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Comment Re:Quite a bit of hardware (Score 1) 187

If anything Titan is a good test for a max-TDP card with a blower type cooler in a confined space.

At 250W it's certainly at the top of the TDP range for a product like a Steam Machine, and it was in part designed for use in small form factor PCs and other devices where the card had to be responsible for its own cooling. So throwing a Titan in there should provide some good feedback on whether Valve's custom design can handle a suitably built card this powerful.

Comment Re:Thank god we have Ted Cruz (Score 1) 255

"Environmental issues" being the code word for pork. Specifically, most of the money from the sale of helium not going to the National Park Service is going to fund a continuation of the Secure Rural Schools Act. The SRSA itself is essentially a hand-out program for dying, rural counties that ran into budget problems after logging and other natural resource extraction activities were significantly scaled back, which had left those counties with no other significant economic activity to tax for income (and the voters, already hurting, always shoot down income/property tax hikes).

This is one of the bigs reason for why Congress has been raiding the helium reserve, despite the fact that they've cratered prices in the process, as helium is seen as one of the few natural resources and/or assets under exclusive Federal control that can be quickly sold off to raise much needed revenue. Which doesn't really solve the issue - we'll run out of helium eventually - but it at least kicks the can down the way for a while longer.

Comment Re:Nintendo's taking a lot of flak for this... (Score 1) 156

Bingo.

The 3D screen, while being a fun gimmick, is expensive to produce. At the same time it imposes a heavy hit to battery life due to both the energy costs of running the parallax barrier and the energy costs of the more powerful backlight needed to send enough light through that barrier. That's a big reason the original 3DS, despite its relatively puny SoC, only gets 3-5 hours on a single charge (typically closer to the former). So producing a model without the 3D screen, along with solving their unsafe-for-children problem, scratches an itch in the market for a version of the console without the 3D screen and its drawbacks.

The issue however is as you note: the rest of the design. I for one was hoping for a 3DS sans the 3D screen and that's it; maintain the size and the clamshell, just ditch the 3D screen. Instead we have something that looks like the bastard son of a tablet and a 3DS. Given the market Nintendo is going for (the under 7 crowd) this may make all the sense in the world for as far as I know; Nintendo does do their research before going ahead with their spacier ideas. But I'll freely admit it's not the 2DS I was wanting.

Comment Re:Call me old fashion (Score 1) 156

Modern SSDs so a lot of compression and de-duplication to reduce the amount of data they write.

That is only true for SandForce based drives as the tech behind it is LSI's "secret sauce". Samsung, Marvell, and Toshiba do not do any kind of compression or dedupe; they write out on a 1:1 basis.

The latter group could probably create their own compression and dedupe tech if they really desired to, but it's a performance tradeoff rather than something that has clear and consistent gains. SandForce performance is more bursty than 1:1 writing, since the content matters.

Comment Re:seems the Mac premium is disappearing (Score 4, Insightful) 224

For the base model. Just don't select any upgrades. Especially don't select RAM upgrades. Apple charges $100 to upgrade from 4GB to 8GB of RAM... so effectively $100 for 4GB. You can get 8GB of brand name (Corsair, G.Skill, Crucial...) laptop ram at RETAIL for less than $70.

Note that the Airs have their DDR3L memory soldered directly onto the motherboard to save space. You can't buy aftermarket memory for those models, so this advice is out of date at best.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 300

The answer to both questions is the same: because subscription revenue alone no longer covers the costs of content and distribution. Advertising is why XBL is $50/year for all of the services they provide instead of $200 for fewer services. Or to use a cable TV example, it's why every channel producing scripted content isn't $15/month like HBO.

Which is not to say it's a great outcome, but the public has shown time and time again that they'll accept advertising in exchange for staving off service cost increases. As MS has found out, all of that content that makes users flock to XBL (and hopefully flock to XB1) is expensive.

Comment Keyword: Beta Driver (Score 5, Informative) 251

The submitter is reading too much into this. The drivers linked are beta drivers - this is not the first time AMD hasn't published an XP version of a beta driver, due to the relatively low number of XP users on 5000/6000/7000 series video cards (all of which are post-Win7). XP is supported by the current WHQL certified driver (13.4) and I expect the next certified driver will support XP, too. If and when AMD does drop XP support they'll announce it a couple of versions ahead of time, just as they did for Win9x and Win2K.

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