The first computer I was allowed to hack was an IBM 403 printer, which I used for a Boy Scout mailing list. We weren't allowed to mess with the wires on the plugboard, so it may not count, but we could do anything we wanted with the paper tape, punch cards, and card sorter. It had very little internal memory, but it could fit a big stack of cards; 1000 cards * 80 columns = 80K bytes, and I think the character set had 48 values (so you could call them 5.5-bit bytes if you wanted.) And the Model 026 keypunch ran on vacuum tubes.

The PDP-11 probably had 24KB of RAM, maybe 32KB. I think they upgraded from an 11/20 to an 11/44 after a year. It was based at the local university, and a dozen or so high schools time-shared on it, using RSTS-11 and programming in BASIC, with Model 33 ASR teletypes.

The first computer I owned was an HP programmable calculator (I forget if it's HP-21 or HP-25. 49 words of program memory, 4 words of stack.) The next computer I owned was a retired 386, because there was no point in owning a home PC when I had a terminal into the machines at work.

The first computer I ran myself was a VAX 11/780, which had a huge 4MB RAM that required two cabinets. Our application really needed 12MB, so I played a lot with virtual memory for a few years; after a few years chip densities improved and we were able to afford to upgrade it to 16MB, and suddenly the application ran in an hour instead of a week. (We could have probably done that upgrade a year sooner, saving a lot of work and getting better results, if the bean-counters hadn't thought that capital budgets and labor costs were entirely different kinds of money.)

My current work computer has 4GB of RAM, and [grumble] 32-bit Windows on it, which is the current annoying-640K-equivalent. The hardware would be fine with a 64-bit OS, but the IT department isn't. I am connected into a larger VMware server, which probably has 48GB, and most of my VMs are 1-2GB. And I've also got a window connected to Google - I don't really know how much memory it has :-)

I've got an HTC Aria. Haven't been able to get HTC Sync to work on Win7. Can't upgrade the phone OS without HTC Sync, and it's a custom HTC version of Android instead of vanilla Google. And as far as I can tell, I need to update Android to get it to talk to the newer HTC Sync?

Dropbox encrypts each of the steps - your PC to their server, their server to their storage, their storage back to your PC/phone/etc. That's very different from user-controlled encryption, where you've got the keys, Dropbox only ever gets cyphertext (which it might wrap another layer around for extra security), and if the FBI hands them a warrant, they've got nothing useful to hand over.

It's somewhat of a business model problem for them, though - if they want to start adding lots of extra features, like Evernote's conversion of data between formats (OCR scanned pictures, read email via text-to-speech, etc.), they need access to the plaintext, but I have no intention of outsourcing my plaintext.

Ok, my home PC is actually running PATA/133, but it's still a lot faster than my DSL connection.

And yes, your 3TB drive may fail over the next five years, but you can buy two of them and do mirroring or incrementals.

I used to live in Sea Bright NJ, which is a barrier peninsula community consisting of a bunch of sand, a sea wall, and some bridges and roads connecting it to the mainland. 200 years ago, the Sandy Hook end of it was an island, and it seems to want to become an island again, though the Army Corps of Engineers periodically pours another $10m of cement onto the sea wall to tell the tides to stop.

I knew I was renting the place I lived; some of my neighbors thought that they actually owned something. I lived on what passed for high ground, about 3 feet above river level. Downtown would occasionally flood during the winter. If the sea level rises much at all, the place is doomed.

Yeah, gangs are partly about violence, but a lot of that is also about money, specifically the money they make selling black-market drugs. Legalize marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, and you've pulled the financial rug out from under them. They'll find better things to do.

It's one thing if Anonymous Coward gets fired from $BORING_INC and whines about it. But this is a story about a really cool well-known hardware geek getting fired by a really cool well-known games company because their believed-to-be-interesting culture is a mess and doesn't have a clue about hardware. That's news.

And it wasn't all that long ago that the tech news was excited that Valve had hired Jeri, because they wanted to do something with hardware that would obviously be amazingly cool since they were willing to start a whole new hardware group to do it and obviously must have some kind of vision about it, and also because our friend had gotten hired by a really fun company.

Yes, SEO is a business term. The technical term for it is "lying to search engine robots so they'll tell people your page is more interesting than it actually is."

There are other people who can help make your web site more interesting, or make it more accessible to search engine robots. Most of those people call themselves web designers or editors or content specialists or people who've spent 15 minutes reading Google's advice.

There are some variants on Morris dancing that are traditionally done in blackface. It's not African blackface, it's English coal-miner blackface.

On the other hand, I also play old-timey American music. There's a really good group called the Carolina Chocolate Drops who talk about the African-American roots of much of that style of music (obviously banjos, but other aspects as well), and they've said that they're probably the first generation of African-Americans who could play that style of music without their parents smacking them for doing something related to the old minstrel shows. Stephen Foster wrote some really good tunes, but you just have to play many of them as instrumentals and not try to fix the lyrics...

I last went to one of those 20 years ago. It had stopped being an actual interoperability demo a few years earlier, but there were still some techies there as well as marketers in suits. It was the smaller Atlanta version of the show, and I was in town for a class. I ended up having dinner with the folks from a small East Coast software company that I knew a few of from Usenet, and they appreciated being able to refer to something that had happened at Pennsic without having to explain what Pennsic was (I hadn't actually been to it, but SCA was part of common techie culture.)

It's not whether they're physically attractive, it's whether they're dressed to be professional or attention-getting. The person in the booth-babe dress doesn't know your product, though neither does the guy doing the magic-show shill and giving out yet another iPod to the person who picks the card with the correct three buzzwords on it. (And neither does the restaurant worker running the espresso machine, but after dragging all over a trade-show floor I'll still appreciate your company for giving out coffee instead of making me go out and wait in line at the snack bar.)

Trolls are smelly cave dwellers. Most engineers have enough sense to wash ourselves, and if the marketers want us to do multiple shifts they'll provide multiple sets of whatever company-logo shirt they want us to wear this show, or tell us to wear basic blue shirts. (And the last time I was "unshaved" was decades ago; since then I've had a beard.)

How do you make your engineer or developer seem credible? Have booth staff who make sure that everybody at the booth knows everybody else, so if a visitor wants to talk to a sales person they get the right sales person and if they want an engineer they get the right engineer (either directly or brought over by the sales person.) And, y'know, make sure that the product you're trying to sell is appropriate for the convention you're trying to sell it at.

(And I won't ask about fezzes.)

Ok, earlier today there probably were more men wearing dresses and high heels around here than women wearing Dr Who t-shirts. But that's because the gay pride parade was today and "here" is the San Francisco Bay Area. Normally, I'd guess there are more women wearing Dr Who shirts.