These are not so common anymore. Most devices use existing OS platforms depending on the task. - time/resource critical? real time OSes - GUI/multimedia/telephony? Android - a platform for you app? Linux

Dev tools are very dependent on the hardware platform. C is common, as is C++. This is also very vendor specific. Intellectual Property add-on's for different micro's, etc.

You really should consult an expert to get guidance - you can probably do the work yourself, but making the right initial hardware choices matching the requirements will help get everything else right afterwards. Once you have hardware chosen, the rest will fall into place.

I work at a research and design firm, our projects are making custom hardware for people who don't have the expertise or time. Our most frequent customers? "We got this started and now ..." Save yourself the headache of getting half way into the project and discovering a problem you can't solve, then need to hire a consultant to fix it, which will entail redoing and eliminating features because the initial decisions won't support the desired outcome. Make a consultation, and get set on the right path from the start.

Since the fastest way in the market to make a million dollars has historically been to start with two million, in todays markets one would need to start with 10 million.

Today 99% of profitable market trades are automated. You will neither have the hardware infrastructure, technical accumen, or market/insider knowledge to EVER compete. You may eventually acquire a sufficient technical understanding. Individually you will never gain the other two.

If you want to "gamble" then I would suggest you figure out how much money you are willing to lose. If it is less than five digits, you will have neither enough for learning nor enough to survive setbacks. Initial minor choice: take this cash to Vegas rather than Wall St.

Once you have your trading account setup and funded, leave it alone for the next month. Watch market news. Read analysis. Join trading forums. Once you are reasonably fluent in the lingo and action, go back to your trading account. Second decision point: IF you are still interested in losing all that cash sitting in the account (think of what you could have used it for this past month, or how much it will accrue in your IRA/401k/saving account), then start tracking sectors which appeal to you.

Develop analysis to track stocks/sectors/etc in such a way that you feel you have insights to offer into the above discussion venues.

Now, the hard part. If you have spent sufficient time to gain understanding, and still have an interest in spending even greater time, then you are ready to start gambling for real.

You will have developed specific sectors/equities which you are interested in trading and so will have a reasonable idea about what to bet on. Do so with 1/4 or 1/3 of your cash. Decide entry, exit and bail out prices. Ignore these at the certainty of loss. Make a buy order, keeping your perviously intuited prices in mind. Wait for either a profit sale or a stop-loss sale. After sale, assess every step of you process. What was accurate? Wrong? Unclear? Resolve all these questions.

Repeat this process until you have no more trading cash available in your account.

Final decision: Either: scrimp, scrounge, beg, borrow and steal another stake; deposit into account and enter a lifelong addictive passion of passing your own money into the coffers of "others." OR: acknowledge you have neither the time, interest, expertise, insider knowledge, infrastructure access or capital to continue this gambling and walk away.

Option 1 will cost you money, health and familial ties. Option 2 will earn you great wealth and free time.

Good luck. Have fun storming the markets and don't say you weren't warned.

Do you mean that 99% of all profits end up with HFT firms?

But, the point being missed is that OF COURSE people don't look the same "in day to day life" because those social media pics are just a moment of one day. If the prof happened to meet the person moments after the social media picture was taken then ... he would have concluded that "people present themselves truly as they are in reality" ...

My point, the point ignored in the article, is that Social Media is a self-reflective, self-curated snapshot. Not a continuous, objective representation.

so much ethno- ego- centric decision making around animals ...

Perhaps the aliens thought that some stupid deaf hunam sent it.

However after a year the drought will still be - unmoderated and with even worse water policies.

But, if you can afford the water, Cali is still the same - although it's harder to see through the haze of selfie sticks and REI gear.

Only, much more of everything. This is, inevitably, for the worse.

Why?

Which is too say nothing about today's websites has offered anything really new since the first webpage did even before that.

Twitter Revolution? not about twitter, it's about the millions who went into the streets (with and without twitter).

Cloud Sharing? In 1990 all my data was housed in the Cloud, my apps ran in the cloud and I was happy to have a slice of the VAX so I could send messages to my mate in the other computer room.

New Browser features! Yay! stuff it that the browser is already unsafe, slow and cumbersome - make it look Different and call it Better.

The point here is that the Web has always been the get rich scheme for half baked ideas ... as it ever was.

Nowhere ever has any Internet based service been free. Someone Somewhere has had to pay for all of it. The only thing "new" about what this author is pining about is for the Johnny Come Lately who entered the Internet, is they assume too much -- they assume they are entitled to a free service and shouldn't have to be bothered about how it is provided. Just like they are IRL.

Then what you saw was NOT a VRAM artifact. Aside from OP clearly stating it is a re-boot issue, powering off the laptop would have removed power to the video RAM chips -- thus they would have lost their stored data.

What is likely you saw was a screen saver program displaying a random image which it found on the laptop hard drive. How this came to be found (assuming it is what you saw, just to give you the benefit of the doubt) would be very hard to guess without the laptop and it's configuration.

But I can clearly recall that I thought at the time precisely that: "how is that even possible, powering off the laptop should have cleared the video memory, and this laptop didn't have a Windows install for years!" Yet, there it was, a Windows desktop with one window (or dialog, can't recall precisely) open. (I don't recall how I knew it was from its old Windows install; it might have been showing some work-related information.)

It wasn't the screen saver; IIRC, I used the "blank screen" screensaver (or some other equally simple screensaver), not a "slideshow" or "random" screensaver.

Yeah, it's hard to believe. I myself would have found it hard to believe if I hadn't seen it. I even took a photo, but it was several mobile phones ago, so I'd have to search through my old backups to see if I can find it.

The only explanation I could come up with was that the video memory on that laptop for some reason retained its contents as long as the laptop battery wasn't removed (while the laptop had been powered off many times, its battery had not been removed), and the Windows driver used the video memory in a different way than the Linux driver, so that desktop snapshot never got overwritten. Then one day a glitch made the "read the screen contents from here" pointer point to it, and so it showed in the screen. It's ridiculously unlikely, but I couldn't come up with a better explanation; it's even more bizarre in that the "ghost" image was perfect, with no visual glitches.