...were all the AT&T ads being shown as I viewed the pictures.

...so many to choose from.

this is a real, working device. Though, in the case of a nuclear reactor, you want the opposite effect.

I know several people who are very happy about this news, and I admit I actually have no idea who he is or what series this is the next book of. I know, Google is my friend, etc., but what I'm really asking is, and this is the perfect place to ask, "Why should I read this series, especially given that it seems he seems takes an awful lot of time to complete a book". Sounds like he'd give Knuth a run for his money.

I'm honestly not trolling: I'm really interested and am just looking for more subjective information about what this whole series is "about", and what people like about it.

Okay, I'll turn in my geek card now.

...Said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also seriously: turn it into a one-stop-shop for all things FSF/Open source, etc., that users can just get, a la the Android and Apple app stores. Such an app store would include things like Blender, GCC, LibreOffice, Linux itself (multiple flavors), all the way down to code files.

The store could be configured so that it would be easy to donate to the projects, even if you don't actually download the program, with them taking a small cut (a la the Apple app store) to provide the exposure.

The key thing, in my mind, is that there are just so many awesome programs out there, and it's hard to keep track of them all; one simple site, structured well, would go, in my mind, so far to raising the visibility of many projects that are just as good, if not better, than commercial apps, but don't have any easy way to get their software in front of users.

What's interesting is that it seems Apple's product announcements are the only remaining tech that gets everyone talking, whether pro or against, people do talk about it. Dell might have released half a dozen new systems last week, but who'd know? I was in a tmobile store the other day and saw a number of Android-based handsets that I hadn't heard of. And even though I consider myself a geek, I have very little idea what the Xoom is, other than a Motorola tablet, and more to the point, why should I care?

I'm not saying that we should care about Apple product announcements, but Apple seems to be the only ones who can generate any significant buzz about whatever it is they're announcing.

What I mean is, what IBM products will be the beneficiary of the tech they developed to make Watson; DB/2? WebSphere? You've gotta think that the IBM execs only agreed to go forward with this whole thing with some thought to being able to leverage it in other products.

Personally, I've love to think this was a "pure research" thing, but I doubt anyone really does that anymore (though I hope I'm wrong).

As one of the two dozen people who got the "System going down now!!!" messages back in the late 80s, then waited for half an hour for the Vax running Ultrix to come back, I agree with the sentiment, especially since walking away from the terminal was essentially relinquishing it to the next person who was going to kick you off anyway.

The problem is that now you've got a box with relatively few actual logged-in users, but a whole lot of applications that can take awhile to start up. On one of the boxes we have, we have multiple instances of Oracle, WebLogic, and some other daemons, some home-grown, some from other software packages. And while it's not 30 minutes to get back to a running state, it's about 5-10 minutes, and those are very long minutes when you've got users screaming about the money being lost because the site isn't up.

Even on my Mac at home, I have to be careful about just rebooting because other family members may have been doing something important, and not everyone hits the 'save' button 30 times a minute like I do. I've gotten some angry looks at home that match the ones I get at work for exactly the same reason; I'm very very reluctant to reboot before asking everyone, anyway (and even then it doesn't always help...)

According to my clock, it's now 10:45 EST. I checked the links above but nobody as posted what the "big announcement" was all about.

Given the $$$ for the boxed set, which was way more than a poor college/post college programmer could afford, I promised myself I'd get these books when volume 4 came out. Over the years I've read through and copied, a lot of times by hand, his algorithms while sitting at B&N or someplace, and I always would finish by saying "Why don't I just buy this and save me the trouble?" Then suddenly everything was on the internet, and I could refer back to my notes, and then I didn't need to look at my notes any longer, but I kept wanting to buy the books, if anything to show gratitude. Now that the 4th is out, I'm going to do it.

It must have been 10+ years ago since I last played a game on the PC, switching over to consoles. Damn right I'm gonna be picking this up. Think I'll break out my original copy of DN3D and give that a play-through as well. Hmm...wonder if it plays okay in DOSBox...

Funny enough, I was just thinking about this insofar as my backup disk died, while the main disk in the machine is still running fine. I've listened to enough TWiTs and the like to know about Drobo and checked out the site. I like that the size can be increased over time (up to whatever limit the firmware supports in the enclosure). I was thinking I could also justify it by getting the version that sits on the network as a NAS and use it for all my Time Machine backups, etc.

I also have a separate external disk (not a Drobo or NAS or anything fancy) that I do an overnight copy of all the important files using rsync with the disk plugged directly into the Firewire 800 port, then I take the disk with me to my folks house and let it sit there. After a week or two I bring it home and the whole process repeats.

I've also got a private vpn to a Linux machine I set up, but even though I did a full update on it for backup, rsync takes forever (many many hours) to determine what files need to be updated/added, and the machine gets pretty bogged down. Still working on a good solution for automatic offsite backups...

I'd be interested to know what others think of the Drobo before plunking down the $$$ for one.

After convincing my boss and *his* boss about the benefits of Skype, yesterday was the day I was going to demo it to show how it works, benefits, video, etc.

Suffice to say, the demo did not go well.

I use GWT. It's a pretty nice toolkit for web pages that is all Java; it compiles the Java to Javascript so there are some classes that you can't use (AWT, Swing, etc.). I've found the performance to be good (certainly better than the big Flex apps I'm using it to replace) and being able to stick with one language through everything is a big plus. You can still use CSS to format the output, so you don't have to stick with a single look or have to dive into the html/javascript to change it.

It's definitely an interesting take on an idea dominated by things like JQuery, Delicious, etc.