Sure, as long as you only ever have one screen DPI to deal with and only need to support a small number of font sizes and don't ever need to print. Of course things look better if you draw them for the exact output format that you're targeting.

Timer coalescing is nice, but it's not that new. iOS and Android have done it for a while and it's mostly useful on devices that spend a lot of their time asleep. App Nap looks a bit annoying: much of the time I have apps hidden behind others because they're doing something processor-intensive that won't be finished for a while, so I hope it correctly handles this case instead of just slowing them down unconditionally. If the app is well-written, then apps that aren't doing anything won't be doing idle processing and so they will be asleep anyway. Safari Power Saver sounds like the thing that the Android Browser does in 4.1, which is quite annoying as it optimises for minimising RAM usage at the expense of responsiveness. Hopefully Apple's implementation is better than Google's... Compressed Memory is another thing that's nice, but not exactly cutting edge and also very easy to get wrong.

I bought Parallels 2. It contained a bug in their handling of IPIs that caused host kernel panics on Core 2 processors (i.e. the processor that I'd bought to run it on). They eventually found the bug and fixed it... in Parallels 3. Their solution to the problem of selling me a product that was not fit for purpose was for me to give them more money. I switched to VirtualBox and will never give that company money again. VirtualBox lacks a few of the nice things in VMWare (in particular, it wires all of the VM's memory and doesn't do deduplication), but it's quite useable.

When I had a Voodoo 2, many of my friends had no 3d accelerator at all. A lot of them bought TNTs when they came out and then kept them until the GeForce 2MX was released (it was really cheap, but still gave performance on a par with the original GeForce, so was quite popular). Sure, it was possible to spend hundreds of pounds on graphics cards every year, but as someone who was a child at the start of this and a student at the end, I still managed to play the latest games (although not at the highest settings) without spending much on graphics cards.

The Voodoo Rush was released in 1997. The TNT2 in 1999, the GeForce 2MX in 2000 and GeForce 4200 in 2002. All of them are low-end parts except for the TNT2, and so that's one low-end GPU every 2 years. That's about the upgrade cycle that I remember for people who were active gamers. Certainly not spending hundreds of dollars every year on high-end GPUs, as the original poster claimed.

Spoken like someone who has never actually written code to display text. Sure, with monospaced bitmap fonts, this is an easy problem. For modern text, you start off with a set of bezier paths representing each glyph. That's fairly easy to render, and you can just start drawing each one to the right of the previous one. That will give you blurry characters with ugly spacing, but it's a start.

So how do you fix the blurriness? Now you need some hinting telling the renderer when it should try to snap lines to the nearest pixel rather than approximate it and just rely on antialiasing. Oh, and those hints have to work on every combination of point size for the font and pixel size for the display (and, ideally, for different sub-pixel layouts) and so they're heavily parameterised. Doesn't need to be quite Turing-complete yet, but you're getting very close to Lambda calculus, although you can get away without recursion.

But you still have spacing problems. Consider this trivial example: To. Now, in your naive approach, the left hand side of the o is the same distance from the right hand end of the cross-bar of the T. This distance will be the same as the distance between characters in nm. If you see this at the start of a word, like Tool, then it will look like there is more space between To than between oo or ol and that's ugly. So now you need some kerning hints that tell you how to tweak the spacing for each pair of letters, and these need to be parameterised over every pair of letters. For a simple ASCII font, that's 2^14 combinations, so you don't want to list them individually, you need to compute them.

And that's just very basic letter layout. On a typical window, you may have thousands of characters, which all need to be laid out correctly (and deterministically, so characters don't jump around on every redraw). And so this is on the fast path. Is it surprising that it ends up in the fast path?

Both Windows and *NIX have had serious exploits involving font rendering. X used to put FreeType in the X server (which ran as root), windows used to put an equivalent in the kernel. Both have resulted in vulnerabilities from documents that embed fonts. When you have something that's performance critical (slow text rendering translates to slow window updates, which directly translates to user-perceived slowness) and depends on user-provided data, it's not surprising that there are security holes. X11 now moves font rendering to the client (although, like Quartz, it composites the glyphs on the server), so a font exploit doesn't get you root, it just gets you arbitrary code execution in your current application, for example the web browser.

No, they know it's an account that accepts email. They don't even know that it delivers mail to a mail spool somewhere, let alone that a human reads it until someone replies...

Maybe he'd like a challenge? Maybe he's tired of everyone comparing him to Jobs and knows that being compared to Ballmer couldn't possibly be worse. Or maybe there's a reason why there are 100:1 odds against him...

Wow:

When that's your best defence, you know you've been doing something wrong...

Depends on what he's done in the past. I can think of a few things I've done that would be mildly embarrassing if they were published, but nothing that would really work as blackmail. For one thing, because enough people saw the various embarrassing things I did that there wouldn't really be any sense of revelation. Most people are in a similar situation.

No, it's retarded to believe that the constitution magically does limit the government's power.

The constitution doesn't grant the government any power. Governments exist solely at sufferance of the governed. If the people wish to limit the power of the government (and are willing to accept the costs of doing so) then they can. If they wish to grant the government total authority, then they can. The constitution simply enumerates the compromise that a group of people a couple of hundred years ago were willing to agree to on what that limit should be. There is very little evidence that the population of the USA over the subsequent two centuries has been willing to enforce those limits.

The belief that the alternatives are belief in the mythical power of a piece of paper and a government doing whatever it wishes (or even the idea that these are mutually exclusive) is exactly what the grandparent was referring to.

Good requirement. When I'm paying a premium rate billed per minute, I really want to have to spend 20-30 seconds listening to a recorded message telling me how much I'm paying...

In the UK, the 0845, 0870 and 0871 prefixes all have fixed costs. The exact cost of calling them depends on your phone company - it does me absolutely no good to be told how much it would cost me to call the number from a BT landline, because I have never had a BT landline.

It's a bit of an odd requirement, because all 0871 numbers are premium-rate lines that cost 10p/minute. Simply advertising the prefix is enough. It's even more silly, because the rate that you're supposed to advertise is the rate of calling from a BT landline, the cost of calling from a mobile or a non-BT landline may be very different.

Good point. If you have cheap energy then mining the moon for other raw materials is possible and so is putting much manufacturing either on the moon or in Earth orbit. Unlike travel in the opposite direction, you don't need large amounts of energy to get things from orbit back to Earth (you do need a lot of cooling / heat shielding). I wonder what the impact on the environment would be if we moved all manufacturing off Earth...

They most likely won't go after the USA, but after corporations that cooperated with the NSA. Given that these are lots of big companies and very few of them are paying much (if any) tax in Europe, there's likely to be little public opposition to very large fines on such entities and hopefully it will mean that companies like Google can then go to members of the US government and say 'this NSA activity is costing the US economy billions of dollars a year and we'll be reminding your constituents of this and the fact that you supported it at the next election'.

It highlights the idiocy in having special laws for religious beliefs. If something should be illegal, it should be illegal for everyone. If something should be legal, it should be legal for everyone. You shouldn't get special privileges for holding certain beliefs. If it's fine for some people to wear hats or other head coverings in official photographs then it should be legal for everyone.