Not that I read TFA, but I would imagine the Javascript is embedded in the email, which loads a pop-up to "192.168.1.1" and attempts to login with "admin" as a username and "admin" as a password. Reading from the pop-up page, the Javascript wouldn't have too difficult of a time figuring out the router version and changing the DNS server. It might be doable with Ajax, which would allow this all to happen behind the scenes. Obviously, this isn't going to work for any competent user, as changing the default password would solve my more-than-likely flawed way to carry out the attack, but what percentage of users are competent?
Currently, ray tracing is slower for most scenes. However, it is trivially parallelizable. After the scene is described, each pixel can be computed completely independently of every other pixel. To speed up, creating a shared acceleration structure is almost a requirement for speed (which is why the proper structure must be chosen). Keeping this in blindingly fast video memory and share it between 128 shader processors and performance is almost 128 times greater. While we don't have any GPU ray tracers that work with SLI/Crossfire, the system should show a near-linear performance increase (with additional overhead for generating or transferring the acceleration structure twice).
I agree with you, though. Since ray tracing is a much easier concept to understand (anybody with knowledge of linear algebra can see what is happening) and has only recently gained momentum (because, until now, it hasn't been technically feasible), there is a lot of hype surrounding it. People need to understand that there is nothing magical about ray tracing - it is just a different rendering algorithm. It may be the future of gaming, it may not. Personally, I think hybrid engines are the real future - strangely, they already seem to be implemented...
Unfortunately, triangle drawing isn't the only thing that happens when a frame is rendered. There are shadows to draw, specular and diffuse lighting, reflection, refraction and transmission, there is bump, normal or parallax mapping, particle systems, motion blur and depth of field. Ray tracing is cut out for these things. There are plenty of other non-triangle things such as anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and the entire non-graphics portion of the game. Anyway, ray tracing scales up for multiple processors a lot better than rasterization, which seems to be the path we're going down.
You do make a good point about ray tracing being O(resolution). With most engines these days, 1920x1200 renders only a little slower than 800x600 - the key to speed up lagging framerate is to turn extra graphics effects off. A ray traced engine will be sped up more by adjusting the resolution. With monitors growing in size all the time and LCD looking terrible at any resolution but its native one, it might not be the best path to travel down.
However, I don't agree with your argument that since graphics cards are geared towards rasterization, that we shouldn't develop (or at least try) a different technique? Did John Carmack look at video cards in the early 90s and decided that they could only play 2-D games? No. If popular game engines shift to ray tracing, video card manufacturers will shift with them.
This is actually my research project (ray tracing on graphics card). As far as I know, all the current working ray-tracers are implemented on CPU. From what I can tell (from the multiple failed implementations), there seem to be endless issues with driver incompatibility, because through software emulation, the systems at least run, but emulating defeats the purpose of implementing RT with shaders in the first place. The graphics card is Turing-complete, even if it isn't sovereign.
GPUs have numerous advantages, the most obvious being how parallelize-able the shader architecture is. The raw processing power of a GPU is so much greater than a CPU for stream processing, and there are many computer science problems that can be translated to a streaming model. Memory access time is incredibly fast (if you even need it with the 4096 registers) and GPU performance on the card is (theoretically) more controllable, as you don't have to deal with operating system interference.
Translating ray-tracing to a stream model is involved, but there are tons of advantages when it comes to building an interactive engine. Once the primary lighting is done (the ambient and shadow calculations), the system can stop - but not just stop, it can stop on the fly. When the first pass kernel finishes its job, we can test how much time has passed since the last screen render and choose to not calculate diffuse and specular, reflection and transmission on the fly. Reflection and transmission calculations are unique in that they can theoretically go on forever. The question is: How many times should a ray bounce before it stops? Long enough to keep up a framerate of 45 FPS? Sure, it is incredibly easy to implement. Granted, stopping a ray trace with the simplest part of lighting doesn't show off the areas where ray tracing is more efficient than rasterization, but it will still work.
Some claim that ray tracing is completely inefficient for rendering non-static scenes. This comes from the fact that ray tracing relies heavily on acceleration structures and that, when objects in the environment move, these will need to be completely recalculated. As games get more and more detailed, things like individual blades of waving grass would present a problem. However, with uniform spacial subdivision (or "the Uniform Grid"), you can easily calculate the areas that a blade of grass can possibly be in and reuse the voxel coordinates throughout the scene. This is an even more trivial problem to overcome with nonuniform spacial subdivision, with the added cost of a harder to traverse acceleration structure. Each scene would have to be tested to see which technique is the most efficient on the majority of graphics cards, as there isn't going to be a definite answer.
Which brings me to my last point, which is that I do not agree with TFA. There is nothing preventing a game from using both rasterization and ray tracing. It takes smarter (more?) programmers to deal with developing two different rendering techniques. The development of a quality ray tracer can also be applied to other parts of a simulator, as ray tracing is incredibly helpful in a physics engine. No, ray tracing is not the holy grail - nor is it a fool's errand. It will be something that every engine developer will need to know and understand. To those not in the small and specific business, you might notice a few more shiny things.
A lot of your ideas are interesting, and many of them are going to piss a lot of people off, but this particular one stands out as problematic:
17. Voting districts are now drawn by computer based on population and area. No more rigging that. You can't do it by race. You can't do it by party affiliation. If the seat isn't completive, then we change the district to make it more competitive.
I will use my home state of Kansas as a good example of "Gerrymandering." Here is a map of our congressional districts. As you can see, the third district is, by area, the smallest, but it contains an equal amount of people when compared to the other districts, as the Kansas City/Overland Park area is the most populated. It also houses almost all the Kansas Democrats. How would you redistribute the voting districts? If you did it by horizontal or vertical stripes of population distribution, the Democrats would not get a say in many votes, as they would be overpowered by the Republicans populating the rest of the state. In fact, the current solution is the only way Democrats get any say. Should the Democrats get a vote? Kansas has been a red state for a very long time. What I'm saying is there isn't really a good solution to the voting district problem (based on how we currently elect officials, anyway).
20. You can't get divorced without 6 months of good marriage counseling, preferable faith-based (you choose the faith, obviously). The one exception is abuse. If there is abuse, you can leave today. We'll help. But if you accuse abuse and it is proven that you lied, you're locked up.
21. Also on the marriage front, you can't get married without at least a few sessions of marriage counseling. Talk about kids, values, in-laws, sex, where you want to live, religion, and everything else. The divorce rate is too high, and I see it as causing too many problems. These last two are designed to help lower that and improve things.
Another solution to this "problem" would be to abolish marriage altogether. There simply would be no more divorcing if you couldn't get married in the first place. Unfortunately, there are way too many things that revolve around the institution of marriage (taxes, insurance, banking, etc.) to completely get rid of it. Personally, I don't think the state should be interfering with the lives of people by forcing them to live in a situation that they don't want to be in. I don't know anybody that actually wants to get a divorce, but rather, sees divorce as the lesser of two evils.
And forcing people to talk to a third party before they get a "marriage certification" isn't going to fix anything either. The Catholic church requires a "marriage training" thing if you want to have a Catholic wedding (I forget the official name), but the divorce rate for Catholics is not any different from Aetheists and Agnostics (granted, they are slightly lower than the national average, but this may have to do with the fact that Roman Catholics don't recognize divorce).
Divorce happens for a reason, but there really isn't much we can do about it. Instead of trying to "fix" everything at once, why not try to knock out the actual reasons people get divorce. Here's a start: Many "bad" marriages come from unwanted pregnancy. How about we try to lower unwanted pregnancies? There are tons of ways to chip away at the perceived "problem" without forcing people to go through expensive councelling.
22. There is a lot I don't like about the education system. We can try many different things to fix that. But if you cause too many problems schools should be able to kick you out. If you are that problematic your parents can educate you (or find someone else to). Stop ruining it for everyone else.
Theoretically, the watermark should still be there, as the watermark is inaudible noise on the track. The goal of a good watermarking algorithm is to survive longer than the audio. You're not safe from detection by transcoding, as these guys have an algorithm (I'm sure many more do, as well) for the original audio track (off a CD) that can be "retrieved" at various bit rates. At the bottom, you can see a graph on the error rate of recovery, which doesn't really fall off until you get down to 64 kbps. Basically, to remove this watermark without knowing the key (which can be as large as needed), you would do more damage to the sound of the track than the background noise.
As long as a strong watermarking scheme is used, it will still be there, unless you screw up the sound. I don't think it will do anything for the RIAA, but it beats the hell out of DRM and root kits.
A Bluetooth/USB ePaper display. Let a person's smart phone, computer render everything and tell the display what to do.
A bluetooth monitor? Bluetooth can transmit at up to 2.1 Mbit/s. DVI can transmit 3.7 Gbit/s in single-link mode and 7.4 Gbit/s in dual-link mode. A 320x240 @ 24bpp would ideally take.9 seconds, but could easily take 5 seconds to fill the screen. And that is a tiny screen. 320x240 @ 8bpp would still ideally take.3 seconds. At a more standard resolution (1280x1024 @ 8bpp), a simple screen fill would ideally take 5 seconds and could easily stretch to 30. Granted, one could try to fix this problem by using a compression algorithm on the data, but PNG and JPEG aren't effective enough to fix the problem (especially in larger displays). USB would help, but it's still only 480 Mbit/s (I don't feel like doing the calculations again).
Not to say the idea is entirely without merit. A worker in a server farm could load a problem ticket (@ 1 bpp?) onto his monitor and walk off with the ticket. There might be a few specialized applications for this, but everything involves writing some sort of specialized "painting" system, which goes against the basic idea of a monitor-only system.
This is analogous to our belief that books have something to say, which devalues the people who wrote them and make us into idiots. There's nothing dehumanizing about reading what others have written. It's simply a form of communication./. didn't write this comment; a person did. The fact that you obtained the information from my comment by reading this site doesn't devalue me or make you an idiot.
That's actually not what he's trying to say. It seems as though he is trying to make people remember that, no matter what the form of communication is, a human being is writing it. For example, it is not the internet that is not the internet itself that enables us to freely share our music, but the people who are freely sharing using the tool of the internet.
However, this particular quote applies very well against Jaron's article. Let us remember that it is not the software license that innovates, but the people making the software.
welfare
1. the good fortune, health, happiness, prosperity, etc., of a person, group, or organization; well-being
3. financial or other assistance to an individual or family from a city, state, or national government
I think the Constitution refers to a different kind of welfare than the one the NASA Party Proponents are talking about. Anyway, I doubt they're changing, so assume the party submission position and give up your tax dollars.
I'm all for NASA having a nice party every once in a while, as it most likely increases their production. I mean, these "parties" aren't a "let's all get drunk, hook up with the secretaries and hope we don't ruin our future at this company"-type events, they're all about maintaining a good relationship with contractors and increasing employee morale. Look at Google, an incredibly successful company - they require employees spend 20% of paid work time on non-Google "projects that interest them." I'm not a Google insider (and I don't want to look up fiscal reports), but I'd imagine that the money spent on these projects (in paid non-work time) accounts for more than 0.1% of operating costs. Or maybe the sand volleyball courts, gym and swimming pools in the Googleplex? They don't directly increase productivity, but they keep the employees happy. And happy employees means more production at higher quality.
Actually, since you have an XBox 360, Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista Home Premium (and Ultimate) will let you connect your XBox to your WiMP library over your network. So, assuming it Just Works, you should already be able to watch anything you can in WiMP on your television.
The theory is that "free v1agra" is free speech, because you are free to communicate anything you want, even if it is annoying. While normal people can see the difference between a million spam and phishing e-mails informing you of an unknown uncle who is a prince and a million people in the streets with signs informing you that your government is racist, the typical Slashdot slippery slope argues that this is not the case.
We already have laws regarding what you can and cannot say, although they're not exactly clear-cut (you know it when you see it), which is where the fear of government advancing the definition of "pornography," "explicit material" and other not well-defined but still illegal in public environments to where the first amendment is truly violated. I know it starts with something small, but I simply do not feel that we're anywhere near the point of needing to wear tin foil hats.
Hard drives are a good example of your point, but I would consider them a special market. What can you possibly think of as a way to improve them? The latest "innovation" is perpendicular recording, which was thought up back in the 1970s. Manufacturers are competing not in an "innovation" sense - simply because the product can't be improved unless everybody does it at the same time. Native Command Queuing and Serial ATA wouldn't have taken off if everybody hadn't done them. NCQ doesn't even lead to major performance increases, it just makes storing more data on the same platter cost less. The next step is flash-based drives, which all the major players are working on making cheaply at the moment, but this is just a different way of storing data. In fact, that's all a hard drive will ever do - store data.
This particular patent appears to patent a semiconductor material and is incredibly general. This line makes me laugh at its generality:
...wherein the range of alumina is from 15% to 85% and the range of zirconia is from 15% to 85%.
If you bother reading the whole patent...well, I really can't imagine this claim standing up in court.
Assuming this claim does not stand up in court, then the patent system works. If any of the hard drive companies try to patent a component, four other companies can point to the research they've been doing as prior art. This forces companies to continue researching. Sure, it wastes time and money, but it sure as hell beats the alternative. The alternative, of course, is one company not researching anymore, but simply copying the works of others and selling a cheaper product. OEMs will switch to them (because the majority of them couldn't care less about reliability and they sure as hell don't care about getting the "original" product). Using this advantage, one manufacturer will eventually establish an effective monopoly wherein no innovation will occur.
What about a new company? If they (hypothetically) come out with a truly unique way to do hard drives, then, in a patentless system, all the major players would simply copy that idea. Having the idea first means nothing, as the major players already have the money and the fabrication labs to outproduce you. Your only hope is to be hired by one of the companies that took your idea - but why would they do that? They would have to pay you. Where is the freedom?
I'm all for patent reform, but this is one of many markets where patents actually force innovation, although not in the way that patents were originally intended.
At some point, you have to deal with the fact that there is going to be some overhead in dealing with an object-oriented approach. Even if the significance is near 0, the scheduler is pushing operations on the CPU on an incredibly large scale, which might show its ugly face in performance. IMHO, it wouldn't, but I guess Linus knows better than I...
Anyway, there is this great site called the Linux Kernel Archives, which has the source code for every version of the Linux kernel ever put out. If somebody was really serious about using their own CPU scheduler, all they have to do is take the latest version of the kernel, download the source code and modify sched.c to fit their needs. Even if it isn't object-oriented, that doesn't change the fact that everything else in the kernel only cares that default_wake_function tries to wake up a thread - it doesn't matter how it works on the inside. All the other parts know about is the sched.h header file.
Sure, it isn't on-the-fly pluggable, but different distributions could easily use different schedulers if they simply compile the kernel. A distribution could make a sched.c that is pluggable (it would have an interesting look to it, but it could be done). I wouldn't want to debug it, but for all this complaining, you'd think somebody would do something about it.
It didn't matter how much I lied on my resumè. My real resumè was in my cells. Of course, it's illegal to discriminate based on genetics - it's called genoism, but nobody follows the laws. They could take a sample from the doorknob, hair or even the saliva on my envelope. If in doubt, a legal drug test can easily turn into an illegal peek at my future in the company.
While you're absolutely correct, you must also factor in how people generally behave. How often is a reliable expert on Professional Wrestling going to edit the issue of Tibetan sovereignty? Sure, somebody could, but the goal isn't to get a black and white objective analysis of right and wrong, it's to get a gray area subjective rating of "trustworthiness." Better yet, it appears to work - in my article on the politics of Djibouti, all the "facts" were highlighted.
Hey, now. As an avid user of iGoogle, I object to your objections. One's Google homepage is only as monstrous as you make it. Mine, for example, has GMail, the weather and RSS feeds for Slashdot and Reuters. It's my homepage, so every time I start up my web browser, I check my e-mail. Sure, you're free to put games, quotes or the terror that is Google Eyes, but you certainly don't have to. Furthermore, your feeds are loaded independently and after the top search bar, so if you want to immediately do a search, you don't have to wait around for replies from a bunch of websites, you can just start typing.
The market is clearly for college students, specifically computer science majors, who live in dorm rooms and have to leave their desktop/server running all night because the kid down the hall might just need your copy of Quake 3.iso at three in the morning and you don't want to have to wake up just to turn on your computer. They're going to sell millions.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I read TFA, but I would imagine the Javascript is embedded in the email, which loads a pop-up to "192.168.1.1" and attempts to login with "admin" as a username and "admin" as a password. Reading from the pop-up page, the Javascript wouldn't have too difficult of a time figuring out the router version and changing the DNS server. It might be doable with Ajax, which would allow this all to happen behind the scenes. Obviously, this isn't going to work for any competent user, as changing the default password would solve my more-than-likely flawed way to carry out the attack, but what percentage of users are competent?
Or I could be completely wrong.
Currently, ray tracing is slower for most scenes. However, it is trivially parallelizable. After the scene is described, each pixel can be computed completely independently of every other pixel. To speed up, creating a shared acceleration structure is almost a requirement for speed (which is why the proper structure must be chosen). Keeping this in blindingly fast video memory and share it between 128 shader processors and performance is almost 128 times greater. While we don't have any GPU ray tracers that work with SLI/Crossfire, the system should show a near-linear performance increase (with additional overhead for generating or transferring the acceleration structure twice).
I agree with you, though. Since ray tracing is a much easier concept to understand (anybody with knowledge of linear algebra can see what is happening) and has only recently gained momentum (because, until now, it hasn't been technically feasible), there is a lot of hype surrounding it. People need to understand that there is nothing magical about ray tracing - it is just a different rendering algorithm. It may be the future of gaming, it may not. Personally, I think hybrid engines are the real future - strangely, they already seem to be implemented...
Unfortunately, triangle drawing isn't the only thing that happens when a frame is rendered. There are shadows to draw, specular and diffuse lighting, reflection, refraction and transmission, there is bump, normal or parallax mapping, particle systems, motion blur and depth of field. Ray tracing is cut out for these things. There are plenty of other non-triangle things such as anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and the entire non-graphics portion of the game. Anyway, ray tracing scales up for multiple processors a lot better than rasterization, which seems to be the path we're going down.
You do make a good point about ray tracing being O(resolution). With most engines these days, 1920x1200 renders only a little slower than 800x600 - the key to speed up lagging framerate is to turn extra graphics effects off. A ray traced engine will be sped up more by adjusting the resolution. With monitors growing in size all the time and LCD looking terrible at any resolution but its native one, it might not be the best path to travel down.
However, I don't agree with your argument that since graphics cards are geared towards rasterization, that we shouldn't develop (or at least try) a different technique? Did John Carmack look at video cards in the early 90s and decided that they could only play 2-D games? No. If popular game engines shift to ray tracing, video card manufacturers will shift with them.
This is actually my research project (ray tracing on graphics card). As far as I know, all the current working ray-tracers are implemented on CPU. From what I can tell (from the multiple failed implementations), there seem to be endless issues with driver incompatibility, because through software emulation, the systems at least run, but emulating defeats the purpose of implementing RT with shaders in the first place. The graphics card is Turing-complete, even if it isn't sovereign.
GPUs have numerous advantages, the most obvious being how parallelize-able the shader architecture is. The raw processing power of a GPU is so much greater than a CPU for stream processing, and there are many computer science problems that can be translated to a streaming model. Memory access time is incredibly fast (if you even need it with the 4096 registers) and GPU performance on the card is (theoretically) more controllable, as you don't have to deal with operating system interference.
Translating ray-tracing to a stream model is involved, but there are tons of advantages when it comes to building an interactive engine. Once the primary lighting is done (the ambient and shadow calculations), the system can stop - but not just stop, it can stop on the fly. When the first pass kernel finishes its job, we can test how much time has passed since the last screen render and choose to not calculate diffuse and specular, reflection and transmission on the fly. Reflection and transmission calculations are unique in that they can theoretically go on forever. The question is: How many times should a ray bounce before it stops? Long enough to keep up a framerate of 45 FPS? Sure, it is incredibly easy to implement. Granted, stopping a ray trace with the simplest part of lighting doesn't show off the areas where ray tracing is more efficient than rasterization, but it will still work.
Some claim that ray tracing is completely inefficient for rendering non-static scenes. This comes from the fact that ray tracing relies heavily on acceleration structures and that, when objects in the environment move, these will need to be completely recalculated. As games get more and more detailed, things like individual blades of waving grass would present a problem. However, with uniform spacial subdivision (or "the Uniform Grid"), you can easily calculate the areas that a blade of grass can possibly be in and reuse the voxel coordinates throughout the scene. This is an even more trivial problem to overcome with nonuniform spacial subdivision, with the added cost of a harder to traverse acceleration structure. Each scene would have to be tested to see which technique is the most efficient on the majority of graphics cards, as there isn't going to be a definite answer.
Which brings me to my last point, which is that I do not agree with TFA. There is nothing preventing a game from using both rasterization and ray tracing. It takes smarter (more?) programmers to deal with developing two different rendering techniques. The development of a quality ray tracer can also be applied to other parts of a simulator, as ray tracing is incredibly helpful in a physics engine. No, ray tracing is not the holy grail - nor is it a fool's errand. It will be something that every engine developer will need to know and understand. To those not in the small and specific business, you might notice a few more shiny things.
A lot of your ideas are interesting, and many of them are going to piss a lot of people off, but this particular one stands out as problematic:
I will use my home state of Kansas as a good example of "Gerrymandering." Here is a map of our congressional districts. As you can see, the third district is, by area, the smallest, but it contains an equal amount of people when compared to the other districts, as the Kansas City/Overland Park area is the most populated. It also houses almost all the Kansas Democrats. How would you redistribute the voting districts? If you did it by horizontal or vertical stripes of population distribution, the Democrats would not get a say in many votes, as they would be overpowered by the Republicans populating the rest of the state. In fact, the current solution is the only way Democrats get any say. Should the Democrats get a vote? Kansas has been a red state for a very long time. What I'm saying is there isn't really a good solution to the voting district problem (based on how we currently elect officials, anyway).
Another solution to this "problem" would be to abolish marriage altogether. There simply would be no more divorcing if you couldn't get married in the first place. Unfortunately, there are way too many things that revolve around the institution of marriage (taxes, insurance, banking, etc.) to completely get rid of it. Personally, I don't think the state should be interfering with the lives of people by forcing them to live in a situation that they don't want to be in. I don't know anybody that actually wants to get a divorce, but rather, sees divorce as the lesser of two evils.
And forcing people to talk to a third party before they get a "marriage certification" isn't going to fix anything either. The Catholic church requires a "marriage training" thing if you want to have a Catholic wedding (I forget the official name), but the divorce rate for Catholics is not any different from Aetheists and Agnostics (granted, they are slightly lower than the national average, but this may have to do with the fact that Roman Catholics don't recognize divorce).
Divorce happens for a reason, but there really isn't much we can do about it. Instead of trying to "fix" everything at once, why not try to knock out the actual reasons people get divorce. Here's a start: Many "bad" marriages come from unwanted pregnancy. How about we try to lower unwanted pregnancies? There are tons of ways to chip away at the perceived "problem" without forcing people to go through expensive councelling.
Theoretically, the watermark should still be there, as the watermark is inaudible noise on the track. The goal of a good watermarking algorithm is to survive longer than the audio. You're not safe from detection by transcoding, as these guys have an algorithm (I'm sure many more do, as well) for the original audio track (off a CD) that can be "retrieved" at various bit rates. At the bottom, you can see a graph on the error rate of recovery, which doesn't really fall off until you get down to 64 kbps. Basically, to remove this watermark without knowing the key (which can be as large as needed), you would do more damage to the sound of the track than the background noise.
As long as a strong watermarking scheme is used, it will still be there, unless you screw up the sound. I don't think it will do anything for the RIAA, but it beats the hell out of DRM and root kits.
A bluetooth monitor? Bluetooth can transmit at up to 2.1 Mbit/s. DVI can transmit 3.7 Gbit/s in single-link mode and 7.4 Gbit/s in dual-link mode. A 320x240 @ 24bpp would ideally take .9 seconds, but could easily take 5 seconds to fill the screen. And that is a tiny screen. 320x240 @ 8bpp would still ideally take .3 seconds. At a more standard resolution (1280x1024 @ 8bpp), a simple screen fill would ideally take 5 seconds and could easily stretch to 30. Granted, one could try to fix this problem by using a compression algorithm on the data, but PNG and JPEG aren't effective enough to fix the problem (especially in larger displays). USB would help, but it's still only 480 Mbit/s (I don't feel like doing the calculations again).
Not to say the idea is entirely without merit. A worker in a server farm could load a problem ticket (@ 1 bpp?) onto his monitor and walk off with the ticket. There might be a few specialized applications for this, but everything involves writing some sort of specialized "painting" system, which goes against the basic idea of a monitor-only system.
...remove one of those "is not the internet"s and it should make sense.
That's actually not what he's trying to say. It seems as though he is trying to make people remember that, no matter what the form of communication is, a human being is writing it. For example, it is not the internet that is not the internet itself that enables us to freely share our music, but the people who are freely sharing using the tool of the internet.
However, this particular quote applies very well against Jaron's article. Let us remember that it is not the software license that innovates, but the people making the software.
I think the Constitution refers to a different kind of welfare than the one the NASA Party Proponents are talking about. Anyway, I doubt they're changing, so assume the party submission position and give up your tax dollars.
I'm all for NASA having a nice party every once in a while, as it most likely increases their production. I mean, these "parties" aren't a "let's all get drunk, hook up with the secretaries and hope we don't ruin our future at this company"-type events, they're all about maintaining a good relationship with contractors and increasing employee morale. Look at Google, an incredibly successful company - they require employees spend 20% of paid work time on non-Google "projects that interest them." I'm not a Google insider (and I don't want to look up fiscal reports), but I'd imagine that the money spent on these projects (in paid non-work time) accounts for more than 0.1% of operating costs. Or maybe the sand volleyball courts, gym and swimming pools in the Googleplex? They don't directly increase productivity, but they keep the employees happy. And happy employees means more production at higher quality.
Actually, since you have an XBox 360, Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista Home Premium (and Ultimate) will let you connect your XBox to your WiMP library over your network. So, assuming it Just Works, you should already be able to watch anything you can in WiMP on your television.
He's most likely referring to this or one of the many things that show up on the "related videos" sidebar.
The theory is that "free v1agra" is free speech, because you are free to communicate anything you want, even if it is annoying. While normal people can see the difference between a million spam and phishing e-mails informing you of an unknown uncle who is a prince and a million people in the streets with signs informing you that your government is racist, the typical Slashdot slippery slope argues that this is not the case.
We already have laws regarding what you can and cannot say, although they're not exactly clear-cut (you know it when you see it), which is where the fear of government advancing the definition of "pornography," "explicit material" and other not well-defined but still illegal in public environments to where the first amendment is truly violated. I know it starts with something small, but I simply do not feel that we're anywhere near the point of needing to wear tin foil hats.
The censorship of something is always worse than the thing which is being censored.
I stole that from someone's signature...
Hard drives are a good example of your point, but I would consider them a special market. What can you possibly think of as a way to improve them? The latest "innovation" is perpendicular recording, which was thought up back in the 1970s. Manufacturers are competing not in an "innovation" sense - simply because the product can't be improved unless everybody does it at the same time. Native Command Queuing and Serial ATA wouldn't have taken off if everybody hadn't done them. NCQ doesn't even lead to major performance increases, it just makes storing more data on the same platter cost less. The next step is flash-based drives, which all the major players are working on making cheaply at the moment, but this is just a different way of storing data. In fact, that's all a hard drive will ever do - store data.
This particular patent appears to patent a semiconductor material and is incredibly general. This line makes me laugh at its generality:
If you bother reading the whole patent...well, I really can't imagine this claim standing up in court.
Assuming this claim does not stand up in court, then the patent system works. If any of the hard drive companies try to patent a component, four other companies can point to the research they've been doing as prior art. This forces companies to continue researching. Sure, it wastes time and money, but it sure as hell beats the alternative. The alternative, of course, is one company not researching anymore, but simply copying the works of others and selling a cheaper product. OEMs will switch to them (because the majority of them couldn't care less about reliability and they sure as hell don't care about getting the "original" product). Using this advantage, one manufacturer will eventually establish an effective monopoly wherein no innovation will occur.
What about a new company? If they (hypothetically) come out with a truly unique way to do hard drives, then, in a patentless system, all the major players would simply copy that idea. Having the idea first means nothing, as the major players already have the money and the fabrication labs to outproduce you. Your only hope is to be hired by one of the companies that took your idea - but why would they do that? They would have to pay you. Where is the freedom?
I'm all for patent reform, but this is one of many markets where patents actually force innovation, although not in the way that patents were originally intended.
Dupe
Gah! Which one is real?
At some point, you have to deal with the fact that there is going to be some overhead in dealing with an object-oriented approach. Even if the significance is near 0, the scheduler is pushing operations on the CPU on an incredibly large scale, which might show its ugly face in performance. IMHO, it wouldn't, but I guess Linus knows better than I...
Anyway, there is this great site called the Linux Kernel Archives, which has the source code for every version of the Linux kernel ever put out. If somebody was really serious about using their own CPU scheduler, all they have to do is take the latest version of the kernel, download the source code and modify sched.c to fit their needs. Even if it isn't object-oriented, that doesn't change the fact that everything else in the kernel only cares that default_wake_function tries to wake up a thread - it doesn't matter how it works on the inside. All the other parts know about is the sched.h header file.
Sure, it isn't on-the-fly pluggable, but different distributions could easily use different schedulers if they simply compile the kernel. A distribution could make a sched.c that is pluggable (it would have an interesting look to it, but it could be done). I wouldn't want to debug it, but for all this complaining, you'd think somebody would do something about it.
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1770138
Your ideas are as queer as a clockwork orange.
While you're absolutely correct, you must also factor in how people generally behave. How often is a reliable expert on Professional Wrestling going to edit the issue of Tibetan sovereignty? Sure, somebody could, but the goal isn't to get a black and white objective analysis of right and wrong, it's to get a gray area subjective rating of "trustworthiness." Better yet, it appears to work - in my article on the politics of Djibouti, all the "facts" were highlighted.
If only we could download the songs over a network filled with crap...
Unless, of course, your ISP was connected to the sewers, in which case you'd be perfectly fine.
Hey, now. As an avid user of iGoogle, I object to your objections. One's Google homepage is only as monstrous as you make it. Mine, for example, has GMail, the weather and RSS feeds for Slashdot and Reuters. It's my homepage, so every time I start up my web browser, I check my e-mail. Sure, you're free to put games, quotes or the terror that is Google Eyes, but you certainly don't have to. Furthermore, your feeds are loaded independently and after the top search bar, so if you want to immediately do a search, you don't have to wait around for replies from a bunch of websites, you can just start typing.
The market is clearly for college students, specifically computer science majors, who live in dorm rooms and have to leave their desktop/server running all night because the kid down the hall might just need your copy of Quake 3.iso at three in the morning and you don't want to have to wake up just to turn on your computer. They're going to sell millions.