If it can stop even a single case like that Garrido monster, I am all for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jaycee_Lee_Dugard

Huh? Since when is Netherlands a low tax place?
I suspect a journalistic error here. Maybe the author meant to say Netherlands Antilles, the Caribean island nation?
The Netherlands though, has some of the highest taxes in the world.
Try 21 percent sales tax, 52% income tax and US$9.28 per gallon gas (most of which is tax).
Corporate taxes are not much lower.

It was not excess credit.
It was synthetic credit default swaps.
Those things are just 'side bets' on whether the creditors will default or not.
The market of side-bets was way larger than the actual mortgage market.

If you have a billion dollar of mortgages, they would have 10 billion dollar bets on whether the mortgages would default or not.
Those bets is what brought banks down.

The lighting in your example is inconsistent.
The trees have shadows straight below.
The house has the light coming from the left.

What are 'all the low level details' you refer to?
The main difference is the separate address space of the small local memory of the SPU.

I believe linux on Cell has made some nice abstractions.
It's been ages since I ran ps3linux, but from what I heard you can execute filter like objects on the SPU from the OS level.
Thus:
$ cat intput.txt | ./a.out | ./b.out | ./c.out > output.txt
This would put 3 SPUs to work, and do the DMAing for you.
You would need to lookup the status of OS-level support for SPU on linux to get more info on this.

Personally, I did the DMA stuff manually.

What you cannot abstract away, is the data-oriented programming that you should be doing.
As Noel Llopis puts it so eloquently: You need to program your entire game as if it was a particle system.
http://gamesfromwithin.com/data-oriented-design

e.g. for 1024 particles, you do:

float x[ 1024 ];
float y[ 1024 ];
float z[ 1024 ];

and NOT:

struct
{
    float x,y,z
} particles[ 1024 ];

I used to program SPUs for a living for a game studio. (Worked on SOCOM Confrontation and some unannounced titles).
I disagree with all this bitching from devs: the CELL SPU is a thing of beauty.

If an engineer is worth his salt, and knows his trade well, what he can do with it is amazing.
I was blown away with how incredibly fast this SPU is, once properly used.

But only if you know how to do branchless code, and you know the difference between structures-of-arrays and arrays-of-structures.
Once the data is lined up properly, and you eliminated those nasty branches, carefully crafted code (intrinsics, not vanilla C++) will make that thing fly like nothing else. Insanely fast, think GPU-fast, but with a more generic programming model.

I regret the death of the Cell architecture.

From wikipedia's entry on Occam's Razor:

>Possible explanations can get needlessly complex.
>It is coherent, for instance, to add the involvement of Leprechauns to any explanation, but Occam's razor would prevent such additions, unless they were necessary.

Now, :s/Leprechauns/God/ and you will see that adding 'God' to the explanation for the universe is wrong.

    Bram

And you get a -1

A true scientific mind will go by Occams Razor.
And Occams Razor says the creation by a god is overly complex explanation of the inverse, thus false.

Yes, c't wins any time.

I love how thorough their tests are.
And their test metrics are pure art.
To test CPU performance, they would include a metric of Linux-src-lines-compiled per second.
But because energy usage gets more relevant with CPUs, they also list a metric Linux-src-lines-compiled per watt.

Now what us mag would be so thorough to do this? None.
Another test they would do for printers is expose the printed page to 5 yrs of simulated sun ray exposure, to see effect on colors.

Ah yes, it is an ndk issue only.
Well... An app may be more likely not to use ndk, but I think games are more likely to use ndk than not, especially if it is an iOS port. I predict it will be a bad gaming device.