This isn't taking advantage of using an iPhone; it could just as well used an iPod Touch.

A real geek card using an iPhone would have modulated the GSM carrier so that the nearest speaker would buzz to the tune of a Christmas carol.

Which is pretty funny, because when Mac users are asked to explain why Windows has 100+ times more software products than Mac versions in any retail store, the answer is, "who needs 10 different versions of a word processor? The Mac market only sells the best product and doesn't bother with the crap."

Understanding the benefits of a multi-architecture binary depend on first accepting the purpose of pre-compiled binaries.

And, they'd have to start designing the programs to have run-time portability rather than depending on the make process to discover and tailor the program for the target machine.

Well, China is behind an all encompassing firewall.

And the French refuse to install malware written in English.

A key plot point was that the message sending machine was also the receiver, so the earliest time they could send messages to was when the machine was first turned on.

Which is why we must invent the time machine before turning on the earth destroying LHC! Otherwise, how are our future selves going to warn us not to do it?

Several posts suggested David Brin's Startide Rising. That's a great book, but if you want to provoke discussion, I'd pick Glory Season.

Also good would be anything by John Varley.

Monty Python released a 3-sided record album!

Try that with your new-fangled compact discs.

Alien is the scariest movie I've ever seen, hands down.

When I saw it in the theater, there were scenes where I could not watch it -- I had to cover my eyes. Even when it was on TV, I still did that years later. (Specifically, the scene where Dallas is crawling through the ducts and the alien attacks.)

What made Alien so different from previous monster movies is the alien was so fast. Before Alien filmakers thought it heightened the suspense to show the monster slowly approaching the victims. Ridley Scott realized that if the alien moves quickly, the danger is increased because you are never safe; it can get you at any time.

That's not the only groundbreaking part of the movie. (Spoiler alert!)

Remember when Ripley set the Nostromo to self destruct, but then the alien is blocking her path to the escape pod, so she goes back to cancel the self destruct. How many times have we seen this before? It is such a cliche. So it was astounding when the timer ran down and she could not stop it! I've never seen that before. And I can't think of many movies that have done that since.

The post you are referring to was referring to mainframes years ago. And he is correct: the first computers (there were no such thing as microcomputers or minicomputers back then) could only run a single "job" at a time, and the data had to be fed in through punch cards, paper tape, etc.

But the fact is that System/360 mainframes were multitasked at least since the introduction of OS/360 in 1966.

However, let's talk about the most commonly used MVS transaction server: CICS. CICS was introduced in 1969, and is still in use today; it is much more popular than any other MVS transaction server. CICS is single tasking! It does use cooperative multitasking to switch between all of the applications running in one CICS region. It is amazing that CICS still has so much market share compared to IMS. CICS is to IMS as Windows 3.1 is to Windows Vista (or Mac OS 9 is to OS X).

Point of order: OS/400 runs on minicomputers, not mainframes.

However, it is try that IBM is still releasing updates to the mainframe operating systems.

In COBOL you would code it as: compute total = units * cost And you could define "total" as having 2 decimal places in binary coded decimal, "cost" was something like 1.30232 in binary, and "units" was a character. How do you do that in C?

MVS is preemptively multitasked. And you can easily create subtasks within each address space, which meet the definition of a thread.