I don't know, I have a second browser and a second office suite and some old-school games and some programming tools and some translation tools and still have like 12 gigs left. If I want to watch downloaded videos I stream them from my desktop computer. 32 GB is fine if you're not using it for modern games or to house all your media.

Not quite 15", but the HP stream is a $230 14" laptop with a 32 GB ssd. Windows, office, and the various bundled apps take up about 15 gigs of that. I have the 12" version and speed is fine, you just can't use it for games, and if you want to keep a large collection of music or pictures (or whatever) you need an external drive or SD card.

What would these fired workers possibly say, that these theoretical severance packages don't allow?' "I had a job, and then I lost it," or something to that effect? Big deal, that wouldn't make it to the front page of the Times or even Slashdot. And isn't there some kind of communication tool out there, which allows people to anonymously relate something that happened to them, and then have it widely distributed by computer?

Sure, losing a job to an H1B worker is no fun. This post is imagining something sinister is being hidden in severance packages, but leaves the sinister happening so vague as to meaningless. Either say what it is or shut up.

Being a felon means he committed a serious crime. It's kind of like saying "I killed a guy and got a couple of parking tickets."

I'm a little confused by the phrasing. Being a felon is a roadblock to a career. Having misdemeanor convictions probably isn't. If you're a felon, why even bother mentioning that you've had misdemeanor convictions?

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is from the early 1910s, meaning it pre-dates pinyin by 50 years. It does look especially stupid in pinyin, but the joke works just as well for theoretical Chinese people who aren't aware of roman characters at all - making puns of words with different tones is very, very common.

I'd need to see a little more background than this article gives, because (as the article does state), puns are just a basic part of Chinese culture. This is probably just an over-interpretation of some vague proclamation given by some no-name politician, aimed at stopping Internet users from posting pictures of crabs wearing wristwatches.

Of course it's anecdotal. It was posted in response to a +5 past where some guy asked about people's experiences. Was I expected to break out a pie chart? Now I see that my honest, on-topic responses have been nodded as troll. Maybe nobody hears about Mac users with problems because of willful ignorance?

The articles you link to are hardly scientific. People who install boot camps are a different subset of users than people running a cheap PC. They're going to be more knowledgeable about computers than the average pc or Mac user, for one.

Ultimately, I value my time enough that I will generally not purchase things I think will break and require fixing or taking to a repair shop. I'll spend extra on a dependable product. Apple computers have shown to not be dependable, despite being more expensive, and despite not having an OS that revolutionizes how effective you are with your computer or whatever Mac OS is supposed to do for you.

Even a warranty isn't a real solution, because obviously there's time required to deal with Mac and find out what the issue is, and then get the computer replaced. They don't send a technician to your house while you're away at work. Personally, a friend of mine had a Macbook refuse to respond after a standard OS upgrade. Eventually, after speaking to customer service and driving to the genius bar a couple times, he was given a new computer. My friend charges by the hour (not a hooker lol), and with the amount of time he put into it he could have charged several hundred dollars. At the prices involved, it makes more economic sense just to buy a mid-priced non-Apple laptop and throw it away every time anything goes wrong.

Personally I own a Mac where the DVD superdrive drive broke right away. My wife's Macbook has a dying battery (after just a year or two), an audio-out that insists on outputting to S/PDIF (which has never actually been used), and had a hard drive that died. After I replaced the hard drive with one that worked, I found out that Mac disables TRIM support in non-Apple SSD drives and performance will steadily decline.

Is that what I pay the extra money to Apple for? Shouldn't I be getting better hardware, not worse? I use Linux and Windows as well, and honestly the only hardware problem I've ever had has been laptop batteries slowly degrading. And who gives a fuck about the OS. On any of them, I just load the program and it works. Windows has more games, but the difference between Mac and Linux for me is the color of the icons.

I read that somewhere.

I wrote it down, then I read it.

Partly it depends on whether you care about being able to write a certain amount of data, or rewrite the blocks the same number of times...

Most consumers of hard-drive services care about how much data they can safely store and retrieve and the speed & cost of the device, not how many times they can rewrite a flash block before it fails...

While this is arguably true for software that directly faces a human being, embedded/specialist applications are getting faster and more powerful. I work on a massively parallel ASIC and it benefits from every iteration of die shrink with clock speed.

If there is a machine intelligence it won't be written in Mono or Python on a standard PC - it will be a specially crafted piece of silicon with very well optimised process code.

I do believe we will reach a singularity where us squishy meatbags make ourselves redundant, but I don't fear it. If the culmination of mankind produces an intelligence that surpasses our own, that's a great end-goal. It/they will certainly be better physically equipped to explore the stars, perhaps carrying a memory of the seeds of their creation with them.

What is curious is why we haven't yet encountered such machines. I guess as a planet we've not been pumping out giveaway radio waves for long enough?

Sequential I/O with big write sizes can be pretty fast (~180MB/s) on modern large drives. SSDs can be ~4x that, so the tests would only take ~4x as long for similar data sizes.

But is that really an answer to "How do I get my 4 year old girl to be a programmer?" It was one woman's quick take on feminism, and not a central idea to her rambles.

Well, that was certainly a collection of one woman's anecdotes, with no central idea, research, or sense of perspective.