How is this news? If you follow any tech news outlet, you know that every piece of Apple news is immediately jumped on by a rabid pack of trolls. For whatever reason, Apple anti-fans are the biggest vocal minority on the internet.

If Ivey and his associate hadn't won SO MUCH in such a short time, and instead had a strategy of losing back some of the winnings (or not using their tactic to win quite as much), they might have actually gotten away with this. It's always suspicious when someone goes on a hot run, especially when it is over multiple visits. I've met Ivey (from my poker days), he's clearly a really talented guy - but he's also a degenerate gambler, and his greed did him in.

I didn't want one either. So much so that when my wife surprised me with an Apple watch for Christmas last year, I could hardly hide my disappointment. Thinking "I really didn't *want* one of these"...

But having used a smart watch for a while now, I absolutely love it. Why?

1. The haptic feedback. I run my phone on silent 24/7, which meant that I was constantly having to double-check that I didn't miss a message while walking around. There's no missing or mistaking the prominent tap from the watch so this problem is solved. No more missed messages and no more randomly checking my phone.
2. The weather. I wouldn't have predicted this one, but having the current weather conditions plus the day's high/low temps on the watch face is super useful. I probably look at my watch for the weather conditions almost as often as I look at it for the time.
3. The general freedom of not needing my phone in my hand. In lots of small ways throughout the day, a well-functioning smart watch is another one of those "living in the future" joys. Sending messages by voice without even pulling out your phone, pausing/resuming podcasts while mowing the lawn, getting haptic navigation directions while having an uninterrupted conversation... a good smart watch is clearly a step forward.

As a former skeptic turned believer, it's a shame to see so many people dumping on these devices without having the chance to really see what they offer.

ahem.

Sorry, I only take comments like this seriously when written by someone with an actual user account, instead of an AC. Then they're being "professional" and standing by their words. In all seriousness, I have experienced virtually no hipsterism in engineering culture over the course of 2 decades in the industry. Those that were about style over substance usually didn't even make it through getting their engineering degree. If you look at computer languages through the lens of "C++ is a proven technology" then you're ignoring other advances that make other solutions more appropriate. This comes from a place of not-understanding, rather than something being objectively better for any task. I started as a C++ developer for the first half of my career, and while I still occasionally maintain some older C++ software, most innovative work is done in modern languages now. Also, have you ever heard of a buffer overflow? There are lots of good reasons not to write certain things in C++, one of them being that it's easy to make a mistake and create a security nightmare. You might have heard of this when watching "business news".

A couple things:

- As someone else mentioned, Twitch Turbo users simply removes adds for the viewer, but does NOT affect the channel operator's ad revenue. Users get the "Turbo" icon in chat
- Channel subscribers get access to subscriber emotes in chat (usable across all of Twitch) in addition to the subscriber icon for that channel, and sub-only chat (if applicable - generally only streamers that have very high simultaneous viewers enable this, to keep chat usable for subscribers).
- "Transcodes", i.e. quality options of low/medium/high in addition to "Source", can become available when a channel reaches a certain threshold of simultaneous viewers. While having partnership can mean the streamer always has them, it is NOT required for transcodes to become available.

If they tested all the cards in the same case, then they did nothing wrong in their testing. Maybe it wouldn't be 57dB for the 290 in another PC case, but it would be lower for all the other cards too. Perhaps it wouldn't necessarily be a linear drop across all the cards, but you can't simply say their choice of case invalidates their findings that this card is REALLY loud compared to other cards. Plenty of people will own cases with "horrible acoustic profile[s]".

In the next several years, it might be weird to _still_ have a Facebook account. Just like an AOL email, myspace account...

I left FB in 2009 and haven't looked back.

You wrote all those paragraphs without sufficiently addressing tablets, e.g. IPad, which has far more in common with "mobile platforms" than desktops (at least, Apple's does, though Windows 8 is a different beast, time will tell).
Needless to say, there's a convergence appearing, and the distinction between desktop and mobile may virtually disappear in time. Your efficiency arguments make logical sense from a techie perspective but are not necessarily pragmatic for the broader population. I think your analysis is much more in line with the present and past, but not really a vision of the future. In fact, the suggestion that desktops will "always be the best value and experience at home" comes off to me as rather myopic.
As the parent reply suggested, your piece is very close to satire. You are blinded by your own workflow and think that people 'tire of 15" ' laptop screens and such. But that's just you projecting your own preferences on the broader public, and it's exactly the kind of thinking that stifles creativity. I realize I'm coming off a bit harsh here - but it's clear from your posts that you are thinking in a bubble.