Intel has already come up with an Atom CPU with integrated FPGA, but only for the embedded market.

I'd already been thinking about the possibility of end-user-accessible, on-the-fly-reprogrammable FPGA functionality as part of a "regular" computer before I heard Intel had produced an integrated CPU/FPGA (though it's not clear how easily configurable the FPGA was there). I raised the issue in that previous thread and got a *very* interesting and informative response (thank you Tacvek) that pointed out some major problems with the concept of general access to such functionality.

The issues raised there explain why Intel are unlikely to be making an easily-reconfigurable hybrid product like this available to the general public any time soon, however smart and exciting the idea sounds.

One of these spiders was going around telling people "Actually, I'm a vegetarian."

When I pointed out that it was eating a fish, the spider replied "Oh yeah, I can eat fish, that doesn't count."

"Also, I'm permitted to eat Carrot Top."

Given the existence of undocumented- and more seriously, undisclosed- yellow marks output by various laser printers which have in at least one case been proven to be steganographic markings *and* decoded, it's certainly not "moronic" to consider that a similar scheme could in theory exist hidden in some digital cameras.

Frankly, in the wake of the Snowden revelations I wouldn't even consider this possibility ludicrously paranoid any more. Of course, digital cameras can have giveaway signatures like naturally-occurring hot pixels (and other signs) anyway, so in a sense it's already there. I don't think it's plausible that a non-GPS-advertised device would have a hidden detector inside, or even any method (e.g. WiFi triangulation) of detecting its location if that wasn't already designed into it.

A camera on a GPS-enabled smartphone though? If my life depended on it, I wouldn't bet against the possibility.

People who berated digital as being convenience-over-quality compared to their 35mm cameras a few years back (back when digital wasn't as good as it is now) seemed to forget- or didn't realise- that 35mm film itself was always a convenience-and-cost compromise over quality compared to medium and large film formats.

Images shot properly on larger format film have always been able to knock spots off their 35mm counterparts purely because they're starting with a massive technical advantage. Unfortunately, though one can buy a film-based medium or large format camera for a very affordable price, their digital equivalents- or more specifically the sensors that can deliver comparable resolution and performance to those formats- are, as you imply, prohibitively expensive.

That aside, as the other reply said, it's unlikely that the students in question are using 4 x 5 cameras and the like, and more probable that they're using bog-standard 35mm film cameras, so this is ultimately a red herring...

True, the universality is a benefit, and that's why SMS will probably remain as a "baseline" service for quite a long time. OTOH, it *is* very limited, even by the standards of the late-90s when it first became *really* popular. (The 140 character limit is more reminiscent of limits imposed by the tiny RAMs of late-70s computers!).

Also, rather obviously, you can't SMS text a photo of your butt(!), and most of the end-users of other services are probably only doing so for ephemeral use- let's face it, that applies to text messages as well! In Snapchat's case, the whole *point* is that it's (supposedly) ephemeral. (Of course, I never trusted that as far as I could throw it, and apparently Snapchat were in trouble for retaining images themselves, which makes it even worse, but that's beside the point here).

OP's wasn't that great a joke, but it was a fair reference to the infamous slogans used in pre-release hype for the game Daikatana- "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" and "Suck it down".

Aside from how this would have come across at the time, it probably backfired even worse when the game was significantly delayed and turned out to be a damp squib when it did arrive, something that must have rendered the apparently arrogant hype- and by extension, Romero- laughable and hard to take seriously, even if it was tongue-in-cheek and Romero later expressed regret at (reluctantly) approving the slogans in the first place.

This may be true, but is typing on a smartphone's virtual QWERTY keyboard the same skill as old-school numeric keypad texting that the then-teenagers of 10 to 15 years ago picked up on their Nokia 3210s et al (i.e. three letters to a physical button)?

In fact, as far as I'm aware, "texting" in its original SMS sense is in decline in Western nations, (*) which doesn't surprise me as smartphones have other ways to send messages. My technophobic Mum seemed quite proud of the fact that she was actually quite comfortable with texting now (she has a no-frills feature phone that suits her). I didn't have the heart to tell her that she'd got there just around the point that "traditional" texting was starting to decline.. :-(

(*) SMS is apparently still rising in absolute terms, but that probably has more to do with the growth of mobile phones into new developing markets, and the fact that smartphones aren't quite cheap enough yet for everyone there- though they will be sooner rather than later.

I got to be a relatively fast typist for a hunt-and-pecker after several years of using computers, to the point that some people at school were quite impressed. (Course, this is back when computers were still geek things- and I was a geek!- and most others only used them for games if at all).

Even so, further computer use alone- i.e. practice- would at best have made me a slightly better hunt-and-peck typist. There's no way I'd have picked up touch-typing if I hadn't made the decision to intentionally learn it (something I ended up doing via Mavis Beacon, less than coincidentally).

Can't say how much it improved my typing speed without the ability to go back and compare. Bearing in mind I *was* already quite efficient- and happy- with hunt and pecking after 15 years of computer use, was it worth relearning from scratch a totally different technique? Another 15 years on, I'd say probably yes, because since then I've been almost exclusively a touch-typist. For example, I'm using a keyboard with German-language (QWERTZ) letter and symbol legends that don't match the US layout I normally select in Windows. This isn't a problem, because I rarely look at the keys themselves anyway!

Nothing magic about touch-typing, and most people could learn it. However, as I said it's not something you'd pick up simply by practice alone.

"That plastic 'ore"?! I don't think that Katie Price is for sale at the moment...

Unfortunately, given that the original "Yo Dawg" was marked as "offtopic" by twice as many people as thought it was funny, it probably *is* necessary.

Shame, as the minimalism of the original poster's joke worked- for me- because it assumed that most of us were familiar with a long-established meme to be able to dispense with the full text (i.e. playing off its clichedness rather than it being a boring rehash of a now-tired cliche) and also that we were smart enough to figure out its relevance to the headline story.

Not sure if the moderators didn't get the reference, or just couldn't figure out how it applied. This is why we can't have nice, minimalist jokes on Slashdot without it being necessary for someone else to overegg the pudding and explain them. :-(

I always thought that ultimately, Flash all but filled the role that Java Applets were supposed to meet on the browser, but didn't.

FWIW, I'm not sure I'd blame Flash for the failure of Applets, as by the time it started to become more than a simple animation player, the latter had already had plenty of time to take off, but never had.

I suspect that this was because Java Applets were too heavyweight and slow to start at the time, whereas Flash was more in sync with what computers were capable of back then.

Of course, it's possible that in the absence of Flash, Applets might have become more popular as computers grew more powerful, but essentially I'd say they weren't so much displaced as never having succeeded on their own merits. Yes, there was (and still is, to a limited extent) some use of browser-based Java, but it never dominated like it was meant to. Flash may be in decline now, but it's enjoyed a decade- if not 15 years- as a major success.

Not that I'm saying that Java was a failure, just that- ironically- the aspect that gained *by far* the most hype at its mid-90s launch was the one it ultimately failed in.

These are some very good points; you should at least get an account so that they start at a Score of +1 or +2 instead of 0, and are more likely to be seen.

I wasn't aware of TV Tropes' attempt to change the licensing terms a couple of years back. Had I known, I would already have had a contemptious view of them (since *my* first thought too was that "you can't simply (legally) relicense CC content under new terms unless the contributors agree or you make it clear"- and, as the article writer pointed out, no such terms were presented or agreed to by me when adding edits.)

Even so, I was already unimpressed with a trick I caught them using a couple of months or so back. I noticed that they had added small, square pictures containing links to other articles at the bottom of some pages. Nice, you might think, but mixed in with these pictorial links (alternating in a checkerboard pattern) were links to external sites, i.e. adverts.

What made this morally dubious was that the advertising links and internal article links were of very similar style, both image and caption-wise, and it was quite clear that they were being intermingled with the intent of looking like links to TV Tropes articles and getting people to click on them.

Not in the same ballpark as their attempt to re-appropriate (i.e. steal) people's work for their own use only, but still an indicator of how sleazy the people who run this apparently friendly site are.

Because I needed a new pair of running shorts (as in, I'd just noticed the other ones were literally starting to come apart), didn't have that much time to buy them, didn't expect that the other shop would be *that* much cheaper (*). And maybe because I was both slightly lazy and willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, while still retaining some doubt as to whether they were actually worth the price...

(*) They typically are, but "cheaper" on the branded stuff *they* sell still isn't that cheap, there's so much useless crap aimed at parents of kids wearing "sportswear as fashion" that it's impossible to find what one wants in a reasonable amount of time, and the staff are useless.

IIRC, my latest pair of running shorts apparently contain bamboo fibre. Whether or not this is a good thing or not, or even just an excuse to justify their overinflated price, I've no idea.