Exactly as much as Henry Ford needed horse-buggy makers, and no more.

Errr.... no. The BBC Micro had 32K, but in the mode Elite ran in the screen was eating about 20K of that. So it had 8 galaxies with 256 star systems in each - each with names, systems of governance, markets, et cetera - about twenty different ship types, and the physics and rendering engines - all in less than 14K.

I still think that's awesome. And, while I'm very impressed with what I've seen of No Man's Sky, the procedural universe of Elite Dangerous looks even more spectacular.

Full disclosure - I spent most of my final year of university playing Elite.

If Windows Phone were a good platform, or even an average sort of platform, why would Microsoft (who get it for free) sell a phone with anything else installed?

I've (personally) never used Windows Phone, so I don't have an opinion; but their choice of Android for this device is hardly a ringing endorsement of their in-house technology.

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

Just like mine...

...also just like mine (except on mine it broke the motherboard, so the tech had to do some exceedingly fine soldering and bodge on a new external socket). The Macbook power cable connector is a thing of enviable excellence and pure common sense. Damaged power connectors are a main cause of laptop failure, and Macbooks just don't have the problem. Whatever you think of Mac software, the hardware is the best around.

Absolutely. I thought long and hard about a MacBook Air before I bought the (superficially very similar, and nearly as expensive) Asus Zenbook which is my current laptop. My reason for not buying the Air was it seemed silly to buy a Mac when I was just going to strip MacOS off it to put Linux on... but I just stripped Windows off the Zenbook to put Linux on. About six months after I bought it, the Zenbook fell off the arm of a sofa onto its power connector, and although I've bodged a repair it's a bodge. If I'd bought a Macbook Air I wouldn't have the problem.

Macbooks are the best built laptop hardware available just now, whatever you may think of the software (and, if like me, you don't like Apple's software, you can just ditch it and put something of your preference on instead). Microsoft Surface? H'mmm, don't know, I've never actually seen one. But I very much doubt they're in the same league.

This is a very cheap offer for Microsoft to make, because my bet is they won't get a single taker.

I first saw X on Apollo workstations in 1986. At that date all the Sun workstations in the lab still ran a windowing system called 'News', if I remember correctly. I saw X on both Suns and Silicon Graphics workstations before 1988, and on DEC Station and RS/6000 machines shortly thereafter. We also had PERQ machines in the lab but I don't believe they ever ran X. In those days I used Xerox 1108 and 1186 machines, which didn't run X.

The first machine I personally owned which ran X was an Acorn R260 running Risc IX (BSD 4.2) in 1990. I switched to Linux at kernel 0.99pl11 in 1993, which is to say more than twenty years ago.

Gosh.

That's a matter of taste. For me everything on MacOS X looks like candy-covered shit on acid, but that's my taste.

I hated NeXTStep, too.

Since Qt works with Objective-C and Objective-C works with Swift, doesn't Qt already (automatically) work with Swift?

Automation may improve productivity, but what is productivity? It's been calculated that Chinese peasants in the Han Dynasty worked an average 13 hour week, and medieval European peasants didn't work much more. Now, OK, they didn't have access to decent healthcare, and because of poor transport they were vulnerable to poor local weather causing famine from time to time. And, of course, they didn't have MTV or Facebook or even iPads. But on the whole they were much better fed (on much better food) than you are now. If you could have a simple life with a comfortable home for thirteen hours a week, would you? I know I would.

I'm not against automation. Automation means that we can get back to working thirteen hours a week, without having to give up MTV and Facebook and iPads, or even modern healthcare. But we can only do that if the surplus value created by automation is widely shared, rather than being captured by elites.

That's a really bad analogy. Peering at someone's credit card - even if it is under a napkin - is quite obviously very bad manners indeed. If you're saying unauthorised penetration testing is like peering at someone's credit card, then it's clearly wrong.

And speaking as someone who has his own little toy server out in the cloud, I'd very much prefer to do my own damn penetration testing, thank you.

Thanks for that, you gave me a chuckle. I agree with you in spririt, but there are a lot of people out there molesting data in order to perform their work function and to get paid. Far more than have any understanding of data structures, algorithms or even basic data normalization. It's unfortunate.

Working. There are far more people that work with large amounts of data than know how to program.

Oh the horror.

... for complex software engineering projects. It's okay for 99% of the stuff that regular people use it for.