I can say this with some authority as a game developer who's working on console titles and with mobile phones:

You are assuming that there's another, more advanced console generation on the horizon. There isn't. Microsoft hasn't announced it, Sony hasn't announced, and Nintendo is still catching up to the last generation. Oh sure, eventually we'll get one, but I'd be surprised if we even got an announcement about a more powerful console within a year.

Meanwhile, sub-1-watt GPUs are gaining ground FAST. The latest phone chipsets are within a stone's throw of "fast enough that nobody can afford to make content that fully uses the graphics hardware".

That's the real reason we're not seeing another console hardware generation: the art budget to fully take advantage of current-generation hardware is in the neighbourhood of $30M. You can't spend much more than that on average and still expect to make money on a game.

So, yeah, you're not wrong, but you're missing the big picture. Nintendo got it when they released the Wii; Epic gets it. It would be nice to get phones up to par with the consoles so we don't have to spend quite as much time optimizing our code, and so the lowest common denominator is better, but game developers aren't all that anxious for more graphics horsepower than the Xbox 360 offers.

I don't think the console form factor is going away, but regardless, there's a lot of value in unified tech across all platforms, PC, console, and mobile; mobile is going to be big enough soon that every serious game engine is going to have to be mobile-capable, even if games are still largely being targeted at consoles.

This was a bizarre concept at one point, there was no way you could use the same engine on e.g. the Nintendo DS and the Xbox 360. Now handhelds and consoles are close enough that it would be stupid not to use the same engine...

GP is actually partly correct though, the spot is staying relatively still side-to-side, so with respect to the direction that the building is parabolically shaped it's stationary; the article is just saying the spot is moving back and forth because the building is vertically flat.

You're not supposed to feel sympathy for the Japanese of the 30s and 40s; they were guilty of terrible atrocities, but that war is over now. You're supposed to feel sympathy for the Japanese of 2010, who weren't in charge almost universally weren't even alive for World War II and are not acting particularly imperialist or aggressive.

The point is that most white westerners have similarly barbaric atrocities of imperialism somewhere in their not-too-distant past. Go back far enough and everyone can find an ancestor that murdered a rival warlord's entire tribe; if you believe that what your grandparents' neighbours did should condemn you, we are all guilty!

Eventually we have to forgive, or at least forget, if we're going to live together.

Aren't you basically talking about a materialized view? (This FAQ item has a simpler explanation than you'll get digging through the documentation above)

I haven't worked with materialized views, but if you want notification when the data changes, usually you can set up a trigger...

Google is big, but Google is not big enough to just buy Oracle. Their market caps are pretty close: Google at ~$150bn, Oracle at ~$115bn.

Hmm, actually rechecking the numbers it looks like current tech might not beat this in raw bandwidth yet. Still, it's pretty close -- 30GB/s instead of 50GB/s, or something like that, for equipment that's been available for a year.

You people are not thinking nearly creative enough. The article doesn't make it clear why you'd want to move your memory farther away -- it would increase latency, yeah, but moreover, what are you going to put that close to the CPU? There isn't anything else competing for the space.

Here's a more interesting idea than just "outboard RAM": what if you replaced the RAM on a blade with a smaller but faster bank of cache memory, and for bulk memory had a giant federated memory bank that was shared by all the blades in an enclosure?

Think multi-hundred-CPU, modular, commodity servers instead of clusters.

Think taking two commodity servers, plugging their optical buses together, and getting something that behaves like a single machine with twice the resources. Seamless clustering handled at the hardware level, like SLI for computing instead of video if you want to make that analogy.

Minor complaint, the summary is a little misleading with units: they're advertising not 50 gigabits/s, but 50 gigabytes/s. Current i7 architectures already have substantially more memory bandwidth than this to local RAM, so the advantage is definitely communication distance here, not speed.

Interesting speculation but unlikely. The Java-specific mode (Jazelle) is deprecated; ARM's for a few years already been moving instead to a mode that supports CLR and JVM managed runtimes equally well, called ThumbEE, which is already in the newer Cortex A8-based smartphone chipsets:

ThumbEE in Jazelle article on Wikipedia
Information on ThumbEE from the ARM tech docs

It's a much more elegant approach -- do all the easy transformations via JIT compilation to the existing native ARM instructions, and add a handful of extra instructions to speed up the expensive things you do all the time, like null pointer checks and array bounds tests.

I don't. I bet it's low. When you run a team of 200 for 2 years it adds up to half that just for salary and facilities, never mind marketing, operations cost of running betas and building out server infrastructure, QA... and that's if they're actually doing a reasonably efficient job, which Blizzard is not exactly famous for.

This wasn't a 2-year sprint either, it's been what, 7 years of probably false starts and rewriting tech and toolchains? And Blizzard is known for high production values in their cutscenes. The figure is totally believable.

Hollywood has a really good (well, actually really terrible but understandable) reason to do Hollywood accounting: the producers are trying to screw the people who might be paid royalties. Nobody does game development for royalties, so there's really no reason for Activision to fudge the numbers like that.

Because it's apt. As much as people like to paint the Chinese government as a cartoon evil, for the most part they're more of a fumbling, incomprehensible bureaucracy, just like every other government. I've watched people at my company deal with the same kind of stuff, trying to meet government requirements for online software, and the distinct impression I got was of jumping through arbitrary hoops.

The Chinese government is still doing some scary things, but it's not like 30 years ago, that's for sure.

But if the light were being converted to food energy that efficiently, wouldn't the plant necessarily grow faster? If it didn't end up bigger, it would have to be burning the sugar and turning the energy back into heat...? <head explode>

(I suspect the real reason is the "600W" LED lights are actually "equivalent in brightness to 600W incandescent grow lights" that draw 100W.)

If I don't replace my sparking electrical wiring, the insurance co will buy me a new house when it burns down.

Right, of course they'll try to prove you negligent so they can not pay out.

The problem is you can't use the same procedure in health care because (a) you need to use every incentive to get people to go to the doctor because they just plain don't like going and (b) it's inhumane; you shouldn't refuse to pay for a lifesaving amputation just because they might have been okay if they'd got that skin infection checked a week sooner. And really, (c) it's a cost-benefit people can't really be trusted to make correctly anyway.

It doesn't matter what the personal motivations of the PhD are, what matters is that they're going to publish data and we'll all indirectly benefit. The yahoos aren't going to publish; therefore, the greater good is served by giving the PhDs priority access.

It's simple fucking common sense! And letting someone who has a job to do do it is common courtesy. Would you be happy if people were driving the delivery routes of UPS trucks and slowing them down? What if it was your package in the back of the truck, and you knew it was going to come a day late and $5 more expensive because a bunch of dicks thought tracing that route was a grand time?

I'm not saying we should outlaw getting in the way of a data collection truck, but the people doing it are still kinda dicks.

Yes, until you actually apply the brakes, or use engine braking, at which point you're wasting the energy you accumulated as potential energy and turning it into heat. So, of course the spread will depend a lot on how steep the hills are, how many of them there are, how much energy you can recover from regenerative braking, and how the efficiencies of your gas and electric motors change under heavy load vs. light load.

I've never driven to Alaska, if the roads up and down this pass are relatively flat it may make no difference. If they're quite steep, they might not be able to recover enough energy with their regenerative braking and they might not make it to the next town anyway, even though they're doing better than the gas car. If you're going to look at the problem holistically, you have to care about road conditions and temperature, too.

I just think it's cool they're trying. Give them the benefit of the doubt.

248 miles is measured using the EPA test, which includes a lot of braking. On open highway alone, they'll do better. Besides, they might not get wonderful mileage in a pass, but with regenerative braking on the downhills, they won't be as affected by it as a gas powered car.

I just drove through the rockies in a second-gen Prius, and the regenerative braking seemed to do a pretty good job of smoothing out the consumption: I'd get worse consumption on the uphill and better on the downhill, and it seemed to average out to just the same as what I got on the flat; within 10% if you believe the meter in the car.