I drive a T221 at 3840x2400 resolution over dual-link DVI - but it has to be at a reduced refresh rate of 24Hz. (Actually I have two monitors with this setup, each in portrait rotation, so the total desktop is 4800x3840.)

I should clarify - the GPU is certainly capable of rendering a 4000-by-4000 frame buffer, it's still only a hundred megs or so of memory. Sending those pixels to the monitor may require something beefier than a standard DVI link. Even dual-link DVI is not enough for high resolutions at a decent refresh rate. The new Displayport 2.0 standard has four times the bandwidth of DVI, which is getting there. So what's needed is for onboard graphics to move to Displayport 2.0 outputs; but the GPUs are already fast enough, if you're talking about text-based uses, static images like photo editing, or relatively low-resolution video like playing DVDs or Youtube.

Can your average onboard video card drive monitors at that resolution?

Yes, without any difficulty. It's 2012. Unless you want to play 3D games - in that case, just drop down to a lower resolution to play your game fullscreen, and go back to normal res when you exit.

Obsessive 'gamers' who want to play the latest titles at maximum resolution and maximum refresh are very much in the minority, and they have always tended to buy separate video cards anyway.

Uh... where can I buy a 'cheap Chinese tablet' with a 15-inch 2800x1800 display?

Yes, the problem is that most consumer devices don't offer a way to limit the bandwidth for anonymous users. I'm happy for my neighbours to share my connection for web browsing and email - a drop in the ocean compared to a typical download limit - but I get pissed off if they use it up downloading movies. (On the two occasions this happened with two different people, they were both apologetic and paid for the extra download allowance I bought. So it turned out okay.)

Conditional execution is nice, but it really interferes with modern architectures. The ARMv8 core is a fully speculative, out-of-order with register renaming implementation.

Conditional execution lets you avoid a test and jump. If you rewrite code to have conditional jumps instead of conditional execution, there are still just as many code paths for the speculative execution to worry about. But I am not a chip designer so there may be some reason why it's easier.

I do wonder whether speculative out-of-order execution is truly the 'modern' way, though. For single-threaded code, certainly. But if your system is going to be multicore anyway, it might be better to spend the silicon on having two simpler, non-speculative cores rather than one more complex one.

CSS was designed to let you specify a user stylesheet with 'important' properties which override the site. So you could force links to always be underlined if you want. It's a pity that mainstream browsers do not provide a simple way to configure this.

Yes I got a call from 'Microsoft' or something like that. This was after, for the first time in my life, I had bought a new computer and sent off the warranty registration. So I thought heck, maybe the OEM does employ people to phone you once you register your new $2000 computer. (That's not what I paid for it, but the list price a couple of years ago.) The woman at the other end asked me to bring up Event Viewer, which I did, but became annoyed and testy when I pointed out that 'error' messages in the log are entirely normal and counting the number of them is not a useful activity. "If you are so clever", she asked, "can you tell me what an application is?". I declined to answer, so she filled me in: "an application is what unifies your hardware with your software". I guess this was in the script if any mark asks the question about what these event viewer log entries are. Of course I didn't proceed to the remote access website she then wanted me to visit so a 'technician' could take control of my PC. With hindsight it was silly to even stay on the phone, but I was so chuffed with the idea that buying a new PC might even include some customer support, in this day and age, that I was ready to believe these were people acting for Panasonic who had helpfully decided to call their new customer. Duh....

I think this is the best wax figure ever.

Until a new slightly taller and lighter wax figure is released next year.

There are two scenarios here. One is where someone inserts himself in the middle, creams off $0.01, so you pay more but the original seller doesn't receive any more. However, I do not believe that is what happens. (If you place your order in the market to buy at $1.00, why would the seller ignore it and sell to the high-frequency trader who put his order in a millisecond later?)

The other scenario, which I believe the article is talking about, is where bricks are trading at $1.00 and without high-frequency trading, you might be able to buy ten of them for a dollar each. Not by putting in an order for ten at once - that would push the price up - but by being a bit stealthy and buying only one or two at a time. Now, with high frequency traders, somebody will notice that you are buying one or two bricks and guess that you're likely to buy more. They buy some, pushing the price up, and hoping to offload them later. But not all of the difference in price is creamed off by the high frequency trader; most of it goes to the original seller. So instead of buying ten bricks at $1.00 each, you pay $1.10 each, the high frequency trader skims off $0.01, and the seller receives $1.09. So the seller, who might also be an 'ordinary investor', gets a better price for the bricks he is selling.

We always imagine that there is some magic way to interpose yourself in transactions and take a cut, but markets don't work like that. The seller would not bother to trade with the high frequency people unless they were offering at least a slightly better price than he would have got otherwise.

12 volt power bricks are produced in China in enormous numbers. Provided you use a power-efficient CPU like ARM or Intel's forthcoming Haswell chips, there is no cost issue with powering your server from an external PSU or perhaps two of them. Sure, if you want to build a 2006-era PC with a gas-guzzling CPU and massive heatsink, spinning disks and internal fans, it would be expensive to get an external power supply capable of supplying enough current. But today's components such as SSDs are a lot more frugal, provided you're not a 'gamer' who requires the fastest-clocked CPU and GPU possible, and we can expect this trend to continue for a few years at least.

It's not clear that high-frequency trading is applying 'an unseen tax' to individual investors. As many have noted, the broker fees you pay have fallen greatly in the past 30 years, and a lot of that is due to automation. People assume that any price movement due to high-frequency trading must be at the expense of 'the little guy', and the article commits the same fallacy:

They also contend that ordinary investors are paying more for their stocks, not less, because computerized traders pick up information about stock orders and push up prices before orders can be filled.

But hang on a second, who is selling the stock which an 'ordinary investor' wishes to buy? Might it not be an 'ordinary investor' on the other end of the trade too? In which case, if the price is pushed up, one 'ordinary investor' benefits just as much as another one loses.

There are two sides to every trade, a buyer and a seller. A change in price is a gain for one side and a loss for the other. A rise or a fall in prices is not good or bad in itself.

Is there a consumer GPS unit which combines GPS and GLONASS in this way?

Because you want a laptop running Linux, and you like high-resolution displays, and the Macbook Pro 15" is the only laptop on the market with a high-res display. It's sad that Dell, or HP, or Lenovo are incapable of selling interesting new hardware rather than increasingly crappy me-too copies of what everyone else has, but that's the world we live in.

Quite right. Read The C++ Programming Language. Classes and objects are not explicitly mentioned until quite late on, although the early examples do use standard library concrete types such as string.