There is absolutely no reason why a kid under the age of 14 YEARS has access to a smartphone.

Especially for rural areas, where pollution is a big problem, I think the advantages of EVs will finally take over. Yes, they still pollute, but the power plants pollute far away from crowded cities, and they pollute less. If you can make more efficient combustion engines, that will definitely help in slowing down the change to EVs, which I think is good because of all the practical issues involved with it (Grid capacity, charging time, etc.) I love EVs but am realistic enough to realize that we can never switch to them within a few years, and therefore welcome any technology that expands the era of combustion engines.

Quite tough to align multiple NAND gates without open spaces between them. With one circular and three flat faces it doesn't fit well. Oww and that annoying circle for the inverter... Happy that I live in Europe: Though I dislike our (square) logic gate symbols, they are great for tetris... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate#Symbols.

See: we Europeans beat the USA even with logic gate-tetris !

Guys, think of it. Our stock exchange, i.e. your pension or if you are unlucky also your mortgage is depending on this kind of software these days... And this is not the first time this year that stock trading software is in the news. This has nothing to do anymore with owning a share of an organization in the hope the organization will make a profit and pay you dividend. This is total craziness.

As a real nerd I have to object. Endianness is all about the order of equal-sized elements in a larger container. In the most popular form, it is about the order of bytes within a larger (16, 32 or 64) word. Hence, assuming every character is stored as a byte, the logo should be

todhsalS (64 bit), salShtodh (32 bit) or lSsadhto (16 bit).

This logo is not a correct representation of any little endianness stored Slashdot, not even on 24 bit machines.

Linux 5.0 could be out tomorrow. Linus just has to say "this is 5.0". What does that tell us ? Absolutely nothing. Sorry Slashdot, I expected a bit better from you.

Windows Phone 8 is't good enough to do anything about Apples and Googles dominance in the market. Microsoft teamed up with a phone vendor that nobody wants anymore. Windows 8 is too late for the tablet market and will destroy the user experience of desktop PCs. With the forced installation of Windows 8 on the new PCs they will annoy a lot of customers. Computer noobs around the world start to ask questions about alternatives when they hear about the prices of upgrading their computer to the latest Microsoft software (OS + Office). The gaming market has finally discovered alternatives, so that's another reason to stick to Microsoft down the drain.

Of course Microsoft has so much money that they won't be history soon. And they will come up with some decent OS again in the near future. However, with Vista they could get away with it because they still dominated the market and there was no serious alternative. These days there are plenty, whether you are an Apple fanboy, Linux fanboy or a "what's an operating system" noob.

How are you supposed to simulate something when the simulation generates so much heat that the simulated object can never exist long enough to run the simulation ?

Great that they finally kill a bot-net, I hope this is an example how "easy" it can be to do it. Now it would be even better if they'd somehow warned the infected PCs, or maybe take them down. Most people will not even realize their PC is infected, and don't have a clue how to do something about it.

As far as I know I'm no grandma, and I run XP on all my three PCs. legally. Upgrading to windows 7 will cost me about 200 dollar, and break a lot of software I got installed. Oh, one of the machines definitely will not work with Windows 7. When it comes to my legal office 2010 installation, I can only hope that microsoft is willing to allow me to switch all three used licenses to the new installations, but I guess I can buy new office software too. And why would I upgrade ? XP is nothing but a tool to browse files and start applications for me. And no, I can't switch to a linux-only environment, though all machines are dual-boot.

You don't want to know how many XP PCs -just working fine- I know here in the wild. The only reason why my parents in law run win 7 is that they recently bought a new PC. They don't have a clue what windows 7 is and why they run it.

Don't underestimate the huge amount of old installations and machines in the world. They won't disappear when microsoft stops supporting XP.

It's the language closest to assembly, which makes it a great language for microcontrollers. In fact, most of the microcontrollers only come with assembler and C programmer, though many understand some convenient C++ features.

They can dismiss it, but when you look at all the tricks they have to apply to keep their current processors running MSDOS 1.0, their design is simply scary. As a processor designer I am amazed how well they manage to keep their bloated processors running, adding extensions of the x86 architecture on top of each other. I want to bet that if they would start from scratch and drop support for Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 (i.e. make a decent 64 bit processor, with a decent, not bytewise instruction set without 20 layers of extensions) they could easily lower the power consumption with a factor of 2.

Then again, the ARM processors lean a bit too much to the RISC approach to be a fair comparison. (yes I know, under the hood modern Intel processors are not CISC any more either, but I'm talking assembly level) The performance per cycle of an ARM is really crap compared to modern intel architectures. The good news is: if ARM manages to improve that a bit, they will manage to stay in the mobile processors drivers seat.

Intel and ARM are coming from a different direction when it comes to the sweet spot of mobile computing: ARM needs to improve performance, Intel has to reduce power. Oh, and ARM is powering the mobile world, so who are you to say Intel is better, mister marketing guy ?

True. As a programmer I can say, PLEASE keep salesmen off my back. They are clueless idiots who waste my time. Please DO give me a programmer who can explain me why the product is great and show it. If he doesn't even wear a suit it is only a pro. I'm allergic to suits.