It must have been a lively debate internally about this. I am sure many inside the companies were pointing out that by removing the physical media component it would destroy the possibility of game resale and the used game market. However, at the same time it kind of shoots their sales channel in the foot -- there's certainly no incentive for retail game stores or other businesses which make their money on having people come in and buy stuff to sell a device which obsoletes all their current sales and also does not provide for any prospects of future game sales.

So, a motherboard with no RAM and no CPU, in the $100 range, I can see. But with Thunderbolt, too? I know the Thunderbolt cables are a bit pricey because of the chips built into those, but are the Thunderbolt controller chips *that* much cheaper than the cable chips?

I must admit, the first thought that came to my mind when reading this is, this sounds like a great setting for some spy thriller or such. I mean, an abandoned military base with launch silos, its own nuclear power, and slowly being destroyed by encroaching ice?

The perfect location to have the mastermind's base located in. At the end, the heroes have to race out of the base as it is finally being destroyed by the ice.

Just where exactly are these 'test servers' in relation to you? What, exactly, was this 'test'? This seems a bit of a worthless test. It's entirely possible your DSL has less than 100 ms latency, but the delay is on the server end or the links in between. This is too vague a scenario to comment on.

My feelings about 'acceptable' latency depend on how much I am paying for it, at what bandwidth, with what level of SLA, and for what purpose.

In some ways, a lot of what is being added to C++ makes me think of Scala, just less readable.

While the additions and extensions certainly make things more interesting and potentially more powerful/easier for the *individual* programmer, I look forward to seeing what sort of interesting train wrecks happen when larger teams try to make use of these features. I certainly hope the debuggers are being updated to be useful when someone's written a template that uses a #define'd macro to specify a closure that is passed through an anonymous function, etc.

This strikes me as the next generation's 'multi-threading' -- where almost every programmer claims they can handle multi-threaded programming, but very few actually do it well. Particularly in teams when interactions require coordination. Going to take a whole new round of winnowing the wheat from the chaff when it comes to finding developers who can actually use these features well without driving their coworkers insane.

I'm not seeing any data on what portion of those keys with bad moduli were actually attached to valid certificates.

It's damn fine survey work, but the conclusions are just strange. More detail here:

<a href="http://dankaminsky.com/ronwhit">Survey is good. Thesis is strange.</a>

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/82-percent-of-atts-q4-2011-sales-are-smartphones-66-percent-are-iphones.ars

Yeah. 66% of AT&T's 4th quarter sales were iPhones. I was on Verizon for years, switched to AT&T only for their iPhone, and stuck with them only for their GSM capabilities worldwide. Sure, your margins are less when you offer a better service. Would you prefer no sales though?

The platform that most successfully upgraded itself was the NES. One of the degrees of freedom they had, because there were chips in each cartridge, was to deploy new memory management units inside the games themselves. Quite literally, the NES became more powerful for games released later in its dev cycle. SNES did this too, with the SuperFX chip inside of Starfox (the most popular DSP in the world, for its era) but it wasn't quite the "all games ship upgrading hardware".

I suspect if there was ever to be upgradable hardware, it'd have to work by yearly subscription, and it'd have to be no more than $50 a year for the part. However, with guaranteed sales in the millions of units (as games would hard-require it) the logistics of making some pretty crazy stuff fit into $50/yr wouldn't be unimaginable. Remember that XBox Live is already pulling, what, $60/yr?

You realize this is completely unscientific garbage, right? None of http://www.fwi.co.uk/Articles/25/01/2011/125212/Handle-with-care.htm makes sense outside of a conscious entity.

Eventually the effective dose exceeds the lethal dose

Except that in only a few countries are you able to go that far. Most places require you to stop short of the lethal dose and live in excruciating agony for as long a your systems (and technology) will support you. Have a nice day.