in the apple world, it's normal to tune for particular screen pixel-counts. in all of the rest of the world, mobile and not, from the mists of time forward, people simply treat screen size as a parameter. it's called "responsive", and all it means is that your app adjusts parametrically, so you don't have to customize it for every possible screen pixel dimension.

in otherwords, BOFH. PBS thinks it has competent computer people, but doesn't.

the remarkable thing about all this 3d-printed-gun excitement is that it's such a non-story. anyone with minimal motivation and dexterity could always have made their own, better guns. the only news is that a complete clutz can push "print".

so, why don't we control ammo? (actually, we do here in .ca - at least on Ontario, you need a firearms license to buy it.)

someone is making a killing, I think. the purchase cost of these computers should be under $30M total, and less than $3M/year to run.

where do people get their definition of supercomputer? a supercomputer is what you have when your compute needs are so large that they shape the hardware, network, building, power bill. this thing is just a smallish multicore chip, like many others (now and in the past!)

when the mil/gov spend a billion on some software project and it fails, we need to start calling it what it is: fraud perpetrated by consultant/contractors.

it's bad enough when the industry burns 10-50M on an ERP project for a company (or university!), but pretty soon those tens of millions add up to real money. spending a billion should be HARD!

normally, any system on the internet will receive lots of bruteforce ssh scans, using password authentication. I wonder if this botch means that Bad Guys will be scanning with publickey as well. (obviously, the set of known and interesting private keys is much less effective than the usual catalog of common passwords...)

"bad form"? it's just security-through-obscurity. it's tempting to try to enumerate some ground rules for security (like "never hardcode a secret"), but if someone is violating these sorts of commonsense rules, would they ever read such a list?

We need to make companies liable for any information they are so careless as to lose. Intruding on their business process is the wrong way to go about it: punitive liability judgements (and tighter disclosure laws) are the right way.

Part of the problem here is this horribly mistaken meme that everyone and everything is hackable. It makes people feel not responsible, and it's only true in the sense that evert newborn baby has started dying, or that the universe will cool/stop. Not concerned with this meme? Well, your country is spending billions on stupid and futile "cyber-warfare" efforts, rather than simply buttoning up the security of the electrical grid, banking network, etc.

Our goal should be for companies to think of sensitive customer data like radioactive waste: they want to ship it elsewhere, not have it sitting around in unsealed, leaky barrels in their offices. Secure access to data is obviously a specialized skill, so why not have companies devoted to doing that alone?

well, you're reiterating the IBM retro-history a little there. Microsoft had a huge role in developing the 32b 2.0, but the main problem was that IBM wanted to take it in the direction of huge, ramified mini/mainframe OSs. to my way of thinking, Linux is actually the proving counterexample of what was bad about OS/2 2.0: modularity and conceptual layering, but without the sclerosis of insisting that modules/layering be reflected in explicit, static APIs.

I worked on OS/2 1.3 and 2.0 at Microsoft. It was very clear then that dealing with IBM was a huge agility problem. And there was no way to foresee that AMD would be the salvation of x86 (the NT stood for "new technology", and referred to both RISC and Mach-inspired microkernels.)

it's funny how the consultant-lobbyist-industrial complex is so good at winding up our computer-phobic politicians. just look at all the cyberwar crap (which can be solved by simply making our infrastructure secure. two-factor authentication for the power grid, imagine!).

there is vanishingly little justification for exascale computing. yes, I AM in the HPC field. just ask yourself: what would a "thinking war machine" actually "think" about? it's not as if war is just a boardgame - heck, it's not as if the political and military moves we make are even carefully thought-out at all!

I'm always amazed at how many people think that there is a lot of variance in physiology. like they have super-fast rods and cones. is this just a generally harmless form of psychosis? I'm not arguing that mutants don't exist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy, or the myostatin), or that training can make you very sensitive to, say, perfect pitch. just that this topic (and related, such as wifi allergy) seems to attract remarkable delusions (imo) of grandeur.