In Soviet Moscow:

Work hurries your boss.
&

Home calls your wife.

You can still get a brand new Touchpad for $220-240 for the 16 GB model. That's still cheap for a tablet like this.

Are you some kind of an Apple HIG fanboy? Is this a sub-cult of the Apple cult of some sort? The way Chrome does tabs halfway in the title bar makes perfect sense. This approach leaves more screen real estate for the content, while retaining the ability to grab the top of the window to move it around. Besides, Apple breaks it's own HIG quite often. iTunes, Mac App Store - those are the main culprits in the current version of OS X. And God forbid you from using the Address Book in Lion.

I'm in Europe, Poland to be exact, and Skype works fine, so no, it's not an OMG W0RdLWiDE OuTaGE (!!!!!!1!!!one!!!), as the title suggests.

... facepalm.

Face the fact that the user base is too small for Microsoft to bother to port the code. Not that they didn't do it in the past - Internet Explorer for UNIX.

I bet he was. I'm using Opera on my Mac right now and it renders /. with no problems.

While I agree with you to some extent, the arguments you provided are flawed.

BeOS was really never anything more than a tech demo. At that time Apple was interested in buying it and using BeOS as the base for their next OS when the Copland project failed miserably. They bought Next instead, and used NextStep. Be Inc. just couldn't compete. Too bad, because it was the most advanced operating system at that time.

Netscape was squashed by Internet Explorer, but it was not because of Microsoft's evil voodoo practices. It happened because IE was a far better product on both Windows and Mac, and to some extent even UNIX (yes, there was a UNIX port of IE 4 and 5).

"Think Children" is the new "Think Different".

Yeah, like multitask?

In case you didn't know, Opera wants to have a new version ready before the Windows browser ballot screen for the EU is in effect.

It's almost impossible to resell, unfortunately. Who buys it on the street, or would trust you to cut it?

Hmmm. I agree that there are some poor design decisions but people that are in the physical sciences tend to only know Fortran because most of what they do is number crunching and, until recently, the Fortran compilers where the ones that got the best performance on any kind of numerical computation, and there's also 40+ years of libraries that they can draw upon. At least it's Fortran90.

However all the references in the linked article appear to be data preparation and not the actual modeling. Now certainly GIGO can be a problem. It does sound like CRU should hire somebody with a Data Warehouse background to do some decent conformal mapping and set up a data quality management framework. Actually it sounds like something the whole climate research community should get together and do. But while I haven't seen the code and only have the followed the link you point to, it's not clear to me that it applies to the actual computations doing the climate modelling simulations, which is where they would presumably primarily focus their attention. Again data quality could be a problem but, since it's for a large stretch of consecutive years, I would expect its main function is to compare with retrospective predictions. In that case the researchers may have considered this a necessary distraction from what was really important: the actual modelling. This may be prototype-quality code that they felt didn't need to be polished because it wasn't time-critical and provided sufficiently accurate results given some statistical analysis of the results. The real question is what does the production simulation code, the stuff that needs to be fast and right because it's iterated millions of times, look like?

Without breaking NDAs, pretty much every game renders into the eDRAM (I'm not even sure if you can render into main mem directly). That's the piece of on-chip hardware that nets you the free AA and z-writes because of the 256GB/s and ROP units. Also, it has nothing to do with caches or VRAM...it's just a piece of write-only memory.

On the PS3 front, it does have 20/15 R/W performance to the Cell FlexIO, but it also has the 22.4 to the GDDR3. Obviously, it's important to use both at the same time.

As for GTA, they've been very, very concerned about having high quality graphics. There's no doubt about that.