These polls are getting more and more USA-centric. What if I was from Germany, Australia or China for example? Slashdot was always US centric, but now it is even more so. Disgusting. I miss nerdy news for nerds sake instead of the brain-dead "USA USA USA USA" flag waving that goes on here.

If I was eligable, I would not join the Alexander Arms, Alliant Techsystems, ArmaLite, Arsenal, Inc., Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Boeing Defense, Space & Security, Bushmaster Firearms International, Caspian Arms Ltd, Charles Daly, Charter Arms, CheyTac, Colt's Manufacturing Company (CMC), Detonics, Federal Cartridge Company, General Dynamics, Henry Repeating Arms, Hi-Point Firearms, JP Enterprises Inc, Kahr Arms, Kel-Tec CNC Industries Inc, Kimber Manufacturing, Knight's Armament Company (KAC), Land Warfare Resources Corporation (LWRC), Les Baer, Lockheed Martin, Magnum Research Inc. (MRI), Manroy USA, MasterPiece Arms, Marlin Firearms, McBros Rifles, Northrop Corporation, O.F. Mossberg & Sons, Olympic Arms, Remington Arms (Remington), RND Manufacturing, Rock River Arms, Royal Aquarius Defense Industries, Savage Arms, Serbu Firearms, Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company, Smith & Wesson (S&W), Springfield Armory (former U.S. Army arsenal), Springfield Armory (modern company), STI International, Strayer Voigt Inc, Sturm, Ruger, & Co. (Ruger), THOR Global Defense Group, Thompson, Taser International, Textron Systems (Textron), Thompson Center Arms (Thompson Center) and U.S. Fire Arms Manufacturing Company (U.S. Fire Arms Mfg. Co.; USFA) profit making machine anyway.

It seems a bit sick to join a group used to profit shareholders with the risk of my own life. Maybe if I was really poor I might join the lottery I guess, but only with the huge chance of losing a little money for the tiny chance of winning big.

War is only for profit these days and greed isn't enough for me to wish death on anyone, let alone myself. (I'm not even Christian, but I wonder if there are any real Christians in the US of A?)

That is as has been, but I'm wondering if this is not a strategic move on their part. Perhaps They are thinking of large clusters of low power ARM cores that kick in as the workload demands with some kind of clever way of sharing resources (Freedom Fabric?). With the global political landscape the way it is, that could be an important point of difference.

Reducing energy consumption is now the "in thing" and will continue to grow in purchasing decisions as financial incentives to reduce carbon emissions grow. If a server can be run using a single voltage PSU instead of needing different voltage on different rails, there are likely to be energy savings over x86. If that server can idle at less than a Watt and then ramp up in small increments as demand requires, that might also yield an overall advantage.

Sure, for serious continuous load applications, it's probably not the best, but for a lot of cloud type applications I can see this as being useful for renewable energy supplied server farms.

I'm just speculating of course, and I fully agree GPUs are irrelevant, but I think the idea that power usage is always secondary to performance has reached it's use by date.

How did you test that 10,000 line java application so that you knew your refactor didn't cause regressions or new bugs?

I didn't.

I looked at the business problem and re-wrote the entire thing from scratch. It took a week and ended up being a couple of hundred lines of code with ~15 classes. Solved exactly the same business problem with better reliability and performance which was what I was hired for. Seriously could anyone be bothered unraveling that much spaghetti just to figure out wtf is going on? I re-used some snippets, but most of it I threw away.

The end result meant that a single instance of the application could do what 7 instances were needed for previously, it allowed new network protocols to be quickly developed as plug-ins rather than being locked into a single protocol and it had indefinite uptime instead of needing to be restarted daily. That's satisfying stuff right there.

This is my concern. Why is the Federal Government singling out Huawei and not subjecting everyone to this scrutiny?

I have a simple idea. Why not make it a condition of purchase that all software/firmware/hardware design be fully and publicly disclosed by all potential vendors and crowd source the security checks? (Hey I know it will never happen but I'm allowed to have my Utopian dream on a Thursday morning)

The premise here is that working with crappy legacy code is somehow not fulfilling. I have worked in jobs with reasonably efficient and well commented legacy code that was boring to maintain because it mostly involved brain-dead incremental changes. I've also worked with complete shit storms that were incredibly satisfying to re-factor and clean up (ex VB "developer" that wrote an entire java application in one method with 10,000 lines of "if then" nesting, I'm looking at you).

Sometimes the worst sample code is an indicator of a fun job so the next question should probably be, "Are you open to me re-factoring this to make it more manageable?". Of course each to their own and YMMV...

I had video chat on my Nokia N900 in 2010. Worked great too, integrated seamlessly into the OS. Even without skype there have been video conferencing standards around for a long time and implementing them on a mobile phone is obvious and hardly innovation.

So both you kids shut up before I bang your heads together.

I played all the way through the tutorial and found the default controls functional with a mouse and keyboard (dammit, where did I hide that joystick???? All that bashing the mouse around sucks). The part where you have to align with the drone was the most annoying because the keypresses need to be really short.

Banking by default is assigned to numpad 7 and 9. Works for me.

Well I spent a few hours last night playing the actual game and I was impressed with the flight dynamics. At one point my viper got stuck in "glide" mode and I was thankful that I didn't have to come in hot for a landing. I hade to come in slowly and use the full 360 degrees of vertical and horizontal axis thrusters to land safely on to the deck. It took a lot of care. Very newtonian. The only thing missing is gravity.

I'm not sure if getting stuck in glide mode was a bug or the result of damage but it's nice to know that you can switch to a pure "float around and manually squirt thrusters" mode. It makes the possibilities in combat really interesting.

FYI, in case you didn't get it from the above, glide mode is effectively turning off the computer assistance in the viper.

WRT the range for engagement, it is all within hundreds of metres by the look of it, but then if that part was realistic it would kind of suck as a FPS.