I know I don't register at any websites.

I have found a solution.

1. Quit your job.
2. Become a private eye who tracks down workers playing hooky.
3. Get paid to go to the same bowling alley you were going to before.
4. Profit!

Didn't even need the ???

Not quite. A great idea that is hacked together will almost certainly be "borrowed" and better implemented by someone else, making them a fortune. The world still gets changed, I suppose.

According to a few different places, Sony started making a profit on PS3s in April this year. Only took them about four years to get there...

Can we stop pushing the idea that consoles are sold at a loss? The Wii has been sold for a profit since launch (source). The Xbox 360 has been sold for a profit for four years (source). The PS3 has taken the longest to get there, but it is now sold for a profit as well (source). New consoles are often initially sold at a loss, but they do not stay at that price.

The problem with the five-year lag is that the consoles are decreasing the lag the consumer sees. Crytek's CEO claims that the current generation of consoles was holding back developers. There are some games that are PC-only, but those only appeal to a fraction of the potential market, so most developers have to go for multiple platforms and accept the limitations that the old hardware has. The consumer mostly sees cross-platform games, so it doesn't look like a five-year lag at all. If there were a hardcore PC developer pushing the envelope, it might be different, but now that Crytek has developed CryEngine 3 for all platforms, I don't think anyone could do it.

I wonder how much of this is Nintendo's fault - MS and Sony look over and see their competitor beating them with half the graphics and a bit of a lower price, and they realize that graphics have hit a point that most games won't benefit that much from nicer hardware. Of course, then they think that the magic is all in the motion controls and that they need to have something that imitates that...it's like watching iphone imitators.

By 'lent once', does Amazon mean that you can lend a book to one other person at a time, or that you can lend it to one other person, once, for each purchase? If the latter, it's not exactly that useful; if the former, I look forward to the websites letting people legally trade ebooks with one another.

You make RSS sound like it's some incredibly complicated enterprise. I use a decent web browser; in the address bar, it displays a little RSS icon if the site I'm visiting has an RSS feed. I click the icon and it subscribes to the feed and tells me, unobtrusively, when new stuff is posted to it. I don't know how I'm supposed to "maintain" it, but I'm pretty sure I've never done it.

If I wanted to use RSS as a way to get general news, it would probably be inadequate. I use RSS to keep track of cool projects or blogs. If they are updated infrequently and if their posts are not immediately spread through the whole of Web 2.0, RSS is a great way of keeping track.

So with this new silent update process, half the time when I start Firefox it'll have to update before I can use it? And this is something that just happens? Mozilla, you should stop worrying about browser cold start time and start worrying about update time. I just want to be able to open a web browser and use the internet; I don't need any more progress bars before I can do so.

Considering that even 1080P HD is 200 lines less than the lower of the old CRT PC gaming resolutions (1600x1200 up to 2043x1536) I would say yes, the LCD was a step backwards in every area except carrying-convenience.

Parts of that story also turn up in "Bare Faced Messiah", the unauthorised biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Scientology tried to ban it, failed miserably, and now you can download it.

Fascinating stuff. Cult leaders are very interesting people.

Exactly. While OpenGL is compatible with 99% of the PC gaming market, it is compatible with 0% of the console market. D3D is compatible with 99% of the PC gaming market, and 30% (very rough estimate) of the console market. Linux and Mac aren't even a blip on the gaming market radar, so why would anybody bother with OpenGL in a marketing sense?

The few that do bother to do it in OpenGL get burned when they want to port it to the console, because instead of a simple re-package job, they have to do 10 times as much work to move to a console. It may not be a massive amount of work, no, but it is more work than necessary. That cuts into your profits. Besides, there will always be less to screw up going D3D to D3D.

Oh, they just released those. They have a 2U box with 4 servers sharing two PSUs now.

PowerEdge C6100 I think. But you're right, I remember looking at HP and the others and they did have them but they weren't the right price for us, as we didn't need density.

Well, I'd be lying if I said I never wondered what it might be like to violate a Scientologist.

... my VCR spit out the tape about 5 minutes in, thus saving me from ever seeing any substantial part of the movie and wanting to claw my own eyes out. That VCR no longer works at all, but I keep him around, just to stop by and say "Thanks" every once in a while.