Like Bash? For me, Linux is what made computing interesting and fun again. It has easy access to programming tools, and none of this forced separation of users and developers.

I admit it gets a little complex here, but for example Python (a key element in my "fun computing" experience) has nice libraries for these. For example, some of my electronics/FPGA work owe a lot to Python's serial port module. Not because the serial port is hard to program otherwise, but for making it easy to write all kinds of code around it.

I have no experience in modern graphics programming. However, I have the feeling that the bar for awesome graphics is a tad higher today than it was in "the year 64". Today's awesome is rather nontrivial at the direct low level we associate with C64 programming, so even professionals use higher level tools. (I think my background in physics and math helps appreciate 3D graphics, for example coordinate transformations using matrices are a basic (pun inteded) skill but I imagine there are lots of programmers with no need to do it.)

Nevertheless, I understand the point about recreating an environment in the '64 spirit. There are several projects around, the two I can think of at the moment being http://sol.gfxile.net/gp/ and http://pelulamu.net/ibniz/ .

Well, at least they had the extra money to put two seats in one bathroom stall...

A big cash hoard is a bad thing. It represents money which could be re-invested in R&D, given to investors as dividends, used to increase salaries/benefits to make it a more attractive employer, given to charity to increase PR, or any number of things.

What bothers me most are endless DLCs required to get the "full experience". I can understand the difference between a "basic version" and a "deluxe" at +10$. But the fragmentation occuring with N DLCs and "season passes" is frustrating to say the least. I just want a clear pricing structure and a complete game.

Goat simulator is a great product at a reasonable price.

I agree with your post. People physically walking in the street are much more impressive than 120000 clicks. Have you seen 100000 people in the street recently? Nevertheless, I would like to add that if the web campaign results in monetary losses, as in people cancelling orders or boycotting companies, it could result in significant distress.

As you say, in the end it has to be much more concrete than virtual "downthumbs".

People with guns need to sleep, go to the toilet etc. Although a gun is a significant advantage, a stealthy opponent with a sharp object is potentially very dangerous.

I am an MD, PhD. For many, many situations the diagnostic performance of an expert clinician with basic tools (stethoscope, diapason etc) is up to 80-90% with all the rest of the technology bringing this up to 95-99% (diminishing returns). Furthermore, in an apocalyptic scenario, the very hard, very complex medical conditions would not be a priority: people dying from cancer at age 78 or from complications of diabetes at age 68 would not require the huge resources we can afford to give them in modern society. We would probably be much more preoccupied with helping women give birth, protecting neonates from infections and hypothermia and doing all that stuff that could save millions of lives in the third world today (like hydrating infants with rotavirus infection).

Obviously, modern doctors are not perfectly prepared for such a scenario, but the basic training is there. So, yes, I think a significant part of medical knowledge would be useful in a post-apocalyptic world, even if the infrastructure is not there.

I don't exactly get it. Is it the group as a whole that predicts accurately or its "best predictors"? Because clearly the first hypothesis favors direct democracy as a decision-making process. My intuitive guess is that when you pick a large enough group, some people within that group are clearly going to do better than specialists, because, in a certain way, they are themselves specialists.

Anyone here think that the computer science revolution is anywhere close to being finished? In my opinion it probably has another hundred years left in it. I also think we are just scratching the surface in biochemistry. It is scary to think of where that field will be in a hundred years. Physics can go figure out dark matter and dark energy. That's sure to stir things up. Maybe figure out sustainable fusion while their at it.

Besides, there are all *kinds* of ways to make someone deaf again if they really want to be.

As with everything, it depends on (1) what you want to do now, and (2) your past experience.

IMHO, you need to separate the need for a media box from a tinkerable gadget. When you sit down after a hard day and grab a drink, the last thing you want to worry about is JTAG chains or something. I like having a few x86-64 boxes to just get something done, even though the idea of little-endian 4004 descendants isn't exactly elegant.

If you love programming, what's the problem? You're lucky to have something that excites you. However, it's nice to take hacking into new directions every now and then. Try to find an avenue from your software skills into hardware, or whateve else that might be remotely interesting. (As a teacher, I just have to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z...).

For example, in early 2011 I got into FPGAs, which for me was the perfect union of software and hardware tinkering, having a smattering of experience in both electronics and programming. It was life-changing in some ways, but eventually it's just one of the tools to hack with. For example, designing circuitry to run genuinely in parallel has given me great insight in the software world as well.

The Raspi always seemed kind of meh, both because FPGAs were already established in the embedded field, and because you'd be programming a chip someone else designed, instead of designing your own ;) Also, having first learned to program on the 1980s BASIC machines, I imagine something like Python (another life-changer of mine) on a regular computer would be much closer to the experience than something that appears to involve hardware hacking.

I have used Oracle, MySQL, and Mongo in prod situations. I have looked at Cassandra for evaluating it for potential usage in prod.

I can imagine situations where I could recommend any of the above. For example, if you are large financial company with billions of rows, I would go with Oracle. If you have smarts but not money and didn't need somebody to sue if something went wrong, then maybe Postgres would do . If I were a simple web based app with simple form submits, I would go with MySQL. If I had complex unpredictable data blobs and unpredictable needs to do certain types of queries against the data, I might recommend Mongo. If I have large amounts of data on which I want to do analytics I would use Cassandra.

Cassandra wins when you have a lot of data and not a lot of complex real time queries against it. It is especially good at scaling up on cheap data storage (think 100s of terabytes). It also has an unreal "write" throughput (important for certain types of analytics which write out complex intermediate results) though that is not relevant for the case described.

The problem generally with noSql solutions is that they increase the amount of storage to store the equivalent amount of information. You are essentially redundantly storing schema design with each "record" that you store. This really matters more than some might suspect, because when you can put an entire collection into memory, the read performance is much higher. You usually need 1/5th to 1/10th as much RAM to do the job with a traditional relational database (especially since MySQL and their brethren handle getting in and out memory better than mongo). This isn't so much the case for Cassandra because of its distributed storage nature, but it really isn't usable for real time transactions.

My recommendation, use a traditional database -- if in a Microsoft shop use SQL Server, otherwise I like postgres or mysql. If however, you have complex data storage needs that a noSql solution is perfect for, then I would go with that. If you are into back end analytics, copy the data as it comes in and put into a Cassandra (or one of its similar brethren) as well.

By "ship", do you mean a submarine? Because otherwise my head in plode (considering a roughly sea-level internal pressure vs. the mile-high club)

Is that an African or a European bit?