LOL at the moderation from somebody who obviously knows absolutely nothing about the industry. :)

I can't believe nobody can find a better system than capitalism even when offered a +5 insightful as incentive. People are so apathetic nowadays...

In pharmacy, it seems pretty clear cut that nowadays it's among the worst. Pretty much no pharmacy lab does real research any more because there's too little ROI. They mostly repackage molecules and research marketing instead.

Creating a new market segment is much more profitable than creating a new cure.

Windows PC and the XBox *come with* DirectX but are in no way required to use it. Both platforms will happily run OpenGL based engines as long as the hardware is capable (on the PC side).

I'm not really sure what you mean by "Linux gamers use windows", but if it's saving a couple hundred gigs aside as a Windows partition that I boot off every now and then when I want to play, you can count me in.
However I certainly wouldn't use Windows for actual work given how clumsy the interface or the i18n support is compared to pretty much any X11 desktop. Even all my photography is processed in Linux and I don't have any problems with that (thanks to Bibble Pro and digiKam).

Basically I run Windows every now and then instead of turning on a Playstation or XBox or whatever the next console will be, because the games I find fun (FPS, simulations, etc.) aren't available on consoles, or only as degraded versions. Plus my 24" monitor is probably larger than my TV anyway...

Especially since you certainly don't want to just send bits as the baud rates remain quite low. Current POTS modems are still around 3.5 KBd I think. It's the use of multiple symbols (instead of just two for bits) that increases the data throughput. On the fly data compression can help further. Of course some administrative stuff will take some of the bandwidth (error correction mostly).

If you actually were in IT, you would by now have noticed that we suffer from a plague of users who not only vastly outnumber us, but care nothing for IT's redefining of standard units. 1K is 1000. That's all there is to it. So 64 is 64000.
You actually expect users to go mess with the way computing defines sizes when a lot of them still have trouble figuring out what the difference between memory and disk is ?

Ah, but what size byte ?
It should be Mb (bits) and Mo (for Mega octet) if you really mean 8 bit bytes.

Also remember that for most of the computer using population (who use them daily and understand nothing about them and certainly won't bother to learn weird historical unit distortions), Mega is million. It's the way it's used everywhere else after all. Even in data transmissions. When you get 1Kb/s, you get 1000 bits every second as specified in the standards, certainly not 1024.

I for one welcome the new units that will finally end this sillyness (although I wish octet was used more wildly).

I think I read somewhere (I'd have to look it up) that both ATI and nVidia make other models.
Maybe you could find one that's more to your liking among those ?

OTOH, with summer comes the season of open case barbecues, so nVidia has at least something going for it !
(is the GF100 dishwasher safe ?)

And the CPU is busy computing the OpenGL the screensaver graphics ? :)

I know the GPUs have now moved into a different realm altogether but I still find it strange at times.
I still see my graphics card as a glorified Tseng ET 4000 despite it probably having more processing power than most of my previous machines combined...

I think you're on to something. A lot of recent trends just made sense to me.

At least *some* people get rich.
Wait, that works in China too. Ah, it's just screwed everywhere.

I thought that was The Onion ?
For us Europeans, keeping track of the satirical press in the US isn't easy.
Well another funny rag to read is always nice I suppose, although this one seems to be a bit too far out from the little browsing I've done of their site.

Ok, there's a lot of savannah too...
But seeing how sparse the cell phone coverage is, there isn't that much Internet access in the countryside. I suppose that a lot of urban people have Internet access (and a lot of people are in cities) but outside of that... I doubt a lot of them are connected to a landline. They are not even connected to the electric grid (although this is mostly because petrol is basically free over there so each village has its generators).

Not to mention that the US and Europe would have to support Volumbia for fear of a drop in cocaine supplies to western markets.