I sincerely hope you don't mean that. Glenn Beck is about as ridiculous as they come. He offers no discussion, only bait. He's like a 13 year old on a forum starting a flame war then watching everything burn while pouring more gasoline. There may be valid points in there but the amount of noise that comes with it makes it hard to find the signal.
Now can someone in government put two and two together and see the absurd situation software patents has caused? VP8 is supposed to be patent-free but everyone on the H264 side is calling it patent-encumbered anyway. The mere existence of patent trolls should be reason enough to get rid of the idea. You should be able to patent implementations, not ideas.
The point of software patents was to protect innovation. This should be a clear example that it is not, as VP8's adoption is supposedly slow because of the risk of violating other patents whose owners won't come out of the woodwork until VP8 has enough market share to make a lawsuit nicely profitable. The whole thing is patently ridiculous.
The sheer amount of patent lawsuits and now that even Google and Apple are teaming up against a troll is very telling. Software patents are not serving their intended purpose and it is obvious because no one wants to adopt VP8 because of the unknown threat. This is the stifling of innovation and is not protecting the patents of the 10 companies that may own patents to VP8 because no one wants to use them so they just become dead weight. What good is an idea if it can't be used?
Software is a fickle thing. Your idea may have also been invented by someone and you just didn't patent it. This is the problem with software patents. The patents themselves can be very vague and cover a whole host of ideas. If the patent office has to pass more patents just to get rid of a backlog, perhaps it isn't the fault of the filers but the fault of the law.
There is a real danger that, while chasing a rating, so much of what made Bioshock "Bioshock", would be removed, and you'll be left with something that no fan of the game will ever want to see.
You mean essentially what happened to the Doom movie with the whole "so let's make it a virus, not an actual demon infestation. Oh snap, now it's another Resident Evil, and that did so well!" and needless pandering to an audience.
The movie deserved to explore themes touched on in the game. The story is more The Matrix and Star Trek than Resident Evil, fear of what's out there, stopping when you should and what happens when science ignores morals. Gibbing the whole point of the plot (even though they didn't even bother to exploit this much in the game) destroyed any chance the movie had at being good.
Which happens all too often in games turned movies.
I really didn't enjoy the scene where what's-his-face didn't turn into a monster because he wasn't "evil on the inside." The Hell plot would have taken longer to pan out. Let it. It was cool to see the monsters from the game done with slightly better CGI but that was the only draw. If they spent the time they did coming up with a new angle to the monsters and just working with the source material... I mean, didn't id Software hire a professional author to come write the game's plot?
Tabs are REALLY on top now. My only gripe is I can't drag the title bar of Firefox any more in Windows 7 to get it out of a maximized window unless I click in empty space. It only does this when it's maximized.
For those of you saying, "That's nice, I'm good with my current speeds and don't need more", that's also nice, but there are others in the US, like me, who appreciate faster speeds, and it's been quite stagnant while prices have gone up. It shouldn't be a wonder why ISPs in the US are among the most-hated companies in the country. My current ISP seems to be creeping speeds up, however slowly. I can sometimes, though very rarely, get 2 MB/s downloads, but my connection still strains when one person is playing videos on YouTube and I'm trying to play Starcraft. When you've got multiple people using it, upload and download speeds are both key.
Car manufacturers also encourage the secondary market. You hear "resale value" fairly often in car commercials. Steam should create some kind of secondhand market. Don't want a game anymore? Sell your license back to them!
Of course, this has all kinds of problems in an environment like Steam...
To be fair, when an application crashes it doesn't always have to be that it tried to write over other memory. A lot of things can cause crashes, such as trying to divide by zero or trying to use a variable that hasn't been initialized. There was a divide by zero error in Diablo 2 when you clicked on your character's feet. It was funny.
Any error that occurs that isn't explicitly handled by _something_ is going to cause Windows (or other OS) to stop the application and show you a "this program has crashed" dialog.
No, the solution is well-known, just unpalatable to many people: stop having the government attempting to micromanage the economy. Every time Congress decides to treat one segment of the economy differently than another, through special taxes, regulations, subsidies, privileges, etc., the lobbyists will appear. Note that I am not arguing against all taxes and such, just pointing out that all such interference produces lobbyists.
Besides, if you want Congress to (e.g.) redesign the health care system, do you think they would actually do a better job if doctors, hospitals, and drug companies weren't consulted at all? I don't. I think they'd end up with legislation that was even more clueless. Just because lobbyists are arguing for a particular group doesn't mean they're always wrong.
If you want to minimize lobbyists, advocate against all special tax breaks and subsidies and for making taxes and regulation as uniform, sensible, and simple as possible.
The scary thing is you believe that with the influence of lobbyists, the laws that are made won't be at least somewhat influenced by the company's or industry's interests and not those of the country as a whole.
It's quite likely it's the lobbyists that are the ones responsible for some of the tax breaks that are afforded to certain industries. I was all for Obama when he said he was going to get rid of lobbyists and I am incredibly disappointed that promise fell through. The very idea of a representative of an industry or company putting his nose in lawmaking should be disgusting to anyone. Let the companies voice their opinion on laws like the rest of us: the Internet. It has the side benefit of making lawmaking more transparent because it's quite hard to hide stuff on the Internet in the first place (as ACS Law recently found out). Let the people hired to make laws make the laws and let the rest of the country have the same voice as any individual. In my mind, lobbying amounts to bribery and those with the most money can bribe the best, which is likely never a single individual. It really is disgusting.
Different industries need different laws governing them if for nothing else than to tax them differently to promote growth.
I'm starting to think some of the ridiculous patents and patent trolls lately are trying to push the buttons of copyright law in the US just enough so that someone in the government gets a hint and enacts some kind of reform, or better yet, gets rid of software patents. Patenting OS shutdown, I would like to see some of the patents that get shot down in the IT industry. Someone should patent a whole bunch of useless stuff but just not sue. Get the patents just to see what kind of stuff they let through, and then point at them for the kind of ridiculousness they're allowing.
I know *that* is a bunch of crap too and it's probably just an arms race of stupid patents before the other guy gets it and sues you.
You bought one ATI card, and it turned out to be a dud (or you just didn't like it, I don't know), so by extension all ATI cards are duds? ATI wouldn't still be in business if its cards were that bad.
Much like motherboards with integrated GPUs (and sound cards, and network cards and hard drive controllers), there's probably going to be a way to insert any graphics card you like into a system packed with a Fusion GPU. You can, after all, disable the on-board GPU through the motherboard, and it's quite likely the motherboard will be able to turn off the on-die graphics core.
As video cards become more and more capable of general processing, it just makes more and more sense to stuff their capability into an x86 chip. The reason we have MMX, SSE, etc. is because it didn't make sense to make a separate chip for them and they were/are leaps and bounds better than the standard x86 FPU. Graphics cards are becoming leaps and bounds better than MMX/SSE for more and more cases as the GPUs get more flexible and in some cases even the integer unit (see here!). They're already capable of doing physics processing, rendering physics add-in cards obsolete (pun intended, and sorry, PhysX).
It seems like the biggest problem for the 4k videos is not the frame rate but the bit rate. There's a ton of compression artifacts in all those 4k videos that I'm not convinced are going to look any better on a 4k-capable monitor.
Also, I thought he wanted to shoot it at a higher frame rate because it would make the 3D less eye-straining?
The problem with rewarding for efficiency is it also decreases efficiency on the project you're working on. It takes time to make code more efficient. It's faster (for humans) to just get it to work. It's all rather unfortunate. I'd rather spend some time on something to make it a more pleasant experience for the user but this want usually conflicts with time needs. Until there's something amazing coming out that can bring up the efficiency of writing applications, efficiency in code will tend to take a back seat.
Case in point, a project I'm working on now, I went to meet up with the guy who'll be using it and decided to spend a little bit of time making a long process a little faster. Then realized it was futile to keep going with the optimization because I was already pressed for time due to last minute additions -- and the project is already deemed late.
My last job my boss really didn't care if something was well-coded. As long as it worked, time and money trumped how well the programs ran.
Of course most countries have their problems. The trick is not every government is trying to shield their citizens from outside influence where they can get dangerous ideas. As long as the Internet's open, anyone smart enough can get their news, which is where I get mine because I don't like the media on television. When you block the Internet, you're blocking the last free source.
I really, really, really hope the Chinese people wake up one day and notice their government has a stranglehold on all information in and out of the country just so it can keep it's own power. Or at least that's how I see it. I really don't know why the Chinese government does what it does but I wish I knew.
When Blizzard takes a popular add-on, like say Outfitter, ItemRack, CTRaidFrames or Scrolling Combat Text and implements them in the stock UI lots of people complain it's "not as good." They have said in the past that that's exactly their intention, to implement these features to the UI as light and fluffy, just the basics. My guess is so it doesn't become overbearing as they continue to do this. I've seen many other people's UIs look like a ride from hell because they have 20 add-ons running at once and they have this magnifying-glass-sized portion to look at the game field.
They also don't want to replace said add-on but feel it has use that probably now belongs in the stock UI. This way, the add-on authors don't feel short-changed that Blizzard stole their work and there's no point continuing.
That said, I have to agree with others. This seems to be in the best interest of add-on consumers. I can easily see 3 years down the road many add-ons charging and/or soliciting donations in-game and whenever I run WoW I have to close 5 windows asking me for money.
Just for all your information, I had my Athlon 64 3200+'s fan fall right off while the computer was on. I tried to turn the machine on two times before I opened the case and discovered the horror. Turns out a piece of the clip attached to the motherboard snapped and the fan came off but once the spare one was on, the computer worked fine. But damn that chip was hot.
Just goes to show you. I wouldn't recommend trying this at home, though.
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I sincerely hope you don't mean that. Glenn Beck is about as ridiculous as they come. He offers no discussion, only bait. He's like a 13 year old on a forum starting a flame war then watching everything burn while pouring more gasoline. There may be valid points in there but the amount of noise that comes with it makes it hard to find the signal.
Close enough.
Er, my intention was there, even if the wording wasn't. :) Replace "patent" with "royalty" where appropriate if you like.
Now can someone in government put two and two together and see the absurd situation software patents has caused? VP8 is supposed to be patent-free but everyone on the H264 side is calling it patent-encumbered anyway. The mere existence of patent trolls should be reason enough to get rid of the idea. You should be able to patent implementations, not ideas.
The point of software patents was to protect innovation. This should be a clear example that it is not, as VP8's adoption is supposedly slow because of the risk of violating other patents whose owners won't come out of the woodwork until VP8 has enough market share to make a lawsuit nicely profitable. The whole thing is patently ridiculous.
The sheer amount of patent lawsuits and now that even Google and Apple are teaming up against a troll is very telling. Software patents are not serving their intended purpose and it is obvious because no one wants to adopt VP8 because of the unknown threat. This is the stifling of innovation and is not protecting the patents of the 10 companies that may own patents to VP8 because no one wants to use them so they just become dead weight. What good is an idea if it can't be used?
Software is a fickle thing. Your idea may have also been invented by someone and you just didn't patent it. This is the problem with software patents. The patents themselves can be very vague and cover a whole host of ideas. If the patent office has to pass more patents just to get rid of a backlog, perhaps it isn't the fault of the filers but the fault of the law.
You mean essentially what happened to the Doom movie with the whole "so let's make it a virus, not an actual demon infestation. Oh snap, now it's another Resident Evil, and that did so well!" and needless pandering to an audience.
The movie deserved to explore themes touched on in the game. The story is more The Matrix and Star Trek than Resident Evil, fear of what's out there, stopping when you should and what happens when science ignores morals. Gibbing the whole point of the plot (even though they didn't even bother to exploit this much in the game) destroyed any chance the movie had at being good.
Which happens all too often in games turned movies.
I really didn't enjoy the scene where what's-his-face didn't turn into a monster because he wasn't "evil on the inside." The Hell plot would have taken longer to pan out. Let it. It was cool to see the monsters from the game done with slightly better CGI but that was the only draw. If they spent the time they did coming up with a new angle to the monsters and just working with the source material... I mean, didn't id Software hire a professional author to come write the game's plot?
Tabs are REALLY on top now. My only gripe is I can't drag the title bar of Firefox any more in Windows 7 to get it out of a maximized window unless I click in empty space. It only does this when it's maximized.
Clearly I'm better than all of you because my UID is only 6 digits. Ha! (There was once a time when 6 digits was considered too long. Wtf?)
For those of you saying, "That's nice, I'm good with my current speeds and don't need more", that's also nice, but there are others in the US, like me, who appreciate faster speeds, and it's been quite stagnant while prices have gone up. It shouldn't be a wonder why ISPs in the US are among the most-hated companies in the country. My current ISP seems to be creeping speeds up, however slowly. I can sometimes, though very rarely, get 2 MB/s downloads, but my connection still strains when one person is playing videos on YouTube and I'm trying to play Starcraft. When you've got multiple people using it, upload and download speeds are both key.
Homosexuality is not a choice. Please learn this. Animals in nature can also be homosexual and I consider that proof that nature approves of it.
Car manufacturers also encourage the secondary market. You hear "resale value" fairly often in car commercials. Steam should create some kind of secondhand market. Don't want a game anymore? Sell your license back to them! Of course, this has all kinds of problems in an environment like Steam...
To be fair, when an application crashes it doesn't always have to be that it tried to write over other memory. A lot of things can cause crashes, such as trying to divide by zero or trying to use a variable that hasn't been initialized. There was a divide by zero error in Diablo 2 when you clicked on your character's feet. It was funny.
Any error that occurs that isn't explicitly handled by _something_ is going to cause Windows (or other OS) to stop the application and show you a "this program has crashed" dialog.
No, the solution is well-known, just unpalatable to many people: stop having the government attempting to micromanage the economy. Every time Congress decides to treat one segment of the economy differently than another, through special taxes, regulations, subsidies, privileges, etc., the lobbyists will appear. Note that I am not arguing against all taxes and such, just pointing out that all such interference produces lobbyists.
Besides, if you want Congress to (e.g.) redesign the health care system, do you think they would actually do a better job if doctors, hospitals, and drug companies weren't consulted at all? I don't. I think they'd end up with legislation that was even more clueless. Just because lobbyists are arguing for a particular group doesn't mean they're always wrong.
If you want to minimize lobbyists, advocate against all special tax breaks and subsidies and for making taxes and regulation as uniform, sensible, and simple as possible.
The scary thing is you believe that with the influence of lobbyists, the laws that are made won't be at least somewhat influenced by the company's or industry's interests and not those of the country as a whole. It's quite likely it's the lobbyists that are the ones responsible for some of the tax breaks that are afforded to certain industries. I was all for Obama when he said he was going to get rid of lobbyists and I am incredibly disappointed that promise fell through. The very idea of a representative of an industry or company putting his nose in lawmaking should be disgusting to anyone. Let the companies voice their opinion on laws like the rest of us: the Internet. It has the side benefit of making lawmaking more transparent because it's quite hard to hide stuff on the Internet in the first place (as ACS Law recently found out). Let the people hired to make laws make the laws and let the rest of the country have the same voice as any individual. In my mind, lobbying amounts to bribery and those with the most money can bribe the best, which is likely never a single individual. It really is disgusting. Different industries need different laws governing them if for nothing else than to tax them differently to promote growth.
I'd really like to see the statistics of hits to www.beautyoftheweb.com by browser.
Er, I meant pushing the buttons of patent law. :P
I'm starting to think some of the ridiculous patents and patent trolls lately are trying to push the buttons of copyright law in the US just enough so that someone in the government gets a hint and enacts some kind of reform, or better yet, gets rid of software patents. Patenting OS shutdown, I would like to see some of the patents that get shot down in the IT industry. Someone should patent a whole bunch of useless stuff but just not sue. Get the patents just to see what kind of stuff they let through, and then point at them for the kind of ridiculousness they're allowing.
I know *that* is a bunch of crap too and it's probably just an arms race of stupid patents before the other guy gets it and sues you.
I'm gonna have to call poop on this one.
You bought one ATI card, and it turned out to be a dud (or you just didn't like it, I don't know), so by extension all ATI cards are duds? ATI wouldn't still be in business if its cards were that bad.
Much like motherboards with integrated GPUs (and sound cards, and network cards and hard drive controllers), there's probably going to be a way to insert any graphics card you like into a system packed with a Fusion GPU. You can, after all, disable the on-board GPU through the motherboard, and it's quite likely the motherboard will be able to turn off the on-die graphics core.
As video cards become more and more capable of general processing, it just makes more and more sense to stuff their capability into an x86 chip. The reason we have MMX, SSE, etc. is because it didn't make sense to make a separate chip for them and they were/are leaps and bounds better than the standard x86 FPU. Graphics cards are becoming leaps and bounds better than MMX/SSE for more and more cases as the GPUs get more flexible and in some cases even the integer unit (see here!). They're already capable of doing physics processing, rendering physics add-in cards obsolete (pun intended, and sorry, PhysX).
If only someone could decide on a physics API...
Terminator is old news. It's all about the Mass Effect references.
As long as we find Legion and not followers of Sovereign, I'm good with this.
It seems like the biggest problem for the 4k videos is not the frame rate but the bit rate. There's a ton of compression artifacts in all those 4k videos that I'm not convinced are going to look any better on a 4k-capable monitor.
Also, I thought he wanted to shoot it at a higher frame rate because it would make the 3D less eye-straining?
The problem with rewarding for efficiency is it also decreases efficiency on the project you're working on. It takes time to make code more efficient. It's faster (for humans) to just get it to work. It's all rather unfortunate. I'd rather spend some time on something to make it a more pleasant experience for the user but this want usually conflicts with time needs. Until there's something amazing coming out that can bring up the efficiency of writing applications, efficiency in code will tend to take a back seat.
Case in point, a project I'm working on now, I went to meet up with the guy who'll be using it and decided to spend a little bit of time making a long process a little faster. Then realized it was futile to keep going with the optimization because I was already pressed for time due to last minute additions -- and the project is already deemed late.
My last job my boss really didn't care if something was well-coded. As long as it worked, time and money trumped how well the programs ran.
Of course most countries have their problems. The trick is not every government is trying to shield their citizens from outside influence where they can get dangerous ideas. As long as the Internet's open, anyone smart enough can get their news, which is where I get mine because I don't like the media on television. When you block the Internet, you're blocking the last free source.
I really, really, really hope the Chinese people wake up one day and notice their government has a stranglehold on all information in and out of the country just so it can keep it's own power. Or at least that's how I see it. I really don't know why the Chinese government does what it does but I wish I knew.
When Blizzard takes a popular add-on, like say Outfitter, ItemRack, CTRaidFrames or Scrolling Combat Text and implements them in the stock UI lots of people complain it's "not as good." They have said in the past that that's exactly their intention, to implement these features to the UI as light and fluffy, just the basics. My guess is so it doesn't become overbearing as they continue to do this. I've seen many other people's UIs look like a ride from hell because they have 20 add-ons running at once and they have this magnifying-glass-sized portion to look at the game field.
They also don't want to replace said add-on but feel it has use that probably now belongs in the stock UI. This way, the add-on authors don't feel short-changed that Blizzard stole their work and there's no point continuing.
That said, I have to agree with others. This seems to be in the best interest of add-on consumers. I can easily see 3 years down the road many add-ons charging and/or soliciting donations in-game and whenever I run WoW I have to close 5 windows asking me for money.
They've been a developing nation for 5000 years. What are they developing, I wonder?
Does my ID count as 5 digits? It's close enough, come on.
Just for all your information, I had my Athlon 64 3200+'s fan fall right off while the computer was on. I tried to turn the machine on two times before I opened the case and discovered the horror. Turns out a piece of the clip attached to the motherboard snapped and the fan came off but once the spare one was on, the computer worked fine. But damn that chip was hot.
Just goes to show you. I wouldn't recommend trying this at home, though.