Slashdot Mirror

Already done: http://www.techspot.com/news/45432-smozzy-android-app-lets-you-surf-the-web-via-sms.html

According to this page, a GTX 560 _averages_ 25fps at 1920x1200. That's not that good.

I accept your challenge.

http://www.techspot.com/news/22178-wardriving-credit-card-thief-gets-9-years-in-jail.html
http://www.crn.com/news/security/26806554/wardrivers-plead-guilty-sentenced-to-jail-time.htm

and one from the UK:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hereford/worcs/6565079.stm

Sounds interesting, here's another source, since this is slashdotted: http://www.techspot.com/news/48335-valve-confirms-steam-and-source-engine-for-linux.html

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

Nvidia settled a class action lawsuit about these GPUs.

(link: http://www.techspot.com/news/43614-customers-get-shafted-in-nvidia-class-action-suit.html)

Samsung just posted $5 billion profit for their last quarter.

You do realize that Samsung makes more than just smartphones, don't you?

http://www.techspot.com/news/48038-apple-samsung-account-for-95-of-all-handset-profits.html

With Apple making 80% of the profit and Samsung making the other 15%.

How are HTC, Motorola, LG, Sony-Ericson, etc. doing?

Of course Apple worries about market share, because it worries about its prospects on a timeframe of more than just one quarter. What I said about Apple cutting its margins? It already happened. Quadrupling its screen resolution has a price: higher bill of materials cost.. Now hang on for a moment... some actual numbers are not going to kill you. Let's think about what the numbers actually mean. So Apple's bill of materials went up 6% expressed as a fraction of selling price. That translates to roughly $38 extra cost against Apple's gross margin of $319. That is 12% profit decrease. So Apple needs a 12% increase in volume just to stay flat. And with Apple's stratospheric stock price, breaking even is nowhere near good enough. See what I mean? This is already heading in the direction of Apple as a shrink stock, even faster than I expected.

Perhaps it will be directly implemented in Skype or something.

Skype will use Opus in future. Opus is a low latency codec suitable for both speech and music coding built from the combination of the SILK and CELT codecs. Opus outperforms AAC (and maybe it outperforms Fraunhofer's AAC-ELD codec as well). I imagine Skype's use of Opus will be dependent on Microsoft deciding to stick with that plan. However, as Microsoft has been discovering recently that codecs which require royalty payments can be difficult to manage, I suppose they'll stick with the plan to use Opus as it's royalty-free.

Of course, there's always the possibility of a rogue Google employee exploiting the data in some way, too, but I don't worry much about that,

Already happened with the David Barksdale asshole. What makes you think it will not happen again. You know that some SRE teams have root access on almost any production machine, right?

While I don't expect much to happen due to rogue engineers I still expect a lot of bad stuff to happen due to sheer incopetence, like all the recent privacy fiascos. If Google was doing the right thing with Safari why did upper management request the "feature" to be removed? Because they all knew it was wrong, thats why.

--
I value my privacy so I NEVER use any Google product.

'Microsoft's biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done.

Only on slashdot is Microsoft Office dying or not needed any more. Back in the real world; the place many here I'm sure must forget exists or something, Office 2010 is selling better than any other MS Office suite before - http://www.techspot.com/news/44268-microsoft-office-2010-turns-one-is-the-fastest-selling-version-ever.html.

MSFT aren't the evil machine they used to be, kids. Move on.....move on......

Your citation is not a logical rebuttal. People realizing they don't need Office does not mean that Office needs to end up selling fewer versions.

What happened is this: Corporations have finally started upgrading everyone to Office 2010 on their new PCs after holding out on upgrading for almost a decade on their old Windows XP PCs.

Also, there's no significant trend of people saying MS is evil in these threads, that's just a straw man you brought up.

'Microsoft's biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done.

Only on slashdot is Microsoft Office dying or not needed any more. Back in the real world; the place many here I'm sure must forget exists or something, Office 2010 is selling better than any other MS Office suite before - http://www.techspot.com/news/44268-microsoft-office-2010-turns-one-is-the-fastest-selling-version-ever.html.

MSFT aren't the evil machine they used to be, kids. Move on.....move on......

This is incorrect. Google released the source code of 3.0, however they did not create tags for the Honeycomb releases. All of the code is in the history. This was done to try and get a handle on fragmentation, and to keep people from putting a tablet only OS on a phone. ICS is basically a more polished Honeycomb, with the phone portions of the OS included.

Citation: http://www.techspot.com/news/46260-source-code-for-android-30-and-40-released.html/

I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment.

The problem is the 20 industry goons standing in between you and the content creator taking their cut.

As for the lawmakers, they're not really convinced of the shit they say as regards copyright and IP laws. For the most part they're just reading off of a script that comes with a 6 figure check stapled to it. It wasn't until massive opposition by their constituents and the threat of repercussion that they started backing away from it, and that was political self-preservation, not any belief that the people were right. How many legislators have even come out and said "The people don't want this, and they are justified"? No, it's all "We must reexamine this bill" or "We must craft it in a way that protects copyright blah blah", never "Yeah, you're right, on closer inspection the bill was a fucking joke." They're stuck between a rock and a hard place because on one hand you've got people like Chris Dodd saying "Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake" while their constituents are threatening to kick their ass out of office in the next election cycle if they jump on board with SOPA/PIPA.

Hell, Steve King (R-Iowa) was sitting in a SOPA hearing and tweets "We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet." What did he find boring? From her remarks:

But there are sufficient loopholes here that would allow innocent sites to be shut down, thereby a loss of jobs. Have we answered the question dealing with national security? And as well are we recognizing the value of the First Amendment?"

Those are the remarks he was so "bored" by. Given that, how the hell can we reasonably expect that these people have even thought about the shit they are doing? The few people actually doing real thinking in the comedy of errors we call congress get routinely ignored and dismissed. They've already decided how they're going to vote before the bill even gets entered. They've been paid to vote a certain way by the same fucking people writing these damn bills. They don't even want expert testimony, they didn't even want to allow anyone in the way of an expert to speak in opposition at the damn hearing. Google gave great testimony as to the problems with SOPA and were themselves dismissed, just as any opposing lawmaker was. I can't find the link to the exact quote, but one of them (I think it was Mike Leahy (D-Vermont) said something along the lines of "I don't see how this will break DNS and I don't believe any expert that says it will". This is what they're being paid for by the pro-SOPA groups, after all.

The only other thing I can think of, that maybe they have thought about it and are just too fucking stupid to see the problems with what they were proposing horrifies me even more.

All in all, I think convincing lawmakers is a fools errand. There are some people trying to pool money to lobby against the media cartels, but fighting bribery with bribery doesn't seem prudent to me. Better to just make their stupid laws as ineffectual as possible. Eventually they're going to get to the point where we really are living in an honest to god Orwellian Police State and the people are just going to overthrow the government entirely. I'm not entirely convinced that we could even prevent it at this point.

Actually, that works out great, less devices for Linux to support, so hopefully they can refocus some coding effort from driver support. It also works because YOU as the consumer are responsible for buying what you need, not the manufacturer (so buy a tablet you know supports it).

I'm not hearing the same news for desktops though? I could care less about the tablets / phones / ARMs. Desktops and laptops, seem to replace the bios w/o the bs. http://www.techspot.com/news/40493-uefi-to-start-dominating-bios-in-2011-slash-pc-boot-time.html Not finding a whole lot on it though.

But anyways, all I'm saying is if my tablet has slightly worse hardware specs cause I bought it for the same price as a win 8 tab BUT it lets me run Linux, I just don't think I care. Same w the phones, they can't kill Android because android is supported by the community more than a corporate (google).

Apple and Google are neck and neck in terms of absolute app downloads. But what I meant was again "selling" in terms of making money. Far more apps downloaded on iOS are purchased apps (to my mind a free app is not really a "sale").

I don't really see Androids numbers compared to Apple increasing much more as WP7 starts to eat into Android market share next year. Laugh all you want but you'll remember what I said a year from now...

He referred to Netflix "shooting itself in the foot" and did not mention only the price increase. There was also the spin-off of mail delivery to Qwikster, leaving Netflix as a streaming-only operation. The net effect, combined with their public statements about the future, showed that Netflix management considers DVD-by-mail to be a dead model and was willing to abandon it immediately.

Also, it has been reported that Netflix mail costs are 20-times more expensive than their streaming costs. The reported change in their studio contracts is about 10x.

Well, here's the press reports on the ruling.

More importantly, here is the summary from the EU Court of Justice, the judgement of the court, the directives involved and the opinion of the court, but in French ad the English translation isn't up yet.

This is the information any of us have to work with, when it comes to understanding the ruling. Bearing in mind that none of us (except for three sheep and a hedgehog) are lawyers, a definite answer is impossible. I read it that ISPs are absolutely required to be common carriers, at least within the EU, and that common carrier status may not be infringed even at the request of a major corporation or pressure group.

and many, many, moooreeee

-mainconcept http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=17
-mediashow http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-h.264 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-vp8 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-sha1 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-photoshop cs5 http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=14
-photoshop cs5 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-15.html
-winrar, faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-winrar, improves over x6 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-7-zip better than 2600k here: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41698.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-7-zip same perf as 2600k http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-POV-ray, faster than 2600k http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/10/
-POV-ray http://www.nordichardware.se/test-la...art=15#content
-x264(2nd pass AVX enabled) http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-x264 (2nd pass, better overall than 2600k) http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11108
-x264 (2nd pass +.3 than SB2600k) http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/7/
-handbrake; http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/9/
-truecrypt; http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11111
-solidworks; faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-abbyy filereader http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-C-Ray, as fast as $1k i7-990X, http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/v.../c-rayir38.png

and many, many, moooreeee

-mainconcept http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=17
-mediashow http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-h.264 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/14
-vp8 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-sha1 http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx...ssor-review/17
-photoshop cs5 http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//i...&limitstart=14
-photoshop cs5 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-15.html
-winrar, faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-winrar, improves over x6 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-7-zip better than 2600k here: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph4955/41698.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-7-zip same perf as 2600k http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-POV-ray, faster than 2600k http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/10/
-POV-ray http://www.nordichardware.se/test-la...art=15#content
-x264(2nd pass AVX enabled) http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...x8150-tested/7
-x264 (2nd pass, better overall than 2600k) http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11108
-x264 (2nd pass +.3 than SB2600k) http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/7/
-handbrake; http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1741/9/
-truecrypt; http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2125&pageID=11111
-solidworks; faster than 2600k http://www.techspot.com/review/452-a...pus/page7.html
-abbyy filereader http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...x,3043-16.html
-C-Ray, as fast as $1k i7-990X, http://i664.photobucket.com/albums/v.../c-rayir38.png

This, from the company where the CEO doesn't think Linux needs a desktop?

http://www.techspot.com/news/34038-red-hat-ceo-sees-no-need-for-linux-desktop-today.html

What an amazing coincidence. A 64-bit arm ISA was just announced last week.

I hope they continue in the tradition and call it the "leg" instruction set.

See these (their usages might match slashdotters more):
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

These rates are probably for "normal users" (as in normal users who buy SSDs ;) ):
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

Note the common failure modes are not very graceful, they're usually brutal and/or weird:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
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.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

In contrast with most (not all of course) of the HDD failures I've seen you still can get a lot of data out.

SSD failure is predictable.

That's bullshit. You call the following predictable?
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
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.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

I might buy a Samsung SSD. The rest (except for Intel) don't have such a great track record even when compared to hard drive failure rates (and Intel's failures haven't been very confidence inspiring).

http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

For some people the failure is predictable in that they can almost bet the drives will fail within a year! http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

But I don't regard that sort of predictability of failure as acceptable, unless the manufacturer is paying me to use their products and gives me plenty of spares.

How about a video clip of a tablet long before they were ever made?

http://www.techspot.com/news/45209-samsung-stanley-kubrick-invented-the-tablet-in-2001-a-space-odyssey.html

The 32-bit descendant of the 6502 is the ARM architecture. But half a year ago, ARM had no plans to expand from 40-bit to 64-bit, at least not until RAM hits half terabyte levels.

When the ARM was launched in the late 80s it was a kick-ass desktop workstation processor that could wipe the floor with a 286. They even made an ARM "accelerator card" for the PC (see here and search for "springboard").

In our IBM PC-free alternate universe, the ARM could have taken off on the desktop, inevitably migrated into servers, and would probably have got some 64-bit love rather earlier. Back in the real world, it survived by carving out a niche in mobile/embedded applications, which don't need 64 bits.

I'm trying to imagine what a 64 bit descendant of the 6502 would look like

The 32-bit descendant of the 6502 is the ARM architecture. But half a year ago, ARM had no plans to expand from 40-bit to 64-bit, at least not until RAM hits half terabyte levels.

I should also add that I found a more recent article which seems to suggest the situation is getting even worse for PC games sales. Though mobile gaming seems to be gaining on both of them.

According to this news story, Windows Vista has 10x the desktop users that Linux does, yet I don't hear anyone talking about "the Year of the Vista Desktop."

Windows XP, that 10 year-old behemoth has nearly 1/2 of all user desktops around the world, Windows 7 on about 1/4th of all desktops and Windows Vista on about 1/10th - Linux is struggling to make one out of every 100 desktops world-wide.

Somebody got Windows 7 running on a PII 266Mhz, 128MB ram and 4MB video card. It took a faster PIII seventeen minutes to boot. This is only for those who like coffee breaks when work refuses to buy new hardware ;-)

OK, now I'm a bit confused. I assume that by transparent firewall you mean that the internal IPs are exposed (the firewall behaves like it is not there, well, other than filtering some packets). In that case I do not see why the attack surface would be lowered. I mean a NAT router also has a firewall (on Linux for example, iptables can be used as a router and firewall). If there is a bug in the firewall code then the device can be hacked and that does not depend on the mode. Same with NAT, if there is a bug in the code then it can be hacked.

Also, a transparent firewall would allow the bad guys to count how many machines you have. While this is not really serious, it would help them, especially since with NAT they cannot be sure whether port 12345 and 12346 go to the same machine or not.

Yes, I do indeed mean the setup where your internal(internet routable) IP addresses get exposed. I meant to point out that it lowers the attack surface of the security measure, in this case the firewall. NAT by itself (as a security measure) does not provide this, granted that one would not be especially smart to not run a firewall in front of a firewall which is one of the reasons I prefer to not run NAT and a firewall but just a firewall instead, to me that limits administration to the one function.
As for counting the amount of machines, this is possible behind a NAT as well, granted it takes more effort, more time and increases the amount of guess work. (2 random sources : http://www.antionline.com/archive/index.php/t-238181.html http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic5154.html [2003] ).

While usually a bug in the code indeed exposes the security measure to possible abuse, if you run transparent however, lacking a public IP address makes the chance those particular bugs get abused drop dramatically. After all you're not aiming communications directly at the firewall machine. One would first need to identify the fact that there's a transparent firewall by profiling, then either try the attack or run extensive profiling to try and identify the brand/version/implementation of the firewall and pick an attack based on that. Much like a NAT prevents direct contact to clients behind it on private ranges, a transparent firewall prevents direct contact to the firewall itself. It's nothing more then a packet filtering bridge like device after all. Intelligently crafted packets can still hurt it of course, but then I don't believe it can be 100% secure unless you unplug the cable.
I just trust transparent firewalls more then I trust NAT to keep my network safe based on the above, I don't find it a threat if someone is able to determine how many hosts are on my network, firewall, NAT or even both can't really prevent that anyway.
And let's not forget one can still control the exposure of hosts by other means like proxies for web/ftp/etc.

Yes, and both methods work well. What I meant was, you said about connectivity issues that are present with NAT. Yes, I need to forward a port for you to be able to connect to me. But the same would be true if I used a firewall - I still would have to add a rule to allow your packets. If I used Linux and iptables, the rules would look very similar.

Also, the point is that with IPv6, nobody would force you to use NAT, like it is with IPv4. If you do not like it or use protocols that do not support it, just do not use NAT, while I could continue to use it (if it becomes available of course).

True, I agree the two effectively pose similar challenges to connectivity yet under the premise that NAT on it's own should always be fortified by a firewall I'd rather leave the NAT out if I had the choice. Save me the trouble of administrating both a firewall and port forwarding or public/private IP mapping on a NAT solution. IPv6, as you point out, makes NAT a choice rather then a given, I am sure that if the IPv6 NAT standard doesn't get drafted the 'big' vendors will step in to fill the void albeit with their own, not necessarily good/friendly/open, 'standard'.

Oh yeah, the diversity of PC games is sooOOOoo remarkable.

George Hotz (GeoHot), famous for his iPhone hacking achievements, is planning on fighting Sony over their violating his rights to use--however he sees fit--hardware he's paid for. Ever since sharing his iPhone hacks, Hotz has always claimed being against piracy and says he's never pirated any game, or even signed any PlayStation Network agreements. He's asking for donations to fight Sony and try to achieve something similar to what was previously accomplished by the EFF in regard to cellphones.

And I threw in the most relevant link of them all, viz., the link to fucking donate.

You forgot about MS writing checks with 9 or 10 zeros on them.

This deal includes Microsoft paying Nokia billions of dollars.

In a shareholder lawsuit, I think it would be pretty hard to convince a judge that Nokia would be better off competing openly with the likes of HTC in the Android world than accepting billions of dollars from Microsoft and getting to be the premier WP7 platform.

Man somedays I wonder what is wrong with the internet....

The i7 is not even 30% faster then the core 2 E8400 in UT3, and Sandybridge is barely faster then the i7 at the same clockspeed. Everyone benching using nothing less then the latest apps is fudging the data purposely.

http://www.techspot.com/review/353-intel-sandy-bridge-corei5-2500k-corei7-2600k/page13.html

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/11390-intel-core-i7-nehalem-920-940-965-xe-processor-review-17.html

Using the latest stuff with the higher to highest settings the performance gaps are unimpressive to say the least.

In the absence of effective hardware security, this is the only way to stop people cheating in online games. This has become a big problem on the PS3 since the jailbreak enabled it.

On the PC, where there was never any hardware security to prevent cheating, publishers have been using the same technique for many years. Consider Blizzard Warden, Punkbuster, and Valve Anti Cheat. All of these allow the publisher - or their authorised agents - to download and run code on your machine when you connect to the online service.

Now Sony's platform is thoroughly broken, Sony has to adopt Punkbuster/VAC/Warden-style technology. It's either that, or suffer a mass exodus of players to other platforms which will be free of cheats.

It's bullshit. What about the site admins for Wikileaks, or the dozens (if not hundreds) of media employees around the globe that are sitting on the full cable file and letting it trickle out? What about the security guys in the military, whose job it is to ensure stuff like this doesn't happen?

Assange is nothing but a mouthpiece. The fact that he's the primary target in this whole thing is just as asinine as the US Government's strategy to prevent leaks being leaked.

If they are able to maintain their dominant position yet be able to maintain absolute control over what software is available for their devices, why wouldn't they do it. In my mind, the only reason they wouldn't do this is if the third party developers refused to play their game and forced them to be more open before they get to that point.

And what makes you think they could maintain a dominant position for smartphones and tablets (they don't have a dominant position for desktops or notebooks) if they disallow third-party applications?

And, even if you go by plurality rather than majority, maybe Apple doesn't have a dominant position in smartphones to maintain.

You can play that protected video, but your CPU can be disabled remotely.

..and thats over 3G, and even works if the system isnt even turned on.

All if they don't like you they can disable the processor from afar. All that at no extra cost! That will be a boon for stopping the computers spreading to countries they don't like.

http://www.techspot.com/news/41643-intels-sandy-bridge-processors-have-a-remote-kill-switch.html

"IPAD KILLER! IPAD KILLER! IPAD KILLER!"
Because the iPad worked, everyone is screaming it, choking each other in their cradles, attempting to produce the next poor and horrible tablet.
If MS had used its 1 working shot, they should have done so instead of FAILING AGAIN!
http://www.techspot.com/news/36328-microsoft-unveils-dualscreen-tablet-concept.html
Look at it! It is pure functional genious, and it won't come out, and it dies in its infancy stage.

MS hasn't sold the Xbox 360 at a loss for years. That $150 number was for launch consoles.
http://www.techspot.com/news/23612-microsoft-makes-tiny-profit-on-xbox-360-hardware.html
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2006/11/16/ps3-loses-up-to-306-per-unit-xbox-360-profits-76-per-sale.htm

It took them less than a year to get costs low enough that they made a profit on each console.

Can we stop pushing the idea that consoles are sold at a loss? The Wii has been sold for a profit since launch (source). The Xbox 360 has been sold for a profit for four years (source). The PS3 has taken the longest to get there, but it is now sold for a profit as well (source). New consoles are often initially sold at a loss, but they do not stay at that price.

The problem with the five-year lag is that the consoles are decreasing the lag the consumer sees. Crytek's CEO claims that the current generation of consoles was holding back developers. There are some games that are PC-only, but those only appeal to a fraction of the potential market, so most developers have to go for multiple platforms and accept the limitations that the old hardware has. The consumer mostly sees cross-platform games, so it doesn't look like a five-year lag at all. If there were a hardcore PC developer pushing the envelope, it might be different, but now that Crytek has developed CryEngine 3 for all platforms, I don't think anyone could do it.

I wonder how much of this is Nintendo's fault - MS and Sony look over and see their competitor beating them with half the graphics and a bit of a lower price, and they realize that graphics have hit a point that most games won't benefit that much from nicer hardware. Of course, then they think that the magic is all in the motion controls and that they need to have something that imitates that...it's like watching iphone imitators.

I wouldn't hold the Xbox of a shining example of good business. While the Xbox has a good marketshare, it does not appear MS will make money on the project. Basically all MS did was pay for marketshare with billions of dollars.

They have actually been making a profit on the xbox console for the last 4 years, despite that it's well-known that console hardware is generally sold at a loss (particularly in its early life) and made up for with game sales. MS have been making a profit on the hardware sales, game sales and xbox live subscriptions so it seems they are doing quite nicely in the console business.

Well I tried with 83 tabs, sorry but I wasn't gonna keep opening tabs. I went from 105Mb to...123Mb from a high of 429Mb with 86 (I already had three including this) open. Did you look at your cache settings? Because by default FF will cache closed tabs for awhile in case you want to undo. If you normally run 100+ for days, which admittedly isn't something the Moz developers test for since Joe and Sally maybe have a dozen tops, you might want to go into about.config and tweak a little.

So while I have no doubt your are having that problem, and I sympathize as I on occasion tend to push some of my software a little hard (I don't know how many times I've crashed Audacity with funky effects) you have to admit that 100+ tabs for days isn't something most folks will normally do, so the defaults probably don't take that behavior into account. So you might want to go in and tweak FF a little, so that behaves a little better with your style. Personally that is one of the things that have kept me on FF, is that between extensions and about.config you can pretty much do anything with it. Anyway here is a guide to get you started, and I personally use the trim on minimize tweak myself. But between that link and this one you should have plenty of settings to try. Have you posted talkback so the devs know? Can't fix what you don't know about, although I agree they should have come clean on FF 2.x. And you can turn off the awesome bar if it slows you down.

"Someone hasn't seen the EVGA SR-2 mobo, yet."

Sad, someone will drop $600 on that board, drop another $2500 on two 6-core Xeon and be the big swinging dick on their forum for the next 3 or 4 years, until everyone's on 24 core cpus for $500, and eventually they'll start laughing at him for wasting 3 grand on just cpus and a motherboard.

Remember quad core cpus just came out 3 years ago and we're already on 12 cores. Does anyone doubt we'll be on 24 or more cores in 3 years?

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic127187.html

It allows you to sign the drivers yourself without having to turn off UAC or anything of that nature (you do have to disable UAC to sign the drivers, but you can re-enable it after with no ill effects).

There is always a solution to the problem, especially in Windows. Microsoft just wants to keep this stuff as far away from the average user as they can, because mucking around with this stuff can easily reduce the security checks in the OS.

You can actually switch Windows 7 driver signing behavior back to XP style as well (just a warning box instead of automatically removing the driver), but signing drivers you trust via the above method is the more secure way to do it.

Note that this also solves problems with signed drivers that have a bad certificate for one reason or another.

That was for x87 FP though. While it's important in that a lot of code out there might still use it, for performance on any Intel architecture, you're supposed to use SSE (scalar SSE if you're not doing SIMD). I would like to see SSE performance broken down to SP vs DP. I suspect, from what little I know of the vector pipeline, that it'd be pretty much exactly half the performance.

No. The Multimedia benchmark in the Sandra suite is all SSE. See their FAQ here.

The following is their only Double test:

Q: What is the SSE2 Whetstone benchmark?
A: With the introduction of SSE2 and its support for double floats (64-bit) it is now possible to write code that does not use the legacy FPU at all. This version shows that the full Whetstone benchmark can be implemented using SSE2 and thus take advantage of the SIMD mode of operation.

And if you want further proof, here is another page posting unabridged benchmark results, which indicate clearly that the Double benchmark uses iSSE2 (you can see the same ~5.5x drop in performance as with the other benchmark I linked). PcPer was just incredibly lazy marking their benchmark graphs.

Atom sucks at double precision. You can deny it all you want, but the benchmarks ring true. I can't say I'm surprised - double performance is one of the first things to go when you're targeting low-power.

That's not Google's tablet, that's a "Google Android Tablet" ("Google" as part of the OS name, not the physical tablet's branding.)

That's somebody else's tablet hardware running what looks like a seriously stock Android installation. (I mean, would Google go to all the trouble of designing a tablet with the same minimalist home screen as a mobile phone? Or a 600 MHz CPU when their phone sports a 1 GHz grinder?)

Waitasec, scam alert: here are some threads questioning whether this device actually even exists (commenters posting about unfulfilled orders for this very same "Google Android" tablet device.)

Here's a video for a "Smit MID-560" with a 5" *resistive* touch screen (rather than capacitive), speculated to be the hardware of this fakey "Google Android Tablet" that is not sold by Google.

Nice try buddy ... looks to be utterly bogus.