FWIW, "Harry Potter" is written at a "Sixth Grade" reading level although a number of kids start reading that book in third or fourth grade.

The are using Azure to provide cloud backup (and Azure active directory syncing) and Single Sign-In Services. It's not so much making Azure hard to avoid but actually providing useful utility near seamlessly in Azure.

Is included with the purchase of PS4. Sony is probably just prioritizing what they can do in the time before launch. There's no reason they couldn't choose to eventually support Bluetooth later as well as USB (even though they're not promising Bluetooth now) and there's presumeably no reason why a third party couldn't create a USB-to-Bluetooth dongle for headsets either.

It is illegal for women to drive a car in Saudi Arabia regardless of what they are wearing and women have received sentences of being whipped with a lash for driving there as recently as 2011.

But there are worse places in the Middle East, where women have been stoned to death for owning a cell phone.

Ban religion -- enforce loyalty to the state". Send anyone who is vocal about their religious beliefs to "re-education camps".

The Nest Protect manual states that the lifetime of this device is 7 years and needs to be replaced after 7 years.

FTA: "the final switch that prevented disaster could easily have been shorted by an electrical jolt, leading to a nuclear burst."

So you're LITERALLY asking to change the definition of a word or retire its proper meaning when enough stupid people use it wrong?

Sigh... Again...

It's worth noting that Assad is basically in Putin's pocket since Russia supplies Syria with a large number of it's armaments. Syria is a good customer / proxy / puppet and it's in Putin's interest to have a peaceful resolution which leaves Assad in power.

In the case of FFMPEG, it's not idiots... it's the EXPERTS that are using the term in this way.

So you replace the tablet often??? Tablets screens will crack on a single drop if the screen lands on a hard surface or usually shatter if the tablet lands on an edge as well.

Nice joke. Although in the current vernacular of media encoding and playback, codec is commonly used to describe modules or libraries that provide EITHER encoding or decoding (or both). For example, if you get a "codec" pack to play media formats, it's often just the decoders. And when you list codecs in FFMPEG, it tells you whether it supports encoding or decoding as separate flags.

And that site is down :-(

I felt the choice of wording was a bit prematurely dismissive (i.e. saying it shouldn't apply to single socket CPU's or to Game Programming -- especially since that is the primary target of my concurrency research).

Also, we are not trying to write specifically to HLE. We are trying to write stuff that runs well on multicore systems and then layer HLE on top of it for an added performance benefit for when we do have lock conflicts.

I agree that well written applications don't have nearly as many locking conflicts to begin with and that's certainly our goal. We try to run most of our game using a multicore graph driven data dependency scheduler (also presented at GDC by my coworker).

But there are a number of systems (both internal and legacy) that do use locking that will benefit from HLE. It's about making the code run as fast as possible.

When we have to lock, we try to make it as fine-grained as possible (until you get diminishing returns in either performance or memory). HLE works well with existing algorithms (almost nothing to rewrite except to specify whether the CAS is acquire or release for a lightweight user space lock) and it is backwards compatible with an extremely low penalty for processors without HLE -- from the benchmarks I have seen, HLE code will run as fast as the original locking code (to within some white noise of most performance metrics on the unsupported CPU's) which should be fairly fast assuming you use RWL's, striped locks, and organize data algorithms to minimize contention.

HLE is a "no brainer" for ease of implmentation. However, a TSX RTM code path does require algorithm rewrites so perhaps that is akin to "writing in asm for a 15% improvement over C" (although some game programmers would find that tradeoff acceptable in small code funtions in low level libraries anyhow!).

As far as gamers are concerned, if we can give them a noticeable performance boost by taking advantage of a specific CPU feature without slowing down the code on CPU's without that feature, they will consider that to be a big win and love us for it.

I want to feel you're not just trolling me because apparently you've been developing software since at least the Amiga days (we have that in common). However, I feel you are quite misguided on some of your assumptions here.

Not to say I may have a more informed opinion than you because I don't know your personal experience in game development, but I certainly feel that TSX isn't worthless for games and I've been writing performance code full time for games for over 20 years.