I would mod you up (except for the stupid mod system that means I never have mod points when I want to mod).

Sadly this is "business" 21st century style ~ 50% politics, 10% luck, 10% corruption, 30% actual work. Many failing companies could be turned around in short order by removing the top heavy bonus culture for a more equitable system (e.g. look at Germany for a viable model) with all the long term benefits that brings but in cultures where next quarters earnings report matters more than whether the company will still be in business in 10 years, thats never going to happen.

its just a pity that B&N only have about 0.0001% of the available books (i,e. of those that have been electronically published in any format) available through their store, and what they do have are vastly overpriced. I'd still rather own a paper copy of a book and pop it on my bookshelves, but at the same time I would love to be able to start reading an e-version immediately hence my last book purchase went through amazon and the errmmm less than kosher e-version onto my nook while the physical ones arrived.

I wouldn't have minded paying a (small) premium for that, even though I think it should be done by default. I wouldn't have minded buying the e-version if the price reflected the significant savings of not having the expenses of physically distributing the books to retailers, the retailers mark up, the printing costs, the warehousing costs etc. etc.....but in the end, the paper copy was cheaper than the e-version!

It's sad really...all the out of print books that exist, all the various opportunities to innovate and instead we see companies driving themselves to the wall from greed.

I used to have issues with locking but it seems fixed with a Ubuntu 12.04/Gnome 3/FF 20 combo....

Its still buggy and cra

I'm amazed no one has said "HUMA" - Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access, and that this fundamental difference between the architecture of PCs and the PS4 is likely to make it an uphil struggle for PS4 emulation. It *may* be a different story when it comes to AMDs Kavari (?) APUs since they use a HUMA architecture themselves.

Personally I think the best to expect is that we may see more games ported to Linux ....

Define "better" please.

My boss would have defined better as the 10x programmer who got done in 1 month what I'd said would take 10 but left zero documentation, unit tests or comments; and code so brittle that the slightest deviation from spec brouht the entire mess crashing down around our ears. Sure he was 2x as expensive and it took me nearly 12 months to sneak something past the powers that be that reduced my daily support request queue back to what it was prior to him coming and working his magic but goddamit he got 10 months of work done in 1, it was obvious that he was "better".

In all seriousness though, I find myself looking at a lot of the work I do these days and being aghast at the lack of optimization but with interpreted languages that are only an order of magnitude (wth a good headwind) slower than C and bandwidth that flows like the aftermath of an all-you-can-eat chicken vindaloo from the cheaper side of Rusholme, it just doesnt matter anymore.

"I would like to hope that Slashdot is a bit more mature than that."

Dude, have you even *read* Slashdot in the last year?

You're quite correct - the OP is sprouting BS, HOWEVER the XBones visualized OS architecture does sound like it will add additional limits and reduce the raw power available to games; while that is probably something like 5-10% when gaming sites are doing frame by frame comparisons on the current gen, I don't see the XBone as coming out ahead on this, especially when developers become familiar with both (XBone & PS4) architectures.

Digital archival is one of the HARD problems. Over the last 40 years we have already lost more cultural artifacts that were created for the entirety of human history. A great deal of that is useless garbage of course but the original moon landing tape? 1000s of government emails reavealing exactly what was going on at pivotal times in history?

The truth is, we need systems for hardcopy; digital is too tranient; emulators are a useful stop gap measure but dont protect againt the kinds of catastropic failures that we will likely see over the longer time frame; and we need indexing because someone at somepoint will want to wade through our digital ditritus.

I think you will find that there's a little known branch of academia called "history" which sometimes takes a curious interest in even the most trivial of past information.....

revolution = revulsion, primise = premise of course *sigh* I'm sure theres more....

To be honest I couldnt really follow the underlying themes because I was too busy lobotomizing myself...

The sad thing is that if you dig into some of the background to the script it appears that the first draft by Spaihts would have made a good movie but between Lindelof, Scott and the producers they ended up with the a train wreck which given Scotts experience with Bladerunner you would have thought he would have pushed harder to avoid. It just doesnt bode well for the sequel...

"Bold choices"? Such as "I will choose to make a film wherein the plot makes absolutely no sense what-so-ever because RAINBOWS!"?

Prometeus failed because it was sci-fi where the basic primise was so flawed that the target audiance reacted with revolution to the tripe that they were being asked to swallow. It failed because it had plot holes so huge that it was impossible not to feel that you had to be a complete moron to not sit there and ask "but why did he just/she just/they just? and did it again and again and again. It treated the audience like *idiots* and let you *know* that it thought you were an idiot. I nearly said something about it being a B movie script dressed up in AAA movie CGI....except the script wasnt good enough for a B movie script.

IT. WAS. SHIT.

The monitor for my 4GB media PC is just an ordinary (plasma) television but if VDUs had kept pace with computing power advancements we would be looking at 655360000p screens....

and bugs made in hell :)

I encountered a company still writing software in VB this week. The new version of their software was crashing so they sent us a debug version which said it would copy any error information to the clipboard and write a log file with any error messages.......it crashed when attempting to write the error message to the clipboard and so never wrote a logfile.

VB DID NOT GET **ANYTHING** RIGHT! ;)