Odd, but I see no sign that this is true. PC Ports of console games typically require far more "firepower" than would be implied by the original console. Case in point: GTA IV/V.

FYI It's normal and customary for companies or individuals who are compelled to perform a significant task to be paid for their time and effort. I had an employer once get subpoena'd in a law suit and I was the admin and the compelling party (a private party) had to pay for the administrative cost for me to do a data recovery from a backup.

I have little doubt that gmail SPAM filtering is Postini SPAM filtering with a few tweaks.

Right now, today, I have a P3 desktop running CentOS6/32 as a network monitor. It's old as the hills. My phone beats it handily in performance. But it runs on about 15 watts, and does the job so reliably that, in 10 years, it's never skipped a beat. It started with the original RedHat 6.1. (before RHEL was a thing)

I know it won't actually make any records, but I'm sure it's one of the oldest 0.01%, maybe even 0.001% of computers in terms of durability. It would be a remarkable machine if it wasn't otherwise so unremarkable.

Wish I had mod points! So, I'll agree, blah blah.

It seems absurd to have lameness filters that seem to specifically target code on a site that caters to the coder types! And the 4 minute limit is just silly. Back when it was still publicly shown, I had karma out the yin yang. I'm sure I still do, even though it's no longer displayed in any form that I can tell.

Slashdot trumps Reddit for quality of articles, Reddit bests Slashdot for UI and comment participation, though posting on Reddit has become such a land mine I don't bother unless I'm on a very small/exclusive subreddit)

We use ffmpeg to process video files uploaded by customers. We'll be patching our app first thing in the morning. This is a big deal for us.

With the number of pills taken by the elderly these days, not to mention people who die in the hospital who may have all sorts of compounds pumped into them before they die, I wonder if the composting process fully breaks them down, or at least to safe levels. I didn't see any mention of it in TFA.

The spinning disk era is coming to a close, and I welcome it! The issue is that while storage capacity has, for decades, increased almost exponentially, the actual performance of the HDD has remained virtually flat. A typical HDD spinning at about 7200 RPM can store 4 TB of data or more, but can only serve about 150 seek operations per second. Physics, she is a bitch, you know? So while you might be able to store 500 million files, it takes a month to copy them.

Everywhere I look, Enterprise or "performant" storage has moved to SSDs. We moved our DB servers 4 (5?) years ago to SSDs and saw at least a 95% reduction in query times involving disk operations. (EG: not cached) For us, spinning rust is the new tape; SSDs (or RAM) anywhere performance matters, and spinning rust for archival use. For our session cache, we use a RAM drive.

So, your program allocates some memory. Should it initialize the memory to make sure it's all a bunch of zeros? Apparently, Nvidia doesn't think so.

So, a program running on your OS requests some memory. Should the OS initialize the memory before handing it to the application? Apparently, Apple doesn't think so.

Either answer is right.

... Moves designed to protect users from MalWare. Of course that's "destruction"...

I use Linux extensively. SystemD has been a very minor speed bump. All the people screaming and crying about systemD haven't been able to down out the simple fact that SystemD works just fine and carries numerous benefits.

I personally don't care enough about the other issues to comment.

Sorry, but with silly results like this, I have to ask why such a small article so vapid of meaningful content was posted on Slashdot. Shouldn't paid shill articles be a different color or something?

No mention was given as to how this ranking was accomplished, and the list given at the bottom of the article doesn't even match the headline (where 2 and 3 are MySQL and MS SQL Server, and Microsoft Access beats Cassandra.

Any DB ranking that puts Access in as a top contender should definitely back up their claims - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence!

i bought a couple of TV sticks at Amazon for about $40 and they work amazingly well. Netflix, Hulu, Google Play, the works! Browses smoothly as well, works as a general purpose super-tablet, works with normal KB/Mouse without issue...

Why would anyone would spend ten times the cash?

We *have* a Samsung 4k "Smart" TV and we don't use any of the smarts - at all. What drives it is the XB One, or the Android TV Stick. I'm not even sure how to use the "smart" part. But it said "Smart" on the box...

I have no doubt that the "smart" feature is something they added to make it more appealing in some way, but why?

The fun part is having to hack the registry so that you get inundated with "free upgrade to 10!" notices all day long...

Years ago, with a then-ubiquitous Moto flip phone at my hip, I "invented" what I called the "Urban Commando Phone" - the cell phone already had a clock, why not add things like flashlight, garage door remote, TV Universal Remote, etc. so that instead of having dozens of devices, you had one to "rule them all".

I had no idea, at the time, of the types of convergence that would come in the form of the smart phone, which has all of these and many more either available built in
or easily available.

The term "ubiquitous computing" has been used for decades, and when I first heard the term, it was to convey the still-radical idea that every home would have a computer.

Computing seems to come in stages or "generations", where each previous generation generally powers or enables the next one. Mainframes became infrastructure for Mini computers, which (eventually) gave way to PCs, which then merged with Mini computers in the Internet revolution, which then gave birth to the smart phone era.

Following this trend, the "next big thing" will use Cell phones, PCs, and Servers to extend their capability. And this is already happening. My cell phone has a small cluster of devices that surround it that it interfaces with: Bluetooth headset, folding mobile keyboard, smart watch, etc. We are just beginning to innovate with these standards-based technologies to develop the true "IoT" that is coming; the things that link to our mobile phones to enable things we haven't begun to imagine.

Some examples that I've seen/heard of include all manner of medical devices: insulin pumps that use software on your smart phone to adjust or recommend insulin administration. Devices that provide the ability to test for common diseases "in the field" inexpensively, serving field medics and impoverished areas alike. Payment systems that use our mobile phones and networks to augment or replace credit cards.

And on and on. As always, the game is just beginning!