First off.. technology is made obsolete??? no shit! Its hard to imagine the slashdot crowd finding this to be news.
This doesn't mean your dx10 card doesn't work anymore, you don't install SP1 and your PC wont boot with DX10 hardware.
If you get upset every time people make revisions and improvements to software and hardware, I suggest you packup your computer and return it to avoid further heart ache. If you are an early adopter of the latest hardware and don't read any reviews (which all from memory said it will be some time before dx10 is going to matter) then thats your fault.
Microsoft have explained in numerous interveiws (and documentation of course) how DX 10 will work, they even suggested 10.1 would be out BEFORE vista shipped. Graphics card features change ALL THE TIME, you have to write miles of CAPS checking code and render paths to support the zoo of cards and features. Now with DX10 they roll all the features up and any DX 10.x card will support the featuers, even if you write a DX 10.0 and DX 10.1 path, its only two options you have to support. You didn't see "ATI MAKES LAST CARD OBSOLETE BY INTRODUCING NEW PRODUCT", even though those changes could be far, far more difficult to develop for by having a bunch of changed caps and maybe even a few new proprietary ones. A fixed feature set is what allows developers to squeze out every drop of performance from PS2 hardware to make amazing looking graphics, even though your mobile phone might have more processing power available to it.
And lastly.. people who mock the, apparent, modest real world improvments dx10 is offering.. what is your point? Intel brings out a new processor every x months with ~1-3% improvements, by your logic they should just stop bothering making new processors. Of course thats stupid, you wait till the improvment is enough for you to find it compelling.
That is false logic. You are assuming that the military is trying to reduce human death because they love humanity. You will find that wars are found in the will of the aggressor to continue waging war. Modern war is broadcast live on TV, its not great for the will of the aggressor. Why do you think the media are banned from filming the conveyer belt of dead bodies being dragged back from Iraq?
The military couldn't care less about soldiers dying or anyone else, they are a machine, they have a goal and they will achieve however they can. If you turn the cameras off you can be assured Iraq would turn into Roman style massacre with tales of death leaking out years later you can even imagine in your nightmares.
We finally have someone getting together to try to protect the digital media rights of these companies, its been a long time comming. They should be able to nail this on the head in a few months and make life much better for us all who buy their products.
I love when people are so evangelical about games being violent. The world is violent, turn on the news. Why not sue the government to stop dropping bombs. Those images of people with their brains blown out all over the ground hurts kids.. and guess what, that's someone's dad, brother, son. Its not a set of bytes on your pc.
Speech recognition is a lot better than it once was. It will require a lot of improvement to make it better... if you look at a human; even we have a lot of trouble understanding another accent. That pretty much means a paltry computer won't get it. However, a computer should be able to be more thorough, so same accent speech should be possible.
However... it takes a person 5-10-20 years to master speech, so a computer needs alot of training, the method of training a computer is probably key. Not only listening to speech, but more advanced concepts like recognizing who is speaking so as to apply the patterns to that person. Also learning who is talking to the computer, telling my computer to turn on the TV might be easily confused with asking if my chocolate wiener is turning my paid gf on for some time till that is worked out. Personally I think prefixing everything with "COMPUTER, turn on that" is not good enough, it should be possible to work out context within the next 10 years with so many cores available.
Lets save everyone, death is bad, hey, 140 billion alive will be fun wont it? As long as they are mainly hot gurls who want to have sex at the drop of a hat.. hurm.. i watch too much net pr0n.
But seriously, the quest for longer life equates to death, we cant sustain life with 10-20-40 billion, just accept it. You have 80 years on average, enjoy it. If you are president with some slaves, you get less.
All they are doing is exactly what they do now. Intergrate more results from images and news etc, into the main body of results. It seems like they are just announcing it for some press really and to point out they are going to keep doing it more and more as time goes by.
Its probably being driven by the fact they have, for a while had now, no space above the search box for all the lab ideas going live, so this is the only way to neaten up the list and remove the clutter of search options so as to stop it becoming a jungle of "click here to search for X" links.
An regarding some people saying when you click over to news or images to search and it clears your search terms, its not happening for me, works as before, but the links are moved into a grey bar above the search results.
Well after the obligatory jokes.. It's a bit sad to think of someone's final resting place being lost then being the source of jokes. It seems fitting if he could have been shot off into space. The whole v'ger idea of floating space until something or other happens is pretty appealing. Especially if you reject modern religion and think of the universe in a more physics orientated sense, it's the only way you can really hope to live on beyond your life.
Anyhow, that's all my sentimentality for the year:)
Thats why they pursue legal action so strongly against all detractors, it protects their interests. Just like any company that gets slandered..
hurm.. i should have posted this through tor
Slashdot contributers are mostly above average people but this same topic keeps cropping up. No company is a single faceted thing, if someone does something it not for a good or bad purpose soley, such a single sided idea from even an individual is hard to come by.
If I want pizza tonight, is it soley a hommage to my love of Italy? Because I like take away food? Because its good value food? Because I feel like oily food? Because I saw Nicole Richie and figured if I can still see my penis when I look down maybe im too thin too?
You can argue any number of them and they could all be true, even I wouldnt know the one reason why.
Just because Microsoft dominates the market with aggressive tactics doesn't mean its not partially a good will thing. You can hardly say bill gates doesn't give back to the community, I don't know any other billionaire that's so altruistic, how much does jobs donate?
If its a move to secure Microsoft's position as the most popular OS world wide, then of course that what they should do, that's what any company would do. Isn't the Linux community looking at the OLPC project as a platform to spread Linux?
The one upside to Windows is that it will allow them to run software 90-95% of desktop users can run, having Linux on most the developing worlds computers but not on the developed is almost like a barrier they are trying to remove.
But in fairness MS should do more to make a cut down version to run, god knows my VM Ware win2k machine boots so fast it makes me wonder what the hell XP and Vista is loading. Dual booted OLPC would be the best middle ground as choice should be something everyone has. Its what I feel the cornerstone of open source software is.
Yes, if that means shareholders are short sighted idiots.
With software the target is always moving, you have open office gaining traction and Linux gaining traction.
Microsoft has something big... it's a 60 billion+ war chest... it's time to find more things to do. While Microsoft aren't the nicest company around (well what big companies are, anyone like their insurance company?) they are good at doing something well as long as they want to. It's in their interest to diversify and try to secure their future. Hell that's what IBM did, the largest revenue company in the world (last time I checked anyhow). They started their consultant business and that is now their most profitable department. Standing still is the death rattle of a company. Once you don't expand you get taken over... as a developer I know its 100x times easier developing an application to compete against an existing application than it is developing it from scratch (another argument against over ambitious patients, they should be there to help, not to hinder simple ideas being used, they need to take into account international conditions, it's not just in the west we are competiting).
In Physics, to observe something means to interact with a system in such a way that it changes whatever you use to interact with it. It has nothing to do with humans looking at it. When a photon hits your arm from the sun it analogous to an "observation".
In regards to the article, I think more than a few already known quantum phenomenon make the idea of the universe not making a sound when no one is there to hear it, one of the less mind boggling ideas. Although its only mind boggling because we use our mind that evolved in a mainly classical newtonian world, yadda yadda, blah blah.
I still think Einstein's most accurate statement is that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that its comprehensible at all. There is no "reason" it should be or will continue to be.
What sort of comment is this, its insightful? You think the fact daylight savings updates are the biggest problem windows has? Or that its even a serious issue?
I truly challenge anyone to install Linux for their parents and have them be able to do everything they want to do, like install programs they want or do the things they want. Just saying there is an alternative is not valid, it doesn't mean anything. An alternative is an alternative because people don't use it a lot. Going this path is a long slow transition process. Not a "dell can support linux easily". Telling customers what to do isn't exactly 101 in business class.
Granted many of the issues are that most people are used to windows, it just doesn't fix the problem. Linux distros nowadays are fantastic , KDE and GNOME are both great interfaces, if we lived without windows ever existing this wouldn't be a problem. However the best things about them are things that programmers or highly technical people can really exploit. This "people are too stupid to understand" argument is exactly the answer to the problem. Package mangers or command line installs its never ever going to work for the masses. I know large attempts at making a better system has been done.. but the problem is, not everyone does it.
Linux has come a long way, but the truth is, its got a long way to go before you can convert enough people. But with Microsoft continuing with stupid licensing models there is allot of opportunity to make inroads.
It seems like most peoples opinion is "if it aint broke dont fix it". But I dont think that is the case, it seems like there is an endless stream of stories you read about military software problems. I liked hearing about the Falklands where the radar operator was saying once the system stuffed up and detected two close planes he could no longer target any of them. The only option was to reboot the entire system. Now that sounds like fun, imaging trying to make that pile of 30 year old code robust! Nothing like watching a plane flying at mach 1 heading to blow you up to make reboots seem slow.
Late reply I know:p
My argument was really only about new world music sales, most money comes from cds (however you could argue this is because they have such poor relations in selling music online). Though the reason I only talk about online is thats where they complain they are losing money and is the logical source for the majority of distro in the future.
Regarding the CD media argument. Sony did get caught... but i think when we say they got their arses kicked (which they certaily didnt legally, the settlement was pathetic). 99% of people will never have heard of it. If you don't read tech news sites or happen to catch the odd story on the local news it slips by.
I do agree cds won't be black hat drm'd. Though I think what their plan is regarding this is get the HDCP chips out in every piece of hardware and then when the transition to the DVD music format becomes mainstream they can begin to destroy the user experience for their customers, yippee.
Oh, so you only want to donate money if they start altering the content, what a generous offer. When I see homeless women I often think I would give them some charitable donations.. but only if they started having sex with me, its only fair. Im not giving my "donation" to someone who isn't going to do what I want.
Text ads might be a bit tacky in an educational repository of knowledge, but at least it doesn't effect the site in any way. And if Wikipedia does not have the ability to at least attempt impartiality without strings attached it has nothing.
I currently have around 3000 mp3s on my computer... now to imagine im going to pay 33 USD per cd (of songs I mainly dont want) for that volume is ridiculious. Its only via online distribution I would ever accumulate this much music.
The arguments against the current system are extensive.. but things like...
1. With so much music I barely listen to any one song.. its nothing like when I bought discreate amounts of music via cds.. its more like a personal radio station.
2. Id never buy so much music at cd prices but no one ever would, we mainly heard that music for free already via the radio or from a friends collection. Surely if someone told a music exec that most people want more than 1000 songs it would be like winning the lotto.
3. The entire paradigm of music "ownership" has changed, it wasn't what the RIAA wanted but its what happened, they cant expect to keep trying to throw buckets of water out of the sinking ship to save it.
It seems as if there is no solution except the death of the current recording industry and a new generation that can tailor to the new markets. They would have to change the entire sale system which would stab in the back all the music retail outlets and staff they have working in the current sales channels.
Im like a lot of people.. if I could buy my 3000 songs for even a dollar a song or so I think I probably would, over a number of years. The bottom line is.. that's a lot more money that I ever spent on cds before I ever pirated any. We should get the Japanese on this, the RIAA view it as disaster but it sounds like opportunity to me...
What a useless analogy, cars are compatible with everything you need to do with a car. Drive on the road.
Convincing someone to change car brands is then rather easy. To complain that migrating platforms is only a problem because he wont just change everything he uses to accomplish it is, well, stupid. This is a major real world issue and one of the main things holding *nux back.
Slashdot Mirror
First off.. technology is made obsolete??? no shit! Its hard to imagine the slashdot crowd finding this to be news. This doesn't mean your dx10 card doesn't work anymore, you don't install SP1 and your PC wont boot with DX10 hardware. If you get upset every time people make revisions and improvements to software and hardware, I suggest you packup your computer and return it to avoid further heart ache. If you are an early adopter of the latest hardware and don't read any reviews (which all from memory said it will be some time before dx10 is going to matter) then thats your fault. Microsoft have explained in numerous interveiws (and documentation of course) how DX 10 will work, they even suggested 10.1 would be out BEFORE vista shipped. Graphics card features change ALL THE TIME, you have to write miles of CAPS checking code and render paths to support the zoo of cards and features. Now with DX10 they roll all the features up and any DX 10.x card will support the featuers, even if you write a DX 10.0 and DX 10.1 path, its only two options you have to support. You didn't see "ATI MAKES LAST CARD OBSOLETE BY INTRODUCING NEW PRODUCT", even though those changes could be far, far more difficult to develop for by having a bunch of changed caps and maybe even a few new proprietary ones. A fixed feature set is what allows developers to squeze out every drop of performance from PS2 hardware to make amazing looking graphics, even though your mobile phone might have more processing power available to it. And lastly.. people who mock the, apparent, modest real world improvments dx10 is offering.. what is your point? Intel brings out a new processor every x months with ~1-3% improvements, by your logic they should just stop bothering making new processors. Of course thats stupid, you wait till the improvment is enough for you to find it compelling.
That is false logic. You are assuming that the military is trying to reduce human death because they love humanity. You will find that wars are found in the will of the aggressor to continue waging war. Modern war is broadcast live on TV, its not great for the will of the aggressor. Why do you think the media are banned from filming the conveyer belt of dead bodies being dragged back from Iraq? The military couldn't care less about soldiers dying or anyone else, they are a machine, they have a goal and they will achieve however they can. If you turn the cameras off you can be assured Iraq would turn into Roman style massacre with tales of death leaking out years later you can even imagine in your nightmares.
Get everyone at your company to call them back two times a day each, maybe 10 if you are very annoyed. They soon will stop doing the same to you.
We finally have someone getting together to try to protect the digital media rights of these companies, its been a long time comming. They should be able to nail this on the head in a few months and make life much better for us all who buy their products.
I love when people are so evangelical about games being violent. The world is violent, turn on the news. Why not sue the government to stop dropping bombs. Those images of people with their brains blown out all over the ground hurts kids.. and guess what, that's someone's dad, brother, son. Its not a set of bytes on your pc.
Speech recognition is a lot better than it once was. It will require a lot of improvement to make it better... if you look at a human; even we have a lot of trouble understanding another accent. That pretty much means a paltry computer won't get it. However, a computer should be able to be more thorough, so same accent speech should be possible. However... it takes a person 5-10-20 years to master speech, so a computer needs alot of training, the method of training a computer is probably key. Not only listening to speech, but more advanced concepts like recognizing who is speaking so as to apply the patterns to that person. Also learning who is talking to the computer, telling my computer to turn on the TV might be easily confused with asking if my chocolate wiener is turning my paid gf on for some time till that is worked out. Personally I think prefixing everything with "COMPUTER, turn on that" is not good enough, it should be possible to work out context within the next 10 years with so many cores available.
Lets save everyone, death is bad, hey, 140 billion alive will be fun wont it? As long as they are mainly hot gurls who want to have sex at the drop of a hat.. hurm.. i watch too much net pr0n. But seriously, the quest for longer life equates to death, we cant sustain life with 10-20-40 billion, just accept it. You have 80 years on average, enjoy it. If you are president with some slaves, you get less.
All they are doing is exactly what they do now. Intergrate more results from images and news etc, into the main body of results. It seems like they are just announcing it for some press really and to point out they are going to keep doing it more and more as time goes by. Its probably being driven by the fact they have, for a while had now, no space above the search box for all the lab ideas going live, so this is the only way to neaten up the list and remove the clutter of search options so as to stop it becoming a jungle of "click here to search for X" links. An regarding some people saying when you click over to news or images to search and it clears your search terms, its not happening for me, works as before, but the links are moved into a grey bar above the search results.
Well after the obligatory jokes.. It's a bit sad to think of someone's final resting place being lost then being the source of jokes. It seems fitting if he could have been shot off into space. The whole v'ger idea of floating space until something or other happens is pretty appealing. Especially if you reject modern religion and think of the universe in a more physics orientated sense, it's the only way you can really hope to live on beyond your life. Anyhow, that's all my sentimentality for the year :)
Thats why they pursue legal action so strongly against all detractors, it protects their interests. Just like any company that gets slandered.. hurm.. i should have posted this through tor
Slashdot contributers are mostly above average people but this same topic keeps cropping up. No company is a single faceted thing, if someone does something it not for a good or bad purpose soley, such a single sided idea from even an individual is hard to come by. If I want pizza tonight, is it soley a hommage to my love of Italy? Because I like take away food? Because its good value food? Because I feel like oily food? Because I saw Nicole Richie and figured if I can still see my penis when I look down maybe im too thin too? You can argue any number of them and they could all be true, even I wouldnt know the one reason why. Just because Microsoft dominates the market with aggressive tactics doesn't mean its not partially a good will thing. You can hardly say bill gates doesn't give back to the community, I don't know any other billionaire that's so altruistic, how much does jobs donate? If its a move to secure Microsoft's position as the most popular OS world wide, then of course that what they should do, that's what any company would do. Isn't the Linux community looking at the OLPC project as a platform to spread Linux? The one upside to Windows is that it will allow them to run software 90-95% of desktop users can run, having Linux on most the developing worlds computers but not on the developed is almost like a barrier they are trying to remove. But in fairness MS should do more to make a cut down version to run, god knows my VM Ware win2k machine boots so fast it makes me wonder what the hell XP and Vista is loading. Dual booted OLPC would be the best middle ground as choice should be something everyone has. Its what I feel the cornerstone of open source software is.
Yes, if that means shareholders are short sighted idiots. With software the target is always moving, you have open office gaining traction and Linux gaining traction. Microsoft has something big... it's a 60 billion+ war chest... it's time to find more things to do. While Microsoft aren't the nicest company around (well what big companies are, anyone like their insurance company?) they are good at doing something well as long as they want to. It's in their interest to diversify and try to secure their future. Hell that's what IBM did, the largest revenue company in the world (last time I checked anyhow). They started their consultant business and that is now their most profitable department. Standing still is the death rattle of a company. Once you don't expand you get taken over... as a developer I know its 100x times easier developing an application to compete against an existing application than it is developing it from scratch (another argument against over ambitious patients, they should be there to help, not to hinder simple ideas being used, they need to take into account international conditions, it's not just in the west we are competiting).
In Physics, to observe something means to interact with a system in such a way that it changes whatever you use to interact with it. It has nothing to do with humans looking at it. When a photon hits your arm from the sun it analogous to an "observation".
In regards to the article, I think more than a few already known quantum phenomenon make the idea of the universe not making a sound when no one is there to hear it, one of the less mind boggling ideas. Although its only mind boggling because we use our mind that evolved in a mainly classical newtonian world, yadda yadda, blah blah.
I still think Einstein's most accurate statement is that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that its comprehensible at all. There is no "reason" it should be or will continue to be.
What sort of comment is this, its insightful? You think the fact daylight savings updates are the biggest problem windows has? Or that its even a serious issue? I truly challenge anyone to install Linux for their parents and have them be able to do everything they want to do, like install programs they want or do the things they want. Just saying there is an alternative is not valid, it doesn't mean anything. An alternative is an alternative because people don't use it a lot. Going this path is a long slow transition process. Not a "dell can support linux easily". Telling customers what to do isn't exactly 101 in business class. Granted many of the issues are that most people are used to windows, it just doesn't fix the problem. Linux distros nowadays are fantastic , KDE and GNOME are both great interfaces, if we lived without windows ever existing this wouldn't be a problem. However the best things about them are things that programmers or highly technical people can really exploit. This "people are too stupid to understand" argument is exactly the answer to the problem. Package mangers or command line installs its never ever going to work for the masses. I know large attempts at making a better system has been done.. but the problem is, not everyone does it. Linux has come a long way, but the truth is, its got a long way to go before you can convert enough people. But with Microsoft continuing with stupid licensing models there is allot of opportunity to make inroads.
It seems like most peoples opinion is "if it aint broke dont fix it". But I dont think that is the case, it seems like there is an endless stream of stories you read about military software problems. I liked hearing about the Falklands where the radar operator was saying once the system stuffed up and detected two close planes he could no longer target any of them. The only option was to reboot the entire system. Now that sounds like fun, imaging trying to make that pile of 30 year old code robust! Nothing like watching a plane flying at mach 1 heading to blow you up to make reboots seem slow.
Late reply I know :p
My argument was really only about new world music sales, most money comes from cds (however you could argue this is because they have such poor relations in selling music online). Though the reason I only talk about online is thats where they complain they are losing money and is the logical source for the majority of distro in the future.
Regarding the CD media argument. Sony did get caught... but i think when we say they got their arses kicked (which they certaily didnt legally, the settlement was pathetic). 99% of people will never have heard of it. If you don't read tech news sites or happen to catch the odd story on the local news it slips by.
I do agree cds won't be black hat drm'd. Though I think what their plan is regarding this is get the HDCP chips out in every piece of hardware and then when the transition to the DVD music format becomes mainstream they can begin to destroy the user experience for their customers, yippee.
Oh, so you only want to donate money if they start altering the content, what a generous offer. When I see homeless women I often think I would give them some charitable donations.. but only if they started having sex with me, its only fair. Im not giving my "donation" to someone who isn't going to do what I want. Text ads might be a bit tacky in an educational repository of knowledge, but at least it doesn't effect the site in any way. And if Wikipedia does not have the ability to at least attempt impartiality without strings attached it has nothing.
It takes this to make windows look secure :)
I currently have around 3000 mp3s on my computer... now to imagine im going to pay 33 USD per cd (of songs I mainly dont want) for that volume is ridiculious. Its only via online distribution I would ever accumulate this much music. The arguments against the current system are extensive.. but things like... 1. With so much music I barely listen to any one song.. its nothing like when I bought discreate amounts of music via cds.. its more like a personal radio station. 2. Id never buy so much music at cd prices but no one ever would, we mainly heard that music for free already via the radio or from a friends collection. Surely if someone told a music exec that most people want more than 1000 songs it would be like winning the lotto. 3. The entire paradigm of music "ownership" has changed, it wasn't what the RIAA wanted but its what happened, they cant expect to keep trying to throw buckets of water out of the sinking ship to save it. It seems as if there is no solution except the death of the current recording industry and a new generation that can tailor to the new markets. They would have to change the entire sale system which would stab in the back all the music retail outlets and staff they have working in the current sales channels. Im like a lot of people.. if I could buy my 3000 songs for even a dollar a song or so I think I probably would, over a number of years. The bottom line is.. that's a lot more money that I ever spent on cds before I ever pirated any. We should get the Japanese on this, the RIAA view it as disaster but it sounds like opportunity to me...
What a useless analogy, cars are compatible with everything you need to do with a car. Drive on the road. Convincing someone to change car brands is then rather easy. To complain that migrating platforms is only a problem because he wont just change everything he uses to accomplish it is, well, stupid. This is a major real world issue and one of the main things holding *nux back.
I thought Microsft only got to be so dominant in the workplace by making proprietry buggy software and bullying competitors *scratches head* :)