I think he has a point. Unless Hollywood can sort out the issue with how to perform cuts without forcing the eyes to refocus all the time, it will be disorienting and to some people even sickening. If 3D gets even more realistic, it'll be a bigger problem.

Maybe it is less important to fix the problems with the 3D itself and more important to focus on transitions which are softer on the eyes and brain. Just watch films from before smooth transitions. You can see how much better films became when a simple smooth transition method came along.

messages are pretty easy to ignore. I feel guilty ignoring invites. This will just make it so that spammers will send these messages using invites instead.

I agree that standard coding techniques are a good thing. I prefer however to focus it towards and existing file or module. If a file was written in a given style, follow that style. It makes the file readable.

Generally I have found that working with a pile of libraries written by third parties, there's no way you can be sure that you'll have a full product with a single given coding style. So, you're already used to calling outside of your own module using alternative coding styles. But when you mix the coding styles heavily in a given file and worse, in a given function, it becomes unreadable.

Things can easily get carried away of course. If you look at gstreamer, the variance between modules regarding coding style is a nightmare. Product is great and I always enjoyed working on it, but there's so little consistency in the system due to being overly complex that some people will do the bare minimum to get their code working with it and then just code an entirely different way after that. It would have worked better of course if people would make an attempt to move their integration code into a separate file and make the transition between files instead of strictly between modules.

I'm hoping at some point that tools like swing will also allow making borders between like languages to have a method of enforcing coding style at the edges of modules.

"...Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8"

Ok, driver support (yes, still an issue), motion sensor support, touch support, documentation, etc... I use Linux all the time... from my Windows machine. I admit, Linux has come a long way, but when companies like Dell are still using 6-8 months to get a single computer out of the door (which was already in production), it just means we're still not there. Even when they managed to ship, it still wasn't 100%.

Biggest problem with Linux these days is still that there's too many damn options. For example, there's gobs and gobs of graphing calculator programs for Linux, nearly all of them still need to be finished and most of them don't have any developers anymore.

Why does it always have to be one or the other?

At one point, I decided to watch some videos of Dawkins and found him to be obscene and utterly rude. While I am personally an atheist, I truly disagree with people suggesting that this man is representative of me. It's reached a point where religious people use him as an example of the raving lunatics atheists are. So far as I can tell, while he's also an atheist, he takes atheism to a degree of being a religion. Between him and organized non-religion groups, I'm thoroughly disappointed.

The point is atheists shouldn't ever be organizing as being atheists. It should not be a defining characteristic. A person who is an atheist should be something else. Maybe an artist, a musician, a scientist, an engineer, a good will worker. In short, an atheist should have a great deal of time to spend on things that are just more important and more meaningful than religion. Instead, these groups (including the Dawkins lackies) spend all their time being atheists and they even get into the "I'm better than the people who define themselves as believing in nonsense since I'm a person who defines myself as opposing believing in nonsense." It's like the morons who stand outside of meat plants protesting slaughtering cows while wearing a leather jacket to stay warm.

People... please just be more.

If Romney gets in, cash strapped states can siphon off the health care budget and then ask for more. Best thing about leaving it up to the states to manage their own budgets is that they generally have so much extra cash laying around that they shouldn't have a problem with it.

Kinda lame that Obama thinks it's a better idea to have central control over it. How the hell are states going to properly misappropriate funds if we don't give it to them in the first place? I know I sure as hell don't want to pay taxes to carry the burden of the poor... like Mississippi.

I was going to write something similar, but you did a far better job than I would have :)

Gotta say, Windows 8 Tablets are just anything but a "Me Too" tablet. The fact is, if you wanted to call it a me too tablet, Apple would have to put the full OS X on iPad and let you run everything on it before it was a me-too.

The regular Surface tablet might be me-tooish. It's just a lame ass tablet. The Surface Pro... which will be more expensive is going to be a whole different beast. The Surface will run the same old apps as iPad. In my house, we have four iPads. One for each of us. I use my iPad for reading books because of the high resolution display, everything else I do with my Slate. Everything is just harder and takes longer on an iPad. Even watching videos is just not a positive experience on the iPad. The App Store and Music store has REALLY sucked since iOS 6 too. These days, when I want to buy a new film, song or app on the Apple store, I break out my slate, use iTunes and buy it there and download it to the iPad.

I have used iPhone 4 for the past few years (got it the week it came out) and now that it's pretty much end of life and it's time for a new phone, I'm looking elsewhere than Apple since I can't see paying for a CPU upgrade which is basically all the iPhone 5 is. And since I'll have to buy all new accessories for my phone anyway (thanks to the dock connector ordeal, I'm probably going to look at the Samsung Ativ S.

Microsoft Surface Pro on the other hand (I really just don't even consider Surface worth buying) will be a huge upgrade for my Samsung Series 7 Slate and it will be accessorizable. I don't usually get that excited about new tech coming out, but if the Surface Pro at least has a full HD screen, I'll replace my tablet and one of my laptops (probably my MacBook Air) as well as my iPad 3 with this one device.

I think people really need to stop comparing iPad to Windows 8. It's like comparing a bicycle to a race car. There are some similarities between the two technologies, but iPad is for FaceBook, eBooks and Angry Birds type games. Windows 8 systems are for getting things done. A machine you can actually accomplish things on should definitely cost more than a machine you read books on and play goofy games on.

I am 37 years old... spent 31 years programming as a hobby or for a living. I got tired of coding for a living and became a Cisco instructor. In 6 months I've gotten 3 CCNPs, 5 CCNA, a CCENT, multiple specialist certs, juniper certs etc... I'll take my CCIE R&S lab exam in January.

I've studied 3-11 hours a day minimum every single day since I quit my job in February. I've also been a father of two young kids full time and taught classes most of the time.

Back when I was 18 I could stay awake and alert for nearly 48 hour at a time... now I make use of Red Bull, chain smoke and drink coffee by the liter. But I'll be damned if anyone will tell me I can't keep up with the 22 year olds or learn as quickly as them.

So... what the hell are you whining about... you recognized the problem... get off your ass and fix it.

Consoles choose RISC vs. CISC for a much simpler reason. The performance isn't really that important. It's typically an issue of endianess.

It has become quite simple in modern times to make a CPU emulating JIT (meaning treating the binary instruction set of one CPU as source code and recompiling it for the host platform.) what is extremely expensive execution-wise is data model conversion on loads and stores. Unless Intel starts making load and store instructions that can function in big endian mode (we can only dream), data loading in an emulator/JIT will always be a huge execution burden.

The result being that while an x86 can run rings around any of the console processors, a perfect one to one JIT can't be developed to make big-endian code run on a little endian CPU with a 1 to 1 mapping.

As an example of this, if you look at emulators for systems that make use of little endian ARM, performance of the JIT is perfect. In fact, the JIT can sometimes even make performance better. But if you look at a modern 3.4Ghz Quad-Core Core-i7, it still struggles with emulating the Wii which is insanely low performance.

So, don't read into RISC vs. CISC here. It's really an issue of blocking emulators in most cases.

Nokia has sold feature phones with Symbian Series 60 on them for ages and called the smart phones. The point was that they were theoretically running a smart phone operating system. Of course, the target market for the phones were generally markets such as elderly women (granny phones). In addition, they were generally phones which were given away for free with cheap contracts. So they weren't really selling them to consumers.

In fact, if you were to tell the people receiving those telephones that they were so "fancy" and had all these "smart phone features", they would in fact choose another telephone which was "simpler".

Those phones will continue to sell quite a lot so long as Nokia continues selling them with big numbers and screens which can be read when you hold them close to your face.

I have never met anyone who is even kinda cool that has a Nokia smart phone when you consider a smart phone to be something actually useful for more than using as a telephone and maybe listening to the radio or music files. The only people I've ever seen with the are people who wear ties as a status thing.

I for example us a great deal of differential equations when I'm developing audio and video filters (FIRs, IIRs etc...). I don't even have a math education past trig, the rest is from books and websites.

There are cases where I'd chose to perform real-time filter calculation for adaptive filters (things like calculating the points of an FIR without knowing my desired frequency response before hand), it's not terribly common outside of for example echo cancellation where I'd want to design the shortest possible filter with the desired effect for the current environment instead of just using a long filter with good response in all frequency ranges.

I generally do most of my math work in a tool like Matlab (sometimes Mathematica if it's more mathy and less computery) and then when I have the coefficients I desire for a formula, then I'll code it in C or C++... oddly sometimes in DSP assembler.

That said, another example of where I'm using calculus, though not terribly advanced calculus is that my 8 1/2 year daughter, 10 year old son and I are writing a platform scroller for their phones. The girl is doing pretty well with coding the object structure, my son is doing much of the artwork. I'm working mostly on things like motion. In the case of motion, I make use of rate of change calculations and apply them using simple physics. For example, if the user holds the right arrow for X amount of time, I increase the positive moment energy. If they press the left arrow it applies negative momentum energy, if they simply let go of the arrows, then at a given rate, the horizontal momentum energy reduces towards zero. For jumping, when the user presses space, depending on the duration, upward energy is applied until a peak is reached which will fight gravity. Gravity however works as expected 32feet *...

I also have used math a bit in producing a TDR for cable length detection.

Math is VERY useful in programming so long as you choose to work on projects where math is interesting :) Even when I was working for a web browser company, I'd find myself writing a JPEG decoder which isn't really hard math, but it's at least somewhat advanced.

Acer specializes in making the cheapest crap you can buy without getting eMachines. If there's a company which can almost be blamed for pushing Microsoft to this point, it's actually Acer.

Asus makes pretty good stuff, but go to their website to download drivers. They don't really stay up to date on that do they? Sure, they show a product love for a few weeks after you buy it, but it's just too much work to have a script file which says "All laptops using NVidia chips should get the new NVidia driver when we add it to the server".

Dell, they will continue selling servers and infrastructure to companies. For users who don't get tablets or laptops, they'll sell those too. For users who will now get a Microsoft Surface, they'd have gotten a iPad or a cheap assed laptop otherwise.

HP is kinda like Dell except they don't depend as heavily on PC (unless you're a shareholder whinging about how PC sales are down, when the real sales on are the big stuff).

I can go on and on, but let's be honest, this isn't going to bother the vendors selling :
    a) Budget crap "Timmy needs a computer honey... this one on the shelf looks pretty, and it's cheap too. Let's get it"
    b) Corporate budget crap "We have to get PCs for 50 telephone sales people, does XX have anything?" (dell's market)
    c) Server sales.

Asus will be the worst hit by this I think. But they'll differentiate by offering 900 models of Windows 8 machines each year to choose from, including ones with quad hex-core i7s and GTX900 in threeway SLI that can cook an egg from across the room.

Surface product is not going to be the fastest. It won't be the sexiest. It won't be the most amazing. But it will be the one which Microsoft ships one or two models of each year and for people like myself who are sick of buying cool gadgets and not being able to find cases or accessories for them, this will be perfect.

Acer should quit bitching and learn from this. Make less shit machines and start focusing on how they can make a smaller number of machines which people don't feel screwed for buying afterwards.

I recently bought my two kids Windows Phones, the HTC Titan. It really has come a long way. There are still some issues, but frankly, Windows 8 Phone (which I intend to finally trade my iPhone in for when I can get a Windows 8 x86 phone) looks really nice. There isn't enough app support yet, but I see Metro solving that.

Windows 8 Phone is just very nice to use... it's much snappier than iOS (on slower CPUs) and it feels more like my desktop Windows 8 systems. Oh, I can write software for Windows desktop and it runs almost unchanged on Windows phone.... and don't forget Visual Studio.

Dutch are taught Dutch, French, German and English before graduating school. Norwegians learn Bokmaal, NyNorsk, English and an elective language, then they generally also understand Swedish and Danish nearly fluently. Swedes learn Swedish, English and usually a third as Danish learn Danish, English and a third. Both Swedes and Danes normally understand Bokmaal Norwegian. Fins learn Suomi, Swedish, English and often a fourth. I only mentioned a small percentage of the world, they're only about 50 million people altogether, but that's about 1% of the world's population.

That sounds pretty common. I'm am American and I can speak 2 languages fluently, a third not-so-fluently, can communicate in 5 other languages (order food, ask directions, etc...) and can read a total of 14 languages without much effort. I suck at language too... my hearing problems make it impossible for me to learn new sounds, but once you learn a few, the others aren't so hard (within the same families).

My kids... they learn new languages like it's just natural. That's because on a daily basis, they can be watching cartoons or playing video games in 4 different languages and then we watch educational videos on learning new languages together. I am really hoping I can get one of them to learn Mandarin at some point.