As long as they keep giving out free tablets to developers at GDC, they can delay it as long as they want.

I have a hard time caring about this. The default is download is Google. An alternate download site offers Bing. Either way, the default is easy to change, who cares? Change is good. Embrace it.

Siemens hole has already been used to rape Iran (Stuxnet fun). Doesn't get much more rapey than that.

You're exactly right ... the power used by businesses far exceeds the amount used by even busy households. Corporate ACs in 20 story buildings use far more electricity than people running appliances at night in their homes. Peak will remain peak, and even in the worst case, 'smart' enough grids should be able to distribute the load across the 'down' cycle, instead of everything running at 2am on the dot.

Because I can't tell...

Meh. 15k drives, multi drive arrays, there's no reason to overclock CPUs anymore, and there's no reason to overclock hard drives. More cores scales better than overclocking, and more spindles scales WAY better than overclocking.

Orgrimmar:DATA admin$ df -h | grep disk7
/dev/disk7 18Ti 238Gi 18Ti 2% /Volumes/DATA
Orgrimmar:DATA admin$ date ; dd if=/dev/zero of=test.bin bs=16k count=10240000 && du -sh test.bin && dd if=test.bin of=/dev/null bs=32m ; date
Thu Jun 30 22:47:45 PDT 2011
10240000+0 records in
10240000+0 records out
167772160000 bytes transferred in 240.477549 secs (697662466 bytes/sec)
156G test.bin
5000+0 records in
5000+0 records out
167772160000 bytes transferred in 139.259221 secs (1204747226 bytes/sec)
Thu Jun 30 22:54:06 PDT 2011



Server has 8G ram, so some of that may be in cache, but certainly not all of it. Extrapolate as needed.

Because no vendor has ever said run iptables/ipchains/ipfw to prevent exploitation of a bug in Linux 2.0/2.2, Freebsd 4.x, etc, right?

You may not be the intended audience. If you have to carry a bare bones phone because (for example) you have one provided by an employer, or you cant have a camera (security reasons), or you don't want to upgrade and lose your ancient awesome phone plan, carrying an mp3 player that also doubles as a browser / calendar / email client / GPS / everything else is convenient and awesome.

If you just want it to play music, it's way too expensive and a waste of money.

Remember: not everyone just wants music.

If your bike cost you a couple hundred million dollars, you'd consider yourself a competitor too.

Personally, I put the blame less on fundamentalists and more on decreasing importance of education in the home.

There are dozens of examples (single mothers with multiple jobs and multiple kids who just don't have time to parent, illegal immigrants raising kids that accept no-skill jobs as manual labor as sufficient for a lifetime instead of working to get an education and work in a skilled field), but the basic problem is that kids don't believe that they need a real education to live.

The problems with K-12 education go WAY BEYOND mathematics.

4 coders ignores the fun parts defining requirements, assigning tasks, testing, QA, regression testing, all the fun things that the first group neglected that caused it to be unfinished.

Sometimes youngsters look at a task and go "That's easy, I could totally do that in 2-3 months". Then there are people who have done it who stand back and laugh at them for being naive.

They're no more trapped than companies stuck with precompiled, third-party software/drivers for, say, RedHat 9 or Fedora Core 3.

Tis life, my friend.