I don't understand what you mean by 'non graphics competitors'. Intel, AMD, and ARM cpu offerings already have integrated GPUs with dual-head capability (and have for a few years now). There are no non graphics competitors.

Currently the best open source kernel and driver compatibility is with the Intel and AMD integrated GPUs. That's what all the KMS work was responsible for giving us. The performance of integrated GPUs has increased steadily over the last few years and has reached a point now where most 3D games will run with modest (but not high-end) settings, and *all* 2D (aka desktop operations) will run faster than you can blink.

I splurged for a mid-range card for my windows gaming box, but all my workstations just use the cpu-integrated gpus these days for dual-head operation. And they're nice and quiet and fast.

-Matt

Well, nobody with a laptop is really going to notice much of a difference because frankly there isn't a whole lot of software that actually needs that kind of performance over the ~550 MBytes/sec that can already be obtained with SATA-III. Certainly not that would be run on a laptop anyway.

It's just using the PCI-e lanes on the M.2 connector instead of the SATA-III lanes. This isn't a magical technology. There's a loss of robustness and portability that gets traded off. It does point to SATA needing another few speed bumps, though. The fundamental serial link technology used at the physical level by PCI-e and SATA is almost identical. The main difference is that SATA is designed for cabling while M.2 is not (at least not M.2's PCI-e lanes).

-Matt

That, plus iterative improvement by using the mk2 rock you produced by banging mk1 rocks together to shape a mk3 rock, and so on; is pretty much the truth.

Ants are awesome; but really a different flavor: they(along with termites) manage to get extremely impressive results from emergent behavior among swarms of really, really, dumb individuals. Very cool, particularly fascinating if you are trying to get good results from multiple agents without tacking on an unweildy command and control system.

The sort of tool use in TFA is interesting because it suggests fairly advanced cognition(and sometimes communication and transmission of learned techniques). Ants aren't so hot at that.

How is that remotely the same thing? The shuttle boosters weren't guided, weren't in powered flight, weren't re-lightable, weren't targeting anywhere terribly specific, weren't trying to make a vertical landing, and were designed for a water landing. None of that applies to the Falcon 9 first stage. Also, the F9 recovery system didn't fail to deploy, it simply didn't fully correct for the rocket's motion. Considering that the booster is basically an inverted pendulum and that there's almost always some lateral winds at sea, getting as close as it did is damn impressive and really not comparable to losing one of the Shuttle's SRBs.

You know, they don't necessarily *need* to save the tank in order to save most of the cost. I bet the engines are both the most expensive and the heaviest parts, and they're at the bottom. If the stage doesn't actually hit so hard that the legs crumple and the engines contact the platform/ground, having the first stage tip over *might* still allow recovery of at least some of the octaweb. Maybe not the ones on the side that it landed on after tipping, but there's lots of engines on those stages, and I'd be shocked if they're less than 5% of the total launch cost each (the first stage, with nine engines, is about 70% of the total cost in total and there isn't a lot more to it than engines, fuel tanks, and the landing systems). Re-using even one of those would be a tremendous profit.

Obviously, it's best if they can recover and reuse literally the entire stage, just rebuild the stack, fill 'er up, and launch again. I'm pretty damn sure they'll get there eventually, too. In the meantime... here's hoping the stage left enough intact components on the barge to examine and possibly even reuse some pieces of a previous rocket. That would still be a momentous achievement.

Oh no, his behavior was a flagrant violation of the rules; and they can selectively destroy his ability to interact with 8x8 black and white tiled surfaces using a cold war mycotoxin for all I care.

If anything, my intended thesis(that even a relatively weak or computationally limited computer could be a substantial aid to a reasonably skilled human) suggests that even modest machine assistance is quite dramatic cheating in terms of allowing you to beat people above your skill level. Being reasonably good just serves to make the computer's job markedly easier in this case, which then allows it to make your job markedly easier, which defeats the point of involving humans at all.

His Nexus 6 wrapped in toilet paper was hidden in the adjacent stall...

I don't know what the state of the art is(and it would presumably vary a bit depending on whether the phone was running the analysis or just acting as a nice UI for a remote server); but it's possible that he was using the computer to augment competent-or-better human play; but not replace it entirely.

Chess has a large enough search space that full scale brute force and ignorance is quite a challenge; but more constrained states(like the actual state of the board partway through a game, or after the use of one of the standard openings) have correspondingly smaller search spaces. A computer program could also assist in checking proposed moves for 'something dumb you would usually recognize; but sometimes miss under stress'. Again, by being one move 'in the future'(since you are just testing, without commitment) you reduce the difficulty of the analyzing the game; but get potentially useful error checking.

I don't know how thoroughly, in terms of human level of play, the game has been beaten with various amounts of hardware at your disposal; but it is definitely beaten enough that a good player with access to a machine is likely to play a better game, possibly a markedly better one.

Those won't really be 'advances' until we have micro-fusion cells and sintered unobtanium nanotube heatsinks.

Well, if you have a taste for brutal irony, newer revisions of the eDP spec include the option to use lossy compression(but it's, um, 'visually lossless', we swear!) to reduce the amount of data you need to send to the screen, and the power costs of the link... Where better than the suckers overpaying for resolution to introduce such a feature?

This is true; but if you've bothered to produce a small, very high resolution, display anyway; you'd have to really not care in order to be unwilling to sell some of the product you already make to somebody willing to buy it.

That likely excludes 'quantity: 1' orders from random hobbyists; but if you can hit the minimum order quantity, your money is a lot more important than your intended application.

The curious quirk, in this case, is that you probably won't even be able to get a 'theoretically better; but not perceptably so and definitely not worth the price' product; you'll almost inevitably get a worse one.

Any phone/tablet SoC with claims to being remotely high end is already some mixture of thermally constrained and deliberately crippled to save the device's battery life. If you demand their full performance, they'll throttle within minutes; and if they somehow had the thermal headroom to avoid that, they'd flatten the battery in a some egregiously short time.

Assuming reasonably equal tech(ie. not a 1920x1080 phone from two years ago against a phone from next year with this screen) the higher resolution device will have worse battery life(or a visibly larger battery) and be at a greater risk of annoying frame rate/responsiveness issues in any applications that try to do complex GPU work at native resolution. Some amount of this is accepted, since visible giant eyeball-slashing pixels suck; but the returns on graphical prettiness diminish, while the power and thermal costs just keep on scaling...

At least audiophile nonsense is generally good at what it does, if you ignore the price tag and the nonsense; this will be actively worse than a similar device based on a slightly less ambitious screen.

Speaking of updating outdated regulations... Is it time to give some thought to the amount of precious, precious, spectrum we dedicate to broadcasting low quality audio using extraordinarily archaic techniques? Sure, I appreciate being able to tune in to talk radio with nothing but a chunk of germanium and the patience to poke it until it agrees to start rectifying; but I need a better reason than that to operate a dinosaur preserve.

What principled justification would there be for excluding 'religious' and 'talk' stations from payment? One would think that any 'religious' station would either be a nonprofit or deserve to pay like any other business; and 'talk' is huge business, and presumably not a terribly heavy consumer of music.

I can take a few guesses about the pragmatic political considerations for those exemptions; but they aren't exactly complementary.