Instead of TVs, I would prefer to have Apple monitors which work with PCs. 1920 x1200 is the minimum for me but 1920x1080 is more and more common. On the iMac, I have 2560x1440. Thats a display I would like to have on my linux boxes too but the current thunderbold displays from apple do not target the PC market.

It might have nothing to do with Neutrinis at all but be more general: the distance through matter could simply be smaller. What would be nice to check is to compare the light and neutrini speed through matter. Lets dig a tunnel through the moon ....

It might have nothing to do with neutrinis at all but be more general: the distance through matter could simply be smaller. Mass is known to change the metric, but maybe it does in a different way. What would be nice to check is to compare the light and neutrini speed through matter. Lets dig a tunnel through the moon ....

> why on Earth would you want to strap one of these to your wrist Because here on earth, we know vanity and use status symbols to impress?

what is nice in linux that its possible to work with different windows managers. I use a minimal windows manager myself (blackbox) Sometimes, I switch to KDE, sometimes to Gnome, or explore Unity. Installation of a new windows manager is an apt-get away. I sometimes wish this would be possible in OS X.

While it is important for adoption how fast one can learn a language, the long term benefits are much more important. I also needed time to get used to Perl but is now a programmable languages very dear to me: it is reliable, has a great culture, is fast, does evolve only slowly and can be extremely powerful. This is similar to LaTeX, which needs first some efforts to learned but after a while runs circles around any other text processing system. Other programming languages or text processors might be easier to get started with, but they do not scale and limitations will eventually lead to frustration.

While a lot of patents are nonsense and software patents in general, it still amazes me how fast things are now adapted in the case of the iphone. We would still have phones with thousand of buttons and switches if apple would not have shown an other way. The sliding idea to unlock the device was new and the engineer who has invented it should has his or her invention protected for a while. Innovation should be rewarded for a couple of years but then freed up. It is the time frame which is a problem. Intellectual property and patent protection should last only a couple of years, but enforced strongly. This gives the artist or inventor a living for a few years. 10 years maximum. After that, the technology or art should go in the public domain. The inventor or artist will be forced to become creative again. I do not know how fast the code for the iphone could have been adapted and copied so fast by others. The only obvious mechanism which comes to mind is that today when we give email and other communication services more and more to external companies, this information is also mined. An apple engineer using an external free email service for example might give away a lot of code just by communicating with others about the projects. In the case of the iphone, the adaption went too fast. When introduced in 2007, the iphone had a lot of innovative features. The interface,including the way how to interact with the device would be unlocked, was new. 2010, three years after, almost identical competitors were already outselling them. Of course this is good for us customers, but the question is, whether in the future, there will be an other boost of innovation from companies. I mean innovation, not just copying or refining what has been done before. If the risk that your innovation is copied in 3 years and outselling yours, there is no point any more for such exploits. For apple it still worked, but who will dare such a thing again? Again: protect intellectual property, new ideas and new art vigorously, go after copy-cats, freeloaders and rip-offs, but then free the technology or art after a decade.

Shutdown like this remind that it is never good to rely on one service or company. From all the services closed, I liked Google desktop quite a bit on my linux box a couple of years ago. It could slow down the machine too much at some points and it had also not been clear to me how much and I fell back to rely on good old unix tools or beagle.

changed my startup page to Yandex. The black bar is too bad. Its strange how little things can annoy so much.

I'm also surprised that it was pulled so fast. Google video had some nice features and was much cleaner than you tube. They initially got the social networking right and good videos showed up first. I would have thought, that only a bankrupt or sold company would trigger such a shutdown. This is a healthy company pulling content and there was no data disaster at work. I lost even more confidence in such free services. What will be tragic in the future that many organizations do not know any more how to be independent because everything has evaporated into the cloud and so much more IT culture got lost or outsourced. Most will no more know what an editor or what a backup is. I would not be surprised if in 20 years, Cloud services will be hated like drug dealers: they have given away free stuff until most customers and companies are dependent. At that point, when all local IT culture has been wiped out, they can charge whatever they want.

My concern is not so much giving away credit card information or the payment itself but the prospect to be data mined. How long is this guy reading which article and when and from where? I would not mind if this information would stay with the publisher, but it will be inevitable that this will be sold and I have morphed from being a customer to become a product. A payment system replacing cash without strings attached is badly needed. Like prepaid cards.

What I appreciate most about Perl and C is the stability and culture. It is not just a hype which _might_ be around in 10 years. It is one of the languages, which will persist, it is a language I can rely on, just because experience has shown me that. In a rapidly evolving time, it is good to have some things which persist.

At least, with the Cloud, Mr Beeks does not need to go places any more to get those "stupid old crop reports" from the department of Agriculture ...

I could not yet try Mathematica 8 out, but I hope one will be able to turn the feature on and off. A switch like in "perl -w" should be built in. Mathematica is first of all also a programming language, especially for Mathematics and colloquial language is not precise. It could be be frustrating if wrong syntax still produces reasonable results. Incorrect, but working code might become the standard if one does not notice. Its like with memory allocation errors in C produced by incorrect code which still compiles. It will haunt the programmer in the long term.