Reposting because I forgot I wasn't logged in. Oops!

Absolutely; it was way ahead of just about anything else. So easy to program, both in BASIC and ARM Assembler although I did most of my GUI programming in C using Desklib. The drag and drop loading and saving was such genius as well. And remember the memory allocation sliders? Not ideal but more control than most OSes provided.

Back in 1992 I was at university and had an idea to write a remote-control and scripting app; ordinary apps would register APIs and the master app could call those APIs to make them do work. Wrap it up in a scripting language and you have a whole automation system.

I had the basic API messaging working and a small app that would make a menu with a submenu for each registered app's functionality, but never did the rest. If I'd finished it I think it would've been well ahead of its time, but hindsight is 20/20 and lack of effort is the doom of many interesting ideas

Netflix will get creamed before too long. The networks are going to jack their fees through the roof now that they've realised how much money can be made in that market. Also, the ISPs, especially ones that do cable TV, would rather partner with the networks to offer their own streaming service and they have various ways to disfavour Netflix (charging Netflix money to not be throttled, counting Netflix but not their own service to the user's bandwidth caps).

I pay $35/mo to Virgin, whom I believe just resell Sprint's network. Works great almost everywhere I go. The only exception is Mendocino country, no service whatsoever up there, not even voice.

I had a cheap, cheap prepaid phone for 7 or 8 years, because I didn't feel like paying $800+/yr for a phone. Mind you, I don't do cable TV because $700+/yr buys a lot of DVD boxsets (and videogames) instead.

I only ever shopped at CompUSA once. I bought a PlayStation memory card there and, after checking out, was accosted by two staff members who refused to let me leave until they saw my receipt, appropriately marked. The checkout person hadn't marked it properly and they made me wait while they found him/her (who had just gone on break) to verify I had, actually, paid for this thing despite having a receipt.

I never shopped there again and made sure all my friends knew about this experience. I do not appreciate being treated like a thief.

I would say Elite was superior, and probably the influence for Starflight since it came out 2 years before. You didn't land on planets in Elite, but every system had a space station to dock with (you had to fly into the station). Also, the galaxies were procedurally generated, so lots of places to trade between. You could mine asteroids, fight the station police, trade illicit goods and become a fugitive, upgrade your ship, scoop fuel from the sun...

I think there are technically two. Jersey Jack Pinball and Stern Pinball, although I don't believe the former has put out their first game yet. In any case the market is the merest shadow of its heyday.

I made pinball machines in the 1990s and I don't think you're exactly right. 2.5 times as many games would've been about 2.5 times the maintenance - time per paid credit would've stayed the same, so there would've been 2.5 times as much wear and tear. Also, games in good locations (which is where new games were mostly sold) would've had their earnings go down because they spent big blocks of time being played continuously so they would've need to pick up a lot more players in the slack times.

Operators had lots of control over pricing, especially on Williams/Bally games; we had elaborate support for custom pricing. So third-tier locations could've helped themselves, but chose not to.

What really killed coin-op was that all manufacturers, both pinball and video, were making games that were more and more expensive for operators to buy, but earned less and less money on location. That slowed the churn rate of games (being sold from bigger to smaller operators) and glutted the market with backstock.

At work I have a maximised IDE on my left monitor (with the editor split vertically so I can see a .c and .h file side by side).
On my right monitor I have my IM client up against the right hand side, email against the left, browser in the middle and taller than the email, music player in the top left. I put IM windows to the right, so they touch the left-hand edge of the IM contact list.

This lets me work on code and watch for incoming emails while referencing a document off the wiki, see when someone comes back from lunch or gets out of a meeting (their IM status) and if someone messages me I can click straight to the window to reply. Similarly, I can click the music player to the front and immediately get at the volume or track list or whatever, without having to alt-tab or go down to the taskbar.

If all that stuff was maximised or tiled it would be a big pain in the ass for me. I don't log out or turn off the computer for weeks at a time, so once the windows are positioned I'm good - and most of them remember where they were last time anyway.

You're thinking of 'kipe'.

The way to look at the federal budget is the Monthly Treasury Reports - http://www.fms.treas.gov/mts/index.html . They are much more concise and don't have all that useless airy-fairy language. They show the current month and the year to date. I don't think state budgets in general are less complicated. All budgets are hierarchical so it's just a question of how far down you want to drill. I bet even Wyoming's budget has more than an individual can wrap their head around if you break it down enough. Did that office in that town's annex of that county's branch of that subgroup of that sub-department of that department really need 3 new toner cartridges?

I would say what really matters is the big picture, the top 2 or maybe 3 layers of any budget. It'll be a few top-level areas that make up the bulk of the money.

You could do that, but there'd be too much latency for really good players. Flipper buttons are digital but modern games (anything newer than 'Funhouse') scan them every 2ms and react. You can flip them 'lightly' as a result. Also remember that the flipper itself takes a small but non-zero amount of time to rise and fall and that matters (eg. when flipper-passing the ball).

One of my first jobs on pinball was writing life-testing code for a test fixture. Springs and solenoids last for a really long time. I'm skeptical that anything using air pressure would hold up as well.

It would be an interesting curiosity, certainly.

Orthonogality would've been a better word than Regularity, but I only thought of that now.

I don't believe that at all. The PS2 is hard to emulate because it's an exotic design intended for a particular programming style (stream processing) and it took people a long time to understand it. It was also designed to be as powerful as possible for the price, so it sacrifices things like regularity and robustness.

I used to do the 'intro to PS2' chat for new programmers and I would draw the architecture diagram on the whiteboard, starting with the main bus and CPU. They'd be fine at first and as more and more boxes appeared they would get steadily more apprehensive. There are 7 big black books which describe the PS2 hardware, sometimes quite tersely, and there is much, much more you need to know to get the best out of it. I am not surprised at all that emulation has proven a tall order.

There are lots of interfaces that don't use that sort of window model. Console games, handhelds, mobile phones, all sorts of embedded systems...

Nintendo DS and DS Lite don't support WPA. Wii, DSi and newer hardware does. I use WEP + MAC filtering for this reason. I know it's easy to crack but it means someone has to take an affirmative step that is unambiguously illegal if they want to use my network.