Black Mesa is beautifully done but combat is not as well balanced as the original game; there are odd spikes in difficulty at certain points that will have you cursing.
Players new to the series would be better served by playing the original Half-Life than Black Mesa.
> older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory ... FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired.
The FAANG companies and other technology platform companies have separate technical and management career tracks. Only those who want to be managers become managers.
> Or you could argue that it originated with Unix coming out of Bell Labs and being passed around universities on reels of tape, with new extensions contributed along the way.
That was not motivated at all by the open source movement. The only reason AT&T Bell Labs didn't charge a significant amount for UNIX is because they were under a consent decree which precluded them from entering other industries at the time, see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/should-we-thank-...
> I kind of expect that the "let consumers be the beta testers and fire all our QA" approach is going to majorly bite them in the ass at some point and lose a lot of goodwill.
I wish I could agree with you. However, the QA layoffs at Microsoft were in 2014; if something like was going to happen, it would have happened by now.
For those curious, the Xeon Ds are designed for low-power servers; one can get a 8 core/16 hyperthread D-1541 that has a TDP of 45W. Makes for a nice home server but Intel has been charging a lot for them. AMDs offering will hopefully be a good alternative that's more reasonably priced.
> I guess what I'm saying is that by allowing a device to upgrade in software to more power-efficient designs, you might claw back some of the efficiency lost by using an FPGA when you consider the entire product's lifetime.
That presumes you put in a big enough FPGA/CPU or whatever fifteen(!) years in advance that has enough resources to handle the increased processing requirements for a future protocol (expensive and wasteful and there's no guarantee that you didn't guess wrong and it's still too small/slow) and that your RF signal path was designed well enough to handle the new signal requirements (expensive and wasteful even if you were prescient enough to guess what future requirements were). And that's on top of the fact that inexpensive electronic devices simply aren't built with components rated to last 15 years.
There wasn't any real reason to use the 80186 in a PC; it was meant for embedded devices. The only major feature that it had was some additional hardware for timers and DMA built in. Everything else was (more or less) architecturally the same as the 8086.
Probably the last series of 80186 PCs ever made were HP's 100LX / 200LX, a palmtop DOS based PDA that was released in the mid-'90s IIRC. It was an amazing little gadget for its time.
> The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced by quantum effects.
So? Transistors used in modern computers directly depend on quantum effects (semiconductor physics was an outgrowth of QM) as well, yet we do not need to take into account QM when writing software or designing microprocessors.
> I'm not sure why you think the underlying physics is deterministic.
If conclusive evidence were found that human consciousness is fundamentally dependent on QM processes to function, that would be a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery. Aside from some minor papers exploring the topic, no such evidence has been found AFAIK.