And for that I get the game, soundtrack and art book in a jewel case. Shipping is free, and had I pledged more I could have gotten more stuff. Had the kickstarter failed to be founded, I would have paid nothing.

This particular project has a good chance of delivering, having already made a working demo of the game, so the $60 was not much different that preordering some limited edition of the next CoD game. Without kickstarter this game would never have been made, so in my eyes kickstarter have served a purpose that no other service I know of could have managed.

Naturally there's always a chance they will take their money and run, but the last $60 CoD game I bought was absolute garbage (despite stellar reviews), so there's always a bit of risk involved no matter how you spend your hard earned coin. It may not be a risk you are willing to take, but fortunately plenty of folks are, and thus project like Giana can see the light of day.

LINPACK is highly parallel. I.e. why I stated "LINPACK like workloads".

How useful LINPACK is to super computers isn't within my field of expertise, but if Arm is truly better on a performance per watt scale and some other constraint don't step in, then it does not matter how much faster a single chip is than the arm solution, as one can just add more arms (for LINPACK like workloads).

I'm somewhat skeptical to that article, reads too much like an advertisement, but the results may still be significant for the super computer landscape.

Unlike with engines if it's truly better on the "performance per watt" scale you can build super computers with 10x, 100x, whatever it takes of extra chips, to get there faster on the same power budget; Which would make Arm A9 viable for people with LINPACK like workloads, unless the cost of extra networking gear (and other support hardware), kills them.

Wasn't some company working on an Arm based super computer? They must be thrilled.

GDI has been hw accelerated since Windows 3.1. There was a time they even benchmarked graphics card on how quickly they accelerated windows drawing calls.

GDI+ introduced different text rendering and alpha colors, but you don't get anymore hardware acceleration in GDI from GDI+.

From Wikipedia's GDI article on Vista: "GDI is no longer hardware-accelerated by the video card driver"

I was thinking on the GDI part of Windows, it is software rendered on Vista. Some applications ran quite badly because of this.

If you wrote WPF or DirectX apps on Vista you got hardware acceleration, but 6 years later and most stuff is stilling using GDI instead.

Looking at the article they're talking about improving Direct2D and SVG performance, which is something apps are starting to use I believe.

Many Windows crashes was caused by hardware acceleration. As a result Vista supported less hardware acceleration than XP.

This makes me wonder if what they've done is gain back some of that performance. They say they render lines and Rectangles faster, and that's hardware accelerated on XP, while software on Vista (don't know about 7).

You'll probably need a driver license for the first round of autonomous enough cars. If only so that you can take over when the automation fails.

Then, imagine, you get in your car drunk, slur out "Drive me to Costa Rica", and fall asleep.

Before one can implement these laws a computer must be able to determine what a "human being" is. Besides flawed heuristics we're not there yet.

Areee? No. A housecat will never teach mathematics at a college level, just like how h. ergaster never got to do that (though some distant descendent eventually did).

A million years is also fairly short. It took more than that for man to evolve, and the rate of genetic mutation, horizontal gene transfer, etc, is fairly constant. Cats are further away from modern humans than man was back then, so 1 million years of natural evolution may simply not be enough to get a college ready smart!cat. And even if this happens, there could still be house cats around... perhaps the smart!cat will have one as a pet.

Not that I disagree about 9:16 being potentially awkward, the arm surface has the same horizontal resolutions as the ipad 1 and 2 in portrait mode.

With the Amiga 1200 being such a low cost system, adding a 030 in 1992 was perhaps not a realistic option. But Doom was released in December 1993, and Commodore could perhaps have had a cheap 030 machine ready for early 1994 with a decent port of Doom.

However, by that time Commodore was bankrupt.

If you're going to get Doom on the Amiga I think you need to go back as far as 1986. C= was in financial difficulties back then, and the Amiga was yet to become a runaway success, and therefore they didn't invest as much in Amiga development as they could have. With some focus they would have had ECS ready by 1987, AGA by 1989 and been more competitive against VGA and SVGA.

However they're still faced with the problem that the 68k is on its way out. 486 PCs will be cheaper than 040 Amigas, no way around that, and a CPU rendered Doom needs the grunt of a 040 to look truly impressive.

If C= is going to have a low cost system that can run Doom they'll probably need to make a 3D accelerating chipset. The Atari Jaguar ran Doom despite having just a 68K CPU, so it's certainly possible. Imagine C= and Amiga being on the forefront of 3D gaming =)

The c2p stuff wasn't too much of an overhead, the big perf. killer is simple lack of memory bandwidth. The game would have to be scaled down to 64 colors at the very least, as 256 colors used up pretty much all the bandwidth. Add 4 MB of fast ram and the AGA (or ECS) chipset is free to consume all the membandwidth it needs without hurting CPU performance.

As far as CPU goes, any 020 is likely too slow (unless there's lots and lots of room for optimization in the Doom engine). A 16MHz 030 is better, but is still slower than the 25MHz minimum requirement of PC Doom (a 030 and a 386 is roughly equivalent clock for clock). So if you get it running it means playing in a tiny low rez window, playable I suppose but hardly a joyful experience.

A quick YouTube search shows doom running well enough on 040 Amigas, while even 50MHz 030s seem to be struggling with choppy slow frame rates. IOW the choice point is likely the CPU, as even the ECS chipset manages a convincing enough version of Doom (colors are naturally reduced there)

Running Doom on a stock Amiga 1200 would be a painful experience. If it's upgraded with a 030 CPU and 4MB memory is another matter, but there wasn't many of those. You could also run Doom on an upgraded Amiga 500, as there were 030 upgrade cards for them too.

But I strongly doubt a stock A1200 would be anything but epically slow on Doom. First you need to run it straight from a floppy drive, as most owners didn't have a hard drive. Then you'd have to squeeze the game into half the memory, and that memory is quite slow as it was used by both the chip-set and the CPU (On the stock Amiga 1200 Commodore had in their infinite wisdom neglected to add fast ram). And even with fast ram the CPU itself is a good bit slower than a 386, which only ran Doom okayish as it was.

I know they make the Windows drivers, but I thought it was Apple writing the OS X drivers?

The summary says "some 64-bit operation systems", but MS12-042 mentions 32-bit XP. 64-Bit XP and Vista is apparently not affected.