I'm not sure this follows. Intel's primary focus for the last 5-10 years (some would say longer) has been process technology, and I don't think lack of competition from AMD has hurt that at all. You might make the argument that the previous generation's failure of desktop parts to materialize in real quantity, and this generation's tick-tock-THUNK cycle are signs that they're coasting because of lack of competition, but simply saying "my 28nm chip and my 14nm chip are fairly close in performance, damn you monopolistic Intel!" ignores the fact that they really HAVE been pushing hard to keep their edge. It's just that their goals and your goals for the technology are not aligned.

Today, their competitor isn't AMD. It's Global Foundries, TSMC, etc.

UC San Diego alleges that Aisen and at least eight colleagues (who have joined Aisen at USC) changed computer passwords to retain their custody and root control of the ADCS system, essentially locking out UCSD from administrative control of the Alzheimer’s study.

Courts have traditionally taken a dim view of that strategy. Hostage taking is almost never the answer, regardless of the nature of the dispute. Had he taken a copy of the database, that would have been more palatable. Something is always hinky when one person sets themselves up as the lone guardian of data purity.

Job's brilliance was turning new technology into entire new industries 5 to 10 years before it otherwise would happen. He could see the future of the application of technology better than others.

He helped bring about a commercially successful microcomputer when HP, IBM, and others were stumbling at the low end. (IBM learned from their mistakes and Apple's success to bring out the PC a few years later.)

When he saw GUI's at Xerox, he know that's where the future was and knew how to stretch the lowly hardware of the day to make it a consumer product. (Xerox tried a product, but was too expensive and F'd up the GUI.) Granted, he stumbled a bit with the Lisa, but with some help got the Mac going.

He recognized the potential of Pixar's technology and helped launch a new industry. Everyone else saw Tron's failure at the box office and didn't want to touch CGI anymore. He said, f8ck Tron, I'm going to make this work.

He simplified the desktop in the iMac and made it stylish when everyone else did beige or macho Terminator gamer boxes.

The iPod had an appealing and simple interface while the competitors were clunky to use and learn, and sales rocketed.

He realized touchscreen was the future instead of Blackberry-like physical buttons, and rolled over them with the iPhone. (Android originally targeted physical keys until they saw iPhone do it right.)

He's the master glue between technology, users, and industrial design. He's not an inventor, but an integrator who knows when to zig when everyone else is zagging.

"Inventor" is the wrong word, but that shouldn't take away from his genius.

Very few need "massive scaling on demand". They need reasonable scaling with easy hosting vendor swappability. If the cloud can't deliver that, it's a niche thing for blue moon projects.

Cloud has no real definition. I consider a "cloud" application to be an application that is relatively easy to pick up and move to a different hosting vendor.

The "vendor" definition of "cloud" is YOU paying a subscription for proprietary or difficult-to-migrate resources instead of buying a box.

Use LAMP as your "cloud" platform and tell IBM to shove their patent where their the lamps don't shine.

Their front page has turned into a mud pit of ads, it's all content from other sites, I can't see any compelling reason to go there in the first place and then they become an attack vector.

Fork English, it's ilojical and suks!

* Chewing gum
* Accordion
* Shoe-horn
* Pizza cutter
* 75 watt light bulb
* Dried armadillo
* Bicycle peddle
* Original painting of a bulldozer
* Rodent repellant
* 7 bottle caps
* Pillow feathers
* Rubber mallet
* Dog bone
* Green paint, exterior
* Detour sign
* Broken canoe paddle
* Decorative beads
* Baby pacifier
* Petunia seeds
* Empty ice tray
* Batman mask
* 3 human teeth
* Toothpick sculpture of a 3-legged donkey
* Drained snow-globe

As a hard-working tax-payer, I demand answers.
   

What that vid portion doesn't show is that the guy followed Buzz around and constantly harassed him for a while, sticking a Bible in Buzz's face.

You need a private count-down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

You gotta give them some incentive. It was a really risky trip.

"Houston, the lunar take-off rockets failed to fire, and the fuel is leaking fast. Uh, we'd like about an hour of privacy, please...".

red and blue values were swapping places across thousands of pixels

Just convince the customers that "the Avatar look" is in style. Who needs technicians when you have a good sales team.

I once contracted with a shop that had a process that generated garbled output data rows. It appeared to be extra stuff that didn't affect (over-write) the intended rows. The shop had added an extra processing step to filter out the garbage rows and eventually just worked around the glitch.

They had asked me to try to track it down, among other projects, because they were newbie programmers. I couldn't figure it out either because it never appeared in my intermediate trace statements. I put a trace (print) statement before every "write" in the program. None of the prints showed the garbage, yet garbage ended up in the output file. Head-scratcher galore. I was supposed to be "the expert", and thus feeling a bit deflated.

On I think the last day of my contract, I was running a test copy of the code with some changes to perform speed tests. I went to try a certain speed tweak, and I suddenly spotted the error: the file handle variable was re-used for another non-handle purpose, something like this:

fhandle = openFileForWrite(fileName);
...
writeToFile(fhandle, someData);
...
fhandle = countX + countY - 7;
...
closeFile(fhandle);

The actual handle name was something like "qhand". But a regular variable, "quantity on hand" ended up "qhand" also, the same name as the file handle.

When it dawned on me what happened, I started screaming like a wildman and the others popped out of their cubicles to see what was going down. They took my coffee away :-)

As far as the link on goofy video game bugs, I remember somebody discovered that if you don't put a game cartridge in all the way, certain characters dance and spin randomly and rapidly in the sky.

It created an Internet meme, and spoofs started appearing all over, typically using stop-motion with live actors. I forgot the nickname of the meme, but I found it hilarious. It took my mind off the handle bug.

I don't blame Google for trying. There are too many variables to say what will work and won't. Social networking is too big of an industry to not bother making a play for. Honda started out a successful motorbike company, and successfully pushed into automobiles even though that industry was full of established players.

However, I do blame Google for forcing their services to be or act like a social networking site, where private info magically showed up elsewhere in unexpected ways. That's just desperation and/or forceful denial in play, ticking off your user base. They forgot "Don't Be Evil". Obsession made them stupid.

I hope Google goes back to what it does well: lots of specialized little services that can OPTIONALLY share info between each other as the user sees fit.