I love all you Americans crowing about the uselessness of the coming distributed energy age. Y'all might be correct as far as the US goes (and for now), but for billions of us in the rest of the world, shit like this has either been cost-effective for years or one of the few methods to get any kind of electricity when you don't the massive capital for the old-school way.

Patience.

The perfect presentation slide is blank. Because I am giving the presentation, and I expect people to listen to what I have to say.

...laura

Windows 3.0 was the first version I used to any significant degree. It looked so high-tech, though to 2015 eyes it looks like something from the old stone age. It did some cool stuff. It also gave us General Protection Faults, the predecessor to the Blue Screen Of Death.

For a long time I recommended Windows 98 to non-technical users. Some people claimed there was a USB implementation for Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion they were mistaken. My first exposure to Windows 95 was an early alpha (I worked for the evil empire at the time) that crashed and required reformatting the hard disc after attempting to reconfigure the mouse.

I was intrigued by some of the other options out there. I sent my resume to Quarterdeck - I thought DESQview was neat - but only got a thanks-but-no-thanks postcard back.

...laura

Actually, you could probably easily get 33% of the US public to agree that money equals free speech.

15GHz woulda been sweet.

Fiber is amply fast.

The bottleneck is the cavalier attitude of web designers to network resources. You do not need to load 25 different URLs (DNS lookups, plus autoplay video and all the usual clickbait junk) to show me a weather forecast. Or a Slashdot article, for that matter...

...laura

No more so than any other brand

There's your problem. Distilling the work of thousands of people collaborating together over the course of literal decades into a 'brand' just because it has some narrative and authorial connections to previous works isn't doing you any favours when you've had to degenerate to a 'no true scotsman' argument.

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

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

Carter was placeholder

Actually, Carter was a complete fluke, a result of post-Watergate Repub scrambling and the new Dem primary nominating procedures introduced by McGovern.

But that's a lot less sexy than your conspiracy, isn't it?

Were you not alive in 2004? There was one. It was a clown car. Not even the hackiest libtard reporter stooped to calling it "vibrant debate".

As for Halperin, welcome to the club. I'm pretty sure blogging was partially invented just to bag on him ;)

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

It's always fun to look up what else people have been in. One that caught my eye was Ms Whitney as an uncredited band member in the still brilliantly goofy Some Like It Hot.

...laura.