P.S. Google Translate in a pastebin (since the page has enormous amount of comments, it won't directly translate): http://pastebin.com/b56n2TnV

There is a post (in Russian) that explains Yandex's position better.

It's quite long-winded, but boils down to the fact that several phone manufacturers were told that they will be globally denied access to Google services if they ship a Russian regional version with Yandex's competing services pre-installed.

It's not just a matter of "in Russia, choose between having Google Play / Google services and Yandex", but "try to pre-install competitors in one market and we won't give you Google Play access anywhere".

Yes, there was much outcry when Chrome killed non-signed extensions installs, but at least it allows to load a development ("unpacked") version of any extension in the stable version. This is essential for testing, after all, to ensure it works and you can debug it on the platform most users actually run.

If FF does not allow it, well, nuts.

Quoting the same article

So no magical "I'll maintain that WiFi connection even when asleep"

Fast forward a few days, and someone tracked that bug down to an incorrect setting in Chrome code: https://codereview.chromium.or...
So yes, it was very straightforward, and wasn't drivers' fault.

If you edit the video (even doing nothing) with YT tools, it will reprocess it from the source that's still kept by Google, according to https://twitter.com/Christophe...

There are some problems with this.

1. This is not optional for videos that support it. If it was processed as 60fps video, then 1080p and 720p streams will only be served as 60fps.
2. Chrome has an outstanding crippling bug for months now in H/W decoding: https://code.google.com/p/chro... with the only viable workaround "disable HW decoding"

Those two combined together mean that 1080p60 is unwatchable on decent but not sparkling-new laptops under Windows, dropping frames / freezing constantly.

The (late) Pictures For Sad Children had a very relevant comic.

On the Gear VR? They've got accelerometer data. It's probably not as precise as external tracking, but still.

What I prefer in the Kickstarter model is that the money is not actually taken until the project funding deadline.

It allows to easily adjust the funding if you want to switch pledge levels (which is an absolute headache on IndieGoGo), and rectify impulsive decisions to fund something.

It also gives a sort of "time to comment". If a potentially fraudulent campaign gains traction, there are usually people sweeping in to confront project creators about it. Extreme case of that was even brought up here on Slashdot, with the iFind tags campaign, that resulted in the project being busted by Kickstarter - all before funds were collected.

With IndieGoGo? Funds are taken immediately. Good luck with refunds.

You should treat both sides as untrustworthy. Fabricated evidence, or just total lack thereof, is used by both sides.

It's an amazing trait of modern wars. We often say that cyberwarfare is the threat of the future, but right now information wars, shaping public opinion that's malleable and not always critical enough of the fact presented, is maybe a bigger thing than actual firefights on the ground. Modern technology makes information easy to manipulate, easy to inject into public view, and far, far easier to spread.

Unless a war goes on in your homeland right next to you, you can't really tell if you're being told the truth.

> For example, the VP9 codec that’s used in High Definition YouTube videos shows a 15% improvement in decoding performance.

Except that with this version, hardware-accelerated decoding broke scaling, so it now seems to scale as nearest-neighbor. Thankfully, on Windows it's possible to override hardware decoding with chrome://flags, which is a workaround for now.

ark.intel.com qualifies as "easily accessible", no?

In terms of thermonuclear fuel supply in the Sun, it's a good approximation. We're talking about space here.

A couple of points.

First, those restrictions have recently been kicked up a notch in ridiculousness. Some publishers now disallow gift copies in those "cheaper" regions - presumably, to stop such cross-region trading, but you can't even gift the game to someone within the region.

Second, it's important to remember that region restrictions are entirely up to the publisher. As far as I can tell, Steam more or less mandates cheaper prices for Russian region, but adding restrictions is entirely publisher's decision. For instance, no digital copy of a Valve game was ever subject to those restrictions (retail is another matter though). Most indies don't opt for regional versions.