Qualcomm's "Snapdragon has good in-package support for cellular flavors in common use in the US. As can be seen in the wikipedia list, that puts them in quite a few US-release phones, even from people like Samsung who have their own SoCs.
Serious question... is this the first time an exec was ousted for a mistake with DRM?
If memory serves, one of the more plausible reasons posited for SimCity's ill-conceived launch was that it was right before EA's financial year wrapped up. I don't think that anybody who mattered gave a damn about DRM; but mangling the DRM-induced server hooks so badly that total non-techie rags like Forbes were writing articles about it... That just doesn't look competent.
If anything, DRM(as a lock-in and market segmentation strategy) is something that team management would probably earn points for; but only if they can pull it off well enough to win more than it costs them. People like Apple and Valve, yes. EA, not so much.
I offer my services as CEO. I might fail, but I'd be willing to do it at half the price.
I honestly have to wonder, at this point, why somebody hasn't caught on to the 'get random Indian H1Bs to fail at leadership for 40k/year and pocket the savings' strategy...
The assertion that Austin is 'more concerned about energy use than in the rest of Texas' seems curious to me. If the Texans that crawl onto the national stage are any indication, Texans are obsessively concerned about energy use... they just happen to be in favor of it.
Depending on how swiftly and convincingly the malicious client(s) can fake new identities, a 'crowdsourced' mechanism may boil down to 'trusting most of the clients, most of the time'. rather than 'trusting the client, full stop'.
That is a much messier case than actually being allowed to trust the client, but if you can constrain a malicious client's ability to spoof identities, you have a much better chance of being able to crowd out the bad data, especially with something like traffic(where, if the 15 users around you are moving at 55, your report of either 0 or 95 looks a little suspect, since vehicles are constrained by the behavior of nearby vehicles, unlike people answering a poll or something of that nature).
A telco operator, say, who gets the IMEI and SIM and possibly some RF triangulation, could probably nail down your ability to lie pretty hard, and severely limit the rate at which you could inject bad data. Google, if they have to trust an app(however invasive, the app still depends on the OS to tell it the truth so it can pass that on), has a more difficult problem.
Hmm, a joke about HP printers gets modded flamebait. I didn't know HP could afford/. shills.
The problem was that you made a joke that implied that an HP printer would last long enough to empty its starter cartridge...
Back in the heroic age, toner was cheap and the printer was built such that anything short of small arms fire wouldn't perturb it(though the firmware on the jetdirects was always total shit, even then).
During the silver age, the printers were still pretty decent; but they bled you dry on the ink.
Now, the printers are so ghastly that you'll be lucky to have yours live long enough to accept the overpriced replacement cartridges.
This is what is wrong with people today..... Everything has to be as easy and must in no way involve manual labor.... Mining equipment.... BAH
Just few hundred years ago we were digging tunnels with showels!
Do you know how expensive it would be to ship enough Irish or Chinamen to the moon to dig the tunnels? Even if we packed them like sardines in the steerage section, and limited their whiskey and tea rations, that's still a lot to carry out of the gravity well...
Even better, it apparently manages some wonderful static cling in the nonconductive lunar vacuum. Razor sharp, unweathered dust, peppered with glassy melt products from micrometeorite impacts, that static-clings like mad to anything it gets on. Probably eats any machinery whose lubricants it contaminates for breakfast, and I wouldn't be too optimistic about breathing the stuff that will end up getting tracked into the habitubes. Silicosis is a bitch of a way to die.
Why worry about the moonbase construction material when you can't even land on the moon?
First things first.
Unless you have a plan for what you are going to do when you land, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to sink a bunch of money into developing the ability to land. Especially since the moon is so hostile, and not at the top of the list in terms of pure scientific interest, you really need a viable plan for your ground game before it becomes remotely worth the hassle.
Don't be silly, nothing like that could happen - the new birds will be engineered to make them unable to produce Lysine, so they'll be dependent upon Lysine supplements from their keepers. Stop feeding them Lysine and the bio-engineered birds will die. Easy-peasy. What could go wrong?
That's why Passenger Pigeons are the perfect choice. Clone a badass motherfucker, like a dinosaur, back to life, and any failure of the failsafes(which never are) makes you carnivore food.
Clone a dumb bird that suffered hundreds of millions of casualties against humans armed with 18th century technology? No problem. What're they going to do, lame you to death?
In addition to being a reminder that the people with a hard-on for 'biometrics' are either morons(Here you go, you were born with only ten passwords, so don't lose them!) or primarily interested in surveillance and tracking, or both; this is a useful reminder that 'security' is a system of interlocking parts Not a product you buy from your Solutions Vendor(tm) and set-and-forget.
We have the one doctor, who was caught with the fake fingers, along with at least three others who were ghosting through their shifts. She claims that they leaned on her, threatened her job if she refused to help with the con, they probably claim that she was in on the con and was absent on other days. Regardless of which of those is true, how many other people at the hospital would be in the position to notice whether or not a doctor is present and doing stuff? Probably more than a few. The front-desk servitors had to know what patient flow looked like, restock requests for supplies in various exam rooms can't have looked right, there are a lot more details than the punch-card machine here. This hospital isn't so much suffering from a 'fingerprint scanners are oversold' problem; but a problem with either massive cheating and/or apathy toward cheating, or unaccountable abuse of authority to suppress people who could have blown the whistle.
It's usually the foodies who go for esoteric salts, and they do so precisely for the impurities, some of which have interesting flavors.
Also, for whatever reason, manufacturers tend to sell differently shaped salt crystals depending on what the salt is being sold as. If you want larger granules(food grade, not the stuff sold for your driveway) or flake, you often end up with something labelled 'sea salt', even though refined mined salt could be produced in those shapes, rather than in the little teeny cubes.
I dont know... there seems to be evidence that they're stupider.
I'd be surprised if they were either notably smarter or notably dumber individually(Probably a few points of extra credit for nutrient abundance, a few demerits for all the mercury we've liberated since the industrial revolution); but as a system the effect might be a lot more dramatic.
If you live in some teeny tribal kin-group, the 'believe whatever crazy shit the people around you believe, especially if they told you about it when you were a dumb kid and they were a responsible adult' heuristic is probably a pretty good one, unless you've been provided with demigod-level intelligence and unlimited time to experiment.
In a modern, mass-media saturated environment, where you are being fed a steady stream of what feels just like social input; but is produced by people who have nothing in common with you or your situation, nor occupy the same boat as you, it's hard not to be pessimistic about the possibilities.
If you talk only to your neighbors, feeling more or less safe based on how often crime is mentioned probably works out OK. If you sit down and tune in to the 24/7 National Sensationalist Violence Channel, you are still applying the same heuristic; but to every photogenic crime in a population north of 200million. That's going to work real well...
Why would you not just hook up a PS3 controller via bluetooth to your tablet?
"(or a greater acceptance among tablet users of peripherals)" Architecturally, there wouldn't be any significant barrier, and it would be the easiest thing to do. I've just never(in a nontrivial amount of observing heavy tablet-use areas) seen any peripheral use aside from keyboard/case quasi-laptop style arrangements, speaker docks(mostly for smaller devices), and video dongles for projector connections. There isn't anything specifically stopping people; but they just don't seem to.
Without some very clever thinking(or a greater acceptance among tablet users of peripherals), that is going to be a brutal UI problem...
Even between PC and console, which are practically cousins in the 'lots of buttons and a pointing device' family of interface devices, you can smell a console port a mile away because of how wrong its interface feels. Some are salveagable(Thank you, thank you SkyUI!), some are basically game-breakers(Sorry GTA IV, I wanted to enjoy you...)
Tablets are a whole different kettle of fish. There are plenty of tablet games; but those tend to involve substantially different mechanics, or a frankly lousy feedbackless attempt an overlaying a touch-sensitive picture of a nintento control pad or something.
I could imagine some very interesting complementary UI arrangements that use a tablet as a second screen for various purposes; but building a control scheme that ports between a console or a PC and a tablet would be quite a feat.
Because said vendors are the one that have to provide post sales support. I suppose they could fork Open or DDWRT (if even possible, I haven't checked) and go their own way. It's basically the same argument for why you don't see Linux desktops on the show room floor at your local B&M store.
That's actually the weird thing: If you wanted to extend the router analogy to PCs, you would see Linux desktops on the show floor at the local store; but they would all be running deeply dysfunctional bespoke distros, mostly out of date and broken in various ways, some built from scratch, some based off an elderly version of Redhat, along with the low end machines all running FreeDOS with a bundled program designed to resemble a KDE desktop. You would be justified in asking 'Why the hell didn't they just install debian?'
I'm not imagining that retail routers would be running open-wrt-SVN-Bleeding-edge-UNSTABLE, or ship without some drool-proof web interface that the support guys have a manual for. I just don't understand why(in the presence of free, solid, easily available 3rd party firmware) vendors keep spending on developing in-house or licenced firmware that has all kinds of nasty personality issues, time after time.
I wonder how much of the 'opportunity cost/things we could have been working on instead' factor has to do with the fact that AMD is simply in a tighter spot than Nvidia, and how much it has to do with the fact that AMD already makes CPU/GPU combination packages(and seems interested in making more), while Nvidia has nothing of that sort except their 'Tegra', which might be a snappy mobile part; but is fundamentally punching in a different weight class(if nothing else, Sony's plans for 8GBs of RAM get a lot uglier on a 32-bit architecture. Yes, ARM also has something PAE-like; but PAE is mostly a hack that makes running multiple independent programs on a 32 bit system with more than 4GB of RAM palatable, not something you'd want to design a game engine around.)
This isn't to say that Nvidia couldn't have done it(heck, what would buying VIA cost these days?); but Nvidia would need, essentially, an entire new flavor of product line for this job, while AMD, whether they call it this or not, is punching out a modestly customized APU, which almost certainly shares substantially with the ones that they sell for PCs.
Given the relatively dismal reputation of vendor firmware on most routers, and the distinctly limited opportunities for software-differentiation in the 'well, it sits there and makes the internet wireless, right?' networking market, I honestly have to wonder why most vendor firmware isn't just thinly-skinned Open or DD WRT out of the box...
What the poster meant was that he's just too lazy to go to the gym when he could be at home watching TV. Any significant workout is going to make you sweat a lot, which is why you don't do it at your desk. If you just want a physical job then sign up to be a mail carrier or bicycle courier.
You aren't going to do jack in terms of serious cardio or muscular exertion unless your white-collar-knowledge-worker environment tolerates people who look like they think that 'data mining' is something you do with a pickaxe.
However, in terms of destroying your fitness less slowly while at work you have options that are worth considering: If you need caffeine, go with (unsweetened/not-full-of-milkfat) coffee or tea, or a pill. Not a soda. Also, try to distinguish between loss of energy caused by boredom or need for sleep(not a good thing; but temporarily treatable with mild stimulants) from loss of energy caused by hunger(eat something lean and proteinacious). Assorted caffeine+sugar snacks are seductive because the combination of stimulants and a quick energy burst allows you to do a mediocre job of fighting off either kind of slump; but they tend to bite you because if you just need some caffeine you end up consuming hundreds of calories in corn syrup, or if you really need some food, you end up letting hunger drive you into using more stimulants than you need, and crashing once the sugar spike wears off.
None of that will actually make you 'fit' worth a damn, nor will it save you from 'research suggests that people who get less than X exercise die early'; but it is a comparatively painless way to cut down the amount of 'fit-as-in-not-fat' effort you'll need to put in at the gym later. Ideally, you'll even be forced to find a more stable, less spike/crash prone hunger and stimulant cycle, which won't exactly hurt your efforts to get some exercise either before or after work.
I have nothing against the Intel drivers, it's just that none of Intel's GPUs are particularly powerful, and(more annoyingly) Intel tends to reserve the most powerful GPUs for their more powerful and expensive CPUs(which are total overkill for most applications that any Intel GPU is capable of).
Does anybody know how well the Linux Steam client runs on this?
Unless they really ripped things up more than expected(or Steam demands a bunch of proprietary libraries, rather than just blobbing them in), I'd assume that it would run more or less entirely the same.
So, you will likely be able to install it; but unless you have an Intel GPU, or specific AMD parts, or even more specific Nvidia parts, you'll end up shoving so much binary blob into your kernel in order to meaningfully use it that your objective in installing it isn't really clear...
Going through IT for every goofy little peripheral isn't terribly sensible(and IT generally doesn't love spending time being the supply cabinet); but I'd be curious to know whether the additional complexity and cost of the vending machines are sufficiently defrayed by the 'surveillance effect' and inventory tracking they provide.
'Just have a supply closet' is not a sexy strategy; but it sure is KISS-compliant.
If memory serves, at least the first-gen 3d printed designs were direct adaptations from http://www.cncguns.com/ CAD files, and that site has been up with little or no controversy for some years now. I assume that there has been some adaptation since then to support the limitations of 3d printing hardware.
Yeah, yeah, '3d printers' are magic star-trek replicators from the future, and CNC gear is old-and-busted-industrial-economy-getting-your-hands-dirty; but small scale weapons manufacture really isn't news(especially when you can legally buy some of the really tricky parts(properly rifled and chromed barrel, say) and just screw them on to the lower receiver you hacked together.)
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Qualcomm's "Snapdragon has good in-package support for cellular flavors in common use in the US. As can be seen in the wikipedia list, that puts them in quite a few US-release phones, even from people like Samsung who have their own SoCs.
Serious question... is this the first time an exec was ousted for a mistake with DRM?
If memory serves, one of the more plausible reasons posited for SimCity's ill-conceived launch was that it was right before EA's financial year wrapped up. I don't think that anybody who mattered gave a damn about DRM; but mangling the DRM-induced server hooks so badly that total non-techie rags like Forbes were writing articles about it... That just doesn't look competent.
If anything, DRM(as a lock-in and market segmentation strategy) is something that team management would probably earn points for; but only if they can pull it off well enough to win more than it costs them. People like Apple and Valve, yes. EA, not so much.
I offer my services as CEO. I might fail, but I'd be willing to do it at half the price.
I honestly have to wonder, at this point, why somebody hasn't caught on to the 'get random Indian H1Bs to fail at leadership for 40k/year and pocket the savings' strategy...
The assertion that Austin is 'more concerned about energy use than in the rest of Texas' seems curious to me. If the Texans that crawl onto the national stage are any indication, Texans are obsessively concerned about energy use... they just happen to be in favor of it.
Depending on how swiftly and convincingly the malicious client(s) can fake new identities, a 'crowdsourced' mechanism may boil down to 'trusting most of the clients, most of the time'. rather than 'trusting the client, full stop'.
That is a much messier case than actually being allowed to trust the client, but if you can constrain a malicious client's ability to spoof identities, you have a much better chance of being able to crowd out the bad data, especially with something like traffic(where, if the 15 users around you are moving at 55, your report of either 0 or 95 looks a little suspect, since vehicles are constrained by the behavior of nearby vehicles, unlike people answering a poll or something of that nature).
A telco operator, say, who gets the IMEI and SIM and possibly some RF triangulation, could probably nail down your ability to lie pretty hard, and severely limit the rate at which you could inject bad data. Google, if they have to trust an app(however invasive, the app still depends on the OS to tell it the truth so it can pass that on), has a more difficult problem.
Hmm, a joke about HP printers gets modded flamebait. I didn't know HP could afford /. shills.
The problem was that you made a joke that implied that an HP printer would last long enough to empty its starter cartridge...
Back in the heroic age, toner was cheap and the printer was built such that anything short of small arms fire wouldn't perturb it(though the firmware on the jetdirects was always total shit, even then).
During the silver age, the printers were still pretty decent; but they bled you dry on the ink.
Now, the printers are so ghastly that you'll be lucky to have yours live long enough to accept the overpriced replacement cartridges.
This is what is wrong with people today..... Everything has to be as easy and must in no way involve manual labor.... Mining equipment.... BAH
Just few hundred years ago we were digging tunnels with showels!
Do you know how expensive it would be to ship enough Irish or Chinamen to the moon to dig the tunnels? Even if we packed them like sardines in the steerage section, and limited their whiskey and tea rations, that's still a lot to carry out of the gravity well...
Even better, it apparently manages some wonderful static cling in the nonconductive lunar vacuum. Razor sharp, unweathered dust, peppered with glassy melt products from micrometeorite impacts, that static-clings like mad to anything it gets on. Probably eats any machinery whose lubricants it contaminates for breakfast, and I wouldn't be too optimistic about breathing the stuff that will end up getting tracked into the habitubes. Silicosis is a bitch of a way to die.
Why worry about the moonbase construction material when you can't even land on the moon?
First things first.
Unless you have a plan for what you are going to do when you land, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to sink a bunch of money into developing the ability to land. Especially since the moon is so hostile, and not at the top of the list in terms of pure scientific interest, you really need a viable plan for your ground game before it becomes remotely worth the hassle.
This is 'first things first'.
Clearly, we have to irradiate the specimens in order to make them mutate faster and generally toughen their moral fiber!
Don't be silly, nothing like that could happen - the new birds will be engineered to make them unable to produce Lysine, so they'll be dependent upon Lysine supplements from their keepers. Stop feeding them Lysine and the bio-engineered birds will die. Easy-peasy. What could go wrong?
That's why Passenger Pigeons are the perfect choice. Clone a badass motherfucker, like a dinosaur, back to life, and any failure of the failsafes(which never are) makes you carnivore food.
Clone a dumb bird that suffered hundreds of millions of casualties against humans armed with 18th century technology? No problem. What're they going to do, lame you to death?
In addition to being a reminder that the people with a hard-on for 'biometrics' are either morons(Here you go, you were born with only ten passwords, so don't lose them!) or primarily interested in surveillance and tracking, or both; this is a useful reminder that 'security' is a system of interlocking parts Not a product you buy from your Solutions Vendor(tm) and set-and-forget.
We have the one doctor, who was caught with the fake fingers, along with at least three others who were ghosting through their shifts. She claims that they leaned on her, threatened her job if she refused to help with the con, they probably claim that she was in on the con and was absent on other days. Regardless of which of those is true, how many other people at the hospital would be in the position to notice whether or not a doctor is present and doing stuff? Probably more than a few. The front-desk servitors had to know what patient flow looked like, restock requests for supplies in various exam rooms can't have looked right, there are a lot more details than the punch-card machine here. This hospital isn't so much suffering from a 'fingerprint scanners are oversold' problem; but a problem with either massive cheating and/or apathy toward cheating, or unaccountable abuse of authority to suppress people who could have blown the whistle.
It's usually the foodies who go for esoteric salts, and they do so precisely for the impurities, some of which have interesting flavors.
Also, for whatever reason, manufacturers tend to sell differently shaped salt crystals depending on what the salt is being sold as. If you want larger granules(food grade, not the stuff sold for your driveway) or flake, you often end up with something labelled 'sea salt', even though refined mined salt could be produced in those shapes, rather than in the little teeny cubes.
I dont know... there seems to be evidence that they're stupider.
I'd be surprised if they were either notably smarter or notably dumber individually(Probably a few points of extra credit for nutrient abundance, a few demerits for all the mercury we've liberated since the industrial revolution); but as a system the effect might be a lot more dramatic.
If you live in some teeny tribal kin-group, the 'believe whatever crazy shit the people around you believe, especially if they told you about it when you were a dumb kid and they were a responsible adult' heuristic is probably a pretty good one, unless you've been provided with demigod-level intelligence and unlimited time to experiment.
In a modern, mass-media saturated environment, where you are being fed a steady stream of what feels just like social input; but is produced by people who have nothing in common with you or your situation, nor occupy the same boat as you, it's hard not to be pessimistic about the possibilities.
If you talk only to your neighbors, feeling more or less safe based on how often crime is mentioned probably works out OK. If you sit down and tune in to the 24/7 National Sensationalist Violence Channel, you are still applying the same heuristic; but to every photogenic crime in a population north of 200million. That's going to work real well...
Why would you not just hook up a PS3 controller via bluetooth to your tablet?
"(or a greater acceptance among tablet users of peripherals)" Architecturally, there wouldn't be any significant barrier, and it would be the easiest thing to do. I've just never(in a nontrivial amount of observing heavy tablet-use areas) seen any peripheral use aside from keyboard/case quasi-laptop style arrangements, speaker docks(mostly for smaller devices), and video dongles for projector connections. There isn't anything specifically stopping people; but they just don't seem to.
Without some very clever thinking(or a greater acceptance among tablet users of peripherals), that is going to be a brutal UI problem...
Even between PC and console, which are practically cousins in the 'lots of buttons and a pointing device' family of interface devices, you can smell a console port a mile away because of how wrong its interface feels. Some are salveagable(Thank you, thank you SkyUI!), some are basically game-breakers(Sorry GTA IV, I wanted to enjoy you...)
Tablets are a whole different kettle of fish. There are plenty of tablet games; but those tend to involve substantially different mechanics, or a frankly lousy feedbackless attempt an overlaying a touch-sensitive picture of a nintento control pad or something.
I could imagine some very interesting complementary UI arrangements that use a tablet as a second screen for various purposes; but building a control scheme that ports between a console or a PC and a tablet would be quite a feat.
Because said vendors are the one that have to provide post sales support. I suppose they could fork Open or DDWRT (if even possible, I haven't checked) and go their own way. It's basically the same argument for why you don't see Linux desktops on the show room floor at your local B&M store.
That's actually the weird thing: If you wanted to extend the router analogy to PCs, you would see Linux desktops on the show floor at the local store; but they would all be running deeply dysfunctional bespoke distros, mostly out of date and broken in various ways, some built from scratch, some based off an elderly version of Redhat, along with the low end machines all running FreeDOS with a bundled program designed to resemble a KDE desktop. You would be justified in asking 'Why the hell didn't they just install debian?'
I'm not imagining that retail routers would be running open-wrt-SVN-Bleeding-edge-UNSTABLE, or ship without some drool-proof web interface that the support guys have a manual for. I just don't understand why(in the presence of free, solid, easily available 3rd party firmware) vendors keep spending on developing in-house or licenced firmware that has all kinds of nasty personality issues, time after time.
I wonder how much of the 'opportunity cost/things we could have been working on instead' factor has to do with the fact that AMD is simply in a tighter spot than Nvidia, and how much it has to do with the fact that AMD already makes CPU/GPU combination packages(and seems interested in making more), while Nvidia has nothing of that sort except their 'Tegra', which might be a snappy mobile part; but is fundamentally punching in a different weight class(if nothing else, Sony's plans for 8GBs of RAM get a lot uglier on a 32-bit architecture. Yes, ARM also has something PAE-like; but PAE is mostly a hack that makes running multiple independent programs on a 32 bit system with more than 4GB of RAM palatable, not something you'd want to design a game engine around.)
This isn't to say that Nvidia couldn't have done it(heck, what would buying VIA cost these days?); but Nvidia would need, essentially, an entire new flavor of product line for this job, while AMD, whether they call it this or not, is punching out a modestly customized APU, which almost certainly shares substantially with the ones that they sell for PCs.
Given the relatively dismal reputation of vendor firmware on most routers, and the distinctly limited opportunities for software-differentiation in the 'well, it sits there and makes the internet wireless, right?' networking market, I honestly have to wonder why most vendor firmware isn't just thinly-skinned Open or DD WRT out of the box...
What the poster meant was that he's just too lazy to go to the gym when he could be at home watching TV. Any significant workout is going to make you sweat a lot, which is why you don't do it at your desk. If you just want a physical job then sign up to be a mail carrier or bicycle courier.
You aren't going to do jack in terms of serious cardio or muscular exertion unless your white-collar-knowledge-worker environment tolerates people who look like they think that 'data mining' is something you do with a pickaxe.
However, in terms of destroying your fitness less slowly while at work you have options that are worth considering: If you need caffeine, go with (unsweetened/not-full-of-milkfat) coffee or tea, or a pill. Not a soda. Also, try to distinguish between loss of energy caused by boredom or need for sleep(not a good thing; but temporarily treatable with mild stimulants) from loss of energy caused by hunger(eat something lean and proteinacious). Assorted caffeine+sugar snacks are seductive because the combination of stimulants and a quick energy burst allows you to do a mediocre job of fighting off either kind of slump; but they tend to bite you because if you just need some caffeine you end up consuming hundreds of calories in corn syrup, or if you really need some food, you end up letting hunger drive you into using more stimulants than you need, and crashing once the sugar spike wears off.
None of that will actually make you 'fit' worth a damn, nor will it save you from 'research suggests that people who get less than X exercise die early'; but it is a comparatively painless way to cut down the amount of 'fit-as-in-not-fat' effort you'll need to put in at the gym later. Ideally, you'll even be forced to find a more stable, less spike/crash prone hunger and stimulant cycle, which won't exactly hurt your efforts to get some exercise either before or after work.
I have nothing against the Intel drivers, it's just that none of Intel's GPUs are particularly powerful, and(more annoyingly) Intel tends to reserve the most powerful GPUs for their more powerful and expensive CPUs(which are total overkill for most applications that any Intel GPU is capable of).
Does anybody know how well the Linux Steam client runs on this?
Unless they really ripped things up more than expected(or Steam demands a bunch of proprietary libraries, rather than just blobbing them in), I'd assume that it would run more or less entirely the same.
The only significant caveat, of course, is that games tend to be hard on the GPU, and FOSS GPU driver performance can be a bit... touchy. Intel GMAs work about as well as they ever do with free drivers(does Intel even bother to maintain a proprietary branch on linux?); but just aren't that fast. AMD GPU performance under free drivers varies by family; but tends to lag their proprietary driver in pure punch(although it sometimes leads it in playing nicely). Nvidia's proprietary driver is generally considered the best; but the alternatives are either Nouveau, which makes the AMD FOSS drivers look mature and powerful, or almost nothing(Nvidia's official advice is as follows Our advice to owners of NVIDIA GPUs running Linux is to use the VESA X driver from the time of Linux distribution installation until they can download and install the NVIDIA Linux driver from their distribution repositories or from nvidia.com.
So, you will likely be able to install it; but unless you have an Intel GPU, or specific AMD parts, or even more specific Nvidia parts, you'll end up shoving so much binary blob into your kernel in order to meaningfully use it that your objective in installing it isn't really clear...
Going through IT for every goofy little peripheral isn't terribly sensible(and IT generally doesn't love spending time being the supply cabinet); but I'd be curious to know whether the additional complexity and cost of the vending machines are sufficiently defrayed by the 'surveillance effect' and inventory tracking they provide.
'Just have a supply closet' is not a sexy strategy; but it sure is KISS-compliant.
If memory serves, at least the first-gen 3d printed designs were direct adaptations from http://www.cncguns.com/ CAD files, and that site has been up with little or no controversy for some years now. I assume that there has been some adaptation since then to support the limitations of 3d printing hardware.
Yeah, yeah, '3d printers' are magic star-trek replicators from the future, and CNC gear is old-and-busted-industrial-economy-getting-your-hands-dirty; but small scale weapons manufacture really isn't news(especially when you can legally buy some of the really tricky parts(properly rifled and chromed barrel, say) and just screw them on to the lower receiver you hacked together.)
"It's a .44 Defcad, the most powerful handgun printed, and it'll blow my hand clean off. So - hey, knock it off with the laughter!"