GRID PC is a really nice game but it's one of the games which were abandoned the moment they went gold. Very little support was given, the developer and publisher kept promising patches and fixes that they never delivered, so it comes as no surprise that multiplayer servers had such short lifespan, actually it's 2 years more than i would give it. And it isn't really big loss, because the multiplayer was broken from start, it was really painful to navigate through the menu system to connect to a server, and when you did, often the request would just time out and you'd be thrown at the beggining of the whole process. Ranked servers sometimes counted your progress, sometimes not, no idea why. On servers with enabled player collisions, half of the people would try to grief by driving in opposite way, trying to crash other players, on servers with collisions off cheating was widespread, in every race there was always someone using speed hacks where you would see the cars simply teleporting long distances forward. There was very little point to multiplayer, so everybody playing it pretty much just stick with the singleplayer mode which was really nice.

Here's a review showing the whole run through PC demo, including intro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6MjzgTZriw

I bet the replacement will be 2-way switch with labels "Terror" and "More Terror" glued shut in the latter position.

Try Moonlight.

When stable Moonlight 1.0 was released as stable version about a year ago i tried it, only to be greeted by 'Silverlight 2.0 required, won't work with 1.0' on most non-demo pages.
This christmas someone posted me a photosynth link, i saw that Moonlight finally reached 2.0 stable release, so i again tried it, only to be greeted with 'Silverlight 3.0 required, won't work on 2.0' on photosynth and most other pages. Maybe someday in future there will be at least few day window when the silverlight app requirements match the available moonlight version, but it's not today.

It is, unfortunately, frustrating to write performant GL these days. While we would like to think that you can do what you want in GL, and the driver will magically make it go fast, the fact remains that some ways of drawing are slow and some are fast. Games are written for specific cards, and drivers get app-specific code. It's a mess, but a necessary mess.

Yes, but that is true for any bleeding-edge performance programming. It is true for Direct3D drivers, it is also true for general x86 programming - i remember having to fine-tune core loop of one app for specific CPUs distincted only by L2/L3 cache sizes - cache misses kill performance better than anything else.

The other problem is that the majority of available hardware and drivers don't support GL 3.x. No open-source driver does, and in fact most Intel, Radeon, and nVidia hardware already in use can only do GL 2.x.
The Red Book is doing what it should. It's providing a transitional viewpoint for writing apps that will work with GL 1.5-2.1 stacks, discussing both the fixed-function and shaderful pipelines. It talks about the maths needed to make things happen, and shows both the old and new ways of accelerating those maths on hardware.

The major addition of GL 3.x series is *deprecating* stuff (and streamlining and integrating some stuff that was already available through extensions). You don't need the deprecated stuff for transition, as GL 2.1 will give you everything you need to drop the fixed function entirely, and code that you write against 2.1 with deprecation in mind will work under 3.0 profiles without problems. Seriously it's time to force change to fully programmable API as the hardware don't have any fixed function for several years now. Every time you use fixed function the drivers will just compile custom shader, and that is something you (or high-level library) can do as well, without the need to complicate the drivers.

Remember back in the 90s when everyone was jizzing in their pants about Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson's writing, dreaming of actually implementing the ideas therein? Data havens, crypto-anarchism, impregnable anonymity, hackers making a decent living by a life of crime, and so forth?
Well, now the future is here. Kind of sucks, doesn't it? Careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

In those cyberpunk visions the world, political and judicals systems are tightly controlled by corrupt mega-corporations and the net is anything but open. The very act of accessing the network or tampering with it may land you in prison, criticizing the rulers means you're dead and so on. Every piece of hardware is registered, so if you want to get any hacking done you have to turn in to black market (for stuff) and criminals (to get money for stuff), out of pure necessity. (it's the classical tale of occupied country's resistance movement working together with organized crime, right?)

Compare that to the reality we got: cheap ubiquitous internet, cheap ubiquitous hardware to access it, the net is *by default* free and open, and all attempts to any large-scale censoring has failed miserably. Anonymity is just one unsecured wifi hotspot away on every corner (so you don't need to pay a hacker to get you online), and any attempts at uncovering corruption and truth are met with public support. So the traditional heroes of cyberpunk stories can operate publicly or semi-publicly (think wikileaks), the worst that can happen to them is someone pulling the DMCA on the copied/leaked documents, which rarely results even in fines, much less prison time. The hackers are working on cool engineering projects instead of breaking into companies networks, and the criminals are, well, criminals - since they are no longer needed for the goals of the freedom fighters, all they do is disrupt the free information exchange (ddosing sites for greed, decreasing signal-to-noise ratio by spamming the hell out of everyone etc.), and so are frowned upon even by the neo-anarchists.

The advantage with a bus is that its much easier to add new stops and routes. You only have to build up the charging station, whereas with a trolley, one has to tear up the road, put in tracks, and build stations.

Maybe trolleybus then?

This is, I think, a general reaction from a lot of people, but it doesn't really line up with the history of the prize. In 1987, for example the prize was awarded to Óscar Arias, a Costa Rican president, for making some strong gestures that he would stop the Nicaraguan war that had been raging for a decade, fueled by the United States. This raised Arias' profile, and gave him the political capital to broker a peace deal in 1988.

Yes, i too hope this prize will help raise Barrack Obama from the relative unpopularity of being president of the USA and supreme commander of world's largest and most technologically sophisticated armed forces. This should give him worldwide fame and may even ignite 'Obamamania', giving him opportunity to meet world leaders and broke deals with them. In addition the prize include a hefty cheque, which no doubt can help to fund his bold reform plans to save world from yet another economic crisis.

One of the problems with LCDs is that even if you find one that has truly good parameters and shines in reviews, you have no guarantee that the monitor you buy will perform at any similar level, due to manufacturers selling different revisions with different panels under the same name. Like the infamous Samsung 226BW.

In related news, D&D is also getting new class, the Witchaloks, designed by the Penny Arcade crew.

Here is image of the flash cd utility crashed (fortunately my drive survived).
Here is seagate page with affected models list and links to firmware downloads (if it wasn't posted by 1000 people already)