Back in the real world, how much would you think the asking price of the first copy of Photoshop or Lord of the Rings should be? And if your answer to that is to put it on Kickstarter, I'm going to laugh. If you want custom development it's going to be $50+ a day at minimum wage, many hundred dollars a day if you want it to actually work (if that's not a requirement you can put it on rent-a-coder too) and nobody's going to "take one for the team". And you've got no guarantee you'll get what you wanted unless you have an iron-clad contract listing exact deliveries with no cure, no pay conditions - and you still have to fight the developer over it. Hell, if any of those methods worked open source would already have taken over since you could hire people to work on it for you today, without changing the law.

People in general don't want that risk, plain and simply. I don't want to fund an author that is looking to write a book or even pay chapter by chapter if I feel there's a risk he'll just leave me hanging in the middle. I'd like him to write it, then I can choose to buy it or not. That is your analogy fail, I want to walk the proverbial isles of the app store the same way I walk in the grocery store, I want to see the finished product on offer and either pay or pass it up. That's how "every other labor industry does" but in your world everything in the store should then be free, because all the work is already done. Real world goods have overhead too, it's not like the price of a pound of beef is literally all cost attached to that pound, there were probably lots of fixed cost that'd be paid if that cow was there or not. But that overhead was spread across all pounds of beef the way a developer spreads his overhead (that is, actually writing it) across all the copies.

Or the TL;DR version: I think $1 for Angry Birds was a bloody good deal and don't see it happening without copyright to organize the "pooling".

Sounds like you should check your fan, my CPU was hitting 99C under load and the reason was that the cheap plastic attaching it to the motherboard had failed from fatigue and the fan was loose on one side but still marginally attached to the processor, providing enough cooling for light loads. No properly attached cooler should have a problem with a 77W processor, not even the cheap OEM ones. The reason I noticed was because it was getting slightly unstable, so since I didn't want to do any more thermal damage to it I got a big 80mm push-pull fan that keeps it very cool. Seems to work so far.

So let's compare single threaded CPU performance at equal price points then shall we. No? Ah right, the comparison of choice lately has been gaming performance at equal price points. Choose the scenario where you win and pretend it's the only scenario that matters, it's a powerful form of self-delusion. But that aside, they don't compete directly just yet but Intel just proved they have an integrated graphics solution that is faster and uses less power than anything AMD can come up with. That is what most people would call "technical superiority" where you can extract tons of profit by offering products your competitors can't. Intel has a lot of that, AMD just lost one of the last strong cards in their deck.

Take a grounded reality check - is AMD's pricing because they're this undiscovered treasure chest of excellent processors or because they're selling inferior solutions they won't sell any other way? I think you can certainly rule out that it's a strategic plan from AMD's side, given how their latest financial statements look. Intel is not pricing Haswell aggressively at all, if anything they're increasing prices so that maybe AMD can manage to not go bankrupt and get Intel in all sorts of scrutiny over their x86 monopoly. And still AMD is failing, really if they can't manage to undersell Intel at the prices Intel have now maybe AMD doesn't deserve to be in business. Sad for the consumer, but true.

So far, because that chip:
1) Trounces AMD in CPU performance
2) Uses less than half the power
3) Is a fully featured mobile chip
where
4) Is somewhat faster in graphics
is only a small detail.

The interesting chip here is the i7-4770R, OEM only and no reviews yet but the same graphics will come to the desktop somehow. I expect it will be sold as motherboards with CPU soldered on for DIY builds, like the Atom boards.

Anandtech tested it, idle power is down probably due to the new voltage regulator (FIVR) but active power.... 113% the performance for 111.8% so performance per watt is essentially unchanged. If what you need is CPU power then you're better off waiting for a IVB-E hex-core in Q3, in threaded applications a quad-core Haswell won't touch a hex-core Ivy Brigde - it's trailing Sandy Bridge hex-cores as well. If you're not interested in the graphics or battery life, it's a giant yawn.

That said, the GT3e graphics for mobile looks to carve out a solid niche in the notebook market, the R-series desktop processors (GT3e graphics, BGA only) is probably compelling for AIOs that don't have room for graphics upgrades anyway and the lower idle wattage should be good for all laptops with Haswell graphics. None of the processors launched now have the new idle states for ultramobile/tablets, so the effect of those we'll have to wait to see. Anandtech tested the i7-4950HQ and it was impressive how a 47W mobile chip consistently beat AMDs A10-5800 100W desktop APU in gaming benchmarks. Of course it's going to sell in a price range of its own, but AMD just lost the crown here.

As a CPU in a regular tower with discrete graphics it's at best incremental but I think the full launch lineup hit all of Intel's main competitors - it's threatening AMD and nVidia's low end discrete card sales, it's threatening AMDs APU sales and the lower idle power is promising for their lower power parts that will compete with ARM. They're just not winning much against the i7-3770K but then they're also fighting against themselves in that market, the FX-8350 is not even close. The 8-series chipset finally brings 6 SATA3 ports, so the main AMD advantage chipset-wise also disappeared.

There's nothing special about tablets, except for one thing: users don't expect backwards compatibility. You can make significant improvements if your customers don't expect to be able to use your product as a drop-in replacement for something else.

The hardware lock elision stuff is going to be more than just a little bit useful. It means that software that uses coarse-grained locking can get the same sort of performance as software using fine-grained locking and close to the performance of software written specifically to support transactional memory. It will be interesting to see if Intel's cross-licensing agreements with other chip makers includes the relevant patents. If it's something that is widely adopted, then it is likely to change how we write parallel software. If not, then it will just make certain categories of code significantly more scalable on Intel than other CPUs.

They probably already seem innocuous in context, because it seems to me all legally operating porn sites are extremely paranoid of being associated in any way with underage content. The suggestions are quite frankly bizarre and counterproductive, a registration requirement for being allowed to search for porn? With the implication that this'll be a huge red flag on you since the border between legal and illegal sexual images is nothing but a thin red line rather than the difference between a healthy, fun and common recreational activity between consenting adults and child abuse. What it in practice will do is make more people use the unofficial and anonymous channels, drowning out any signal to noise ratio of the really illegal material.

One of the greatest challenges of any system is the stigma of running it, sure downloading Justin Bieber and Game of Thrones via torrents isn't exactly legal but nobody really bats an eye at that anymore than admitting you were speeding on the interstate. And every male teen will understand why you'd want to torrent Asa Akira or Jenna Haze too, if you can't find them on Google. But if you start talking about things like BitCoin and TOR more will start wondering if you're involved with drugs, money laundering, terrorism, kiddie porn or you're a tinfoil hat nutter. Like, what does any "normal" person need it for and by that I don't mean law abiding. Drive porn underground and being underground will become socially accepted.

By "real value" do you mean the cost of copying it? Or the $1 people are willing to pay for the convenience instead of chasing it down on a pirate site for $0? Besides, you're confusing "real value" with rational behavior. If I'm drop dead in love with a song with a song and would pay $10 for it but it's offered for sale for $1 then of course I buy it. Just because you feel the total cost (moral, legal, financial) of copying that textbook is a better value than buying the $350 eBook the real value is neither, it's the point where you'd make do without it. Which is sadly rather high since you'd be pretty likely to fail without the book, students that want to pass the class is a very captive market.

You can start worrying already:
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/12/28/163211/ask-slashdot-linux-friendly-motherboard-manufacturers

Nope, still doesn't make any sense. The winners gets to dictate terms to the losers, they may lose their country, their houses and land, their goods and property, their laws, their freedoms, their civil rights, they can become all manner of second class citizens or practically slaves without being killed. Robotic soldiers can impose martial law with not a circuit for leniency or compassion, most want a cowed enemy not a dead enemy. Not that there haven't been genocides where they intentionally seek to wipe out the civil population, but that is by far not most wars. You still don't want to be on the losing end of one.

1. Create new crypto mining scheme
2. Mine lots of early, practicially free coins
3. Increase mining complexity
4. Convince everyone this is the next big thing
5. Watch dollar value soar
6. Cash out your free coin for real money
7. Leave suckers with worthless bits nobody wants for anything

Or in short, why be a peon in BitCoin when you can be king of a new currency?

This. Here in Norway the Tesla Model S is looking like a very compelling offer because they're getting all the tax breaks of electric vehicles and the taxes tend to be much higher on high end cars which means that here a $80k Model S Performance sells for about the same as a slightly upgraded Audi A6 that'd sell for $50k in the US. Or if you look at cars that'd be roughly even priced in the US like the $75k Audi A8 it sells for 90% more than the Tesla here. Yes, it's exploiting a tax structure that won't last but right now they're getting to sell a damn fine high performance car like it was the most environmental-friendly subcompact on the block.

They've confirmed that 1000+ people here are now on a waiting list in a country of 5 million people, that's the equivalent of 60k+ in the US. And that was before the 99/100 Consumer Reports score which was widely publicized. It's not petrol/diesel car volume but they're getting decent volume - it's not like you're one of ten people in the country who has one, they get real people who have experience with them - most people are very conservative and true to brand when it comes to car purchases - and they get to boot a charger network. All in all, I'd say this looks like wins all around for them. So far I think they've promised the EV perks will last out 2015, if they come to an end I expect a huge rush of Tesla Model S orders before that who are still waiting for the first round of kinks to be worked out first.

That only works in cases where there are clear and specific requirements/specifications for how this software should work or it crashes in some way no application ever should. Even then, the user won't know those he only sees what he thinks is incorrect behavior. Usually the definition of correct is just a meeting of minds, the user saying this doesn't look right, the developer agrees and the code changes since most bugs appear where the specification says nothing at all. And if the code follows the specifications it usually just moves the problem up a level, are the specifications correct or not. It's great for a blame-shifting game but really the user only cares about what he can't do, not why he can't do it and at what level it failed.

WINE also does the same, if you want a bug to stay open you have to babysit it. But to be fair they're often dealing with closed source software that they might not have a copy of themselves.