I think I may see the problem.

If netbooks are used primarily for webapps (hence the "net"), the OS and its libraries don't matter so much.

Experience the Speed and raw Power of a 600 MHz processor! 256 MB RAM! 32 GB storage! 1999!

Well, "Good Enough" was the Past of Technology, so I guess so. But the truth is that industries fluctuate on their focus.

When the market demands more features and performance than the technology provides, then the businesses that improve the technology become the industry leaders. Think silicon: intel, RAM, Flash, iPods.

But when the market is happy with the features ("good enough"), and demands cheaper products, then the businesses that can make them cheaper become the market leaders.

I think they're saying that there are important benefits to the depressive style of thinking. It's only a problem when it's inappropriate.

It's similar to the instincts of gorging on high-energy foods; of being terrified of potential dangers; and of being violently enraged about intrusion into one's territory. These all have benefits in some situations that used to be more common than they are today.

If you ain't first, yer last!

Q. What brilliant idea did Google have?

[A. Pagerank]

I've just been reading an Edison biography, and it depends on what you mean by "idea". Alexander Bell made the first telephone (he didn't really have the "idea" for it, because lots of people thought it would be cool to transmit voice by wires, although they didn't see any commercial application for it - and they didn't make it work). But, hearing of this idea, Edison (and many others) began to try to improve it, particularly for longer distances (which limited Bell's version), by creating a microphone that worked by varying resistance, instead of generating currents by induction, and therefore could be amplified (by regulating an ordinary telegraph signal). So, that was Edison's idea: not entirely obvious, unless you understood the issues, as one skilled in the state of the art would. But it wasn't worth anything.

Edison did a ton of work, and came up with something that was OKish. He submitted it to Western Union for commercialization, and they weren't impressed. He went back, and experimented some more. He had thought that the carbon disk he used (that translated pressure into resistance) needed to vibrate with the sound waves. But as he tried stronger springs, that incidentally reduced the vibration as a by-product, the signal got clearly. He eventually noticed this, and tried locking the carbon in place, so it didn't vibrate at all - and the signal was perfect.

The idea of a telephone was not valuable; the idea of translating sound into resistance was not valuable, but *this* idea - that rigid carbon is very effective for translating sound into resistance - *was* a valuable idea. Although it seems less Edison's, than nature who had to keep... banging... him... on... the... head... with... it.... until he got it. But I think that's the nature of truly new ideas: they are very hard to see, even when right in front of you. We likely are surrounded by great ideas at all times that we cannot see...

Why is the "south polar region" on the top? Is that an astronomer thing?

You can also get immersed in a novel - because the printed page has a much higher dpi than today's displays.

Yes, the 2nd ed of the Dragon book rewrote their sample parser in OO. It was much simpler, clearer and cleaner in procedural version in the 1st ed.

Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?

There's a great cartoon online illustrating this, but I can never find it.

Regarding the limit of C: using the third dimension can help minimize the distance between components. A different layout of transistor communications paths (such as a linear pipeline) can help with bandwidth of processing, though not latency, by signals not needing to traverse the entire chip in a single clock cycle.

Regarding density: it's not the density that doubles, but transistor count (number of components per integrated circuit.)

I'm thinking it might have involved the microscope