And all the other people use stripped down pc with no USB dongle, no print screen, no copy-paste
Uh huh. So people take screenshots with their cellphone. Much as I'd love to see cellphones banned, I'm not optimistic.
If Google or any company promise "full information lock-down" to anybody, they'll be lying. DRM doesn't suddenly become less silly just because it's being applied to text rather than music/video.
Re point 1 - true, but not insurmountable. A trivial "case has been opened since last shutdown" trip switch could determine whether a full boot is needed.
Re point 2 - why would the boot image need to be pre-built? Why not record it at install/update?
I agree with you that a properly-implemented hibernate would deliver essentially what the OP is asking for, and I don't think it needs your caveat.
Before the Russian "invasion" of Afghanistan [...] embassy staff in London went round buying up old history books on the Afghan wars. A bookseller tried to tell the Foreign Office but they didn't want to know - John Le Carre is spot on about UK and US intelligence inadequacies.
Didn't want to know, or knew already and were happy about it? US support of the Mujahideen was intended to sucker the USSR into an expensive and unwinnable conflict. Zbigniew Brzezinski has said:
That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap..." [...]"The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War.
I don't know for sure that the UK was in on it, but it's not an unreasonable assumption.
Sorry, but I happen to think that's crap. Much like the government, whenever a controversial law/license is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're LYING. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
If you're going to quote another user's post verbatim, it's generally considered polite to include attribution.
I don't see much hope for the short-to-medium term, though, with the content mafia pushing executable content hard and Microsoft poisoning efforts for declarative content with proprietary solutions (VML, XAML) or foot-dragging (ECMAScript, CSS). I don't think this is going to change until other platforms (probably phones) eclipse Windows as the dominant web client platform.
Is anything happening with WebForms, btw? That "This document is in the very final stages and will very shortly become a call for implementations." message has been up for well over a year now.
The problem is that games are supposed to be fun. You're going to have to work really hard to come up with an alternative criteria. And since fun is pretty subjective, there's really not much room for criticism.
No argument there. But a game can be addictive without being fun, and addictiveness is arguably easier to achieve than fun in game design. It's certainly far better understood.
I haven't played WoW or any of the other MMORPGs, but a lot of players seem to fall into this trap. I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe EverQuest as "fun".
I'm curious... assuming you really meant freeware (free-as-in-beer, closed source), how do you justify the price of the Qt libraries to yourself? I thought it was in the thousands per year per seat. Did you have a commercial license anyway for other projects, or are you just obscenely rich?
Huh? Why can't a proprietary app static-link against an LGPL library? That was the whole point of the license.
You have to distribute linkable object code for the app, which is what puts people off and pushes them down the.so route, but there's no legal problem.
The Japanese were on the verge of surrendering already. [...] The atomic bombs were almost completely unnecessary, except to establish US dominance in the world theater by demonstrating god-like firepower.
The US was also under severe time pressure. The Soviet Union had just wrapped things up on their Western front and were about to start an Eastern one. (Hiroshima was August 6th, the Soviets declared war on Japan August 8th.) This would almost certainly have led to them grabbing, and quite possibly keeping, large chunks of Japanese-occupied China.
The US was already planning for what would become the Cold War, and were anxious to forestall this.
It'll vary enormously from country to country, but here in the UK single-issue parties are doing lobbying. Sometimes serious, sometimes not, but lobbying. Thanks to first-past-the-post they never get elected at the national level, and don't expect to. The point is to get a noticeable share in a marginal seat, so that the big parties think "Hmm, if we just adopt that policy, it'd give us enough votes to tip the election."
The restriction to marginal seats does limit the effectiveness of this kind of thing, of course, but campaign finance in the UK isn't as b0rked as in the US - you can't just buy the legislation you want openly. (You can buy titles and the like, but it's generally considered sleazy by the few people who still care.)
Had a play with this yesterday
on
Google Image Labeler
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
And it's kinda flawed at the moment. Seems to hang a lot for one thing, but the main problem is that the images are so ridiculously tiny. Google aren't going to get useful tags that way - most of the points of agreement end up being words like "man" or "people" or "building". It's frustrating, because often it's clearly a specific building, maybe even with a sign saying EXACTLY what it is, except that the text is half a pixel high.
That said, the end-of-game summary is an illuminating (and terrifying) revelation of just how bad some people's spelling is.
Coincidentally, I discovered today that Linspire/Freespire are standardizing on Haskell for core OS development. I'm still blinking a bit about that one, but you have to give them marks for chutzpah.
OpenGL on vista will be running on TOP of DirectX. This means that DirectX will EMULATE opengl
So? OpenGL is an API specification, not a processor architecture. If GL-on-DX does what the spec says then it's every bit as much a 'real' OpenGL implementation as any other.
I don't know if it's possible to be a history nazi, but here goes... If it was 1361, it would be Edward III
Egads, you're right. Upon investigation it appears that Edward I was indeed the correct Edward, but that the date in question should have been 1272. I shall amend the offending article forthwith.
It wasn't government that cut pollutions, it was industries striving to reduce waste and increase efficiency that did it.
Untrue, or at least highly selective. Much (most?) pollution is not a consequence of inefficiency, and industry has no inherent incentive to reduce it. This is the standard example given to illustrate negative externalities.
Government is the only instrument I'm aware of by which people can push these externalized costs back onto the polluters. And claiming that it hasn't done so is flat wrong. All the way back to Edward I in 1361 banning the burning of sea-coal to reduce London smog.
Software generates the OpenGL instructions, which get turned into identical but probably different OpenGL instructions (on a 1:1 basis) in some OS library, which then gets translated into identical but almost certainly different OpenGL instructions (still on a 1:1 basis) by the graphics driver, which hands the data to the card.
Erm... "identical but almost certainly different"?
AFAIK it's nowhere near as bad as you suggest. OpenGL API calls go direct to the driver (on Windows, they're patched though by the system's opengl32.dll at DLL load time), and the driver translates those calls straight into the command buffer, in the GPU's native format. So there's only one mapping layer involved in a API call, and it's a necessary one.
The bigger problem with OpenGL at the moment is that this mapping is decidedly not 1:1. The OpenGL API was designed for the hardware model of ~15 years ago, and modern GPUs don't look anything like that model any more. The mapping logic is therefore pretty convoluted; it's doing a similar job to the microcode that makes a modern CPU look like a 386. The mooted 3.0 release of OpenGL aims to remedy this with a cleaned-up API that maps much more directly onto the current hardware model, with the legacy API layered on top.
"If no one signs up then our countries military falls apart leaving us defensless."
Wow. That's possibly the most egregious example of a false dichotomy I've ever seen. As if the only possible alternatives were:
a) I agree to blindly follow every order (no matter how illegal, immoral or just plain flat-out stupid), or
b) I cower under the bed and cry, as the the (Mexican? Canadian?) Legions of Doom swagger through Times Square setting fire to puppies.
Here's one idea off the top of my head: by signing up, you agree to participate in any action of actual national defence. That means foreign military or paramilitary personnel on US soil or in US airspace or territorial waters. Participation in any other action, such as an unprovoked invasion of another sovereign state for no adequately explained reason, is strictly voluntary. The military has the option to discharge you if you decline, but that's as far as it goes.
Well, graphics is only a hobby for me, but yes, I'm pretty sure. Profile a helloworld-type app, and it shows pretty much all your time in SwapBuffers.
calling glFlush or whatever the D3D equivalent is will cause the system to wait for the pipeline to empty but in any modern game so much time is spent actually calculating what commands to send that the overhead of synchronising with the card is quite low.
I'm not talking about modern games; with those, you expect the machine to sweat. I'm talking about much more modest apps. The issue isn't the driver waiting for the pipeline to empty, as that's pretty much instantaneous in a helloworld app. And yet the CPU overhead is 100%-(whatever you're actually using).
Also the fact that a simple rotate-the-cube type app hits 100% cpu time is more to do with the fact that most such hello world programs don't do framerate throttling so they are going as fast as they possibly can
No, I'm talking about running with vsync enabled. Your framerate can't be higher than the screen's refresh rate.
Incidentally, in the other case where vsync is disabled, how would you implement a framerate throttle without timing frames? (Not a rhetorical question; I know it's done, but I don't know how.)
Not disputing anything in TFA, but there's another power-related annoyance that (IMHO) should be easier to address.
When rendering in double-buffered mode with vsync on, the graphics card driver needs to wait for the display's vertical retrace before it swaps (or blits) the back buffer to the front. Today, all Windows drivers that I know of accomplish this with a spinlock. This means that an animated app grabs ALL available CPU cycles, even if the CPU actually needed to redraw each frame is trivial, and thus runs much hotter than it ought to for the amount of work being done.
For a high-end game that stresses the system anyway, this isn't a big deal. For more modest games or non-game applets, it's embarrassing to have a single rotating triangle forcing the machine to run all-out, particularly on battery power.
Application-level 'fixes' for this problem are very unsatisfactory - mostly trying to guess how long you've got until the next flip, Sleep()ing a bit and hoping you get woken up in time. It's clumsy, imprecise and the wrong place to be solving this. Why can't the driver wait on the flip - the flip it controls, for crying out loud - in some more efficient manner? (Can the new MWAIT instruction in EMT64 help with situations like this?)
Slashdot Mirror
And all the other people use stripped down pc with no USB dongle, no print screen, no copy-paste
Uh huh. So people take screenshots with their cellphone. Much as I'd love to see cellphones banned, I'm not optimistic.
If Google or any company promise "full information lock-down" to anybody, they'll be lying. DRM doesn't suddenly become less silly just because it's being applied to text rather than music/video.
The primitive portion of the brain, called the amygdala, feels fear and incites a fear-or-flight response
Hire River Tam as your chief security officer.
Maybe the movie DVDs are starting that now, but I have not watched any TV series DVDs that have that.
It's starting. The later Black Books DVDs have extraordinarily annoying unskippable trailers (including one for the series you're already watching).
Re point 1 - true, but not insurmountable. A trivial "case has been opened since last shutdown" trip switch could determine whether a full boot is needed.
Re point 2 - why would the boot image need to be pre-built? Why not record it at install/update?
I agree with you that a properly-implemented hibernate would deliver essentially what the OP is asking for, and I don't think it needs your caveat.
Didn't want to know, or knew already and were happy about it? US support of the Mujahideen was intended to sucker the USSR into an expensive and unwinnable conflict. Zbigniew Brzezinski has said:
I don't know for sure that the UK was in on it, but it's not an unreasonable assumption.
Sorry, but I happen to think that's crap. Much like the government, whenever a controversial law/license is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're LYING. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
If you're going to quote another user's post verbatim, it's generally considered polite to include attribution.
Excellent post.
I don't see much hope for the short-to-medium term, though, with the content mafia pushing executable content hard and Microsoft poisoning efforts for declarative content with proprietary solutions (VML, XAML) or foot-dragging (ECMAScript, CSS). I don't think this is going to change until other platforms (probably phones) eclipse Windows as the dominant web client platform.
Is anything happening with WebForms, btw? That "This document is in the very final stages and will very shortly become a call for implementations." message has been up for well over a year now.
The problem is that games are supposed to be fun. You're going to have to work really hard to come up with an alternative criteria. And since fun is pretty subjective, there's really not much room for criticism.
No argument there. But a game can be addictive without being fun, and addictiveness is arguably easier to achieve than fun in game design. It's certainly far better understood.
I haven't played WoW or any of the other MMORPGs, but a lot of players seem to fall into this trap. I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe EverQuest as "fun".
I'm curious... assuming you really meant freeware (free-as-in-beer, closed source), how do you justify the price of the Qt libraries to yourself? I thought it was in the thousands per year per seat. Did you have a commercial license anyway for other projects, or are you just obscenely rich?
Huh? Why can't a proprietary app static-link against an LGPL library? That was the whole point of the license.
.so route, but there's no legal problem.
You have to distribute linkable object code for the app, which is what puts people off and pushes them down the
Lots of Americans have the constitution of a beached whale.
In that case, I don't even want to know what their Charisma is like...
The Japanese were on the verge of surrendering already. [...] The atomic bombs were almost completely unnecessary, except to establish US dominance in the world theater by demonstrating god-like firepower.
The US was also under severe time pressure. The Soviet Union had just wrapped things up on their Western front and were about to start an Eastern one. (Hiroshima was August 6th, the Soviets declared war on Japan August 8th.) This would almost certainly have led to them grabbing, and quite possibly keeping, large chunks of Japanese-occupied China.
The US was already planning for what would become the Cold War, and were anxious to forestall this.
It'll vary enormously from country to country, but here in the UK single-issue parties are doing lobbying. Sometimes serious, sometimes not, but lobbying. Thanks to first-past-the-post they never get elected at the national level, and don't expect to. The point is to get a noticeable share in a marginal seat, so that the big parties think "Hmm, if we just adopt that policy, it'd give us enough votes to tip the election."
The restriction to marginal seats does limit the effectiveness of this kind of thing, of course, but campaign finance in the UK isn't as b0rked as in the US - you can't just buy the legislation you want openly. (You can buy titles and the like, but it's generally considered sleazy by the few people who still care.)
And it's kinda flawed at the moment. Seems to hang a lot for one thing, but the main problem is that the images are so ridiculously tiny. Google aren't going to get useful tags that way - most of the points of agreement end up being words like "man" or "people" or "building". It's frustrating, because often it's clearly a specific building, maybe even with a sign saying EXACTLY what it is, except that the text is half a pixel high.
That said, the end-of-game summary is an illuminating (and terrifying) revelation of just how bad some people's spelling is.
Coincidentally, I discovered today that Linspire/Freespire are standardizing on Haskell for core OS development. I'm still blinking a bit about that one, but you have to give them marks for chutzpah.
OpenGL on vista will be running on TOP of DirectX. This means that DirectX will EMULATE opengl
So? OpenGL is an API specification, not a processor architecture. If GL-on-DX does what the spec says then it's every bit as much a 'real' OpenGL implementation as any other.
I don't know if it's possible to be a history nazi, but here goes... If it was 1361, it would be Edward III
Egads, you're right. Upon investigation it appears that Edward I was indeed the correct Edward, but that the date in question should have been 1272. I shall amend the offending article forthwith.
--
The price of Wikipedia is eternal vigilance
Most. Apposite. Sig. Ever.
It wasn't government that cut pollutions, it was industries striving to reduce waste and increase efficiency that did it.
Untrue, or at least highly selective. Much (most?) pollution is not a consequence of inefficiency, and industry has no inherent incentive to reduce it. This is the standard example given to illustrate negative externalities.
Government is the only instrument I'm aware of by which people can push these externalized costs back onto the polluters. And claiming that it hasn't done so is flat wrong. All the way back to Edward I in 1361 banning the burning of sea-coal to reduce London smog.
Software generates the OpenGL instructions, which get turned into identical but probably different OpenGL instructions (on a 1:1 basis) in some OS library, which then gets translated into identical but almost certainly different OpenGL instructions (still on a 1:1 basis) by the graphics driver, which hands the data to the card.
Erm... "identical but almost certainly different"?
AFAIK it's nowhere near as bad as you suggest. OpenGL API calls go direct to the driver (on Windows, they're patched though by the system's opengl32.dll at DLL load time), and the driver translates those calls straight into the command buffer, in the GPU's native format. So there's only one mapping layer involved in a API call, and it's a necessary one.
The bigger problem with OpenGL at the moment is that this mapping is decidedly not 1:1. The OpenGL API was designed for the hardware model of ~15 years ago, and modern GPUs don't look anything like that model any more. The mapping logic is therefore pretty convoluted; it's doing a similar job to the microcode that makes a modern CPU look like a 386. The mooted 3.0 release of OpenGL aims to remedy this with a cleaned-up API that maps much more directly onto the current hardware model, with the legacy API layered on top.
"If no one signs up then our countries military falls apart leaving us defensless."
Wow. That's possibly the most egregious example of a false dichotomy I've ever seen. As if the only possible alternatives were:
a) I agree to blindly follow every order (no matter how illegal, immoral or just plain flat-out stupid), or
b) I cower under the bed and cry, as the the (Mexican? Canadian?) Legions of Doom swagger through Times Square setting fire to puppies.
Here's one idea off the top of my head: by signing up, you agree to participate in any action of actual national defence. That means foreign military or paramilitary personnel on US soil or in US airspace or territorial waters. Participation in any other action, such as an unprovoked invasion of another sovereign state for no adequately explained reason, is strictly voluntary. The military has the option to discharge you if you decline, but that's as far as it goes.
http://www.google.com/search?q=spinlock+vsync
Particularly some of the comments to the Old New Thing blog.
NVidia hasn't spinlocked for a while
Actually, are you sure about that? I've just installed 84.21 for my ageing 4200 Go, and the 100% CPU problem is just as bad as ever.
Actually, ATI finally fixed this bug in their latest drivers. NVidia hasn't spinlocked for a while.
Hey, some good news! Thanks for the info.
Are you sure about that?
Well, graphics is only a hobby for me, but yes, I'm pretty sure. Profile a helloworld-type app, and it shows pretty much all your time in SwapBuffers.
calling glFlush or whatever the D3D equivalent is will cause the system to wait for the pipeline to empty but in any modern game so much time is spent actually calculating what commands to send that the overhead of synchronising with the card is quite low.
I'm not talking about modern games; with those, you expect the machine to sweat. I'm talking about much more modest apps. The issue isn't the driver waiting for the pipeline to empty, as that's pretty much instantaneous in a helloworld app. And yet the CPU overhead is 100%-(whatever you're actually using).
Also the fact that a simple rotate-the-cube type app hits 100% cpu time is more to do with the fact that most such hello world programs don't do framerate throttling so they are going as fast as they possibly can
No, I'm talking about running with vsync enabled. Your framerate can't be higher than the screen's refresh rate.
Incidentally, in the other case where vsync is disabled, how would you implement a framerate throttle without timing frames? (Not a rhetorical question; I know it's done, but I don't know how.)
Not disputing anything in TFA, but there's another power-related annoyance that (IMHO) should be easier to address.
When rendering in double-buffered mode with vsync on, the graphics card driver needs to wait for the display's vertical retrace before it swaps (or blits) the back buffer to the front. Today, all Windows drivers that I know of accomplish this with a spinlock. This means that an animated app grabs ALL available CPU cycles, even if the CPU actually needed to redraw each frame is trivial, and thus runs much hotter than it ought to for the amount of work being done.
For a high-end game that stresses the system anyway, this isn't a big deal. For more modest games or non-game applets, it's embarrassing to have a single rotating triangle forcing the machine to run all-out, particularly on battery power.
Application-level 'fixes' for this problem are very unsatisfactory - mostly trying to guess how long you've got until the next flip, Sleep()ing a bit and hoping you get woken up in time. It's clumsy, imprecise and the wrong place to be solving this. Why can't the driver wait on the flip - the flip it controls, for crying out loud - in some more efficient manner? (Can the new MWAIT instruction in EMT64 help with situations like this?)