enough ram to run without swap file thrashing. Price was high as well
These two are related. OS/2 needed 16MB of RAM to be useable back when I had a 386 that couldn't take more than 5MB (1MB soldered onto the board, 4x1MB matched SIMMs). Windows NT had the same problem - NT4 needed 32MB as an absolute minimum when Windows 95 could happily run in 16 and unhappily run in 8 (and allegedly run in 4MB, but I tried that once and it really wasn't a good idea). The advantage that Windows NT had was that it used pretty much the same APIs as Windows 95 (except DirectX, until later), so the kinds of users who were willing to pay the extra costs could still run the same programs as the ones that weren't.
Sort of. The desire not to cannibalise sales was a key factor in the design of the PC, but these were also features that IBM didn't think would be missed.
IBM knew what multitasking was for: it was to allow multiple users to use the same computer with administrator-controled priorities. Protected memory was for the same things. Why would you need these on a computer that was intended for a single user to use? A single user can obviously only run one program at a time (they only have one set of eyes and hands) and you can save a lot in hardware (and software) if you remove the ability to do more. And, of course, then no one will start buying the cheap PCs and hooking them up to a load of terminals rather than buying a minicomputer or mainframe.
In the broadest scope I've never understood why there has to be laws concerning marriage. It's a private contract. There shouldn't be a question of can two people of the same sex get married - the question should be why we need to regulate this at all. If some regulation is found to be useful, what should it be? I'm not happy about "The State" getting that far into my business.
It's not the state getting into your "business", it's your business getting into the state. Marriage predates nation-states by millennia. And as a practical matter, I'm glad I didn't have to get a lawyer and sign a 500-page contract in order to get married, and I'm glad that other people don't need their own lawyer to go over such a contract in order to recognize my marriage.
Java anon classes aren't quite the same because of the lack of "var" or similar - so you can implement interface members or override base class members, but you cannot introduce new members that can then be referenced outside of that object.
OTOH, C# anon classes don't support base types...
Global warming is a sloooooooooooooooooow process
Not necessarily. Greenland ice core records show that in the past the planet has seen temperature shifts of up to 7 C in as little as 30 years. 7 C is huge. It's like transporting Moscow to Rome. Of course, we have no idea what caused such rapid changes in the past. It wasn't CO2 levels, or particulates.
i would not be surprised if humans died off within a couple centuries after that.
I would. If one or more isolated populations managed to survive more than a couple of generations after the event, I think it's highly likely that they'd continue to survive indefinitely. The worst of the changes would be past, and they'd clearly have learned how to survive in the new environment, else they'd have died sooner.
Human intelligence makes us highly adaptable, as evidenced by the extraordinary diversity of environments in which we live, and lived even before the advent of modern technology. Humans who lack the necessary knowledge of how to survive in a particular environment are at severe risk of death any place on the planet, but if they manage to survive for even a year or two, odds are that they'll have learned enough to be able to extend that time almost indefinitely.
I'm not necessarily saying that begin..end is better, just that it's an obvious alternative. Personally, I don't mind {}, though I think that it's really redundant, and the proper way is to treat everything as an expression, in which case semicolon becomes a sequence operator (i.e. "a;b" means "evaluate a, then throw the result away and evaluate b" - like comma in C), and you just use parens to group things where needed.
If you read my post, you'll see that it specifically calls out "import static", and why it's not really good enough.
Scala's problem, I think, is not that it has operator overloading, but that the conventions around the language encourage its use for DSLs. C++ also has this problem, but to a significantly smaller degree, and C# doesn't have it at all.
Yes, but you have a very narrow view, here. If I change the name of 'x' in the class, I have to change it
And how is this different from setX?
"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde