I'm talking about BEFS... generation hardware, pre-WRT. I think by the time WRT rolled around they finally started to fix some of their garbage.

This was demonstrably false in earlier Linksys "router" hardware. The first "router" I used from Linksys required bi-weekly reboots to function at all. None of the firmware updates improved this, and some releases even made it worse.

Perhaps the quality has improved in later models, I wasn't willing to give it a second chance.

I'll throw in my one minor data point on this, my current video card is a PNY GTX 680 and I've had no issues with this card so far. Doesn't say anything about their production as a whole, but they are capable of making at least 1 functional card. My first few NVidia cards were BFG, which I did have some minor issues with, then I moved on to ASUS before this recent PNY upgrade and those ASUS were pretty good as well.

Unless you happen to be playing Gradius 3, where the code causes the ship to blow up. Based on the design here, that also seems the most likely.

(Note : The code will work using the top flapper L/R buttons on the game, giving near max power-ups)

No, wrong, Carmack has explained the issues involved with ray-tracing at least a dozen times. But clearly since you've worked out a better solution, maybe you should sell it and get rich?

I've had a couple computer cases which I would get cuts from every time I did any serious work on. The cases were OK overall, as long as you didn't open them, just too many sharp spots in too many places. Fortunately my newest cases are a bit better, I don't think I've got bloody from any recent selections.

This is basically how anyone buys RAM these days.

I have given up on SLI, just not worth it. One high end card and basically everything runs at max settings anyway (maybe 1 notch down on AA, whatever) with far less trouble.

Out of date Microsoft hate. A fully updated Vista install with current drivers is roughly equivalent to Windows 7 these days.

Well, for one you don't get the MFC libraries in the express versions. That's probably one of the most significant ones if you are dealing with anything that uses it.

Going forward it's probably not such a huge issue since Microsoft has been trying to transition away from it. I'm not sure what the differences are as far as the new Windows RT in express. I think they are trying to push people into making Metro apps, so the express of 2012 might be geared for just that.

Have you seen how big the Metro Solitaire app is? When I checked app disk use it was something over 100MB! Yeah granted it does have a few different game types including freecell, but that disk consumption for just a simple app is absurd. Minesweeper was similarly huge, over 100MB again there.

Maybe everything is statically linked or something, I just don't see where they managed to burn all that space. Raw bitmap cards maybe? You'd almost have to work to make it that bloated either way.

Unless you have a 120Hz monitor, the 63fps thing literally is not going to help at all if you can keep up with a 60Hz VSYNC locked.

WoT really isn't all that optimized of a graphics engine though, I am running GTX 680 @ 120Hz and it still only pushes like 80 fps tops anyway.

Depending on how obvious and well designed the library is, just seeing the function and parameters in auto-complete might be enough to go on and could even produce workable code if you are lucky.

Of course this will be influenced by how well assumptions about the behavior line up with actual use, hopefully if it's similar to a number of other libraries it will offer up functionality with about the same results. If not, then it could lead some obscure bug which will be difficult to find if everyone uses the same set of assumptions or until someone with intimate knowledge happens to take a look at it.

Also, this is really what I'd like to see in a programming reference book, just a quick outline and typical use cases and then a listing of possible pitfalls in using it. The books we used in school were not really at all geared toward the quick reference style I'd like to have on hand now.

Even among the community of BSD users, my guess is many of them are not running it on their main desktop. I've tried to use all the main variants on the desktop (Open/Free/Net), and they generally work more or less OK after a fair amount of tweaking, at least if you don't want to get anything too bleeding edge on it. If for some reason I absolutely had to have it on the desktop then FreeBSD is probably the least painful one in the main group to go for.

As a server OS, it's been absolutely awesome, and where I get my use from it. Great router / firewall and easy understandable config to set up. Lot of the standard network services simple enough to setup, dhcpd / bind / ntp / etc. My new NAS is running NetBSD and is working good now, although I did have to tweak a fair number of sysctl's to get proper gigabit network performance from it. Problem being the default tuning there seems to still be for a fairly low end system.

So yeah, maybe some masochists run it for a desktop, I just don't see the benefit from picking it there.