Why do you think the iPhone was/is the hottest thing going? Hint: it's not the hardware, and it's sure not the carrier...

'Pretty much he can't talk or think about the PS3 for some time.'

I wasn't aware that the only things one could say about the PS3 were related to cracking its protection schemes and pirate! (or, okay, 'traffic in copyrighted works'). He can talk about the games, he can talk about the OS, he can talk about the hardware, he just can't, y'know, talk about how to circumvent any of it. Really, this seems like a relatively reasonable restraining order all around, at least by the metrics for such things; it stops the specific (alleged) infringing behavior and doesn't strike much more broadly than that.

Perhaps the reason the court didn't overturn the encryption restrictions is because the defendant didn't challenge those restrictions? The judgement in the linked-to article seems relatively clear (even if by omission) that the only restrictions challenged were the three restrictions (to use their lettering and wording) (A) on 'Use of Computer for Non-School-Related Purposes', (B) on 'Use of Instant Messaging or Social Networks', and (C) on 'Use of Computers Contaminated with Viruses or Unwanted Software'. If the defendant didn't request to have the restrictions on encryption (which are certainly there so that the juvenile justice system can track his communications) overturned and made no request for the total overthrow of his probation conditions, then I'm not sure the court even has standing to unilaterally throw out the encryption provision, and certainly it's little surprise that they wouldn't do so without being explicitly asked.

God, the 99/4a was a horrible system. Not bad as a games machine, but the worst possible machine to get a budding young coder (one of the most locked-down systems I've ever seen; even PEEK only came in extended basic and that still didn't get you POKE, and doing fast graphics was all but impossible unless you were an expert assembly coder and sprung the $100ish for their assembler). I still haven't forgiven my parents for that.

Parsec was also flat-out excellent, and it had one of the best versions of Miner 2049er out there, but that appeared on so many systems that it could hardly be called a hidden gem.

So far as I know, Knuth has done essentially zero work related to the P/NP question; a lot of algorithmics and tons of fantastic work in combinatorics, but I can't think of a single significant result he's contributed to complexity theory. While it's not impossible that he could have some sort of 'outsider breakthrough', it seems almost infinitesimally unlikely given the mathematical context and techniques that have had to be developed for similar complexity problems. My money would be on either a formal open-sourcing of the TeX codebase or the development of a full HTML5 rendering engine for TeX along the lines of the system that mathoverflow.net uses.

The reason why PageRank 'has to be' linear is essentially mathematical; treating importance as a linear function of the importance of inbound links means that the core equations that need to be solved to determine importance are linear and the answer can be found with (essentially) one huge matrix inversion. If you make importance nonlinear then the equations being solved become computationally infeasible.

What's interesting to me is how close the connections are between PageRank and the classic light transfer/heat transfer equations that come up in computer graphics' radiosity (see James Kajiya's Rendering equation); I wonder if there's a reasonable equivalent of 'path tracing' (link tracing?) for computing page ranks that avoids the massive matrix inversions of the basic PageRank algorithm.

While it's unsurprising given that the current Unreal Engine is still in active development and a ton of commercial games are still being developed and shipped using it, it's worth pointing out that this isn't a source code release; instead, it's something much closer to an elaborate mod engine, with generous swaths of behavioral scripting but no real ability to get 'under the hood' as it were. Still, kudos to Epic for this; it'll be interesting to see who picks up the ball and runs with this.

Especially in a case like this, where there are other tightly-correlated variables. Why is the authors' presumption that it's the cosmic rays (or lack thereof) that are regulating tree growth, rather than solar and sunspot activity itself? It seems at least as plausible to me that sunspot activity correlates to some other solar features (e.g., solar irradiance) that would have a more natural and direct effect on tree growth than cosmic rays.

Strictly speaking, there aren't any seriously new methods of multiplying numbers here; even the techniques they use for handling multiplicands larger than the computer's memory (sectional FFTs, using the Chinese Remainder Theorem to solve the problem by reducing modulo a lot of small primes) are pretty well-established from things like computations of pi, with this group offering a few improvements to the core ideas. What they did provide, and what sounds particularly promising, is a library (judging from the article, likely even open-source) for handling bignums like this that they've made available for general use. It'll be interesting to see if anyone else picks up this ball and runs with it.

...depending on your moral stance; the company (which unfortunately owns a host of major computer book publishers, most notably Academic Press, Digital Press and Morgan Kaufmann) has had a small host of scandals, mostly concerning exorbitant journal fees and 'sponsored' pharmaceutical journals (they were the publisher behind the Merck Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine scandal, if you recall that). MK and AP publish some of the finest books in the industry, which makes this that much harder a moral stand to take, but it's worth evaluating how you feel about the publisher before you consider going down that route.

Despite waning console sales, orders for PS3-related hardware have risen sharply.

'related' is an odd word to see there; what 'PS3-related' hardware would this be, and where's the evidence for this random assertion? Is this meant to imply that Sony's suppliers are getting more orders for some of the hardware used to build the PS3 (which could mean more PS3s in the pipeline but could also be wholly unrelated), or just a consolist claim that Sony is doing better than its sales figures would indicate?

...that Google licenses this to scanner manufacturers and we see this at a consumer level at some point in the future? I know I'd pay good money for a book scanner that doesn't need to have a 'book edge' (which you already have to pay through the nose for)...

The Apple ][ version (and probably others, but that's the one I played) of Karateka had my favorite Easter egg ever: while there was nothing to indicate this, the original floppy was two-sided. Inserting the floppy upside-down would bring up another copy of the game, identical in every way -- except that it was flipped over (and inverted left-to-right, IIRC); title screen, all of the character's movements and animation, scores, all of it. It may not have taken that much effort to do, but it's brilliant in its simplicity.

Nonsense. The non-software side of software engineering -- project planning, development methodologies and the like -- may be divorced from Computer Science, but modern CS has a deep and lengthy relationship with modern programming practice and software design. Formal correctness principles (and proofs!) inspire type-safety, functors/functionals come from recursion theory (with a small splash of category theory), generic programming also has deep roots in category theory and denotational semantics... and that's without ever getting into the algorithms that are still at the heart of modern software. All the finest engineering principles still wouldn't have produced something like PageRank without developers who had an intimate knowledge of Linear Algebra and Markov Theory.

What are your relevant browsers (and platforms), and what is Flash giving you that couldn't be achieved with (a) good CSS and DOM scripting code talking to a back-end server, or in a worst-case scenario, (b) Java running on the user's system? Yes, the latter requires a user install, but so does Flash itself -- neither Firefox nor IE comes with it pre-installed...