Sure, but for now AMD and Nvidia seem to be happy rebadging previous-gen chips with new names and calling it a day. 2014 is almost here and still nobody knows anything about Maxwell, which was already supposed to be shipping by this point. With huge per generation improvements and a significant process advantage, Intel could really put the hurt on them in the lower end of the market, which is the majority of it.

What about all potential electricity users who won't get anything because everything except perhaps natural gas power plants are more expensive and the poor countries won't be able to afford as many of them?

They do work very well at improving efficiency and cutting down on unnecessary travel. Do you think everyone in Europe loves driving gutless 3-cylinder shitboxes and agricultural diesels? Of course not, but for people who aren't rich and aren't car enthusiasts, the taxes make fuel efficiency one of the top priorities, and the manufacturers pay attention to this.

Average fuel efficiency is significantly higher in the EU, while theres no CAFE-like bullshit - which is why you can still easily get a bi-turbo V12 AMGs, V8 Land Cruiser, or whatever you want, and the manufacturers don't have to game the system by pushing useless trucks to people who don't need them just to take advantage of different economy standards.

As a car nut I'd prefer not to have the fuel tax so I could afford to run a muscle car and not cry when filling up my Miata, but as it stands, that's by far the easiest and also effective way to raise revenue and slowly nudge consumer preference towers better fuel efficiency.

If you think this is bad, check out the recent story about this on Arstechnica. Like 2/3s of the comments are trying to prove that the hyperloop won't work because of... terrorists! Sure, you can screen anyone at the entrance like in the airport, but what if the terrorist drives to the middle of the route and blows it up with an RPG? How do you counter that, Musk?

Why not just look at Elon's PDF, which already has a map with all the radius circles drawn on it?

Shit, I hoped they'd go with pacem lacerta or something.

You still haven't crashed your helicopter, so why would this be any different?

I'm just hoping they'll try to make a database this time...

Oh no, I certainly didn't expect anything else. I just wanted to (humorously) highlight the fact that the original post is making MS sound like a sinking ship with struggling product lines and a bailing CFO, while overall their situation is nowhere near as gloomy.

Ah, yes, Microsoft is in deep shit now, what with the record revenue and what not. No wonder the CFO ran away. 2013 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop, all hail RMS!

>Just because a Head Chef job is really rough, doesn't mean that the IT job is any less rough.
Well, it could mean just that. I'm not going to comment on the head chef as I have no experience, but extrapolate that to miners or fishermen, say: you have to catch at least a certain amount of fish to get paid, work outside in shitty weather, and there's a non-trivial chance of dying horribly. Does i make sitting on your naked ass at home sound less rough?

I think the point might be that the echo chamber is developing some sort of persecution complex, whereby only the IT employees are hard working, valuable, over-stressed, underpaid, and most threatened by offshoring and immigration.

It's important to keep an overall perspective, otherwise you come off as VW Phaeton owners complaining about slow ashtrays to the rest of the world.

Personally, I'm very happy with such size in that respect, but my girlfriend does complain that 10" is uncomfortably large, however.

And in Austria you need a reflective vest for every passenger. And if this wasn't silly enough, then in Russia and Ukraine, as I suspect in most ex-Soviet countries, also a fire extinguisher. In the Czech Republic a year or so ago they changed the requirements for the first aid kit, thus screwing anyone who didn't buy the new version. Cops love to check all of this too if they're bored or aren't reaching their quotas otherwise, so be prepared to unload everything from the trunk to demonstrate that you do, in fact, have all of this crap.

Shit's getting ridiculous, really, soon I'll be going for Sunday drives with a surgeon riding shotgun, just in case.

But nevertheless quite interesting. The idea of updatable views is certainly a good one, but it seems that the current limitations make this feature more or less useless for now:

• The view must have exactly one entry in its FROM, which must be a table or another updatable view.
• The view definition must not contain WITH, DISTINCT, GROUP BY, HAVING, LIMIT, or OFFSET clauses at the top level.
• The view definition must not contain set operations (UNION, INTERSECT or EXCEPT) at the top level.
• All columns in the viewâ(TM)s select list must be simple references to columns of the underlying relation. They cannot be expressions, literals or functions. System columns cannot be referenced, either.
• No column of the underlying relation can appear more than once in the viewâ(TM)s select list.
• The view must not have the security_barrier property.

> You do realize that anyone who works in the Defense Industry, military, or other US Government contracting positions could lose their job over clicking that, right?

You say that like it's a bad thing!