Not had any problem with ATI's drivers myself; they feel pretty much like nVidia's, only with a very slightly less awful control panel app. I've been all-nVidia since the GeForce 256, and switching to a HD4870 has been about the least painful hardware change ever; everything works, it's a fair bit faster, and new drivers keep coming out that supposedly make things even faster.

Crysis is the exception rather than the rule, though; I have a system you could build for about $600 and Crysis is pretty much the only game I can't manage at 2560*1600. No great loss.

Regardless, it runs fine at a more modest resolution, especially Warhead which is somewhat better optimized. Dead Space, Far Cry 2, PoP, Left 4 Dead, The Witcher, ArmA, BioShock, Stalker; all quite happy at 2560*1600 and typically with maximum settings (though I don't usually bother with AA).

Which is, of course, the entire point of the article; why spend $2000+ when $600 can get you something with 90% of the utility?

I became suspicious of Gigabyte when they did a board where half the power phases were on an "optional" daughterboard.

Of course the ad copy wibbled about how it improved reliability, but what I read was "We don't have the engineering talent to fit everything on the board". With my experience, the power board was anything but optional, and even with it the board didn't really enjoy having a beefy graphics card plugged into it. Funnily enough, when I replaced it with a practically identical Tyan board, my stability issues vanished.

Java has quite a few tuning options; limits on heap and garbage pool sizes, different garbage collectors and strategies for running them, different optimization levels. Maybe it's defaulting to client mode on Windows, thus putting more effort into reducing memory use by running the gc before growing the heap (and placing stricter limits on its size and the sizes of the gc generation pools), doing less aggressive optimizations and putting them off later.

Java also has bit of a history of enjoying cheap syscalls; 1.5 ran somewhat poorly on FreeBSD because it called gettimeofday() at some significant rate of knots, and system calls on Windows are significantly more expensive than that, while Linux prides itself on them being very cheap.

I suggest you improve your sci-fi diet. There are literally thousands of far better fleshed out, better thought out and more interesting and realistic portrayals of the ramifications of potential technological, social and political changes in the future, they're just mostly in the form of books, not crappy TV shows or movies, which are developed using a process that seems designed to filter out most of what's actually good about science fiction.

Not particularly; the technology doesn't make sense, the portrayed capabilities aren't taken anywhere near their logical conclusions, and frankly most of the universe is left completely untouched; let's face it, most of Star Trek takes place on at least semi-military spaceships, of course it looks like a communist utopia; they're mostly crew. The day to day lives of ordinary citizens is handwaved away with a few soundbites like:

But that's bollocks; it simply shifts your economy from being driven by materials to being driven by (utterly humungous amounts of) energy and knowledge. You want the latest and greatest hovercar? Well, those engines didn't develop themselves, the 50 petawatt hours of energy for a small 2 tonne vehicle didn't magic itself into existance, and the replicators sure don't maintain themselves, the software to run them doesn't write itself, even the sleek fashionable bodywork doesn't spring into existance out of thin air. Replicators can't even make everything, so chances are you'll need to pay for some good old fashioned non-magic manufacturing to go with it; if nothing else, some assembly might be required, since replicators seem to have some upper limit on practical size.

But no, Star Trek goes with "replicators solve everything and everyone lives happily ever after, so let's go and do another stupid holodeck episode because the reality we made was too boring to make another show about".

Right, making a cup of tea involves generating and moving around the energy of 475 Fat Man nuclear bombs (assuming 100% effeciency at all points) and there's no longer any problem of resources. That sure does make for interesting social commentary. Also, people no longer have any real ideologies, and certainly don't disagree with anyone over them; there's no terrorism or politics, except out in space, where the implications of these sort of energies being thrown about are never really considered, even at times of war.

Again, unlikely oversimplification. We have pretty extensive scientific knowledge *now* and still 90% of the planet is still rather religious, and much of the rest have some pretty strange ideas. Commenting on social and cultural progress should typically involve a little more than some just-so stories which completely ignore most of the issues involved.

Dwarf Fortress is a bit easier to get into with a good tileset like DFG.

Why would you want a CPU for video encoding when a decent GPU can do it ten times faster?.

So in what way does criminalizing them help alleviate this? If you make some bad decisions and end up dependent on a drug, wouldn't it be immensely more productive for you and society to provide care and support through effective healthcare than by throwing you in jail and giving you a criminal record that's going to make things that much more difficult when you get out?

Everything up to space stage is just tedious filler; a mechanism for making you design a creature and form some "attachment" to it. Space stage opens up a lot, and is really what the game is all about.

But yeah, even getting that far sucks; you play a boring if slightly prettier version of fl0w; then a really dire third person, er, chomper; then an "RTS" without any appreciable strategy or tactics; then a hilariously bad and incredibly vague attempt at Civilization. That's an hour or two of time wasted in some of the worst games you're likly to force yourself to play through, and you get to do it for every creature you want to play.

Space stage gives you a lot more stuff to do and look at, but it opens up tediously slowly. By the time you've faffed about enough to start opening up the sandbox aspects where you can blow up or terraform/modify planets, you realise it just isn't really fun and isn't likely to get much better; the game makes annoying repetitive demands on you to progress (save planet $foo from ecological collapse for the 8th time! save planey $bar from pirates again!) and hides most of itself until you've done it all dozens of times, and when it eventually reveals itself it's.. disappointing.

But, it looks pretty, and it's got a marketing budget larger than the GDP of a small country, so of course it still sells well. *sigh*.

WebKit nightly, best of 6 runs (several failed at 98%):

Failed 0 tests.
Test 65 passed, but took 35ms (less than 30fps)
Total elapsed time: 1.18s

Opera 10 alpha:

Failed 0 tests.
Test 26 passed, but took 46ms (less than 30fps)
Test 69 passed, but took 27 attempts (less than perfect).
Total elapsed time: 0.62s

Not doing too badly. Test 69 failed on one of the WebKit runs too, but I guess a random nightly is gonna be worse than a scheduled alpha release.

Nope, it's not a song from Earth:

I learned that the idea was not that Bob Dylan necessarily exists in the charactersâ(TM) universe, but that an artist on one of the colonies may have recorded a song with the exact same melody and lyrics. Perhaps this unknown performer and Dylan pulled inspiration from a common, ethereal source. Therefore, I was told to make no musical references to any âoeEarthlyâ versions, Hendrix, Dylan or any others. The arrangement needed to sound like a pop song that belonged in the Galactica universe, not our own.

I use a quad port PCI-X Intel Pro/1000 in this machine, and Samba with UFS2 or ZFS is mostly limited by the disk. The only tuning I've done is "socket options = TCP_NODELAY".

(I also haven't experienced any problems with Samba; I easily break 60MB/s. what NIC do you have?)

The kmem exhaustion issues are mostly if you fail to tune the ARC cache to not, er, exhaust it. CURRENT has largely resolved the issue by making kernel VM space much larger; previously it's been limited to about 1.5GB, even on 64bit.

If it does exhaust kmem, it's not at risk of nuking the filesystem, especially with the ZIL, it's just an irritating reboot.

Other than that, well, people are using FreeBSD/ZFS in production today; even the FreeBSD package building cluster uses it, making use of snapshots to provide clean build environments.

Yeah, the latest ZFS is in 8-CURRENT; it's far too new for RELENG_7, never mind RELENG_7_1.

If you don't want to bother with the commit mailing lists, you can track this stuff using FreshBSD. You could have an RSS feed which tracks commits to RELENG_7 mentioning ZFS in the message, if you wanted to.