+5 Insightful.

Forming packs and hunting people is old sport too. There's a reason they call this activity a witch-hunt.

Along with the pack violence mentality that persists in us humans, what amazes me is our capacity for double standards.
There's a special sort of viciousness that we reserve for others, when we observe a trait in them - that we despise in ourselves.

Yes, agree 100%. Leave ASAP.

The other way to think about this is - any organization is only as good as your boss. If she or he is is veritable shite, the organization is as well. You are not only wasting your time, you are doing the equivalent of hanging out with a bunch of dicey "friends" who might go do something illegal when they are tanked up.

Not contradicting you but making a tangential point. The main problem with your line of thinking is that you still think like an "IT Manager" or any first line manager. I've seen that in many cases, it is worthwhile to think like an entrepreneur instead.

The main problem is that IT has become perceived as a background problem or a fixed cost. Like electricity or water supply. We're nothing but glorified plumbers as far as senior management is concerned.

You cannot fix this by presenting an IT Manager type solution. They would perceive it the same way you would if your plumber told you about the three different ways he would solve your basement leak problem. While you would be interested in getting it fixed and getting it fixed "right" in a reasonable price, you really don't give a crap for the details or even how it gets done and with how many people.

You fix this by changing their mentality. Get them to believe that IT doesn't come for free (as a fixed cost on the balance sheet), and is not a cost center. Get them to believe that IT is really a "pay as you go" kind of service or capability. Get them to believe that IT is a profit center in itself. That it is an independent entity.

Infosys or IBM or Accenture is your competition. So treat them as such instead of just bitching about them in general (you didn't say that, just saying in general). You need to either match their cost or need to differentiate yourself (and your IT team) as a crack high quality and super reliable team.

I admit this stuff is easy to say, and much harder to do. But this is how it should be done, IMHO.

You know, the more I think about this, the more I realize that the real skill a good IT or software manager needs, at least in these types of roles, is really a good understanding of how finance works in an organization. Stuff like charge-back, reconciliation. I mean, if we were an independent contractor team handling a company's IT, this is exactly what we would be concerned with. Work is fine, but we and our organization needs to get paid correctly and on time.

I'm only talking about organizations where IT is a sub-organization. Of course, in pure IT shops or software development or software product shops, the dev team IS the profit center. So the point becomes moot.

Apologies for the double post. The submit button didn't respond for several seconds so I clicked it again. In fact, I think I did it thrice.

I think that Kaveri would become a very compelling choice for htpc and even gaming. You could easily build an entry level steam machine with this and because there is no discrete GPU, you could do a really small form factor with good airflow.

An audio server that uses true audio is another intriguing option.

There are even fanless cabinets that will take up to 95 watt CPUs like this one.

http://www.fanlesstech.com/2013/11/asktech-nt-zeno3.html

I also have a noob question. Can kaveri or even the existing a10 chips be used in crossfire mode? Meaning integrated graphics crossfired with a discrete GPU. Does it even make sense to do something like this? For example, it could be a good upgrade path.

I think that Kaveri would become a very compelling choice for htpc and even gaming. You could easily build an entry level steam machine with this and because there is no discrete GPU, you could do a really small form factor with good airflow.

An audio server that uses true audio is another intriguing option.

There are even fanless cabinets that will take up to 95 watt CPUs like this one.

http://www.fanlesstech.com/2013/11/asktech-nt-zeno3.html

I also have a noob question. Can kaveri or even the existing a10 chips be used in crossfire mode? Meaning integrated graphics crossfired with a discrete GPU. Does it even make sense to do something like this? For example, it could be a good upgrade path.

Not trying to do the "one up" thing here, but IMHO, the end game for evolution would be to become beings of pure information. Energy and matter are merely vehicles to store and transfer information content. We would probably get equally frustrated with the limitations of existing as energy beings as we currently do with the flaccid biological bags that we exist in.

And your DRM comment is indeed something to ponder on - the artificial copy protection mechanisms that we have slapped on top of our existence - not just at physical levels but even in our minds.

Do you think that keyboard you are holding is ... real?

Hmmm.

Heh, that was quite funny!

There's very little I know about ISRO. But there are a few things that work well in India (as a government run entity) and ISRO is definitely one of them. You have to understand that for several decades, Indian organzations like ISRO had to innovate and invent even basic engineering stuff largely in isolation. The homegrown Param supercomputer was also a repsonse to this - because most high technology items (even basic things like CPUs and interconnects) could not be imported as they were banned by the US.

As such, the frugality of organizations like ISRO is more of a byproduct of the severely constrained environment in which they grew up in. So they learnt to make do with what they had, learnt to develop workarounds and become really innovative. Plus, some early successes enabled ISRO to acquire pride of place even in the mind-numbingly inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy. Due to this, they were able to largely avoid a lot of red tape that is endemic to any Indian government organization. They were able to get reasonable amounts of funding and were also able to attract some reasonable levels of talent.

In terms of talent, the situation is still quite sad as most scientists who work in ISRO either do it because of a true calling or because of patriotism or both. They still know they get paid peanuts compared to their American or Chinese counterparts. It is a near miracle that organizations like ISRO survived and even thrived in the morass that is the Indian Administration Service - an ignoble legacy of the Brits, but something that was made a hundred times worse by the Indians themselves.

You make a valid point - and I don't know *all* the options that exist.
It would actually be a very interesting exercise to do this kind of a comparison. Say, take some HTPC like constraints such as space and heat, identify the options available - both CPU+discrete graphics and CPU+GPU integrated, and compare the options using price and performance.

Back to your point, it is not just power draw - space and cooling are also factors. A reasonably strong integrated CPU+GPU system lets you build a cabinet that can be very slim - say, something that resembles a compact blue ray player.

I would also imagine that an integrated solution like this will allow better airflow.

Finally there's price. Undoubtedly discrete graphics will always have the performance crown. However, if you think of Moore's law, CPUs have already reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of size of individual cores or even number of cores in a chip. From now on, IMHO, Moore's law will be all about integrating as much of the motherboard as possible into a single chip or package. And GPU is the most obvious starting point.

To put it another way, in terms of price-performance-heat, discrete GPUs will not be able to compete with a highly integrated solution - over time. They will keep getting pushed into smaller and smaller niches. An integrated solution will generally be cheaper and cooler for equivalent performance. It wasn't a viable solution in many cases until now only because the performance was sub-par - but Kaveri is the first viable chip that gives you enough horsepower to play last gen games at full HD with reasonable frame rates. In two years, Kaveri will be at 2 teraflops - the same as a PS4.

Yes, but could you do that in a compact HTPC cabinet (breadbox sized or smaller) and have your total system draw less than 100W or so?

I'm really excited by this news - because it allows traditional desktops to reinvent themselves.

Think Steam Machines, think HTPC that lets you do full HD and 4k in the future, think HTPC that also lets you do light-weight or mid-level gaming.
Think of a replacement to consoles - a computing device that gives you 90% of the convenience of a dedicated console, but gives you full freedom to download and play from the app store of your choice (Steam or anything else), gives you better control of your hardware, and lets you mix and match controllers (Steam Controller, keyboard and mouse, or something else that someone invents a year down the line).

I'm long on AMD for this reason. Maybe I'm a sucker. But there is a chance that desktops can find a place in your living room instead of your basement. And I'm quite excited about that.

Electricity is the relative flow of electrical charge so storing electricity is an absurd notion. You can store electrical charge however.

The cost of the plant works out to about 30k per home which leads to some very interesting ideas.

Every home could have footed the bill as incremental construction cost. Considering how much we pay for electricity, the initial cost would pay itself off in about 20 years which is actually not bad.

For this cost, every house could have fitted high efficiency solar panels - although I have no clue if it would be the same equivalent thing.

The govt should be investing in smart grids that encourage people to contribute to the grid efficiently, not subsidizing solar power plants.

Just some thoughts. I'm not an expert though.

A noble thought, and one that is bandied around by the ruling party as well (the Congress). The problem is the extent of corruption. Rajiv Gandhi, ironically the ruler of the same party, said that for every rupee spent on social welfare, only 10 paise (a tenth) reaches the poor.

That was a couple of decades ago, and arguably, corruption in India has increased 10 fold.

So the problem you state is very real. However, the solution (i.e. money spent on social welfare) is farcical.
Most of the money comes back to the senior members of the ruling party so it is in their self interest to put even more money in social welfare.

Marketing speak aside, I would expect
- a good Steam Machine (Steam Engine?) to play current gen games at 1080p with high details settings

- a mid level Steam Machine to either play current gen games at 720p or play them at 1080p with dialed down details
I would also expect a mid level machine to play last gen games reasonably well at 1080p

- an entry level Steam Machine to play last gen games at 720p with mid to high level details

I'm not much of a game freak (well, I was, but I have a baby now), but I would totally buy an entry level or even mid level machine that would run Steam on top of Linux, and would let me play Counter Strike and a bunch of other games fairly well. Especially if I can get the thing up and running in a minute or so, so I can realistically play a game in an half hour time window - those precious windows of time. Maybe I will spend less time on the pot reading my tablet.

Huge bonus points if I can run this as an audio server/player when I am not gaming - run Logitech Media Server and/or Foobar or provide some other mechanism to play high bitrate mp3s, FLACs, and WAVs (and do optical/coax out). I know most people will say HTPC instead of media server but I actually think Roku does a stellar job and I find myself streaming movies and TV shows from Netflix or Amazon Prime on Roku and that's sufficient for me. Don't really need terabytes of space and the whole HTPC thing. But I guess I might be a minority.

Actually, it would be really nice if Valve made this more like a Roku - an easy to use and navigate OS that would run Steam but would also let you play other apps (say, for audio and HTPC).

Thank you! For finally bringing some perspective into this conversation.

The trend nowadays seems to be to first trash and ridicule anything new or innovative that anyone does. Or better still, list out the 10 reasons why something like this should never have been built in the first place. Jeez man, maybe we should just send some people over to work in the patent office - maybe, we can harness all the negativity to solve the "stupid patent" problem.

I have no clue if this controller will really work well in real life or not. But we can definitely say

- This is indeed very innovative. For the first time, someone truly thought out of the box and redesigned a game controller from the ground up, instead of just adding more haptics. Well.. the Wii controller notwithstanding.

- Love the attempt at how they've translated the "keyboard WASD + mouse" way of navigation in an FPS to a controller. Might *just* work. More power to you, Valve!

- Sure, it will have a fairly steep learning curve and people will complain like hell, but hey, so does any other control mechanism.

- For me, the litmus test will be playing Counter Strike using these controllers. Or maybe I'm getting old, but it still remains the benchmark game for me as far as an FPS is concerned.

P.S. Isn't Steam Engine a better name than Steam Box?