Real gamers often do their gaming on a desktop, and have an Ultrabook for portability. Said gamers might not want or need the bulk of a gaming notebook 99% of the time, but might still appreciate the ability of an Intel iGPU to handle basic game rendering on the rare occasion when they want to keep themselves busy while on the go.

I'm a gamer, and I do all my gaming on a relatively high-end desktop. I've got a Macbook Air, because I only have a desire to fire up a game on my notebook a handful of times a year. But at the same time, I appreciate that I can run Civ V or Civ: BE on said notebook when it's called to do so.

It's not US retailers, generally, who are overcharging Australians. If the retailers also do business in Australia, they might care. But if you buy something from a company with no presence in Australia who previously wouldn't ship there themselves, then it'll be fine.

Browsers weren't running javascript at two third the speed of native code in the 90s, nor were they fast enough to run ports of recent games that are virtually indistinguishable from their native brethren. It stopped being an hypothesis when it started actually happening in the wild.

People make a big deal about replaceable batteries, but how often do users actually replace the battery in modern devices? Sure, I managed to wear out the battery in my Dell laptop after three or four years of heavy use, but by then it was time to replace the notebook for other reasons anyhow. The quality of lithium ion batteries has also improved since then, such that they don't wear out as fast.

I can't seem to recall having ever replaced the battery in a mobile device, so when my mobile devices started having non-replacable batteries, it didn't make any difference. The idea of keeping spare fully charged batteries around is also a non-starter, as it's far more convenient (and flexible) to use an external battery pack that can be recharged independently and used with multiple devices.

I'd be happy to give the Surface Pro 3 a try, but it isn't a replacement for my tablet, it's a replacement for my notebook. It's an ultrabook without a built-in keyboard, the evolution of Microsoft's TabletPC. And there's nothing wrong with that, I've heard good things about the product... but as a notebook, not a tablet.

Is it really so obtuse? As JavaScript engine efficiency improves, the gap between what you can accomplish with a native app and a JavaScript app narrows, and as CPU performance continues to improve, what you can accomplish with JavaScript increases. Lots of apps on iOS and Android these days are just thin wrappers around a browser anyhow, and the user never notices.

Eventually, sure, but NAND hasn't reached that point yet, and we're just starting to see 3D flash memory hit the market, offering dramatic increases in density.

Facebook is generating 4 PB per day *now*, while the LHC will be generating 400PB per year by *2023*. 27PB to 400PB in 9 years is MUCH slower than Moore's Law, so their annual storage costs/space requirements will decrease each year.

With the highest density servers I know of (1U 136TB SSD servers), LHC generates around five racks of data per year today. By 2023, they will only be generating around one rack of data per year, based on an 18-month Moore's Law.

As a C# .NET developer, I obviously disagree with your assessment. I've not used Visual Basic .NET, but the Windows.Forms UI designer (which would have been available in VB.NET) never made you manually attach events. Click events were defined in the events list, and you could just click on them to attach the event and create a stub of the event handler, or you could just double click on the button in the designer to do the same thing.

Microsoft's latest release of Visual Basic was roughly a year ago, and there's no indication that the next release of Visual Studio will discontinue Visual Basic...

RunRev might be inspired by HyperCard, but it has no connection to it. It's not the "current version" of HyperCard.

Games generally don't know or care about the window manager; they're doing their own interfaces in OpenGL. And any APIs specific to Steam aren't an obstacle, because Steam isn't restricted to SteamOS (although they only package it for Ubuntu). Heck, some games don't even require X.

No, they literally sat in a warehouse for 40 years. They were built for the Soviet moon program, discovered decades later, bought by the Americans, and then refurbished.

Both. The engines were literally built in the 1960s and 1970s for the Soviet moon program, and then 150 of them were stuck in a warehouse for decades. When the Russians realized many years later that the engines were worth a lot of money, they started selling them in the mid 90s.

Better in terms of Isp for a non-cryogenic engine. The SSME's Isp (366) is better than the NK-33 (297), but the NK-33 is better than any non-cryogenic engine that is flying in the US, and there are a lot of big tradeoffs to cryogenic engines (Hydrogen takes up a lot more space).

For comparison, the NK-33 engines (first built in the 1960s) have a higher Isp than the SpaceX Merlin 1D (297s versus 282s at sealevel).