I've done some work with both PhysX and the things that AMD is pushing for. I try to keep with the Physics Abstraction Layer, which lets me plug in whatever physics engine as the backend, which gives a pretty damn good apples-to-apples performance metric. Personally, my ultimate choice of physics engine is the one which exhibits the best performance. My experience may differ from others, but I generally get the best performance from PhysX on with an nVidia GPU and BulletPhysics with an AMD GPU. Sometimes, the software version of PhysX outstrips the competition, but I have never seen anything beat PhysX in performance with GPU acceleration turned on. And with PAL, it is easy to check if there is GPU support on the machine and swap in the physics engine with the best performance (PAL is awesome).

Here's the thing: GPU-accelerated physics are just plain faster. Why? Because collision detection is a highly parallelizable problem. Guess what hardware we have that can help? The GPU. Another great part of using the GPU is that it frees the CPU to do more random crap (like AI or parsing the horribly slow scripting language).

AMD is working on both BulletPhysics and Havok so they can do GPU acceleration. But I have a feeling that PhysX performance will remain faster for a while: PhysX was designed to natively run on the GPU (technically, a GPU-like device), while these other libraries are not. Furthermore, nVidia has quite a head start in performance tuning, optimization and simple experience. In five years, that shouldn't matter, but I'm just saying that it will take a while.

So here is my message to AMD: If you want people to use your stuff, make something that works and let me test it out in my applications. You've released a demo of Havok with GPU acceleration. PhysX has been and continues to work with GPU acceleration on nVidia GPUs and will frequently outperform the software implementation. I'm all for open alternatives, but in this case, the open alternatives aren't good enough.

One idea would be to use the many available cloud services like EC2, Google App Engine and Azure. The IP blocks those services come in are going to remain fairly regular, but they are so common that it might not be acceptable for a site to block everything from ghs.l.google.com (and whatever EC2 and Azure live on). It is still blockable, though, so it probably would have been better for them (from a technical standpoint) if they hadn't announced their existence and these sites had been slowly indexed by their service before anybody knew what was happening.

Another (better) idea would be to use a service like Tor. Sure, their latency is going to skyrocket, but that's not a big deal since interactivity isn't a primary concern of an indexing service. It's still blockable, if infringing site admins block Tor nodes. This may or may not be doable, as I would imagine many users of said infringing sites use anonymizing networks for their normal traffic.

Sure, either of the solutions I've come up with in five minutes can be circumvented, but the idea isn't to totally eliminate piracy, its to make it inconvenient enough to make getting the legitimate version easier.

These guys make a decent point: 10GUI. The keyboard is a pretty nice thing -- we can express quite a wide range of things to the computer. The mouse, however, sucks. An entire hand and we're limited to a position on the screen and binary "clicks." I use an 11-button mouse to help with this, but most applications are not built to support such interaction, so I'm limited to setting them for global commands (back center is reveal, left and swipe is change desktop), save for some special cases (which is pretty lame). The overall theory is that once you establish a better system of interaction with the computer, your everyday tasks become easier. Ultimately, it would be best if we just wired our brains into the computer, but until that is practical, we'll have to work with what we have.

Don't learn OpenGL, learn graphics and software engineering first. Assuming you want to learn OpenGL for games, I would recommend David Eberly's 3D Game Engine Design . It is extremely comprehensive and presents an incredibly well-designed engine, WildMagic (which has inspired many other engines, like jMonkey), for which you are given the full source on CD. If you're not looking for games, then you probably don't need to know the latest OpenGL stuff, because scientific visualization usually doesn't require it. And if you DO need the latest stuff from OpenGL, you're probably not actually doing graphics and you probably shouldn't use OpenGL, but CUDA or some other platform (CUDA = awesome).

In any case, you need to know that OpenGL is just a specification, so you rely on other multiplatform libraries like GLUT, GLFW or SDL. I would personally recommend SDL, since it is awesome. GLFW is nice, easier to use than SDL, but harder to tweak the small things for performance. GLUT development died many years ago, so don't use it.

The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.

The company I work for uses a system called Document Locator. It is a Windows-shell integrated document management system. Basically, if you took Subversion and gave yourself extremely fine-grained control of repositories, folders and the like. It scales decently, too -- we have millions of documents spread across 25 major repositories, many of which include AutoCAD, Bentley Microstation, Smartplant 3D and other sizable files. The system is also fairly extensible, as we've built quite a few internal applications off of the DL system and there are plenty of third-party plug-ins available (a notable one being Brava, an application that allows adding QC and other markup to repository files). And if you don't want to be constrained to Windows, there is a web client available, which works decently. While it is not without its problems, the overall experience has been pretty good.

Full disclosure: My company is ColunbiaSoft's largest customer and, as such, we know a good deal of the development team.

Karma be damned, but the use of Windows in a secure system is nowhere near as bad as not sanitizing your inputs on any system. No platform can just make up for bad practice. FreeBSD will happily allow someone to guess 'PASSWORD' as the login password (from TFA: "Software configuration involves setting up a software system for one's particular uses, such as changing a factory-set default password of "PASSWORD" to one less easily guessed."). If you're using Oracle DB, MS SQL or MySQL, if you store passwords as plaintext instead of hashes and secure data in plaintext, you will run into problems (TFA: "...hackers had the ability to obtain more than 40,000 FAA user IDs, passwords, and other information used to control a portion of the FAA mission-support network."). Microsoft may not patch in a timely manner, but it doesn't matter what platform you're running if you don't apply the patches (TFA: "...software with known vulnerabilities was not corrected in a timely manner by installing readily available security software patches released to the public by software vendors."). PHP, JSP, ASP, ASP.NET, Ruby, Perl or whatever, if you program poorly, you're going to have problems.

Larrabee is expected to at least be competitive with nVidia/AMD's stuff, although it might not be until the second generation product before they're on equal footing.

Competitiveness is not a quality of generation number. Still: What statistics have you seen that compare Larrabee and something people use right now (ATI/nVidia)? There is this presentation (PDF) they made at SIGGRAPH, which shows that performance increases as you add more Larrabee cores. Here's a graph which may mean something. The y-axis is "scaled performance" What might that mean?

Graphs show how many 1 GHz Larrabee cores are required to maintain 60 FPS at 1600x1200 resolution in several popular games. Roughly 25 cores are required for Gears of War with no antialiasing, 25 cores for F.E.A.R with 4x antialiasing, and 10 cores for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 with 4x antialiasing.

Sounds neat. I guess that's why they're going to promote the 32-core Larrabee. How much will something to run these cost and how much power will it consume? They're still developing this thing, so why do I keep hearing that it will BLOW MY MIND? I have no doubt that Intel has an army of capable engineers that could build something to render graphics great, but if it costs more than the consumer can possibly pay, there's no real point. Intel is gunning for 2 TFLOPs. I'm pretty sure the Radeon HD 4870 passes that mark already (and you can purchase it for less than $500). Sure, it's a cool technology, but I'd like to see some more facts and figures.

What have I heard? Power usage/heat: 300W TDP. That's pretty horrific. Cost: 12-layer PCB. That's twice the typical graphics card and four more than the high-end Radeon and nForce cards. That doesn't directly translate into cost, but generally more complicated equals more expensive.

But back to the PS4 -- Sony's real mistake with the PS3 was expecting the Cell processor to be the most incredible computing device ever. Original plans for the PS3 included 2 Cell processors, but they changed to the RSX when they realized the Cell wasn't capable of rendering graphics like they wanted to (whereas the XBox 360's architecture was designed with the GPU and CPU co-existing from the start). You can't build a bunch of fast parts and stick them together, you have to build a fast system. Perhaps Sony has learned their lesson.