(I'm only posting this because I want it archived with this article.)

This reminds me of the paper "The Camel Has Two Humps," which details the author's theory that some people just aren't cut out for computer programming because they lack the ability to conceptualize in a machine-friendly manner.

This is a problem that is not best served by "dumbing down" computers to be useable by people who have no business programming them, in the same manner as television shows should not be dumbed down to be readily accessible to the visually-impaired.

Why is so little effort being spent making it easy for me to repair my own car with soft, clean, lego-like tools?

If you want to be a plumber, you have to be willing to occasionally shove your arm into a pile of s#it to solve a problem.
If you want to program computers, you have to be willing to occasionally shove your brain into a pile of mathematics to solve a problem.

I'll believe computer programming is "ready for the masses" when plumbing is "ready for the masses".

It's all about the tubes, people.

Today's low-bitrate MP3/AAC will be tomorrow's vinyl.

I firmly believe that you prefer what you're accustomed to hearing in the first place. Most kids today have grown up hearing nothing better than highly-compressed FM or low-bitrate MP3 music. They don't know anything better, and given the option of hearing better music, perhaps even uncompressed, with a much larger dynamic range and noise floor, they'll gravitate to what their ears and brain have been trained to appreciate.

Tomorrow's world will have "128Kbps MP3 Afficionado" publications extolling the virtues, "warmth", and "naturalness" of the low-bitrate MP3. And audiophiles will pay top-dollar for crippled hardware and overcompressed, undersampled music tracks.

Please do not destroy vital network apparatus.

I've told this story before on slashdot, but once--about 10 years ago--the shuttle flew over Austin, TX on descent to land in FL not long after sunset. We went outside to see the boiling plasma trail it left in the atmosphere, then went back inside to see it touch down 9 MINUTES LATER.

Fast, indeed.

Slackware Linux, pre-1.0 kernel, roughly 1992 (my memory is hazy)... I was using it to run Common LISP much more effectively than the unfortunate ones who were using the class-provided DOS-based version of LISP with horrible memory management limitations.

This let me solve larger problems in a much more friendly development environment (including basic X windows w/ TWM) than they could. It made my university days much more tolerable and productive, right up until I was forced to use OS/2 2.1, which I also fondly remember for no other reason than I could communicate with the actual developers via email and they'd respond about issues I was having writing device drivers.

Good times.

I'm sure within a few hours of "mowmylawn.com" being up there will be an auto-redirect from "mowdownmybegonias.com"

It is disingenuous to measure the "size" of the new shuffle without including the size of the cord up to and including the "remote control" portion of the headphones. In fact, since the device is nigh unusable without the bundled headphones, you should just probably find the total displacement of the whole shebang before you've found the true size of it all.

I could almost picture one of these Wall-Warts hooked up via USB2 to a DisplayLink adapter and a TV/Monitor, using a nice BlueTooth keyboard (Apple Wireless Keyboard) for a sweet little noiseless media center front-end.

Too bad the CPU is not quite capable of HD content decoding, and DisplayLink does not have Linux support yet.

That's just me dreaming and wishing...

Advertisers will eventually prove to be the single largest threat to privacy, since that's how our media system makes money in the USA. They are in the business of knowing the most about us, eventually to "sell" us to the media producers.

This patent reads to me to be too "finger"-centric. If the claims didn't specifically limit their utility to contact of a "finger" with the device, it could be improved upon if you could press anything (even a stylus) to cause the "touch." The motion and heuristic would still be triggered just by physical contact or close proximity with the detector, whether the detector was the display itself or some other part of the device.

There's lots of ways to design around this patent. It's not the end of the world. Innovators will innovate.

I actually ask this question in all interviews I conduct. The answer is not important so much as how the candidate justifies the answer. I'm just interested to hear that the candidate has a preference and stands behind it for a valid reason that can be articulated clearly.

The choice of editor, in my book, is an ergonomic decision. Certain people are more productive using emacs, some using vi, some using nedit, and some just using notepad, depending on the task at hand.

Most of the replies so far show a glaring lack of knowledge of what USB3 really is. Honestly, it only bears a passing resemblance to its predecessors, and is a closer relative to PCIe. If you want more technical information, Denali has a good whitepaper (registration required):

http://www.denali.com/en/events/usb3_whitepaper/?EB20090105

In case anyone's curious, it was the Netpliance i-Opener:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener

A friend of mine bought two when they went under. He had grand plans to hack them, but life got in the way.