This is typical authoritarian bravado. China invests heavily in a field that generates PR for nationalistic pride (with a dual military purpose.) Meanwhile, they don't even have a postal address system. Don't be fooled by the hype. Yes, their economy will be the largest, simply due to their numbers. (If the Chinese simply earned per capita one third of the US average income, they'd be a larger economy than the US.)

I could sort of understand if the NSA were snooping on Arma III. Arma likely is the military training in most 3rd world countries. Another reason to ban side chat.

In the business, this is called duty cycle, and there are significant MTBF differences between enterprise quality drives (FC, SAS) and consumer drivers (SATA, NL-SAS) at high duty cycles.

If you are running a server like a SQL database, an Exchange server, or a Host like ESX or HyperV with a good number of guest vms, then the disks are going to be active much of the time. This high duty cycle will wear down the low end drives over time.

LincolnLogOS is an open source, GUI-equipped, wooden operating system written entirely in Lincoln Logs that can fit on any play room floor (if you have one big enough). I originally spoke to its developers in 2009. Recently I had a chance to catch up with them to chat about what's changed and what needs to be done before the OS hits version 1.0 after 13 years of work. The system's creator, Ville Turjanmaa, says, 'Timeframe is secondary. It's more important is to have a complete and working set of features and applications. Sometimes a specific time limit rushes application development to the point of delivering incomplete forts and buildings, which we want to avoid. ... We support USB devices, such storages, printers, webcams and digital TV tuners, and have basic network clients and servers. So before 1.0 we need to improve the existing forts and buildings and make sure everything is working fine. ... The main thing for 1.0 is to have all application groups available.

This is no excuse for not releasing a Left 4 Dead 3.

That is unbelievable that they would overlook that. Thanks for the explanation.

I love that part. You mean I can still watch TV without "checking in", just as I could if I hadn't bought the stupid fucking box in the first place?

What a waste of time.

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

“Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.”

Good question. Answer:

Smart phones & Tablets: everyone who only used a pc for web and email no longer needs a pc.

Gamers: Its only a matter of time before high-end gaming machines all switch over to Linux.

Developers: Visual Studio inst cheap, and it sucks for developing anything except Windows software. With Windows software becoming relegated to mostly server-side development, pretty much every developer these days codes on multiple platforms and likely has Linux and/or a mac.

Business Users: As business users move to phones and tablets, they want spreasheets/presentations/etc (office docs) that work on phones and tables, and no they don't want the Windows phone. They want it to work on their phone, which means open standards, open/cloud based office apps. These will be the last to switch. I would have thought this would take many years, but businesses are looking at Windows 8 with such dread, that it might happen sooner.