My biggest concern right now is that some of the very early 3D 32 bit Windows games will continue to be hard or impossible to play on a modern machine

You might be surprised. Wine is making surprising progress on the early 3D 32-bit Win front, and with luck they'll finish the job once they acknowledge how critical the DIB bug is. That would be the ultimate goal; make a platform that will run old Windows games agnostically and you've succeeded in the hardest part of a goal to "emulate" Windows (yes yes, Wine is not an emulator). Apart from that I think the only critically broken game right now is Alpha Centauri, and it used quite a few stupid tricks with the IDX register for speedups so that might take awhile to be fixed. Hopefully when Windows XP is long forgotten we'll still be able to play these games.

Looks like you and I both appreciate the games of the era. Let's hope some other folks take an interest in preserving the classics. You can be certain in 50 years people will be looking back and either appreciating our ability to still play them or lamenting the lack thereof. It very much resembles the state of early film. History will repeat itself, I'm certain of it.

I sure hope so. I'm still waiting for a fullspeed Gamecube emulator but Dolphin just isn't quite there yet.

System Shock 2 actually does run just fine under Win7, but you need to download a fix for it -- SS2Tool by Kolya fixes the compatibility problems and removes the CD check on top of that, and even provides a widescreen patch. To Looking Glass's credit I don't think they could have foreseen the issues with multicore systems or NT permissions issues back then. But someone fixed it, and it runs. Do you think anyone will be able to maintain your console games 10 years from now? Will anyone be able to cut through the legal red tape? Will anyone bother?

I just played through SS2 in 1920x1200. Keep in mind that game came out in 1999, which makes it 10 years old. How many old Xbox or PS2 games can you play on a next gen console with higher resolution? None. How many can you patch with high res texture packs or reskins? None.

You lumped Steam in the list of intrusive DRM with Starforce. I don't like DRM any more than anyone else on ./ but Steam isn't intrusive. It doesn't break your system and it does just work.

The new UI doesn't bother me as much as it bothers some people but for the life of me I can't figure out the new meta-moderation system.

I agree. It's straightforward if you see a positive mod and it's good; plus means "yes, it's funny, I agree, mod up". But what does minus do? Does minus mean "that's not funny at all" or does it mean "that's not +5 Funny"? And how are you supposed to metamod things that are labeled Troll or Offtopic? Does plus mean you agree with the negative moderation, or does it mean "this should be rated higher"? Same with minus. It's the equivalent of the OK/Cancel box in bad UIs, in that it's not at all clear what effect your actions will have.

The old system was a lot better; you get three selections labeled "Funny", "Unfunny", or "Not sure", and mark the appropriate one. For a comment modded "Flamebait" the options were also clear: "Flamebait", "Not Flamebait", and "Not sure". Why can't we have the old metamod system back?

You do know that the term "algorithm" is named after a mathematician, right?

Algorithms and computer programs are absolutely a subset of mathematics. Take a few basic computer science courses at a university and you'll learn that very quickly. Just read some journal papers on the algebra of sets, group theory, lambda calculus, or Turing machines. You can't even understand provability without understanding the underlying mathematics, and provability is only one critical facet of a properly designed algorithm. Prove to me that your sorting algorithm actually works on any arbitrary data I throw at it. Hell, I dare you to prove that your program actually finishes. You won't be able to do it without framing it in a mathematical context. Without such a proof your algorithm isn't noteworthy enough for a patent or for publication. And if you give me a mathematical description of your algorithm proving its correctness you just lost your own argument.

I get the feeling I'm being trolled here but some people might read your post and actually take it seriously. You have no idea what you're talking about. Algorithms are mathematics. Logic is mathematics.

Soulskill has herpes!

You know there's a treatment for that. But I hear it may have some side-effects.

As a clarification, they did not boot you off of Live, they booted the console off of Live. You still have a subscription, your modified hardware just can't use it. Your subscription will still work on a legitimate device.

I see. And if you unmod your hardware, will it let you back on? Didn't think so.

"Your honor, I didn't kill Bob Smith, I killed his heart cells via blunt trauma. He still has a brain, it's just that his heart can't pump blood to it anymore. I'm sure he'll be reincarnated and it'll be fine.

Seriously why not Japan, or most European countries?

Indeed. I had 100Mbps fiber in northern rural Japan, in 2006. That's fiber from the pole through my wall and into my apartment, by the way, and I never experienced throttling or arbitrary caps. Total cost? Around US$70 per month.

Then I come back to the USA, move into a neighborhood right next to a university in a city of a million people, and the best I can get without some crazy business plan is 1.5M/128K ADSL, for about $40 per month. And the connection from my department on campus is actually slower than the fiber I had there. What the fuck is with broadband in this country?

Very well said; I agree with much of this. In short, the low-hanging fruit of IT has been picked. We're all still waiting for Google-like improvements to our lives from artificial intelligence, but aside from Google, nobody at this point is holding their breath any longer...

IT has shifted from an innovative industry to a maturing one, and as it does so, the mental void resulting from a lack of excitement is increasingly filled by the fact that IT is ultimately an expense.

Nobody needs another damn WCMS, or accounting application, or spreadsheet...

I do disagree with you strongly though on the point about bidding wars. Have you seen the business side of IT contracting this year? Love it or hate it, the economic theory of competition holds very sound - and the competition is quite fierce; there is plenty of under-bidding, and the process of such bidding wars is a race-to-the-bottom, by definition. ("Bottom" needn't be "zero" - it just has to be low enough that only 1 vendor is willing to provide the product at that lowest-of-all price level.)

Also, many people are taking pay cuts to keep their jobs; where they are not, salary freezes are usually in place -- meanwhile, inflation eats-away at workers' real income, which is essentially a pay cut.

That depends on the nature of the flaw, though.
You could feed the ballots through 8 machines that all give you the same, but *wrong*, result.

To be even nit-pickier, it's valid beyond just for x > 4. It's valid for all x != 4. It just turns out that (IsPrime(x-1) && IsPrime(x+1)) is false for all x 4, so the theorem is irrelevant across that domain.

Or alternatively, the theorem could be amended that x is divisible by six or x is exactly four.

I think the main problem is not just that top talent is no longer going into science and engineering, but that poorer talent is entering. Every university you can think of now has a program where you can graduate with a bachelors in science. It used to be that top schools were the only ones producing anyone who can reasonably call themselves scientists, but now everyone is doing it. It's even worse for engineering. Here in Canada we have very strict regulations on the certification of our engineers to make sure that they all have the same basic knowledge, but I know people who went into engineering programs that had required entrance averages a full 20% lower than mine! I wouldn't trust them to engineer a toaster, but they're in fields with a lot more responsibility, like aerospace for example. And that's /with/ our strict regulations, I know places in the U.S. have lower standards and the people who graduate from those programs will one day call themselves engineers.

The Soviets were a lot more willing to shove nuclear reactors in places we were politically unwilling/unable to. The Russians may even have some Soviet prototypes around. It would be the same barely-post-war era tech all their stuff was, and it would be really, really, REALLY dangerous to use, but the very well might have gotten beyond blueprints.

Seen the Soviet space shuttle prototype? Scary.