Looks like I'm wrong -- see what happens when you trust your own memory over Google/Wikipedia? Someone clearly lied to me in my youth when they told me it was referring to our town :-(

You do realise no one outside of New Zealand will get that joke...

Did Apple really do the high DPI display R&D? I thought they bought the displays from Samsung and LG (and maybe others), and that those displays varied in quality, suggesting that each manufacturer has their own process rather than just doing what uncle Apple tells them to.

Me too.

I have an AMD motherboard with integrated Radeon graphics. Yeah, the open source drivers aren't as fast as the binary ones -- but I could do with playing less minecraft anyway. And wow, I can upgrade the system and not worry about graphics drivers breaking things.

My netbook has an Intel GPU. Same situation.

Thanks, AMD/ATI!

You'd think so, but they're often enough caught up in the culture wars to vote for the other guy anyway.

I assume you're in the USA and need reminding that your defense and agricultural industries are hugely dependent on government funding or subsidies, but somehow get missed in the "government needs to spend less" arguments.

Of course, if you ran Linux, you could have this now (sort of) -- it's possible to run full Linux on a rooted android phone, and with MHL you can tether it to a display. Imagine something like the padfone with a keyboard dock...

From a pedant who remembers how this worked:

* You could get more than 8KHz. But the number of PWM steps you had was 1.193180MHz / sampling frequency - so only 54 at 22.050KHz. The higher sampling frequencies made the PWM "whine" less audible.
* As long as you called the original timer interrupt code at the correct frequency (1.193180MHz / 65536, ~18Hz) the system clock would stay accurate. Of course, if you failed to do this, it wouldn't.

It's also not that good a story. It's exposition with poor narrative bolted on. Marshall Brain is, alas, not Aldous Huxley.

Does it make you any less of a dick because someone else paid you to be one?

Would you deny a meal to a starving person standing in front of you because it will contribute to other problems? How is it different if you deny it from a distance?

Okay so some aid is misdirected/misused/etc -- but that's no reason to throw your hands in the air, say the problem is too hard, and ignore it completely.

You want them to stop? Don't randomly drift; return a stupid time like now minus a year (so nice and stable, just wrong). That's easy enough with a second NTP server and DNAT.

Well you can rent Windows servers from Rackspace...

Also I hear myspace runs (ran? is it dead yet?) on Windows.

The only thing that threw me is that "unix" symbol. cpp says it's "1" -- I assume it's one of those #defines to let you know what platform you're on.

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

After that it's easy -- obvious principle at work is that a[b] is equivalent to *(a+b).

And yet every other piece of software on the planet seems to at least manage to fit text within horizontal margins without a human to hold its hand. What the TeX engine does when it allows a line to simply overrun by a few characters is the worst possible solution to the problem that I can imagine. It really did take several years before I realised that it was actually doing so by design and not just a bug they hadn't fixed yet; the idea that anyone might consider that acceptable behaviour hadn't even occurred to me.

pdflatex and the microtype package help immensely with this, by letting TeX stretch the glyphs horizontally a little bit. Not enough for you to notice, but enough for the gaps between the words to be small enough for you not to notice either. Microtype rocks.

I'll take one! What's shipping to New Zealand?