If it is open source (and a cursory look around the web site didn't show me any links to the source), it's a shame that it isn't in F-Droid.

ARM exists largely because of Apple. They didn't want to buy mobile chips from a competitor (Acorn), so invested in a joint venture so that Acorn would spin off their chip division into a company that would sell to both. They then ignored ARM after killing the Newton though. Many of the people working on the current ARM cores at Apple formerly worked on a PowerPC processor at PA Semi. I think, if IBM and Freescale, had been serious about selling desktop chips that Apple would have been happy to avoid a load of software costs by having a single CPU family for their entire product suite. IBM didn't want to compete with Intel in mobile chips and Freescale kept promising exciting parts and never quite bringing them to market.

Neither the NeXT nor OS X UI toolkits have ever asked you to specify pixels. They specify everything in PostScript points.

They're still not offering a retina external display, but they're about the only manufacturer that isn't. I just got a 4K 27" display at work (and I'm now back to preferring to read text on the big screen instead of on the laptop screen). The panel quality is nice, but it lacks any bells and whistles. They're only £300 now though, so we're buying them as the standard external displays.

You know that OS X comes with ipfw, right?

Direct3D 10 is very different from DirectX 9. The latter was designed with modern GPUs in mind and so is based around an entirely programmable pipeline. DirectX 9 is predominantly a fixed-function API with various places where you can insert shader programs into the pipeline. This means that DirectX 10 is easier to support because there's less provided by the API.

Supporting D3D 9 is akin to supporting OpenGL 2. You need to expose most of the programmable interfaces but also have a load of fixed-function stuff work, typically (on modern hardware) by providing shader programs that do the same thing. Supporting D3D10 is more similar to supporting OpenGL 3, where most of the complexity is in moving data to and from the GPU and compiling shader programs.

With Gallium, there are two aspects to supporting these APIs. The first is the compiler turning programs from a source language (HLSL, GLSL) into TGIR. The second is the state tracker, which handles API-specific state. The former part is about as complex for D3D 9 and 10, as they have similar shader language support. The latter is a lot simpler for 10, as it is a much less stateful API.

Oh, but it is. You just need to know how to refer to it properly.

I don't care if the plane I'm on departs on time, as long as it arrives on time. I've been in a situation once where changing winds meant that delaying takeoff allowed the plane to land earlier. I don't recall anyone on the flight being upset with the decision to depart a bit later...

A navy ship, what about a cruise liner? With cheap energy, you could process the deuterium from sea water for fuel, grow food in artificially lit enclosures below decks and have a self-sustaining artificial ecosystem that could spend years between trips to port.

The Linux desktop wars mattered when Linux was the future of the desktop.

Now that the desktop has a much smaller future, and Linux clearly doesn't play much of a role even in this drastically reduced future, it's just that KDE and GNOME really don't matter much.

Desktop Linux is a niche product, and it behaves like one—adoption is vendor-driven, and clients use whatever the vendor supplies.

For individual Linux users, things haven't moved in half a decade or more. Linux is still a mostly complete operating system with mostly working desktops. None of it is very polished (polish, as always, is just a couple years off in the future). Significant time and customization are required to make any stock distro+DE work well, things are generally cluttered, kludgy, and opaque, and for the hobbyist that fits the profile—the sort of person that will actually put up with and use this kind of computing environment—one or the other (KDE or GNOME) is already a clear favorite and this isn't likely to change.

Of course there is also the developer group, probably Linux's largest cohort of "serious" users on the desktop, but they just plain don't care much about which DE is installed. They're much more concerned with toolchains and versions of environment components.

So the KDE vs. GNOME thing is just plain...not that big a deal any longer, for most anyone.

The only possibly interesting development in a very long time is Elementary OS, which appears to have adopted a different philosophy from the one traditionally associated with Linux development/packaging groups. But whether this will ultimately translate into an important operating system and user experience, with its brand that supersedes the branding of the desktop environment itself, remains to be seen.

I was more wondering if they partnered with Bussard's company. The sizes sound similar and Bussard was DoD funded.

> an entire plane of people yakking on the phone

What old world do you live in? Everybody text messages now (or uses Snapchat or Whatsapp or whatever), very few people ever "talk" on a phone. Watch what happens today as the plane lands and the announcement goes out that it is ok to use phones. Of 100 people, maybe 50 quietly text their friends to come pick them up at baggage claim, and one old guy makes a fast, quiet actual call saying in an embarrassed tone "Yeah, it's me, I just landed." Then he hangs up.

I've flown a depressing amount over the last couple of years. United actually does have pretty entertaining security briefing (although they're less funny the fifth time you've seen them in a week), but they insist on showing you a couple of minutes of adverts after telling you to pay attention for the important security briefing, but before showing the security briefing. If you want people to pay attention, then ban airlines from showing ads before the briefing, because after being advertised to for a couple of minutes, you can bet that I've unplugged my noise-cancelling headphones from the jack and am reading a book until they put the screen back under my control again...

Political terminology in the US is weird. You have the liberals / progressives, who want to resurrect the worst ideas of the 20th century on one hand and the conservatives on the other who want to resurrect the worst ideas of the 19th. Judging from your post about 'leftists' (by which you seem to mean 'authoritarian state capitalists', or as the rest of the world calls them 'the right wing'), the rest of your terminology is equally confused.

My favourite one is:

#include <stdio.h>
int x;
int main(void)
{
struct x { void *a, *b; }foo;
printf("%ld\n", sizeof(x));
}

Try compiling this as both C and C++. It's completely valid in both languages, but the output will be different in each.