I enjoyed that one too but when I think Lwaxana the first things that pop into my mind are when she, Troi, and Riker get kidnapped by Ferengi and when she goes crazy because of Troi's secret sister. I did like her DS9 episodes though.

Some of the Crusher episodes were good though like the one involving the solar shielding tech(which showed up in a later episode) and the one where everyone on the Enterprise keep disappearing. I'm assuming the awful one you refer to is the one from season 7 where she gets space raped by a ghost candle. The lesson here is that stories about women can be good when the writers give them stuff to do besides being space raped.

For the most part, yes. They only mention the ones where Troi gets space raped. They don't even bring up the Luwaxana episodes.

Let's do this. Burn the redesign into the fucking ground!

This is the chip that unites the CPU and GPU into one programing model with unified memory addressing. Heterogeneous System Architecture(HSA) and Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access(HUMA) are the nice buzzword acronyms that AMD came up with but it basically removes the latency from accessing GPU resources and makes memory sharing between the CPU cores and GPU cores copy free. You can now dispatch instructions to the GPU cores almost as easily and as quickly as you do to the basic ALU/FPU/SSE units of the CPU.

Will software be written to take advantage of this though?

Will Intel eventually support it on their stuff?

Ars article on the new architecture.

Anandtech article on the Kaveri release.

You've been able to add shortcuts to non-Steam games from within Steam since... oh... forever. I've got a shortcut to notepad in Steam that I rename whatever I want so people that I'm friends with can see shit like...

Dudeman
In non-Steam game
Nerdfest has full-blown AIDS

You can make shortcuts to any executable you want and name it anything you want. It's pretty cool.

Agreed. Just imagine decent x86 Surface tablet with an AMD Jaguar based chip or that new Intel Atom with the Silvermont cores that is supposed to not suck. It probably wouldn't too be too difficult get something like that into that $400-$500 price range. Sure it couldn't be as awesome as the Surface Pro in other aspects either but the compatibility with desktop applications would go a much longer way to promoting the Windows 8.1 platform on the consumer end than the stupid RT.

If they really want to promote RT they need to make it like their OS software has always been up to this point. Start offering the software by itself and support it on third party hardware and allow us to install and play with on our Nexus and other tablet devices. They couldn't charge much (if anything) for it in this climate but do they want in the game or not?

Quake Live runs their engine through a NPAPI plugin. They're supposed to port that to NaCl just for Chrome users? More likely they'll just not support it and ask people to switch to Firefox.

We're talking about running our Steam libraries here. MS and Sony are not going to allow the Steam software and our huge legacy libraries to run on their shiny new consoles even though the hardware itself(x86) could handle it quite well.

WINE may be a kludge but my library has over 200 games and most will not be ported to Linux. It's just not happening. So they need to get that "kludge" to the point where we can easily run most to all of our Windows games in order to get people to switch. Once people switch then they native ports will come and that kludge's role can slowly be faded out. Hardware and software will eventually get to the point where we can properly virtualize or emulate the old stuff instead of "kludge" it. If you want people to switch today though, you need to "kludge" our libraries so they function. It's the only way.

That IS the difference. I actually like Windows(even 8/8.1) for the most part. I also like the idea of running Linux instead but my Steam library has over 200 games. I think about 15-20 of those titles work natively under Linux. Valve has to invest in WINE and perhaps hire some of the developers directly like they did for SDL to get it to a level where most of our games can work under Linux just as they do under Windows. There's no way I'm switching from something that just works for all of my productivity and gaming needs to something else that cannot run the programs I run.

Ideally I'd like to see them make their own distro with all of the drivers and WINE shit needed to just allow all software in my library to run just like it does under Windows. I double-click the title, it downloads and installs, and then I run the thing. Not all Windows games need to run perfectly and some might not ever run at all but that needs to be the exception and not the rule.

I'm not going to dual-boot. I'm not going fuck with a separate Windows instance of Steam through WINE which I have to configure arcane settings for each game I have. Make WINE good enough and integrate it with Steam so almost every game I "own" can work right out of the box or there's not even a choice to made about what OS I'm going to run.

Ummm.... I liked Vista just fine(I actually had the hardware to run it). I also like 8/8.1(oh no, my start menu looks different again).

People forget that when XP came out it had the exact same problems with hardware that Vista had at release(most PCs didn't have enough RAM and new driver model problems). XP also changed the start menu in a way that added an extra click to get to the "real start menu". I'll grant you that at least they gave you option of switching back to the old Win95/2K start menu. Eventually I got used to the new XP start menu though, just like I got used to the changed Vista/7 menu, and just like I got used to the new full screen 8/8.1 start menu. Taskbar pinning, search functionality, and (my old favorite) desktop shortcuts make searching through the start menu to run your programs a pretty obsolete way of getting shit done anyway.

It's fun to complain about change though.

Windows 8 Client Hyper-V REQUIRES VT-d. Otherwise there is no first-party VM solution for Windows 8 and you're have to install VirtualBox or WMware. Windows 8 doesn't default to installing into Hyper-V when the requirements are met as the parent suggests. Hyper-V is a feature that needs to be installed on all machines. Once installed then Windows 8 boots the hypervisor first then boots Win8 from the drive as a highly privileged VM. Performance for most things is near where it would be if the OS was on bare metal(thanks to the required VT-d instructions). "Host"(i.e. that highly privileged VM you boot to) 3D game performance does take a noticeable hit however even with no other VMs running so I leave the Client Hyper-V turned off most of the time. I'm guessing that Intel knows this and figures that overclockers won't give a shit about running type-1 hypervisors on their gaming desktops. Still a dick move though. Microsoft should get pissed at them but I doubt that would matter anymore or at least not as much as it used to.

Technically, those are cyborg(not robot) rules.

Same goes for New Super Mario Bros. Wii also. NSMB for the DS is an amazing game and only makes you use the touch screen for calling a power up with a giant button on there. NSMBWii makes you do stupid controller wiggles for all kinds of shit like the spin jump move that would work nicely by pressing UP+A. Instead you gotta wiggle the fucking controller and hoped you wiggled it enough and slow enough for the game to register. It turned a great game into a frustrating mess.