Eh, which half?

This is legitimately the best comment I've seen on Slashdot in five years; it's so positive and humane. Thanks!

I can't tell you what a relief it's been to not have to care about Microsoft's latest encroachment.

They just can't help themselves anymore, such is their commitment to copying Google.

First do this:

https://www.tech-recipes.com/r...

Android (at least my moto x4) will still respond to the "Ok Google" hotword and prompt you to set up Google Assistant. You probably don't want that, so go into Settings > Apps > Google > Permissions and uncheck the microphone permission.

Keep an eye on that; you know all of this runs afoul of their conversion strategy so they'll find an excuse to turn it back on or tie that permission to something you actually want to do.

Honestly, I don't know if Google knows what it wants or why some people find this sort of thing objectionable.

Touche

This is Google demonstrating that their platform for abstracting a client's hardware is robust and performant. I suspect that Amiga emulation is just because it's cool.

Having this layer of abstraction protects Google from the machinations of software vendors who might want a piece of their action.

Looks like they used a Multics box at MIT. http://www.frankston.com/public/?name=ImplementingVisiCalc

Really?
http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/eclipse-adt.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/IDEs/Conceptual/iOS_Simulator_Guide/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator.html

Rather subjective. They do quite a bit more than Apple DOS or MS-DOS ever did.

Same as it ever was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Quest

Ever use a BBS back in the day?

The PC made computing accessible to commonfolk where it was previously the province of large institutions. Mobile continues this trend.

We invented a new platform. Web Applications and APIs facilitated by cheap, commodity hardware have changed the nature of human communications and learning in the last 15 years.

Huh? None of those are proprietary. If a young person chose to learn about and use Haskell, I think they'd be well-equipped to learn quite a lot about how computers work.

Because he's trying to make an interface for a convergence device where it no longer matters if you're running it on a phone, tablet, or desktop.

You know, a Unified interface. It's a hard problem--you need only look at Windows 8 to see how badly it can go wrong. Apple started to move in that direction with Launchpad too, but I don't really know if they can make it work either. In the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to sync your computing environment between all your various devices and persist settings and whatnot through the cloud (like a very distributed home directory or roaming profile).

Anyway, Mark Shuttleworth is trying to go where the puck will be, not where it is. And he's trying to do it with open source software. I wish him the best of luck.

It's amazing the kind of sociopathy one can rationalize by saying, "That's what corporations do."

First they ignore you, (IE6, "What other browsers?")
then they laugh at you, (IE7, "LOL we got your tabs right here")
then they fight you, <-----(You are here)
then you win.

No. No, they weren't.

Did you miss the "Free data" link on the website http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/mpp/freedata.html? NCDC tries to limit the charging of "$$$$" to only commercial and private entities in order to help offset the enormous cost of ingesting, archiving, and processing one of the world's largest datasets; we're not fully funded by Congress.

Charging for data is a touchy subject around here, though--the scientists, developers, customer service people, and management would all love to give away as much of our data as possible (and we give away a lot of it), but the money is always an issue.

I Groovy'd it:

println str.tokenize().collect({(char) Integer.parseInt(it, 16)})

Not as good (it returns a list), but quick...