Look, no one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. ReactOS may be eventually be 99 44/100 % Windows compatible. It may look like Windows, feel like Windows, and act like Windows almost all the time--but it won't be Windows.

I mostly agree, with two exceptions. Well, one exception that has an interesting corollary.

There are places where Windows isn't run in order to run Windows, but because there's some kind of "appliance computer" (dental records, machine control, whatever) that needs to run a very specific set of software and nothing else, and that software happens to run under Windows.

This could let vendors who sell those "appliances" stop paying a Microsoft tax, lowering their costs.

The specific case of this that could be of most interest to Slashdot readers: imagine a ReactOS Steambox. Imagine if the Steam client knew about ReactOS, and in cases where a game wasn't compatible, made that clear. (So, you'd get less games than you do via Steam under "real" Windows, but more than you currently get via Steam under MacOS or Linux.)

My first programming environment was Basic on the TRS-80, but I never got very good with that. I wrote some trivial programs, even a wee bit of hand-assmebled Z80 machine language poked directly into memory, but I couldn't write a program of any real size yet.

Then I got a disk-based C compiler and a copy of the old 1st edition of "Kernighan and Ritchie", and taught myself elementary C over a three-day weekend. That's when it really took off.

I got better by continuing to read programming articles in magazines.

Around 1984 or so I wrote my first really architected programs, with features logically separated into functions, code re-use, separation of code and data, different builds for different deployment environments/feature sets, and an event-driven user interaction model (in some builds).

(It was a set of programs to help me run 1st edition D&D games, set up so I could run it in different execution environments, eg. with/without graphics, with/without mouse. I named most of the different builds after different witch's familiars from Shakespeare. "Graymalkin" was of course the coolest version, with all the optional features turned on.)

That is "surprisingly well" -- I expected it to be a waste for everything.

..."sleep deprivation lowers all achievement in everyone"?

Who's surprised?

(Mind you, I'm all for conducting experiments to test things we all "know". I just don't usually expect to see those experiments classified as newsworthy.)

I'm guessing that any men who actually managed to give birth themselves would be able to successfully argue for more leave.

(The less tongue-in-cheek way to express the same thought is: if the parents are a married lesbian couple, what does their policy say about the amount of time permitted? If a female parent who didn't carry the baby is entitled to more leave than a man under the same circumstances, then yes, there's no argument by which the policy isn't discriminatory. But otherwise, there may be.)

There's extensions for just about every browser. Good stuff.

http://www.ghostery.com/

My favorite temperature for serving beer (that I'll tolerate drinking) is roughly the ambient temperature of a typical cellar in Ireland in the Spring and Autumn.

Gee, I wonder why that is...

Isn't this basic high school science class stuff? Yes, condensation raises temperatures, just like evaporation lowers temperatures.

That's the whole reason human beings can sweat to cool off.

A lot of people presumably know about that. Are those people surprised that this works "in both directions"?

Renewables will finally take over when the price/performance numbers are better.

They're getting more economical over time. In particular, solar seems to have been obeying something like Moore's Law in some ways.

If that doesn't stop, then at some point renewables will be more economical than even plentiful legacy energy sources, and at some point the gap will be large enough to cover the retooling costs over a pretty short time frame.

The availability of other usable carbon sources would merely delay this, not stop it.

...if something like an upgraded/improved Google Glass takes off in time.

It's hard to beat the subjective screen size of a thing that draws on your eye.

If it's got eye tracking and is combined either with peering with other devices that have tolerable input mechanisms (phone? keyboard?) or with something Kinect-like, then sure, physical tablets may become less common.

I doubt that's what they mean, though.

Three devices? What's the state of original PlayStation games? There's a (small) subset of those that don't run properly on the PS2. Will they run on the PS4?

(I have a ton of PSX and PS2 games. Today, I keep both an original PlayStation and a PS2 hooked up in our guest room, next to the SNES, Genesis, and GameCube. I do not have a PS3 or any PS3 games, so the question of how original PlayStation games play on the PS3 isn't of interest to me.)

maybe the sysadmins liked them but as a developer i hated solaris boxen. the libraries were always years old, nothing modern would compile, the cli tools were slightly incompatible with linux scripts, ...

Myself, I hate when developers depend on the newest versions of libraries and stuff.

I run Debian on my servers. If your app can't run on top of the older versions of the libraries, then... I just don't need to run your app, at least not for a few years yet. I'll take "stable" over "modern", please.

That when Mankind actually launches ships to other star systems, the computers on board will be running a descendent of the x86 ISA, even if it's running 1024-bit words on superconducting molecular circuitry.

It's kinda worse than that, if you look at the history deeply enough and squint your eyes a little.

The 8086 takes much of its design from the 8085 -- in a sense, it's a souped-up 16-bit version of the 8085.

The 8085 was a souped-up version of the 8080 (which Zilog also cloned as the Z80, and which the CP/M80 ecosystem revolved around).

The 8080 was a descendant of the 8008. The 8008 was the 8-bit descendant of the 4-bit 4004.

The 4004, released by Intel in 1971, was the very first commercially available microprocessor.

So we're not really running a descendant of the 32-bit 386, or even of the 16-bit 8086. We're really running a descendant of the 4004, the very first mass-market CPU, from 1971.

IIRC, early versions of Windows NT could run emulated x86 software at decent speed on the DEC Alpha, but that machine was too pricey for the mass market.

I can confirm this.

I had a DEC Multia, Alpha version. Nifty little desktop machine, odd in that it had PCMCIA card slots. I used mine to help debug some Linux PCMCIA drivers, helping them become 64-bit clean (which was a big deal back around then). But I also had a copy of Windows NT 4.0 for Alpha, and I ran it sometimes.

It ran many 16-bit x86 Windows apps (like Office... 6.0 I think?) just fine.

(Hm. Still have the OS media. There a good cross-platform Alpha emulator out there somewhere?)

Does the tool let people specify various epigenetic factors, such as methylation? This is a thing that's pretty important, but that a lot of people don't understand well (and some refuse to believe there's anything to understand there).

If so, wow.

If not, this is going to have some severe limits in utility. Useful, certainly, but completely incapable of producing working DNA for, say, a human being or a giraffe.