I've had much the same problems and concerns as the original poster running Eyefinity, so I'll expand a bit on the subject. For a quick summary, trying to configure Eyefinity correctly on multiple systems makes me long for the days of manually typing in Xorg.conf, and that's saying something!

When you're trying to play a game under Windows, the game will see each of your monitors as a separate physical device, and performance will range from being fine to horrible to not at all. Under Eyefinity, the ATI driver essentially tricks your application into thinking that it has access to one huge monitor up to almost 8K on a side. You get all the benefits of a single monitor like homogenous DPI, color matching, and performance. This was the original purpose for Eyefinity. If you're looking for 3D support, nice VDPAU playback, and all of the other capabilities that a modern video card has across multiple monitors, you need Eyefinity or NVIDIA Surround. There's no subsitute.

What about Linux? I've only experimented a bit under Linux due to the fact that many games don't have a Linux version, but to be frank, outside of the binary NVIDIA blob, support for advanced features really suck, no matter if you're talking about 3D gaming or accelerated playback. I wish Valve the best, because SteamOS is the one thing that I can see that might give AMD a push to work on their Linux drivers. I said back in 2003 that it would be really nice to be able to ditch Windows and to play all of my games in Wine. We're a lot closer now than back then, but there's still a sizable gap to catch up.

If you don't need to store tremendous amounts of data or to keep this data in more than a dozen different places, spinning hard drives will do just fine.

If you need to store petabytes of data in redundant locations, tape robots are your friend. ;-)

From http://cerncourier.com/cws/art...

The interesting thing is that the LHC can generate up to 6GB of data per second, which means that even a 500GB tape will only last for 83 seconds. It's good that they've got all of those robots handling these tapes.

The articles were better then, and all of the "OMG! My eyes!" posts were funnier as well. ;-)

Same here. I started reading Slashdot back when I was in high school back in the 90s, and I'm pretty sure that even back then, I could have come up with better gags then the ones that are being posted today.

Oh well, I'll come back tomorrow for the reviews of all of the other tech sites' April Fool's jokes to see if there's anything that I missed...

Some people just like a particular tool or language. Having used C# for a couple of Windows projects myself, I do admit that I like the language itself much better than C or C++. The big problem with the .NET runtime is how many common things *aren't* included in it, such as when I had to go back to the Windows API just to change the desktop wallpaper (?!#%). You'd think that an organization the size of Microsoft could spend some time on proper encapsulation of previous APIs in their own object-orientated language.

Personally, I'll stick with Qt, Unity, Kivy, etc... if I want to do cross platform development, but if someone else wants to spend their own time doing what they want, I have no problems with it. Being able to do what you want is the whole point of open source.

--John Shepherd

;-)

Sounds like this guy is more clever than most of the constables and prison officials in the article. Perhaps MI5 should hire him for penetration testing instead of putting him in jail!

Definitely hard drives. Everything else tends to keep running great as long as you don't power down the machine, but our spinning platter friends tend to fail by themselves even without any help from shock or vibrations. I'm definitely enjoying the SSD in my current laptop because I don't need to worry about it being knocked over from kids so much, and I still have an old K6-233 which is doing well as a file/print server to this day.

Now, if you include CD-Rs and CD-RWs in the discussion, then those are more troublesome than hard drives by a longshot; particularly some drives that only like some types of CD-RWs but don't like other types of CD-RWs. Thankfully, we're well into the flash drive, drive imaging, and Internet-downloaded era now, so I haven't bothered with any type of optical disks since the last time that I installed Windows 7.

I'm glad to say that I've never experienced this particular joy, but I do enjoy "make clean" much better than anything with "rm *" in it. 8-)

The main problem that I have with Python 3 is that there are still many libraries which have not been ported to it and are still Python 2.x only. However, for my day to day development, the warts that 3.x fixed from 2.x make a significant difference.

How significant? Google "python unicode subprocess windows" and you'll get the tip of the iceberg. Some things that are impossible to do with 2.x are routine with 3.x. I'm fine with using 2.x when it suits my needs, but I do enjoy progress and ease of use as well.

I'm living in China at the moment, and I can confidently say that probably 95% of the goods available on Taobao and Alibaba have some type of problem with them. If you're looking for something cheap, only need to use it for a little while, don't require any type of technical support whatsoever, and have no long term expectations, Alibaba is a wonderful place. If you're looking for something else, I would stick to American, European, Japanese, and Korean goods.

I'm a foreigner living in China right now, and you're right in that I tend to use Yahoo because it loads faster than Bing and I don't have to initialize a VPN to use it. However, the locals don't know how to use anything outside of Baidu, so I doubt that Chinese searches are significantly changing these statistics. There's only ~0.6 million foreigners in the country, and those in offices tend to have VPNs available, so I'm sure that they're still using Google on a regular basis.

I'm an English teacher in China at the moment, so let me add some observations to your post. The Great Firewall is definitely noticable on any foreign website, as they load much slower than native Chinese websites whereas I didn't notice much difference between American websites, Canadian websites, and European websites when I was still in the U.S. OpenVPN connections are still viable. In fact, the only way that I can get onto the real Internet nowadays is thanks to the volunteers at VPN Gate and SpeedVPN on my phone. The Chinese government does a pretty good job playing Whack-a-Mole with the paid VPN providers, but there's always one that slips through the cracks sooner or later. More volunteers running VPN Gate servers would help tremendously. China's blocking, foreign policies, and pretty much anything else has gotten much worse since Xi Jinping became the top Chinese official. He has pretty much angered all of the neighboring countries and is building his political power in a way not seen since Deng Xiaoping back in the 80s. Most of the Chinese people I've met here are actually quite friendly and decent just like the Americans and Europeans back home, but the government is akin to what the U.S. government would be with an one-party system and total control of the media. In fact, since I've left the U.S., I'm noticing more and more parallels between the U.S. government after 9/11 and the Chinese government, which is not a good thing by any means of the imagination.

What's the point of making a New Year's Resolution when only 3.1415926535% of people actually keep them? ;-)