philosophus

"Future" police state?

How is this different from the hundreds of aftermarket fans already available? This article implies that no one has ever thought to redesign computer fans before, yet if you take a glance at NewEgg, there are 1841 listings under the "CPU Fans & Heatsinks" category: http://www.newegg.com/CPU-Fans-Heatsinks/SubCategory/ID-574

It claims "the company’s fans are half the size and achieve 35-40 percent greater thermal performance than traditional PC fans." What is the definition of "traditional PC fan?" Stock fans?

I don't believe he said it makes no difference.

"there is only who has the military power to dictate terms." That's generally how these things work, yes. What were you expecting?

Fairly sensible advice. One quibble I have is the idea that computer science departments are somehow shortchanging students by not teaching them business skills. If you want to learn business, take some classes from the business or economics department. Or ask for advice from a businessman. Computer science professors should be teaching computer science, not business. It's kind of silly to expect otherwise.

Well, I think you could be a bit more specific than that and reasonably say something like "If speed is a high priority for you, then C++ is often a good choice." That's why PC games are generally written in C++.

Should be interesting to see how they define "bad."

Kind of off-topic but the Korean term for a Samsung type of company is Chaebol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

I guess this might be focused on the consumer end, but if you're looking for this in the enterprise, you can get it from IBM and Oracle. You can buy Oracle (Sun) hardware, Solaris, WebLogic, and Oracle database and never use a non-Oracle product. Same with IBM.

And maybe I'm cynical, but "unified ecosystem" sounds a lot like "total vendor lock-in" to me.

TLDR: A little, but if you read between the lines you can still figure out which games are worth playing.

Maybe I'm being nit-picky, but it's not "entirely self-sufficient," as it still needs light from an external source.

Are there better quality images anywhere? On the Antartic Heritage Trust site it's just a crappy Flash slide show. Would be nice to see high res JPEGs.

So doctors get paid less than, say, used car salesmen, pawn brokers, payday lenders, etc?

What exactly is the point of ruining their contest?

I realize this article is from 2010, but it could have mentioned AMD, which does have a 5 GHz chip available now. It requires liquid cooling however.

Yes, did you notice that Salon edited "Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen?"

Salon's version:

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen Nobody knows my sorrow Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen Glory Hallelujah

The original: Nobody knows the trouble I've seen Nobody knows but Jesus Nobody knows the trouble I've seen Glory hallelujah!

How is believing in religion different than believing in irony and pluralism?

No idea, probably just a mock-up.

"becoming the go-to technology in Enterprise[y]"

Hmm, I work for a company that processes insurance claims. That's enterprisey, right? Let me tell you you'll get a blank/'are you crazy' type stare if you suggest node.js here (rightly or wrongly). We use programs written in COBOL running on AS/400. That's insurance/banking enterprise software. The very thought of running some trendy hipster WWW-popup-box-turned-server-side "programming language" like JavaScript for anything -- anything at all -- is likely to be met with disgust. Like I said, this might not actually be the right attitude to take, but rest assured the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" attitude still prevails in the truly enterprisey enterprise.

Care to explain? We just lost two wars, were embarrassed by Putin over the "red line" in Syria that turned out to be an empty threat, Iran is moving towards nuclear weapons, Hagel said a few days ago he wants to draw down the Army to pre-WWII levels, and now this with apparently no response from the US.

I don't either, but this is the way the world works. Exiting powers create a vacuum. Expect to see more of Russia and China asserting themselves on the world stage now that the United States is no longer a credible military power.

The literal meaning of the individual kanji is not the same as the entire word. You might want to do a bit more research into what a geisha actually is ...

Life's a marathon, not a sprint.

Not quite. We can compute any determinate process, perhaps. (Although as Gödel‎ showed, self-reference introduces computational paradoxes even in closed, limited, artificial, formal systems: how do we compute "this statement is false?") You seem to believe that consciousness is essentially computation, and perhaps you're right. You may be wrong though -- the nature of consciousness is one of the trickiest, most intractable problems. It's an open question. Again as with Gödel‎, self-reference introduces problems. If we believe that consciousness is a mechanical/chemical operation without innate intelligence, then any statement about consciousness is itself a product of a certain balance of chemicals in the brain only. So the whole idea of getting to the truth about such things is a pointless endeavor.

"does not mean that a computer can understand itself" -- not sure I entirely agree here either. My computer seems pretty good at understanding itself: right now it's telling me its internal temperature, what programs it's running, CPU and memory utilization, and so forth. In fact, it probably understands itself much better than I do -- at billions of computations per second, I certainly can't keep up. I'm being cute, yes, but I'm also suggesting you seem to implicitly accept that there's a certain type of self-understanding or consciousness that computers don't have, but living beings (in particular, humans) do. Whereas before you said your brain is just a computer ... ?

Stupid.

I had a similar experience with a very basic Android app I did for a Coursera class. It took me about an hour to finish it, and then 3-4 hours to figure out that the test cases would only run successfully using one particular Android virtual device at a particular API version. It didn't work on any other AVD's or on my phone. This was an exercise designed by a compsci professor at a major university. Who knows how many additional hours would be necessary to determine the exact reason for the error?

I think that was a little joke.

SquareEnix sells some ported versions of older Final Fantasy for around $15, but I doubt many other companies could get away with that.

These are good. Guild Wars 2 is also worth a look. However, I am enjoying not having any in-game purchases and instead paying $14/month with FFXIV. It's much more relaxing to just pay your $14 (it's not that much, you can't even see a movie for that much anymore), you get the entire game, developers get paid, new content every 2-3 months, etc.