http://lanyrd.com/ is a pretty good repository of conferences in general and has a good listing of technical conferences as well. As everyone mentions, it depends what your actual responsibilities are.

I believe engineers generally hold non-technical departments in contempt because of the seeming inability to understand technology and the lack of common sense exercised. Here are a few reasons I have cringed when working with non-engineers over the years:

1. 1. Unable to detect phishing attempts
2. 2. Installing crap software on their workstations infesting it with trojans
3. 3. Making demands that clearly show a lack of research / thought
4. 4. Office politics devoid of reasoning / rationale
5. 5. Lack of transparency in decision making

While it is true that engineers generally value logic and reason (how else could we do the job others cannot do?), I believe engineers are more likely not to put up with people's bullshit to the extend everyone demands. There is a time and place for sentimentality and everyone shouldn't be catered to because they are a precious snowflake

I hope you live or die by that opinion Sonny. Like everyone else, I believe you and I make comments about coworkers and bosses to the same extent this teacher makes about her kids, so do these comments and feelings preventing us from being effective employees? Does gossiping with coworkers introduce instability within the ranks? Honestly, the teacher is reacting as humanly as the rest of do, so I think suspension is a little borderline as a simple reprimand might be enough. Reality is that people's kids suck, which is why wife and I are seriously thinking about raising cats.

If you actually read the article, it is fact less about the actually situation with the kid and is pure theoretical on "how" someone could cheat to cause it. This attention whoring troll really should drive back to where he is from and checkout the kid's controller before he goes slandering the poor kid. Jerk

Unfortunately, I am prevent from looking anything up as search engines, searching, and typing are all patented ... doh!

Everyone has already chimed in about the merits of learning foundational programming languages like C and C++, but I wonder if the defense of "this is what the industry is" should be the main reason for getting rid of languages. I liken this to forcing US students to learn COBOL because larger companies and universities don't want to get rid of their mainframes. Though it is the responsibility of higher education to prepare individuals for the work force, it seems this move will only stagnant the talent pool and make it harder to advance to new paradigms later.

While reading the review of the book, I thought the reviewer's comment about the history of Vim being unnecessary to be wrong. Having used Vim on various systems including RHEL, Fedora, Mac OS X, Windows (gvim), and BSD there are some differences that catch unaware users off guard. Most Linux operating systems will install Vi as a standard editor and add an alias for Vim to use Vi. This is seems all well and good, however Vi has some pain points in particular the inability to backspace / delete characters on the current line. Anyhow, I'm not sure ignorance is the best policy especially as there are so many variations out there on different OSes.

• 1987 - Final Fantasy 1 (NES)
• 1988 - Final Fantasy 2 (NES)
• 1989 - Final Fantasy 1 (MSX2)
• 2000 - Final Fantasy 1 (WSC)
• 2001 - Final Fantasy 2 (WSC)
• 2004 - Final Fantasy 1 + 2 (GBA)
• 2007 - Final Fantasy 1 (PSP)
• 2007 - Final Fantasy 2 (PSP)

The sad part is that I have been alive for all of these and have purchased over 50% of them!

Source: Final Fantasy Release Info

Computer science has addressed this issue with a variety of algorithms. It boils down to using mutexs (mutual exclusion). Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_exclusion) has a number of algorithms that you should evaluate. The biggest problem is that once a lock is acquired, how long do you wait before you realize that the lock will never be released?

The Touch Book from Always Innovating has a detachable keyboard and a touchscreen. I've pre-ordered one, and expect to have it by September. Looks like it may be part of the future you speak of -- though it won't play Planetscape Torment on it's ARM processor... :-)

You call that irony? This is irony!

Nah, this is still hilarious, the 1000s time someone brings up exactly the same point. Who is it who doesn't have a sense of humour.

Now, there is a company that converts macbooks to table pcs.

I have always wanted a x41t myself (or the newer x61t)

The current Macbooks have a touchpad interface that supports multi-touch. You can right click on those by pressing and holding with one finger and then tapping with a second finger.

You can probably figure this out based on sales of games released simultaneously on different platforms. It won't be 100% accurate for a variety of reasons, but given a sample of enough titles in different genres, it will probably be pretty close.

I haven't done this myself but it would be an interesting project. With this data, you could at least figure out an approximate relative number of systems in actual use.

For example, if Madden 10 sells 300,000 copies on the 360 in its first month, and 200,000 copies on the PS3, and if other games were selling at that same ratio, then you could reasonably conclude that there are 50% more Xbox 360's in use than PS3's (or at least that there's at least one 360 in 50% more households than PS3). You could then look at the hardware sales data and see if that matches the sales advantage the 360 has. If it does not, then you could pretty reasonably conclude that the additional 360's being sold are either replacements for broken systems, or second 360's being bought by someone who already owns one.

I remember I did do this just for kicks in the PS2 era, because at that time the tables were turned and it was de rigeur to claim that all of the PS2's sales (especially later in its lifespan) were people replacing broken systems. But the game sales didn't support this - sales of multiplatform games always showed almost the exact same sales ratio as you'd expect given the total installed base of all three systems on the market at the time.

That always bugged me too. Why did they fly along that trench for about 20 miles when they could have just flown in somewhere near the target and avoided flying past all those laser towers?