I think you're overselling it somewhat. I've tried the swype systems, and I always devolve to just tapping. Same with my friends that have access to it. Out of 4 of us, all of us hate swype based systems. That's not data, obviously, it's just an anecdote.

I think the GP is overselling it a bit too, but I've been using the standard Android keyboard for a bit now, which includes swype-like typing, and I'd have a tough time switching back to just tapping. It's substantially faster and generally as accurate as tapping and quite a bit better than any miniature hardware keyboard I've tried. I don't know that if it wasn't built if I'd have bothered downloading Swype or Swiftkey, but it's nice to have the option.

In some ways, it reminds me of the difference between Newton HWR and Palm Graffiti; you had to learn some new patterns to use Graffiti, but when you got used to it, it was light years ahead of the performance of the natural handwriting recognition of the Newton.

Well... Yes. All technology corporations try their best to bring technology to more people than before.

I couldd swear that Microsoft has been trying hard at the exact opposite...

People ***HATE*** "Windows". Windows is associated with work, pain, crazy difficulties, nerds and viruses. The brand name has negative value.

True. But it still gets more respect than "Windows Phone".

Well, that would explain why my language center pretty much seized up trying to make sense of that.

There I fixed it for you.

On the one hand, I can't blame notch, because if Microsoft offered me enough cash to retire, I'd sell out. But on the other hand, notch is already a millionaire, right? It's not like he needs the money.

He might be a millionaire, but there's a subtle qualitative difference between retiring comfortably versus buying a large Pacific island, having an army of minions carve it into something that looks like a Minecraft world, and retiring comfortably.

If my wife is driving and I am riding then what?

It's supposed to be applicable to people caught (and, presumably, convicted) of texting and driving. I'm sure being stuck as a passenger with no interesting distractions other than the company of the driver and other passengers might be considered a living hell by some people, but such is life.

Or to paraphrase whimsically: "C: it's been ignoring Unicode since before you were born."

In fact C (C89/90 to C11) is character-set neutral, and continues to maintain support for EBCDIC for those still stranded without 7-bit ASCII (which is technically superseded by ISO/IEC 646) by providing trigraph (5.2.1.1) and digraph (6.4.6.3) support.

See Section 1 Scope: 2. "This International Standard does not specify / the mechanism by which C programs are transformed for use by a data-processing system" and the definition of 3.6 Byte which is an "addressable unit of data storage large enough to hold any member of the basic character set of the execution environment". So yes Cray, you can even have 12-bit bytes (CDC Cyber).

Kids these days.

Several years ago, a kernel developer submitted a patch that greatly increased Linux performance for desktop-oriented tasks

Well, sure. But that'd be a kernel fork.

Here's the problem... I'm not clicking on an infoworld link, so I can only go by the summary, which clearly talks about forking Linux distributions, not the kernel. And I assume the submitter is a professional infoworld writer, so the emphasis on distributions must've been intentional (since, it being slashdot, it's not like an editor would ever actually do any editing).

Now, someone could fork the Linux kernel according to workload, but any sane distro would just handle that scenario with a linux-image-server and linux-image-desktop packaging option and maybe a few meta-packages to sort out any other distinctions. Not unlike the -smp and -bigmem kernels that were typical until multi-core multi-GB desktops showed up.

In other words, even if the article-I-won't-read is talking about a kernel fork, the conclusion in the summary doesn't necessarily follow.

TSX is not for virtualization, but for transactional synchronization, it provides efficient transaction locking for multi-threaded applications. Not necessarily virtualization, although it can benefit from efficient locking as well

No, as far as I know, these have TSX disabled, or will be with a microcode update, as TSX isn't expected to be fixed until 2015 in Broadwell or Haswell-EX Xeons (not Haswell-EP which these are).

I assume that this is yet another click-bait blog-spam article, because I can't imagine that anyone who knows jack about Linux distributions wouldn't be aware that server and desktop variants of various distributions have been and still are done.

More to the point, anyone who wanted it done that way would've or could've already done it. That the more popular distros don't generally make the distinction or don't emphasize it should be taken as a fairly solid answer to the question posed in the headline.

From what little I have read on calculators in standardized testing, Texas Instruments never had or has a monopoly on approved calculators. In particular I have never seen a list of approved calculators that did not have at least some Casio or Sharp models as well, and more complete lists often included at least one HP model -- the real premium calculator for geeks.

The fact that the TI-84 Plus was probably the most advanced model approved, meant it marketed that position into a perception of being a highly desirable model that encouraged parents who were willing to pay the premium because they wanted to give their child ever advantage they could possibly afford or find.

Parents are "trained" (indoctrinated) right from pregnancy to buy "educational" toys, aids, to prenatal music blankets. After the child is born, they are constantly bombarded with "educational" products that often have no merit, beyond the statistical correlation between parents who invest the most money into their children's learning, are more likely to be the same ones who invest time in their children's learning as well.

While a Math/CS major in undergrad I used a $5 whatever-brand scientific calculator rather than my $100++ graphing calculator, because a) I didn't need any graphic or fancy features - they were useless, b) the battery life sucked, and I was too cheap to constantly replace them, c) other than engineering students who bought RPN calculators (e.g. HP-35) it didn't matter one iota, beyond merely having the cheapest scientific calculator you can find.

Actually, after learning about the ridiculous access privileges the Facebook app requires

Cyanogenmod with privacy guard locks Facebook down enough for me, but yes, that's the main reason I'd be using a browser otherwise.

The main advantage of using the app is smoother performance, bandwidth use seems somewhat lower (hard to tell for sure since if you use the browser it's aggregated with all the other browser traffic), and uploading things like pictures and video is far less hassle.

But generally speaking, I agree that if you don't have some way to restrict apps, you should either switch to the browser version of Facebook or put a decent ROM on your phone.

and people access the facebook with their cellphones using browsers like chrome and firefox...

Yes, and I did this until I switched to CM, but I strongly suspect those people are a distinct minority.