Sorry, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the real world. They're giving twenty people - ten in experiment group and ten in the control group 30 minutes to do a bit of analysis. And they measure minutes to apply a few changes, without any qualitative measure on how the code is growing. There's very little proof that the refactoring they did made any sense, the sample size is so low you'd never get reliable results and pretty much what you can conclude is that refactoring doesn't make hackjobs easier. Never thought so, that just involves finding the place something's happening and hack it. If it's a good idea, well... it works there and then.

Well somebody has to be the first at discovering something before somebody else can confirm it. And yes, in human years it might take a while to build another billion dollar project to do that. Science works on incomplete information, otherwise there wouldn't be anything to do science on. Has anybody independently verified the Higgs boson yet? All the exoplanets discovered recently? Probably not. That's always how it will be at the leading edge of science.

Somehow I find that implausible, I expect China to take the whole country or not at all. South Korea would be to worried about a conventional or nuclear counter-attack on Seoul to do much of anything while China could probably swoop in and install a new authoritarian regime that by NK standards would seem like heaven, all they need to do is bring them into the 21th century. After that I'll think it'll be a bit like Life of Brian:

Not if you're talking game performance rather than compiler performance I think. From what I understand games generally compile their shaders to native instructions long before they're used, it's not just-in-time compilation like when you download javascript on a page and do it on the fly as you execute, more like delayed traditional compilation until you can optimize for this particular hardware like Gentoo ebuilds.

However, the IR instructions is probably much simpler than the source language, for example Java has tons of classes but only ~200 opcodes. It would make graphics drivers not quite, but a lot more like CPUs running "assembler-ish" code instead of being huge graphics libraries. Basically you're moving most of what's OpenGL/DirectX today over into the application. Stallman might not approve but it might mean more AAA games being able to run on a thin OpenGL Vulkan shim than Mesa.

They've come full circle:
1. AMD announces Mantle, a low level graphics API which may give consoles an edge over the PC.
2. Microsoft panics and announces DirectX 12, aiming for pretty much the same thing.
3. Khronos Group panics and announces OpenGL Vulcan, aiming for pretty much the same thing.
4. AMD announces there'll be no public SDK of Mantle, use OpenGL/DirectX.

So in the end we'll probably have feature parity again. How important it is remains to be seen, outside of drawcall benchmarks it's unclear how much real world difference it makes, what is certain is that it exposes a lot more of the complexity to the developer. That of course gives you more room to optimize, but it remains to be seen how many will be able to take advantage of it.

On the bright side, it might actually mean there's less code that needs to be written and that open source might catch up a bit, it says it'll run on top of all platforms that support OpenGL ES 3.1 which might become a much bigger goal than OpenGL 4.x.

...and wouldn't understand even if they did. The only people who enable file extensions are those who understand file extensions, that's a pretty big bias right there. Sure, you can show the rest a file extension but it'll fly right past them just like all the dialogs they don't read but click "OK" on. Like when I accidentally made a rar instead of a zip file and my friend couldn't figure out how to open it. Nice guy, but he doesn't use Google. He wouldn't install 7z or WinRAR unless you pointed him to it and said download this. And I'm pretty sure he'd run absolutely anything I pointed him to.

EULA

In an actual zombie apocalypse I think my list of threats would be:

1. Opportunistic bastards (thugs, gangs)
2. Desperate bastards (hungry, cold, afraid)
3. Devious bastards (poisoned, stabbed in sleep)
4. Survival skills (and fighting for the good spots)
5. Zombies

Not really, the X3s are all made with third party GPU and modem functionality at TSMC. It's a bought design where they add a CPU and a brand to pretend they're competing in a market they're really not. The X5/X7s are Intel's homegrown solution with their own graphics and LTE modem and aimed only at the premium segment. You will not get Intel tech for cheap.

Why would that help them? Not being cruel but being open source and ARM a recompile away was supposed to be their big boon and with so much running on Android that's likely the primary source of ports. If they can't make it as a first party OS then they'll never go anywhere in the mobile world that's full of custom, poorly supported, one generation hardware, I don't see any compelling reason why you'd buy a Linux/x86 tablet if Linux/ARM tablets don't sell. And the aftermarket install market is probably just as tiny on the x86 side as on the rootable ARM side.

Yes, XFCE is a nice light-weight window manager. Is there a light-weight distro that uses it? Ubuntu wants 5-10GB of disk, even for Xubuntu and Lubuntu. TinyCore can do a graphical environment with maybe 100MB, but is a bit too minimalist for me - I want something that can keep security update working with no more work than apt-get/yum/etc. I need a window manager, browser, shell, and maybe a C compiler or so, and I want something under 0.5 GB so I can keep a few spares on a desktop and spin up lots of cloud instances as well.

You don't want to end up like Weev, even though they did eventually let him out of jail. And you're apparently not somebody who's got the kind of personality he has, which, while it may make you less likely to end up in jail, isn't necessarily going to get you off the hook either.

At that point you're better off imagining the sub had a critical weapons malfunction and blew itself up so the longship wins on walkover. Or that the warrior sneaked into the riflemen's camp and poisoned their water supply.

Well first off you're not looking back far enough, during the first industrial revolution there was massive unemployment as machines replace skilled artisans and craftsmen with cheap, expendable factory workers that could receive minimal training in their one task on the line. The assembly line actually comes very late in a mostly industrialized society already and an old fashioned manual assembly line still employs a considerable number of people. And Ford famously doubled wages to get retention up, because the assembly line work was actually getting complex and needed trained workers.

This time we're not just dividing and rearranging the way workers produce their product, we're cutting the humans entirely out of the equation except for meta-roles like designers, developers and repairmen. For example take the banking industry, it used to be huge with branch offices all over the place. ATMs were the first blow, now online banking has reduced it down to next to nothing. I just checked the figures on one bank I know, 250 FTEs (full-time equivalents) supporting 380,000 customers.

Think about it, in how many service industries is the human staff actually a service? When I go to the grocery store, what I want are the groceries. I don't care if robots automate the whole shop if they keep delivering the same service and quality. When it comes to water/sewage/electricity/internet etc. I'd rather not deal with them at all, I pay a bill and it works. If a lot of those jobs disappear at the same time and I don't mind seeing them go, but I'm paying nearly the same for the robot/self-service service there won't be much left of my paycheck to pay whatever new jobs these people have found.

And the system settings, that one is much tighter integrated to the DE than the file manager. And it needs to manipulate the pointer. And context menus, arrange menu bars etc. so it need some kind of UI toolkit. I don't quite see what it has to gain by reinventing the wheel, it's not like pulling in Qt/Gtk drains that many resources by themselves.