Really, Slashdot, isn't there a better way to do this?

OSX is a decent OS. Linux is a decent OS. Windows is a decent OS. People manage to use all of the above productively. Make you own choice but don't act as if others aren't allowed to make theirs.

Where did I say everybody under the age of 30 goes to college? When I said 'that whole group' I was referring to people who do go to college (who are 99% under 30 after all). You're hearing what you want to hear. GP made it sound as if nobody under 30 uses a computer. I was just pointing out that is not a valid assumption.

I updated all my PCs to Windows 10, starting with the laptop that was running 8.1 anyway. Inevitably there will be software and hardware that just isn't supported on Windows 7, whether intentionally or by accident, and I see no reason to stay behind when the update was free. Windows 10 cleaned up some of the annoyances I had with using 8.1 on a laptop (the Metro screen and Charms bar for instance), and the remainder are hardly an issue.

And regarding the idea that everybody under 30 uses a phone or tablet, sure they use phones, but I don't see many tablets out there, and laptops are practically a requirement for a college education these days, so that whole group of (under 30) people uses a Mac or PC computer as well.

Obviously this works because the domain system has been designed so that domain expiration dates are visible to the public. Is there any compelling public interest in making this so? Perhaps this was one of those decisions made during a more naive, simple time on the internet, that needs to be revisited.

I don't want to write a thesis on this, but it's really not that easy. APIs have all sorts of implicit rules that are not obvious at first glance (and undocumented, hence 'implicit'), so even if you write what appears to be a valid drop-in replacement for every individual API function, you may end up with a garbage result. Throw in multi-threaded programming and event-driven GUI programming, and it becomes exponentially more complicated. It's not unusual for a GUI program to rely on a specific order of events received from the OS in order to calculate things like layout, positioning, font sizes, etc., or to make desired features like animation work properly. The events might -always- occur in the expected order on one OS and give all the right answers, but come in differently on another OS or a new release of the same OS. An emulation of one OS by another has to replicate a ton of behavior that you can't predict in advance just by reading the API specifications.

This recent video demonstrated that nicely.

100,000ft is nowhere near 100km. About 30%. But still, if this is an experience people are willing to pay for, good for them.

Earlier today I played with the Rose Chatbot demo on Brian Wilcox's website, and it falls apart pretty quickly. Human beings (especially one with the presumed life experience of a '30-year-old security consultant') have an enormous body of knowledge to draw context from, plus the ability to quickly identify relevant context, which no chatbot today can replicate. My conversation with 'Rose' jumped off the rails after about a minute with this simple exchange (paraphrasing):

Rose: I'm a programmer too.
Me: What languages do you use?
Rose: I only understand English.

FAIL. Unless I'm dealing with a person on drugs, or intentionally trying to act like a chatbot, I would obviously expect them to realize that my question about languages was asked within the context of computer programming, since that is what they just told me they do. Failure to deal with context (which Rose seems to handle by deflecting the conversation) is what prevents chatbots from giving a convincing impression that there is a 'mind' behind the words, that is operating from the same principles that you or I do.

The amount of context a chatbot would need to store and identify in order to provide -sensible- (not just grammatically correct) responses in an open-ended conversation with a human is still beyond our ability to contain in software, except perhaps in gigantic bespoke systems like Watson.

You had me worried there for a second. Next thing you know we'll have Basic on Blimps or MASM on Mules or Fortran on Ferries.

The BIOS isn't installing apps to the hard drive (give it time?) As AC indicates this is a Windows-only issue. the BIOS -holds- an application that Windows helpfully detects and installs into itself on behalf of the hardware. A Linux system will totally ignore the app (which is Windows-specific anyway!!) sitting in the BIOS.

I was surprised by how 'flat' the performance increases are as well. If you interpret Moore's Law as expecting a doubling of performance ever 18 months (yes I know this wasn't what Moore's Law originally said, but for long time the transistor count on a die and performance ran hand in hand), 8 years gives time for 5.333 doublings. 2^5.333 is about 40.3. That is a big difference from the 'up to 11 times faster' results these benchmarks produced. If you're more lenient and allow for 2 years between expected performance doublings, the current processors should still be 16 times faster than those from 8 years earlier.

Of course, they did eventually get caught. So maybe not such a good example to follow.

" Unfortunately for him, Iowa law requires the original ticket buyer's name to be divulged before any money can be paid out. "
Unfortunately for him, he had stupid friends - FTFY.

Would hiring managers or HR people really be put off by reaching voice mail? Is it that much of a risk in a job search? I see no reason to -ever- answer the phone for a number you don't recognize, since any legitimate caller can leave a message.