I share your sentiment, and I've only been reading since '06 or so.
Even as late as then, this place felt like "news for NERDS", not "NEWS for nerds". It was non-corporate, open-source, everything that I liked. The commenters were intelligent, reasonable people (if a bit rabid in their anti-establishment rhetoric), the stories were a mix of "hey, this is a cool nerdy thing", "technology industry news" and the occasional "this affects everyone, may as well see it here as well".
Now? I still read/., but it's not the/. I started reading. It's basically Google News, minus all the sections I remove anyways ("Entertainment"?), plus some basic features. Even the commenters have gotten worse - more herd-mentality groupthink, more contextless quoting - although they're still well above average, especially compared to some sites (I'm looking at you, Cracked - hilarious articles, but your commenters are worse than Youtube's).
I'm starting to think that someone ought to fork Slashdot. Make it "news for NERDS" again. Problem is, it's not the site's code that needs to be forked, but the management and community...
Fortunately, I had a less by-the-books history teacher, so I actually did learn less America-centric history, but if one were to read nothing but my old history textbook, you'd think the Soviet contribution to the war was essentially "cannon fodder, armed with American guns via Lend-Lease, who distracted the Nazis while the English-speaking countries stormed the beaches and won the war".
There was a proposal back in 2001 to rebuild them with one extra floor: a mosque, as both a "you can't attack us without destroying one of your own holy places", and as a "we did not let the actions of a few extremists turn us against an entire religion".
Unfortunately, today, even trying to build a mosque several blocks away from the rubble causes a massive uproar, so I think we must have rolled a one on our "save vs. intolerance" roll...
There's a difference between "remembering" and "obsessing over".
We still "remember" Pearl Harbor. We still "remember" the Alamo. We still "remember" the Boston Massacre. But I'm pretty sure very few people are still angry at Japan/Mexico/Britain, and I'm pretty sure we're not going to use them as casus belli anytime soon.
Britain still "remembers" the Gunpowder Plot. France still remembers the Bastille. Both of those events are centuries in the past, yet they are still worth *remembering*.
There's nothing wrong with *remembering* that these things happened. There *is* a problem with obsessing over it and continuing to use it as justification for everything from invasions to the TSA. For example.
PS: We *do* remember achievements (the Apollo program, etc), even some we didn't really accomplish (who single-handedly beat the Nazis? We did!).
You know how long it takes to "scramble ze fighters"? Too long, in cases of "hey, that Airbus we thought was coming in to drop off tourists just decided to go kamikaze on us".
And do you know how insanely expensive keeping even a handful of fighters in the air 24x7 is? A lot. Not to mention the noise, and the intimidation factor (despite what/. thinks, the government does not want to induce general terror in their populace), and the chance of one of them crashing on accident OR shooting down a friendly plane by accident.
First, although it's often easier to think of Nintendo as a single entity (as I did earlier), they have dozens of internal teams - the Mario team, the Zelda team, and so on, including a few distant studios like Retro. The Mario team, headed by Yoshiaki Koizumi and Koichi Hayashida, seems to know what it's doing. The Zelda team does not. That's no different from, say, Microsoft's XBox team being completely on the ball while the Office team keeps making everything worse.
Second, being formulaic isn't what made later games worse. The gameplay is still fine. The problem is the story - a cutscene, by definition, has zero gameplay value. It can add to the gameplay surrounding it, but it can never replace it. Cutscenes and other gameplay-pausing storytelling is like salt - in moderation, it makes things better, but when you've got more salt on your chips than potato, a) it tastes like shit and b) you'll probably get a heart attack.
Windwaker was fine - the story got in the way only rarely, and the padding was more of the "repetitive-gameplay" variety. Twilight Princess (directed by the same person) was where the story problems started - long cutscenes, long tutorial sections (even knowing exactly what to do, and skipping cutscenes, it's a full hour before you get to the first dungeon), too much emphasis on trying to tell a good story rather than make a fun game. I have not yet played Skyward Sword, but all reports have it being even worse - longer cutscenes, longer startup sections.
Oh, in the context of the original argument, Nintendo is at least *trying* to make good games. They're sometimes failing, but it would seem Nintendo would rather make a failed game that doesn't abuse their customers, rather than make a good game that does. As evidenced by the fact that even now, their paid DLC is limited to one game (a Fire Emblem 3DS title, not yet released outside Japan), and consists of single character additions for roughly $2-$4. No pay-to-win, anywhere. No advertisements. Nothing but fun* games.
Imagine Super Mario Brothers if it were made today; The entire first level would be a tutorial where it cheers everytime you press 'A', gives you an 'achievement unlocked' after you stomp 10 goombas, and at the end of the level asks you to 'upgrade' to a Premium Mario that would start every level in 'fireball mario' mode for only $9.99. Especially in MMOs -- microtransactions now mean you can buy levels, gears, whatever you want. Some guy who slaved through all the levels gets no respect when some 14 year old with daddy's credit card comes in, curb stomps him, and then steals all his hard-earned equipment, which he just drags to the trash anyway, because hey, I can just buy it with real money. ha ha!
Well now, let's take a look at that. Last Mario game I played was Galaxy - since then, there's been Galaxy 2, and maybe 3D Land, in the main series, but I haven't played them. The first level was indeed primarily a tutorial and story introduction, but there was no cheering or achievements. Next level was essentially the same as any level of Super Mario 64, save for the whole "walking on spherical surfaces" thing, which mainly boiled down to the camera.
There are no microtransactions, although you can spend in-game coins (gathered the same way they've been since Super Mario Brothers) on in-game power ups at in-game stores, just like in many RPGs. You can't buy power-ups, coins, anything, with real-world money. Not even expansion-pack DLC.
The difficulty was about average for a Mario title - harder than SM64, but still easier than SMB2 or the FLUDD-less levels in Sunshine. Story introduction was about fifteen minutes, with maybe a sixty-second cutscene about every other level. Controls were mostly intuitive to anyone who's played a 3D Mario game, although the motion controls were a bit imprecise.
Overall, the only real reason I didn't finish the game was because I no longer had enough time *at* *home*, sitting in front of a TV, and instead had to get my gaming in on my laptop and phone. I'll probably go back and finish it sometime. It was a bit tedious, since there were some "repeat this level BUT WITH A TIME LIMIT!"-type stages, but given how long the game was, I can tolerate a certain amount of padding.
So yeah, maybe every other company has forgotten what business they're in, but at the very least Nintendo remembers that making *fun* games is the best way, long-term, to make *profitable* games.
Now, hands up who volunteers to be the first one to get to the hijacker, more than likely to be mortally wounded, so that the rest may live.
*raises hand*
Day fucking ONE of the "War on Terror", people knew that if the terrorists take control of the plane, not only are you pretty much dead already, you're actually guaranteeing *more* people die. Remember the fourth plane?
People will go for it. And I'll be one of them, if necessary. Because better to go down fighting than be killed like a coward.
(best strategy, of course, is to try to coordinate so several people attack at once, but even if nobody else would follow, I'd go)
The top result, at least for me, is this Amazon page, which has (again, for me, not sure if Amazon does "personalized" searches): Four other Asus laptops, including two of last year's G5x models, a similar business-class laptop, and a larger business-class laptop Several Asus laptop accessories - bags, car chargers, batteries - none of which is explicitly compatible with the G55 A VGA Cable marked "for Asus laptops" (bogus marketing, Asus didn't change the pinouts or anything, several regular VGA cables worked with my last laptop) A power adapter for Asus home router Laptop backpack with "gaming console sleeve" Notebook cooler (one of those gimmicky fan pad things) USB charger, USB wifi adapter Book of guitar tabs
I have seen that model up for pre-order before. I found several "news" sites that had copied each other, eventually found that the site that actually had them up for pre-order seems to have taken the page down.
I was trying to find a purchase or at least pre-order page for a specific laptop model. Top search result on Google was an Amazon link - an Amazon search page for that exact model, showing 0 results followed by the regular "you may also be interested in" links (most of which weren't even tangentially related to what I was looking for).
That's not all - get this. Google noted that it was recommending this because I had already visited the page
Really, Google? Really? You track my every move, scour the entire Internet for information, and then you use it to give me a result that is not only wrong, but that you know I've already found (and found useless)? Really?
I mean, come on, Google. "Turning to the Dark Side" is supposed to at least make you more effective (bad guys always win for at least the first three acts), not make you worse.
Valve is what I call "nice DRM". The things it stops you from doing are generally pretty mild - can't be online in more than one place at once, can't run games you haven't bought. As long as you're in online mode, you'll never even notice it. Offline mode is about as tricky as some DRM platforms' online modes - basically, as long as you've been permitted to play the game before, you'll be allowed to do so in offline mode (although patches have an unfortunate tendency to break that, making you go back online). As far as I know, it's never been found to do any sort of secret spying on the user - even the hardware survey (checks what hardware you're running on, so Valve knows what kind of computers they should be optimizing for) is opt-in.
It lets you do things many DRM systems would not allow - you can run on any computer you want, even simultaneously (although only one can be in "online" mode). You can play on LAN in offline mode, even against "yourself" - I regularly duel my brother in CS:S using just one copy of the game. You can copy and modify game files. Nothing is encrypted EXCEPT games that have not been released yet - many games will let you "prepurchase" them, start downloading a week or two before release, then all you need to do on release day is decrypt the files, usually takes about five minutes.
Compared to other DRM, Steam is at worst "tolerable". If what you care about is "playing games", Steam is fine, because any minor impediments it puts up are offset by it making many games more available. Steam's competitors, like Origin, tend to cause much more headache, and even most gamers only use them for the platform-exclusive games (I'd bet 90% of all Origin accounts have Battlefield 3 and/or Mass Effect 3, and nothing else).
tl;dr the only people butthurt about Steam's DRM are the people who don't actually like games, they just like complaining about "oppressive" DRM.
Well, as a guy whose wallet is frequently raped by Steam Sales, and as one whose used the Mac version of Steam, I can say a few things:
1) Steam does make it convenient to buy games - arguably *too* easy. I can buy a game in about thirty seconds and have it downloaded within at worst two hours (for a 20GB epic), often as little as two minutes (for the 100MB indier-than-thou titles). Seriously, it's not uncommon to hear Steam fans complaining about how they get hooked into impulse-buying games on sale that they never play (I've actually played perhaps half the games I own on Steam, and that's considered "doing pretty well").
2) Prices for some games are definitely in the impulse-buy range. There's an entire section for "under $5", mainly containing extremely old titles (Doom, Half-Life) or low-budget indie games. And they literally *always* have some sale going on, and at least twice a year they have massive sales.
3) The initial lineup of Linux games will primarily be Valve's own recent titles, as well as whatever indie games already have Linux versions. Roughly one in four titles I own are Mac-compatible (fifty or so out of two hundred); I would anticipate seeing less than that for Linux, perhaps one in eight.
* For some reason, Valve's only ported Half-Life 2 and later to Mac, and I would expect the same on Linux. So no Half-Life 1 (there *is* Half-Life: Source, the port to the HL2 engine), no Opposing Force, no Counter-Strike 1.6, no Ricochet.
4) There *is* DRM. The DRM is normally pretty benign and limited - as long as Steam is running in online mode (on only one computer at a time - someone else signing in to the same account elsewhere will boot you out), you'll have zero problems. Offline mode exists, but it does have oddities (it's perfectly usable, but you'll actually have to think DRM, at least while setting everything up). Note also that some third-party games have their own layer of DRM, so if you're a militant anti-DRM fanatic, check the game details (it *does* say "this game uses additional DRM" or something to that effect).
Yes, IB isn't a massive improvement on SB. But it's also worth stating what Intel did right: Same price Compatible with old sockets/motherboards
And who said every generation of processors had to be a significant improvement? Toyota puts out essentially the same car every year for a decade, with only minor, incremental improvements. There's no reason why you can't do the same for processors. The only downside is for people who like to brag about having the very-latest processor.
Personally, I'm going to be grabbing an Ivy Bridge laptop, if only because my old, reliable Core 2 laptop finally died. And I'll probably skip over Haswell, maybe Broadwell too, before upgrading again.
Long story short, if you've got a Sandy Bridge, you don't need to upgrade yet. If you've got a Nehalem and some spare cash, an upgrade may (or may not) be useful. If you're on something before that, IB is the chip to upgrade to.
PS: I'm not really a fanboy for either company (I've used both extensively - the Phenom's were great, and even my old Athlon 900 still sees service now and again), but AMD really doesn't have any attractive higher-end options. The Fusion processors look good compared to Intel's low-power options, though - I seriously considered getting a small Fusion laptop and then building a more powerful SB or IB desktop at home, but decided single-device was better.
Gentlemen, we see here a textbook example of homo sapiens capitalus in it's natural environment: shortly to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Ah, so you posit, essentially, that the M100 was succeeded not by laptop computers, but by handheld calculators?
That's interesting, and maybe even a bit true. The only thing they can't really do is communication - the most my old TI could do was a VERY rudimentary device-device or device-computer link. All that's really needed is a high-end calculator with either WiFi or Bluetooth, or perhaps some USB-type connection (able to function as both host and device - is there a standard for that already?).
Slashdot Mirror
finally yanked us into.
Well, we *are* the Yankees, not the Yankers...
I share your sentiment, and I've only been reading since '06 or so.
Even as late as then, this place felt like "news for NERDS", not "NEWS for nerds". It was non-corporate, open-source, everything that I liked. The commenters were intelligent, reasonable people (if a bit rabid in their anti-establishment rhetoric), the stories were a mix of "hey, this is a cool nerdy thing", "technology industry news" and the occasional "this affects everyone, may as well see it here as well".
Now? I still read /., but it's not the /. I started reading. It's basically Google News, minus all the sections I remove anyways ("Entertainment"?), plus some basic features. Even the commenters have gotten worse - more herd-mentality groupthink, more contextless quoting - although they're still well above average, especially compared to some sites (I'm looking at you, Cracked - hilarious articles, but your commenters are worse than Youtube's).
I'm starting to think that someone ought to fork Slashdot. Make it "news for NERDS" again. Problem is, it's not the site's code that needs to be forked, but the management and community...
That is indeed what I intended to say.
Fortunately, I had a less by-the-books history teacher, so I actually did learn less America-centric history, but if one were to read nothing but my old history textbook, you'd think the Soviet contribution to the war was essentially "cannon fodder, armed with American guns via Lend-Lease, who distracted the Nazis while the English-speaking countries stormed the beaches and won the war".
AND WE WONDER WHY THE NEW GENERATION IS SO STUPID
There was a proposal back in 2001 to rebuild them with one extra floor: a mosque, as both a "you can't attack us without destroying one of your own holy places", and as a "we did not let the actions of a few extremists turn us against an entire religion".
Unfortunately, today, even trying to build a mosque several blocks away from the rubble causes a massive uproar, so I think we must have rolled a one on our "save vs. intolerance" roll...
There's a difference between "remembering" and "obsessing over".
We still "remember" Pearl Harbor. We still "remember" the Alamo. We still "remember" the Boston Massacre. But I'm pretty sure very few people are still angry at Japan/Mexico/Britain, and I'm pretty sure we're not going to use them as casus belli anytime soon.
Britain still "remembers" the Gunpowder Plot. France still remembers the Bastille. Both of those events are centuries in the past, yet they are still worth *remembering*.
There's nothing wrong with *remembering* that these things happened. There *is* a problem with obsessing over it and continuing to use it as justification for everything from invasions to the TSA. For example.
PS: We *do* remember achievements (the Apollo program, etc), even some we didn't really accomplish (who single-handedly beat the Nazis? We did!).
You know how long it takes to "scramble ze fighters"? Too long, in cases of "hey, that Airbus we thought was coming in to drop off tourists just decided to go kamikaze on us".
And do you know how insanely expensive keeping even a handful of fighters in the air 24x7 is? A lot. Not to mention the noise, and the intimidation factor (despite what /. thinks, the government does not want to induce general terror in their populace), and the chance of one of them crashing on accident OR shooting down a friendly plane by accident.
There's two problems with that argument.
First, although it's often easier to think of Nintendo as a single entity (as I did earlier), they have dozens of internal teams - the Mario team, the Zelda team, and so on, including a few distant studios like Retro. The Mario team, headed by Yoshiaki Koizumi and Koichi Hayashida, seems to know what it's doing. The Zelda team does not. That's no different from, say, Microsoft's XBox team being completely on the ball while the Office team keeps making everything worse.
Second, being formulaic isn't what made later games worse. The gameplay is still fine. The problem is the story - a cutscene, by definition, has zero gameplay value. It can add to the gameplay surrounding it, but it can never replace it. Cutscenes and other gameplay-pausing storytelling is like salt - in moderation, it makes things better, but when you've got more salt on your chips than potato, a) it tastes like shit and b) you'll probably get a heart attack.
Windwaker was fine - the story got in the way only rarely, and the padding was more of the "repetitive-gameplay" variety. Twilight Princess (directed by the same person) was where the story problems started - long cutscenes, long tutorial sections (even knowing exactly what to do, and skipping cutscenes, it's a full hour before you get to the first dungeon), too much emphasis on trying to tell a good story rather than make a fun game. I have not yet played Skyward Sword, but all reports have it being even worse - longer cutscenes, longer startup sections.
Oh, in the context of the original argument, Nintendo is at least *trying* to make good games. They're sometimes failing, but it would seem Nintendo would rather make a failed game that doesn't abuse their customers, rather than make a good game that does. As evidenced by the fact that even now, their paid DLC is limited to one game (a Fire Emblem 3DS title, not yet released outside Japan), and consists of single character additions for roughly $2-$4. No pay-to-win, anywhere. No advertisements. Nothing but fun* games.
Imagine Super Mario Brothers if it were made today; The entire first level would be a tutorial where it cheers everytime you press 'A', gives you an 'achievement unlocked' after you stomp 10 goombas, and at the end of the level asks you to 'upgrade' to a Premium Mario that would start every level in 'fireball mario' mode for only $9.99. Especially in MMOs -- microtransactions now mean you can buy levels, gears, whatever you want. Some guy who slaved through all the levels gets no respect when some 14 year old with daddy's credit card comes in, curb stomps him, and then steals all his hard-earned equipment, which he just drags to the trash anyway, because hey, I can just buy it with real money. ha ha!
Well now, let's take a look at that. Last Mario game I played was Galaxy - since then, there's been Galaxy 2, and maybe 3D Land, in the main series, but I haven't played them. The first level was indeed primarily a tutorial and story introduction, but there was no cheering or achievements. Next level was essentially the same as any level of Super Mario 64, save for the whole "walking on spherical surfaces" thing, which mainly boiled down to the camera.
There are no microtransactions, although you can spend in-game coins (gathered the same way they've been since Super Mario Brothers) on in-game power ups at in-game stores, just like in many RPGs. You can't buy power-ups, coins, anything, with real-world money. Not even expansion-pack DLC.
The difficulty was about average for a Mario title - harder than SM64, but still easier than SMB2 or the FLUDD-less levels in Sunshine. Story introduction was about fifteen minutes, with maybe a sixty-second cutscene about every other level. Controls were mostly intuitive to anyone who's played a 3D Mario game, although the motion controls were a bit imprecise.
Overall, the only real reason I didn't finish the game was because I no longer had enough time *at* *home*, sitting in front of a TV, and instead had to get my gaming in on my laptop and phone. I'll probably go back and finish it sometime. It was a bit tedious, since there were some "repeat this level BUT WITH A TIME LIMIT!"-type stages, but given how long the game was, I can tolerate a certain amount of padding.
So yeah, maybe every other company has forgotten what business they're in, but at the very least Nintendo remembers that making *fun* games is the best way, long-term, to make *profitable* games.
Unless someone brought Charlie back from the dead and cloned him a couple dozen times, I think you mean Chaplains.
I'd vote for HAL over any current candidate. Pretty sure a machine would find a way to balance the budget...
Penalty! Illegal Holocaust metaphor! Advantage AC, score is 1-0!
I'm pretty sure there's a "political science" joke here somewhere, but I can't seem to make it work. Anybody else want to take a shot?
Now, hands up who volunteers to be the first one to get to the hijacker, more than likely to be mortally wounded, so that the rest may live.
*raises hand*
Day fucking ONE of the "War on Terror", people knew that if the terrorists take control of the plane, not only are you pretty much dead already, you're actually guaranteeing *more* people die. Remember the fourth plane?
People will go for it. And I'll be one of them, if necessary. Because better to go down fighting than be killed like a coward.
(best strategy, of course, is to try to coordinate so several people attack at once, but even if nobody else would follow, I'd go)
My search terms were 'order "asus g55"', as, shockingly, I want to order an Asus-built laptop, model G55.
The top result, at least for me, is this Amazon page, which has (again, for me, not sure if Amazon does "personalized" searches):
Four other Asus laptops, including two of last year's G5x models, a similar business-class laptop, and a larger business-class laptop
Several Asus laptop accessories - bags, car chargers, batteries - none of which is explicitly compatible with the G55
A VGA Cable marked "for Asus laptops" (bogus marketing, Asus didn't change the pinouts or anything, several regular VGA cables worked with my last laptop)
A power adapter for Asus home router
Laptop backpack with "gaming console sleeve"
Notebook cooler (one of those gimmicky fan pad things)
USB charger, USB wifi adapter
Book of guitar tabs
I have seen that model up for pre-order before. I found several "news" sites that had copied each other, eventually found that the site that actually had them up for pre-order seems to have taken the page down.
or has Google's search gotten crappier lately?
I was trying to find a purchase or at least pre-order page for a specific laptop model. Top search result on Google was an Amazon link - an Amazon search page for that exact model, showing 0 results followed by the regular "you may also be interested in" links (most of which weren't even tangentially related to what I was looking for).
That's not all - get this. Google noted that it was recommending this because I had already visited the page
Really, Google? Really? You track my every move, scour the entire Internet for information, and then you use it to give me a result that is not only wrong, but that you know I've already found (and found useless)? Really?
I mean, come on, Google. "Turning to the Dark Side" is supposed to at least make you more effective (bad guys always win for at least the first three acts), not make you worse.
What do you think "intuitive" means exactly?
Intuitive (adj.) - Anything I already know.
Pretty sure even that is opt-in, or at least it was several years ago when I opted in. It'll nag you every few months, I think, but that's about it.
Valve is what I call "nice DRM". The things it stops you from doing are generally pretty mild - can't be online in more than one place at once, can't run games you haven't bought. As long as you're in online mode, you'll never even notice it. Offline mode is about as tricky as some DRM platforms' online modes - basically, as long as you've been permitted to play the game before, you'll be allowed to do so in offline mode (although patches have an unfortunate tendency to break that, making you go back online). As far as I know, it's never been found to do any sort of secret spying on the user - even the hardware survey (checks what hardware you're running on, so Valve knows what kind of computers they should be optimizing for) is opt-in.
It lets you do things many DRM systems would not allow - you can run on any computer you want, even simultaneously (although only one can be in "online" mode). You can play on LAN in offline mode, even against "yourself" - I regularly duel my brother in CS:S using just one copy of the game. You can copy and modify game files. Nothing is encrypted EXCEPT games that have not been released yet - many games will let you "prepurchase" them, start downloading a week or two before release, then all you need to do on release day is decrypt the files, usually takes about five minutes.
Compared to other DRM, Steam is at worst "tolerable". If what you care about is "playing games", Steam is fine, because any minor impediments it puts up are offset by it making many games more available. Steam's competitors, like Origin, tend to cause much more headache, and even most gamers only use them for the platform-exclusive games (I'd bet 90% of all Origin accounts have Battlefield 3 and/or Mass Effect 3, and nothing else).
tl;dr the only people butthurt about Steam's DRM are the people who don't actually like games, they just like complaining about "oppressive" DRM.
Well, as a guy whose wallet is frequently raped by Steam Sales, and as one whose used the Mac version of Steam, I can say a few things:
1) Steam does make it convenient to buy games - arguably *too* easy. I can buy a game in about thirty seconds and have it downloaded within at worst two hours (for a 20GB epic), often as little as two minutes (for the 100MB indier-than-thou titles). Seriously, it's not uncommon to hear Steam fans complaining about how they get hooked into impulse-buying games on sale that they never play (I've actually played perhaps half the games I own on Steam, and that's considered "doing pretty well").
2) Prices for some games are definitely in the impulse-buy range. There's an entire section for "under $5", mainly containing extremely old titles (Doom, Half-Life) or low-budget indie games. And they literally *always* have some sale going on, and at least twice a year they have massive sales.
3) The initial lineup of Linux games will primarily be Valve's own recent titles, as well as whatever indie games already have Linux versions. Roughly one in four titles I own are Mac-compatible (fifty or so out of two hundred); I would anticipate seeing less than that for Linux, perhaps one in eight.
* For some reason, Valve's only ported Half-Life 2 and later to Mac, and I would expect the same on Linux. So no Half-Life 1 (there *is* Half-Life: Source, the port to the HL2 engine), no Opposing Force, no Counter-Strike 1.6, no Ricochet.
4) There *is* DRM. The DRM is normally pretty benign and limited - as long as Steam is running in online mode (on only one computer at a time - someone else signing in to the same account elsewhere will boot you out), you'll have zero problems. Offline mode exists, but it does have oddities (it's perfectly usable, but you'll actually have to think DRM, at least while setting everything up). Note also that some third-party games have their own layer of DRM, so if you're a militant anti-DRM fanatic, check the game details (it *does* say "this game uses additional DRM" or something to that effect).
I think you're making the rather large assumption that you will know what your own code does.
The successor to Haswell is Broadwell. 14nm process, if I remember correctly.
Yes, IB isn't a massive improvement on SB. But it's also worth stating what Intel did right:
Same price
Compatible with old sockets/motherboards
And who said every generation of processors had to be a significant improvement? Toyota puts out essentially the same car every year for a decade, with only minor, incremental improvements. There's no reason why you can't do the same for processors. The only downside is for people who like to brag about having the very-latest processor.
Personally, I'm going to be grabbing an Ivy Bridge laptop, if only because my old, reliable Core 2 laptop finally died. And I'll probably skip over Haswell, maybe Broadwell too, before upgrading again.
Long story short, if you've got a Sandy Bridge, you don't need to upgrade yet. If you've got a Nehalem and some spare cash, an upgrade may (or may not) be useful. If you're on something before that, IB is the chip to upgrade to.
PS: I'm not really a fanboy for either company (I've used both extensively - the Phenom's were great, and even my old Athlon 900 still sees service now and again), but AMD really doesn't have any attractive higher-end options. The Fusion processors look good compared to Intel's low-power options, though - I seriously considered getting a small Fusion laptop and then building a more powerful SB or IB desktop at home, but decided single-device was better.
<diabolical scare chord>
No-one expects the French Inquisition!
Gentlemen, we see here a textbook example of homo sapiens capitalus in it's natural environment: shortly to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Ah, so you posit, essentially, that the M100 was succeeded not by laptop computers, but by handheld calculators?
That's interesting, and maybe even a bit true. The only thing they can't really do is communication - the most my old TI could do was a VERY rudimentary device-device or device-computer link. All that's really needed is a high-end calculator with either WiFi or Bluetooth, or perhaps some USB-type connection (able to function as both host and device - is there a standard for that already?).