You do this for a living? The fact you said "deep embedded" and Arduino in the same sentence kinda made me giggle. With 8-bit AVR's you're probably better off with assembly. With the 32-bit ARM variant, straight ANSI C is probably where it's really at. I really don't know anyone using C++ for microcontroller programming.

"Deep Embedded" would be more like VHDL or CUPL programming.

Yep, that's why there's still so much FORTRAN code getting written.

Russia probably sold them an old cold war PDP-11 or VAX clone for $75. They had to increase taxes for generations to pay it off.

You exactly like an American dumbass, I hope you were just making fun of ignorant partisan morons.

If you voted for either party, you are part of the problem.

I think he killed his passenger though.

It took a long for heavier-than-air aircraft to be able to fly from the US to Europe without refueling. For the Hindenburg this was no problem. It was also much larger and much more roomy than flying coach in a modern passenger jet. I'd actually LOVE to see a true modern take on a full rigid airship. With modern materials science, we could probably do something truly amazing with it.

In WW1, the massive rigid airships were actually just as fast as fixed-wing fighters in many cases. The only thing that prevented the zeppelins from erasing England in WW1 was the fact that high-altitude bomb sights didn't yet exist and high explosives weren't as vicious as the ones that came later in WW2.

A blimp isn't as versatile as a rigid zeppelin. Germany couldn't really use helium because we had the market cornered on it and it was hideously expensive.

Hydrogen is flammable but not quite as volatile and easy to light as one would think. The brits had to come up with fiery phosphorous bullets to take them down effectively.

The only thing that prevented the zeppelins from erasing England in WW1 was the fact that high-altitude bomb sights didn't yet exist and high explosives weren't as vicious as the ones that came later in WW2.

There was a SysV UNIX port for the Amiga as well as the Atari TT030.

The ST should have been a PC & Mac killer. It held its own for a long time but the tech got stale, they didn't dump enough R&D into it fast enough and they fell behind.

The ST had a CPU that could keep up with the 286, built-in MIDI and HDD controller, 512-color palette, half decent sound and a color 100% mouse-driven GUI. For half the price of a Mac and much cheaper than a 286. Good times.

Nope, I either wait for a DVD release or I acquire it through other means if I want HD quality as I refuse to ever own a BluRay player.

And yet in spite of all these things you mention that existed in the late 90's, OSX 10.2 still smeared X11 in UI performance. I was a *rabid* FreeBSD desktop user in those days yet my jaw still dropped when I saw Quartz Extreme working the first time.

2D graphics acceleration has been around forever. Early attempts in XFree86 were more similar to hardware QuickDraw acceleration on classic MacOS than Quartz Extreme. Using OpenGL for compositing was introduced in OSX 10.2 and it was some time before that was seen in X11.

So yeah, Macs have had hardware accelerated graphics just as long as Linux, possibly even before Linux existed. This is part of the reason they were so awesome for the DTP and graphic arts fields for a long time. Hell, my Atari 800 had hardware graphics acceleration LOL

EDA apps are kind of a rarity on the Mac but they exist. Now that's a pretty extreme niche market but one that needs more attention. Funny that Xilinx ISE has a Linux version yet no Mac version.... when the market for a Mac version would probably be larger. Hell, it wouldn't take much to port.

In an academic environment VMWare is your friend in those cases because you can't simply run an alternative for OSX and get away with it in class most of the time and you're quite on your own if you decide to and run into problems.

There are various circuit simulators and layout tools however but you'll still probably really want VMWare around for that particular field.

Yes, Intel *helped* Apple gain more market share but people wouldn't be interested anyway if the "overpriced piece of shit" myth was true. In most typical fields, people have been able to "do their work" on Macs since the early 90's and they can coexist in a Windows domain quite nicely if you have a SysAdmin with a clue who isn't afraid to learn something outside of the "MS is god" comfort bubble. You can even manage them with AD.

Not saying the Intel leap didn't make sense at the time but there was nothing wrong with PPC. The PPC601 and PPC604 absolutely SPANKED the early Pentiums. The later G3's were faster than the Pentium II. The G4 was faster than the Pentium III for a long time until the P-III finally got a severe clock speed advantage for a couple years. The G5 obliterated the Pentium IV performance-wise, especially in floating point.

The biggest issue is the PPC manufacturers (Freescale, Motorola, IBM) couldn't/wouldn't dump the R&D dollars necessary to improve power efficiency and they always lagged behind in clock speed except for the initial major CPU releases. Intel is simply "good enough" and fast. That does not make it a great architecture. Hell, even back in the 386/486 days the Motorola 68030 and 68040-based Macs were often faster at lower clock speeds. The PowerPC was a damn good architecture and still is.

I've seen several desktop workstation architectures come and go..... VAX, Alpha, m68k, m88k, PPC, SPARC (arguably not quite dead yet), PA-RISC, etc.... All of them had real measurable advantages over x86. But x86 is very common, thus lots of R&D dollars available to propel it to "good enough" status and let people run legacy x86 crap. That doesn't mean x86 is always better and people should ignore anything else. Personally, I like choice! Especially when the other choices are very innovative and compete on merit rather than existing market presence.

Yeah, there probably is. That was my point, they use those apps in Unity Mode with VMWare and use native apps the rest of the time normally. Most people trying to use it as simply a Windows box get confused by the different keyboard layout and multi-touch trackpad. So I imagine the cases where people buy a Mac just to run Windows on it are rare.

Strange niche business apps and hacked-together VB and Access stuff are very common use cases for VMWare. Not bootcamp generally.

Yep, it ended up being split two ways:

Option A.) Brutal hours at the same pay with less coworkers
Option B.) No hours and no pay

I imagine companies are far more profitable due to the technology as well but the employees typically don't see any of that additional gain. I seem to remember health benefits being a whole lot more obtainable in the past as well. Now most lower-middle-class people with families simply can't afford it.

Considering that we recently had a significant minimum wage hike several years ago, I'm really not seeing much damage that was caused. I'm all for another increase.

Most of these places actively look for desperate adults and won't hire kids. You can't even work in most convenient stores in this state until you are 21 anyway.

The reason is, desperate adults have no options and are willing to be abused and deprived of benefits. A lazy kid can always go back to school.

The only time I see teenagers or young adults working in my area is during summer break. At that point, McDonald's might pick a few of them up but they don't last long. The average minimum wage worker I see in my area is in their late 30's to early 50's.

I work for a company that employs a LOT of minimum wage cashiers. I know the deal pretty well.