I see you're not up to date with current german politics. We are.

Merkel doesn't give a flying fuck because she really doesn't give a fuck about anything. She was trained very well how to get into and stay in power, and that's the only thing she's doing. Every move of her makes sense if you analyze it from that perspective. This is no different - big trouble with the USA is not a career-improving path, but the people of Germany are too forgiving and will let her and her party get away with all this shit.

The limitation of the consumer nVidia cards is double precision floating point. He may not need that. There are plenty of problems that need only single precision math, the extra precision is wasted. In that case, you don't see much benefit going to the pro cards, certainly not enough to justify the price.

They created new rules very recently about reddit being a "safe space". This is something that is, of course, extremely vague. What the hell is a "safe space"?

So suddenly some long time subreddits are getting banned for violating that. They are all shitty splaces, but then other shitty places seem to get left alone. As such people are rightly saying "What the fuck?"

Basically the rule is an arbitrary one. They are saying "We can ban you if you say things we don't like." Now its their site, they can do that if they wish, of course, but that is why users are reacting so negatively. It isn't a clear rule that is being consistently applied, rather it is deliberately vague and being targeted in a scattershot fashion.

"Oh look at me, I'm so awesome, I don't need that high end technology! I'm just so great and productive that this old stuff is excellent!"

The reason I say that is because I've always seen it on Slashdot. Many people here seem to take pride in using old systems. Even back in the P2 days when a brand new system was still "slow" for a lot of things you'd have people humblebraging on how they were using a 486 and it was fine.

While I'll certainly agree that machines have WAY more life these days (a 5 year old machine is perfectly serviceable at work for most things) it has always been something I've observed on Slashdot. Rather than a bunch of people bragging on the high end hardware they have, as you tend to see on gaming forums, you have a bunch of people bragging on the low end hardware they have.

I've not tried GTA 5 yet but the GTA world is generally very limited to do what it does. A great example would be GTA 3 and Vice City. Open world games that ran on PS2 hardware. Amazing... However they did it by tracking very little. Only things in your FOV and relevant to what was happening (quest NPCs, police chasing you) were handled. Everything else was not there. Turn around and then around again, and traffic would be totally different because it was not tracked off screen. Drops/pickups disappear when you go slightly out of range. Most objects couldn't be interacted with past them being damaged, which would fix offscreen.. Stuff like that.

Fallout/Skyrim track quite a bit, some of it in a very permanent fashion. Granted not all of it is in memory or simulated at one time (there are a certain number of grids simulated at once) but it is still pretty complex. You can go in to an area, interact with things, pick them up drop them off move them around, travel far away, come back and they'll be in the same state you left them.

Not saying clever optimization can't fix some thing, but there's limits. Also there are limits to how much time it is worth spending. Say you can engineer a clever system that uses all kinds of hacks and tricks to reduce what is tracked and how it is tracked, and then you optimize the shit out of it to reduce the space it takes... great but how many man-hours did that take? Is it worth it? Time is money in games, and you don't want to spend it on things unless it is needed.

So if projected sales from the older consoles aren't enough to justify the development costs and/or offset the cuts that have to be made, you don't do it.

They were having real, real problems getting the kind of game they wanted in to the very limited memory of the last gen consoles. Cutting down graphics only goes so far, there are just limits to how large a world you can easily have, and how many things you can keep track of at once. They did a lot of creative things to manage that, but it was causing issues and they were reaching their limit.

Some games scale more easily but the big open world types that Bethesda likes do not do as well. Hence it makes sense to target only the current gen stuff.

If you want to university back in the 80s and you STILL haven't repaid your loans, well you are the one who is failing. Not only was university cheaper, and loan terms better, then but you've had like THREE DECADES to pay it back. Student loans are a bitch, and take a long time to pay back for sure. However unless you really fucked up, you can manage it in 30 years.

A good way to tell is with nickle metal hydride rechargables. They have a 1.2v cell voltage. So does a device work with them? Then it'll work on less than 1.3v. Of the things in my house that take batteries, all but one have worked with them. That device, a swifer wetjet, specifically says no rechargables so I haven't tried.

NiMH batters work well in devices including, but not limited to, remotes, wireless microphones, EOTech sights, laser pointers, cordless phones, headphone amplifiers, and wireless mice.

Ironically, I large stay away from complex CSS. But "mobile-ready" largely is complex CSS and Javascript and three other things, for breakpoints and responsiveness.

I don't care if my site ranks last when you Google on your smartphone. If I didn't design it to be mobile-friendly, your mobile device is welcome to stay away.

But this sounds much like it would be punished in general, even when the visitory is searching using his desktop computer. And that's just wrong.

You cut down the interesting part. That it's not just about rounding. It's a about domain knowledge that tells you what to round in which context and how (i.e. how many significant digits does a good answer have?).

That's not a very easy task, and it's not solved by simply rounding everything somehow.

I understand that.

But I'm one guy running a website, not a company with budget for a web-designer. My content is now being punished not for its content, but for its presentation.

And what if my website isn't intended for a mobile audience at all? I'll readily admit I'm stuck 10 years in the past with my web design, but a few of my sites are intentionally not built for mobile because the content they have is not intended for mobile and if you told me you're using your phone to access the site, I'd get a puzzled look and say "but why?".

Can I set a "X-intentionally-not-designed-for-mobile: true" header?

I watched this some days ago (/. isn't the place to read things first anymore) and came away half impressed and half underwhelmed.

The speech recognition part is nice, and that's understating it a lot given the complexity of the topic. That for a demo they'd use examples they made sure work nicely is a goven. That it can understand fairly complex, disorganized questions is really cute. No, seriously, on this I am impressed.

But it is clearly still very far from human. It lands smack middle in the uncanny valley. It becomes incredibly clear when it talks about population numbers and lists them down to the last digit. Not only is that typical computer-ish, it's also vastly less useful than a human who would tell you "about 80 million".

When I ask my personal assistant device how long it'll take to get to city X, I'm not interested in an answer that says "3 hours, 57 minutes, 48 seconds". I want to hear "4 hours", because we humans understand it's an estimate anyways and a few minutes more or less doesn't matter anyways.

Then again, when I'm building a bomb and ask my phone for the recipe, I'd like to have exact numbers. Again, a human would understand that in this situation, "about 200 grams" is not an ok answer.

This intelligence is still missing, and it's crucial.

They are different for sure, but that doesn't make them bad. I enjoyed Fallout 3 and I loved New Vegas. Are they the same kind of game as 1 and 2? No, not at all, but they are enjoyable all the same. Not everything needs to be the same all the time, you can have different things in the same universe and it can be fun.

By the same "things can never change" logic, Fallout 1 and 2 were no good because they were different from Wasteland, which was their predecessor (the universe was made because Interplay couldn't get the rights to Wasteland from EA).

Evaluate a game on its own merits. Don't demand that it be just like its predecessors.

I mean you need things like computers, cellphones, beverages, etc in a show. I'm not bothered if those have logos, or if they don't. In fact, it can look more natural and realistic if they do. A Good example is Dell in V for Vendetta. Nothing in your face, the logos on the cop's monitors just aren't covered up. They are just part of the set. When it is done like that, I'm quite happy.

An example of it being done poorly that bothered me was in I Robot, when Will Smith puts on some brand new Converse shoes released in sync with the movie and talks about them. It was very clearly something shoehorned in there, not a fluid part of the script.