Eh, Avast always had the registration, 5.0 just made it easier to do. Although I guess the only reason I use Avast instead of MSE is momentum; I've been using it for several years and it just has an untangible familiarity (silly, I know). Otherwise I would have switched to MSE a long time ago. On a related note, it would be nice if MS would allow third parties to tap into Windows Update and make it more like Linux package managers.

I don't own a smartphone, but I'm about to buy one and I agree for the same reasons. There's no way I'm going to be running emacs over ssh on an on-screen keyboard, it's just not going to work. I'd like to be able to type without covering up half my screen, thanks.

Duh, I know what instruction sets are. I don't expect MIPS and x86 to have the same operand order, but I'm just surprised that there are assemblers that use different operand order. I guess the Intel style is closer to what I expect from MIPS I guess.

So, we only learned MIPS in school. Why does x86 have different syntaxes? Do different assemblers just have different psuedoinstructions or something? That seems a bit kludgy to me...

No problem. It's a far cry from being able to run normal Linux userland programs on Android (which may be possible if you have root or something? at the least you can apparently install Debian in a chroot jail. I dunno, don't have an Android device yet) but it is a nice and necessary addition to Android.

Actually, they somewhat recently released a Native Development Kit which allows JNI style access to native code.

The funniest part is that much of the 2xx series cards are just renamed 9000 series cards, and much of those are renamed or die-shrunk 8000 series cards. That said, Charlie Demerjian is hardly an unbiased source of reporting on nVidia, although I think he does have good reasons for his "grudge."

I guess the 5670 has lower power consumption than the cards it replaces. As an owner of a Radeon 2900, I can appreciate what that would be useful for, like not sounding like a vacuum cleaner while playing games. But I don't know whether I'd want to upgrade to the 5670, since as you said it seems to not be significantly faster than a 3870, but it costs a fair bit more.

I agree completely, for example, video encoding is pretty common these days and can be GPU accelerated for massive gains in speed.

Nah, you can set minimum and maximum clock speeds in Windows without difficulty, and third party apps like RMClock give you a lot of fine control including undervolting. This is really nothing new except for dynamic GPU switching.

Well, I think it's because Firefox keeps tabs around in memory after they've been closed in case you want to open them again. It also keeps back/forward history in memory so that you don't have to reload the page. Somehow though, I don't notice insane memory usage or slowness with Firefox and I use a pretty good number of extensions - currently, I've got 8 tabs and it's using about 160MB, or about 20MB per tab. That seems pretty low to me.

It's not well below the PS3 by any stretch of the imagination. Both contains GPUs based on the same generation of PC GPUs, and Cell hasn't really been exploited fully yet so that advantage has yet to be seen. I only own a Wii and I'm most likely considering getting a PS3 because of the Blu-Ray, but the 360 is much better than you give it credit for, except of course for the abysmal failure rate. And now you can get a 360 for the same price as a Wii, which is kind of ridiculous in my opinion.

Yeah, it's more interesting how he exploited caching to good effect with his algorithm. This is not something we hear about all that often.

Is that your iPhone's typing correction kicking in there? :P.

I think he's making a pointed remark about how downloading/distributing ROMs is illegal, and you're supposed to rip them yourself if you want to play them in an emulator.