This sounds a bit biased to me. Firstly Toms isn't the only site. Secondly taking into account something which is currently non-existent to test is pretty tricky.

What performance advantage are you going to give the Mantle API without knowing anything about it? The best they can do is give the figures they currently get for both cards and add an addendum which states that Mantle may improve the performance for the AMD cards. They should probably add that in real world situations the ATI may have performance degradation due to heat if they're being fair.

From my perspective the current AMD offering is too hot, the Nvidia is too expensive. AMD are being cheap releasing a card which may not perform due to temps, Nvidia were being cheap not releasing the Ti before they needed to due to competition. Swings and roundabouts as they say, but competition is good.

I'm genuinely interested in what Mantle will bring to the table - it better be good or AMD are gonna get roasted for the hype train they've created, but fingers crossed.

You can always run your Linux environment in a VirtualBox rather than using cygwin. I use Debian with an eclipse development IDE all linked to an SVN server, all works perfectly well in a VM. I've got nothing against cygwin (used it at work quite extensively) but it does have a few gotchas that can be avoided by having a standard linux environment.

So going with this style of law enforcement:-
If someone shoots a gun into a crowd and the bullet happens to miss everybody and embeds itself in a tree, then no crime has been committed, right?

Yeah, I've seen this numerous times.

Them: We decided to write our own protocol for this interface
Me: Why didn't you go for the fully tested standard protocol that we're already using on this other interface which is fundamentally the same?
Them: Just in case we wanted to add some extra stuff to it.
Me: Have we added extra stuff?
Them: No
Me: Well given that I've just found a basic design error in this new protocol that means it doesn't error trap I'm guessing it didn't get a lot of testing.
Them: Really? Oh that's a problem, we've burnt this into silicon for some of our other devices already.

And the classic one where their memory management routines cause problems, I replace them quite quickly with new versions. They all wonder how I managed to do it so quickly and they work so well. I explain that a number of years ago a guy called Donald Knuth wrote a book called "The Art Of Computer Programming" and they came from that. None of them have heard of it - go figure.

" It should be difficult to write the same, simple function in multiple ways".

I'm interested in why you think this part is important. I would assume that any programming language that is restrictive enough to have only one way of writing a simple function would also be less versatile. The question would then become "Does the versatility outweigh the predictability." I would also expect it to be a continuum rather than a binary chose, with various programming languages littered across the spectrum. But maybe there's a sweet spot.

I welcome any insights into how people value predictability and versatility and the corresponding secondary effects e.g. code review, bug finding, performance etc.

Jesus juice maybe?

I don't know the design of the fingerprint device so my comment here may not apply to this device specifically but it's still a thing worth thinking about.

The security of the device is not that of the final destination of the data (the fingerprint data and the A7 in this case) but of the data path from the reception of the data to its final destination (and in this case I don't know what that is). You get a weakest link level of security. If any processing of the finger print data goes through a snoopable interface or storage area then your security is shot.

You would hope that the design is such that the fingerprint device itself is attached to the A7 directlly with a completely separate bus, but I wouldn't put money on it. I'd need some hardware schematics and data sheets to know for sure.

And comments from some users like "Is there any evidence at all that the fingerprint data store in the A7 is even usable outside of iOS?". That's backwards security thinking, you want evidence and assurances that it isn't usable/accessible before you start. Otherwise, you might want to pay top dollar for my new crypto routines that I've just knocked up as there's no evidence that they're a steaming pile of junk (yet).

Yeah I had an Arcos mp3 player until it got stolen, which came out well before the iPod.
It was replaced by the insurance company with an iPod.

So then I had to install iTunes to get music on it (the Arcos was treated as an external hard drive and you could drop whatever you liked on it via a file copy, though it would only play the mp3s). I couldn't move music between multiple PCs using it (you couldn't have more than one iTunes library), and I couldn't install a new OS on it (Rockbox for the Arcos) with lots of extra features. So, yeah, much 'better'.

I use MediaMonkey now so most of that functionality has come back despite Apple's best wishes.
This made me realise that the Apple eco-system didn't fit for me, I like to have more control - but each to his own.

Erm, I think fluids cover liquids and gases and apparently some plastic solids - who knew?

So:
pneumatic = gas
hydraulic = liquid
would be more accurate.

And the moral of this story is that whether you are a government, union, company or individual, power corrupts eventually.

Yeah, there's a large number of occurrences of that in English. One that annoys me from the town where I grew up was the use of the word pacfic instead of specific - must be a mishearing malapropism kind of thing, don't know if that particular one is common across the country though. There's also a tendency to use 'of' instead of 'have' in some instances e.g. 'he could of been a contender'. This sort of thing is probably countered by better literacy, being brought up in a farming town the older generations didn't read so much, so most language was passed down spoken.

I do wonder how foreigners cope with these nuances of the English language, with all the euphemisms, sayings, it must be a struggle.

One thing I have noticed frequently online is that peoples whose first language is not English tend to misuse 'since'.
e.g. I have been working on this thing since one week.
I suppose as since uses a fixed point and not a duration it's easily missed - but for a native English speaker its weird reading it, though the meaning is perfectly clear so it doesn't really matter.

It'd be boring if it was all regular and simple :-)

Well, if you want to completely ignore common usage then technically the Ops use of 'beg the question' is indeed incorrect.
The phrase 'begs the question' is also used to mean 'begs for the question' and is widely used in modern English today. I had no problem in understanding the meaning of the OP and as such his post succeeded.

Here's a link showing the dual meaning (just showing that your assertion that it 'has a specific meaning' is also unsupported and that it doies mean what the OP intended):
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/beg+the+question

Can't get more wronger than that ;-)

http://www.amazon.com/Story-about-Reading-Railroad-Books/dp/0448421658/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_z

And a whole series of Torchwood!

I've had numerous calls like this. I've taken a number of different stances on dealing with it. On the last one I didn't really have the time or patience so it went like this:-
Them: "Sir, we are ringing you about the errors on your computer".
Me: "Oh, this scam again, trying to get money from people that don't know any better. I don't know how you get away with it, you should be ashamed or yourselves, ashamed!"
Them: "Brrrrrrr....".

Quickest hang up yet. Felt kinda sorry for the poor woman reading the script but if you're gonna work for 'Evil Inc.' then that's what you get.

Other good tactics:
"Oh, I'm out of work, actually could you lend me fifty quid?"
"This is GCHQ madam, the UK government security center - it is a criminal offence to have access to our secure servers. Are you a terrorist?"
"On mondays my papa sings my happy song, huh, huh, huh"

Since they have a script maybe we should make one for us, just to see how they like it :-)