Sir, you are just either old or retro. There is no real, logical reason to keep around a 286 and 386, much less move data around between them. If you got access to the internet and are using gmail, ajax website and the likes you probably also a normal computer and can use things like dropbox, which are free to exchange data with your friends.

What about SDL? They seem to handle those aspects pretty well

As far as I have understood the problem here is not the "lit portion" per-se, but the fact that it looks basically identical to the Microsoft one. If you see the Datel controller, you can hardly distinguish it from the Microsoft controller.

The problem is that foreigners usually pick the worst restaurants, because they located are near the attractions. At the same time foreigners generally don't know the Italian names for pizzas. I for one love the Contadina (mozzarella, potatoes and sausages), Boscaiola (mozzarella, mushrooms and sausages), Quattro formaggi (4 kinds of cheese) and Diavola (tomato sauce and hot salami). You should also try the "sliced pizza", which is basically our fast-food. It is usually richer than round pizza, and in my opinion can better appeal the tastes of an American.



BTW: The word you are looking for is "peperoni" and not "pepperoni", also "margherita" and not "margheritta". Yes we have double consonants in many words, but not in every.

I live in Fiumicino, which you may know as the "Rome Airport". Other than being the Rome Airport, is also the "Rome restaurant". Indeed in Rome is pretty hard, especially in the center, to find a good pizza, because too many restaurants are targeted toward tourists. Usually they serve frozen pizza. In Fiumicino the pizza is very good in many restaurants. Also remember that in Rome we very often eat "sliced pizza" and not the round one, is much easier to find very tasty sliced pizza than a good round pizza here.

CD-RW.

I am using Darcs and it seems to do the job. Is strange that it isn't even mentioned cause it has been around since quite some time and is pretty mature. The only problem I am having with Darcs is huge resource consumption (a copy of the repository is on a VPS with 256mb RAM, no swap) but you can move a repository by just copying it somewhere else (even across systems) without problems. What are the advantages of using Git/Mercurial/Bazaar? I think I need to mention that I am developing on OSX (but a copy of the repository is on a Linux system).

Wooooooooooosh

Actually he is mentioning Linux. GNUstep is a really good platform for experimenting with Objective-C. It should be stable and full-featured enough for the needs of learning. I started coding Objective-C on that about 6 years ago. Over time I switched to Mac, which of course provides me with a more stable environment for Objective-C programming, yet GNUstep was very useful and I guess it evolved since I last used it.

You say that you have only done a bit of Obj-C programming. The problem is that for small programs retain/release is much like malloc/free, but in bigger projects it becomes a life-safer. The conventions are very easy, even if you throw some CoreFoundation object in the equation.

The main difference between retain/release and malloc/free is that with retain = "I (object calling retain) need this object to stick around" and release = "I (object calling release) don't need this object anymore". Instead malloc = "create this", free = "nobody else in this process needs this". You can see yourself that while is usually trivial to determine if an object needs something it is referencing or not, doing so for the whole process everytime you try to get rid of an object is painful.

Note that now the Objective-C runtime offers garbage collection (except on the iPhone), which is of course a good step forward.

This was true a few years ago, when DRM didn't actually get in the way of legitimate customers in a major way. Now even Mr WhatIfTheyGetMe (because many of those who don't pirate don't do so because they are afraid of getting caught) starts to get pissed about these extremely obtrusive DRM systems.

I know game makers, recording labels etc have lost sales from me. I did not pirate though, I am still waiting for DRM free versions of their content. I purchased a lot of shareware and some iTunes Plus music instead.

After all I can live just as well (dare I say, better?) without playing Spore.

There is nothing politic at all about purchasing a game. I don't really understand why one tries to find a justification for piracy - there is none. Not giving them the money AND not playing the game is actually way more "violent" than pirating. Sending emails complaining about the DRM is even better. They probably do not care that you don't like DRM, but they do care that not only you don't pay for the game, you also break a ring in the chain of "word-of-mouth" marketing by not playing it (and if it happens on a large scale, the game will be considered an huge flop instead that a massively pirated successful game)

Actually the iPhone is one of the few cell phones which doesn't do what is described in the patent, so the probably didn't even look at the iPhone.

I didn't bother to read TFA, so I don't know what the devs claim, but does every piece of software need to target the mass? To me it looks like an useful development/testing software for web developers and for users who regularly need to use sites that require a specific engine (assuming that the software allows tying a site to a specific engine so it is opened automatically with the correct one, otherwise is worthless for the last category I mentioned)

Yes probably Italian names are not very common there, although here Michele is a very common name.