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Comment Re:This is the slope before the cliff (Score 1) 385

by rivercityrandom (#44265255) Attached to: PC Sales See 'Longest Decline' In History
My 386 back in the day booted to an OS (albeit MS-DOS) in about ten seconds, had an excellent (IBM Model M) input device, and ran numerous productivity and games software pretty quickly and seldom ever crashed. And the only virus it got, I think, was that stupid prank that turned your screen upside down. I think I wouldn't mind an ARM tablet with similar qualifications :)

Submission + - The reason we lose at games (moneyscience.com)

Submitted by JacobAlexander
JacobAlexander writes: Writing in PNAS, a University of Manchester physicist has discovered that some games are simply impossible to fully learn, or too complex for the human mind to understand. Dr Tobias Galla from The University of Manchester and Professor Doyne Farmer from Oxford University and the Santa Fe Institute, ran thousands of simulations of two-player games to see how human behaviour affects their decision-making.
The Internet

Submission + - How the Internet Makes the Improbable Into the New Normal 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away; a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike; a candle at a wedding sets the bride's hair on fire; someone fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark. Now Kevin Kelly writes that in former times these unlikely events would be private, known only as rumors, stories a friend of a friend told, easily doubted and not really believed but today they are on YouTube, seen by millions. "Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we'll see or hear about today," writes Kelly. "As long as we are online — which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal." But when the improbable dominates the archive to the point that it seems as if the library contains only the impossible, then the "black swans" don't feel as improbable. "To the uninformed, the increased prevalence of improbable events will make it easier to believe in impossible things," concludes Kelly. "A steady diet of coincidences makes it easy to believe they are more than just coincidences.""

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