While that might be true when it comes to beancounters look up the Angry Joe video I linked to, the new Xbox is gonna be DOA thanks to it adding DRM so draconian that people didn't believe what they were being told, nobody thought a company could be THAT stupid but...yep! Always online or no games and all games tied to an account so no more trading, selling, or renting...its dead Jim, before it even comes out.

The simple fact is there is a REASON why Forbes named Ballmer worst CEO and its because Google and Apple couldn't ask for a better competitor as he is so fucking retarded and greedy he kills anything good they come up with, Zune, Kin, Windows 8 (which it appears we are gonna get to see our first double flop from MSFT, as Win 8.1 takes everything people hate about Win 8 and makes it even worse) and now the Xbox.

Sadly you could have chimps throw poo at the financial section and invest on what the poo sticks to and get a better ROI than what MSFT has done in the past 5 years, for every success they had enough failures that they never even break even.

Dude you are missing the point, the point I was making was NOT whether shared memory for APUs is a good idea, I'd argue that is a non brainer, its whether a chip designed for netbooks is gonna make for a good gaming rig and I'm saying its not, the IPC is too low and putting all the memory on the die itself isn't gonna change that.

Let me put it THIS way...would you want to buy a "gaming rig" that was powered by an Intel Atom quad with hyperthreading? because that is EXACTLY what you have here, a chip designed to compete NOT with even the low end Pentiums and Celerons but with the ATOM both on price and power usage which I'm telling you all the memory tricks in the world isn't gonna change the fact that your CPU is primitive. Look at what chips they compare the last gen E1800 to or even read TFA where they say the new chip is pretty mediocre on everything but power use.

Hell by that argument the 733MHz Celeron in the first Xbox would beat an i3 if only you put the memory on die and we know that isn't the case, why? Because the Celeron is a MUCH more primitive design compared to the i3, and the same goes for comparing a Bobcat to even the lowest Athlon duals, there is just no comparison when it comes to IPC, none at all.

To use a /. car analogy you can put the biggest wheels on it in the world its not gonna make that Pinto any better and hauling heavy loads uphill.

The Bobcat, which just for full disclosure I have a Bobcat dual in my netbook and I think in that context they are great, I also use them to replace P4s in offices and for a basic office box it also works well, is simply NOT CAPABLE of doing what you want it to do, not without just pimpslapping the shit out of the cores. Look up the benches on notebook check and see how the fastest bobcat stacks up, its a design that gets its ass handed to it by the absolute weakest Celeron chips and gets curbstomped by a 5 year old Athlon, hell give me the slowest Athlon dual core that they make and it'll run rings around the Bobcat as its not made to compete with anything BUT the Intel Atom.

So I'm sorry but you are falling for "magical thinking" in that "Since this product has (buzzword) it'll kick serious ass!" when in reality there is no getting over the fact that this chip just isn't built for that. I mean are you HONESTLY gonna argue that having a pool of standard DDR memory is gonna be FASTER than having a dedicated pile of GDDR 5 for the GPU and an equally large DDR 3 pile for the CPU, really? You DO know that no matter how they spin it you are STILL having to have ALL the graphical memory and computer memory on a single bus, yes? And that you can go to plenty of sites where they even paired the Bobcat with a dedicated GPU just to take the tired old "Oh it shares memory" argument out of the equation and it STILL loses badly to a Celeron or Athlon, yes?

To steal a line from Mel Brooks "Bullshit, bullshit aaaannnddd bullshit" because no matter how you spin it you can't change the fact that at its core its still the weak as hell bobcat chip that frankly has more in common with the P3 than it does with a modern arch. I'm sorry but you could put all the fucking memory on the die itself, its not gonna change the fact that you are using a design where they gave not a single fuck about anything OTHER than battery life and price, seeing as how this chip was built to compete with Atom in netbooks and tablets.

Shared memory is NOT gonna change the fact you have a CPU with such a low instructions per clock that it gets beat by a 5 year old Athlon because all the memory in the world isn't gonna give it shit when it comes to IPC, that all arch and jaguar was made to be cheap and give a decent battery life THAT IS ALL.

Actually if Valve pulls off their Steambox you'll have the best of both worlds, machines designed to be ready to go out of the box but with multiple vendors competing to lower costs and give you choice. That said its been reported that the PS4 and Xbox Stupid (Sorry I'm not calling it Xbox One, Xbox one was a Celeron 733MHz big green and black box that was easy to hack and make into a media tank, this thing is a corporate DRM wet dream) are both gonna be north of $400 at launch which means frankly you could build or buy a decent PC that can game for roughly the same price only again thanks to competition you can buy the games from multiple vendors which keeps the prices down.

I do wanna know WTF is going on at MSFT though, because frankly if I didn't know any better I'd swear somebody was trying to torpedo the company from within. I mean you take a console, which the whole reason people buy a console over a PC is because all you really need is the console and a TV, hassle free and simple to use, and you then tie a fucking boat anchor of phone home DRM that makes the system into a useless hunk of plastic if it can't call home every 24 hours (Fuck even Steam gives you 30 days between connections with offline mode) but that isn't enough so just to make absolutely sure the system goes down about as well as finding a flaming bag of shit on your doorstep you put a bullshit mechanism that locks every game after a single install behind a paywall? So the only other advantage, the ability to rent games, trade games, and buy used, is completely destroyed in a move so nasty that an antitrust investigation really needs to happen? I'm sorry but if I was told the facts without anything else I'd swear a mole was sabotaging the company.

So I'm just glad I switched my boys over to Steam and PC gaming, because between this and Sony with their "Oh we have the same paywall thing but its up to the publishers whether or not they want to use it" which means spoiler alert! EA and Activision and probably Ubisoft will ALL use this bullshit it has made one thing perfectly clear which Angry Joe in that video points out....there is no longer ANY advantages to owning a console over a PC, and a hell of a lot more downsides. Now you will be forced to install everything to the hard drive (which with the Xbox S is a lousy 500GB like that won't run out damned quickly) and it will ALL be tied to a single account thanks to the DRM...huh...doesn't that sound familiar? Kinda like...ohhh I don't know...Steam only without the MUCH lower prices that make it worth using? Basically they've turned the new consoles into nothing but a PC but expect you to pay console prices for games but with none of the upsides to having a console!

So as for TFA from what I understand the Wii U is the only one that is actually still a console in that you can rent games, trade games, buy and sell used games, the other two are just overpriced PCs. If the Wii U can hit the right price point I can see those fed up with the wallet raping the other two are planning buying the Wii U if they aren't ready to switch back to the PC. Personally I think we are gonna see a new PC golden age as a gaming device, I really do. Never before has it been so simple to hook a PC into a TV thanks to HDMI being everywhere, you can get a much better variety of design in controllers that will work with the PC, and thanks to Valve and the Steambox you'll be able to walk into any Worst Buy or Wally World (as well as any mom & pop shop like mine) and just look for the Steam sticker and know it'll game right OOTB. And most importantly thanks to competition you'll have plenty of choices when it comes to where you buy your game, hell if you never wanted to spend a dime you have an endless amount of FTP games to choose from. Being on a PC has never been better and these companies are shooting themselves in the head by focusing on how they can wring every penny instead of making a compelling product, PCs are gonna be THE way to game IMHO.

I thought the UK got their stuff from the Americans? Is Canada really taking third hand stuff when America is right next door? Our economy may be shit but one thing we can do is build a sub, hell its pretty much the only weapons tech we can still build worth a fuck, not like we can build a plane that does more than suck money.

BTW would it be possible to get a tag warning if something is from Fox news or HuffPo? I try to avoid propaganda and those two sites are nothing BUT propaganda and frankly they are the absolute WORST kind of propaganda in that they promote that mindless ballclub mentality where they'll excuse anything that a slimy politician does as long as they have the correct letter after their name. I don't think you can do anything worse to this country than to promote mindless ballclub mentality and a "Oh you can't question that because he is on OUR side" bullshit, because it promotes hypocrisy and blind loyalty, the same ones that railed against the excess of the Bush white house will turn a blind eye and smile to shit like Fast & Furious which was nothing but a false flag against the American people, its fucking disgusting mindless flag waving is what it is.

So how about a little heads up before you link to a propaganda site huh? Both sites are as heavily tilted as Soviet era Pravda and if either told me it was raining I'd want a second opinion, when I see an article on either one I just start wondering on how this helps their cause or hurts the other flag wavers, because that is pretty much all they care about.

This is such an egregious typo that I have a hard time believing it wasn't deliberate.

Dont be so sure. Back in the day when I played videogames there was a very strong Sony vs Nintendo rivalry. Specially in the SNES vs Genesis generation I remember some Sega people saying that the SNES was not truly 16bit (but super-charged 12 bits). The thing is, Sega fans would laugh at the thought of a Sonic game in a Nintendo console... fast forward 15 years, and it is the *only* place where you can get a Sega game.

I can imagine than in 5 to 10 years, all the Nintendo franchises (Zelda, Mario, Metroid, etc) will be part of either Microsoft or Sony's console. The latter would be very funny (or sad, depending on how you see it) as in the beginning Sony's gaming technology was supposed to work for Nintendo.

Probably to 15 decimal places on a workstation with more transistors than the entire world possessed in 1980, along with an entire PPT deck full of pretty renders, and a basic sanity check skipped early in the process...

I think that his point is that, with CAD, even a trained monkey can tell the software "Just iterate through all the pretty little pictures we drew, multiply their volume by their density, and then add it all up" and arrive at a final weight.

It's definitely the case that myopic-design-by-CAD allows people to fuck up in ways that the days of Heroic Engineering and designers who had to be just-that-good in order to design anything didn't; but a CAD system, unless the software is a ghastly morass of nightmarish failure, should make basic accounting-style checks comparatively simple.

I wouldn't be so proud of the fact(given that most of Spain's "sunken patrimony" is just bullion that they were brutal enough to grind out of the backs of the locals in South America; but not competent enough to ship back to Europe); but it's probably true. The sheer scale of Spain's "Why don't we just ship every last troy ounce of precious metal we can get our hands on in the entire western hemisphere?" project was really pretty nuts. Unfortunately for them, of course, the kind of "wealth" that is shiny and looks good in treasure chests tends to be rather less useful than the mixture of human and technical capital that actual productive economies are built with(a comparison with what the relatively tiny Dutch were doing at the same time the Spanish Empire was considered something of a superpower is instructive)...

According to our wiki overlords this project (as is totally customary for military designs) has some tangled family history going back to the cold war, and the actual contract currently being fucked up was approved in 2003, signed in 2004, and was itself an iteration on a slightly different plan originating in the late 90s. Spain may well have been totally fucked in the early 00s; but it was still riding high on the 'nobody seems to have caught on yet' section of the bubble.

Now, in an ideal world, Spain would probably just say 'fuck it, "commie naval invasion" is so far down the list of our problems that we should just scrap the whole damn thing.'; but defense programs rarely die so easily or cleanly, regardless of their nation of origin.

I went on holiday for three weeks in March. While on the train to the airport, I set the work email account "check frequency" to "never".

My manager has my personal email address (I have hers). She has used it once: on the final day of a holiday last year she emailed to tell me that the office was shut to non-essential staff due to a problem with the water supply. That's the way it should be! She also has my mobile phone number, but she's never called it.

I'm on holiday again this week. I don't have a sensibly priced data service, which usually makes me realise how often I pull my phone out of my pocket in otherwise empty moments. Too much!

Not that there aren't lots of problems with these so-called "free trade" agreements that really aren't... but this would definitely be a violation and would justify sanctions (such as tariffs) from treaty member nations.

What good does a "competitive advantage" do if the "profit advantage" is taken out of it?

Hahahaha. Sure. But look at all the "waterfall" projects that have failed after 10 years and more billions of dollars or pounds. I'm not sure about over there, but there have been a few famous ones in the U.S.

Since Chavez took office, the Bolivar lost its value by 992%.

So... people pay you dollars if you agree to take their bolivars away?