Oh shoot. I'll definitely not be getting the new Mac Pro then. I was hoping my next computer would justify putting a rack in my living room, right next to the Cray I bought on ebay.

Oh, thank you. As a Macintosh people, I now understand myself much better. Thank you for your pithy post.

A RLC near me gives tickets to drivers who make a right turn on red, if the cars fail to COMPLETELY stop COMPLETELY prior to the intersection painted lines. On a daily occurrence, I see several drivers get tickets because they came to a complete stop INCHES past the intersection painted lines. In no rational universe would a police officer ever give a ticket to any of these drivers; yet, the municipality is collecting several thousands of dollars each day due to such minor infractions.

Has science or technology revealed any secrets recently that would change how you teach these topics? For example, when I studied electronics as a kid, the theory was that electrons travelled through conductors at almost the speed of light. I think it's now well know that individual electrons actually travel through conductors quite slowly.

There's this web technology called "query string parameters" that can be appended to any request for a resource on the web. A query string parameter containing a site identifier is more than enough to correlate with an etag identifier.

It's shocking to discover that the government can actually accomplish anything, as opposed to wasting $800 million in taxpayer money with nothing to show for it.

It's hard to not take you seriously, with a 4-digit user ID and all.

As a programmer, I'm pretty sure you're wrong.

Joel Spolsky has famously stated that he prefers software engineers who come from highly accredited universities, preferably Ivy-league. His thought is that one has to distinguish oneself in order to be granted admission to such places. Do you think that Joel's opinion, and those of other elitist employers, will change with the introduction of free, quality online education?

The term "Computational Science" is the most spot-on clarification I've heard applied to computer science, in my 20+ years of academic and professional programming.

Higher resolution means more pixels to calculate and push, which require more powerful CPUs and GPUs.

The miniaturization of electronics has resulted in the miniaturization of spectacular failures.

Same concept, written by Charles Petzold in 1999:

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Software/dp/0735611319

I would invite you to learn how Etsy releases multiple times per day:

http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/05/20/quantum-of-deployment/

Are you using ReiserFS?