Really? You just throw this assertion out there without spending the extra few seconds to name a few of these technologies? I'm really curious.

Silly wording. "U.S. Democrats Propose Legislation To Ban Internet Fast Lanes" The "fast lane" is what customers pays for and we expect to receive. The "slow lane" means they don't have to give us the bandwidth we pay for. They have no obligation to expand infrastructure to meet most customer's demand. Therefore, destroying net neutrality means everything becomes a slow lane.

And while you are at it, remove the person(s) who made this user-screwing decision. I'm serious. They are not a PC user. Investigate and you'll find they own an iPad, even.

Things I want to see: 1. An Android tablet with a 1TB hard drive. Even if it were bulkier, or with a 4" screen and shaped like a 3.5" disk enclosure. I want an Android device with tons of capacity, that can be used as both a media player as well as portable photo/video offloading device - so I can quickly dump photos from my Vixia or Sony camera flash cards while I'm traveling. 2. Normal PC Laptop that contains a low-power ARM-based Android "accessory" PC that I can jump to (either full-screen via keypress or via client window under Windows/Linux), because let's face it - Android apps like gmail/yelp/fandango/gmaps/facebook/etc/etc/etc/etc/etc beats the holy living sh!tf*ck out of navigating their respective websites or apps (if they even exist), even without a touchscreen interface. In fact, I'm quite happy with bringng along my Motorola Lapdock and MK802 dongle in lieu of a laptop on many occasions - but having both in a single device would be beautiful. And better, a mode for booting up in Android only, only powering up the ARM board, screen and a few accessories. Off a typical laptop battery, that should run for days.

According to Wikipedia, Hobart is right and you are out of your scope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Popularization_through_NeXT

This is of course if you don't edit out that -j64 in Google's main Makefile.

This might be interesting if it weren't for the fact that the content of New York Post's online edition is worth far less than the paper it's printed on (which is zero).

The reason Netflix isn't watchable on Linux is fairly understandable. You just can't protect content on a system that is top down open-source. Even if Netflix were to provide closed-source modules or players, there are still APIs that can be patched, replaced that can record all output from the player, even snoop out video from the framebuffer, transcoding that into a nicely, unprotected video stream. Think of how quickly you'd see Netflix rippers appear.

But that isn't even remotely the real reason, this could happen in Windows just as well. The real reason is that Microsoft provides the entire streaming framework and content protection, so this is Microsoft's responsibility. Who could Netflix blame if say the fault lied somewhere gstreamer? Microsoft can push out updates very quickly to close up loopholes and even enforce new driver-level DRM protections that would never happen universally on Linux.

Of course, if you really want the movies for yourself, you could just rent and dupe them like everyone else. ;)

UNDER 1920x1200?!? What, did I fall into a coma and wake up in the era of 20 megabit computer displays? If it's an RPG with a considerable amount of on-screen text, I can see how this would be an issue. For most games, you just don't notice much difference after a few minutes of gameplay. I'd much rather have silky-smooth framerates at 1024x768. Yeah, the fillrates on most decent modern GPUs can easily handle smooth gameplay at extreme resolutions, but what really kills is when multiple layers of post-processing effects are being used. This hype for running PC games at high resolution is unfortunate because one of the great things about console development was that you focused on making your graphics look as good as possible and play as smoothly within the constraints of a fixed screen buffer at a fixed frame-rate. I see this as becoming more of an issue as GPUs become more and more like general processors, and inevitably use more painterly-like rendering techniques.

I don't see fully ray-traced game engines being that big a deal in the future. It's a bit like in those early 3D movies having shit poked in your eye for WOW factor, going overboard with reflective surfaces in a fully raytraced 3D FPS would look like a mess. Look around you(tm), how many surfaces are fully reflective, how many of those reflect something recognizable? Answer: Very little... A simple static sphere map is perfectly sufficient to create the "illusion" of a reflective surface in most games. A separate thread could render a sphere map for any reflective surface in a scene on an as-needed basis for a scene. Or in real-time, creating a much more convincing raytracing effect without much overhead - as GTA IV does, for cars f'instance. As a bonus, you can do a more diffuse reflective mapping for surfaces like plastic. I think technology like Larabee will be much better used in game engines for accurate lighting models. Again, I simply point to GTA IV.