.30232 in binary, and "units" was a character. How do you do that in C?

MVS is preemptively multitasked. And you can easily create subtasks within each address space, which meet the definition of a thread.

Running off the external battery shouldn't attempt to charge the internal battery.

Consider running off of 15v aircraft adapters, which provide enough power to run the computer, but not enough to charge the battery.

Apple doesn't publish how the current MagSafe adapters are designed, but they do have a document that explains how power adapter sensing worked on the PowerBook. The power plug shell is used an "adapter sense" line to signal the adapter type to the computer's power management unit.

That might be true in a vanilla environment.

For some reason, many applications don't understand how to communicate with authenticating proxy servers. (Even Internet Explorer's system of downloading intermediate certificate authorities can't authenticate!).

Google Update is one such app.

The first problem is you can't install a program (such as Chrome) that is Google Update based.

So let's say you download the stand-alone Chrome installer.

Then what happens is the Google Updater tries to update. It can't. So it tries again. It can't.

The visible symptom as my machine was hitting the hard drive every second, forever. Tracing through the processes led to Google Update.

Deleted Google Update and the problem was solved.

In my experience what happens is the opposite problem:

1. Corporate IT department decrees that all machines will only run WIndows, and will only use Internet Explorer, because that way there is only one client version to target.

2. Corporate IT develops (or buys from a vendor) a web based application. It becomes widely deployed.

Needless to say, said web application only works with IE. Why should it work with anything else? See item #1.

3. A new version of IE comes out. The widely deployed app won't operate with it, because it was designed to be dependent on ActiveX, and it is incompatible with IE version what-ever-we-have +1.

4. So, corporate IT decrees that no one using this application can upgrade IE until the app has been fixed and tested.

Which is why we are still using IE 6.

Now the interesting question is, what happens when we need to use two web apps, each of which has different (and mutually exclusive) browser version requirements?

The ironic thing is that if in step #1 they had said we can use any browser, on any O/S, then we wouldn't be in this mess, because the web apps wouldn't be browser version specific.