Given enough labeled pictures of me, one could run it through a facial recognition system. It would have the same applications, without the initial creepy factor.
It's all creepy to me. The fact is, it's pervasive and very difficult to opt out of as current social norms exist. Even if you don't have a gmail account, if you have even a small circle of friends there is a high chance of someone else having a gmail account that you have sent mail to, which puts your email in that circle of friends. If someone else in the same circle of friends has your picture and labels it, that would be enough to reliably link your email, first name, last name and face together. (Your friends would be identifiable as a cluster.)
With the above and a sample of your writing, there is a good chance that you have a statistically improbable phrase or two (or vocabulary) that is going to identify you elsewhere on the net.
Have enough cameras in a given country, and you can build up a database of people and locations they have been to, updating in real time. Those whose faces haven't yet been identified will relatively easily be able to be associated with the groups of people they associate with (enough times at nearby camera locations with a given person at the same time, with extra weight if those other people are there at the same times, coupled with cell phone location information), and their domicile located to within the nearest camera. In fact, just correlate the cell phone location info with the face from the camera - if they have a phone you have a match. Remember there is also the database of passports (with photos) that can be assumed scanned, and nicely labeled high-school graduation photos for all potentially subversive people coming of age. And those unidentified faces might be driving a car which will have a license plate, again, traceable to a database of names and addresses.
At this point the number of unidentified people should be small enough so that there are only a relative handful of people who are just unidentified faces. These people will be probably be high value enough on average to make it worthwhile to find out who they are. It would be relatively inexpensive to obtain their identity - identify from the database the scheduled activities they keep, send an undercover vehicle there to stake them out at probable times, when the camera gives a positive, trail them home to an address etc. You'll get at least an alias if not a name, an address, a face, and a likely circle of friends.
If they can recognize faces they should be able to recognize ethnicity (if you can recognize a face and an ethnicity from a photograph, so can a machine). The facial measurements and last names will form a cluster. A scan through the last names will identify the ethnicity probably within the first few entries or so.
If I can think it, google/NSA has smarter people than me working for them and they will have done that and more.
The only way to opt out is to live as a hermit or with similarly google avoiding hermits. Maybe not even possible. It seems harmless enough now, but the moment the rulers are actually fearful (e.g. if there was a large enough depression, people out of work started rioting in sufficient numbers or with arms), you can bet that there will be unmarked vans going around the city in the night picking up people with their "SubversiveRank (TM)" above an arbitrary threshold with a one-way ticket to either a slave labor camp or an unmarked grave.
Who exactly does google's "Don't be Evil" motto apply to? It makes MUCH more sense if it is externally directed.
Since this is basically an NSLU2 with roughly an order of magnitude faster CPU, RAM and ethernet, the capabilities should be a superset of the NSLU2. Here is a pretty comprehensive list of what the NSLU2 has been used for:
The more interesting question for me is, since the NSLU2 was ~$100 and used ~5W of power, what would this allow me to do that the NSLU2 wouldn't? The first things that come to mind are streaming HD content, a more load tolerant webserver, and running a less stripped down version of Linux. Am I missing any other major applications?
... because wall warts with a tail plugged into the nearest network port wouldn't attract any kind of attention.
It really depends on Murphy's law. If you were planting the device, you would be caught red handed and receive fines and a jail term.
If the device was planted by someone you were interviewing in your office, it would escape detection for 5 years. Your company's trade secrets (in a convenient folder labeled "top_secret_company_docs") would be stolen by a larger competitor and used to drive your company out of business. Additionally, you would be fired 5 years later as a port audit discovered the device in your office.
You could have a point. Why have MS increasingly enabled DRM in their operating systems? My guess is that they are hoping for a cut of all digital movie and music sales.
To go back on that after so much investment is a big about face. However, most of this investment was done prior to releasing Vista, so an about face is possible.
At what point do Microsoft halt their delusions of grandeur and start battening down the hatches? If it is now as you contend, then this move makes sense. Network effect and rampant piracy of games and applications was certainly a help for Windows to become entrenched. Even its own applications and operating system. This is still a factor - the operating system that allows the most capability and content for the least amount of dollars and work will gain or retain users.
However, knowing Microsoft I would expect there to be a hook there in that bait. Maybe when this service reaches market saturation, Microsoft will start integrating DRM "as a result of media industry pressure".
Perhaps better to find a different way of putting it?
I think of it like a ratchet. No doubt Microsoft believes that ratchet is attached to a loop enclosing their air supply. Whether their paranoia is justified is another question, but you don't get to where they are without doing a little contingency planning.
Consider the US and the rate of adoption of the superior metric system. Engineers and scientists (i.e. geeks) love it, the average person finds it confusing. Sounds suspiciously like OS market share. There are more downsides to MS than imperial units though, including the lock-in, the cost, the changing stuff around just to be different and justify more income stream, unlike FOSS that converges on an ideal.
I'm not sure if I even want Linux to become more popular than it would have to become to just get really good driver support. The more popular it gets, the more it becomes a target for parasites such as malware.
At the very least, manufacturers need to start listing input lag as part of the spec sheet. It is often an order of magnitude greater than the response time, which is always listed. There is no excuse as far as I am concerned, enough consumers play fps games and the like.
By the time oil, uranium, coal, and natural gas resources all begin to dwindle, new technologies will have made new forms of elecricity generation economically feasible.
Right, but what are the unintended consequences of burning through all of those resources with nothing more than the hope that the invisible hand will take care of everything? Potentially irreversible and hazardous environmental changes, infrastructure reliant upon the false assumption of a never ending supply of energy exploitable at a rapid rate (as opposed to solar), and perhaps truly important uses for large amounts of energy (or power - e.g. try doing Project Orion with anything other than nuclear energy) are a few things I can think off the top of my head. For what? So a few bozos can get some utility from blacker blacks?
Any serious gamer will tell you Doom3, Quake4, and yes, TF2 are terrible games. Of course, we are on Slashdot; so your safe groupthink response is valued much more than individual thought; or of someone who's been gaming since the late 1970s.
I thought TF2 was highly addictive, and very fun; I've been playing games since the early 1980s. My favorite kinds of multiplayer games are those where there is no "one best way" - there is always a valid counter to a particular strategy, and this forces a constantly evolving game. The more balanced classes, the more variety, and the more tweaking it takes to get the balancing right. And ultimately, the more longevity the game has. (There is a limit; a good game must still be easy enough to learn while being very difficult to master). Games like these are more like good sports, or chess. I don't think it's an accident that such games choose to dispense with realism because realism isn't the point - see Starcraft for example - or chess.
Perhaps in a downturn people will become more value conscious. With the replayability of games like TF2, the cost to play TF2 is negligible compared with WoW or a 12 hour, interactive movie type FPS.
I'm not sure how any OS is going to eliminate counterproductive fanboys and zealots. At least on the ubuntuforums they have a moderation policy that effectively filters out the unhelpful stuff. That is one of the most effective things Canonical could have done in terms of getting quality support and community happening, bang for buck wise.
There's been some interesting stories over the past couple months about how many European countries have always considered themselves far more progressive in terms of race than the US, but are now being forced to realize that a minority citizen would never be elected to their highest offices. They haven't solved racism any more than the USA has, they merely did a better job of pretending that it wasn't an issue.
I really don't understand the big push to turn the world (especially the European world it seems) into a big melting pot. There is no diversity in a melting pot.
I also don't understand the desirability of having non-representative leaders (racially or otherwise). Why would a world with an Ethiopian presiding over China while a Sikh presides over Israel and a Brazilian presides over Russia be any better than the world we currently have? (FWIW I think that Obama is a better choice than the senile egomaniac who somehow bubbled up (meritocratically no doubt) to be the second best choice of leader in the wondrous US system.)
People who may already exhibit signs of anger or aggression may be drawn to such games. The games don't cause the anger or aggression.
I enjoy the odd FPS game every now and then. I notice that I tend to become irritable and aggressive for some time after I have played them for a period of time (e.g. several days). After I have stopped for a day or so, I become even-tempered again. The FPS games never drive me anywhere near the point of a public safety danger type thing, but there is certainly an effect, and one I'd like to avoid.
I know I'm only one datapoint, but chances are good that at least a subset of humanity has a similar sort of reaction to playing violent video games. Some weaker, some negligible, some stronger. The far right of the bell curve in terms of this reaction would be a public danger, and if I was to make an educated guess I'd expect to see a correlation with testosterone levels. i.e. Males, especially in the high school years where testosterone is going crazy but there is not enough life experience to moderate the anger.
To draw an analogy, violent video games are fairly realistic killing/murder simulations. Effective armies typically condition their soldiers to kill when ordered to, and sometimes to enjoy killing. The Japanese army would blood their recruits on killing a POW and reward them with a feast, sake etc. How much different is that from the simulated killing (in some cases) of hundreds of people, for hours at a time, followed by routine in-game encouragement ("Headshot!"), names at the top of the ladder, adulation/respect from online friends etc?
I know this is slashdot and I would naturally expect 95% of people on here to have at some point in their lives to have enjoyed violent games responsibly. I'd expect they'd get irritated at even the threat of blanket bans to stop the 0.0001% of people who will constitute some sort of public safety risk by playing a video game which will push them over the edge. There is also going to be a significant subset of people who make a living from producing violent video games. So it's not really surprising to see most of the modded comments here on the defensive.
MP3s were the last one, and IIRC that's been commonplace for almost a decade now.
HD video is newer, but your point is still good. The main area that CPUs (and GPUs) need to improve (from the perspective of most users) is in power consumption, as this brings silence and lower costs. I can see LCD monitors getting bigger - 30-40 inch monitors for a similar price per unit area as 22 inch monitors would sell well. I can see getting games to run at decent FPS at higher resolutions will give some more legs to GPU speed increases. Someone else mentioned SSD, they will be huge and everyone will be wanting to buy one to put their OS and program files on.
Other than that, we are waiting on a killer app. A bloated but not more functional OS will only drive people to Linux.
I think you meant joke instead of meme. I doubt we'd see a combination of those 3 memes spreading outside this thread, for example. But anyway...
1. Go to Soviet Russia. 2. Pay someone. 3. ??? 4. Profit 5. Realize that although your joke checks all the boxes at the time of design, it is excessive and misses the mark - much like the Edsel.
I'd agree with you, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm a human and not a machine. Survival of a species tends to be proportional to the size of its territory and its population. You can't really compare a human mission to Mars with a robotic one, since there has never been a human mission to Mars.
I agree with you to the extent that the ultimate goal of exploration should be a self-sufficient and perpetually growing (rate doesn't matter, provided that it is exponential and positive) human colony on Mars (and other areas of space). How we get to that point should be a question of schedule and cost - what will get us to that point fastest and cheapest. Humans are always going to require lots of heavy and therefore expensive systems to keep them alive, whereas robotic capabilities keep growing. Until we get to the point where there are bottlenecks involved in colonizing that can only be solved with a manned mission, why not keep using machines?
Linux is a world-class platform for servers, a halfway descent desktop, and a kind of crappy gaming machine.
That's an excellent nutshell view of Linux as it currently stands - correct on all counts. Thank you for that.
I'm not convinced the approach of a dedicated Linux gaming machine won't work, although history is littered with examples of failed consoles. Maybe a variation on that theme. There is an incentive to make something like this work. Think of a combination of the following: AMD 780G mobo and CPU, Ubuntu, Steam. The CPU/mobo already have the capacity to be a decent games platform, and is marketed as such (AMD Game!). They are currently let down by drivers in Linux. By 2010 the ATI FOSS 3d drivers should be half decent. Obviously AMD sees some sort of future in Linux otherwise they would not be doing this.
Success really hinges on something like Steam supporting Linux. The games are good, attracting gamers. Steam's DRM ensures that developers get paid. The more platforms that Steam can run on, the more revenue. The cheaper the platform, the larger the volume.
As PCs powerful enough to run games become more of a low priced commodity, more people will buy them, and the price of the OS will loom large. Linux can be expected to become more common as a result. If Steam moves now, it will gain a large (and difficult to erode) market share among Linux users, and also experience. Steam will have some competitive advantages over consoles. Steam doesn't have to invest anything in hardware development (in what is a loss leader anyway) - AMD, Intel, ATI and Nvidia will do that for them as a matter of course. Consumers will be constantly upgrading in piecemeal fashion; there won't be a situation where their hardware is all obsolete (e.g. a console at the end of the lifecycle), and thus there won't be the risk of a mass migration to a competitor. Consumers also have some advantages over consoles with that sort of setup - hardware upgrades won't render their investment in older games obsolete. Motherboard vendors like Asus could even incorporate Steam into a fast boot, nullifying the fast boot advantage of consoles.
The bottom line is that the geological sciences (esp. seismology, vulcanology) are notoriously inept at accurate useful-time-frame predictions. They may be kinda consistent/accurate when it comes to a couple minutes/hours before an event, but our understanding is too incomplete for anything consistent beyond that.
More than ineptness, it may be practically impossible to model to or get useful inputs for such a model (when there will be a surge in magma convection or a shearing in rock). It's like a lot of unstable situations - you need a trigger but can't predict when that trigger will come. Often that trigger is a result of random noise or something too small to track. Houses of cards at a certain height, economic bubble burstings, soap bubble burstings, supercooled water freezing, disgruntled postal workers snapping... you can't predict except within a certain time frame when any of these are going to occur. It's more a result of lacking omniscience than being inept or not understanding the phenomena.
I don't think the parent should be called a troll; It's a valid opinion. Up until now, nvidia is what you picked if you wanted:
better compatibility with recent kernels
easier installation
better performance
For sure. Of those who have bought the 780G (HD3200) for ideological reasons, a portion just get a cheap nvidia card to tide them over until the FOSS drivers get up to speed.
So far I can't be bothered. And unless I develop an interest in running the latest games, my new system could last 10+ years. A year or two of poor performance was not a deal breaker. Having a fairly low wattage, functional system for the indefinite future was more important.
I'm willing to bet that if everyone who *REALLY* wants to see great F/OSS drivers for ATI were to plop down $5 USD it would make a difference to how they are thinking about releasing drivers. Yes, $50,000 might not be much but it also might make a difference to ATI. This falls into a category of donations that I've talked about before.
Since AMD/ATI made the commitment to open source the video drivers and docs I bought an AMD CPU and ATI GPU knowing full well the GPU wouldn't work very well yet in Linux. At least the GPU part of the purchase was made specifically because of AMD's commitment to FOSS, and the CPU was good enough that I didn't bother looking at the equivalent Intel offering. Hopefully they made more than $5 USD from the purchase. And I wouldn't have cared about any of this if it weren't for Theo's proselytizing.
If they can get rid of the tearing and provide some useful 3d by 2010 or at least the next LTS Ubuntu (10.04) I will be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
It's all creepy to me. The fact is, it's pervasive and very difficult to opt out of as current social norms exist. Even if you don't have a gmail account, if you have even a small circle of friends there is a high chance of someone else having a gmail account that you have sent mail to, which puts your email in that circle of friends. If someone else in the same circle of friends has your picture and labels it, that would be enough to reliably link your email, first name, last name and face together. (Your friends would be identifiable as a cluster.)
With the above and a sample of your writing, there is a good chance that you have a statistically improbable phrase or two (or vocabulary) that is going to identify you elsewhere on the net.
Have enough cameras in a given country, and you can build up a database of people and locations they have been to, updating in real time. Those whose faces haven't yet been identified will relatively easily be able to be associated with the groups of people they associate with (enough times at nearby camera locations with a given person at the same time, with extra weight if those other people are there at the same times, coupled with cell phone location information), and their domicile located to within the nearest camera. In fact, just correlate the cell phone location info with the face from the camera - if they have a phone you have a match. Remember there is also the database of passports (with photos) that can be assumed scanned, and nicely labeled high-school graduation photos for all potentially subversive people coming of age. And those unidentified faces might be driving a car which will have a license plate, again, traceable to a database of names and addresses.
At this point the number of unidentified people should be small enough so that there are only a relative handful of people who are just unidentified faces. These people will be probably be high value enough on average to make it worthwhile to find out who they are. It would be relatively inexpensive to obtain their identity - identify from the database the scheduled activities they keep, send an undercover vehicle there to stake them out at probable times, when the camera gives a positive, trail them home to an address etc. You'll get at least an alias if not a name, an address, a face, and a likely circle of friends.
If they can recognize faces they should be able to recognize ethnicity (if you can recognize a face and an ethnicity from a photograph, so can a machine). The facial measurements and last names will form a cluster. A scan through the last names will identify the ethnicity probably within the first few entries or so.
If I can think it, google/NSA has smarter people than me working for them and they will have done that and more.
The only way to opt out is to live as a hermit or with similarly google avoiding hermits. Maybe not even possible. It seems harmless enough now, but the moment the rulers are actually fearful (e.g. if there was a large enough depression, people out of work started rioting in sufficient numbers or with arms), you can bet that there will be unmarked vans going around the city in the night picking up people with their "SubversiveRank (TM)" above an arbitrary threshold with a one-way ticket to either a slave labor camp or an unmarked grave.
Who exactly does google's "Don't be Evil" motto apply to? It makes MUCH more sense if it is externally directed.
Self interest? I'm guessing that you can expect more overtime out of people who won't ever have kids.
Since this is basically an NSLU2 with roughly an order of magnitude faster CPU, RAM and ethernet, the capabilities should be a superset of the NSLU2. Here is a pretty comprehensive list of what the NSLU2 has been used for:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Info/WhatPeopleAreReallyUsingTheirSlugsFor
The more interesting question for me is, since the NSLU2 was ~$100 and used ~5W of power, what would this allow me to do that the NSLU2 wouldn't? The first things that come to mind are streaming HD content, a more load tolerant webserver, and running a less stripped down version of Linux. Am I missing any other major applications?
It really depends on Murphy's law. If you were planting the device, you would be caught red handed and receive fines and a jail term.
If the device was planted by someone you were interviewing in your office, it would escape detection for 5 years. Your company's trade secrets (in a convenient folder labeled "top_secret_company_docs") would be stolen by a larger competitor and used to drive your company out of business. Additionally, you would be fired 5 years later as a port audit discovered the device in your office.
Swedes are the indigenous people in Sweden. Shouldn't they have a right to homeland?
You could have a point. Why have MS increasingly enabled DRM in their operating systems? My guess is that they are hoping for a cut of all digital movie and music sales.
To go back on that after so much investment is a big about face. However, most of this investment was done prior to releasing Vista, so an about face is possible.
At what point do Microsoft halt their delusions of grandeur and start battening down the hatches? If it is now as you contend, then this move makes sense. Network effect and rampant piracy of games and applications was certainly a help for Windows to become entrenched. Even its own applications and operating system. This is still a factor - the operating system that allows the most capability and content for the least amount of dollars and work will gain or retain users.
However, knowing Microsoft I would expect there to be a hook there in that bait. Maybe when this service reaches market saturation, Microsoft will start integrating DRM "as a result of media industry pressure".
Hard to say. Estimating probabilities of a single event in the absence of similar events to learn from is always going to be tough.
I think of it like a ratchet. No doubt Microsoft believes that ratchet is attached to a loop enclosing their air supply. Whether their paranoia is justified is another question, but you don't get to where they are without doing a little contingency planning.
Consider the US and the rate of adoption of the superior metric system. Engineers and scientists (i.e. geeks) love it, the average person finds it confusing. Sounds suspiciously like OS market share. There are more downsides to MS than imperial units though, including the lock-in, the cost, the changing stuff around just to be different and justify more income stream, unlike FOSS that converges on an ideal.
I'm not sure if I even want Linux to become more popular than it would have to become to just get really good driver support. The more popular it gets, the more it becomes a target for parasites such as malware.
At the very least, manufacturers need to start listing input lag as part of the spec sheet. It is often an order of magnitude greater than the response time, which is always listed. There is no excuse as far as I am concerned, enough consumers play fps games and the like.
It looks like you are having trouble imagining a beowulf cluster. Perhaps a car analogy would help?
Right, but what are the unintended consequences of burning through all of those resources with nothing more than the hope that the invisible hand will take care of everything? Potentially irreversible and hazardous environmental changes, infrastructure reliant upon the false assumption of a never ending supply of energy exploitable at a rapid rate (as opposed to solar), and perhaps truly important uses for large amounts of energy (or power - e.g. try doing Project Orion with anything other than nuclear energy) are a few things I can think off the top of my head. For what? So a few bozos can get some utility from blacker blacks?
I thought TF2 was highly addictive, and very fun; I've been playing games since the early 1980s. My favorite kinds of multiplayer games are those where there is no "one best way" - there is always a valid counter to a particular strategy, and this forces a constantly evolving game. The more balanced classes, the more variety, and the more tweaking it takes to get the balancing right. And ultimately, the more longevity the game has. (There is a limit; a good game must still be easy enough to learn while being very difficult to master). Games like these are more like good sports, or chess. I don't think it's an accident that such games choose to dispense with realism because realism isn't the point - see Starcraft for example - or chess.
Perhaps in a downturn people will become more value conscious. With the replayability of games like TF2, the cost to play TF2 is negligible compared with WoW or a 12 hour, interactive movie type FPS.
I'm not sure how any OS is going to eliminate counterproductive fanboys and zealots. At least on the ubuntuforums they have a moderation policy that effectively filters out the unhelpful stuff. That is one of the most effective things Canonical could have done in terms of getting quality support and community happening, bang for buck wise.
I really don't understand the big push to turn the world (especially the European world it seems) into a big melting pot. There is no diversity in a melting pot.
I also don't understand the desirability of having non-representative leaders (racially or otherwise). Why would a world with an Ethiopian presiding over China while a Sikh presides over Israel and a Brazilian presides over Russia be any better than the world we currently have? (FWIW I think that Obama is a better choice than the senile egomaniac who somehow bubbled up (meritocratically no doubt) to be the second best choice of leader in the wondrous US system.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ
I enjoy the odd FPS game every now and then. I notice that I tend to become irritable and aggressive for some time after I have played them for a period of time (e.g. several days). After I have stopped for a day or so, I become even-tempered again. The FPS games never drive me anywhere near the point of a public safety danger type thing, but there is certainly an effect, and one I'd like to avoid.
I know I'm only one datapoint, but chances are good that at least a subset of humanity has a similar sort of reaction to playing violent video games. Some weaker, some negligible, some stronger. The far right of the bell curve in terms of this reaction would be a public danger, and if I was to make an educated guess I'd expect to see a correlation with testosterone levels. i.e. Males, especially in the high school years where testosterone is going crazy but there is not enough life experience to moderate the anger.
To draw an analogy, violent video games are fairly realistic killing/murder simulations. Effective armies typically condition their soldiers to kill when ordered to, and sometimes to enjoy killing. The Japanese army would blood their recruits on killing a POW and reward them with a feast, sake etc. How much different is that from the simulated killing (in some cases) of hundreds of people, for hours at a time, followed by routine in-game encouragement ("Headshot!"), names at the top of the ladder, adulation/respect from online friends etc?
I know this is slashdot and I would naturally expect 95% of people on here to have at some point in their lives to have enjoyed violent games responsibly. I'd expect they'd get irritated at even the threat of blanket bans to stop the 0.0001% of people who will constitute some sort of public safety risk by playing a video game which will push them over the edge. There is also going to be a significant subset of people who make a living from producing violent video games. So it's not really surprising to see most of the modded comments here on the defensive.
HD video is newer, but your point is still good. The main area that CPUs (and GPUs) need to improve (from the perspective of most users) is in power consumption, as this brings silence and lower costs. I can see LCD monitors getting bigger - 30-40 inch monitors for a similar price per unit area as 22 inch monitors would sell well. I can see getting games to run at decent FPS at higher resolutions will give some more legs to GPU speed increases. Someone else mentioned SSD, they will be huge and everyone will be wanting to buy one to put their OS and program files on.
Other than that, we are waiting on a killer app. A bloated but not more functional OS will only drive people to Linux.
Tell that to Ted Kennedy.
I think you meant joke instead of meme. I doubt we'd see a combination of those 3 memes spreading outside this thread, for example. But anyway...
1. Go to Soviet Russia.
2. Pay someone.
3. ???
4. Profit
5. Realize that although your joke checks all the boxes at the time of design, it is excessive and misses the mark - much like the Edsel.
I agree with you to the extent that the ultimate goal of exploration should be a self-sufficient and perpetually growing (rate doesn't matter, provided that it is exponential and positive) human colony on Mars (and other areas of space). How we get to that point should be a question of schedule and cost - what will get us to that point fastest and cheapest. Humans are always going to require lots of heavy and therefore expensive systems to keep them alive, whereas robotic capabilities keep growing. Until we get to the point where there are bottlenecks involved in colonizing that can only be solved with a manned mission, why not keep using machines?
That's an excellent nutshell view of Linux as it currently stands - correct on all counts. Thank you for that.
I'm not convinced the approach of a dedicated Linux gaming machine won't work, although history is littered with examples of failed consoles. Maybe a variation on that theme. There is an incentive to make something like this work. Think of a combination of the following: AMD 780G mobo and CPU, Ubuntu, Steam. The CPU/mobo already have the capacity to be a decent games platform, and is marketed as such (AMD Game!). They are currently let down by drivers in Linux. By 2010 the ATI FOSS 3d drivers should be half decent. Obviously AMD sees some sort of future in Linux otherwise they would not be doing this.
Success really hinges on something like Steam supporting Linux. The games are good, attracting gamers. Steam's DRM ensures that developers get paid. The more platforms that Steam can run on, the more revenue. The cheaper the platform, the larger the volume.
As PCs powerful enough to run games become more of a low priced commodity, more people will buy them, and the price of the OS will loom large. Linux can be expected to become more common as a result. If Steam moves now, it will gain a large (and difficult to erode) market share among Linux users, and also experience. Steam will have some competitive advantages over consoles. Steam doesn't have to invest anything in hardware development (in what is a loss leader anyway) - AMD, Intel, ATI and Nvidia will do that for them as a matter of course. Consumers will be constantly upgrading in piecemeal fashion; there won't be a situation where their hardware is all obsolete (e.g. a console at the end of the lifecycle), and thus there won't be the risk of a mass migration to a competitor. Consumers also have some advantages over consoles with that sort of setup - hardware upgrades won't render their investment in older games obsolete. Motherboard vendors like Asus could even incorporate Steam into a fast boot, nullifying the fast boot advantage of consoles.
More than ineptness, it may be practically impossible to model to or get useful inputs for such a model (when there will be a surge in magma convection or a shearing in rock). It's like a lot of unstable situations - you need a trigger but can't predict when that trigger will come. Often that trigger is a result of random noise or something too small to track. Houses of cards at a certain height, economic bubble burstings, soap bubble burstings, supercooled water freezing, disgruntled postal workers snapping... you can't predict except within a certain time frame when any of these are going to occur. It's more a result of lacking omniscience than being inept or not understanding the phenomena.
For sure. Of those who have bought the 780G (HD3200) for ideological reasons, a portion just get a cheap nvidia card to tide them over until the FOSS drivers get up to speed.
So far I can't be bothered. And unless I develop an interest in running the latest games, my new system could last 10+ years. A year or two of poor performance was not a deal breaker. Having a fairly low wattage, functional system for the indefinite future was more important.
Since AMD/ATI made the commitment to open source the video drivers and docs I bought an AMD CPU and ATI GPU knowing full well the GPU wouldn't work very well yet in Linux. At least the GPU part of the purchase was made specifically because of AMD's commitment to FOSS, and the CPU was good enough that I didn't bother looking at the equivalent Intel offering. Hopefully they made more than $5 USD from the purchase. And I wouldn't have cared about any of this if it weren't for Theo's proselytizing.
If they can get rid of the tearing and provide some useful 3d by 2010 or at least the next LTS Ubuntu (10.04) I will be happy.