I would actually be interested to know what the logic is here: the hacker clearly doesn't like AM, or they wouldn't be spoiling their rumored-IPO quite this enthusiastically, they also don't like the users they are threatening to expose; but they also appear to be really bent out of shape about AM's allegedly-dishonest-and-exploitative 'pay to purge the embarrassing traces' feature.

Anger about that feature would seem to be something more likely in some portion of the users, or among people who identify with the interests of the users; but this interested party displays only contempt for them; rather than viewing AM's attempt to squeeze them as an amusing and justified punishment.

We obviously have no particular reason to trust their statement; but we do have to expect that they have a reason worth the legal exposure for doing this(especially since the dataset they are talking about would probably be worth a decent sum for sale to others looking for really juicy spearphishing targets ) rather than not attempting the hack at all or hacking but then staying quiet about it. My guess would be that it is more about attacking the site operator than about the users specifically; it is pretty common for at least a person or two to end up suitably embittered during the course of business.

Unforeseen consequences.

Probably not directly. To the degree that Microsoft has any specific plan to limit game adoption on non-Windows platforms it is called 'DirectX'. It is the first-class set of APIs on Windows and any games developed for it, or drivers developed to support it, are obviously resources dedicated to gaming being better on Windows and either unavailable or produced at additional cost for OpenGL elsewhere.

Once you get into how AMD's OpenGL driver does(or doesn't) apply application specific optimizations for different OpenGL games, though, MS doesn't have nearly as much to gain from any specific meddling. The general success of DirectX and Windows gaming is presumably the reason why AMD cares relatively little(along with the fact that people looking to use proprietary drivers on Linux usually go Nvidia, while AMD is regarded as very much the second choice unless you are looking for the vendor more cooperative with FOSS driver development).

Give him some credit: you don't get -1 unless your post was at least locally offensive, if not globally.

I doubt that there is an actual price list. At least on the Windows side, releasing driver optimizations(sometimes including overt cheating if the popular benchmarking programs of the day are detected, though that seems to be rarer in recent years) to support popular programs and games is something that both Nvidia and ATI do reasonably routinely in order to improve their products' perceived competitiveness. You don't get a profile unless you have moved enough units to make it worth the effort, or there is a particularly embarrassing performance discrepancy; but the GPU vendors are sufficiently concerned about appearances that just stalling you is a poor choice. If anything, it appears to be that the GPU guys are the ones pushing for greater prominence in game, hence the obnoxious little videos that roll when you start some games and the Nvidia's enthusiasm for PhysX and related middleware being used.

On Linux, it looks like AMD doesn't care very much(I assume that the Linux gaming numbers don't justify much engineering labor for specific titles; but if you have a 'Half-Life 2' optimization it wouldn't be terribly laborious to have the intern look up other Source-based games and add those to the list), but the same reasons for AMD's apathy would also discourage any one vendor from paying very much to get on 'the list'.

That said, I have no reason to doubt that a vendor would outright refuse you if you demanded to pay your way onto the list(especially if you provided both cash and access to any information they needed about your application or from your developers); but unless it is actively all kinds of horribly broken without special optimizations, in which case you have a problem, simply selling enough copies makes supporting your application part of the job of selling GPUs. Since Intel is just waiting to scoop up everyone who doesn't care very much about graphics cards, neither vendor can really afford to withold optimizations and take a hammering in reputation just to squeeze a little protection money out of a publisher.

Another handy advantage to moving away from 10base5 and 10base2! Much trickier to open and tap a bunch of twisted pairs; and the system will not be happy with having two devices on the same cable unless your spybot is quite unobtrusive in any sniffing and spoofing it does. Vampire tapping coax would be much easier to automate with reasonable simplicity and reliability and the system is intended to work with multiple devices on the same wire.

Would you care to go into more detail about what brilliant innovations we are missing out on? The market in remote access Trojans and spyware remains open, the Boing subsidiary with the drone(who were the ones proposing a drone-mounted malicious wifi device) remains open, suppliers of ever smaller computers and wifi systems remain open. 'Hacking Team' may have been reasonably competent crackers, if not so hot on defense; but their(hopeful) demise would be a "and nothing of value was lost and we were all slightly more secure for it" situation if I've ever seen one.

That's actually a bit surprising. Microsoft sure went to a lot of trouble with their precious 'protected media path', so if their own application is merrily recording a DRMed stream(as I believe Netflix is on all supported platforms); either they've screwed up or Netflix couldn't be bothered to use the feature. I imagine that re-compressed copies of streams aren't terribly high priority; but I would have imagined that they'd be contractually obligated to at least pretend to care.

Unfortunately, you still need to use the correct incantations(and sometimes some annoyingly expensive and specific material components) if you want the magic to work properly.

I assume that the problem is with noticing the fire. A small Li-ion battery can self-ignite and burn fairly enthusiastically; but isn't too dangerous if it is prevented from setting anything else on fire. The smoke is noxious and any one directly exposed the the flame will be burned; but it just isn't a very big fire. If the battery is hiding down in the cargo hold in somebody's suitcase, it has a better chance of recruiting all the nearby luggage and getting a proper fire started; at which point suppression becomes more difficult and release of enough energy to actually damage the aircraft becomes likely.

I'd be interested to know what the current standard for fire detection in the cargo area is; and how difficult and costly it would be to achieve better early warning.

Your options really depend on what sort of 'high performance' you have in mind. When it comes to performance per core, Xeons typically crush Opterons; but the pricing reflects that, especially if you need the 4-8 socket support and RAS features. If what you need is large amounts of RAM with the lowest possible spending on the system around it, Opterons have tepid performance per core; but are likely to be the cheapest option that still supports ECC, more than one socket, buffered DIMMs, and any other niceties you wouldn't get from just desktop. If your application is one that can be made to fit, GPUs are enormously powerful for the range of things that they are capable of doing well.

They also depend on how big you need your system to be and how tightly coupled it has to be. If your intended application handles its own network-level parallelization and doesn't depend on very low latency, blessed are you. Price per core skyrockets if you go above 2 sockets, and GbE is effectively free(at least in the sense that you pretty much can't buy a system or motherboard that doesn't come with at least 2 NICs by default, often more) and relatively cheap to switch. If you need lower latency, this will hurt more and you are looking at myrinet or infiniband. If your application needs a cluster that presents a single system image; especially one that also has genuinely low latency, you probably need to fortify your checkbook and consult an expert. You can get systems with more than 8 sockets and the appropriate custom interconnect; but you won't like paying for one.

Unless you value your time at surprisingly low rates; you probably won't want to build your own systems from parts; but depending on how tightly coupled you need, this may be something that you need to purchase as a system or something you construct from multiple computers you purchase.

Can you use either hardware you have or AWS(or one of their similar competitors) to better characterize what your application actually needs?

But it (used to be) AMD who has zee German fabs!

Given that LEDs already lean pretty enthusiastically on those elements, without too much comment; and some of the stuff they bake into the silicon is pretty dreadful I imagine that they'll diplomatically ignore the issue and hope really hard that the Indium content is high enough to make the semiconductors that aren't super small and embedded in epoxy economically recyclable.

Getting changes made when there are at least partial alternatives and the material is distributed in substantial quantities throughout the entire product is much less of an uphill fight than getting changes made to the relatively small chunks of the product where much of the value and the profit are; and the producers say they've exhausted the options. They would probably be loathe to push it unless their position were markedly stronger than it appears.

I'm sure that that's true on total sale, less sure that it's true on profit(you obviously drop out of the 'buy license from ARM, tell TMSC to make it, attempt to sell it' business if you can't at least keep the lights on; but I suspect that Allwinner and Mediatek aren't exactly commanding Xeon margins); but either way Intel has less pressure on the high end. If you do need a relatively powerful processor you options are pretty much 'Intel', a substantial chunk of dead space, 'maybe AMD', then another chunk of dead space, and then one of the 64-bit ARM people.

That isn't really so scary. On the low end, though, they have plenty of alternatives; some quite possibly overtly superior and definitely plenty that are cheaper. That is more scary.

It certainly doesn't make the task compact or cheap(and appears to make it much harder to directly duplicate with either transistors or the inspired-by-but-not-models-of version of 'neurons' that 'neural network' usually implies in the context of computers); but the one nice thing about the very low 'clock rate' of the brain is that it suggests that however it does what it does; it can tolerate suffering fairly high latency per unit of distance between elements.

If you can tolerate latency, you at least have the option of buying more racks to compensate for what you can't achieve with available miniaturization and integration. If you can't, you run into relatively painful constraints on size. At the speed of light your hypothetical 3GHz processor is going to be waiting ~10clocks/meter for anything it needs from elsewhere in the system; and any practically available arrangement is going to be slower than that. If the brain were dependent on low latency, inability to replicate its density would(at best) mean being limited to replicating it slower than real time, possibly much slower. If it is relatively tolerant, replicating it at lower density might be horrifically expensive; but at least potentially doable with the ability to fabricate only rather small chunks of very high density.