The OEMs asked AMD for six possible outputs for DisplayPort from their notebook GPUs: up to two internally for notebook panels, up to two externally for conncetors on the side of the notebook and up to two for use via a docking station. In order to fulfill these needs AMD had to build in 6 lanes of DisplayPort outputs into its GPUs, driven by a single display engine. A single display engine could drive any two outputs, similar to how graphics cards work today.

Eventually someone looked at all of the outputs and realized that without too much effort you could drive six displays off of a single card - you just needed more display engines on the chip. AMD's DX11 GPU family does just that.

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3635

Because resolution and size are not the same thing.

This service will likely cost more for a few months of subscription fees than a midrange video card does, and a netbook to play one of these streamed video games on costs about the same as a budget/midrange gaming PC. PC "gaming hardware" is hardly "insanely" expensive and for PC games this isn't terribly useful unless you have a portable machine and a quick internet connection, things that often don't go together.

It's clear there's a use of the word that's technically fine but it's misrepresentative to pretty much anyone that's going to be reading the BBC article or this Technology Review site or whatever and all sources claim it wasn't the media making it up. It's pretty easy to post here and imply people are idiots because they don't know more than the popular science definition but then again everyone's an idiot about a great many things.

..that my toaster is four dimensional because I can describe it as "silver".

This is cool enough as it is, I don't understand why the technobabble was added: polarization and color information layers may be novel attributes of a disc but there's no real reason to describe them as "5-dimensional" other than to sound physics-y.

Whoa. And I always thought there were drivers on CDs that came with hardware. I guess those are too expensive nowadays.

That's more because of the state of the software industry, as well as nVidia's failing to move the market forward through rebrands. My 8800GTS has the same longevity, but if you look one generation back you'll see that the 7900s didn't fare so well, even if people went even higher and put 7950s in SLI and such. At 1920x1080 you're going to spend maybe $200-$250 of course, but for somebody that was on a 1440x900 or 1680x1050 monitor? Nothing high end would end up lasting any longer than a 4850 right now.

No, you could upgrade every year to the highest price/performance card in the lineup and not bank on your expensive card lasting a long time. Because it won't. More expensive hardware doesn't "futureproof". It's just obsolete AND expensive.

That makes no sense because the publisher pays to make the game too, there is a tradition behind stand-alone patches, and the amount of work that goes into a patch is substantially less than an entire game. That also has nothing to do with parent's post which emphasizes that pirates are users, and further emphasizes it as failing to provide patches to pirates ultimately results in more calls to your support team.

seeing how Stardock puts patches behind Impulse "DRM" they do that worse, not better, than most major publishers