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Comment VM's (Score 1) 614

This topic comes up all the time and every time I wonder "why don't they just put the old system on a VM?" Sure there are some rare cases where VM's won't do the job right, or maybe you don't have any reason to upgrade anything at all, but there's very little reason to hold back upgrading your systems just to continue using an IE6 frontend like described in the OP.

Comment Why would anyone major in QA? (Score 4, Insightful) 220

The best QA testers are usually the people overqualified for it. They're not doing it because they want to, they do it for a paycheck while waiting to land a dev job. If QA testers start needing degrees then why would anyone choose studying QA over CS when the skills overlap but most of the fun and pay is in CS?

Comment HDD in cars? I sure hope not. (Score 1) 455

I would be very displeased if I bought a car that uses a mechanical drive that is going to get bumped around and severely damaged by a cars movement. I would expect that the car uses flash memory. 10GB of flash is still incredibly cheap (~$10) so I would expect more, but comparing desktop HDD capacity to that of a car's is asinine.

Comment Flawed examples (Score 1) 533

I don't expect google glass to ever become popular for everyday use but do think it will have niche markets but the reasons that Marcus thinks it will fail are completely flawed.

I've never seen anyone use bluetooth and then put it away or have it away and then put it on just for a call, from what I've seen people either leave it on all day looking like douches or put it on the entire time while driving. ie. if they have the headset with them then they are wearing it.

He says segways are lame because they are rational which makes absolutely no sense - segways are completely irrational. How are you going to get to work 20 miles away on a segway? You're not. How would you carry groceries home on a segway? You wouldn't. How are you going to transport very young children on a segway? You can't. Segways are toys for the rich and tourists that rent them. They have extremely limited practical usage that is better accomplished with things such as mopeds, bicycles, skateboards, skates, or even good old fashion walking.

Comment Re:OpenCL is a heterogeneous processing language (Score 4, Informative) 60

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
>Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), DSPs and other processors.
>OpenCL includes a language (based on C99) for writing kernels (functions that execute on OpenCL devices), plus application programming interfaces (APIs) that are used to define and then control the platforms. OpenCL provides parallel computing using task-based and data-based parallelism. OpenCL is an open standard maintained by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group. It has been adopted by Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Nvidia, Altera, Samsung, Vivante and ARM Holdings.

This has nothing to do with Gallium 3D or Mesa which are 3D graphics related. The only similarity is that some of the targets happens to be GPU. The person has no clue what the hell he was talking about. May be he is confused it with OpenGL!?

This is AMD's answer to CUDA.

Neither do you. How can it be AMD's answer to (Nvidia's) CUDA when Apple developed it with help from AMD, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia?

AMD's answer to CUDA was their Stream framework that they abandoned in favor of an open standard (OpenCL) but Nvidia built a business around CUDA so they're supporting both but still pushing CUDA on their customers and using it as an excuse not to support other GPU's in PhysX.

Comment Re:question (Score 4, Informative) 305

It doesn't and that's not even what the AMD exec said but the dumb articles are running with an idiotic interpretation of what he said. He was only saying that there is no new version of DX currently in the works so in order to differentiate their products they have to bundle pretty looking games instead of implementing new features because there aren't any new features left for the to add right now.

Comment Re:question (Score 1) 305

I forgot to mention that sometimes when they do these bundles then the game is locked so that it only plays if your graphics card is the one that it was bundle with by checking the serial of the card. Other times the game isn't locked and then you can just sell it on ebay if you don't want it.

Comment Re:question (Score 2) 305

The OP and article are taking an offhand comment way out of proportion. The quote in the article from the AMD exec is basically saying that they need to bundle top quality games with their graphics cards in order to showcase what their cards are capable of because there is no new graphics card/api features in development currently. ie. they can't say "hey buy our new cards because they support X, Y, and Z new features" so instead they are bundling games and saying "hey buy our cards and you get these games that have beautiful graphics on the card you just bought."

Comment Re:I wish I had pirated it lol (Score 2) 511

How are you going to pirate it when it is a client+server model? All your cities live on EA's servers and there's no local saving/offline play. The only way it will ever be pirated is if the developers left some hidden local saving in it that management told them to disable, or if someone reverse engineers the network protocol and writes a server for it.

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