Funny you should say that, because it's exactly what Christian orthodoxy is: that nobody can predict the time or the place of the end times. Just goes to show there's nothing new under the sun.

Oh, and if you really, really care about performance, you don't even do dynamic memory allocation at all. You figure out exactly how much you'll need in advance, do it all in one go, and let the CPUs rip.

Actually, it's more likely they're not using the standard library's malloc at all, so there's nothing to integrate. Just -lmy_custom_malloc and off you go.

Replacing malloc is pretty common among performance fetishists. Back in the good ol' days, almost nobody used the standard library malloc.

First point: HDMI is all-digital, so you don't get "aural interference from the video components". It's actually a pretty cool feature of the current batch of HD 4xx0 cards that you can run the output of an HTPC on one cable.

Second point: HDMI, in the later revisions of the spec (1.3+ or so), actually does have improved features over DVI, like deeper color support, and higher bandwidth to support higher resolution displays. (It also supports 7.1 sound, not merely 5.1. Not that you actually need any of this, but saying it's just DVI is misleading.) It doesn't hurt that the connectors are a lot smaller and easier to work with, too.

As an aside, the audio from HDMI isn't carried on separate pins. HDMI is digital signaling, it's all just bits. The reason to have so many pins is to enable more bandwidth by spread the signal across more wire pairs, not because you need extra wires to carry different parts of the signal.

Now, I'm not all rah-rah-rah HDMI (the only thing I'm using it for right now is to plug a Blu-ray player into a TV), but for home theater applications, it does seem pretty attractive.

I'm also not convinced all those connectors and slots belong to a single card, particularly in the final product. I'm more inclined to believe that it's an engineering sample designed with extra outputs for experimentation, perhaps even a dual card solution with some sort of extra bus. It'd be nice to have all the connectors you could want on one back panel, but I think it's ridiculous to believe most cards are going to have the space for them all.

Actually, it would be kinda fun if you could just take the elevator to get up to the space station.

The problem with that being that the space station goes around the Earth every 90 minutes, while a tower attached to the ground... well, shouldn't.

That does raise an interesting point about how much this would actually reduce launch costs, since the biggest energy requirement for launch is accelerating your payload to orbital velocity, not hefting it 200 km straight up.

A space elevator takes your payload to geo, and leeches the energy from a big counterweight anchored up there, and the Earth's rotation. A shorter tower is only really useful for avoiding atmospheric drag, which is usually only significant in the lower 10 km or so--a relatively short tower (like the Eiffel, only on a much bigger scale) would actually work perfectly for this.

Not to mention it'll be slower. memcpy is one of the most optimized functions in any C library. It's frequently handled as a compiler intrinsic, that can do stuff like unroll short copies, generate optimal machine code, etc.

What I don't understand is... OK, the original MySQL developers only have the right to fork the GPL-licensed version of the code. Presumably, the ability to commercial license remains solely with Sun (and I guess, now Oracle).

Doesn't that sorta shoot their old business model in the foot, where they would charge for a commercial license for non-GPL clients? Sure, fork away, but haven't they still screwed themselves over by selling out to Sun to begin with? It's not an ideal situation for them, either.

Maybe, but genitalia isn't doing too bad, either.

Shit rises to the top. Don't let it bother you. It's always the vocal minority that's shrillest.

Winning doesn't mean killing everyone. "Winning" in a game can mean a lot of different things, even including "losing"--"winning" is just whatever the game designer decides is the outcome they want you to pick. Maybe that outcome is that you sacrifice yourself for the greater good, instead of waving a flag over a pile of skulls. You have just as much freedom to tell a complicated story in a game as in a movie.

I especially like the idea that there'll be video where Marines who actually fought will have a chance to tell their story. A little more meaningful than your typical video game cutscene, no?

Ah, if the Romans only had television...

This is categorically incorrect. You can create wealth without ever trading with another country on the entire planet. The idea that wealth only comes from a positive current account is a discredited idea that dates back to mercantilism.

You know how you really create wealth? By growing your GDP faster than your population, resulting in a growth in disposable income per capita. It doesn't matter if we're digging holes and filling them again, as long as at least one party in the economy finds this valuable to them.

Let's say I write a book and sell it to you for $10. Then let's say I pocket $2 of that as profit, then turn around and pay someone else $8 to print the book. That person turns around and pays someone else $6 for paper and ink. Etc., etc.

In exchange for your $10, you've made a whole series of people $2 richer, and you now own a book presumably worth $10 to you. That $10 just became $20 of national wealth, by the "magic" of economics. And no other countries were involved, no mining of gold or printing of money, just an input of domestic labor, capital, and resources to provide a product you value.

Economics is ultimately about everyone providing goods and services to everyone else. Money is just a mechanism for keeping score of who owes who what.

At least it seems to be limited to paid apps only. Meaning if someone gives away a free-as-in-beer app, they won't have an opportunity to pester you to buy an upgrade later--it'll be as free as advertised.

From a developer perspective, I can see where this cuts off some legitimate business models, but that's probably outweighed by the interest of the users not to get a lot of free-in-name-only apps bombarding you to unlock them.

I find TV to work a lot less effectively than some alternatives. Ultimately, it's just too distracting--I've timed myself performing a task with and without the TV on in the background, and it takes much longer than if I'm sitting in a quiet setting.

Actually, I think they did a study about this with playing music in the background. All that classical music floating around your cubicle may not be a good thing...

They'll talk up all the other specs, but anyone who works in graphics is going to want an 8-bit panel on this fancy laptop of theirs. That one feature is probably worth more to a real professional than all the rest of the bling.