So are the console makers creating the games, or are there independent companies who make the games? Sure, Sony may not want to port to a Microsoft platform, but certainly a third party game maker would be interested in doing this.

There were games on terminal before there was even the first console or gaming computer or arcade games. So keyboards came first.

I never got used to a joystick, they were always awful. And the thing on the consoles are too much like that stupid nipple mouse thing on some laptops that are impossible to use (but which somehow some people like).

I have no idea what the alternative, they're not the sort of game that sounds interesting. Most console games fit into that category.

Of course, the idea of playing the game in a TV from my couch does sound interesting, but then you're stuck with a godawful controller that's utterly useless for gaming compared to keyboard and mouse. If you manage it then the game has a bug but you can't fix it without subscribing and selling your soul to Microsoft or Sony, can't use mods, etc. So the console ultimately is to keep the kids occupied and I don't have kids.

I think that console exclusive games are a travesty, a stupid concept that the customers *should* have boycotted to preserve a better gaming environment. This is not a matter of game companies deciding not to port a game because it's hard or the market is small, but because they signed a deal with the console maker.

I can't be bothered to pay more for a console when I already have a PC.

"We are a hedge, please move along."

Newton looked at the spectrum and saw that it contained six distinct colours to the human eye: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. But his alchemist beliefs considered 7 to be a magic number and so wanted the spectrum to have seven colours. He decided that purple should be split into indigo and violet to reflect this, but didn't split any of the others (even where the difference is at least as pronounced) because it contradicted his mystical thinking.

If even Newton 'One of the smartest men to ever live' couldn't manage to keep his science separate from his mysticism, what hope do you think other religious people have?

No, sorry. A compiler is, in theoretical terms, a partial application of an interpreter to a program. In practical terms, a compiler transforms the input into some other form, which is then executed, whereas an interpreter executes the input directly. JIT compilation is still compilation. A just-in-time compiler is the term given to compilers that produce their output just before it is executed, as opposed to ahead-of-time (AoT) compilers, which produce it all up front, even if some paths are never executed.

There's some complication, because most environments that do JIT compilation also include interpreters that gather profiling information to incorporate into the JIT compiled code and to improve startup times. JavaScript implementations, in particular, often spend a reasonable amount of time in the interpreter because most web pages contain a load of JavaScript that's only run one or two times and the time taken to compile it is more than the time saved to execute it. Some have multiple compilers - JavaScriptCore from the WebKit project has an interpreter and three different JIT compilers that have different points in the space between compilation time and execution time - they'll recompile hot paths multiple times as they're executed more, with more optimisation each time. The key difference between the interpreter and compilers here is that the compilers are each invoked once on a segment of code and it's then executed without involving the compiler. The interpreter is involved every time the bytecode is run. It reads a bytecode and then jumps to the segment of interpreter code that executes it and then returns. The compiler takes a sequence of bytecodes, generates a fragment of native code to execute them, and then this fragment is combined with other fragments to produce a running program.

The shader compilers in drivers, however, are not JIT compilers. They are AoT compilers that are invoked at load time - often at install time. They don't compile the code just before it's run, they typically compile it once and cache the result for multiple invocations of the program. Some drivers (Windows and Android come to mind) have a mechanism that allows you to do the compilation at install time. Unlike most JIT environments, graphics drivers don't tend to use run-time profiling for optimisation, the bytecode exists solely for the purpose of providing an ISA-neutral distribution format.

Ugh, trust MS to fuck up a reasonable UI choice. On OS X, by default, it only happens for programs and requires you to close the dialog and then bring up the context menu for the program while holding a modifier key. You don't know how to do it unless you've actually read all of the way to the end of the dialog, so it generally protects people.

There are some interesting corner cases though, such as shell scripts. The file manager doesn't know if the thing that you tell it to open a shell script with is a text editor or a script interpreter, so may warn spuriously.

SJW seems to be code words for people who don't like trolls. The definition is just so vague. Anyone trying to upset the sexist status quo, or even hinting that someone somewhere might be sexist, is an SJW. It's like a knee jerk reaction to political correctness, except that this has nothing to do with political correctness except in the mind of trolls.

Donating to a political party does not necessarily make one a rabid supporter of far left or the far right. This is not a sign that that the journalists are liberal.

Enlightened self interest, journalists are likely to have come from or be in a unionized background. Being pro-union says nothing whatsoever about tendencies on social issues, pro/anti war, size of government, etc.

Being in the center and a decline to state voter, it's a tempest in the teapot. Both sides do it, both sides are corrupt, and the current shouting and fist shaking is just another case of political theater used to hide the hypocrisy.

I disagree. Fox News is absolutely a right wing mouthpiece, and it is by design and it is not denied by the owners or management. Fox explicitly says that they don't make any attempt to be balanced. However most news organizations are not like that at all, they are not left or right wing and make at least a token effort to maintain fairness, even if they have an ownership that has a leaning very often the management will insist that they maintain control. Even the most left leaning mainstream news organization is much closer to the center and less vitriolic than Fox is on a slow day.

The biggest problem today with news media is not their political bias but their tendency towards sensationalism in order to mainain ratings. Even with Fox, they are not necessarily right wing because that is their politics, but they are right wing because that is the market segment that they are going after and they are keeping that market through sensationalism.

Some kickstarters do interact with their backers, asking them for directions, and so forth. Of course this is optional. But even with real investment if you're not on the board of directors you have extremely miniscule control other than a yearly proxy vote about whether to keep the current board.