That Porsche may have 600 hp, but in the hand of an excellent driver, it would be still a very safe car.

Nothing against the Porsche, but it would never be a "very safe car" regardless of the driver, the better the driver, the less likely you are to find out how "safe" the car is but that doesn't make the car safer.

As I have gotten older, I've become less offended by the Fast and Furious movies, they're just fun movies, that's all. From the news, it sounds like everyone involved had fun and enjoyed each other, that makes it somewhat sad, they didn't seem to take what they were doing too seriously and they were just making fun movies and having a good time. I say this without intending to be an asshole but that car was a chainsaw without a safety guard, it's meant for expert drivers and tracks, this is exactly the outcome that makes that so. Being in some car movies and maybe some celebrity sports car races doesn't make you a professional racing car driver. I'm absolutely certain this wouldn't have been the outcome if they were obeying the traffic laws or in a lot of different (albeit less sexy) vehicles. Also, there are a lot of dead really really good racing drivers, guys who were among the best in the world and at the tops of their games when they made a mistake in a very unforgiving vehicle.

Nobody is denying them the ability to push for a unified vision. The market just isn't buying it. This isn't a punishment people are imposing, they think it's the way to let the good assets really fly highly. And it also happens to be an easy way to kill the bad assets.

Does Xbox need to be part of MS to succeed? If so why? If not, could it really dominate Nintendo and Sony on its own?

How about bing? If they lived and died by their own revenues, would they get more hungry?

The idea a lot of people have is that MS simply does too much, not that they don't have a unified vision but they have that vision, a giant legacy and a lot of cruft.

HBase and Hadoop is a very interesting option for certain kinds of data. It becomes more and more interesting as you add more and more machines too...

I have no idea how the data is structured or how it is queried and worked with but HBase may be a very interesting option. Once you dork around with the configs a bit and get it booted up, it's insanely easy to scale it.

They can. They have to in F1.

This, the P1 and the new Porsche 918 use electrics because of the insane torque... They are upfront about it, a Ferrari is about performance, not green.

Since you mentioned it, what are the good calculator apps for smartphones? THey all seem to focus on a smaller subset of things, I'd like an HP48 or Ti89 replacement. Either that, or why not Mathematica or Maple or Derive on the iPhone?

Any suggestions?

We live in Colorado (300+ days of blue sky and sun shine) and were greeted with a similar story. To cover our normal usage, we'd need a $26,000 system and with all the rebates and what have you, we'd still need to shell out $12,000. 6 to 8 years to pay for itself.

It's not crazy crazy expensive, I think it's in the range of something a homeowner can purchase. Maybe get an equity line of credit if needed. However it's on the high side. If it was in the 5000-8000 range? I think we'd have easily done it by now.

You mean journaling and some other features migrated to ReiserFS...

It pushed some issues, also went about things the wrong way with the community.

Fundamentally, and this is an issue that caused community issues with Reiser pushed on it initially, a filesystem's integrity is paramount. People trust it to safely store data. Reliability tradeoffs for performance doesn't cut it; regardless of the benchmarks. The other thing, how committed is the community to taking care of it? Last thing you want is a couple terabytes of data on a disk that you cannot read. The geek boys that want to simply run benchmarks might get a kick out of it but it's devastating when you lose data to something you trusted..

Wasn't New Century Schoolbook demonstrated to be noticeably easier to read in large scale tests? ALl the subtle things, the serifs, the a-spacing and c-spacing. I could have sworn I saw a study on that from like the 70s.

The problem is, the easier to read NCS font is ugly to look at. There are intermediate options, but sans-serifed fonts with simple lines and curves have a better looking style. A car in particular is a difficult blend of style and function.

It's more than that. They do statistics to try to identify language patterns and then associate those language patterns with bias.

That might be a very reasonable approach, in fact it might be the best we have but I don't think the language patterns are that great at identifying bias so much as they identify the bias of constituents. Freakanomics radio had an show about this a while back. The closest you get is a couple derivatives away from the actual intent, you chart politicians and their level of 'loyalty' then you chart their speech patterns and think tanks they frequently quote and then you compare the usage of newspapers and other articles to those speech patterns. It's better than nothing but they also identified that papers with more bias tend their bias toward their customer base. Read: papers in conservative places tend to be more conservative or at least use speech patterns that are consistent with conservative speech patterns and the same is true for liberal places.

Seems like more liberal folks in more conservative places would adopt the conservative speech patterns but not the intent. The intent or actual viewpoint doesn't always match the choices of words, does it?

The difference? There are a couple but the first of which is that the lawyers and judges involved are not stupid, they may not be techsters but they are almost certainly not stupid and this encrypted data is but one piece of evidence and you f-ed up long before if you're in this position. Second, there is a judge that will judge.

If you pistol is stolen or lost, you have some obligation to report it as such. It's typically registered and in that case, they know you have it, know the make and model. If you conveniently discover that it is missing when a court requests it they can check to see if you reported it lost or stolen beyond that, there is a judge there to judge you and he'll judge your credibility as he sees it from your behavior up to that point. Basically, keep track of your weapons, particularly when you're getting ready to be involved in a trial. Are you the kind of person that loses a pistol and forgets to tell anyone?

The password isn't quite the same. They may have some idea if you regularly used the computer. Again, I'll reiterate a couple things, the other guys aren't stupid and you didn't get in this position simply because of an encrypted drive. Now if you've spent 3 years doing something considered crime and there is other testimony where you've suggested you don't remember something because it's on the computer you use daily and now you don't remember the password, I can tell you how I'd judge you. Or maybe it's on the computer you resisted handing over and kept in a safe, those factors might not be admissible in the case against you but they certainly come in to play when you attempt to "forget" the password. Do you regularly use computer and keep track of dozens of accounts and passwords but this one computer you had locked up in a safe at your mothers house that you tried to pretend didn't exist, you forgot how to log in?

What will a judge think from your story?

Seriously, I have been trying to get over the MS hate that I've had since Windows 3. They're just another big company, trying to do what they can and at least they try to compete in new markets even though they routinely get shelled by the competition when they stray off the desktop.

But WTF?!?. Badges in Visual Studio? For real? They have no idea what they are doing. Are they chasing 15 year old developers to be? This is a company with 10s of billions in cash that can subsidize products like Xbox for years and years. This is fucking Bob in the IDE.

Ubuntu (and it's variants) and OpenSuse are pretty damned good, it's literally minutes and you've got an integrated, modern KDE, or Unity or GNOME up and running. You want more software of security patches? It's just a couple clicks and you're there. Now if you had some concrete numbers on instability or performance numbers then you could talk about something, real numbers, not just hearsay.

Thing is, I don't think you can find and interesting performance difference between Linux and FreeBSD, excluding the possibility that there might be a few pathological cases where one really out performs the other, and the Linux community is such that if you could produce a real benchmark, they'd invalidate it before too long and fix the performance problem. And from my own experience shipping products and running businesses on it, I don't think you could show a substantial difference in reliability. Now one thing I know you could measure the difference on is the amount of time managing them and I think Linux has a gigantic lead here.

I'm not a BSD hater exactly, but they need a better story than they've had and they need a different sort of community. If you like oldskool like UNIX, real UNIX, then BSD is just the thing. If you want UNIXy like stuff with some more contemporary things (think upstart, systemd, I don't know a full desktop UI) then Linux is pretty clearly the choice. Now that newer stuff may not be what you want, I'm personally sort of surprised how well Linux does in the embedded world where a BSD might be far better suited in a multitude of ways. PCBSD is getting nice, it's still nowhere near the level of polish that Ubuntu is though. LLVM and Clang have finally provided them with a non-GCC build chain option, there has been a ton of cycles spent on GPL vs. BSD licenses and in this particular case, I don't see how BSD has benefited in those discussions, at the end of the day the difference fundamentally lets businesses do stuff and just not contribute it back. Maybe I'm wrong but while BSD was worrying about a build chain, Linux platforms were building GNOME and KDE and remarkably simple graphical installers and easy to use automatic patch systems and support for tons of hardware and the list goes on.

That's part of the solution. I'm not sure how many people are killed by the police every year (maybe 8-10 in Colorado alone) but if they don't want to be recorded, then the masses should vote to disarm them, give them pepper spray and nothing else.

I don't visit it nearly as much as I used to, it's still in my home
page tabs and I scan it regularly but with a family and my career
where it is I can't post as much. Some parts of growing up suck.

The world is so different now. I'll tell you what slashdot showed me
and helped me with, in the mid to late 1990s it became clear that
nerds and geeks could change the world. A couple guys with a computer
and an idea could start a company, make money, employ people and
ultimately make a difference. The hard part of that for most of us
introverted nerdy dudes is "community." A few people can really make a
difference but it still takes a community around them and there are
community skills. "Opensource" was taking off, VA Linux and Redhat
were hot stocks, I was young, fresh out of college, full of piss and
viniger but I didn't know how to take part. (Why is that? I have no
idea, it's really odd saying it but it's true)

I guess I had two experiences: At work, we hired a relatively well
known Linux kernel hacker to help with something and he showed me how
to contribute, the hows and whys of things. It was incredible how it
built the community confidence. I knew how to code, I knew technology
but for some reason I felt like I didn't want to look stupid or be
rejected or I didn't know how to play with others. Second, I took
part in the Loki Hack competition at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. ESR
was there, Ryan Gordon was there a couple other guys that seem to
still be nerd famous, Taco and Hemos showed up with some food or
something a couple times. I remember thinking "these guys are 'doing
it!'" and you guys were cool enough and friendly with *everybody* It
was oddly confidence building. I have no idea why exactly I felt that
way, but being around other people doing the things you want to do,
contributing to a cause, taking part inspires and gives confidence to
contribute and take part.

Community, communication, and all sorts of other
not-quite-as-technical things are incredibly important to making
something like Linux succeed. It's really hard to quantify, but I've
seen and felt the difference, it's incredibly important and valuable.
Thank for that. I've made my career with Linux and opensource
technologies, I've got a home and a family that that stuff has helped
me realize.

Apple spent a couple decades on 2 other less popular platforms before they got to Intel and for years they took beatings about performance and fabricating benchmarks or tests to stack the performance the right way. Now they are more than capable of building their own chips, they have the money and the know how but why would they do that again unless the prediction is that there will be a world where they aren't compared to Windows on Intel machines?

Now I could see Mac books and Mac Pros with an ARM chip in them for certain functions and for the custom silicon that Apple adds to them. That doesn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility. At the end of the day though, someone is going to rip a blu-ray or render some HD video or count the FPS with some game and compare that number to the one made on a Dell with an Intel Core x in it and that's going to be that.