I think you meant to reply to the grandparent poster, not my comment.

However, in case you gathered something different from my statements than what I intended, let me clearly state that I am in favor of protecting the speech and expression freedoms of teachers, both in, to a certain degree, and out of the classroom; for example, I don't agree with the ruling of Mayer v. Monroe County Community School Corporation et al., as it set a bad precedent due to, what was, a rather innocuous statement made by an instructor concerning seeking a peaceful solution to the war in Iraq. At the same time, it is difficult to determine what limits should be imposed, if there should even be any at all, given the gamut of views and beliefs held by others and the chances for offending those individuals or their parents.

How could you even begin to assume that I am a liberal and a union supporter (when, in fact, I am not and do not, respectively) merely on the basis of my desire to see that freedom of speech and expression are upheld for public employees?

The fact that you can't spot thinly veiled raillery is adorable. Have a great day!

Hosts files are terrible.

Here's a link to the pre-published manuscript: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/corner-prep.pdf, a related manuscript: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/arxivoe.pdf, and a technical report: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/67888

Yes, I could imagine playing Gears of War 3, or any other similar, graphically-intensive game, on a tablet. However, I wouldn't expect to physically interact the tablet whilst doing so.

To elaborate on the first part, as smart phones and tablets become more complex and powerful, they will begin to encroach and eventually overlap with the processing and graphical capabilities of consoles. (The PowerVR G6200/G6400, let alone NVIDIA's Tegra offerings and the state-of-the-art devices in the research literature, are a testament to this, from a GPU standpoint. From a CPU one, the quad-core ARMv7 Cortex-A15 handily beats out the triple-core IBM Xenon in the Xbox 360 and the Cell processor in the PS3, in terms of MIPS.) As this happens, there will only be a handful of relatively minor reasons, most of which concern how to handle older, potentially out-dated devices, as to why we could not expect to see quality games ported over to these mobile platforms, let alone have studios change focus and solely push their titles for them.

Now, as for actually playing the games, it's easy to imagine a few scenarios for how this could be done for a variety of titles. One that would work well, in general, would be to interface the tablet or phone with a TV, either through an HDMI connection or perhaps wirelessly through something like the Apple TV, and rely on one or more Bluetooth controllers for input. In this instance, the device is functioning like a console; however, once you're done playing, you can just grab it, take it with you, and revert back to using it for a multitude of other purposes.

What is needed is an architectural paradigm shift, not necessarily a more beefy, faster (single-instruction, multiple-threaded-based) GPU.

To elaborate, with a naive implementation where independent kernels are run in parallel, one of the major bottlenecks for ray/path tracing via GPGPU processing is that every warp, a set of 32 threads, essentially executes the same instruction, with branching realizing by transparently masking out threads; as such, if branching often leads to divergent threads, then there will be low hardware utilization and performance will degrade. With a more robust implementation, you can improve hardware utilization by appropriately partitioning sub-kernels, but you'll run into issues when you start handling secondary rays.

For ray/path tracing to be carried out in an expeditious manner, it would be prudent to move to a programmable multiple-instruction, multiple-threaded (MIMT) architecture with many small cores that can handle many threads. In fact, researchers have been moving in this direction for quite some time now and the results are rather promising: while an NVIDIA GTX 285, which has a die area of around 300mm^2, can handle around 100M primary rays/sec and 60M diffuse rays/sec, with a thread issue rate of ~70% and ~50%, respectively, a custom MIMT ASIC solution, with an area of 200mm^2 at the same fabrication level, can reach around 400M primary and diffuse rays/sec, with a thread issue rate of ~70-80% for both. (As an aside, I have a paper, that's being submitted to either the ACM Trans. Graphics or IEEE Trans. Comp. Graphics and Vis., on an FPGA and theorized ASIC solution that blows these numbers away.)

On top of everything else you have reading comprehension issues. To help make things clear for you, I never said that I owned a hackintosh.

However, I will mention that I assembled my workstation, if you can even classify it as such, and it is far more powerful than a Mac Pro: it has 8 Xeon E7-8870s, for a total of 80 cores and 160 threads @ 2.4/2.8 GHz, a Supermicro X8OBN-F motherboard, 512 GB (16x 32 GB DIMMs) DDR3 RAM, and 4 NVIDIA M2070s. (As an aside, a single Xeon E7-8870 costs more than the entry-level, dual-socket Mac Pro and the entire computer is a few thousand dollars short of the price of a new Porsche 911 Carrera.) Oh, and yes, I routinely develop software or run simulations that actually require that much, or far more, computing power: try running lattice-Boltzmann/finite element or Stokesian particulate flows, for modeling thousands to hundreds of million red blood cells, on a Mac Pro.

Continuing the above remark, it's laughable that you take what I've written and automatically default to assuming that I'm "unemployed," let alone a baby boomer. Just so you know, I'm not even 30.

What a humorous, yet snide, response to my merely pointing out and verifying that you can have a workstation with the same quality as a Mac Pro, at least where the components are concerned, not necessarily functionality and aesthetics, for much, much less than what you could get through Apple; clearly, you have some serious issues that you need to address.

Oh, and to answer your question, yes I do have a job: I work as an applied maths researcher and pay for my salary, research endeavors, and travel arrangements to present papers at conferences like NIPS, ICCV, CVPR, and ECCV through the annual interest made on my investments and healthcare patent royalties from GE, Intel, Honeywell, etc. so I don't have to bother with writing grant proposals or department politics.