Pfft. I bought the ebook recently to read it again, and, given the source material, it's a pretty good novel. As steveha mentioned, Asimov fixed many of the stupid elements of the movie in his novelization, even if he had little choice about leaving in a few of the absurdities (like, well, the whole idea of the miniature submarine).

Nah. After they've gone through the US healthcare system, they'll be at least $20,000.

$250 for an operating system is insane when you can buy a decent tablet or a low-end PC for less than that. And, guess what? You get a free operating system, thrown in!

Microsoft and the OpenGL group developed the API. We just had to make the software that used the API work, when the people who called it had no idea that repeatedly allocating hardware buffers on every single frame, or not locking buffers when they wrote to them directly, was a really bad idea idea ('but it works fine on my machine!').

When I worked on 3D drivers, oh, how we used to laugh when some idiot developer put in code that deliberately broke the game when run under a debugger. Yet they still expected it to work well on our cards...

But, yeah, it wasn't at all unusual for developers of little clue to do completely retarded things that worked on other hardware, but not ours. Often because we actually implemented the feature they were using in hardware, whereas the other drivers simulated it in software.

True. Actually requiring Congress to declare war before you can attack another country? Ridiculous. Term limits for Congress? Absurd. Cutting taxes? What could he be thinking?

To a hipster, everything old is new, because they know nothing about the past.

I hear that, in the next radical upgrade, Android will add 'borders' to their apps and you'll be able to click on these 'windows' and move them around the screen and resize them, so you can control how much of each app you see, based on what you're doing at the time. It'll be so cool!

I doubt any of these 'you will do things my way because I know what's best and it's not what you think is best' bozos really have high IQs. Dunning-Kruger effect seems far more likely.

If there was no copyright on software, few people would care about the GPL.

It's the best part of twenty years since I wrote any software where we cared about copyright. Everything I've written since then has been useless without our hardware, and that's where we make the money.

Emulating RISC instructions on an x86 is typically much easier than emulating x86 instructions on RISC. Particularly if you have to emulate the clunky, convoluted PC hardware, too.

From: http://chrisacorns.computinghi...

"In use the Archimedes PC Emulator program gives quite acceptable performance if you don't want to go too fast. While the hard disk access is extremely fast, the computing speed is only average and the screen display speed is slow."

And it gives the 'computing index' performance as about 1/10 of an AT PC. That's pretty much my experience of PC emulators; for apps that spend most of the time waiting for user input, it's fine, but anything that requires real computing power needs a CPU that's about 10x the performance of the CPU you want to emulate.

Most radiation can be stopped with shielding--which won't be a big deal on a spacecraft big enough for humans to live in for decades or centuries--and humans with lifespans measured in centuries would require much better genetic repair mechanisms than we do.

And I'm sure I read an article recently about researchers increasing the radiation tolerance of cells by a factor of 1,000 or more by boosting the repair mechanisms.

Exactly. Life extension will be required to colonize the galaxy, if we're forced to use slow, sub-light spacecraft that require decades to centuries to reach the next star.

So they'll keep voting Democrat.

When they stopped being radio controlled. There are plenty that can be programmed to fly specific courses via GPS and left to their own devices.