"Which is more impressive: Wi-Fi hotspot in 2013, or E-ink display in 2008?" sounds like a new iteration of " Quien es mas macho ?"

"X-Wait" doesn't mean it's never coming back... if you notice it, it means that response time is slower than you expect but it still might come back. Many mainframe block-mode terminals and application "servers" like CICS (CICS is most analogous to Tomcat though the comparison isn't exact) "lock" the terminal until the transaction response is produced, to keep people from entering hundreds of transactions in a row and losing track of which response goes with which transaction. So, if a transaction is delayed for some reason, your terminal is still "locked". Impatient people don't like the situation, reset the terminal emulator, and enter the transaction again - but the only effect of that is to throw away the result of the first transaction when CICS goes to send it (because the terminal session was lost) and put your transaction at the back of the queue. That's not to say that things _never_ get hung up in the locked state, of course there are failures where the response never comes back, but it's good to pick some amount of time (30 seconds, 1 minute) to wait before going through the "throw it away and start over" process.

I don't need or want my watch to check my e-mail, flash when I have voicemail or any of that stuff. I'd be happy with a watch just smart enough, with a very very simple API, to allow me to design and download new "skins" to the watch when I feel like it. It would have a screen no bigger than my current Timex (including the bezel), and have these basic UI elements:

1. Background
2. 12 or 24 hour time
3. Digital or analog display supported
4. Analog display Hand designs - including transparency for those people who just want a little dot rotating around or whatever.
5. The font for the digits; perhaps a separate one for the day/date display
6. A button to cause it to brighten, dim, or be blank when I want it to not glow in the dark
7. Download one or two alarm sounds

Since I don't want to change the watch theme extremely frequently, I'm OK with micro USB to do that, I don't need wireless. Of all of the above, the most important point is to _not_ make the thing look like I've strapped some cellphone to my wrist!

Plastics are primarily made from petrochemicals - i.e. petroleum-based, so their prices fluctuate with the price of oil.

I hate to be pedantic, but 5081 Hollerith cards had 12 holes per column, which means you could actually encoded 12 bits per column if you wanted to. 12 bits x 80 columns = 960 bits per card, or 120 bytes. 120 x 3,000 = 360,000 bytes; divide by 1024 = 351.5 KB

"I'm just a simple caveman, ..." with a mainframe background, so I have a question of curiosity here At what point does the bandwidth/throughput of the DMA start limiting the performance of your backup? In my world, DMA for I/O is called a "channel". We have many, and while there are a lot of nuances we could discuss, basically we try to segregate the I/O for the input to backup (disk) and the output of backup (usually tape) , and have the backup task process in parallel as much as possible - my nightly backup, for example, runs 9 parallel tasks, 9 being the limit that this particular backup program has. I could run multiple instances of the program, but then I have to have mechanisms to make sure I don't back up the same disk twice between two concurrent executions; with one instance and 9 tasks I can just say 'back up everything that's online at the moment'. So, the throughput is limited by the performance of the slowest devices, multiplied by the parallelism we are able to achieve. In the PC / server environment, does the DMA limit the I/O capability?

Chaos Monkey start up get working Chaos Monkey is a hoot Chaos Monkey's preferred new target is instance of a group... (the rest is left as an exercise for Coulton fans)

Isn't this the Lytro camera concept?

This is not the answer you're looking for... Could you post a reply here with whatever you chose to do?

Perhaps the discovery of graphene will be viewed as the event which tipped us over into the Singularity !

I believe "graphene" is single-molecule-thick silicon, isn't it?

1. As many have said, this is Windows on a blade, in a frame that is part of the mainframe box
2. It will most benefit Windows-based applications which access mainframe things on the back end (such as GUI .Net apps with DB2), because the servers are attached through a high-speed internal network.
3. The system management tool for the hardware will provide unified management of the z/box and the blades, which will help some folk.
4. There actually was a "Windows" implementation on the mainframe at one time, Bristol had ported Wind/U (a Windows API implementation) to z/OS Unix Systems Services - but after some pushback from Microsoft I believe their license to do so was revoked.

Let's not forget that Palm had a lot of good experience developing simple UIs for use on portable devices and they had some good design ideas for not wasting battery life in applications, either. Some of the PDA functionality that Palm was so good at wouldn't be bad to have on a Kindle, really.

We might drop our subscription to our paper, but we have elderly people living with us who prefer their news (and *their* crossword puzzle) on newsprint. I, myself, don't really think it matters what medium my news is delivered on, as long as it's a good news organization (competent at gathering and reporting the facts). I think it also depends what company owns your paper. When Knight owned our local paper it was pretty good. Gannett bought it, and ever since it has shrunk in size, the national news page is now basically a facsimile of the one USA Today prints, and their moves to be "conversational" and "blog-like" have detracted from their ability to convince me that they're a serious news organization. It is also difficult to trust that a news organization is giving me the news correctly when they don't bother to copy-edit what they write any more: as long as the spell checker passes it, it goes in the paper - hence, multiple instances of things like "meat" for "meet",

What is your philosophy on software tools? Do you prefer to use a lot of small pieces, loosely assembled, using scripts to join things together and get things done, or do you like to find a software suite (such as Office) and work within that?