Before, as best I recall. It went something like Geocities -> LiveJournal -> Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook, not counting the various Diarylands, Xangas, and other strains of internet funk that bloomed and withered on the sides like little fungus gardens.

The answer's simple: Facebook wants their interface to be gobbledygook because that means you're spending more time on the site, and having to mentally filter relevant content from the ads they want you to see. By the logic of someone creating an attractive nuisance, interfering with this kind of product makes a perverse sense because it's making the product better for users but worse for Facebook's actual customers - advertisers and marketers.

In BeOS R5 you could drag 'n' drop audio tracks from a CD (and with a decent drive you could do it quite quickly), but I don't remember CDDB integration. Still pretty handy for huge batch LAME encoding jobs, though.

What would YOU say if you'd been through what he has? Who can say if he's sincere? This is just another part of the dog and pony show. Keep fighting.

I like Slackware too, but what's wrong with quiche? It's the beautiful marriage of an omelette and a pie.

Blu-ray's variable, but video bitrate alone will sometimes jump over 36 Mbit/sec. Audio's also variable - Blu-ray supports everything from 0.1 Mbit Dolby Mono all the way up to 7+ Mbit lossless 24-bit PCM. Worst-case scenario you could expect something pushing 50 Mbit/second, which is definitely not within range of the typical American's broadband connection. 4K will be impressive, but assuming a linear doubling (as HEVC will be twice as efficient, but have to deal with four times the video data)... yep, your math checks out. There's also the problem of product segmentation between different streaming video providers and studio bickering, lapsing of rights, seasonal variability, &c. Until and unless that gets sorted out, I'm buying physical copies of my favorite movies.

...is that sometimes I have kinda weird but harmless taste in porn, and spend too much time on Slashdot and Reddit. Horrors.

As long as you've got IOMMU support, you're golden. If you don't, get ready for grossly lower performance.

The problem isn't just surfacing for DTS Master HD films - my Blu-ray player connected via HDMI to the same TV grunts through everything fine, and the audio problems have happened with AAC and Dolby Digital from Netflix streaming as well. We'll see what happens after I rebuild the system.

Yeah, I've been wondering about that. The configuration's pretty vanilla: the Radeon uses an HDMI cable to connect to a late 2011-era Philips HDTV that hasn't given a pinch of trouble otherwise, and there aren't amps or optical audio to complicate the pipeline any at this point. While the glitch appears during video playback, it's surfaced in both Netflix (where I'd expect Silverlight to be a possible culprit of a DRM snafu) and VLC (where I definitely wouldn't). Fingers crossed hoping the issue disappears going into a clean install, and fingers crossed extra-hard that AMD finally releases the first official, non-beta driver in months soon...

Short of using it for OpenCL at lower rates than FirePro cards or gaming across multiple high-res monitors or a numbingly high-res projector, I've got to agree. But if its generous margins help subsidize ongoing research into cards mortal humans can use and appreciate, I can't complain either.

The only issue I've run into with the Radeon 7750 I snagged last year for my home theater PC has nothing to do with 3D rendering. For some reason, there is a very occasional glitch with the card's HDMI audio during video playback that causes a weird, harsh, and intermittent kind of sound artifacting, and after a couple of seconds the audio rolls off into silence... and then goes back to normal. If the problem persists after a fresh install onto mostly new hardware (goodbye Athlon X2 5050e, hello Ivy Bridge Celeron), I'm just giving up on the HDMI audio altogether and going back to a mini-stereo cable. Overall I'm pretty happy, but that's an irritating unpolished edge on what's otherwise been a terrific bargain and a reliable performer. It sure as hell didn't make me eager to grab a Radeon for my Linux workstation...

I didn't know that! Some time soon I'm gonna have to get some very old games up and running in Linux soon... Thank you!

Sure, and heaven forbid any of those "users buying commodity computers with 64-bit CPUs and OSes" could ever use their hardware to begin tinkering with high-resolution video editing, or programming, or playing with the full capabilities of the hardware with which Moore's Law has blessed them. The fact that I do real work that can use more than 4 GB RAM doesn't mean the average user of whom you clearly think very little is incapable of doing so.

Look, I like bashing straw man lazy programmers as much as anybody. But in scientific computing in the year 2013 - say, where you need to store 50 cubic miles of subsurface 4-dimensional seismic reflector data for 3D visualization and modeling density change over time - you run into the limits of 4 gigabytes very quickly. Never mind large-scale simulations run in TOUGH2-MP... Don't paint with such a large brush. People may piss memory on stuff that ran in less RAM back in 1996, but we're not there any more, and adventurous, relevant, and efficient uses of RAM really do exist.