More and more developers seem to be using the existing engines (i know you used Unreal 3 for Rev 60, Unity, UbiArt, etc) which makes sense given the huge number of features they provide with little initial development cost and common tool sets/plugins used by other developers. Do you think there is much future in developers using custom engines for games (both indie and non-AAA) or do you think it will continue to become more uncommon for common genre games as you start at a larger and larger feature 'deficit' by having to redevelop the features on your custom engine, let alone porting issues, leaving only vert large/profitable houses (Naughty Dog, Insomniac, EA, etc) to be able to bear the time/$ costs?

No one is being killed by the 5v on the USB bus. The problem is the counterfeit chargers are often poorly designed and can fail in a way that shorts the USB cable to the AC power.

There was an excellent teardown & analysis of a cheap charger last year that pointed out serious safety issues.

Recently they added the ability to also buy the audiobook version and the app *syncs your place* so you can switch between the two formats. That's a pretty amazing idea.

But the app doesn't help the author. He said he had a Nook. Thanks to the recent firmware update people with a Nook Color or Nook HD can get then app, but if you have the eInk based "normal" Nook, you're just out of luck.

As DRM goes, Amazon has done an excellent job of reducing annoyance. They don't try that "you can only read this book on 2 devices, ever." stuff that we've seen elsewhere. But I get the feeling the only reason Amazon's DRM is so unobtrusive is they were so overwhelmingly powerful they could force publishers into a relatively consumer friendly system. We're lucky Amazon cares more about selling books than trying to wring money out of Kindle hardware sales, or the DRM would have been a lot worse.

The video says that the wind is manually entered by the operator. I find it odd that it shows the temperature and barometric pressure. Is that really useful information when you're lining up a shot?

After watching their little YouTube clip, I wonder how useful this is. Placing the aiming dot seems really similar to aiming in the first place, I guess the only difference is you don't have to compensate for gravity/etc. I found it conspicuous that they didn't show their simulated target moving in the video. Can this only help with a stationary target? It seems like it would screw up your aiming if half the time you had to do it manually (compensating for everything) and half the time the system handled it.

I'm not surprised. It can be bad enough when they actually know what they're doing, if they have no clue it can be terrible.

There is an amazing story on Reddit (in 23 short parts!) of an IT manager from hell destroying a workplace. It's frustrating just to read.

1451 is really pretty cool. It runs like a dog in Safari (0.5 FPS if lucky), but ran great for me in Chrome (probably closer to 20). It's very impressive.

I agree about the minecart. They did a fantastic job with that one as well.

The article is from Linux Weekly News (great resource, long time subscriber). It shouldn't be surprising that they would take a Linux bent on the story.

Um... no. The pentiums were a major leap because that was when they moved to superscalar execution. They were great processors.

I assume you're referring to the name "Pentium" instead of calling it the 586, which was done because Intel lost a lawsuit and courts ruled they couldn't copyright numbers.

Celeron. I'd forgotten that was how those started. They were just P2s without any external cache (and thus without any actual performance).

You're right that there were slot based PIIIs using the Katamai core, I owned one. When I wanted to buy a second processor years later I had a terrible time finding a non-coppermine version that I could use in my dual slot motherboard. I don't know if the L2 cache was still off-die at that point or not. I think digitalsolo is right that they didn't go on-die until they went to socket 370. That was one of the best computers I ever owned.

No, Slot 1 was to allow them to put the cache on the same board as the processor so they could speed it up. It quickly became unnecessary as later Pentium IIs and all(?) Pentium IIIs put the cache on die, making the slot unnecessary and expensive.