Someone working for a company cares about what the company pays them to care about. If they spend time on something the company doesn't want them to, it will cause them to get a bad review and/or fired. A company paying someone to make open source software is going to care more about the code being clean than a company paying someone to make propietary software. this is because with open source software many more people will see the actual code than with propietary software and shoddily written code will reflect badly on the company.
None of this reflects on the work ethic, morals or ability of either the open source programmer or the proprietary source programmer. It is possible for these to be the same person and the analysis still applies.

These machines were not creating any greenhouse gases while they were broken.

It's Xfinitesimal! Oh, wait...

That would be the Zune, with all those competing music stores that had similar catalogs to the iTunes store. Not many of those around.

We also have no idea what the iPad app store is going to come up with - there have been some exceptional iPhone apps, so no doubt some third party app will amaze us.

Also, conveniently, Apple has some cracking deals with video content providers - sort of ideal for a 10" screen, wouldn't you say?

Yeah, but the point is more that the Verizon brand is only 10 years old.

I knew Ed Begley Jr. had something to do with this.

Actually Darwin's evolution means that those best adapted to the environment survive, not necessarily the strongest.

I guess I don't understand the distinction. Both those concepts in this context sound the same to me.

Really? It's not hard to understand.

Say you drop some apes into a place where the only food source is growing in the bottoms of holes 3 feet deep. Some of the apes are really strong, but others have really long arms. The strong ones are going to have a rough time getting food, the long armed ones are better suited for this environment. The strong ones will survive for a while by stealing food from the long armed ones, but eventually they'll lose if conditions don't change.

In this context, the supposedly more fit would be buzzing at a different frequency. It's not at all obvious that those mosquitoes would also be stronger, or even more efficient at anything - there's almost certainly an evolutionary reason why most mosquitoes buzz at the frequencies they do. Ones that buzz at a different frequency could be far less efficient flyers, or they could be easier to swat, easier to hear and thus less stealthy, etc.

Be careful sizing a backup generator when a large part of its load will be switching supplies and UPSes. UPSes in particular have _very_ strange load waveforms due to the rectifiers that are used in the charging circuit. The harmonics passed back on the line can cause the generator to 'seek' trying to lock in to 50/60 Hz, which can cause significant damage.

A permanent magnet generator can help, but they're a little more expensive.

http://ecmweb.com/news/electric_ensuring_generator_ups/

http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-186969.html

I'm more than dubious... I think that there is so little value in what AI experts have predicted in the past that I didn't even bother to RTFA.

...that doing anything on a motherboard, setting jumpers or whatnot, I have to use the stevie wonder method, touch based only."Is that the right set of pins..let me check..bump..one..bump..two" etc. I really can't see the darn tiny stuff like I used to. Have to rely on memory and then muscle memory. If it is out of the case and I can throw a really bright light on it and then use a magnifier that isn't so bad, but inside the case..not so easy, need to be three handed and three eyed...

Now distance though, with my glasses, still seems OK enough. Astigmatism I have always had, but that more shows up at night than during the day. I still can see tiny movements in the woods pretty fairly. I'm red / green deficient, and I think that is my DNA compensation, to see odd shapes and very subtle movement. Some old hunter/gatherer thing, where the subtle movement good gene made you more a hunter than a gatherer. The gatherers with better color vision could spot the "food-good-eat" verus the "might be food-bad color-no good eat" deal. The hunters would go "see eye flicker-deer" whereas the not so great hunters see "many colorful leaves and flowers and branches" in the same exact spot. I try to train myself to do both, but have to more rely on plant shapes than colors for identification. Makes it a little harder.

What are you building?

You sir deserve every last one of 5 score points for this post. I would add, though, that capitalism could work much better with stringent ethical and moral requirements for top executives and politicians. These would rule out the corruption and over-valuation that destroys so many businesses and even entire industries. The hard thing to understand is that both thriving and failing companies are wealth opportunities for certain people. An executive I know once told me that heavy compensation during a time a failure may be nothing more than hush money to protect the board of directors. I don't know if that is true, but it makes sense. Why else would you fire someone then give them millions of dollars?

> a lot of people (ie older parents/grandparents)
> buy a Mac because it's "easier" and are more
> inclined to be on a 5-10 year cycle.

In the Windows world, a lot of people are on an 8-12 year upgrade cycle.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if more people are still using Windows 98 than the total number of Mac users, all versions combined (actual general-purpose computers, I mean, not handheld music players and such). Obviously there's no reliable way to get actual numbers for how many Windows 98 systems are still in use, but I bet it's a lot higher than most computer geeks realize. People's tendency to upgrade promptly increases (more or less) geometrically with their level of computer knowledge, and the people whom an IT professional knows personally tend to be significantly above average.

DNA microarrays (also know as DNA chips) can already identify every virus ever discovered, and it can even identify undiscovered viruses by recognizing genetic sequences that are highly conserved among viruses. This type of chip first proved its worth in 2003 when it was used to identify SARS. The New York Times interviewed the inventor Joseph DeRisi about it:

We had just finished building the full version of our ViroChip, when we read about SARS in the newspapers. We literarily begged the C.D.C. to send us samples of the virus. Once we had it, we immediately put it onto a chip. In less than 24 hours we confirmed that this was a novel coronavirus. We confirmed the ViroChip’s finding by subsequently sequencing this virus’s genome. This had never in history happened before.

It is not yet evident what, if any, advantage this other chip that hopes to identify viruses by their size will have.

For the same reason that you can't take a piston from one engine and put it into another as easily. (Pedants stand down, I'm sure there's many cases where you can do this.) Automakers will muck it up with all of their proprietary shit and make the whole thing into a huge clusterfuck.

A standardized charging port is probably more likely than a standardized battery.

Except from all the people who believe that it does...