"Some DX12 features will still need updated GPUs, but all the basic features should work." ExtremeTech

What surprises me is that these manufacturers are advertising the cards as supporting DX12, yet at Microsoft's Press Conference, they said that these cards weren't going to support the *entire* DX12 spec... Sort of makes is generation of PC GPUs a "why bother" moment at best, or a deceptive marketing moment at worst.

Agreed, and it is an unusual concept to mull over hence the article. The vernacular used is theirs, throwing out that the multiverse isn't composed of mostly identical copies of our universe spawned via wave function collapses, or in another incarnation completely separate universes that are identical until a wave function collapse at which point there is a divergence, or any number of similar theories. It is a fascinating concept, and in and of itself does not preclude the possibilities of conventional "parallel" / "mirror" universes, it simply implies that out of any like universe, there may be trillions that are completely unlike ours in every sense of the word.

Except, it does... Inflation dictates the spatial dimensions occupied by the observable universe and distribution of matter within it. If said inflation occurred differently even in what could be described as the most insignificant value, than matter distribution could be dramatically different than what we see today in our observable universe. Different matter distributions == a universe in which said parallel universe which is inherently different than what we see around us.

However, at the same point it may as well be saying that within the multiverse where an infinite number of other universes exist, it is more plausible that there will be universes that are not like our own than there are those that are like our own as fundamental laws regarding the creation of said universes need not be identical, preventing the creation of sufficiently similar natural systems; ergo, the Goldilocks Principle.

All of your emails in one app. Gmail, IMAP and MAPI are presently in different apps.

Yes, there was... The key talking points of said article was how the barrier for entry in creating a successful title was in the six figures, and months of effort. No longer is App Development on Mobile with simple titles produced by a single person can be an overnight ticket to millionaire status as was the case with the early days with Trism and it's comrades.

However, the same can be said of the film industry, where successful releases requires teams of people and significant upfront investment, except usually with a zero or two added to the end of that figure and more people than a typical app or game.

It is also worth noting here that there is more to this market equation than *just* Tablet vs. Smartphone. Since Q4 2013, Non-Windows Tablets have surpassed the PC (Windows, Mac, Linux, ...) Quarterly Sales Figures. When one factors in devices like the Microsoft Surface, the Fujitsu Stylistic, Motion Computing, and various other Windows-Only brands, said lead of Tablet PC Devices grows further at the expense of traditional Desktops and Laptops.

One doesn't need to crush Cell Phones or even continue exponential growth to be successful in what Jobs described as the "Post PC World" as Oremus writes in his article. Apple secured for themselves what is effectively 35% of a wholly new market over the past 5 years, where they've previously only been selling 5m PCs a quarter. Other manufacturers like Samsung and Asus too have managed to secure quite large cuts of this new market, as have various "crapgadget" manufacturers for what it's worth. (PCs too have crapgadget manufacturers, so that doesn't feel too much like a new development)

The fact of the matter is that pressure from Android and iOS has pushed Microsoft to take some very exciting risks as of late, and as such are now looking like they may again be a legitimate competitor in both landscapes that are being increasingly pressured by the likes of ChromeOS, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, Thin Clients, People staying behind on old versions of Windows and the like.

You don't need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ or ‘Do owls exist?’ or ‘Are there hats?'

And Greenpeace showed that they don't give a fuck about the environment when they added their own contribution to the Nazca Lines. They elevated themselves to PETA with antagonizing victims of shark attacks, which I didn't believe was possible, so congratulations guys... You did it... (slow clap)

Our ability to discern planetary positions has largely been based on our understanding of orbital dynamics and looking for protuberances in the motions of known, directly observed objects that were naked eye observable. This technique has been used since the 16th century and led to discoveries of all Planets, Planetoids, various Asteroids, Comets, and Plutoids ever since without the need of direct imaging; just some very cool math...

Said probes are somewhat delicate and require various forms of when falling from a height of 401 million km, especially the final *heat shielding* for the height of 11km for it's fall through the Martian Atmosphere and heating to a temperature of 2,100 degrees C.

Also, as 2,100 degrees C is considerably higher than the melting point of 1,410 degrees C of the silicon antenna used to communicate from Mars back to Earth, it is understandable why said antenna would need to be *inside* the heat shield rather than outside the heat shield. Just saying...

(Oh, and Slashdot, learn how to display a Unicode degree () symbol appropriately!)

There's a huge difference between Apple's Minimum of 3 years OS Updates for Phones and the typical Android 18 Months if you chose the right model and the Manufacturer feels like being generous, which is itself very different from Microsoft's approach up until now of "You get what you get, and you don't throw a fit."

Technically, Google *did* fix the flaw, in later versions of Android. They just didn't backport said fix to 4.3.

However, as Manufacturers won't roll a new update off of said backport even if it did exist as they're incentivized to support phones that are under warranty and where possible sell new phones to customers, Carriers would drag their feet on approvals of said updates if they even authorized it at all as they're inclined to both avoid angry support calls from customers about "my phone is different" yet also sell new phones to get people under contract, money disappearing at all levels into the giant black hole of bureaucratic process, what does it really matter? It's a zero sum proposition.

While it is absolutely the case that emoji has no place in certain text fields, as a web browser it is Chrome's responsibility to handle all valid and compliant UTF-8 symbols, including emoji symbols, within the application. Emoji are not some imaginary pseudo-symbol type or image format sent in-line. Where the symbol is seen, an image from a font will be displayed instead of a conventional character. As such, is it really that different than needing to support Cyrillic characters in text fields?

It could also be an acknowledgement that newer business server environments where roll backs are more likely to be "painful" are typically run in sandboxes, be it through VMWare, Hyper-V or a handful of other tools. As such, a problematic roll-back is presently accomplished through snapshots. Where virtualization isn't employed, hopefully companies employ a prod/non-prod environment for their servers. And as far as workstations are concerned, Microsoft's default WSUS behavior has been to force manual whitelisting of updates for deployment, as such it is the responsibility of administration staff to test said updates as they would anything that they choose to push to machines that they are responsible for as to reduce the likelihood of having their whole organization sitting on their hands for a day or two while they scramble to fix. Microsoft's change while annoying for process compliance within organizations makes some sense in a round about way as it forces people to test before deployment into their networks under the guise of "ZOMFG SCARY!"