"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

-- Charles Babbage

"Over half the US population is obese."

Half of the population is male as well - by your logic, half of all cases of breast cancer should be male.

"Ya, but i'm not putting together the data, I'm just telling you about it. Really, is google now beyond the means of the average /.er?"

And what's deliciously ironic about your "data" are the articles saying "All the evidence so far is anecdotal."

If you disagree with others about the relative severity of H1N1, fine. Just don't pretend you are somehow intellectually superior because someone disagrees with you.

He is attacking the belief by some that in a perfect world all software should be free. The fact is that while there should be freedom to provide and use free software, and there should also be freedom to make profit by selling software. Anything that encroaches on either freedom is against Libertarian principles.

>>>these young punks have a huge ego, but no knowledge of computing history. They don't realize that "cloud computing" is merely what we called "mainframes" back in the day.
>>>

What I don't understand, even if these young'uns have no knowledge of history, why do they think cloud computing is a good idea? Why would they want to offload all the processing onto some distant central computer, when they have a quadruple CPU sitting right here in front of them? It makes no logical sense.

My own computer may "only" be a Pentium 4, but it's still about 12,000 times faster than the old 8-bit machine where I used to write book reports. If that ancient machine could handle the workload than my current computer certainly can - there's no need to connect to some distant mainframe.

Because the OS certainly has an ability to slow the whole process down... There many things Windows does to handle setting up, managing and tearing down the processes to do all that number crunching. If Windows does a better job there, then the performance (especially when splitting the job up over many cores) will be better.

Oh yeah, Doom3 was painful. I played that for all of a couple of hours before figuring that I'd probably seen all there was to see.
I know Q3 isn't that dark, but OpenArena is *so* much brighter, I don't see why Q3 wasn't. Though this was played on two PCs, it's likely there's a difference in display settings.

Great...because people aren't crappy enough drivers with an interface that they understand and have been using for decades.

People misuse the word "CPU" the way they abuse the word "cloud computing"? Really? I've not heard anyone saying they need to buy a new 1920x1080 CPU, or a new 10 gigabyte CPU for their machines.

I never played Duke Nukem and as such have heard the line you're referencing, but based on your description, I'm sure that William Shatner could have nailed that line perfectly.

There are a number of important differences when comparing mainframe/workstation systems to the modern notion of cloud computing. One significant difference is distributing computational problems to a number of concurrent processes on (possibly) distant systems. Another is that where the mainframe were typically placed close to the workstations, the servers in the cloud can be placed remotely. A third is that the workstations often were unable to function without access to the mainframe, modern desktops are able to use the advantages of the mainframe/cloud as well as the advantages of an autonomous desktop.

Yes, it is, because the car still functions 100% correctly without those unnecessary options. GM doesn't build a Camaro and then the dealer pulls the engine and charges you to have it reinstalled.

This is what's^wthe only thing thats actually good in Windows Mobile.

FTFY

I disagree that downloading content for free from the Internet is a right. However, I would say that there is no right to be granted a legal monopoly on the production of any item, physical or not. This in effect makes the result the same, that users would be capable of downloading whatever they can get access to, but it is a possibly large disagreement on why they can do this.

I wonder about a system wherein copyright is not automatic or even guaranteed, a system where each producer of IP (say, an artist) establishes a contract that has a clause prohibiting the copying of the IP in question. It would be very hard to enforce, and likely not work in practice, but is has the benefit that the only people who can be charged with anything are those who agreed to and broke the contract. And then it would be a contract violation, a situation in which I feel judges are less likely to issue mega fines for copying music.

I am not opposed to paid DLC, though I usually have played the game to a point where some minor expansion packs can't rekindle that interest when they come out.

The most ridiculous PAID DLC was for Tales of Vesperia. You could actually buy 5 levels for your character. In a non-MMORPG. So you don't have to level up in a single player RPG.

That's a little like buying an autopilot for a Truck driving simulator.

This is.... such a horrible idea. Office '07 is complete garbage mainly because of the 'ribbon' system. Intuitive my ass.