It depends on how you measure "differently". Maybe for me, a $100 fine is no problem, but for my friend a $100 fine means that they aren't going to be able to make their rent payment on time this month. So, I get mildly inconvenienced (gotta transfer $100 into my checking account), but my friend gets evicted. I think there's something fundamentally wrong with that outcome.

The only positive is that it's a 64-node cluster cheaply. The Pi's USB and ethernet implementations are absolute shit, requiring constant handling from the CPU to function. There've always been problems with dropped network and USB packets when the CPU is under heavy load. A Hardkernel ODroid-C1 uses the ARMv7 architecture instead of v6 (and has a quad-core CPU, to boot), has better ethernet, better USB, faster storage options, and costs the same as the Raspberry Pi. It beats out the RPi 2 in every way.

So, there's a better computer for the same price, which wouldn't have the unusually-strong requirement to avoid inter-node communication. The Pi's fine as a beginner's learning tool, but it's a bad model for scaling up to PC-type hardware that a "real" cluster would probably be built out of.

NES and SNES systems used virtually the same method to communicate with their controllers (reset strobe signal, then bit-by-bit serial read of the button states). If I were building custom hardware to feed data into the system anyhow, I think that I'd implement it as a custom memory-mapper, where a write into a read-only address on the cartridge would fill the PPU's (Picture Processing Unit/GPU) memory space with the next frame of video, and the CPU's memory with the next chunk of digital audio (the NES was capable of 7-bit PCM audio samples, at up to 16KHz sample rate, although no games would actually spend that much memory on audio).

Khronos Group is a consortium that creates open graphics and media standards. As an example, it's the current developer of OpenGL, which is one of the two main 3D graphics APIs. Vulkan is being designed as a next-generation replacement for OpenGL and OpenGL ES (the mobile device version of OpenGL). Part of its purpose is to unify the two APIs.

DirectX is a collection of APIs by Microsoft, which provide functions that are useful for graphics and audio applications (especially games) on Windows and in other Microsoft products.

OpenGL has been around since about 1992, and DirectX since about 1995. Your age probably isn't a factor here. More likely, you haven't had a remote interest in graphics programming in the last two decades and also haven't had close exposure to computer games, CAD, or other graphics-heavy applications within that time period.

Pseudonym posted this earlier in the thread, and I think that some of the ideas in the interview are what they're referring to.

The TV, ISP, and phone companies provide ongoing services. I could maybe see paying for ongoing security updates, but not for access to use the software on my own hardware, assuming I was fine with running it without updates.

That's a different situation, though. Imagine that your hardware was functional, but the company that rents you your software declares it obsolete, requires you to buy new hardware when you're happy with the current kit, and basically turns your hardware into a nice, black paperweight. There's no upside.

In the situation you described, your current hardware has a relatively easily repairable failure. You have the option of repairing it (yourself or professionally), and you have the option of replacing it. In the former situation, there's no choice; there's a requirement imposed on you by the outside. In the latter, you have options.

I have two issues with your post. First, the use of some kind of standardized grammar aids in comprehension by decreasing the difficulty of interpreting the meaning. If you reduce the number of re-parses that the reader has to do due to unexpected/non-standard word/punctuation use, the information comes through smoother and cleaner. Second, the reader will notice the "register" of the text and tend to give less credence to the information if it doesn't match what they expect. People don't expect idiosyncrasy from an encyclopedia. As an extreme example, I'm perfectly capable of understanding a computer science article written in Cletus Spuckler's dialect, but I'm not likely to trust the information without some form of independent verification.

Of course, perception of the appropriate register, and the sets of language features included each register, are also subject to change over time, and the appropriateness of some specific feature at a specific time to a particular register also isn't a binary value.

Because Eben Upton and most of the Raspberry Pi Foundation are Broadcom employees. The primary goal was to build something educational and to build it cheaply enough to be affordable around the world. Since they could work on acquiring the parts from inside the company, Broadcom made sense as a vendor to support their goal. They got cheaper parts, some level of code-openening from Broadcom, and manufacturing in Britain. Openness was a secondary goal, and only because it supported the primary goal of education.

No, they have an app like this, which allows them to view the DSLR's viewfinder on a tablet, control various settings, and take pictures. "DSLR remote shooting", in other words.

I don't disagree with either of those points. As far as games though, there's also currently a vibrant culture of independent game development that carries some of what Flash game development did. Then there's the combination of SVG and Javascript, which allow similar things to be done.

Flash actually works better on my current phone than it did on the phone I had when it was actually supported. The APKs are still available from Adobe themselves, for anyone who cares to download them. Sometimes a nostalgia trip to some of the old flash video sites is fun.

Maybe you're outside of the general demographic that they served. 10-15 years ago, there were few people that I knew between 10 and 20 years of age that didn't visit one or more of those sites occasionally, or at least know of them. In some ways, they filled similar niches to what Youtube videos and smartphone games do now, but in a lower-bandwidth, resolution/device-independent way.

Many of the non-interactive videos can be found on Youtube now, rendered into raster video from the original vector source files. Similarly, most of the game concepts have been replicated in one way or another to various mobile devices.

What about something like M-Discs? They're a consumer-available optical medium designed for long-term storage. They require a drive with a higher-powered laser to record, but will read in a standard DVD or Blu-ray drive. Of course, their "1000 years of storage" can't really be tested, but the idea of using an inorganic data layer seems like an improvement, and the discs passed some kind of DoD reliability testing.

That's a wonderful idea if I were just working on my own projects. Clang++'s output *is* much cleaner than GCC's. However, it's more difficult to suggest as one of hundreds of developers in a corporate setting. Politics, legal hoops, inertia, verification that there are vendor-supported packages for that compiler on systems that haven't updated to gcc 4.x, etc.