That's true. To be honest, my laptop runs on Intel, too. That's a market semgnet Intel is very good at. Still, budget desktop exists and I hope they will continue to keep AMD afloat because I really don't want to see what happens when Intel has x86/amd64 for itself. (Of course Intel probably doesn't want to see that, either; monopolies have this pesky habit of falling under antitrust regulations...)

It's all about target demographics. The last few times I've built desktop PCs I've been on a budget and that's where AMD becomes really interesting. AMD CPUs are usually good enough (especially in gaming rigs where desktop CPU performace has become essentially irrelevant years ago) and can be faster than Intels at the same price point - not because AMD is better but because Intel is more expensive, especially once you factor in that Intel mainboards also tend to have higher prices.

Sure, Intel CPUs are better. But if you don't do heavily CPU-intensive tasks (ie. if you use your computer for generic consumer-type stuff) AMD's ones are adequate and cheap. Intel is great in workstations but most people don't need a workstation. That's why AMD is still alive. It's pretty much the VHS of x86/amd64.

Well, the IE patches should matter. They might affect the rendering engine, which is used everywhere.

I never said that I deserve automatic business success. "Reward" and "getting paid" are two different things. I do agree, however, that I expressed myself poorly. Of course the mere idea is not enough to get a patent: At the very least I should supply enough information to make my valve. Still, I shouldn't need to actually produce valves in order to deserve patent protection; after all there are dedicated research entities like CSIRO who do expend significant effort to develop technologies even though they don't develop physical products based on those technologies.

If the non-company actually came up with a working prototype and wrote a patent that explains in detail how to copy it and demonstrably came up with the whole thing first then yes, the non-company deserves the patent. Of course this scenario is utterly unlikely. Still, patents shouldn't be about how much it cost to come up with something; they should be about whether this something advances the state of the art and is described in a precise manner that allows an average worker in the field to reproduce it. If your company spends $10m and mine spends $100k and we independently arrive at the same method of solving a particular problem then your company's claim isn't automatically more valid than mine.

If we could ensure that all granted patents are for things that advance the state of the art in a reproducible manner we'd be much closer to a reasonable system (although there'd still be work left to be done).

Patents are not inherently evil. If I get the idea for a new valve design that uses some obscure property of gasoline to make direct injection engines five percent more efficient then I deserve to be rewarded for that. But do I deserve a reward for taking something we already do and adding "via electronic transmission" without even detailing how exactly that transmission would work? Do I deserve a reward for taking the concepts of HTTP redirects and credit card processing and coming up with a redirect to a credit card processing software?

We have a few problems right now that need fundamental changes to how patents work in order to be resolved:

Firstly, there is a flood of patents far too great to allow patent examiners to examine each patent in detail. We can't solve this by adding more examiners; there's no money for that. We can't solve this by allowing an arbitrary backlog; sooner or later we'd get to a point where you'd spend longer for your application to be processed than the patent would last once approved, which would hurt legitimately useful applications. The current solution, just doing less work per patent, just means that more junk patents come through.

Additionally, we don't have enough experts. A patent on "storing a word processor document in a single XML file" (real patent) might not sound obvious to a patent examiner who doesn't have a deep understanding of IT but to an IT professional it's blindingly obvious; after all XML is a universal format and we store all sorts of other documents in XML form already. Still, a patent has been granted for this "innovation", most likely because the patent office can't afford enough IT experts to properly evaluate every IT patent. (Admittedly, the patent is specific enough that one can, with effort, create a non-infringing XML text document format. But it's still obvious.)

Of course it doesn't help that some granted patents are overly generic. Many patents just declare dominion over an idea, sometimes even without providing technical information on how to make the idea actually work. This can be hard to see for the examiner because of the relative dearth of domain experts.

Compounding that is the fact that willful infringement nets harsher punishment. However, if I actually do the research to make sure I don't violate certain patents it becomes reasonable to assume that I know about all relevant patents in the field. If I overlooked some and end up infringing them it becomes difficult to prove that I didn't know about them, costing me more money. Thus, the safest course of action is to never read any patents at all so I can at least claim ignorance. This keeps me open to surprise litigation, of course, and it also perverts the entire point of the patent system: Patents are not there so that someone can control an idea, they are there so that someone provides his idea and technical work to everyone else in exchange for some royalties.


Fixing this mess won't be easy. We need far more experts, more time per patent and fewer patent applications. The former two aren't going to happen because nobody's willing to pay that much money and the latter isn't going to happen as long as obtaining patents is as lucrative as it is today. While I don't think that killing off the entire patent system is the way to go it's easy to see how people come up with the idea.

Well, there are the schenanigans around the .iq domain. While accounts seem to differ it was a bit peculiar that .iq dropped off the root zone right around when the Iraq War happened. (I know that the guy administering the TLD was nasty but he wasn't convicted yet and I'm not sure it's reasonable to shut down a TLD because the Tech-C is being prosecuted.)

"Random people" includes any single government. Jon Postel might have been trustworthy but his government isn't. Not when international politics are involved. No single government or regional bloc truly is. (Neither are all governments combined but at least they'll have a harder time screwing everything up.)

Then again many people outside the USA aren't entirely comfortable with the USA having control over internet governance. Mind you, there are many other countries equally unsuited. The problem is that if one single country has control then one country might decide to use that control to further its own interests. And I don't think that it's a good trade to give all power to one country just to ensure that certain other countries get no power at all.

Of course this is about power shifting towards governments in general. This is to be expected - after all, we can't just have random people running the internet and governments happen to be the very things that represent their countries internationally. I expect ICANN to become something like the ITU: A UN agency that handles infrastructure governance. That does seem to be the safest and fairest option. Do Iran and North Korea get a voice? Yes, they do, just as they should. But that doesn't mean they run the show.

I like Apple as much as the next guy but their add-on prices are silly. The fact that their hardware tends to be good in general doesn't excuse the fact that they charge twice as much for an upgrade as you'd pay on the open market. This is obvious when looking at RAM where you pay huge markups on modules with identical stats made by the same company.

That's why I don't like their Retina lineup - less customer-serviceability (and parts in more expensive form factors) mean less independence from Apple's horrible add-on prices.

Well, to my knowledge this attitude is mostly found in non-IT companies. For them their computers are no different from, say, their plumbing. As long as the plumbing works (and there are no other pressing factors like legal requirements) there is no need to replace the pipes with new ones that may be in some way better. IT professionals understand that outdated software can (and often does) pose a security risk but most other people don't.

Of course it would be nice if we could get people educated about that sort of thing. Then the only ones we'd have to worry about would be those who just plain can't upgrade - either because they have custom software or because their job-specific hardware has no drivers for modern Windows versions.

Seriously; I'd be happy if Microsoft stopped supporting newer versions of IE as well. It's not that IE is a terrible browser per se, it's that Microsoft's policy of only releasing new versions of IE for versions of Windows they still support means that many people out there are stuck using ancient IE versions. This means that web designers often still need to care for things like IE 8 on Windows XP (which, to make things even better, behaves unlike IE 8 on other Windows versions) because that's what some customers use to see if their shiny new website works.

No, those customers aren't going to replace their still-working XP boxes with brand-new computers running Windows 8.1 Upgrade 1 Patch 1 Service Pack 1, especially not to get a browser update. As long as those computers don't physically break down they're going to keep running Windows XP; after all, replacing a working tool is unneccessary cost and businesses don't like unneccessary costs. So IE 8 compatibility remains important, at least for those customers who still use it to look at their websites.

All of that would change if Microsoft wrote IE to support the same platforms Firefox and Chrome do. Firefox 31 runs on XP SP2, as does Chrome 36. So should IE 11. Then we could finally move on from the days of horrible IE-specific hacks and dozens of kilobytes of compatibility code and actually get some work done. As it is, the only recourse we have is to keep telling people to never run IE under any circumstance except to download a better browser; hopefully at some point we will have drilled "IE is always the wrong choice" into people's head hard enough that they will reflexively use a browser with a sane update policy and IE will be marginalized enough to be irrelevant.

Which would be sad; more competition in the browser market would be good. But not through an obsolescence factory like IE.

Well, I can believe in Xiaomi winning on quality. Their phones are quite powerful, yet reasonably priced. I have a coworker who swears by the brand and from what I've seen I definitely like his Mi2 better than my Galaxy S3. Are they the alpha and omega of phone development? Definitely not. But they certainly are a welcome addition to the high-end smartphone market.

Well, they're better than Samsung, which admittedly isn't terribly difficult.

Well, I wouldn't call it great. Sheldon is an exaggerated stereotype, same as 90% of all TV characters. It's easy to read people's behavior into him because, well, he is an exaggeration of those behaviors. It's just a TV character, written to be easily recognizable. Nothing too great, nothing too horrible. He reflects certain behaviors and attitudes commonly associated with nerds so the writers did their jobs right.

Now, I still don't watch the show but that's because every time people have tried to hook me on it I watched an episode and never laughed. The show's brand of humor just isn't mine and I don't find the main characters very likable. It's a matter of taste, though, and I recognize that many people find the show very entertaining. (Hell, The Middleman got canceled before they had time to shoot the first season's final episode and I consider that show to be among the best live-action entertainment produced in the last decade. My tastes certainly don't align with those of the people who actually count.)

Nonsensical names are everywhere. Microsoft .NET isn't a network protocol. ActiveX and DirectX have nothing to do with the X Window system, which in turn doesn't use cross-shaped windows. Apple's Lightning connector isn't rated for millions of volts. The Fiat Panda is not an animal and neither is Mozilla Firefox. eBay has nothing to do with an actual bay and Amazon is not even a Brazilian company. SAP doesn't even do anything with trees, much less their sap. The AMD Athlon has nothing to do with sports and the Intel Core-i7 doesn't have sqrt(-1)*7 cores.

Here are some more sensible names. Don't abbreviate them; nobody would understand you.

.net becomes "Microsoft Common Language Infrastructure Application Development Platform".
ActiveX becomes "Microsoft In-Browser Native Code API".
DirectX becomes "Microsoft 32/64-bit Multimedia API".
The X Window System becomes "Graphical Display API for Unixlike Operating Systems".
Lightning becomes "Apple 8-pin Connector Introduced In 2012".
Fiat Panda becomes "Fiat Cheap Car".
Mozilla Firefox becomes "Mozilla Web Browser"; likewise all other web browsers become "[manufacturer name] Web Browser".
eBay becomes "Physical Goods Marketplace Website With Many Auctions".
Amazon becomes "Physical Goods Marketplace Website With Sometimes Free Shipping".
SAP becomes "Big German Expensive Software Company".
Athlon becomes "AMD 32-bit Processor" (or "64-bit Processor").
Intel Core becomes "Intel 64-bit Processor (AMD-derived)". No distinctions between i3, i5 and i7; those don't contribute anything a model number can't.

See? Much better. Now, you might argue that names like "Core" or "Panda" are used to distinguish products from each other and not to inform the user of the exact properties of the product but that kind of sloppy thinking will get you nowhere.

Of course the V-2 would've been more useful if the Nazis didn't have to rely on their spy network for targeting data - at a time when the German spy netwok in the UK had been completely subverted. Properly aimed V-2s would have caused a lot more damage.

It's the opposite for me. Setting up a Windows box generally requires a second computer to hunt down various drivers without which Windows can't access the internet. Setting up a Linux box requires only the USB stick you put the installer on and an hour of your time. In my experience, with a distro like Ubuntu or Mint setting up Linux requires zero effort beyond deciding on what your partition scheme should be and you generally get better performance (modulo availability of 3D acceleration) than with a Windows install.

Now, I use all three major desktop OSes. Once it's set up Windows is okay. It just doesn't have the fire-and-forget nature of Linux (where installing most software you need requires nothing more than a short incantation) or the polished UI of OS X (despite Apple's efforts to make it worse).

I admit that my Linux boxen are usually not exactly cutting-edge devices. I don't use 3D acceleration on them and video playback doesn't go beyond YouTube. That may be a factor in why I find the OS to be easy to take care of.