They don't want you to know this; but the various 'cloud gaming' startups are actually part of an attempt to uncover enough precogs to set up a practical precrime unit.
With latency what it is, only limited precognition allows the player to perform as well as they would locally. With online leaderboards, it becomes a relatively simple matter to screen for players who play more effectively than the limitations of the game would ordinarily allow.
This 'cloud gaming' stuff seems severely overrated; but there might be another way in which cheapie consoles do cause real trouble for their more expensive brethren:
Because(with the historical exception of Nintendo) consoles have been sold at a loss(and have also generally been somewhat odd ducks, with a fair amount of custom architecture thrown in), with the economic logic being built around massive volume sales of officially blessed games that pay a tithe for the privilege, the present sales model is only viable if it is assured that they will be sold in large numbers to customers who will buy lots of games for them. If the sales numbers suffer, or the attach rate goes to shit, the available subsidy will dwindle considerably.
We've certainly seen a rather dramatic shift on the mobile side, with 'free-as-in-you-already-own-one' cellphones and cheap downloadable games striking a certain amount of fear in the hearts of dedicated mobile console makers. Notably, they haven't done this by being objectively better(if anything, pure touchscreen gaming is sort of mediocre, and a lot of cellphone games are worth all 99 cents they cost); but they sure are convenient.
On the home console side, we could end up seeing a very similar squeeze from the low end if Google or Apple's attempts to move their mobile ecosystems into set top boxes end up working, or if one or more cable/satellite companies decide to kick out a set top box that doesn't entirely suck. The effect on dedicated fans of Medal of Halo: Gears of Assault will be limited; but lazier and more casual players could easily skip the console if they can download games from their set top box in 30 seconds for less than the cost of a new xbox AV cable... On the top end, the longer the consoles go without a refresh, the relatively cheaper PC gaming becomes.
Given the inherent weaknesses of 'cloud' gaming, and the fact that nasty little mobile SoCs aren't as powerful as CPUs that cost several times as much, the little guys aren't going to match the consoles; but the traditional console model depends on a big market in order to be viable. The more sales they lose, the harder it becomes to offer the subsidies that make console gaming cheaper than PC gaming and the AAA several-hundred-million-dollar platform exclusives that help drive sales.
And for quality content, you do not need a giant octo-core monster with a dedicated GPU that will burn through the PCB without a proper heatsink and fan. You need power to produce another shitty cookie cutter game running off UDK, hence the reason for the Xbox 360 and PS3.
I played plenty of games in 1997-2004 that were astoundingly awesome (and still are today via emulation). For those kinds of games, even the OUYA is drastically overpowered because it runs Android and they didn't feel like writing their own OS. Seriously, if someone started from the ground up and built their own console with their own OS and their own SDK, you could pull off some impressive things with a 500mhz processor and 256MB of RAM. If you think that's bullshit, then you need only look into the history of gaming to say otherwise.
So, yeah, I suppose what qualifies as a "tiny" console today could give the 360 and PS3 a decent kicking if they got enough talented developers on board who actually had an interest in making solid games (and game engines) rather then barfing up some more crap in UDK or Unity.
While I would hardly disagree with the notion that today's gaming market is loaded with derivative crap(not that the past wasn't: how many crap re-sprites of Mario Brothers did the world get to endure?); your proposed solution seems counterintuitive:
Derivative crap comes about for some combination of 1. Customer demand, 2. Publisher risk aversion, 3. Tight deadlines, and 4. Very high development costs that essentially require a game to be a big seller lest it be a massive money pit.
How does increasing the amount of low-level(and technically challenging) engine optimization grovelling that developers need to do help any of this? Barring a few exceptionally talented outliers, that seems mostly like a recipe for more bugs(and more hard-lock-to-desktop stuff, not just quest logic issues) and less time spent on storytelling and gameplay tweaking in favor of writing yet another pseudo-newtonian physics engine or making sure that the shader code doesn't crash on specific GPUs. Somebody has to do it; but there isn't a whole lot of benefit to having everybody reinventing the wheel badly when they could be using tools built by people who know how to build tools in order to build actual games...
Trouble is, unless you've got a decent internet connection(preferrably uncapped, if you plan on doing much 'cloud' gaming), the effective latency is a combination of your basic ping time and the time to transfer whatever data are needed to paint the next frame of video. Your keystrokes going out aren't likely to be all that much bigger than an ICMP packet; but unless you can pull a good 10Mb/s down or better you'll be choosing between pixel soup and slideshow mode...
It looks to me like somebody forgot to specify the network device over which the call is supposed to go out, as well as failing to specify the tty that the SIM is listening on...
Oh, it's DRM alright, it's just my suspicion that (based on its history) Valve won't be demanding a signed-from-the-bootloader-on-up tivoized linux setup for their Linux version, any more than they did for their Windows or OSX versions(unlike, say, Netflix, where the fact that Roku boxes are linux-based means fuck all for 'Netflix on the Linux desktop'). From a 'free software' perspective, Steam is exactly the same as the others, it's just that from a tivoization perspective, Valve's statements and actions to date suggest that, while they do want to prod the industry into providing a standardized, living-room-friendly platform, they aren't looking for something that fundamentally isn't a PC anymore(as opposed to, say, the original Xbox, where Microsoft wanted a PC in a standardized and living-room-friendly shape; but also wanted to break PC compatibility as hard as economically feasible).
It's a bit lightweight, and weirdly noncompliant with certain UI conventions of Windows; but I've always been impressed by how fast Paint.net is. Not quite as fast as paint; but far faster than Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or GIMP. If you just need to pop an image open and do a quick fix, that really matters.
Apple servers must have been pretty dreadful indeed(and their partnership on various matters with IBM rather weak) if the stuff that MS was selling as 'server' operating systems in the 1994-1996 period counted as an improvement... That would have put them on NT3.x or NT4...*shudder*
I wonder if the thieves were at all cautious about stealing MS hardware from MS because of how tightly some tech companies are known to control pre-release or dev versions of hardware?
Most likely, the fact that it's easier and quicker to flip stolen iDevices for cash was the reason; but I know that I'd be a bit nervous about stealing a contemporary 'appliance' type device in a situation where it might be some kind of specially blessed dev unit. Modern hardware has at least 3-4 globally unique numbers burned in, and tends to call home frequently, and it wouldn't be a big surprise if dev gear(for reasons of loss prevention or UX testing) is stuffed to the gills with analysis and reporting software...
They'll try to turn it into a marketing strategy, with constant reminders to update to a newer version every time you open your "free" version.
I suspect that their problem is that CS2 is more than adequate for most people who haven't already upgraded to CS5 or 6(in particular, it should curb-stomp any version of "Photoshop Elements" which Adobe doesn't exactly give away...
Adobe does add some interesting features with each new revision(their software engineering people are exactly as good as you'd expect, given the sordid histories of things like Flash and Acrobat Reader; but they have some genuinely interesting machine vision/image processing people); but a lot of the core tools don't change too much, both because there isn't too much to change and because the Pro users get touchy.
It probably won't hit existing CS5/6 customers hard; but allowing free CS2 into the wild will murder 'Elements' and make upselling harder.
So you freely admit that your argument is against the AAPS, not against their claim (AKA "poisoning the well")?
No, I merely wish to provide some background data that might be useful in coming to a decision without access to perfect knowledge of the situation.
Obviously, what we really want is a methodologically rigorous, peer-reviewed, statistically powerful, study demonstrating the efficacy of nurse vaccinations for influenza in controlling its incidence in the patient population. Unfortunately, not being an expert in the field, I don't have one, and certainly haven't done one myself.
Since I don't have what I want, I'm forced to fall back on trying to find somebody who claims to know what I want and learning about it from them. At this point, if I am trusting somebody else to tell me, their credibility becomes an issue. Nothing requires a group of ideologically motivated medical contrarians to be wrong; but it's worth knowing that they are such a group when attempting to determine how much to trust them. 'Trust' is a second-rate standard of evidence; but unless you do a lot of research yourself, sometimes it is what you have to work with. Party A says X, Party B says not-X. Unless I already know about X, all I can do is use prior statements about other matters I might know something about to try to determine their reliability.
Imperfect knowledge sucks; but it's rare to have anything else, so you reach a tentative conclusion, subject to revision on further evidence, and hope for the best.
Ironically, you are probably more likely to have access to paid sick days if you are one of the less dangerous works than if you are one of the more dangerous ones.
White collar cube drone on salary? Quite possibly has some(whether or not actually taking them will get him fired for 'not being a team player' next time 'rightsizing' season arrives, is a slightly different question).
Dude who earns $8/hour slinging food down in the cafeteria? Probably sucking it up and sneezing into the entree; because he really needs that $8/hour...
This isn't to say that the cube drone doesn't deserve sick days(if nothing else, sick people aren't very efficient and dragging them into the office to make horrible nasal-mucus noises doesn't help them or their colleagues); but which of these two is more likely to kick off a contagion that affects the entire building(while, incidentally, being so much cheaper, per day, to just send home)?
That's my point: If you want to argue that 14% is some sort of cruel usury, step up and show me the better offer... *Crickets*.
Given the state of the capital markets, and the fact that the 'insurance' that was supposed to have negated a whole bunch of risk was suddenly being offered by a company that had no money, 14% was a gift. Had there been something better on the table, from another party, and Uncle Sam made it clear that 14% was an offer you couldn't refuse, you might have a case. As it was, though...
There is certainly a case to be made that the AIG bailout was structured in no small part for the benefit of AIG's counterparties(for reasons that, um, have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Goldman Sachs was one of the big ones, and the thing was essentially written by GS staff temporarily working for the feds); but it takes serious chutzpah to complain about an interest rate lower than the one on a consumer credit card when your situation was so fucked up that nobody would touch your corpse with somebody else's ten foot pole during one of the most dramatic capital-market fuckups in the history of capital markets...
The racial and town/gown tensions were synergistic. In addition to the usual friction between rowdy college students and the locals who have to wake up and get to work, it wasn't exactly news that Duke was a whole lot whiter and a whole lot wealthier than the surroundings so when allegations emerged that the lacrosse team had raped the black stripper they had hired came up, it pushed all the pre-existing buttons. The DA, Mike Nifong was the local(and authoritative) figure responsible for really charging ahead of the evidence, allegedly because of his desire to curry favor for the upcoming election. Nationally, the media chatter was more about race, because local DA electoral politics is boring. In a rather exceptional outcome, Nifong managed to go so far that he ended up being sacked over the incident.
In rough numbers, it looks like brass scrap is going for about $2.33/lb. Given the big brass balls that AIG apparently possesses, they should never have needed any sort of bailout in the first place...
(And, incidentally, if that 14% interest rate was so crushingly unfair, where exactly were the private lenders willing to offer better rates and cut big, bad, Uncle Sam out of the picture?)
In the Duke case, the DA was pandering to constituents who wanted action(it was a serious town/gown thing, and students don't do much voting in local politics). In this case, the relevant authorities are pandering to constituents who want inaction to protect their precious football heroes.
Different incentives; but both good examples of the fact that criminal investigations can be...modified...by the desires of local stakeholders.
The better title might be 'Anonymous actually gives a damn about gang rape case, unlike clannish and football crazed natives of some backwater hellhole'.
The perps in this case were almost unbelievably sloppy in concealing their activities; but the people supposed to be enforcing the law were, by turns, overtly apathetic and far more interested in protecting their hometown heroes and their precious football season than actually seeing justice done.
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology – where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
Remember when this was the straw-man that Apple was against?
Wake me up when people start making consoles that stack again
I curse the process by which rack compatibility for A/V gear somehow became a "Wow, you must be crazy rich and want a $50k system installed by specialist contractors, or you are a roadie and only buying musical gear, not home theater stuff' feature.
Most of it is still roughly the right width, and light enough that a simple two-post setup built into the basic crap MDF enclosures that TVs are placed on would be able to support it; but no not even optional rack ears, and a proliferation of weird-shaped set-top boxes...
if this means more games for linux on the desktop then yeah it could be big.
Otherwise - it's just another locked down console and I'm not sure what benefit it will have for linux on the desktop.
Unless Valve has been lying through their teeth this whole time(certainly possible; but not obvious why doing so would be an advantage for them), their desire is to compete in the console space by offering one or more 'easy, just-works, fits in your living room, appliance' style PCs that will be churned out to spec by cooperating OEMs and running Steam-on-linux by default; but that they have no problem with people running Steam-on-linux on whatever oddball homebuilds they like, subject to the caveat that Valve has minimal interest in dealing with the rough edges of motherboard Z's shitty ACPI implementation or binary compatibility problems introduced by your Gentoo install's creative compiler flags.
Steam is, among other things, a DRM system; but not one that has ever depended on some crypto-lockdown-trusted-firmware(and, indeed, they seem quite worried that Microsoft, despite Games for Windows Live sucking pretty brutally, is well placed to be the ones offering such a system instead, same with Apple and its app store on the OSX side) in its Windows or Mac iterations. It would be odd if they were to go that route for Linux.
Obviously, they aren't porting stuff to linux just because they love penguins and freedom and whatnot(since the closed source Steam binary will still mostly dish out closed source game binaries); but the threat posed by both Microsoft and Apple having digital stores attached to their platforms, along with a desire not to add the cost of a Windows license to every 'console' they ship, gives them a pretty good reason to support compatibility of games with at least the most common Linux desktop systems.
Isn't SGI one of those companies that has achieved eternal coolness by (like any self-respecting rock star) dying horribly before it could really ruin its reputation with a string of pathetic comeback attempts at 3rd string clubs?
My sense is that SGI's last gasp of genuine relevance was over a decade ago; but that they are forever enshrined in the datacenters of Valhalla(and every system today that uses OpenGL gives them praise)
Support for this varies by studio and even by game; but sometimes the PC side can at least enjoy the benefits of having minimum specs that are basically dictated by the console ports; but at least having the option to shove the sliders all the way toward 'overkill' or install a bunch of mods that each use more RAM than a PS3 or Xbox360 has available for its entire system...
The existence of consoles generally means that even your crap best-buy special is an $80 video card away from being able to play the game; but you also have the option of throwing a gloriously detailed gameworld across 2560x1600 if you feel like it.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't want you to know this; but the various 'cloud gaming' startups are actually part of an attempt to uncover enough precogs to set up a practical precrime unit.
With latency what it is, only limited precognition allows the player to perform as well as they would locally. With online leaderboards, it becomes a relatively simple matter to screen for players who play more effectively than the limitations of the game would ordinarily allow.
And don't forget Blizzard's innovative Massively Singleplayer Online RPG experience in the latest iteration of the Diablo franchise...
This 'cloud gaming' stuff seems severely overrated; but there might be another way in which cheapie consoles do cause real trouble for their more expensive brethren:
Because(with the historical exception of Nintendo) consoles have been sold at a loss(and have also generally been somewhat odd ducks, with a fair amount of custom architecture thrown in), with the economic logic being built around massive volume sales of officially blessed games that pay a tithe for the privilege, the present sales model is only viable if it is assured that they will be sold in large numbers to customers who will buy lots of games for them. If the sales numbers suffer, or the attach rate goes to shit, the available subsidy will dwindle considerably.
We've certainly seen a rather dramatic shift on the mobile side, with 'free-as-in-you-already-own-one' cellphones and cheap downloadable games striking a certain amount of fear in the hearts of dedicated mobile console makers. Notably, they haven't done this by being objectively better(if anything, pure touchscreen gaming is sort of mediocre, and a lot of cellphone games are worth all 99 cents they cost); but they sure are convenient.
On the home console side, we could end up seeing a very similar squeeze from the low end if Google or Apple's attempts to move their mobile ecosystems into set top boxes end up working, or if one or more cable/satellite companies decide to kick out a set top box that doesn't entirely suck. The effect on dedicated fans of Medal of Halo: Gears of Assault will be limited; but lazier and more casual players could easily skip the console if they can download games from their set top box in 30 seconds for less than the cost of a new xbox AV cable... On the top end, the longer the consoles go without a refresh, the relatively cheaper PC gaming becomes.
Given the inherent weaknesses of 'cloud' gaming, and the fact that nasty little mobile SoCs aren't as powerful as CPUs that cost several times as much, the little guys aren't going to match the consoles; but the traditional console model depends on a big market in order to be viable. The more sales they lose, the harder it becomes to offer the subsidies that make console gaming cheaper than PC gaming and the AAA several-hundred-million-dollar platform exclusives that help drive sales.
Power has nothing to do with it.
The quality of the content does.
And for quality content, you do not need a giant octo-core monster with a dedicated GPU that will burn through the PCB without a proper heatsink and fan. You need power to produce another shitty cookie cutter game running off UDK, hence the reason for the Xbox 360 and PS3.
I played plenty of games in 1997-2004 that were astoundingly awesome (and still are today via emulation). For those kinds of games, even the OUYA is drastically overpowered because it runs Android and they didn't feel like writing their own OS. Seriously, if someone started from the ground up and built their own console with their own OS and their own SDK, you could pull off some impressive things with a 500mhz processor and 256MB of RAM. If you think that's bullshit, then you need only look into the history of gaming to say otherwise.
So, yeah, I suppose what qualifies as a "tiny" console today could give the 360 and PS3 a decent kicking if they got enough talented developers on board who actually had an interest in making solid games (and game engines) rather then barfing up some more crap in UDK or Unity.
While I would hardly disagree with the notion that today's gaming market is loaded with derivative crap(not that the past wasn't: how many crap re-sprites of Mario Brothers did the world get to endure?); your proposed solution seems counterintuitive:
Derivative crap comes about for some combination of 1. Customer demand, 2. Publisher risk aversion, 3. Tight deadlines, and 4. Very high development costs that essentially require a game to be a big seller lest it be a massive money pit.
How does increasing the amount of low-level(and technically challenging) engine optimization grovelling that developers need to do help any of this? Barring a few exceptionally talented outliers, that seems mostly like a recipe for more bugs(and more hard-lock-to-desktop stuff, not just quest logic issues) and less time spent on storytelling and gameplay tweaking in favor of writing yet another pseudo-newtonian physics engine or making sure that the shader code doesn't crash on specific GPUs. Somebody has to do it; but there isn't a whole lot of benefit to having everybody reinventing the wheel badly when they could be using tools built by people who know how to build tools in order to build actual games...
Trouble is, unless you've got a decent internet connection(preferrably uncapped, if you plan on doing much 'cloud' gaming), the effective latency is a combination of your basic ping time and the time to transfer whatever data are needed to paint the next frame of video. Your keystrokes going out aren't likely to be all that much bigger than an ICMP packet; but unless you can pull a good 10Mb/s down or better you'll be choosing between pixel soup and slideshow mode...
It looks to me like somebody forgot to specify the network device over which the call is supposed to go out, as well as failing to specify the tty that the SIM is listening on...
Oh, it's DRM alright, it's just my suspicion that (based on its history) Valve won't be demanding a signed-from-the-bootloader-on-up tivoized linux setup for their Linux version, any more than they did for their Windows or OSX versions(unlike, say, Netflix, where the fact that Roku boxes are linux-based means fuck all for 'Netflix on the Linux desktop'). From a 'free software' perspective, Steam is exactly the same as the others, it's just that from a tivoization perspective, Valve's statements and actions to date suggest that, while they do want to prod the industry into providing a standardized, living-room-friendly platform, they aren't looking for something that fundamentally isn't a PC anymore(as opposed to, say, the original Xbox, where Microsoft wanted a PC in a standardized and living-room-friendly shape; but also wanted to break PC compatibility as hard as economically feasible).
It's a bit lightweight, and weirdly noncompliant with certain UI conventions of Windows; but I've always been impressed by how fast Paint.net is. Not quite as fast as paint; but far faster than Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or GIMP. If you just need to pop an image open and do a quick fix, that really matters.
Apple servers must have been pretty dreadful indeed(and their partnership on various matters with IBM rather weak) if the stuff that MS was selling as 'server' operating systems in the 1994-1996 period counted as an improvement... That would have put them on NT3.x or NT4...*shudder*
I wonder if the thieves were at all cautious about stealing MS hardware from MS because of how tightly some tech companies are known to control pre-release or dev versions of hardware?
Most likely, the fact that it's easier and quicker to flip stolen iDevices for cash was the reason; but I know that I'd be a bit nervous about stealing a contemporary 'appliance' type device in a situation where it might be some kind of specially blessed dev unit. Modern hardware has at least 3-4 globally unique numbers burned in, and tends to call home frequently, and it wouldn't be a big surprise if dev gear(for reasons of loss prevention or UX testing) is stuffed to the gills with analysis and reporting software...
They'll try to turn it into a marketing strategy, with constant reminders to update to a newer version every time you open your "free" version.
I suspect that their problem is that CS2 is more than adequate for most people who haven't already upgraded to CS5 or 6(in particular, it should curb-stomp any version of "Photoshop Elements" which Adobe doesn't exactly give away...
Adobe does add some interesting features with each new revision(their software engineering people are exactly as good as you'd expect, given the sordid histories of things like Flash and Acrobat Reader; but they have some genuinely interesting machine vision/image processing people); but a lot of the core tools don't change too much, both because there isn't too much to change and because the Pro users get touchy.
It probably won't hit existing CS5/6 customers hard; but allowing free CS2 into the wild will murder 'Elements' and make upselling harder.
their key servers are down.. do you think they even have stable code for that one?
Did you suspect that Adobe had stable code for one of their products even when they released it?
So you freely admit that your argument is against the AAPS, not against their claim (AKA "poisoning the well")?
No, I merely wish to provide some background data that might be useful in coming to a decision without access to perfect knowledge of the situation.
Obviously, what we really want is a methodologically rigorous, peer-reviewed, statistically powerful, study demonstrating the efficacy of nurse vaccinations for influenza in controlling its incidence in the patient population. Unfortunately, not being an expert in the field, I don't have one, and certainly haven't done one myself.
Since I don't have what I want, I'm forced to fall back on trying to find somebody who claims to know what I want and learning about it from them. At this point, if I am trusting somebody else to tell me, their credibility becomes an issue. Nothing requires a group of ideologically motivated medical contrarians to be wrong; but it's worth knowing that they are such a group when attempting to determine how much to trust them. 'Trust' is a second-rate standard of evidence; but unless you do a lot of research yourself, sometimes it is what you have to work with. Party A says X, Party B says not-X. Unless I already know about X, all I can do is use prior statements about other matters I might know something about to try to determine their reliability.
Imperfect knowledge sucks; but it's rare to have anything else, so you reach a tentative conclusion, subject to revision on further evidence, and hope for the best.
Ironically, you are probably more likely to have access to paid sick days if you are one of the less dangerous works than if you are one of the more dangerous ones.
White collar cube drone on salary? Quite possibly has some(whether or not actually taking them will get him fired for 'not being a team player' next time 'rightsizing' season arrives, is a slightly different question).
Dude who earns $8/hour slinging food down in the cafeteria? Probably sucking it up and sneezing into the entree; because he really needs that $8/hour...
This isn't to say that the cube drone doesn't deserve sick days(if nothing else, sick people aren't very efficient and dragging them into the office to make horrible nasal-mucus noises doesn't help them or their colleagues); but which of these two is more likely to kick off a contagion that affects the entire building(while, incidentally, being so much cheaper, per day, to just send home)?
That's my point: If you want to argue that 14% is some sort of cruel usury, step up and show me the better offer... *Crickets*.
Given the state of the capital markets, and the fact that the 'insurance' that was supposed to have negated a whole bunch of risk was suddenly being offered by a company that had no money, 14% was a gift. Had there been something better on the table, from another party, and Uncle Sam made it clear that 14% was an offer you couldn't refuse, you might have a case. As it was, though...
There is certainly a case to be made that the AIG bailout was structured in no small part for the benefit of AIG's counterparties(for reasons that, um, have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Goldman Sachs was one of the big ones, and the thing was essentially written by GS staff temporarily working for the feds); but it takes serious chutzpah to complain about an interest rate lower than the one on a consumer credit card when your situation was so fucked up that nobody would touch your corpse with somebody else's ten foot pole during one of the most dramatic capital-market fuckups in the history of capital markets...
The racial and town/gown tensions were synergistic. In addition to the usual friction between rowdy college students and the locals who have to wake up and get to work, it wasn't exactly news that Duke was a whole lot whiter and a whole lot wealthier than the surroundings so when allegations emerged that the lacrosse team had raped the black stripper they had hired came up, it pushed all the pre-existing buttons. The DA, Mike Nifong was the local(and authoritative) figure responsible for really charging ahead of the evidence, allegedly because of his desire to curry favor for the upcoming election. Nationally, the media chatter was more about race, because local DA electoral politics is boring. In a rather exceptional outcome, Nifong managed to go so far that he ended up being sacked over the incident.
In rough numbers, it looks like brass scrap is going for about $2.33/lb. Given the big brass balls that AIG apparently possesses, they should never have needed any sort of bailout in the first place...
(And, incidentally, if that 14% interest rate was so crushingly unfair, where exactly were the private lenders willing to offer better rates and cut big, bad, Uncle Sam out of the picture?)
In the Duke case, the DA was pandering to constituents who wanted action(it was a serious town/gown thing, and students don't do much voting in local politics). In this case, the relevant authorities are pandering to constituents who want inaction to protect their precious football heroes.
Different incentives; but both good examples of the fact that criminal investigations can be...modified...by the desires of local stakeholders.
The better title might be 'Anonymous actually gives a damn about gang rape case, unlike clannish and football crazed natives of some backwater hellhole'.
The perps in this case were almost unbelievably sloppy in concealing their activities; but the people supposed to be enforcing the law were, by turns, overtly apathetic and far more interested in protecting their hometown heroes and their precious football season than actually seeing justice done.
"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology – where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"
Remember when this was the straw-man that Apple was against?
Wake me up when people start making consoles that stack again
I curse the process by which rack compatibility for A/V gear somehow became a "Wow, you must be crazy rich and want a $50k system installed by specialist contractors, or you are a roadie and only buying musical gear, not home theater stuff' feature.
Most of it is still roughly the right width, and light enough that a simple two-post setup built into the basic crap MDF enclosures that TVs are placed on would be able to support it; but no not even optional rack ears, and a proliferation of weird-shaped set-top boxes...
if this means more games for linux on the desktop then yeah it could be big.
Otherwise - it's just another locked down console and I'm not sure what benefit it will have for linux on the desktop.
Unless Valve has been lying through their teeth this whole time(certainly possible; but not obvious why doing so would be an advantage for them), their desire is to compete in the console space by offering one or more 'easy, just-works, fits in your living room, appliance' style PCs that will be churned out to spec by cooperating OEMs and running Steam-on-linux by default; but that they have no problem with people running Steam-on-linux on whatever oddball homebuilds they like, subject to the caveat that Valve has minimal interest in dealing with the rough edges of motherboard Z's shitty ACPI implementation or binary compatibility problems introduced by your Gentoo install's creative compiler flags.
Steam is, among other things, a DRM system; but not one that has ever depended on some crypto-lockdown-trusted-firmware(and, indeed, they seem quite worried that Microsoft, despite Games for Windows Live sucking pretty brutally, is well placed to be the ones offering such a system instead, same with Apple and its app store on the OSX side) in its Windows or Mac iterations. It would be odd if they were to go that route for Linux.
Obviously, they aren't porting stuff to linux just because they love penguins and freedom and whatnot(since the closed source Steam binary will still mostly dish out closed source game binaries); but the threat posed by both Microsoft and Apple having digital stores attached to their platforms, along with a desire not to add the cost of a Windows license to every 'console' they ship, gives them a pretty good reason to support compatibility of games with at least the most common Linux desktop systems.
Isn't SGI one of those companies that has achieved eternal coolness by (like any self-respecting rock star) dying horribly before it could really ruin its reputation with a string of pathetic comeback attempts at 3rd string clubs?
My sense is that SGI's last gasp of genuine relevance was over a decade ago; but that they are forever enshrined in the datacenters of Valhalla(and every system today that uses OpenGL gives them praise)
Support for this varies by studio and even by game; but sometimes the PC side can at least enjoy the benefits of having minimum specs that are basically dictated by the console ports; but at least having the option to shove the sliders all the way toward 'overkill' or install a bunch of mods that each use more RAM than a PS3 or Xbox360 has available for its entire system...
The existence of consoles generally means that even your crap best-buy special is an $80 video card away from being able to play the game; but you also have the option of throwing a gloriously detailed gameworld across 2560x1600 if you feel like it.