I think the underlying intent of the article is to show that the Microsoft Surface is a waste of time, and so it was Windows 8 focussed. They compared a Microsoft Surface with an Acer W510, and the Acer tied on power and won on performance. But also the Acer runs all Windows apps, so why would you buy the Microsoft Surface over the Acer W510?

Just thought I'd add to your bit that says:

you'd have to be particularly crazy to develop a game that requires DirectX 11.1 any time soon

Given a pragmatic developer I can't see how that would happen, unless they were doing a tech demo. Most of the DirectX utility and sample code sets up the device like this:

1. Try initializing Directx9
2. Try initializing Directx10
3. Try initializing Directx11

so now you add:

1. Try initializing Directx11.1

All the fixed function stuff is gone now. You do your own object-local-to-word transform in the vertex shader, and then the world-to-view transform using the projection matrix. If you have stereoscopic rendering, then you have 2 projection matricies in the shaders.
Thus in the above tests you get back what version of DirectX is running, and load the corresponding set of shaders for your world, lighting and material renderers. You'd need the option to turn on or off stereoscopic rendering anyway, so it makes having an exclusive Directx11.1 renderer highly implausible.

Hard drive usage doesn't affect speed. I've got Terrabytes of data on on number crunching machine, and it still runs just as fast as it it did when I was writing the software and had only a few GB of random test data.

Gelly Roll Classic Fine 0.3mm. It's what you need. They're cheap, pick one up and try it. I know it's thicker than what you want, but it's real easy to write with.

98 SE was better. I've not been a fan of the NT line

No way. I had NT 3.51 as my main OS (circa 1995). That was the good version before they killed it with NT 4.0. This OS gave you the OS/2 experience with a Windows skin (If you used OS/2 2.0 then you know what I'm talking about), and OpenGL to boot (no DirectWhatever). The multitasking was butter smooth, and it came with a C/C++ compiler bundled in the OS. I was doing user/programmer tech support at the time, and all the 98SE machines I saw that came years later sucked arse.

NT 4.0 with the Windows 95 skin was a backwards step. Apparently Billg had a bee in his bonnet about beating MacOS at the automated bytemark benchmark in word processing or something, and so the OS guys had to move GUI stuff into the kernel to get the benchmarks up. It was downhill from there.

Oh by the way, if anyone's looking for a 39 yr old programmer with a boat load of experience (150 different skills), I'm open to offers... just though I'd add that in, in case someone reads this, as some of my clients have hit hard times recently, hence I've....

HTC is a Taiwanese manufacturer, Apple is more of a Chinese manufacturer. That aside I think that the argument should be that Samsung are so far ahead on Android, that Nokia need to be number 1 on something else as they can't compete with Samsung. Looking at the build vs buy numbers wrt to writing the OS, buying from Microsoft was most likely more economical than trying to go it alone.

I haven't personally used Eclipse for 3 years but, as I'm primarily a C++ developer, I left the IDE choice to my full time Java developing peers who informed me that Eclipse sucked hard. I had assumed this was an informed opinion. The problem I've found with NetBeans is that we are using Ant for the build process, which seems to work like a shell script rather than a makefile. I've found I'm faster in C#/VS2010 mainly because the intellisense seems to work better with that combination. As someone who is continuously changing languages and platforms I find intellisense quite valuable.

Java has something C# lacks: a good IDE. Java has eclipse.

Wow, where did you get that opinion from? Using a beta version of VS2005? VS2001?. The team I'm in right now is coding Java for Android in NetBeans because Eclipse sucked hard. But coding in C# in Visual Studio 2008/2010 is way better, way more productive. Hell even coding Javascript / HTML in VS2010 is better than this.

In the last couple of years I've seen more and more C in code bases for mathematically intense applications due to requiring C for GPU programming. OpenCL and Cuda are C based and from where I'm standing are the two main choices for GPU programming at the moment. Something on the horizon that looks interesting is Microsoft's C++ AMP stuff which fullfills the same need.

If they release these models into the public doman this might just be the self justification I need to convince myself to get a 3D printer. They should sell the printers and printer consumables off their website, and give away the models for free.

Years ago I was sitting at light. The light turns green and the driver in front of me starts going oblivious to the car that's sailing down the road and clearly not intending on stopping for the red. So this guy slams right into the guy in front of me.

In Taiwan the lights count down to when they turn green, so as it gets to 3,2,1 you look both ways and can see if anyone is going to run the opposing red light. Apparently this reduced the sort of accident you saw by 30% vs putting in red light cameras that increased rear-end accidents by 20%. So they don't have red light cameras. They do have big yellow and black painted speed cameras, that are sign posted so people can clearly see where they are, but these are just in areas where they really do need people to stick to the speed limit.

You make it sound like people WANTED Windows 7. They didn't and they don't. Even today, if Windows XP was an option, they would go with that

Ha! good one. This should be awarded Troll of the week! I wish there was an option on slashdot to count troll points as +ve rather than -ve, as I have to browse at -1 to read good stuff like this.

I know the code you pasted was for C#, my comment was directed at your initial opening sentence... .Net has both query form Linq (what you posted) and method form Linq (what the java version looks like), and the two are interchangeable.

I read your comment in the wrong context. Thanks for clarifying.

Yes the code I posted was for C#, I was replying to a Java guy who was saying that Java has LINQ but looks like this http://slashdot.org/submission/1810940/java-linq

Wow, is that what you call LINQ? In C# LINQ looks like this:

var filteredStrings =
from s in myStrings
from p in myPrefixes
where s.StartsWith(p)
select s;

I guess Java really is light years behind. In C# you can multithread this as well:

var filteredStrings =
from s in myStrings.AsParallel()
from p in myPrefixes.AsParallel()
where s.StartsWith(p)
select s;