It's not questionable at all. When devs actually use in-game footage, they'll rub it in your face in every way possible. In-engine footage is marketing speak for "We wish we could do something like that, but right now it's running at 2 fps on SLI Titan Xs and all the animations are static".

To be fair, they did give one good justification for moving things to the GApps package: updates. They initially put everything in the OS and expected that manufacturers would, in good faith, keep their devices updated. As it turns out, manufacturers are complete shit at doing anything beyond pushing a device on market and dropping it like a hot turd six months later, and so thanks to them Android has been called "fragmented" and every new OS version takes years to see significant adoption. Their solution was to push as much stuff as possible into their GApps package, which is the only thing they control absolutely and which manufacturers cannot meddle with or delay. It's not the full OS, but a lot of key functionality gets ported over, allowing for instance to develop for 5.0 and still be able to backport to 4.x or even 2.x thanks to GApps providing a compatibility layer.

Because the plugin outputs a JPEG, thus completely eliminating the data that makes RAW attractive in the first place. You don't use RAW because it's cool or practical (it's not), you use it because it gives you more bits per pixel without any form of irreversible compression or as little as possible, depending on the camera. You use it because it lets you set the white balance in post. You use it because you have far more latitude in adjusting exposure, bringing up or down various parts of an image, etc. JPEG conversion completely eliminates all of that and shows that the developers don't really understand why you want RAW in the first place.

I just hope any connected device that can heat up requires manual intervention to turn on... I don't want to think about what'd happen if you could turn up the oven remotely.

Or perhaps comparing a ~$350 phone with a ~$650 one and a dumb-but-not-quite Nokia phone isn't exactly fair.

And remember, the EFF is a non-profit. Donate if you can, show your appreciation. They're fighting the good fight.

Would you perchance be American? I don't think there's any other developed country where (4) would be that strange and where (5) would even be brought up, let alone brought up in a negative light. That peculiarity of the US has always fascinated me.

UT2004 actually had quite a few vehicles you could use, and the comparison isn't really correct anyway because "having vehicles" doesn't make the game necessarily better. Still, games like CS:GO and TF2 show just as much focus on skill and gameplay as older titles.

The gaming world hasn't left you old farts out, you just need to go beyond watching the latest Call of Duty ad, huffing and puffing a bit about it and declaring gaming dead.

If you care as much as you imply, look for new games. No, you won't find them in TV ads. You didn't find them on TV way back when anyway. There are dozens, even hundreds of new games that come out that have amazing gameplay, depth and breadth and everything in between. Yes, some of them even look pretty while doing it, *gasp* you don't have to look ugly to be engaging!

You want strategic depth? Beyond the obvious choices like Starcraft 2 (which has more strategic layers than most RTS of yore), you can find stuff like Cities: Skylines (amazing, in-depth city builder, released less than a month ago), Endless Legend (amazing and beautiful 4X), Homeworld Remastered (yes it's an old game but it plays like a modern one with the remaster), Crusader Kings 2 (you want complex interactions? this goes way beyond rock/paper/scissors), Europa Universalis IV (it's Crusader Kings but with a scope 10x larger), Kerbal Space Program (make rockets, send things to space, all physically-driven), Invisible, Inc. (early access turn-based spy game, extremely well crafted and difficult), Planetary Annihilation (spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, but set on multiple planets in the same match, with all that that entails), Civilization V (the pinnacle of the series with both expansions), Wargame: Red Dragon (latest in a series of highly accurate historical RTS games, focus on realism and scale, very detailed), Frozen Cortex/Synapse (turn-based duel games where you give orders to a squad and watch your orders and the enemy's unfold simultaneously, very high skill ceiling)... need I go on? I've barely checked 10% of my own library here.

Then there's the stuff outside of the more strategic/planning. Let's only name a few examples: Transistor (amazingly beautiful and atmospheric isometric brawler with unique pause planning combat set in a cyberpunk setting), Bayonnetta (probably the best spectacle fighter ever made, easy to learn, hard to master, incredible depth), The Stanley Parable (very funny, very enjoyable interactive fiction with a lot of branching paths), Antichamber (really really novel puzzler, lots of interesting brain teasers), Portal 1 and 2 (if you don't know about them, where the hell were you?), Gunpoint (excellent noir-style 2D hacking game) and more besides.

So I'm sorry if I'm not partaking in the Slashdot tradition of bashing on modern gaming as though it lacked substance and depth, but unlike most people here I seem to have actually followed gaming's development instead of merely going "get off my lawn."

That's only ever been "true" for the first iPhone to use that display, and even then only at a certain distance from the screen. It's been a generic and meaningless marketing term ever since.

Or perhaps it's rather a reading comprehension failure on your part. Visual Studio 2013 has a Community edition, but this is talking about 2015, which isn't out yet.

Actually, if you want the performance you mention (straight number of disks times read/write speed of disk), you need to use RAID0, which makes reliability absolutely awful, especially on an array of 4 or 5 drives. RAID1 will give you faster read speeds, but poor writes and no disk space. More advanced striping generally is slow-ish and loses out space as well.

I really don't see many cases where a RAID array is better than a drive like this, especially considering Intel's reputation and reliability ($100 256GB SSDs aren't going to be the best fault tolerant ones...).

I have to ask... why? Looking at the few samples, it looks like some kind of hybrid between Microsoft's Effect framework (which used "techniques" to sandwich multiple shaders at different levels together) and Nvidia's Cg language (which output HLSL and GLSL from a common, sorta kinda average of the two languages). Considering how close GLSL and HLSL are already, I just don't see the point of writing anything more than a thin wrapper and a few headers that work as a shim/compatibility layer.

Or alternatively making up strawmen from all the stuff you dislike does not turn them into real human beings. They're still straw.

I'm guessing the GP also farts a lot then.