The Macintosh was Jef Raskin's baby. Steve Jobs hated it, and tried to undermine it, until he loved it and (successfully) tried to shanghai it. I wonder if Apple is as successful as it is as much in spite of Jobs as because of him.

Don't tease the octopus, kids!

"Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections."

It should be noted that personally I admire guys like you who do the hard work on technically exciting stuff that means something to people. I was just quoting Glengarry Glen Ross to illustrate that when large amounts of money are being moved around, to money people all else is irrelevant.

I'm nowhere near your level, but I work in the robotics field and to see the code I write move and control an autonomous device is cool beyond measure.

I have been called upon to "debug in minutes" though, as when one of our underwater vehicles is running a survey and it bobs to the surface on a mission abort, finding out what went wrong and fixing it if it's trivial is essential if you don't want to burn daylight.

You:

HFT programmer:

These guys don't give a shit about your piddly system of ethics. They're making more money than they know what to do with writing software that the guys who run America rely on every day.

... that there was an 80186 processor -- Intel's first 16-bit x86 offering. It was popular in embedded applications, but a few workstations based on it were made -- one of them being the Tandy Model 2000, a not-quite-IBM-compatible, MS-DOS-based PC which you could buy at Radio Shack. I owned a second-hand one of these, and even learned how to write assembly on it.

What I didn't learn until recently was that there was a version of Windows for this curious beast, and indeed the 2000 played an integral role in the development of Windows. Unlike its IBM cousins, the 2000 was offered with a high-res, 640x480 color graphics card as a standard option, and Microsoft was interested in implementing a full-color display for Windows. So, Microsoft developed the initial versions of color Windows on the 2000, and Bill Gates touted that fact in celebrity endorsements for Tandy ads.

The much more modular driver architecture of Windows -- a revolution in PC software at the time -- enabled it to be smoothly ported to the Tandy 2000 irrespective of the hardware incompatibilities that made it not a true PC compatible.

It turns out David Ahl is a tea-party-grade conservative. Remember "Ninja-Endo", the blatantly racist, WWII-propaganda-style smear against Nintendo? Yeah, that was him who came up with that.

As instrumental as he was in bootstrapping the computer hobbyist community, today's computing world is probably better off without folks like him in high prominence.

I've heard this variation:

Canada should have been the perfect blend of French cuisine, British culture, and American industry. But what they got instead was British cuisine, American culture and French industry.

That's just the problem. A Japanese wife is too good for the target audience of this game. Just like us, Japan has no shortage of pudgy, sweaty, repugnant turbo nerds who repel any decent girl with their offensive BO and even more offensive sexual proclivities. Hence the need for a virtual girlfriend, a computer entity which always reacts in the same sweet way and doesn't care what kind of pig you are.

The Wii makes little beeping sounds that grow and fade in volume when it is connecting or downloading.