If expensive solutions count, why not a PC version of the PS4 board?
8Gbyte would be enough for an average gaming PC, and with DDR5 the bandwidth would be decent too :-)

I don't think they gave Rockstar the money without setting rules for how the patents are used. So we can assume that the founders at least did not mind Rockstar turning loose the lawyers on the competition.

Already preferring LibreOffice ;-)
Yes, it is not online but I consider that an advantage. Keeping your stuff in the cloud just increases the risk of losing it. Cloud vendors sometimes go offline...

Of course you can keep local backups, but if you maintain local storage anyway, why not add a local installation of an office suite?

But the companies behind Rockstar are known. From TFA:
"Apple, Microsoft, Sony, RIM, and others".
So any patent retaliation from Google would be against those.

Depends on the vendor. I had pretty good quality from Osram and abysmal from Megaman (both CFL brands in Germany).
From Osram, 10 years or more of lifetime seems normal (small sample size here, but it points in that direction).
From Megaman, I bought four CFLs and three of those broke after a few months. Not a vendor that will get any more business from me...

But some are harder than others. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology) it took around 12 years and some notable scientists to go from theoretical concepts to a program that played halfway well.

BTW I'm using the time frame between Claude Shannon's paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess" to Kotok-McCarthy here. If you want a tournament victory against a human as reference, that would be Mac hack in 1967 and 17 years of development.

If WOW was that hard to bot, Blizzard would not need to sue developers of bot software.

In general, the perpetrator would be the management of that 3rd party testing company.
In this case, the culprit is known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib#Fabricated_efficacy_studies
Also according to Wikipedia, he was actually convicted. One might consider the sentence too lenient, but it is not like no punishment was meted out..

That is what criminal law and the court system are for. If a drug company does a trial and makes a honest mistake in missing dangerous side effects, they might be liable for damages but that is all.

But if they fake a trial and people die from the drug, I think it counts as negligent homicide.

Well, why not FreePascal/Lazarus in place of Delphi?

From Germany, I currently see a price of â199.00 for Delphi® XE5 Starter, which is the cheapest version available (mostly for private use, very limited commercial license). Maybe South Africa could haggle the price down a bit more for school use, but generally Embarcadero is f**king expensive.

Free Pascal is, well, free. And IMHO good enough. It has obviously not much presence in the job market, but Delphi is also on its way out.

I'm working for a company that used Delphi 6 until recently, but new projects are migrating to .NET now. And we were one of the last holdouts anyway. I guess Delphi will still be used for a few years in maintenance tasks/minor upgrades, but its days are ultimately numbered here.

More importantly, I don't think NVidia is far enough ahead of AMD to make this a smart move. Their Linux drivers still have a better reputation compared to AMD, but it seems to me this advantage is eroding. Pissed customers might simply get an AMD next time.

By comparison, Intel can get away with similar crap in the CPU world (no ECC RAM support except on Xeon processors and "workstation" chipsets). Their lead over AMD in CPUs is big enough that most people will swallow the bitter pill and buy Intel anyway.

If you compare benchmarks where multiple generations of GPUs compete against each other, such as the Passmark benchmark, later AMD GPUs seem to have a better ratio of benchmark scores to theoretical computing power (as given on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units )

Examples:
Radeon HD 3850: 427.5 GFLOPS, Passmark score of 532
Radeon HD 3870: 497.3 GFLOPS, Passmark score of 744
Radeon HD 4850: 1000 GFLOPS, Passmark score of 1043
Radeon HD 4870: 1200 GFLOPS, Passmark score of 1361
Radeon HD 5750: 1008 GFLOPS, Passmark score of 1399
Radeon HD 7750: 922 GFLOPS (at 900 MHz), Passmark score of 1624

The 38xx surprise by bucking the trend - maybe some AMD developer had a bright moment there? But in general, drivers for current cards seem more efficient. In the 7750, the change in architecture may have helped.

For Linux in particular, the open source drivers are gradually getting closer (at least to the AMD Catalyst driver). For some older and presumably simpler games, the reviews on http://www.phoronix.com/ already show 80% of the performance of Catalyst. In other, more demanding, tests they still suck but the long term trend is encouraging.

Ahem. Not even close.

They have been porting Steam and some games to Linux, and now they are doing a Linux-based gaming PC. That are some of their activities, not all. And most of those are still closed source. If I am mistaken here and there is an Open Source Steam client, feel free to prove me wrong by pointing out the repository ;-)

This said, the whole Steam Box project might bring some very welcome improvements in Linux driver support. Actually that is the one field in which there are some reports about Valve contributing to everyone's benefit:
It seems they worked with Intel to improve their graphics drivers :-)

Not according to Michael Larabel on phoronix.com.

The guy frequently tests the latest Open Source drivers for AMD's chips, and sometimes nouveau too.
While AMD Open Source drivers are still outperformed by Catalyst, they are getting closer. Comparisons of nouveau to the nVidia binary drivers show a much greater performance gap.

As an occasional linux user I tried Mint Debian Edition with xfce some months ago, but was not entirely happy. My general impression was that maintanance had stopped shortly after the release. Latest kernel version from the Mint repository was 3.2.0.4 when kernel.org was around 3.2.0.38, and configuring the system was not entirely painless.

My next attempt was with xUbuntu, and it seems to be much better maintained while it also got rid of the Unity GUI (which I dislike). So that one is certainly worth a try :-)

I think the low wattage trend is most important in mobile, because there it directly translates into battery life. And yes, ARM is making inroads there. Intel also tends to offer more performance per watt.

For desktops that don't need huge performance, AMD has a fairly good product in its APUs. Wattage is not quite as important there. But as Intel's integrated graphics get better, AMD is coming under pressure there as well.
Now reviews of APUs vs. discrete cards and CPUs show that the APUs tend to be bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, so I wonder if AMD might do better with a PC version of the chip they built for Sony's PS4. I'm thinking of a small form factor mainboard (Mini ATX? ITX?) with soldered in APU and 8 GByte of GDDR5 RAM. Which would obviously not be upgradeable, but should be quite sufficient for the sort of PC their current APUs are typically used in. Compared to the PS4, that board would have to offer more USB and SATA connectors, plus maybe 1-2 PCIx slots for a bit of extendability.

In the gamer market, it seems that most people don't care that much about power consumption. I do, but I'm the exception among my friends. For most it is about framerates and higher framerates. AMD has a problem there with their CPUs, because Intel has a huge advantage in performance. But in the GPU market they are fine.

I hope AMD can survive on the console business for now and close the performance gap to Intel with the next version of their Bulldozer architecture. Because if they don't, they will disappear from the x86 CPU market eventually.