That could work, but I think that might still be too extreme a break in what the user expects. Unmuted by default should probably be the default, for now at least.
Or perhaps it could default to muted unless you do something to trigger the sound (pushing "play" on a video, for instance). That would cut out the annoying autoplay ads, at least.
I see a lot of people playing music in a Youtube (or whatever) tab while doing other things in the other tabs. Automatically muting any background tabs will break that usage.
That link is not very truthy. Not only does it only list a single "recommended" card, rather than a list of any that are compatible, but it also has not been updated for these new GCN-based APUs. As noted in TFA (the Anandtech one, specifically) "AMD recommends testing dual graphics solutions with their 13.350 driver build, which due out in February."
I'm helping a friend with a custom, low-cost gaming machine. We'd looked into using an APU, and I looked into it again today when I saw this. The gaming performance just isn't there yet. They're fine for regular desktop use, but even the top-of-the-line one can't handle gaming.
The two things that could still be useful are GPGPU, and dual graphics. Having an on-chip GPU just for compute purposes, especially with all the enhancements they've added, would be very useful if more things used GPU compute, but it just wasn't worth it for this build and this user. And they have spoken a bit of using both the integrated GPU and a discrete graphics card in tandem, similar to using two GPUs in Crossfire, but they haven't released the drivers for it, nor listed which cards will work, and the card they chose to demo it with was their bottom-end graphics card. Given all that, and that a similar CPU without the integrated graphics was about half the price, I couldn't justify getting one.
I am pretty impressed with how tightly they've integrated them, though. Much better than Intel's offerings. If they made one that had the graphics horsepower for gaming, I'd have used one.
I work as a programmer with various POS devices and other card readers on a regular basis, as the software I develop for integrates with many different devices. So for once I actually know what the fuck I'm talking about.
Out of all the ones we currently use, the highest-quality by far is the one that uses an IBM terminal running Windows 7. It is also easily the most expensive. It's regular desktop Windows, but it's configured for automatic updates is about as secure as you can expect a Windows device to be. These do, in our case at least, require a direct internet connection, but they're pretty hardened out of the box because they were expected to be hooked up to the internet. I do not know how they transmit CC data, but for our integration at least communications are done over standard HTTPS (HTTP is still supported by our side, being phased out once we make sure no customers accidentally set HTTP).
Meanwhile, the absolute worst is a piece of rubbish that continues to use 486 processors after they were discontinued, and runs an old version of Windows CE, with their main application apparently being written in Visual Basic. They talk to an on-site Windows server, which is usually set up and configured by someone with minimal training beyond this specific application (on our test server, they turned off the firewall completely rather than opening only select ports). They also transmit transaction data in the clear - we force our customers to use a VPN to connect to us if they insist on using these, as it is so highly insecure. These are also by far the cheapest POS we support, and is the only one I've seen at other stores. I won't name names for obvious reasons, but a regex that would match their name would likely match the vendor of their OS as well, if you catch my drift.
It's not that they're cheaping out on the hardware - they're skimping on salaries, hiring whoever has a night-school certification for setting up the systems and not bothering to make sure anything's secured. It's like those SCADA systems that still have their default three-character password - failure of setup, not necessarily of hardware.
Metro isn't a bad UI in itself. The problem is how it is currently implemented on the desktop.
First, of all the default Metro apps, not a single one matches the functionality of their desktop equivalents. That alone is enough to sink it, especially when it took me less than an hour after first installing W8 to find something that I needed the old application for (the Music app lacked workgroup support, and I wanted to play some music stored on my laptop). If your default Metro apps are less functional in a concrete and quantifiable way than the old Desktop apps, then Metro apps in general get a reputation as being underfunctional and dumbed down. It doesn't matter that your Music app works just as well, even better, than the Android music app or the iOS version of iTunes - on the desktop, it's fighting WMP and all the third-party apps like VLC and whatnot.
Second, you shouldn't have two different means of interaction. We knew this even back in the CLI->GUI transition - DOS prompts, and later the "command prompt", were encapsulated in windows because everything was being done through windows.
There's two ways this could be done. The simplest, and perhaps the most popular, would be to simply let Metro apps run in a window (or something interacted with like windows). Yes, Metro apps look different than Desktop apps, but who really gives a shit? Counting the windows I have open right now, at least four have their own distinct UI paradigm (Thunderbird, GTalk, Steam and PuTTY), plus several that differ from Windows norms in subtler ways (including Microsoft's own Media Player).
Or you could double down on Metro's tiling, and make Desktop apps run in Metro tiles instead of in the traditional windows. If you designed it right for the desktop, this could be perfectly fine, maybe even better than the desktop. But you'd have to design it for power users to be able to use, because the casual computer users are slowly switching to tablets or laptops. Don't run things fullscreen unless it's a small enough screen - let us configure layouts we want on each monitor, switching them as needed, and just "drop" apps into the spaces. Add virtual desktop support, so I can emulate having six or twelve or thirty monitors instead of three, and I'd basically have my current work setup, with slightly more space (lack of window borders+UI) and without having to manually set up these layouts.
In short, having *two* UIs makes users choose between the two to find one they prefer, using the other only if forced to. On the tablet, they went for Metro because it was more tablet-oriented and the only Desktop app of note was Office. On the desktop, we went for the classic UI because its programs worked better and because most of us have enough display real estate that using fullscreen apps for almost anything is wasteful. Instead, go full-on with Metro, but give us variants (I'd go with Phone, Tablet, Laptop and Workstation, each slightly tailored for that device class) so that our *experience* fits what we're using.
That's really the short version of it - they decided to bundle API, UI and UX, and they failed because those things don't actually have to be bound together.
I will note that while TFA does identify the species of the bird (Hirundo Rustica), it does not clarify whether this was Hirundo Rustica Rustica, the European Swallow, or Hirundo Rustica Savignii, the non-migratory Egyptian Swallow.
My Dell 27" 1440p monitor came with an application that let you "snap" windows to various locations, more so than the normal two-side-by-side Windows does. You could set up various modes, from a few asymmetric two-side-by-sides at the least dense, to (I believe) a three-by-three grid. I ended up not using it, since the productive stuff I do with it actually works best with just the Windows normal setup.
I'm sure there's similar free software for your OS of choice if Dell managed to put it on their driver disk.
I have an old, first-gen Mac Pro, which I use as a regular desktop. I tend to spend the bulk of my time in Windows, but I use OS X on occasion.
For whatever reason, the firmware on it is for 32-bit systems, something Mountain Lion and now Mavericks does not support. I'm still running Lion because I don't care about their new features and don't want to risk breaking something trying to hack it into working. Getting 64-bit Windows onto the machine was difficult enough.
So yeah, for me at least, it's because Apple doesn't want to give me security updates, not because I don't want to download them.
The situations an automated car is be able to handle needs to include emergencies. I can see the cases where human control is needed being things like "unmarked cobblestone streets" or "dirt driveways", where the computer can safely come to a full stop and signal the human to take the wheel.
It only came out on PC at all in 2013, which is when I played it. Mac+Linux support lagged only two months behind Windows support.
And I used it as an example both because it's still one of the bigger-name and higher-price Linux games, and because I really enjoyed that game and will name-drop it given the slightest excuse.
I did a lot of thinking on this subject for a book I was once trying to write (I've stopped, since the characters and plot turned out to be horrible - might revisit it once I can figure it all out). These are the rules I came up with for the fictional empire featured in it:
1) Target selection is still done by humans. It can range from having a human operator manually designate every target, to having a human confirm that the machine-selected target is valid. Perhaps even have a "shoot everything that moves" option that can be initiated by the operator. Once the machine has the go-ahead, it can engage as it wills, subject to whatever mission parameters were set (for example, you might disable certain weapons in an urban civilian-heavy environment). The level of human involvement would generally scale based on how "open" the war is. Counter-insurgency stuff happened in the manual-designation mode, while the all-out WW3 scenario had UAV swarms told "anything that isn't part of the swarm that enters this bounding box dies".
2) Humans must be nearby enough to provide oversight. The ground drones were integrated at the squad level, eventually the fireteam level (three humans with rifles and one drone with a heavy machine gun). The UAVs were controlled not by people halfway across the world, but by the same staff that maintained and launched them (sometimes from AEW aircraft). Naval drones were part of fleet formations. This also has the benefit of, if a drone "goes rogue" or control is hijacked by the enemy, there are forces in play that can neutralize them.
Both those points lead into:
3) There must always be a human who has the responsibility for any kills. Drones do not "kill" in the way humans kill, they kill in the way bullets kill - the murderer is the one pulling the trigger. So if a drone attack caused civilian casualties, the operator was subject to investigation and possibly court-martial. Probably wouldn't always happen that way in practice, but in theory at least the person who "pulled the trigger" wrongly would be punished appropriately.
Now, even in the story I had downsides to those rules - particularly the lack of automation on the anti-missile weapons. But it also made projecting just a *little* bit of power impossible. With these rules, you can't really have a couple dozen drones flying around Terroristan, it's either "nothing" or "deploy a full air wing with drones".
I will also concede that, since the story was set 10-20 years from now, where drones could not fully replace humans, the rules are ill-suited to a battlefield fully owned by drones. But since we're not there yet either, I feel these rules should work for the near future.
With so many corporations focused purely on next quarter profits, not thinking even six months ahead, I suppose it's normal for people to not understand the decade-long plans of Valve.
First off, they're only competing with the PS4/Xb1 by being a couch+TV focused system. They're a fully open system - you can build your own Steam Machine and slap the OS on it. But you'll have a hard time getting a quality machine for less than $500. That's one prong of their long game - erode the Windows tax, and just as importantly, make sure that if Microsoft suddenly fails or turns hostile to PC gaming, they have a way out. But stop thinking of it as "$500 console" (which is basically normal now), and more as a "$500 gaming PC", which is really damn cheap.
I know what you're about to say - "that's just semantics!". Well, yeah, it is, but it's also the truth. You're not getting a console with fixed hardware being sold below cost so they can make up for it in games or even with later hardware revisions, you're getting an upgradeable, user-accessible system.
Second, their "launch lineup" is arguably bigger than the Xb1's and PS4's combined. I just did a search on Steam for games with Linux and full controller support - got 58 results, from Metro: Last Light to Super Hexagon. Sure, they're almost all indie or older games, but you know what? I had more fun with Brutal Legend than I did with the last Call of Duty, so maybe that's a good thing. And that's ignoring the fact that a lot of these boxes also have Windows preinstalled as dual-boot, to get you the hundreds of games *that* supports (even with the "on Steam with full controller support" requirement, there's 292 games that meet the mark, including aforementioned latest CoD).
Third, game support is aimed at long-term growth, not a sudden burst at launch that fails to hold on. Remember how the PS3 was at launch? Decent set of launch games, I suppose, then nearly nothing for a few years. At times I felt like the Gamecube had better third-party support, although looking now the numbers don't back me up. They're not able (or perhaps just not willing) to bribe companies into developing for their hardware, so they basically have to convince them by showing that it's profitable.
Oh, and every SteamOS game intrinsically has Linux support. Remind me again, before Valve got involved how many developers were releasing Linux ports?
They've got the hardware guys rallying behind them because removing the Windows tax removes one of the bigger disadvantages from PC gaming. They've got the indie guys rallying behind them. You are correct in that the major third-parties have not yet committed to the platform, but I'm not sure your implied analysis that AAA games are necessary for a platform is correct. If this takes off, it will make new AAA developers from the indies. I wouldn't bet on that, but I'd also not bet against Valve's long game.
To begin with, the summary and headline are being misleading - that's 192 GPU "cores" (really ALUs - there's only one scheduler on this entire GPU), so it's already inaccurate. But it's also hardly the first Nvidia chip with 192 "cores".
First Tegra with a 192-core GPU, but it's not their first 192-core GPU. Their first was the GeForce 260, followed by the GeForce GTS 450, GTX550 Ti, GT630, and GT635.
In fact, this is basically a GT630 with a smaller memory interface (64-bit LPDDR3 instead of 128-bit DDR3) and a few power optimizations.
The sad thing is, they don't have to make up bullshit for marketing - they're bringing a full-fledged, full-featured GPU to mobile products, with all the modern features that entails. And even with just one SMX at low clocks, that's still a lot of horsepower - I run Crysis at 1080p on high with just two SMX units (660M). Putting that amount of power into a tablet would be impressive on its own, no lying about "cores" necessary.
In a fight of China vs Taiwan? Probably, but I'd give even odds of it becoming something like the Winter War - China wins, but with massively disproportionate casualties and expenditures. The PLA is massive, but their quality is an unknown factor.
If the US gets involved? Then it gets very expensive, very fast, for everyone. I won't bet either way, which normally means neither side would risk such an uncertain war. But we've gone so long since there was a full-blown military conflict (last one was Korea), it's possible both sides think they're invincible, and while I can't speak for Chinese politics, there's enough hawks in Congress that they might start a war regardless of what the actual military thinks.
But for a $1.44B hole in the ground, I'd want to make damn sure every inch I dig through presents abolutely no risk whatsoever.
And how do you suppose they are to do that? The only real way to see exactly what is underground is to dig a hole. Sonar only gets you so far, records are sketchy and incomplete, at the end of the day the only way to be 100% sure there's nothing in the way of digging a hole is to dig the damn hole.
This was a fuckup, sure, but it's on the scale of "we hit something we knew we were going to hit (although not exactly where), we removed it when we hit it, but it turns out it fucked up the drill head when we tried to drill through it." I wouldn't bet on this causing the whole billion-dollar project to fail - it's most likely to be a couple hundred grand, maybe a few million in repairs. And that's coming out of the contractor's profits, not from the state, most likely.
This is a relatively public question, and Snowden has an obvious interest in keeping up with what Congress is doing about the NSA.
As others have speculated, it seems like Senator Sanders is trying to catch them lying on record to Congress, which would be major political ammunition. They're obviously going to answer "no", so all the Senator needs is evidence that they are. Perhaps he already has it, but if not, asking the question this publicly is a good way to get Snowden to dig through his stash and find the evidence that they are. Or even another whistleblower - someone might decide it's time to pull the same thing, and because of this ensure that some of their files cover congressional spying.
I've found that the world makes a lot more sense when you stop thinking about governments as being "special", instead treating them as just another "corporation" (for lack of a better word).
Now, they are unusual corporations - usually not-for-profit, governed by the shareholders (citizens) with no publicly traded shares, and having secured a monopoly in a given region for many business sectors. Oh, and they aren't bound by normal business rules, but by different international laws. But in all respects, it acts like any corporation would given those conditions.
From my understanding, the ability to have *a* backdoor is a quirk of the math, but the "key" depends on the parameters of the elliptic curve. Those parameters for this specific implementation were written by the NSA (under the guise of their mandate to secure American communications) and standardized by NIST. TFA had a full proof of concept using parameters he had generated, which worked.
Slashdot Mirror
That could work, but I think that might still be too extreme a break in what the user expects. Unmuted by default should probably be the default, for now at least.
Or perhaps it could default to muted unless you do something to trigger the sound (pushing "play" on a video, for instance). That would cut out the annoying autoplay ads, at least.
I see a lot of people playing music in a Youtube (or whatever) tab while doing other things in the other tabs. Automatically muting any background tabs will break that usage.
That link is not very truthy. Not only does it only list a single "recommended" card, rather than a list of any that are compatible, but it also has not been updated for these new GCN-based APUs. As noted in TFA (the Anandtech one, specifically) "AMD recommends testing dual graphics solutions with their 13.350 driver build, which due out in February."
I'm helping a friend with a custom, low-cost gaming machine. We'd looked into using an APU, and I looked into it again today when I saw this. The gaming performance just isn't there yet. They're fine for regular desktop use, but even the top-of-the-line one can't handle gaming.
The two things that could still be useful are GPGPU, and dual graphics. Having an on-chip GPU just for compute purposes, especially with all the enhancements they've added, would be very useful if more things used GPU compute, but it just wasn't worth it for this build and this user. And they have spoken a bit of using both the integrated GPU and a discrete graphics card in tandem, similar to using two GPUs in Crossfire, but they haven't released the drivers for it, nor listed which cards will work, and the card they chose to demo it with was their bottom-end graphics card. Given all that, and that a similar CPU without the integrated graphics was about half the price, I couldn't justify getting one.
I am pretty impressed with how tightly they've integrated them, though. Much better than Intel's offerings. If they made one that had the graphics horsepower for gaming, I'd have used one.
And as we all know, the pound is defined as 7000 grains, which are simply defined as the mass of a grain of wheat.
I work as a programmer with various POS devices and other card readers on a regular basis, as the software I develop for integrates with many different devices. So for once I actually know what the fuck I'm talking about.
Out of all the ones we currently use, the highest-quality by far is the one that uses an IBM terminal running Windows 7. It is also easily the most expensive. It's regular desktop Windows, but it's configured for automatic updates is about as secure as you can expect a Windows device to be. These do, in our case at least, require a direct internet connection, but they're pretty hardened out of the box because they were expected to be hooked up to the internet. I do not know how they transmit CC data, but for our integration at least communications are done over standard HTTPS (HTTP is still supported by our side, being phased out once we make sure no customers accidentally set HTTP).
Meanwhile, the absolute worst is a piece of rubbish that continues to use 486 processors after they were discontinued, and runs an old version of Windows CE, with their main application apparently being written in Visual Basic. They talk to an on-site Windows server, which is usually set up and configured by someone with minimal training beyond this specific application (on our test server, they turned off the firewall completely rather than opening only select ports). They also transmit transaction data in the clear - we force our customers to use a VPN to connect to us if they insist on using these, as it is so highly insecure. These are also by far the cheapest POS we support, and is the only one I've seen at other stores. I won't name names for obvious reasons, but a regex that would match their name would likely match the vendor of their OS as well, if you catch my drift.
It's not that they're cheaping out on the hardware - they're skimping on salaries, hiring whoever has a night-school certification for setting up the systems and not bothering to make sure anything's secured. It's like those SCADA systems that still have their default three-character password - failure of setup, not necessarily of hardware.
Metro isn't a bad UI in itself. The problem is how it is currently implemented on the desktop.
First, of all the default Metro apps, not a single one matches the functionality of their desktop equivalents. That alone is enough to sink it, especially when it took me less than an hour after first installing W8 to find something that I needed the old application for (the Music app lacked workgroup support, and I wanted to play some music stored on my laptop). If your default Metro apps are less functional in a concrete and quantifiable way than the old Desktop apps, then Metro apps in general get a reputation as being underfunctional and dumbed down. It doesn't matter that your Music app works just as well, even better, than the Android music app or the iOS version of iTunes - on the desktop, it's fighting WMP and all the third-party apps like VLC and whatnot.
Second, you shouldn't have two different means of interaction. We knew this even back in the CLI->GUI transition - DOS prompts, and later the "command prompt", were encapsulated in windows because everything was being done through windows.
There's two ways this could be done. The simplest, and perhaps the most popular, would be to simply let Metro apps run in a window (or something interacted with like windows). Yes, Metro apps look different than Desktop apps, but who really gives a shit? Counting the windows I have open right now, at least four have their own distinct UI paradigm (Thunderbird, GTalk, Steam and PuTTY), plus several that differ from Windows norms in subtler ways (including Microsoft's own Media Player).
Or you could double down on Metro's tiling, and make Desktop apps run in Metro tiles instead of in the traditional windows. If you designed it right for the desktop, this could be perfectly fine, maybe even better than the desktop. But you'd have to design it for power users to be able to use, because the casual computer users are slowly switching to tablets or laptops. Don't run things fullscreen unless it's a small enough screen - let us configure layouts we want on each monitor, switching them as needed, and just "drop" apps into the spaces. Add virtual desktop support, so I can emulate having six or twelve or thirty monitors instead of three, and I'd basically have my current work setup, with slightly more space (lack of window borders+UI) and without having to manually set up these layouts.
In short, having *two* UIs makes users choose between the two to find one they prefer, using the other only if forced to. On the tablet, they went for Metro because it was more tablet-oriented and the only Desktop app of note was Office. On the desktop, we went for the classic UI because its programs worked better and because most of us have enough display real estate that using fullscreen apps for almost anything is wasteful. Instead, go full-on with Metro, but give us variants (I'd go with Phone, Tablet, Laptop and Workstation, each slightly tailored for that device class) so that our *experience* fits what we're using.
That's really the short version of it - they decided to bundle API, UI and UX, and they failed because those things don't actually have to be bound together.
So in other words, it covers murder but not manslaughter?
I will note that while TFA does identify the species of the bird (Hirundo Rustica), it does not clarify whether this was Hirundo Rustica Rustica, the European Swallow, or Hirundo Rustica Savignii, the non-migratory Egyptian Swallow.
I feel this is crucial information to neglect.
My Dell 27" 1440p monitor came with an application that let you "snap" windows to various locations, more so than the normal two-side-by-side Windows does. You could set up various modes, from a few asymmetric two-side-by-sides at the least dense, to (I believe) a three-by-three grid. I ended up not using it, since the productive stuff I do with it actually works best with just the Windows normal setup.
I'm sure there's similar free software for your OS of choice if Dell managed to put it on their driver disk.
I have an old, first-gen Mac Pro, which I use as a regular desktop. I tend to spend the bulk of my time in Windows, but I use OS X on occasion.
For whatever reason, the firmware on it is for 32-bit systems, something Mountain Lion and now Mavericks does not support. I'm still running Lion because I don't care about their new features and don't want to risk breaking something trying to hack it into working. Getting 64-bit Windows onto the machine was difficult enough.
So yeah, for me at least, it's because Apple doesn't want to give me security updates, not because I don't want to download them.
The situations an automated car is be able to handle needs to include emergencies. I can see the cases where human control is needed being things like "unmarked cobblestone streets" or "dirt driveways", where the computer can safely come to a full stop and signal the human to take the wheel.
It only came out on PC at all in 2013, which is when I played it. Mac+Linux support lagged only two months behind Windows support.
And I used it as an example both because it's still one of the bigger-name and higher-price Linux games, and because I really enjoyed that game and will name-drop it given the slightest excuse.
I did a lot of thinking on this subject for a book I was once trying to write (I've stopped, since the characters and plot turned out to be horrible - might revisit it once I can figure it all out). These are the rules I came up with for the fictional empire featured in it:
1) Target selection is still done by humans. It can range from having a human operator manually designate every target, to having a human confirm that the machine-selected target is valid. Perhaps even have a "shoot everything that moves" option that can be initiated by the operator. Once the machine has the go-ahead, it can engage as it wills, subject to whatever mission parameters were set (for example, you might disable certain weapons in an urban civilian-heavy environment). The level of human involvement would generally scale based on how "open" the war is. Counter-insurgency stuff happened in the manual-designation mode, while the all-out WW3 scenario had UAV swarms told "anything that isn't part of the swarm that enters this bounding box dies".
2) Humans must be nearby enough to provide oversight. The ground drones were integrated at the squad level, eventually the fireteam level (three humans with rifles and one drone with a heavy machine gun). The UAVs were controlled not by people halfway across the world, but by the same staff that maintained and launched them (sometimes from AEW aircraft). Naval drones were part of fleet formations. This also has the benefit of, if a drone "goes rogue" or control is hijacked by the enemy, there are forces in play that can neutralize them.
Both those points lead into:
3) There must always be a human who has the responsibility for any kills. Drones do not "kill" in the way humans kill, they kill in the way bullets kill - the murderer is the one pulling the trigger. So if a drone attack caused civilian casualties, the operator was subject to investigation and possibly court-martial. Probably wouldn't always happen that way in practice, but in theory at least the person who "pulled the trigger" wrongly would be punished appropriately.
Now, even in the story I had downsides to those rules - particularly the lack of automation on the anti-missile weapons. But it also made projecting just a *little* bit of power impossible. With these rules, you can't really have a couple dozen drones flying around Terroristan, it's either "nothing" or "deploy a full air wing with drones".
I will also concede that, since the story was set 10-20 years from now, where drones could not fully replace humans, the rules are ill-suited to a battlefield fully owned by drones. But since we're not there yet either, I feel these rules should work for the near future.
Wild-Ass Guess.
Awesome, my enemies are forced to resort to puerile ad-hominems. That must mean they can't actually argue with my logic, which means I'm right.
Either that, or you're just trolling, but you made me feel better so you failed at that as well.
And you can view Twitter without an account (maybe Facebook? I think you could the last time I used it, nearly two years ago).
With so many corporations focused purely on next quarter profits, not thinking even six months ahead, I suppose it's normal for people to not understand the decade-long plans of Valve.
First off, they're only competing with the PS4/Xb1 by being a couch+TV focused system. They're a fully open system - you can build your own Steam Machine and slap the OS on it. But you'll have a hard time getting a quality machine for less than $500. That's one prong of their long game - erode the Windows tax, and just as importantly, make sure that if Microsoft suddenly fails or turns hostile to PC gaming, they have a way out. But stop thinking of it as "$500 console" (which is basically normal now), and more as a "$500 gaming PC", which is really damn cheap.
I know what you're about to say - "that's just semantics!". Well, yeah, it is, but it's also the truth. You're not getting a console with fixed hardware being sold below cost so they can make up for it in games or even with later hardware revisions, you're getting an upgradeable, user-accessible system.
Second, their "launch lineup" is arguably bigger than the Xb1's and PS4's combined. I just did a search on Steam for games with Linux and full controller support - got 58 results, from Metro: Last Light to Super Hexagon. Sure, they're almost all indie or older games, but you know what? I had more fun with Brutal Legend than I did with the last Call of Duty, so maybe that's a good thing. And that's ignoring the fact that a lot of these boxes also have Windows preinstalled as dual-boot, to get you the hundreds of games *that* supports (even with the "on Steam with full controller support" requirement, there's 292 games that meet the mark, including aforementioned latest CoD).
Third, game support is aimed at long-term growth, not a sudden burst at launch that fails to hold on. Remember how the PS3 was at launch? Decent set of launch games, I suppose, then nearly nothing for a few years. At times I felt like the Gamecube had better third-party support, although looking now the numbers don't back me up. They're not able (or perhaps just not willing) to bribe companies into developing for their hardware, so they basically have to convince them by showing that it's profitable.
Oh, and every SteamOS game intrinsically has Linux support. Remind me again, before Valve got involved how many developers were releasing Linux ports?
They've got the hardware guys rallying behind them because removing the Windows tax removes one of the bigger disadvantages from PC gaming. They've got the indie guys rallying behind them. You are correct in that the major third-parties have not yet committed to the platform, but I'm not sure your implied analysis that AAA games are necessary for a platform is correct. If this takes off, it will make new AAA developers from the indies. I wouldn't bet on that, but I'd also not bet against Valve's long game.
They already do that, and they already lie a bit by counting an FMA as two floating-point operations.
To begin with, the summary and headline are being misleading - that's 192 GPU "cores" (really ALUs - there's only one scheduler on this entire GPU), so it's already inaccurate. But it's also hardly the first Nvidia chip with 192 "cores".
First Tegra with a 192-core GPU, but it's not their first 192-core GPU. Their first was the GeForce 260, followed by the GeForce GTS 450, GTX550 Ti, GT630, and GT635.
In fact, this is basically a GT630 with a smaller memory interface (64-bit LPDDR3 instead of 128-bit DDR3) and a few power optimizations.
The sad thing is, they don't have to make up bullshit for marketing - they're bringing a full-fledged, full-featured GPU to mobile products, with all the modern features that entails. And even with just one SMX at low clocks, that's still a lot of horsepower - I run Crysis at 1080p on high with just two SMX units (660M). Putting that amount of power into a tablet would be impressive on its own, no lying about "cores" necessary.
In a fight of China vs Taiwan? Probably, but I'd give even odds of it becoming something like the Winter War - China wins, but with massively disproportionate casualties and expenditures. The PLA is massive, but their quality is an unknown factor.
If the US gets involved? Then it gets very expensive, very fast, for everyone. I won't bet either way, which normally means neither side would risk such an uncertain war. But we've gone so long since there was a full-blown military conflict (last one was Korea), it's possible both sides think they're invincible, and while I can't speak for Chinese politics, there's enough hawks in Congress that they might start a war regardless of what the actual military thinks.
But for a $1.44B hole in the ground, I'd want to make damn sure every inch I dig through presents abolutely no risk whatsoever.
And how do you suppose they are to do that? The only real way to see exactly what is underground is to dig a hole. Sonar only gets you so far, records are sketchy and incomplete, at the end of the day the only way to be 100% sure there's nothing in the way of digging a hole is to dig the damn hole.
This was a fuckup, sure, but it's on the scale of "we hit something we knew we were going to hit (although not exactly where), we removed it when we hit it, but it turns out it fucked up the drill head when we tried to drill through it." I wouldn't bet on this causing the whole billion-dollar project to fail - it's most likely to be a couple hundred grand, maybe a few million in repairs. And that's coming out of the contractor's profits, not from the state, most likely.
I think he is.
This is a relatively public question, and Snowden has an obvious interest in keeping up with what Congress is doing about the NSA.
As others have speculated, it seems like Senator Sanders is trying to catch them lying on record to Congress, which would be major political ammunition. They're obviously going to answer "no", so all the Senator needs is evidence that they are. Perhaps he already has it, but if not, asking the question this publicly is a good way to get Snowden to dig through his stash and find the evidence that they are. Or even another whistleblower - someone might decide it's time to pull the same thing, and because of this ensure that some of their files cover congressional spying.
I've found that the world makes a lot more sense when you stop thinking about governments as being "special", instead treating them as just another "corporation" (for lack of a better word).
Now, they are unusual corporations - usually not-for-profit, governed by the shareholders (citizens) with no publicly traded shares, and having secured a monopoly in a given region for many business sectors. Oh, and they aren't bound by normal business rules, but by different international laws. But in all respects, it acts like any corporation would given those conditions.
From my understanding, the ability to have *a* backdoor is a quirk of the math, but the "key" depends on the parameters of the elliptic curve. Those parameters for this specific implementation were written by the NSA (under the guise of their mandate to secure American communications) and standardized by NIST. TFA had a full proof of concept using parameters he had generated, which worked.