"The rule is that you use a before words that start with a consonant sound and an before words that start with a vowel sound."

It's all about sound. "N" is pronounced "En." Hence, "an."

Grammar Girl: http://tinyurl.com/nuj8h5a

I wonder if it's not so much a function of age, but rather that "older" programmers want to live in a place where they can own a home and raise a family. That is exceedingly hard in the Silicon Valley, even for someone with a well-paid tech job. The cost of a rundown three bedroom bungalow in Cupertino is in excess of one million dollars (Zillow link: http://tinyurl.com/lq2wpcq). A four or five bedroom home is closer to two million. Purchasing such a home is a challenge for even a family with two tech incomes, harder for a family with one tech income and one "normal" income, and damned near impossible for a family with a single breadwinner. Even if you manage to pull off purchasing a home, you've still got a rundown bungalow. Why not go somewhere where you can better enjoy the fruits of your labor?

As a tech worker in his early 30s in the Valley, guys my age talk constantly of moving to Austin, Raleigh, or some other non-Valley tech hub---some place where the idea of raising a family doesn't boggle the mind. I suggest that while age discrimination may be very real, we must also consider that "the old guys" are merely moving out of the Valley. Thus, the average employee age of any company that has the bulk of their operations in the Valley will skew towards the young side. I don't believe it's a coincidence that the average age is less than 30, since 30 is about the age many educated men start a family.

It strikes me that a 3D printed gun doesn't need to actually look like a gun at all. Indeed, a 3D printed gun could use colors/markings and form of existing toy guns (a nerf gun that fires real bullets!), or perhaps it could look like a toy dinosaur that actually shoots bullets from its head. Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but it never occurred to me during all these discussions about 3D printed guns. Something like this puts security/police/secret service officers facing people armed "toys" in a terrible position.

Electric shock in a game is not new. Tekken Torture from 2001: http://www.eddostern.com/tekken_torture_tournament.html

A capitalist economy partly guards against oversupply. However, oversupply has resulted directly from Chinese policies: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/business/global/glut-of-solar-panels-is-a-new-test-for-china.html

Now both American and Chinese solar companies are failing. Further private investment in this oversupplied economy seems unwise; there is a distaste for subsidizing failed business models in the US (at least where green tech is concerned). Perhaps university research is the best alternative investment.

With respect to throughput and multitasking, your desktop OS may be better. Theoretically, a focused game OS may take steps to reduce worst-case latency (real-time OS techniques) and optimize operations for game-related workloads (possibly game-tuned memory allocators?). Unfortunately, console makers are very secretive on how their OSs are designed and implemented. I would be interested to hear from anyone who is familiar with modern game OS development. Is there any secret sauce?

Maybe this isn't a solution for FPS games, but I would love to be able to play Civilization V from the cloud with all the graphic bells and whistles.

Maybe because of the paywall?

The thief will have to sell the goods on the black walnut market.

Normally, I would agree, but I must disagree in this case. The vast majority of people in the U.S. are science-illiterate and easily swayed by sensational headlines (For example, last week slashdot posted a story on how the background radiation in Fukushima is less than that of Denver, yet people panic over radiation exposure in Japan, but not Colorado.). I worry that a similar backlash against GM crops could negatively affect the world's food supply.

While we can disparage crops that have been crafted to withstand copious amounts of insecticide, please keep in mind that there are 7 billion people on the planet, and all of them need to be fed. Much of the world depends upon the United States' agricultural output. GM helps boost this output. While the American consumer can withstand a few cents increase in cost due to decreased food supply, the same increase can trigger food riots in less fortunate countries. If the United States' agricultural output is enhanced by GM, then I'm all for it. I worry that shunning GM food in the US could hurt further investment/development.

Yes, and the rover could have sent "I'm on a boat!" for its first message home.

Jim.

CUDA was released, supported by NVIDIA GPUs, in early 2007. The first OpenCL specification was not released until late 2008 (OpenCL has not been around for 4 years, as you claim). As for which is more popular, I'm afraid that you have this backwards too. The dominant market force for GPU computing is supercomputing. How many of the top 5 supercomputers used AMD GPUs? Zero. How many use NVIDIA GPUs? Three. And they're all using CUDA because it's more feature rich---it can do fancy things like direct memory copies between infiniband interconnects and GPU memory.

FYI: OpenCL on NVIDIA is implemented on top of CUDA, so you're still using CUDA if you're using OpenCL on NVIDIA.

Surprise, surprise, I have the feeling that most of you haven't actually read the article. The article is not arguing that GPUs are inherently flawed. Also, the article is not an NVIDIA-vs-AMD competition. Rather, the author tests software on each platform. It's the software that is bad, not the GPUs themselves. For instance, the NVIDIA GPU does quite well with Arcsoft and Xilisoft; this wouldn't be possible if GPUs were somehow broken for transcoding. After all, as others have pointed out here, floating point support is actually quite good on modern GPUs.

Still, poor software shouldn't come too much as a surprise. While CUDA and OpenCL certainly make GPU-based computing easier, it is still a relatively new technology that only a few programmers know how to use efficiently. I'm also not sure that the market pressure is there yet from consumers for efficient GPU-based applications (how many of them actually know what a GPU is?).