I do own one...

does it have plastic jams the way we have paper jams? Clogged nozzles? Low "ink" or whatever the consumable is?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Driver problems? Compatibility problems between template any my printer?

Surprinzingly, those are incredibly rare (free software is awesome).

Of course, they only make any economical sense if either you take utility out of just owning one (hobbyst tinkerer) or if you use it to print stuff that isn't mass produced at all.

Perl was once my go-to language for small scripts.

It isn't anymore. Perl is so full of idiosyncrasies that it's easier to learn another couple of languages than to code a couple of scripts on it. Even after it's your go-to language.

And that's the reason you want to target them, so those 30,000 people get the McDonalds ads, and the other dozen gets whatever they'll actualy buy.

What leads back to the in the title.

Had GTAT and Apple succeeded, all of the profits would have been private

Wait. What?!

The part of the profits that would change hands if they succeed is called "interest". All the companies that GTAT owns money to would get some of it.

Just a normal star... with a huge mass in quite a small volume, and that does not emmit light.

There's no reason to assume those things are black holes. That's jumpping to conclusion.

Maybe OS kernels are indeed too small nowadays, and we do need some basic services packaged in an integrated suite.

Or maybe it's due time to POSIX to die, and to divide issues differently between kernel and user space.

Anyway, the ascendence of Systemd is clear evidence that the way we organize our software is currently outdated.

What do you mean by a stable star anyway?

I just love the 4k TV trend.

Those rich people parting with their money now will finance a cheap very good quality set of computer monitors for me in just a few years.

Python have some problems with I/O being allowed only in ASCII or Unicode on some circunstances, depending on your version. It also has some problems with composing codepoints, lengths, encode translations, and other of that stuff that nobody does right.

Yet, Python has the most comprehensive support for Unicode of any language that I looked out, outside of C/C++. (Beats Perl 5 in any day. I don't know about 6.) It's just that no language has complete support (except for C/C++, that properly ignores the entire issue).

Can any language do unicode right yet?

You can throw away any language that uses UTF-16 right from the start. What's left is C/C++, if you are careful enough.

you can give a type to an arbitrary pointer, and do strongly typed enums that way?

Strongly typed... C... Those things do not belong in the same sentence.

The point is probably that there must be some behaviour, and it's better to define it. Thus, they defined. I hightly doubt it has any practical application, besides minimizing the damage in case of some kind of error.

But yeah, it's amusing.

From the GNU C manual (in the section about bit fields):

You can also specify a bit field of size 0, which indicates that subsequent bit fields not further bit fields should be packed into the unit containing the previous bit field. This is likewise not generally useful.

I guess now I have a new favorite C feature... Well, as soon as I actually understand what this means.

Also, GCC accepts empty structs, and they use no memory! I should look at the C specs more often.

Really, even if you are completely ignorant about it, it does not take much more than a short reading to see how simpler IPv6 is. That's why it corrects so many issues.

The problem with IPX style local names assignment is in security. Doing it in the open, wild Internet is a certain way to destroy it. The nearest option that's actualy usable is dynamic DNS, and it's quite widspread.

I just decided to upgrade my 2011 computers, so I got out to searching what improved.

Changed the heat sinks, fans, and casing. Also, changed the power supply of one of them. Nothing else was worth it.

A high resolution display is on my list, but it's still too expensive, so I'm waiting...

What happened to Slashdot lately?

There's a xkcd for that: http://xkcd.com/1104/