Wow. Just wow. If that is true that is a pretty fucked up system, then. In the future, I'll refer everybody who complains about the Canadian tax system to this thread.
Re:AMD has done what it has always done...
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 1
I think you drastically over-estimate the value of the open source drivers to game developers. I am an academic, and I have no trouble at all getting fairly detailed architecture information from either NVIDIA or ATI under a non-disclosure agreement. You can be absolutely sure that all the bigger game outlets have the same (or better) info.
The other thing is that ATI drivers (at least the Linux ones) suck big time when it comes to optimization in the first place. There are so many OpenGL states that are not supported directly by the hardware, it is not even funny. Any of these will result in the system falling back to software rendering. Compare that with the NVIDIA divers, which are very good about doing averything in hardware (even though some data paths may still not be as fast as others). Also, NVIDIA has excellent profiling and performance monitoring software for all platforms. Like I said before, I don't care too much if that stuff is open source or not, so long as it WORKS, and allows me to get my work done. ATI's drivers don't.
Re:AMD has done what it has always done...
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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· Score: 1
It seems to me that there is an end. AMD has done what it has always done, invest for the future. Maybe a year from now everyone will be using AMD CPU-GPU chips in their low-cost laptops. Maybe? Sure. But maybe not. Intel actually holds the largest market share in GPUs (about 50%, with NVIDIA and ATI sharing the other 50%), and that is precisely because of the chipset-integrated GPUs they sell. Whatever ATI does in that price segment, Intel has quite a bit of a headstart.
AMD has open-sourced its performance library. And that translates into market share exactly how? Nobody who uses Windows or Mac on the desktop will care abou this one bit, and percentage of people using Linux and other open source OSes on the desktop is tiny. And even in that small percentage of desktop Linux users, you'll find people like me who are quite content with closed source drivers such as NVIDIAs so long as the work well (which ATI's don't!).
3D acceleration itself is not useful for 99.9% of the applications running on these chips, if we include computing activities that are not gaming. That may certainly be true, howver there clearly are people who buy these cards to do stuff with them. As you correclty point out, "stuff" is mostly gaming, so it makes no sense to add features to these cards that are not useful for gaming but add significant costs. That was what my remark was about.
They're not the same as the main graphics processors; they're a separate part of the chip AFAIK. You know wrong. OpenGL, Direct 3D and CUDA all share the same stream processors on the chip.
(Think! Why would NVIDIA waste expensive chip real estate for stream processors if they weren't useful for 99.9% of the applications running on these chips?)
Re:He didn't quit! Can't you people read?
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
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· Score: 1
The part where he said he would make reduce his resources (make the tema "leaner" etc) dedicated to the nomination campaign? Essentially, he'll stay on the ballots, but he will stop putting in enough money for posters, and events (he also wants to spend more time with his electorate). So yeah, he is essentially giving up.
Every so often I stumble across a post on slashdot that is so bizarre that I have to wonder what planet the poster is living on. The parent is one of those cases.
I have a faculty position at a public university, and believe me: you do NOT want to pay the taxes you'd have to pay if all my research activities (and those of my colleagues) were publically funded. So it is either private funds or reduced research activities. Guess which one is better for society?
There is a role for both public and private funding in university research. Public funding is great for high uncertainty research and everything with a horizon of 10+ years. This type of research is absolutely necessary to push the edge in science and technology, but is expected that only a small percentage of such research will ever be successful of commercially viable. Once you have discovered a basic phenomenon that seems to have promising applications, now is the time to extract the most societal benefit from that work. How do you do that? In some cases (e.g. medical research) the societal benefit is direct. In most science and technology areas, the societal benefit is indirect, through the creation of jobs. That means there has to be a path for taking the basic science and using it in products down the line. Note that at this stage, there is typically still quite a bit of work to be done to make the technology product ready. Who should pay for that work? The government? I think not! So this is the time for industry to step up and invest significant amounts of money (often more than required to do the initial basic research!). Of course they'll only do that if they can be reasonably sure their investments are protected, hence you need patents.
You may want to go easy on the drugs yourself; your post makes no sense. If you reduce your intake, you may realize that most of the time you don't need to wear that tinfoil hat.
First, you make it sound like meth is some kind nice harmless recreational drug. "By the people for the people", my ass. Meth is a nasty piece of work, and it is produced by criminals that don't care about anyone or anything other than making money. Maybe meth is not quite as destructive as heroin, but it still very effective at ruining people's lifes. I've observed people in my city getting hooked on this stuff, and after a few months you wouldn't recognize them.
Second, "THE GOVENRMENT" stands to make more money on meth than on other drugs, precisely because meth's precursors are produced by legal drug companies in the US. It's called taxes. Compare that to cocain, where "THE GOVENRMENT" has no real way of making money from it. Sure, there are probably a few corrupt cops here and there who do make money, but how exactly is that helping "THE GOVERNMENT"? Or maybe you are referring to confiscated property, but surely you are aware that the value of confiscated properties pales in comparison to the cost of the "war on drugs"? Now, I am not a big fan of the war on drugs myself, but to say that the government benefits from imported drugs is plain nonsense.
I have been consistently arguing in favor of copyright on slashdot and elsewhere. But this is not about enforcing existing laws, it is about tying college educational funding to policing of the students by their colleges. That is something the colleges have neither the mandate nor the expertise to do. Also, depriving an already underfunded public education system even more just because some students violate copyright laws strikes me as a really dumb idea.
Not in a fly-by-wire system, where the pilot's instruments aren't directly connected to the mechanical components, but only issue commands to the control computers. If you send these computers the same requests and they come up with different courses of action, you are in trouble, no way around it.
Just flew back SFO to NRT, 11 hours. Got 8+ hours of work done with no battery swaps on my 17" MacBook Pro. How? Power socket. Well, good for you. In my experience I have power sockets available only roughly half the time on intercontinental flights. Hopefully that will change at some point, but for the time being I will select my laptop for a worst case scenario, and take spare batteries with me, thankyouverymuch.
If not, why not buy one of the other fine Apple laptops and QUIT BITCHING? With/. being a technology forum, the discussions naturally include deliberations of tradeoffs for new technologies and products. If you aren't interested in these, or if you are such an Apple fanboy that mentioning any negatives for an Apple product hurts your religious feelings, then why don't you just skip the discussions for such topics?
As somebody else has pointed out, that design was abandoned for the 777.
An additional point, though: even if you had independently develped 3 systems and used them in a voting scheme. You would run into problems as soon as 2 of them have ANY kind of error (they don't need to be THE SAME errors). In that case, you'd end up with 3 different results, and since an aviation system doens't have the luxury to throw its hands up in the air and ask for service, you now have a situation where you have to pick one of the three distinct results. The probability for picking a faulty one is 2/3 at that point.
Well, I also travel a lot, and I ALWAYS take spares, since it is the difference between turning a long flight into a productive business day and being bored to death by some silly in-flight romantic comedy. And yeah I have an ibook right now, so I am not actually anti-Apple or anything.
As usual, the "we have coped without before" argument makes no sense at all. We have coped without cellphones before, but if you travel a lot, you'll still pick one that gives you the best coverage wherever you intend to go. Likewise, most people will of course pick a notebook that provides the best availability for their travel, and that means the Air is probably not going to be at the top of their list.
Right, because there are no intercontinental flights, NOBODY would EVER spend 13 hours to go from LA to London, for example. Or 11+ hours to go to Tokyo.
Just because your job doesn't require intercontinental travel doesn't mean that is true for all of the rest of us.
That's right Apple will deliberately sacrifice their reputation of building devices that are safe from malware just to stick it to the handfull of geeks who have unlocked their cellphones./rolls eyes/
I am fully aware of these issues. Back in '87 I was a highschool student in Erlangen, Germany, and I did a summer internship with the Fraunhofer Institute. One of my duties was to do the routing of the first ever MP3 hardware (a DSP sitting on an Atari ST extension board). Actually, it didn't have the name MP3 at the time, but it was the same technology. As nice side benefit of this job, I got to do their blind tests on what would now be about $70k HiFi equipment, where they were switching back and forth between CD and MP3. I wasn't one of their official subjects, but I was able to play around with it. I know first hand that that 256Mbit/s MP3 is (to me) indistinguishable from a CD even for really delicate test sounds. I also know that for certian songs I DO here a difference at 192MBit/s. So, I am not arguing that digital is somehow inherently inferior than analog. I am well aware of noise floor limitations etc.
That said, the point is not about some kind of phantasy peak performance, but about real world CDs, MP3s, and records you can go out and buy. And if you do that, you'll find that the records often sound a lot better than the digital media due to dynamic range compression (CD) and/or too agressive bitrate compression (MP3).
As for your point about records being mastered with dynamic range compression, well it IS possible I suppose, but there simply isn't any incentive for it. The reason for dynamic range compression (loudness war) in digital media is that more and more people listed to music on the go, so the music needs to overpower ambient noise. Records are a technology that is inherently non-mobile so there is no reason to do it.
Yes, but CAN contain (most of) everythign that was in the uncompressed, finely quantized digital master but didn't make it into the MP3 or the dynamic range compressed CD release.
I think there are still people like you and me in the generation entering the job market today. The problem is just that the number of people genuinely interested in technology has remained relatively stagnant, while the number of people entering IT for the money has increase dramatically. It is esentially a problem of signal to noise ratio that has gotten worse by way of the noise going up as opposed to the signal going down. Thankfully, the worst golddigging years ended with the.com bubble, so things will get better over the next few years.
Well, besides the point that the GPLv3 doesn't stop TIVO from doing that... I salute you! Finally somebody who gets it. I so wish I had mod points right now. Whenever this topic comes up, I am tempted to post the N different ways for circumventing GPLv3 that I can think of, but ultimately I don't want to encourage anybody.
Escalating the rules and restrictions for distributors in the GPL is somewhat similar to ever increasing new DRM methods: the more difficult you make it, the more likely it is that you'll find somebody who sees it as his mission to produce a workaround. The escalation of rules and workarounds will just go on until the rules have become so restrictive that a whole number of legitimate uses are precluded, at which point people will move on to the next project. The only way to deal with that is to stop, and accept that a minority will always be using your stuff in ways you don't fully agree with. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Just wow. If that is true that is a pretty fucked up system, then. In the future, I'll refer everybody who complains about the Canadian tax system to this thread.
I think you drastically over-estimate the value of the open source drivers to game developers. I am an academic, and I have no trouble at all getting fairly detailed architecture information from either NVIDIA or ATI under a non-disclosure agreement. You can be absolutely sure that all the bigger game outlets have the same (or better) info.
The other thing is that ATI drivers (at least the Linux ones) suck big time when it comes to optimization in the first place. There are so many OpenGL states that are not supported directly by the hardware, it is not even funny. Any of these will result in the system falling back to software rendering. Compare that with the NVIDIA divers, which are very good about doing averything in hardware (even though some data paths may still not be as fast as others). Also, NVIDIA has excellent profiling and performance monitoring software for all platforms. Like I said before, I don't care too much if that stuff is open source or not, so long as it WORKS, and allows me to get my work done. ATI's drivers don't.
You always pay for sex. The difference is only whether you pay in money or in freedom.
And I am only half joking, too.
(Think! Why would NVIDIA waste expensive chip real estate for stream processors if they weren't useful for 99.9% of the applications running on these chips?)
The part where he said he would make reduce his resources (make the tema "leaner" etc) dedicated to the nomination campaign? Essentially, he'll stay on the ballots, but he will stop putting in enough money for posters, and events (he also wants to spend more time with his electorate). So yeah, he is essentially giving up.
Every so often I stumble across a post on slashdot that is so bizarre that I have to wonder what planet the poster is living on. The parent is one of those cases.
I have a faculty position at a public university, and believe me: you do NOT want to pay the taxes you'd have to pay if all my research activities (and those of my colleagues) were publically funded. So it is either private funds or reduced research activities. Guess which one is better for society?
There is a role for both public and private funding in university research. Public funding is great for high uncertainty research and everything with a horizon of 10+ years. This type of research is absolutely necessary to push the edge in science and technology, but is expected that only a small percentage of such research will ever be successful of commercially viable. Once you have discovered a basic phenomenon that seems to have promising applications, now is the time to extract the most societal benefit from that work. How do you do that? In some cases (e.g. medical research) the societal benefit is direct. In most science and technology areas, the societal benefit is indirect, through the creation of jobs. That means there has to be a path for taking the basic science and using it in products down the line. Note that at this stage, there is typically still quite a bit of work to be done to make the technology product ready. Who should pay for that work? The government? I think not! So this is the time for industry to step up and invest significant amounts of money (often more than required to do the initial basic research!). Of course they'll only do that if they can be reasonably sure their investments are protected, hence you need patents.
You may want to go easy on the drugs yourself; your post makes no sense. If you reduce your intake, you may realize that most of the time you don't need to wear that tinfoil hat.
First, you make it sound like meth is some kind nice harmless recreational drug. "By the people for the people", my ass. Meth is a nasty piece of work, and it is produced by criminals that don't care about anyone or anything other than making money. Maybe meth is not quite as destructive as heroin, but it still very effective at ruining people's lifes. I've observed people in my city getting hooked on this stuff, and after a few months you wouldn't recognize them.
Second, "THE GOVENRMENT" stands to make more money on meth than on other drugs, precisely because meth's precursors are produced by legal drug companies in the US. It's called taxes. Compare that to cocain, where "THE GOVENRMENT" has no real way of making money from it. Sure, there are probably a few corrupt cops here and there who do make money, but how exactly is that helping "THE GOVERNMENT"? Or maybe you are referring to confiscated property, but surely you are aware that the value of confiscated properties pales in comparison to the cost of the "war on drugs"? Now, I am not a big fan of the war on drugs myself, but to say that the government benefits from imported drugs is plain nonsense.
You introduced a fictional character ino an otherwise rational discussion. How is that fixing anything?
I have been consistently arguing in favor of copyright on slashdot and elsewhere. But this is not about enforcing existing laws, it is about tying college educational funding to policing of the students by their colleges. That is something the colleges have neither the mandate nor the expertise to do. Also, depriving an already underfunded public education system even more just because some students violate copyright laws strikes me as a really dumb idea.
Not in a fly-by-wire system, where the pilot's instruments aren't directly connected to the mechanical components, but only issue commands to the control computers. If you send these computers the same requests and they come up with different courses of action, you are in trouble, no way around it.
As somebody else has pointed out, that design was abandoned for the 777.
An additional point, though: even if you had independently develped 3 systems and used them in a voting scheme. You would run into problems as soon as 2 of them have ANY kind of error (they don't need to be THE SAME errors). In that case, you'd end up with 3 different results, and since an aviation system doens't have the luxury to throw its hands up in the air and ask for service, you now have a situation where you have to pick one of the three distinct results. The probability for picking a faulty one is 2/3 at that point.
Well, I also travel a lot, and I ALWAYS take spares, since it is the difference between turning a long flight into a productive business day and being bored to death by some silly in-flight romantic comedy. And yeah I have an ibook right now, so I am not actually anti-Apple or anything.
As usual, the "we have coped without before" argument makes no sense at all. We have coped without cellphones before, but if you travel a lot, you'll still pick one that gives you the best coverage wherever you intend to go. Likewise, most people will of course pick a notebook that provides the best availability for their travel, and that means the Air is probably not going to be at the top of their list.
Right, because there are no intercontinental flights, NOBODY would EVER spend 13 hours to go from LA to London, for example. Or 11+ hours to go to Tokyo.
Just because your job doesn't require intercontinental travel doesn't mean that is true for all of the rest of us.
...AND the shop owner actually got an injunction against you.
This whole story is a compelete non-issue.
9.99?
;-)
Always glad to help
That's right Apple will deliberately sacrifice their reputation of building devices that are safe from malware just to stick it to the handfull of geeks who have unlocked their cellphones. /rolls eyes/
Well I read that, but what the heck does it MEAN?
"Jazz is a technology platform, not a product"
Wow. What insight. This should get the Pulizer for "best piece in managerspeak".
I am fully aware of these issues. Back in '87 I was a highschool student in Erlangen, Germany, and I did a summer internship with the Fraunhofer Institute. One of my duties was to do the routing of the first ever MP3 hardware (a DSP sitting on an Atari ST extension board). Actually, it didn't have the name MP3 at the time, but it was the same technology. As nice side benefit of this job, I got to do their blind tests on what would now be about $70k HiFi equipment, where they were switching back and forth between CD and MP3. I wasn't one of their official subjects, but I was able to play around with it. I know first hand that that 256Mbit/s MP3 is (to me) indistinguishable from a CD even for really delicate test sounds. I also know that for certian songs I DO here a difference at 192MBit/s. So, I am not arguing that digital is somehow inherently inferior than analog. I am well aware of noise floor limitations etc.
That said, the point is not about some kind of phantasy peak performance, but about real world CDs, MP3s, and records you can go out and buy. And if you do that, you'll find that the records often sound a lot better than the digital media due to dynamic range compression (CD) and/or too agressive bitrate compression (MP3).
As for your point about records being mastered with dynamic range compression, well it IS possible I suppose, but there simply isn't any incentive for it. The reason for dynamic range compression (loudness war) in digital media is that more and more people listed to music on the go, so the music needs to overpower ambient noise. Records are a technology that is inherently non-mobile so there is no reason to do it.
Sooo, Greece and Cyprus, huh? There are worse places on earth ;-)
Yes, but CAN contain (most of) everythign that was in the uncompressed, finely quantized digital master but didn't make it into the MP3 or the dynamic range compressed CD release.
I think there are still people like you and me in the generation entering the job market today. The problem is just that the number of people genuinely interested in technology has remained relatively stagnant, while the number of people entering IT for the money has increase dramatically. It is esentially a problem of signal to noise ratio that has gotten worse by way of the noise going up as opposed to the signal going down. Thankfully, the worst golddigging years ended with the .com bubble, so things will get better over the next few years.
Escalating the rules and restrictions for distributors in the GPL is somewhat similar to ever increasing new DRM methods: the more difficult you make it, the more likely it is that you'll find somebody who sees it as his mission to produce a workaround. The escalation of rules and workarounds will just go on until the rules have become so restrictive that a whole number of legitimate uses are precluded, at which point people will move on to the next project. The only way to deal with that is to stop, and accept that a minority will always be using your stuff in ways you don't fully agree with. Get over it.