Sony actually intended for it to be the graphic chips. Early on they were doing graphics demos of things running on a number of Cell chips. However, it wasn't good at that either and as the PS3 went in to hardware development, it was clear that they'd need a real GPU.

Well rather than just admit that the Cell wasn't ready for a consumer device (I mean who the fuck tries to put first gen technology in a consumer device) they decided to make it the CPU instead, and had nVidia make them a GPU.

Ultimately Cell's long term problem has been GPUs themselves. As you say Cell sucks as a general purpose CPU. No problem, that wasn't really its design. However as a stream processor it can't keep up with the new GPUs. That wasn't an issue when it was designed (this was back in the pre nVidia 8800 days) but now it gets out stream processed by GPUs.

Hence it has kinda just languished. IBM has chattered about it a bit, but nothing has happened.

I am Russian, FYI.

As a Russian living in US, I can assure you that Russia is nowhere near a "bastion of human rights" or "the right to expose corruption" - certainly lagging much behind the US on both counts. The sole reason why they're helping Snowden is because his exposure hurts US. If he tried the same stunt against the Russian government, he'd find himself rotting in some unnamed hole pretty quick, along with any journalist who'd try to report on it.

They wouldn't get 2 years in prison for doing that kind of thing in US, or any other sane country.

Indeed, some guys did something very similar in Finland shortly after. IIRC they ended up doing some community service.

Iceland is not just any small country. It's a first world European country with close ties to EU members. Invading it to get some whistleblower would be seen in a very negative light by Europe - it would probably result in immediate dissolution of NATO, and economic sanctions by EU against US.

In this particular case, the national self-interest that Russia is pursuing in Syria is the naval base that it's renting from the Syrian government - which also happens to be the only one that Russia has in Mediterranean.

No, I was talking about Windows (Vista and above). And yes, it is that smart.

At the same time, most apps that don't declare themselves as high-DPI aware really aren't (in fact, some which do also aren't). The good old Win32 UI APIs mostly measure things in device-dependent pixels (except for CreateDialog, which uses device-independent "dialog units"). The first UI framework that was DPI-independent through and through was WPF, and that came in relatively late, in 2006. On the other hand, with WPF, it is practically impossible to write an app that is not DPI-aware (because even WPF pixels are logical).

Because they can't do anything about you. The reason your own government is more of a concern than foreign governments is they have power over you whereas foreign governments do not. Now yes, technically foreign governments can go after someone, like North Korean kidnappings or the US drone program, however by and large they have little control over citizens of other nations.

In terms of looking at civilians, you think that is new? Most people in a country are civilians, as in not in the military. That doesn't mean they aren't involved in things a nation might take interest in. A simple example would be spies. You think they are military officers? No, they are regular civilians, or often diplomats.

Also in some countries, like China, the line is considerably less clear. The PLA outright owns many industries, and has their hands in many others, so even were you to take the line that spying is only for military things, well that would be rather unclear there.

That aside, I've seen little enough protesting period, and none that seems to be people mad about civilian spying. It is DOMESTIC spying that seems to bother them. They are mad that the NSA is (allegedly) spying on Americans which they are not supposed to do according to the law. I haven't seen any protests complaining about foreign spy agencies doing it, and they do it, make no mistake.

Spying on foreign nations is the NSA's business. If you don't like that, then it is something to take up with your representitive, but I would have to ask why all of a sudden you have a problem with it, since that has ALWAYS been its business. The NSA is the US's signals intelligence agency. It's reason to be is to spy on the electronic communications of foreign powers.

Now, you can argue the US shouldn't spy at all if you like, but you do have to realise that would put the US at basically the only major nation that didn't. More or less all nations have intelligence agencies. The UK has the SIS (and the Security Service to an extent), France has the DGSE, Canada has the CSIS, Switzerland has the NDB, Finland has the SUPO, China has the MSS, Russia has the SVR (and realistically the FSB, FSO and GRU as well). Nations spy on each other. They have for a long, LONG time.

The flap with the NSA is that they have been spying on American citizens. That is something they are not supposed to do. While some countries, like China, have a unified intelligence apparatus (the MSS is their spy agency, secret police, all that jazz), the US purposely has divided agencies. The NSA, CIA, etc are not supposed to collect intelligence on Americans. That is only supposed to be done by law enforcement, and then only in compliance with court orders.

That the NSA would spy on other nations is not only unsurprising, it is the reason they exist.

In terms of China being an enemy, well you can't really think in those terms. Nations don't have friends and enemies so much as they have interests. As such other nations can align or not align with those interests to different degrees. If you mean an enemy as a nation they are at war with then no, but of course they US hasn't officially gone to war in a rather long time. However China is certainly a nation the US would have many reasons to watch. They are quite authoritarian, the military is heavily mixed up in their economy (I'm talking direct ownership of things), they have imperialistic ambitions and they have a lot of weapons. Thus it should not be surprising if the US has interest in watching them.

Also if you think the US is irrelevant, you need to wake up and have a look at world affairs. The US is an extremely influential country in a tremendous amount of ways. It is the only military superpower at the moment, it controls the world's reserve currency, it has the largest economy in the world, it exports culture (in the form of books, TV movies, video games, that kind of thing) like no other in history and so on. You might wish the US was not relevant, but it is, very much so.

Also it isn't small. Buy a globe. Or use a search engine. The US is the 4th largest country in the world by land area, and 3rd largest by population. If that is "too small" by your metric, then I don't want to know what you rank most countries (which are, by definition, much smaller).

Since this is Slashdot, you might as well just refer to Larry Niven's "Known Space" series, where the punishment for large-scale pollution (e.g. using nuclear rocket engine in the atmosphere) was exactly that.

You don't have to provide all the intermediate sizes in an .ico file - you can have one that only has 16x16 and 256x256, for example.

Also, aren't OS X icons bitmap-only as well? My impression was that only Linux DEs have embraced vector graphics for everything.

It is strictly application-dependent. If app declares itself as high-DPI-aware (which they have to do explicitly in the app manifest), then it's expected to properly handle DPI by scaling everything appropriately. Some frameworks do it automatically - for example, WPF. Others do not, but people declare their apps as high-DPI-aware anyway because they don't understand what it actually implies.

It should be noted that this is a strict subset of fractional scaling that Windows has. If you set scaling to 200% in the latter, then you'll get the same integer scaling for non-DPI-aware apps.

Well three problems there:

1) Not really a Rogue kind of guy. It isn't my sort of game. I like more story in my RPGs which does, of course, preclude random generation. It is a tradeoff.

2) When you play a game made for a PC, it doesn't translate well to touch. Touch dictates some things be done rather differently to work well, and these do not have the UI to deal with that.

3) As you said, they are old, I've already played them. I like new games, not playing the same ones over and over for a quarter century.

It still quite supports my and the GP's point about the lack of good games for mobile.

Note that this is not a part of the language itself (a comment is a comment). You can use Doxygen with C# if you really want.

Though I agree that the "standard" syntax for doc comments could be thought out better. On the other hand, the nice thing about XML is that it's an "Extensible" Markup Language. Which is to say, you can use any custom elements that you want in your comments, and the compiler will extract them into the .xml file when it compiles your source code, alongside with other stuff that it does understand. Then you can write custom tools that post-process the binaries, or do various other things, based on that XML.