This reminds me of the odd undocumented workaround processes that always seem to creep into the work habits of the users of some complex systems. It is almost impossible to catch those when gathering requirements because they never formally exist.

Essentially, yes. They have sold a lot of their silverware in the last couple of years to keep going. They fired lots of developers, sold Qt, sold their company headquarters to rent them back, etc.

I consider lambdas and inner functions to be quite different types of biests. How would you write a lambda that has itself 10 to 20 lines of code? How would you nest another function inside a lambda expression?

Most higher level languages in common use? C, C++, Java don't have them. What other language is in "common use" these days? PHP?

To know what was before is important to understand why the product that finally created the mass market managed to do just that.

Not if the .m4a is encoded using Apple's own lossless format, which they also store in a MPEG 4 container.

At this point it's not about being better or worse. It's about which of the two alternatives gets the important closed source drivers first (high-end AMD and nVidia GPUs as well as mobile GPUs). *No* open source driver for this hardware is remotely good enough to put it through its paces properly.

No, game AIs will be designed by humans for a long time to come. The good ones are usually tuned very well to provide a very specific experience to the player. A big part of game design is to define this experience and behaviour. Automatic tuning risks altering the game in ways that deviate from the designer's intent too much and might make the game unplayable. The game may become too hard or too easy or the learning algorithm may decide to optimize the AI to exploit some obscure game rules or even a bug to become much stronger than it is supposed to be. Automatic learning may even backfire completely and get the AI in a state where it does fine for the most part but breaks completely if you do one specific, maybe even very common thing.

Anecdotal evidence: some guys trained a neural network as a driving AI for a racing game. All went well on the training track. The network started to find its way along the course and did faster and faster laps. Then they took that AI and put it onto a new track. It did fine until it suddenly failed horribly and put the vehicle against the nearest wall. The developers finally figured out that there was some new, harmless object on the track that the AI wasn't trained to encounter. So it mistook it as an obstacle to avoid and did just that.

The SAP R/3 client from 2005/2006 was (supposedly) able to do messaging and emails. It was there in the UI but we didn't use it. I don't know about calender functionality. Wouldn't surprise me, though.

When done for the first time? Yes.

Learning AIs in games have been problematic in the past. Mostly it is about control over the experience that gets delivered to the customer: as a designer your job is to get it just right. You can do this easily with current more or less heuristic AI algorithms. The ability to learn opens the scope of possible behaviours so much that it's not possible anymore to deliver a guaranteed experience.

Short version: the designer can't stop the game from going nuts in unpredictable ways because of stupid player input (and well, all player input is "stupid").

They sell this stuff under the brand name Xeon Phi now. It's something like 60 simplified x86-like units on a die. Looks like they only cater to big orders from supercomputer builders right now.

Well, a tap on the Win key and the first few letters of the program I want beat your clicking through hierarchies every time. KDE introduced their sort-of equivalent minicli about a decade ago and I think that it's a terrific idea. I use these features regularly. And don't tell me they're slower than your mouse navigation. They aren't.

And they did say something about that: https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/gamedev/docs/Porting%20Source%20to%20Linux.pdf

Hm, all those XNA and Unity based games that I've tried - all written using C# and therefore garbage collected - perform very smoothly here. OK, this is anecdotal evidence, but C# is so widely used in game development now that I have to assume that it really works. Otherwise, the engine makers would have changed programming language in an instant.