No one writes more maintanable code than the person that believes that their code should be able to be read like a book. For that reason people that major in writing and english can turn out to be supprisingly good coders.

Not to wreck your analogy, but when I was a kid we had a carpet sweeper. It was a cheap vaccuum cleaner that, wait for it... didn't need to be plugged in. Then we decided to get an electric one because the carpet sweepers just weren't as good.

Disclaimer: I don't own an xbox. Never have, and never will if they require an always on internet connection. I do have a steam account, but I'm in the odd minority (according to loudness of form posts) that has never had offline mode fail me.

I'd write analogies for those if I had expirence with them. The only one on that list that I have any hands on expirence with is Haskell and that was only in acedamia :P

Hrmm... that's weird: Checks cnet article, "the research firm pegged Apple's U.S. smartphone share at 53.3 percent"
Ok where's that source: Follows to sub article, "Apple has achieved its highest ever share in the US (53.3%) in the latest 12 weeks"
Ok where's the actual data: No, link. Checks google. Oh here's the actual data, "This data is exclusively focused on the sales within this 12 week period rather than market share figures." http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/global/News/news-articles/US-iOS-Maintains-Lead-Among-US-Smartphone-OS-Sales
Checks dates: Ok so the 12 weeks directly after the iPhone 5 release saw 53% of smart phone sales being iPhones.

Ok so cnet is calling percentage of sales in a 12 week period directly after a the iPhone 5 launch 'market share', while the data it quotes from states that this is not market share. Aside from the dishonesty in cnets reporting that's still kinda impressive.

I wrote this a while ago, but I find it's useful to post it here:

The precondition that you can write terrible code in any language is a mental diversion. You must design languages for people that believe in intelligent design.
If there is low hanging fruit in your garden of eden, people are going to assume that someone vastly smarter then they are placed it there for plucking.
Not even God himself coming down from on high and face to face telling every member of the human race not to touch it is going to keep it from being abused.
That is the true nature of humanity and by inclusion programmers.

perl: An unorganized, but sprawling garden full of almost every imaginable fruit. Regex is a shiny sinful apple at eye level on every single tree. The only way to navigate the garden is to ask the snakes.
python: An organized garden that has one of each kind of fruit. But it's half way through being dug up and replanted into an even more organized garden.
ruby: A newer garden. Heaps of fertilizer make everything grow incredibly fast, but the trees are getting tangled and there's a problem with weeds.
c#: Someone spent a lot of money crafting this garden correctly. They also planted trees that emit a hypnotic pollen that will murder you if you try to leave the garden.
java: A beautiful garden but only when viewed from space. Every tree has exactly 1 fruit, and getting anywhere takes forever. Recently taken over by someone interested in c#'s hypnotic pollen trees.
c++: An industrial farm complete with tractors and combine harvesters, but no safety equipment. As a bonus 98% of the farm does not contain buried land mines.
c: A plot of land and a barn full of seeds. Get to work.
javascript: There's only 1 tree and it grows upside down, but you can find it resurfacing in all the other gardens. It's also sentient, growing rapidly, and trying to murder you.

See here's what I don't think you understand. Valve is not selling dedicated hardware. They are selling STANDARDIZED hardware. Two of their "Good, Better, Best" systems will be general purpose linux PCs that come pre-loaded with steam set to go full screen on startup.

I fully believe that general purpose PCs will eventually overtake consoles, but I don't think it already happened due to a single factor. Price. Now a console may currently cost more than an equivalent gaming PC, but keep in mind, current generation consoles are sunk expenses for 95% of their player base, and have been for 5 or so years. General purpose PC's are price competing against a sunk expense, and that's always a loosing battle. However that's only true until the console cycle refreshes itself.

Here's how I see it playing out. MS and Sony know that they need to release a 10 year console that is at least somewhat edges out a similarly priced gaming PC. That might buy them 10 more years of sunk expenses that they can ride on, but this very well may be the last console generation. Valve sees this and is heavily invested in general purpose gaming. If they can bridge the gap with good enough hardware at a competetive price point they may well be able to get the future on 10 years early.

We'll just have to see how everything prices out next year as it happens though.

Too many people want this. For some reason no one will ever do it. I don't understand.

The reason why the US will not switch from Imperial to Metric is simple. Metric is based on strict mathematical principals, Imperial is based on ease of use (not conversion)
This is under the assumption that:
        1. People like units that are easy to visualize.
        2. People work well with things on a scale between 0 and 10 or 1 to 100 consider:
        3. People scale things with 5 being average, [6,7] and [3,4] being large and small respectively, and [1,2] and [8,9] being exceptional.
Take for example:
Distance:
        Inches: One of the sections of one of your fingers is almost exactly 1 inch long. On many average people the 'rule' is that it's their thumb.
                The average hand is 5 inches long, if you have a 6 or 7 inch long hand, your hand is on average big, children or small adults may have 3 or 4 inch hands.

        Feet: A person leisurely walking has a 1 foot stride. A brisk walk to slow jogs run about 1 to 2 foot strides.
                The average person is just over 5 feet tall (today). Tall people are 6 or 7 feet tall while children or very small adults are 3 or 4 feet tall.

        Yards: A person at a moderate run generally has a 1 yard stride.
                Even in the US people don't use yards for much, but in American Football a down is 10 yards.

        Miles: One mile is kinda an arbitrary distance until you consider that:
                The average person at a brisk walk gets 3 or 4 miles in an hour, 5 miles at a jog, and 6 or 7 miles at a run.

Pounds:
        A rock that fits in your hand (baseball sized) weighs about 1 pound.
        While working weak people might have problems with a 30 or 40 pound box (law requires you to be able to lift 40lbs to qualify for any type of manual labor). The average person can pick up and cary a 50 pound box around as part of his daily work. A healthy adult could cary a 60 or 70 pound box.
        For laptops, you have 3lb ultra books, 5lbs for a normal laptop (but that's rapidly shrinking, mac book pros are now high 4's), and over 7lbs is considered a desktop replacement.

Liquids: In the US we use metric and imperial interchangeably. It's the one area where metric has actually stuck because wtf is wrong with imperial liquids?
        Milliliter: Generally medicine is measured in ml, but normally we fill the included cup to the specified line and don't care about the specifics.
        Pint: When you "Could use something to drink" you want 1 pint of liquid.
        Quart/Liter: When you're "Very thirsty" you generally want a liter of liquid. Most people have no idea how much liquid a quart is these days.
        Gallon: Milk is measured in gallons, and the average American family buys 1 gallon of milk a week.
        2 Liter: You go to the store for a 2 liter of pop/soda. In American vernacular the "Two-Liter" is a single unit of measurement because it's easy to visualize.

This is false and one of my pet peeves. In drivers training they teach you to stay 2 seconds behind the vehicle in front of you. Since speed is distance over time the distance between you and the driver in front of you is a simple linear function based on your speed. So for distance in feet d=2.9333*mph (roughly).

To be legal parked you can be 0 feet away from the car infront of you.
At 5mph that distance increases to 14.6 feet.
At 10mph you'd need to be 29.3 feet away.

If everyone accellerated uniformly you'd be breaking the law, because your rate of accelleration is legally capped at a fraction of the accelleration of the person in front of you. Now with automated cars these laws could be relaxed as soon as every single human was banned from driving.

They have a service for that. It's called GMail.

Straw man. Unlimited != Full speed all the time. Unlimited means that they're not limiting it. Your basement walls limit it and that's fine. Cosmic radiation limits it, and that's fine. Your other users clog up the spectrum and that's a grey area; maybe it's fine if you're making an effort to up the transmitters in the area, and maybe it's not if you're cutting costs by taking them down.

If you're paying money for software and hardware to limit, it's no longer unlimited. That is what they're doing.

Umm... The article was saying that they can cut 10x as many slices from the same block of silicon.

So they aren't making a panel 10x more dense, they're making 10 panels for the same materials cost as 1 modern day panel. Which (if you dismiss the price of buying and operating the frickin ion cannon) makes this price competetive with some fossil fuels.

The hope is in 20 or 30 years this tech will combine with a dozen or so other breakthroughs and we'll start to see truly competetive solar options.

You remember that on facebook you are not the user, you're the product? Now think of everytime your parents have asked you something tech related over facebook.

Seriously. If you're on slashdot, chances are you are the search engine.

The Judge looked at the charges, mentally tosses out the bs, then looks at the defendants assets.

Megaupload: "These guys probably won't be doing business after this."
ReDigi: "If they are guilty they're probably good for the fines."

That's probably the difference (IANAL).

Runs off to check wikipedia...

Ok you were right, there was a version of the iPod released in november 2001 that was actually much worse than the one I remember. Also yes, it was the Zen that had firewire. That is what my post said. The Zen technically competed with the second gen iPod (released 9 months later).

I probably never considered it because it was impossible to use if you didn't own a brand frickin new mac with OSX 10.1 (which came out in september 2001). It was the second gen iPod released 9 months later that let you use a windows box to put music on them, and it was a long while after that (iirc) before someone hacked it to allow linux.

So my bad. You were right, the very first iPod was so terrible that it completely fell off my radar, and it was the second itteration that I had hands on expirence with, and rejected as an overhyped fashion accessory. Seriously, the first gen iPod only worked if you had a brand new iMac to go with it. There's a bad product and then there's pants on head stupid.