I can help with that one.. ARM Ltd can not get any licensing fees from MIPS cores. ARM Ltd has a huge incentive in pushing ARM in the datacenter in all possible forums.

The irony with everyone's disdain for this is that there is nothing in the scene that is completely divorced from reality.

The chick is clearly talking fast... so maybe she is talking about 2 action items
1) Create a GUI in Visual Basic
2) and also track an IP address

Or, maybe she plans on creating a VB GUI wrapper around some networking tool. Because we know they couldn't just use the fucking command line, its gotta have all that pretty graphics and shit. And though you may not like it, there is no technical reason that all the graphical nonsense in CSI is cranked out by some dude writing VB6 or VB.NET code... VB6 is a shitty ass language... but yes you can do anything with it.

There are a number of "realistic" interpretations around what was being said. That being said
1) Any explanation is completely *tasteless* to the sensibilities of an experienced software/networking professional
2) CSI still sucks ass
3) The digital zoom in CSI is sickening, because they use it every fucking time.

They were... mostly...

There were real CM-5s used as prop pieces and named "Thinking Machines Supercoumputers" by the animated tour guide.
The workstations were all real SGIs. The thing that confuses some people... there was no Mac running UNIX... it was the other way around, a SGI UNIX workstation "running" Mac OS.. What people are referring to is that there is at least one scene where Newman is watching the "live video" feed on his SGI workstation (I believe it is a Crimson), but it is clearly a Macintosh Finder interface running Quicktime on the screen. This was notable because the progress bar for the "live video" was clearly visible.

The reason CSI sucks ass and always has is because they use "computerz" as a plot crutch for the shitty story. I could put up with once or twice using impossible digital zoom... but they just take it too far... It's always DNA this, or zoom onto someone's eyeball to tie everything up 10 minutes before the end...

For all those idiots that constantly worry about China "owning" the US because we're all living off a Chinese credit-card. Think about this: If Facebook is sold to the "Chinese" that means money and capital is coming into the US, and it isn't a loan. In fact, basically, if you can sell something that doesn't cost very much to make (Facebook) and is basically a worthless piece of crap for a huge sum of money, you're only reversing any problem with getting loans from China (or from brown people in general).

In this case, the original post was modded to +5, Insightful. So that seems like a good enough reason. He's just a stranger anyhow.

That school that I guess is not going to be named (CMU), they also attempt to have a legitimate software engineering program. While I sorta appreciate the idea of making software engineering a real discipline, it seems like CMU is just a way for the creeps that think theories and writes-up about pair-programming are not weird at all to have a shot at tenure.

After seeing that Amy Chua satire-that-really-isn't piece about not letting her kids go outside and now this that worries about the fate of the US once AOL(!!) is in foreign hands the US media is finally trying to beat the forums and blogs at their own game. It's not so much extremism to promote buzz, its just putting so much garbage that people can't look away, so it's a little different than what they usually do.

I may be a moron, but you can still eat a bowl of dicks.

In the US, we license engineers, but they are licensed in specific areas and software engineering ain't one of them. That same licensing system doesn't license train engineers nor operations engineers nor process engineers, all of which are used in industry as titles. The licensing applies to those that practice independently or need to offer "engineering services". it just isn't the same thing and although you might not like it, that's the way it is, So just eat a bowl of dicks you git.

While "right tool for the job" is a nice sentiment, it is actually one of the easiest things to say for those that know close to nothing and actually have very little knowledge of the available tools. That you would go on about Lisp, and state that it is a functional language and yet NOT a procedural/imperative language pretty much demonstrates you don't know shit about it. Few Lisp dialects are purely functional... and this is exactly why there was actually quite a bit of real world programming done in Lisp (no matter how uncommon in the grand scheme of things).

Your post is an exquisite cornucopia of fail. "ARM can play..." but "ARM can't". Thinking an iPad is a representative example of all ARM chips or thinking it is representative of anything more than a toolbag's status symbol. Newsflash, numerous ARM SoCs (including those used in mainstream Android phones) include hardware video decoding for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, and many of these ARM based chips can easily decode MPEG-2 in software and can DMA that to the display.

I would actually be surprised if the iPad couldn't easily decode MPEG-4, because I thought they designed a custom ARM SoC for that thing. But then again, I always assumed it was a piece of shit anyway.

Be happy you've never encountered an actual problem with DRM and copy protection systems and enjoy feeling smugly superior to all of us incompetents telling stories. And you can also go fuck yourself while you're at it, douche bag.

So much for decentralizing the money-supply, though.

I mean, I just enjoy the rhetoric of "central banks are evil and abusive" (which is true to certain extents), and the solution proposed either a) makes things worse b) replaces that problems with a set of new problems, some of which are worse than the original problems. Yea.

Assuming this ever gained momentum: Lovely, so they think they can impose an absolute cap from the outright on Bitcoin currency and not be affected like everyone else by deflation. The ability to increase money supply has proven to be quite necessary (not even bringing in QE2 or the recent BS).. of course if you are convinced that the US is in hyperinflation right now because of some toolbags on Youtube I guess this is an argument not worth having..

And LOL I guess there is an article on their wiki about this very issue.

Whatever.