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Until the domain's new owner sets up a robots.txt, causing Wayback Machine to retrospectively block public access to the archived copy of a document. See debate about this a year and a half ago.

Except they don't do that any more, unless the domain's new owner explicitly blocks the internet archive's user agent. A disallow * policy is now ignored.

I think this were mentioned in an earlier slashdot post, but here it is again since it seems relevant: https://www.bit-tech.net/news/...

their intent seems difficult to gauge though, even the sum they invested is up is an unknown, but I think when we look at what's happening each day - new spectre releases, patents lapsing, proliferation of ARM and so on - it looks more and more like a bad idea to base your entire fortune around a single processor.

to be more specific, I think going forward we'll see ISAs factor more and more into security decisions, especially as fpga stuff gets cheaper, and this could change the ecosystem up a lot. there was a recent-ish article in another thread about intel losing ground in the server market to ARM, so you could say the shift is already happening.

alternatives like RISC V, would stand to benefit a lot in this, though in which capacity and to what extent is hard to tell at the moment. It's worth noting ARM were scared enough to wage a smear campaign on RISC V recently, so at the very least the future may be interesting for awhile.

My guess is that they probably won't anytime soon. Not necessarily because it's impossible, but simply because they're the premium hard drive product and will be priced in such a way. Perhaps once they have sufficient capacity to supplant spinning disks in even the entry level bargain PCs and notebooks, the price difference between the two will erode further, but I don't think there are enough companies manufacturing the NAND flash memory to really drive prices down through competition and the biggest players are facing a price-fixing lawsuit at the current moment so they may have been conspiring to keep prices artificially high.

you can... until a vendor like e.g. lenovo releases a laptop with a UEFI BIOS where you are not permitted to remove the boot-locked settings that would *allow* you to install a GNU/Linux distro... https://www.bit-tech.net/news/...

Risk averse CEOs who don't want to sink in the R&D to make carbon based chips because there is risk of it not working.

A synthetic diamond transistor was first built and tested over 13 years ago at 81GHz: http://www.geek.com/blurb/81gh...

More recently they developed a 300GHz Graphene transistor, but that was still 7 years ago: https://www.bit-tech.net/news/...

The technology is there and proven, but scaling it up to processor scale would be a massive investment and a big risk.

This has been out for a while. Dolby bought BrightSide which first pushed individual LED backlighting for HDR LCDs AFAIK.

Maybe they have now gone to individual pixels instead of white LED? Same idea, just higher res and probably lower cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrightSide_Technologies

2005 BrightSide Demos
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/10/04/brightside_hdr_edr/8

This is a friend of mine:

http://forums.bit-tech.net/sho...

Honestly, just look at the hardware involved. Not a fucking amateur or new to this stuff.

And the problem? BIOS incompatibilities when putting multiple cards into a PC. Spotted by a serious of highly-obscure and technical hints, and a lot of research.

But everyone they asked suggested power. "It's just power, it's all plug and play nowadays", in effect. And yet, it was nothing to do with that. This person isn't an idiot. And the BIOS is one of the last things I'd consider in such circumstances. And they were just very lucky that, actually, the BIOS update exists and works. I imagine a great many smaller motherboard manufacturers just don't give a shit.

Or would you like the stories I can tell of random and otherwise untraceable BSOD on gaming PCs? Change the card from AMD to an nVidia and they disappear. No, it doesn't matter what version of the drivers you are using and, no, you don't have to be using Windows 10 or anything "new". At least one of the manufacturers you list just has drivers so bad they BSOD for no discernible reason on a correctly "working" and fitted card, no matter how many replacements you try, no matter what you do to the power and card setup, but a similar-but-more-power-hungry nVidia card will "just work".

It's NOT just as simple as plug and play. It never really has been. Today it's much better, I'll grant you, but that was kind of my point in mentioning my history. But weird incompatibilities still exist, especially if you try to save on the motherboard to get a more meaty PSU or graphics cards.

Everything from PCI-E driving on the BIOS firmware, to resource management in the drivers can cause you problems. On top of the overall power, 12v rail, cooling, and other physical issues that just aren't obvious when you just buy a card and slap it into a machine.

Sure, if you choose only well-tested, reviewed and quality components, and know what you're doing, and forget about the troubles you had at installation because you're an expert and just kept everything up-to-date and tried all the combinations, everything works.

But for the average person building a PC? Forget it. Almost every one I've seen, from teenagers trying to save money to overclockers trying to show off, is far from plug-n-play.

iMessage will never be coming to Android

Isn't that what they say everytime before they do the thing?

* MP3 players are junk and just get left in drawers... http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...
* Macs will never run on Intel http://www.theinquirer.net/inq...
* Ipods will never do video. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo...

* We are not working on a phone. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo...
* People want keyboards, tablets are going to fail http://www.wired.com/2010/02/s...
* Information about a tablet is incorrect http://www.googl8.com/85998192...

Now consumers have mostly rejected it

You say that as if it were, in fact, actually true. I really respect your willingness to demonstrate such a high level of "flexibility." ;)

Vizio announces its first consumer 4K TVs, kills all 3D support
Sky drops 3D channel
BBC drops 3D programmes due to lack of interest
The End Of 3D? ESPN Drops 3D Channel
DirecTV scales back 3D content due to lack of demand
Poll: Is 3D TV dead? Do you care?

A quote from the last one:

3D's biggest issue has always been lack of 3D movies and TV shows, however, and they're only getting more scarce. ESPN's highly hyped 3D channel quietly got put to rest two years ago. Many other 3D-only channels, like 3net, Xfinity 3D, Foxtel 3D, Sky 3D and more, are also gone.

Some download services, like Vudu, still offer 3D, but the total number of 3D Blu-ray movies has dropped off significantly. They peaked in 2013 at 77, up from 66 and 68 the two years previous. Last year? 44, and only 22 so far this year. There will certainly be more in the second half, but I doubt we'll break 40.

Maybe you liked it, I'm not to argue with personal taste. But it's barely been mentioned as a feature for a couple years now, there's no plans for 4K in 3D in the new Bluray standard and nobody really seems to care. It works for most people at the cinema for a few hours every now and then, but at home it's been a dud.

Considering the reach of the alphabet agencies I think it more likely that they just gave him back a completely 0wn3d machine so that they could watch him.

http://hackaday.com/2010/03/31...

http://hackaday.com/2013/03/14...

http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18...

http://www.extremetech.com/com...

https://www.avforums.com/threa...

Most any WiFi firmware artificially limits the radio -> http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/proj...

http://www.ilounge.com/index.p...

Whoa, your car has hidden features? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Extra cores on your CPU? No way! http://www.bit-tech.net/hardwa...

Cripple phone features? Oh noes! https://www.techdirt.com/artic... https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

More than one HAM radio have been found to be subject to software tweaking for improvements in scan speed and frequencies covered.-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Got a RAID card? Some of them can be crossflashed to gain features BTW. Or you can pay thousands to the manufacturer for some features (*cough*PERC*cough*) http://www.servethehome.com/ib...

Gains can be had by flashing custom firmware to your DVD\BD RW drives but I didn't feel like spending any time past a cursory search to find this. http://binflash.cdfreaks.com/ http://www.rpc1.org/viewtopic.... http://dvrflash.rpc1.org/

Firmware being used in external HDD has also been found to be crippled vs a standard drive, this didn't used to always be the case....

Here's one that's just an upgrade with features the manufacturer didn't include (see also ANY Jailbreaking post ever)

http://lifehacker.com/find-out...
http://lifehacker.com/5942229/...
http://www.digitaltrends.com/p...

Oh look, your camera now supports RAW? Thought that was only for pro cameras not P&S pocket models...

I could go on and on with examples but suffice it to say yeah it DOES happen and it happens fairly often. It happens most often with system that have a full OS, often Linux, where a firmware flash can give you all sorts of features (OpenWRT or Tomato anyone?) but it also happens in cameras, lab bench tools, TVs, stereos, and just about anything else that is driven by software. Want more turbo boost in your car? Software baby! Want that printer to register an empty toner cartridge sooner? No problem!

Tired now, think I've made my point?

Now, if there is any good chance to smuggle a bomb into the white house, this is it.

Perhaps, if his clock looked like this.

microsofts track record on their gaming studios:

FASA http://www.bit-tech.net/news/g...

Ensemble - shut down

Aces Studio - shut down

Xbox Entertainment Studio - shut down

Cabonated games - shut down

Rare - couldnt release one game as good as before they were bought and they used to have a lot of massive hits.

Bungie - split from microsoft in 2007 http://seekingalpha.com/articl...

Lionhead - has only really worked on one game franchise microsoft bought them - fable

Press Play - Who? Went from multi platform developer to windows/xbox only after purchase.

343 - founded by microsoft to make halo stuff

black tusk - founded by microsoft to develop future gears of wars games which microsoft bought off Epic.

Turn 10 - founded by microsoft, makes forza games for xbox only.

Twisted pixel - who? Makes windows/xbox games only

Big park - who? Makes stuff for the kinect only

Here's a guide to how this is done professionally.

Memory speed can technically still be the bottleneck on large memory footprint games like BF4; see the bit-tech review for some numbers on that. The people chasing after PC gaming benchmarks reflexively use the fastest memory around though, and if you do that it's less likely for memory to dictate the speed limits.

something tells me I've read this before.

http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/p... (viability study from this year)
http://www.neowin.net/news/78-... (MSCI corporate venture to provide 3G backhaul from LEO (news from 2011). To date, I think about 0 have been actually deployed).
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h... (oh yes, this is one of the more recent ones by Google - again, nothing came of it).

I don't think any of the microsats being launched from ISS are intended for trunking wireless. ICBW.

Nvidia PAYS for removal of features that work better on AMD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...

Reading the link you posted above, it seems like a bit of a non-factual load of waffle. Nvidia deny paying, Ubisoft deny being paid, and the only sources mentioned are anonymous speculators we have no way of knowing are not just a few paid ATI shills.

Nvidia pays for insertion of USELESS features that work faster on their hardware

http://techreport.com/review/2...

Wow, another example of amazing journalism here.

Some guy moaning about Crysis having loads of detailing that is only used in the DirectX11 game. He give loads of examples of this, then posts a summary page of wild speculation with no sources quoted other than his own imagination. He never asks any of the companies involved, he just posts a bunch of stuff about why this might be the case.

I have another possible suggestion as to why this was the case: Crytek like making stuff look overly detailed and include graphics detailing that means their games continue to max out graphics cards long after they are released. They always make they games playable on the budget cards if you crank the detailing down, but they also like catering to people who buy a new graphics card then go back and play a few oldies that they had to crank the detail down on previously. Crytek also probably also quite like their games being used in hardware reviews because their games hammer the hardware.

Nvidia cripples their own middleware to disadwantage competitors

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

Ok, congratulations on actually posting an article that was real journalism, with quote sources and not just made up of the authors own conjecture.

The issue here though seems to be that there was an optimisation, moving from x87 to SSE that they did not do on a bunch of legacy code. Instead they rewrote it from scratch, which took slightly longer to use SSE.

This was not them intentionally doing something to hobble a competitor, this was them not doing anything to help them quickly. That is very different.

They did however ultimately fix it:

"PhysX SDK 3.0 was released in May 2011 and represented a significant rewrite of the SDK, bringing improvements such as more efficient multithreading and a unified code base for all supported platforms"

Intel did the same, but FTC put a stop to it
http://www.osnews.com/story/22...

There is a massive difference here, Intel's were intentionally hobbling the code their complier created based on finding a competing vendor name in the product string. They did not say "wait for version 3" like the PhysX case, they just did something then just sat their tight lipped until it went to court and they were forced to change it.

This is something FTC should weight in just like in Intels case.

As I said earlier, Nvidia made the all important change to use SSE when running PhysX on the CPU without the FTC being involved.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h... - What? It's just story speculation here

http://techreport.com/review/2... - the article doesn't state that Nvidia pays anyone, it's a statement you made up yourself.

At this point I decided not to waste anymore of my time after looking up the first 2 links

Nvidia PAYS for removal of features that work better on AMD

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...

Nvidia pays for insertion of USELESS features that work faster on their hardware

http://techreport.com/review/2...

Nvidia cripples their own middleware to disadwantage competitors

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...

Intel did the same, but FTC put a stop to it
http://www.osnews.com/story/22...

so how exactly is that not Nvidias doing??

Nvidia is evil and plays dirty. They dont want your games to be good, they want them to be fast on Nvidia, any means necessary. They use "means to be played" program to lure developers in, pay them off and hijack their games to further nvidias goal.

For example how come Watch Dogs, a console title build from the grounds up with AMD GPU/CPU optimizations to run good on both current gen consoles, is crippled on PC when played on AMD hardware? How does this shit happen?

This is something FTC should weight in just like in Intels case.

they pull shit like this world's greatest virtual concrete slab:

http://techreport.com/review/2...

or this
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...

>improvement was to the tune of 20 percent as a result of DirectX 10.1 on ATI cards.
>there was some co-marketing between Nvidia and Ubisoft

All just to make AMD look slower.

Concerning power consumption, technically probably not, but I suppose I'm referring to home users. Even if you work out all the math for difference in electricity costs, it's not going to make a difference unless you're putting heavy loads on your computer every single day (busy servers, your whole life is gaming, etc). Realistically for home users the difference would only be a few $ per year. Of course it's obvious for data centers that they will save money by paying more for power saving CPU's. For home users the computer is idle most of the time anyway. Reference for cost/CPU wattage: http://www.tomshardware.com/fo... http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2...

Seagate already announced 8-10TB disks for next year: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h... .
Now if SanDisk can deliver 16TB SSDs in 2016 then they might be indeed ahead of the hard-disks but not in 2015.

With IBM also making progress in this realm, the days of silicon could actually be numbered.

IBM: Graphene as it is won't replace silicon in CPUs

This is good nerdy news to know! I googled futher, and attached citations. Thanks!

"Tom's Hardware" writes they had to sell off a lot of their facitiies:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/h...

Western Digital's hopes of turning the hard drive industry into a duopoly have been dashed as the US Federal Trade Commission demands it sells its desktop hard drive manufacturing facilities to a competitor.

Western Digital had previously hoped to purchase Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, manufacturer of previously IBM-made hard drives, in a deal valued at $4.5 billion. While the FTC is allowing the deal to go ahead, it has a major caveat attached.

The revised terms of the acquisition require Western Digital to sell selected Hitachi desktop hard drive-related sales and manufacturing assets to rival Toshiba within 15 days of the acquisition.

Dutch language review follows. I had to copy paste into Google Translate but this person gives the drives a thumbs up at review-time, and wrote if it failed they'd update the review, which hasn't happened. And they wrote specifically with 'green' NAS requirements.
https://tweakers.net/productre...

Now, how to tell if their 3Tb drive is from the former Hitachi Fab?

Developers use DirectX because its superior and more advanced, and does more things right.

OpenGL takes longer to be updated and they took paths that led the format to be cumbersum and less optimized.

DirectX became king after version 9 was released because they essentially scrapped the old API, made many renovations that were necessary, whereas OpenGL has been identical from the beginning. Apparently very antiquated and doesn't do modern things as well.

its true that OpenGL is used on other platforms, but only because its the only solution and DirectX isn't available...

Here is John Carmacks comments which basically state the same thing.. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/g...

like this? There's many other such instances of various companies doing exactly that. Personally, I feel that if the RIAA/ MPAA really wanted to fight their cyberbattle, they should be deploying fake torrents with system-wiping malware. Let's just go 100% shadowrun...MPAA can hire some runners in some "other nation" to build software that erases .avi, .mp*, erases your TCP/IP stack, then hoses your MBR on the HD. Within a month or so, they should see a serious drop in piracy. At the moment that is illegal, but they will never will such asynchronous warfare via the courts against downloaders (which I am one of).

The main reason I am a downloader instead of cable is I despise commercials. I don't dislike the idea of knowing about new products, but the manipulations of emotions on such a wide scale, with no regards to the affects of said manipulations have on our cultural psyche, just to get me to buy stuff...that's OK, I'd rather have an 1-2 hour delay in my watching and enjoy it without commercials. If there was a legal way to pay per-episode and just easily get my ,AVIs, I would as long as I didn't have to install some more special software. HEY HBO, GIVE ME MAGNET LINKS FOR .AVI's AND I'LL PAY YOU.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/03/30/linux-atmel-microcontrollers/1

well, yeah. it hasn't. since the port needs external memory module..

I go by Cinebench myself. It seems completely neutral.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/06/12/intel-core-i5-4670k-haswell-cpu-review/6

Perhaps you should read the second chart here. That's testing encoding with Handbrake (Which is essentially a graphical frontend to x264). In that particular test, the i5-4670K wipes the floor with the comparably priced FX-8350, even without the former's huge overclocking potential.

Maybe you should look at the actual performance numbers. Intel is performing better than AMD, and at a cheaper price point. And unfortunately, I'm an AMD fan, running a Hexcore Bulldozer here.

And for those computations, at the desktop level, 1 Intel core is approximately as fast as 2 AMD clocks. Intel has MUCH better IPC (Instructions Per Clock) and better re-ordering and lookahead than AMD, and have since the Intel introduced their "Core" infrastructure. This is why a mid-range Intel part (Say, an Intel Core i5-4670K) can handily (and significantly) beat AMD's top-of-the-line desktop CPU (An FX-8350)

And for those computations, at the desktop level, 1 Intel core is approximately as fast as 2 AMD clocks. Intel has MUCH better IPC (Instructions Per Clock) and better re-ordering and lookahead than AMD, and have since the Intel introduced their "Core" infrastructure. This is why a mid-range Intel part (Say, an Intel Core i5-4670K) can handily (and significantly) beat AMD's top-of-the-line desktop CPU (An FX-8350)

Found it: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/02/10/the-big-cooling-investigation/1

FTFA:

Scientistsâ(TM) work follows a consistent pattern. They apply for grants, perform their research, and publish the results in a journal. The process is so routine it almost seems inevitable. But what if itâ(TM)s not the best way to do science?

- yeah, that's a false choice.

Private companies do science all the time because they need to push their knowledge forward to stay competitive.

By the way, who is preventing any scientist from publishing his papers anyway he or she likes at all? Who is standing in their way just throwing the stuff on some free Internet site, like, I don't know this or even this silly site?

Well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_acquired_by_Microsoft_Corporation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Microsoft_Corporation

http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/07/list-of-companies-that-pay-royalties-to.html

http://www.serviceteam.co.uk/diy_articles/10_companies_bought_by_microsoft.html

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2009/08/26/ms-nearly-destroyed-us-and-bungie/1

You mean when he said this?

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/03/11/carmack-directx-better-opengl/

The cache on your CPU is "stupid-caching" everything too, making it compatible with different OSes. Think about that. You're stupider than you think.

*facepalm* One of the major design decisions in CPU architecture is cache optimization. Over half of the silicon in your CPU chip is cache. Saying that CPU caching strategies are as optimized as the drive referenced above is so stupid that God probably had to kill a kitten.

TSMC is at the forefront of producing chips, yes. The word that's not there is successfully. It's not entirely their fault, except that it is.

Examples: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/04/19/qualcomm-28nm-capacity/1
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/130937-tsmc-still-struggling-with-28nm-qualcomm-and-nvidia-threaten-to-jump-ship

Unfortunately not. AMD's best (Piledriver 8-core FX-8350) is getting it's ass handed to it by Intel's basic i3 parts these days. And I am very disappointed, as I recently "Upgraded" to Bulldozer. Beginning to regret that decision more than a little. :/

I'm not the guy you asked but I'll give 'em to ya Woofy...here is a review of FX 8150 VS i5 2500K that gves the tale of the tape with the numbers you ask for on page 2. i linked to the conclusion because its title sums it all up nicely...why so bad? And the answer they give is pretty obvious, not really better than the X6, sucks more power, lousy single core performance, and the prices are noncompetitive against the i5 2500k.

Its damned sad but in this case the numbers don't lie, they use real world tasks for their benches and the 8150 was found to be lacking, with the currently being sold for $89-$119 Thubans matching or even in a few cases beating FX 8150 while having a third of the price knocked off. So if you want AMD on the desktop the answer is Thuban, on the laptop liano, and the tablet netbook market bobcat... pretty much anything BUT the Bulldozers.

A unit is is not a pair of full cores, but almost. It is not in the same leauge as hyperthreading. Almost all parts are duplicated, or has enough performance to serve both cores without slowdown. As I see there are only special situations, which cause the two cores to collide (like the issue with shared libraries on randomized addresses, occassionally causing frequent cache collisions - already solved in Linux kernel), but in 99% of the workloads the pairs do not slow down each other.

For example, contrary to the common oppinion, the two cores in the module can do floating point operations parallel, the only restriction is that they cannot do 256 bit operations. On the other hand if only one core in a pair does 128 bit operations it can grab the other half of the floating point hardware of the unit. I think it is a very clever design, but the OS and compilers do need time to adopt.

See this article for more information: AMD Bulldozer - What's a Module, what's a Core?

> The research into frame-rate latencies is really interesting,
Indeed. There was a VERY interesting article last year on Micro-Stuttering And GPU Scaling In CrossFire And SLI
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html

> but the whole idea that *anyone* knowledgeable about PC gaming would have *ever* denied that the CPU was an important factor in performance is ridiculous.
Not exactly. Battlefield 3 doesn't use more then 2 cores.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/11/10/battlefield-3-technical-analysis/7
http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page7.html

If you have a high profile AAA title with that level of quality of graphics it kind of makes you wonder why other games "need" 4-cores?

That's a myth. Maybe it was true for some old SSDs. But it hasn't even been that true for normal usb drives.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot-I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?78706-OCZ-Vertex2-180GB-lost-all-Data-after-3-Days
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html

You may say those failures are due to bugs, but when there are so many bugs, they are effectively the main failure cause of SSDs, not "wear and tear": http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/09/01/ssd-users-report-widespread-data-loss/1

And when the SSD return rates are often even higher than "spinning disk" drives you should be very careful which SSDs you use (so far I think Samsung is OK).

http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-7/components-returns-rates-5.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html

I see you didn't bother to link to even one of them.

Did you have your head in the sand last month? Heard of Flashback?

A roundup of reviews from the usual major sites as well as others not mentioned in the summary above: Overclockers Review, Anandtech Review, Anandtech Undervolting/Overclocking, HardwareSecrets, Bit-tech, PCPer, Tweaktown, Hard OCP, The Inquirer, Techspot, Computer Shopper, Tom's Hardware, ExtremeTech, PC Mag, Overclockers Club, and Guru 3d

I have to ask at 1000 Gbps are your hard drives even able to write that fast ? That's 125 Gigabytes per second, 500 MB/s is pretty good for an SSD. Also, what are you doing that requires that kind of speed?

We have 8 blade servers with SSDs, each blade keeps most data in DDR3.

What are we doing? Medical and statistical research. You should see some of the protein folding units.

DDR3-1600 will give you a peak transfer rate of around 13GB/second. You can get higher throughput by interleaving across banks, but the Xeon 7560 (for example) will peak at around 15GB/sec

PCIe Gen-3 x8 will deliver around 8GB/second.

The fastest interconnect I've seen on a blade chassis has 10Gbit ports.

Are you sure that "1000 Gbps is considered normal here"?

All affiliates and trading partners received the following email over the last few days. The appropriate "changes" section is also in GAME/Gamestation store fronts in the stores that have remained open.

A list of closed stores is here: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2012/03/27/game-closes-277-stores/1

----
GAME Group plc (the parent company of GAME in the UK) is now in administration. We want you to know that the Administrators aim at this time is to continue trading while they seek to find a new owner for the business. In the meantime, we?ve had to make some changes. We?ve summarised them below. Some of them are temporary, some are permanent.

GAME Changes
1.Online Sales: We expect some disruption to our online services over the next few days while we make some changes. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes.
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8.Pre-owned Hardware: We have had to suspend trade in for pre-owned hardware at this time. If this changes, we will let you know. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes.
9.Click and Collect titles: We have had to suspend this service. We apologise for any inconvenience this causes.
MJA Jervis and SD Maddison have been appointed as Joint Administrators of The GAME Group plc, Game Stores Group Limited, Gameplay (GB) Limited, Game (Stores) Limited, Games Station Limited, Game (Retail) Limited and Gamestation Limited on 26 March 2012 to manage their affairs, business and property as their agents and without personal liability. MJA Jervis and SD Maddison are licensed in the United Kingdom to act as insolvency practitioners by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

GameStation Changes
1.Online Sales: We expect some disruption to our online services over the next few days while we make some changes. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes.
2.Refunds and Exchanges: Until further notice, we will not be able to offer refunds or exchanges for products purchased either before the administration or for products purchased from the date of the administration.
3.Pre-Orders: No new pre-orders can be taken until further notice. No refunds can be given for any pre-order deposits which have been paid. We are reviewing this over the next week.
4.gamestation Elite card: We have had to suspended use of gamestation Elite cards. This means that points can be earned but NOT redeemed until further notice.
5.Gift cards: We have also had to suspend gamestation gift cards. The value on these cards cannot be redeemed. If this changes, we will let you know. We apologise for the inconvenience this causes.
6.Pre-owned Software: You can still buy pre owned products at great prices i

So let them offer a non-ad version for more money and people like you that are so bothered by it can shell out a few more $'s for the app. Personally, I love the apps on Android and never care about the ads unless they somehow impede the use of the app, which has never happened in all of my downloading of free and pay apps.

People bitch about ads, but the fact is they are a part of life. Hell, even video game developers have started inserting ads into games AFTER they are released. That is how websites make their money as well. Even slashdot has ads for non-regular, unregistered users. I don't see what the big deal is.

Here is an interesting quote from AMD's head of GPU developer relations, Richard Huddy :

'It's funny,' says AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy. 'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.' Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is: 'Make the API go away.' 'I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers,' he says, 'and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all.'

Also, the rest of the article explains most of the things that suck about D3D.
Note the last sentence, according to him D3D does damage to innovation. So your comment about microsoft providing functionality as demand rises is nonsense. There is demand, yet no solution from microsoft.

That's the fundamental flaw with this bullshit I just can't believe they don't understand. Because there is no real recourse for someone that gets hit with copyright infringement bullshit and their site nuked, all a person has to do is:

1. Identify blog/site you do not agree with
2. Post link to infringing content then report
3. Site gets nuked from orbit
4. ????
5. Profit!

We already know that these Intellectual Property holders themselves host their shit specifically to catch pirates. They've been caught before. What is stopping them from just having someone spam infringing content on a site to get it shut it down? For instance, uploading infringing shit all over Youtube themselves so they can file a claim and get Youtube itself knocked off the net?

Yeah, that seems a little extreme, seeing as how Google would go to war over something like that. But is a personal website owner going to have the resources to protect themselves against underhanded shit like that? Of course not.

This bill is using "Stop the pirates!" fear mongering bullshit to give themselves a dominant position on the internet and lock out any competition, regardless.