Gosh, why not? I can see someone looking at their MBA saying, "It works perfectly, has a great OS, awesome battery life, and does everything I could ask for and does it fast. I need to dump this for a barely functional device with an actively antagonistic OS sold by a company unable to secure a wet paper bag or make software that works acceptably. All this for far less battery life and far more money. I wish I had 2 MBAs to trade in!",

Back to the real world....

Did I mention that the day after the S3's release I was at a press event on a bus full of journalists. Anand has his S3 and in less than 24 hours it broke. The entire bus full of tech journos all concluded it was better that way.

That said, some people do like it. Microsoft traded in an absolute monopoly lock on the desktop to cater to 10% of their base. Clever that MS management, clever.

                                -Charlie

There's a Perl 6? When the fuck did this happen?

As a 30-something who read /. in the early days but had no experience to comment from; I had linux 3.5" floppies from bootleg books I got in NYC, the nearest LUG was over an hour away, I could read code but hadn't written any yet. Why comment when I knew how out of touch I was? Eventually registered this UID because my main net name was taken (maybe I did register from one of those long lost 'free pop3 accounts") and used a new persona I had just created for anonymouse purposes.

Not really. Even in the drug trade you find preferential treatment and local monopolies. I mean, what do you think crips vs bloods was all about? It was about distribution monopolies, forged not by agreement or fair competition, but by force. I know a girl who sold a lot of X back in the 90s. She was really good friends with several promoters and when they threw events, she would be the "official" dealer at the party. If you got caught dealing, they'd kick you out. In return, the promoters got a piece of the action and everyone made a lot of money. It did help that she had a good line to quality product.

Absolutely not true.

The Core 2 Duo is approximately 2x faster clock-for-clock versus the Pentium 4, and the current Haswell core is barely 40% faster than that (assume a 7% speedup per-clock for every core rev since). That gets you somewhere in the 2x-3x performance improvement range for Haswell, barring corner-cases that are embarrassingly easy to leverage AVX/FMA (most real-world use cases show small improvements).

Intel proved that they could do a whole lot better than the Pentium 4, but your performance improvement factor is off by half!

The next super secret spy agency will be a private contractor group that has ginormous interests in building profiles of internet users, their interests, their browsing habits, and will be able to convince everyone to use them without blinking an eye. They will then monitor, filter, and sell that data back to the US Government because some clause in the EULA will allow them to do so.

I figured the hardware effect was fairly obvious :D

I concentrated on the software side effects because more readers here work on that end.

Because whatever you do in the computing world, you are affected by processing power and cost. Growth in these regions drives both new hardware and new software to go with it, and any hit to growth will mean loss of jobs.

Software (what most of us here create) usually gets created for one of two reasons:

1. Software is created because nobody is filling a need. Companies may build their own version if they want to compete, or a company may contract a customized version if they can see increased efficiency or just have a process they want to stick to. There used to be a lot of unfulfilled need out there, but this demand is much sated in the 21st century.

2. Software is created because a company desires increased performance/new features (basic need is filled, this is a WANT). Once a new processor/feature becomes available, you either wedge it into existing code. Or, if it's a massive enough of an improvement, you create entirely new software enabled by the new level of performance-per-dollar.

Without continued growth, the industry is in danger of cratering because there's only so much processor architecture optimization you can do in the same process node, and the same goes for optimized libraries on the software side. In addition, brand-new industries enabled by cost reductions (e.g. digital FMV explosion in the 1990s, or the movement to track your every move in the 2000s) will no-longer be so common, and that will again force people to look elsewhere for employment.

Software engineers won't disappear, but they will be culled. The industry has not had to deal with that yet in it's entire history, so it will be painful. I'm hoping they can hod this off for as long as possible!

That's how the later model IBM T221s worked (with additional converter boxes dangling off the monitor). Each half of the screen was seen as a 1920x2400 display. Some newer 4k monitors work similarly using multi-stream transport (MST). The video card sees two 1920x2160 displays. But there is only one DisplayPort cable. Dell's 24" and 32" 4k monitors are like this. Video drivers usually have special support for gluing the two halves back into a single display, but the extra complication can expose bugs in either the driver or the monitor's firmware.

I think that's what I was saying: a random mixture of disk sizes is not supported by this particular RAID implementation - it will only use the same size across each disk, meaning you are constrained to the size of the smallest disk in the pool. You have to upgrade all of the disks to a larger size before starting to use that size. Btrfs and ZFS sound like they handle it much better.

Yes that's right, the listing was deleted if you didn't respond. That tended to bite me as I would only check my personal email infrequently. I think that even if the listing owner disappeared completely, it would still be better to have an entry saying 'hey, this program exists, can you help find it?' and listing the last known whereabouts. But I see your point that you didn't just delete them without warning. Thanks for your work maintaining the site over many years.

Thanks for the correction. A pity the Dell 4k monitors have not been refreshed with newer electronics to work as single stream.

Try it. Set 200% font scaling and the toolbars, icons, etc double in size. This is with Windows 7 - perhaps in Windows 8 it doesn't work as well, but my guess would be if you turn off Aero and just use the old-fashioned font size scaling it should still be fine.

The trouble with Freshmeat/Freecode was that they aggressively deleted entries when links broke. So if a project's homepage went down it would soon become unsearchable on the site. This reduced the site's usefulness as an archive of known free software. (Much better to keep the archived information and encourage people to fix the links - as a last resort, somebody who downloaded the tarball before the site went down could re-upload it somewhere.) Is there an alternative site which works as a kind of encylopaedia of free software? Github is great and all, but it is a project hosting site rather than an index of all software (which may be hosted externally and perhaps not even maintained in a public git repository).

It depends on how the upscaling is done. If you choose exactly 200% font scaling in Windows, and turn off Aero, then almost all applications scale up crisply. A few such as the command prompt window remain unscaled, but none turn into a blurry mess.