Those purchasing it (assuming that anyone actually has) are probably interested in getting some use out of it. Anyone looking to preserve value in their investment will want as few eyes looking at this as possible.

I'm thinking it's generous to even label EVE Online as being a game. Needs reclassified as something like sci-fi online job simulator.

Have you seen how big the Metro Solitaire app is? When I checked app disk use it was something over 100MB! Yeah granted it does have a few different game types including freecell, but that disk consumption for just a simple app is absurd. Minesweeper was similarly huge, over 100MB again there.

Maybe everything is statically linked or something, I just don't see where they managed to burn all that space. Raw bitmap cards maybe? You'd almost have to work to make it that bloated either way.

Unless you have a 120Hz monitor, the 63fps thing literally is not going to help at all if you can keep up with a 60Hz VSYNC locked.

WoT really isn't all that optimized of a graphics engine though, I am running GTX 680 @ 120Hz and it still only pushes like 80 fps tops anyway.

Depending on how obvious and well designed the library is, just seeing the function and parameters in auto-complete might be enough to go on and could even produce workable code if you are lucky.

Of course this will be influenced by how well assumptions about the behavior line up with actual use, hopefully if it's similar to a number of other libraries it will offer up functionality with about the same results. If not, then it could lead some obscure bug which will be difficult to find if everyone uses the same set of assumptions or until someone with intimate knowledge happens to take a look at it.

Also, this is really what I'd like to see in a programming reference book, just a quick outline and typical use cases and then a listing of possible pitfalls in using it. The books we used in school were not really at all geared toward the quick reference style I'd like to have on hand now.

The phrase "deeper Windows experience" should probably never be used ever. Masturbating with a fist full of glass shards is all that comes to mind when I read that.

Even among the community of BSD users, my guess is many of them are not running it on their main desktop. I've tried to use all the main variants on the desktop (Open/Free/Net), and they generally work more or less OK after a fair amount of tweaking, at least if you don't want to get anything too bleeding edge on it. If for some reason I absolutely had to have it on the desktop then FreeBSD is probably the least painful one in the main group to go for.

As a server OS, it's been absolutely awesome, and where I get my use from it. Great router / firewall and easy understandable config to set up. Lot of the standard network services simple enough to setup, dhcpd / bind / ntp / etc. My new NAS is running NetBSD and is working good now, although I did have to tweak a fair number of sysctl's to get proper gigabit network performance from it. Problem being the default tuning there seems to still be for a fairly low end system.

So yeah, maybe some masochists run it for a desktop, I just don't see the benefit from picking it there.

As far as content aware filtering, yes perhaps much more difficult. However, for exact matching purposes this should be somewhat straightforward. Simply record the first small portion of outgoing phone calls, and after detecting an outgoing call which is an extremely high match with some number of past calls made block that number. Thresholds could be set on counts, match %, number of calls, block duration, etc.

Yet another useless stupid option to turn off before playing a game. I always have to hunt around and turn the stupid vibration options off because all it does is distract my aim or whatever. Rumble pack has been nothing but pure gimmick ever since Nintendo tried it. Wherever this technology goes it's almost certainly on the immediate disable list.

Or an Intel Extreme Edition, i7-980x / i7-990x / i7-3960X, or even the i7-3930K (non extreme 6 core apparently).

My gaming rig barely falls short as well due to the single GTX 680 bandwidth.

Wow... I'm sure that's going to help calm people down, now that they know the computer is sad about being crashed (actually a frowning face, it's not happy about it at least). Although if it was a :) that'd be even more hilarious.

When AMD first released dual core CPU's there was some problem with RDTSC. AMD then released this utility. A lot of games had stupid stuttering issues without it, so not always as dire as an application crash, but it was on more than a few games. Problems could also be resolved by forcing the application to a single core.

I'm not aware of any game in the market that actually *needs* PhysX to run (although perhaps one exists?) And until a game absolutely mandates support as a minimum requirement all PhysX gets used for is making more crap happen on the screen that doesn't have any direct impact on gameplay. On Borderlands 2 setting PhysX to high will result in tons of shrapnel being thrown all over the ground from explosions, but those objects are all non-clipping, so it doesn't matter beyond the fact that sometimes you have a hard time seeing through it to the weapon drops.

And that's generally all I've seen done with it, extra crap that doesn't impact any game entity or interfere with main logic. Other than the couple non-game demo-ish simulations or whatever, no developer has been willing to make it part of core engine design.

Registry stuff is provided out of the box on command line... Regedit Command Line

And Diskpart provides entirely command line driven disk management.

For managing services you can use SC.

Installing software is kinda at the whim of the developer, some might have quiet installers like "/q" or command line switches, and some might not, depends on them to provide.