The OEMs asked AMD for six possible outputs for DisplayPort from their notebook GPUs: up to two internally for notebook panels, up to two externally for conncetors on the side of the notebook and up to two for use via a docking station. In order to fulfill these needs AMD had to build in 6 lanes of DisplayPort outputs into its GPUs, driven by a single display engine. A single display engine could drive any two outputs, similar to how graphics cards work today.

Eventually someone looked at all of the outputs and realized that without too much effort you could drive six displays off of a single card - you just needed more display engines on the chip. AMD's DX11 GPU family does just that.

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3635

Because resolution and size are not the same thing.

This service will likely cost more for a few months of subscription fees than a midrange video card does, and a netbook to play one of these streamed video games on costs about the same as a budget/midrange gaming PC. PC "gaming hardware" is hardly "insanely" expensive and for PC games this isn't terribly useful unless you have a portable machine and a quick internet connection, things that often don't go together.

It's clear there's a use of the word that's technically fine but it's misrepresentative to pretty much anyone that's going to be reading the BBC article or this Technology Review site or whatever and all sources claim it wasn't the media making it up. It's pretty easy to post here and imply people are idiots because they don't know more than the popular science definition but then again everyone's an idiot about a great many things.

..that my toaster is four dimensional because I can describe it as "silver".

This is cool enough as it is, I don't understand why the technobabble was added: polarization and color information layers may be novel attributes of a disc but there's no real reason to describe them as "5-dimensional" other than to sound physics-y.

Whoa. And I always thought there were drivers on CDs that came with hardware. I guess those are too expensive nowadays.

That's more because of the state of the software industry, as well as nVidia's failing to move the market forward through rebrands. My 8800GTS has the same longevity, but if you look one generation back you'll see that the 7900s didn't fare so well, even if people went even higher and put 7950s in SLI and such. At 1920x1080 you're going to spend maybe $200-$250 of course, but for somebody that was on a 1440x900 or 1680x1050 monitor? Nothing high end would end up lasting any longer than a 4850 right now.

No, you could upgrade every year to the highest price/performance card in the lineup and not bank on your expensive card lasting a long time. Because it won't. More expensive hardware doesn't "futureproof". It's just obsolete AND expensive.

That makes no sense because the publisher pays to make the game too, there is a tradition behind stand-alone patches, and the amount of work that goes into a patch is substantially less than an entire game. That also has nothing to do with parent's post which emphasizes that pirates are users, and further emphasizes it as failing to provide patches to pirates ultimately results in more calls to your support team.

seeing how Stardock puts patches behind Impulse "DRM" they do that worse, not better, than most major publishers

suppose someone was at a bar and they drove drunk but then their car turned into a robot and the robot saved 22 babies from the wreck but those babies would have died later from preventable diseases anyway and the act of saving those babies killed two adults who were tied to a train in a thought experiment saving fifty others because the guy that was at the controls was crushed.

you are comparing downloading [FLAC RIPPED HQ LIMITED BROUGHT TO YOU BY SCENEXX NONUKE] BRITNEY SPEARS DISCOGRAPHY [SEED] [UPPED BY NARUTOFAN69] to being killed by a drunk driver, how stupid do you have to be to think that's even a remotely useful analogy

Um, no they're not. The tracker is an index of seeds/peers, and DHT means that tracker-less sharing is also possible (and isn't walled off on TPB like it on Demonoid/other "private" trackers). If you're making the argument indexing something is suddenly illegal when the index is a "file" and not a remotely hosted...uh..file somewhere else that is downloaded exactly the same way but shown differently, I'm not sure what to tell you other than that's bizarre.

Oh, and the second forum link's second page makes a good point as well:

Pavlo claims that he wasn't aware of eventual ethical implications of his doing. He was. This quotation was present yesterday as footer in the FAQs, now deleted.
Quote:
"I found this paper completely outrageous." -- IPTPS'09 Reviewer.
Yesterday the original project aim was "A Subversive, Internet-Scale File Sharing Model". Today is to exploit wiki weaknesses.

It's pretty clear if you're gloating about the reactions to how unethical your "project" is you're fully aware of the fact it is unethical in the first place. Pavlo, Internet trolling isn't for the university setting.

Pretty easy to see through the whole "durr we are helping site owners secure their wikis" crap considering the original page said nothing about security, only a possible way of distributing files. The garbage about "abandoned" wikis is also transparently false, as the site makes no reference to even checking when the last edit(s) were made to the wiki through Recent Changes, as well as my own personal experience and several others. It's also a hilarious rationale considering wikis have pages-by-views counters built into them and any site owner would easily notice hundreds of peers downloading plaintext off a wiki regularly faster than they would the results of some graduate student's pet CS project.

It's a shocker, but some wiki owners like to allow anonymous edits, and they have the right to do so. It's equivalent to abusing other site resources like public uploads in everything but style. This "project" is not only unethical but now they're blatantly lying about (or at best misrepresenting) its purpose.

No, they weren't using "abandoned resources", they were using wikis with anonymous editing enabled so that they could experiment with what amounts to decentralized bandwidth leeching.