Isn't this the movie that's been accused of plagiarizing a US Soldier's life story? Oh, Hollywood, why are you so ironic??

Of course, Nvidia says that GPUs are the answer. But then again, as a scientific software developer, I completely agree with him. In fact, I'm in the middle of a grant proposal right now to purchase a series of GPUs to complement our CPU based cluster.

dd only bypasses the filesystem. It doesn't override the HDD firmware, which has to avoid bad sectors and write ECC information to the platter as well.

I would love to hear why the submitter thinks he needs to write directly to the platter.

I don't know why it irks you. ATT is doing the same thing with their U-verse; it's FTTC. But by doing so, it enables the last few dozen yards of copper to carry much more bandwidth than if you tried to do it over a 3 mile run (like you do with DSL). Plus FTTP means digging/stringing cables to every single home.

So you get the speed of FTTP with the cost of the existing copper wires. It sounds like a win/win to me.

"Internet connections these days are pretty damn reliable. Mine croaks maybe once or twice a year, and usually only for a few hours at worst."

Where do you get your Internet connection? I've never had one that is that stable. Any ISP that uses dynamic IPs (DSL typically) will reset the connection every so often. My ATT DSL goes down for a few minutes every 2-3 days in order to get a new IP.

Cable, which usually has a static IP in my experience (although I was briefly with a cable company that did use dynamic IPs), still goes down from time to time. My Comcast cable would go down at least once a month.

This doesn't even count routing failures on the Internet, DDOS's against Ubisoft, or Ubisoft's own servers failing.

And it doesn't include user hardware failure. I had a Netgear router that would overheat about once a week and lockup. I also had an RT-chip-based USB wifi card that had a buggy firmware that caused it to lockup after so many bytes of data transfer (a newer firmware eventually fixed the problem).

When you consider the entire stack of devices that must be working in order to play your game, it becomes ridiculous to require a constant Internet connection.

I don't play a lot of games, but I know for a fact that GTAIV was multi-threaded. And as to why all games aren't multi-threaded, it's because it's hard to do and it's even harder to do right. Video processing and ray-tracing are two areas where multi-threading is a natural choice, but in a game where you've got multiple input and output streams, interacting with several different pieces of hardware, and no tolerance for lags and delays, it is much more difficult.

Your comment + your signature gave me a laugh.

It's perfect! It's a fact that we're going 88mph. No wait, it's just an interpretation!

Clean, safe, American-made, no foreign oil, low level of pollutants, and a reasonable amount of entropy (heat) released. Sounds like a winner to me.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/07/09/1189634.aspx

This is an older article that also talks about the banding.

I'm lost. Doesn't Dell take a standard Intel/AMD CPU and pair it with a standard Intel/VIA/SIS/Nvidia chipset? What is there to go wrong? I can understand if the thing is improperly cooled, but beyond that, aren't they just selling us the same crap that HP/Lenovo/your pick are, but inside a Dell laptop case?

Reading glasses - they are cheap ($5) and available (Walgreens). Why everyone feels the need to solve easy problems with complex solutions, I will never know.

I'll second that. My gf and both parents are now full-time Linux users and the amount of support that I've had to do has dropped down to near zero. My gf doesn't even know that she's using Linux, just that it isn't Windows.

This still doesn't resolve a major problem in the chip industry and that is that these two companies have a duopoly on x86 and x86-64 chip designs due to patents. I'm not a patent lawyer, but I really don't see how Intel can possibly patent an instruction set (the implementation thereof, sure, but the instructions themselves?). Until these companies are forced to license to third-parties, we'll still see a real lack of competition.

Write your governor, state representatives, federal representatives, and your DMV to let them know how you feel.

Especially if you are a resident of NC. I for one would be pretty pissed off if I was forced to participate in a (virtual) line-up.