I use a tool (glIntercept) when debugging my OpenGL products that lets me disconnect the camera and fly around in the scene, on any OGL software, even closed source. It works by pre-transforming the projection matrix, essentially creating an additional modelview matrix...
The XBox 360 inside has the same low level control over the graphics being rendered...
To make nice reflections we use something called an Environment Map, or Cube Map. It's the same sort of tech that Google Street View uses. To make a real time updating reflection where what's reflecting isn't a fixed env map, simply render the scene to a texture from the object's perspective with a 90 degree FOV in each 6 cardinal directions, and use them as the env / cube map for the object.
So, any vantage point can be converted into a full 360 degree render from that camera's position. MS could take advantage of this technology to send the images to each projector automatically, for legacy games, and/or provide an API so that devs can take advantage of the feature directly -- maybe have an equipment loadout on one wall, health display on the right, Radar on the ceiling, etc.
In fine Slashdot tradition, let's hear from 52 people telling us that correlation does not imply causation and that only people with brain trauma or predisposed to it play football.
Negative. I put it to you: Natural Selection will eventually correct for this. We pay them a lot, the star players are sexually and socially desirable.
Eventually we'll grow thicker skulls and/or our brains will shrink to contain more fluid, much like a wood pecker's... Much in the same way that "tall dark and handsome" has lead to taller darker and more sexy humans... Now if we could just get on board with crotchless pants, all guys could finally grow giant cocks.
Not to mention all the crackers and hackers with BBSs came before and spawned the Demoscene to one up eachother's cracked intro screens, and coined the competitive term N-Day, eg: 3-day or 0-Day (three day or zero day -- meaning a software (or game) that had its copy protection (DRM) cracked on 3rd day or 0th day (release), thus devs didn't know about the hole and it needed to be patched immediately) all originally in the pursuit of sharing files...
Will a torrent server operator wake to the beeping terminal alarm "Archive Not Present" and search frantically to swap in a different disk/drive just so you can access the warez or porn you're looking for before you log off the BBS at 2:00am? Now THAT is a service; For what compensation? Just to meet folks and share common interests -- You're browsing the files when suddenly: Your screen splits in two "Sysop Wants To Chat" and you chat about some rare games / demos / warez for a bit, seeing each keypress as they're typed, much more personal than today's revisionable chat progs... Ah good times.
File sharing has been around since files. Torrents, eMule, Usenet, etc. are just the latest incarnations. Seems like the smart thing to do would be to join them and leverage the "pirates" (who are the biggest fans) as word of mouth advertising, I mean, considering that "you can't beat 'em". That's what we're seeing in some new-media, e.g., Indiegame the Movie uploaded their film to TPB with a scroller that appears ~3 times at the bottom asking you to buy a copy if you like it so they can keep making films... That's smart, but the scroller text could have been more wobbly and colorful IMO... kids these days...
I get your post is specifically about torrents, but if you're just picking some arbitrary point in the past to say "these sharers came before", if you ask me. To say they're the "last man standing" is laughable at best. File sharing evolves, they're just another notable part of its history, more relevant due to being more recent and powered by a global network, not limited by local calling area codes, you know, like the warez rooms on IRC w/ direct transfer requests... I feel that so many people get caught up in the present day struggles that they forget sharing files is something that has always been a part of digital culture.
You can't win the war on sharing information -- That's what makes us human. Making laws against human nature is how you create a police state...
It's true the Earth is very rare, but only because it keeps getting destroyed, thus the new Young Earth is always a little under-done -- Nothing a bit of Global Warming won't fix... Where was I? Oh, Shortage, right: The answer is quite simple, grant human rights to the Dolphins and ask them if they'll build you another one! Then you just have to make a formal complaint to the intergalactic zoning commission to prevent the hyperspace expressway before the Vogons get here... Blam! Just doubled your natural resources! (and my CPU power)
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a few mazes to run before I get back to removing the labels (and your memories) of the most important button on everyone's keyboards. I mean, look at it. It's the biggest one, and it's Blank?! Ha! Soon no one will be able to remember how it's used to locate the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, thus I'll have saved the Universe too! It's taking longer than I thought since many folks have retained a vague recollection of that unforgettable place and started re-labeling the key: "Space Bar"
Use it or lose it is already a farce. Authors make deals with publishers requiring publishing runs or the author regains control of the work. As you've alluded to the publisher will produce 5 copies in a run and claim they're still being published so they can retain the rights. If you require 50 trillion copies per run minimum then they'll simply spin off a shell company who buys the books with the money the parent company gifted them. Require physical copies and they'll just make 10 copies and run the fake customer gambit 10 trillion times.
Look, copyright laws were enacted for the benefit of society as a whole. We have no proof that they're needed. How will authors and artists get paid? The same way a car mechanic does. They simply don't do the work unless they have a contract to get paid for the work. Instead of selling a piece of software I can simply say: Look, here's my idea, I'll make this for $X, that'll cover dev costs and a bit of profit. People like the idea, they agree to pay, I make the software, I get paid, everyone gets the software for free afterwards (since the work has been done and paid for). No more piracy at all; That's because there's no more artificial scarcity.
The only difference between that and the current system is Publishers. If I make software working under a Publisher, I still get the same $X to do so. The only difference is that after I'm done a Publisher uses legally enforced artificial scarcity to try and get lots more money without actually adding anything of value to the product. They're leaches, they don't need to exist.
This is the Information age, everyone is a publisher and distributor now. That's why the original strict copyright laws are obsolete. These laws were created to protect authors from greedy Publishers, and in a time when copy machines were few and expensive. The founders thought that 14 years would be plenty of time back then, when making duplicates was tough. Now there are digital copy machines in nearly every household item -- Even some magazines themselves! Thus making EVERYONE subject to the strict laws that were meant to apply only to the professional Publishing houses. Now that copying is easy copyright terms span 3 to 4 generations of humans?! You & your life, then 70 years: Have kids @ 30, they die 30 years after you die, and your grand kids 30 years after that... Ten years after your grand kids are dead THEN the work MIGHT enter the public domain -- providing there is a readable copy somewhere... No, this isn't what the founders meant by "a limited time".
You give the publishing creeps an inch and they'll take that inch an infinity number of times, then claim they're only taking an inch! They have teams of lawyers just to find loop holes. Meanwhile they've managed to turn copyright laws on its ear, they figured out ways to ensure the Authors never reclaim their rights after publishing, and they've applied the laws meant to restrict them to everyone, even teenagers!
I'm sorry pal. There is no proof that Copyright is doing it's job, providing benefit for society as a whole and promoting the arts an sciences. We need a new approach to laws: Stop operating under unproven hypotheses. It's unscientific. ASININE. No engineer or scientist would allow themselves to be ruled in such a way. Until you come back with PROOF that in this day and age copyright law is beneficial to society, I'm sorry, get bent. Laws based purely on speculation with no proof they're beneficial should be abandoned as unfit theories until they're tested.
Don't you believe in the scientific method? We must abolish them to even see if they're beneficial. WE HAVE TO DO THE EXPERIMENT.
Note: If you come to the bargaining table with your best offer out of the gate, then you'll get talked into a deal you didn't want. Aim for the price better than you want, and you'll strike a deal much closer to what you wanted. The way to get reform is to point out how ridiculous it is and insist on scientific proof of merit before re-enacting the laws. THEN we might see some loosening of the laws. I'm not a fool for overshooting my aims, you're the fool for asking for what you actually want to happen!
So we used our super advanced technology to know precisely where this asteroid will be in like 2042 or whatever but we were off by almost half its mass (or volume)? Anyone see a little disconnect there? Especially since other solar system bodies' gravitational fields will affect it differently if it weighs double what we thought. I knew it was a load of alarmist, headline-grabbing BS.
So, re-read what you said and think about that. You'll come to the conclusion that you should be quite alarmed because we don't know what might hit us when. We also didn't know about Eris, a proto-planet more massive than Pluto until 2005. That means we're pretty damn blind, and that stuff we can see we can't see very well and thus can't make very precise predictions about them.
If anything, to me that means we should be pretty concerned about this situation and seek to rectify it ASAP. We need to swap the NASA and armed force's budgets. Get some space infrastructure in place to protect us from other asteroids: Get a few big rocks of our own orbiting to use as slingshots or gravity tugs, etc; Much better telescopes, esp. wide field systems; Self sustaining colonies off-world so all our eggs aren't in one basket. We can squabble about Oil after we're sure we're not going to be extinct.
The dinosaurs regarded chicken little as an Alarmist when she saw a meteor shower and said the sky was falling. Turns out she was right, only the dinosaurs in the flight program survived.
You know those little ID batches you have to wear to work (office workers everywhere know this)? Same technology. Adults do it all the time, and nobody complains about how MegaCorp Inc is watching where they're going once they're off work because they're carrying an RFID card.
That's because Adults get to decide where they work, and if they're worried about carrying 'the mark of the Beast' or whatever religious belief, then they can choose to quit and work elsewhere. It's true the kids could quit school too, but it's not nearly as easy because of zoning and their parents might not be able to home school them, and the schooling is mandatory so they can't just protest by not attending.
Not that I'm saying it's rational thinking, just explaining since you don't seem to understand why these folks go "full retard." Honestly, it doesn't seem like you're trying to understand the situation or answer the question to which you relied. Having fun shooting fish in a barrel? "Oh look! Irrational folks acting Irrationally -- And I'm pointing it out!" How Interesting. Fuck you mods.
To your left you'll see the remains of Hitler. On the right here we have on display the remains of the last grammarian.
Much to the chagrin of the grammarians the cobbled together English language continued evolve. Not even the machine learning systems cared for the antiquated language bound communication style; They strove to understand what people meant regardless of how precise they were in saying it. Both races having been developed in much the same way, through evolution, realized a Universal truth that escaped the grammarians (though they could not escape the truth itself): All that can not adapt becomes extinct.
And that, class, is how we won the war against the Grammar Nazis. Now, let us momentarily link minds momentarily so we may more deeply contemplate the significance of this achievement.
Where is my watch? My Alarm Clock? Oh, that's right, I don't use one. I use the general purpose computer in my pocket: A "Smart" Phone...
Once, not so long ago, Game machines were purely mechanical. Levers, knobs, gears, buttons and contractors shot balls through hoops or pucks into goals, etc. This meant that each Arcade Game's hardware was custom fit to the game itself. With the advent of digital games with integrated circuits it got cheaper to mass produce the games because you could install multiple different games onto the hardware, but memory constraints and controller configurations meant that the arcade cabinets only supported one game at a time.
As hardware got cheap enough the demand for digital games resulted in home gaming consoles. These early consoles weren't as powerful as the arcade machines, but they allowed one piece of hardware to run many different games. The console hardware was necessarily dedicated to gaming because it needed to be designed for speed: Consoles favored read-only cartridges for near instant data access speed vs slow magnetic media, and dedicated graphics systems with hardware collision detection over general purpose computing logic. The game consoles were less powerful than the arcade machines, but eventually they closed the gap.
As before with single game Arcade Cabinet hardware vs multi-game supporting hardware, the more general purpose game hardware became dominant; Thus, Consoles destroyed the Arcade market. PCs were even more general purpose that consoles, but as with the more powerful dedicated Arcade Cabinets vs weaker Consoles, the consoles held dominion in the game market. The circuitry in game consoles had become so generalized it was nearly indistinguishable from PCs. Some consoles even flirted with being both a Console and a general purpose PC (Atari PC), but their hardware optimizations for sprite collisions and scrolling kept them in in first place.
As the gap closed between PC and Game Console, the game consoles themselves became the exact same as a PC in hardware terms, even to the point of running PC OSs like a modified version of Windows, and Linux. At this point the PCs had eclipsed Game Consoles in terms of raw power. The PC's more general purpose design had been eroding all dedicated electronics, not just the game industry. Everything from, Televisions, set-top cable boxes, TV remotes, phones, had been installed with general purpose computing components. The future looked bleak for any dedicated circuitry, especially dedicated gaming hardware, as phones and tablet computers quickly approached and even surpassed the power of some gaming hardware (Wii).
We are at the end of the dedicated gaming hardware history, having caught up with the present. Vendor lock-in, DRM, and dedicated controllers have become the only differentiating features between general purpose computing and dedicated gaming hardware -- And console like controllers are now available for PCs (but the more general purpose keyboard and mouse aren't on consoles...), leaving only anti-features as "pros" in the console's corner. Console hardware cycles have slowed, unable to keep pace with the more rapidly improving mobile and desktop computing markets, they need to take more time to make the next leap because they know the console hardware is sub-par vs PCs even before the console is released (this wasn't always true in the past, however), and they can milk the console for the most money possible -- Much to the chagrin of hardcore gamers and developers alike who both want to play and make better games if only the hardware were better... Gamers continue to buy games for dedicated hardware made by entrenched publishers due to nostalgia, ease of install and availability only, everything else from exclusivity to DRM being ant-features. Meanwhile developers try ever harder to make cross platform titles so that all gamers can play their games. AAA studios, being forced to dumb down games because of the lowest common denominator (consoles
The mass of X number of molecules of element Y = 1 gram.
First off, it should be atoms not molecules... Secondly, the atomic masses aren't actually constant between atoms. Primarily due to isotopes, but additionally due to electrons (though very minimal they too have mass), so you should also state the charge at least. Ah, but now we know of sub-atomic particles, and may even have discovered and measured the field / particle responsible for mass itself, so we should instead describe mass in terms of interaction with the Higgs Field...
Ah, but all the quantum fields and particles are really just forms that energy can take, so we should instead define mass in terms of energy in a closed system...
Considering we still haven't gotten scientists to agree on how to define units of atomic mass (currently 1u (unified atomic mass unit) = One Dalton = one twelfth a neutral (no charge) unbound carbon-12 atom, but in 2012 it was proposed the dalton be redefined as being 0.001/NA kg, thus diverging from AMU), I suspect the heat death of this universe to occur long before a correct standard mass is adopted...
Do you think it would be possible to get him to plead guilty to ALL of the world's piracy? I mean, If I'm ever looking down the barell of the *AA's guns and expect to be found guilty, then I'm going down Like Spock: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Who wouldn't want to become the modern day version of, Jesus?!
They're seven year old hardware, where the games ultimately look about the same (if not as good) as with a modern PC. While of course the PC would win the Pepsi challenge, it's a hell of a lot smaller difference than (say) PS2 v. PS1.
I'm a game developer. It takes far less time and effort to make a cross platform game with features coded & content authored to the lowest common denominator -- or average common denominator then slightly improve or dumb down features / fidelity (except for textures, those are pretty easy because resampling can be automated). The PC has FAR more memory than the 360 or PS3, yet those Witcher2 models had the EXACT same vertices and animations; It's really noticeable in the hair. So, the only real difference was the particle effects and pixel shading, maybe some higher res detail textures. Re-Topo for various LoD and different baked bump-maps, and re-rigging them, just to make the game look as good as it can on each platform? No. That doesn't happen, publishers won't pay for that, so if you want it to run on the 360 or PS3, then the PC graphics suffer. You can't really compare a cross platform AAA game between platforms and say "The PC's only a little bit better!", you fool.
Element & Style Editing, PDF rendering, scripting, embeddable animation, sound, video, client side storage, 3rd party plugins...
Am I talking about Flash? Java? A web browser? MS Word? A bloated do-everything "Kitchen Sink" Business Solution? WHO CAN TELL?
Fuck that. I already know the best way to engineer things: Each thing does one thing and does it well, and provides an interface so it can be used in conjunction with other things to perform a task. Some call this "The Unix Way", but really it's the only sane way to do anything. See also: Object Oriented Programming (same shit), or Model View Controller (same shit), etc, etc...
A browser should be a text markup system that relies on a content provider layer to provide services for rendering embedded elements: images, videos, animations, games, whatever. It should be a glue program, and I should be able to select what content / mime-types map to what data decoding providers in the content providing layer. That's the way to make a minimal "do everything" engine. That way I can roll my own graphic format and renderer service (maybe for 3D point cloud data), and register it with any browser and create my documents with new elements, maybe submit an element to the W3C, and get it standardized so others can also implement it, then "image/cloud" mime type and my rotate&zoom capable 3D data display can be adopted. W3C needs a content provider / plugin standard for browsers, this way plugins or applications can work across all browsers.
Look, we can't have our cake and eat it too. Either browsers are a lean and mean text and image display system, for static documents, or it's a platform for making any kind of program you want -- If it's the latter then YOU DON'T PUT EVERYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF IN THE PLATFORM. You kick all that shit out of the platform, reduce it's role and complexity, and offload PDF, video, sound -- hell even scripting -- to plugins. Everyone's already seen the include everything approach. It's dumb. You end up with Java. We should be making browsers that can be integral parts of our OSs, standardized so we can swap them out without losing functionality. Make "browser" instances isolatable (optional non shared DLL/.SO) so I can fire up a client side only instance and stay isolated from the web and its exploits.
Gods damn, I know this is just a pipe dream, but this shit WILL happen eventually, why not start doing it now? It's so frustrating to watch all this effort wasted time and again on the do-everything approach, when we could do shit the right way, "the Unix way". WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY.
A new essay in The New Atlantis revisits the controversy and asks whether the fact that Kuhn based his argument almost exclusively on physics means that it does not apply as well to major developments in biology...
Hippos, Rhinos, Elephants, Manatees, Dolphins, Whales, etc, etc... Hairless Mammals. They have aquatic ancestors. Compared to apes: We're naked, have superior breath control (can make vocal noise under-water), have fat concentrated in outer layers rather than inside our cores (insulation blubber), travel predominantly upright (like primates do when in water).
Want to know what happened to the Merfolk of Atlantis? Look in a Mirror.
Not really. While I agree that C is a bad language, it has no competition in low-level coding.
Oh, there's competion, just not much because it's not wanted or needed. As a hobby I started building an x86 OS from scratch with only a hex editor. From there created an assembler in machine code, then used it to create a small text editor and then assemble a disassembler, then disassembled the assembler (to save me from re-entering ASM), then I began work on creating my own system level language from scratch to build the OS with. The thing is, if you want to make the leanest language just barely above the metal, but still be cross platform, guess what you get? You get C. Seriously.
My syntax was different, but because the op-codes (eg: jmp, the movs and push, pop, call, ret, enter, leave, protected mode & architecture features like the MMU, restricting use of code & stack registers, etc. when you add any features (like functions) you end up creating something almost exactly like C in all but name. The architecture is responsible for C, it's a product of its environment. For instance, I wanted to use multiple stacks: a separate stack for the call stack and another one for parameters / local vars / etc -- In fact I wanted to extend that to support co-routines at the lowest levels possible, all while eliminating stack smashing as a direct exploit vector -- Ah, but because of the way Virtual Memory Addressing works, and because there are dedicated operations for doing single stack per thread function calling, there's a huge performance hit to doing things in other ways down at the low level (I figured out a few tricks, but it's still slower than C functions).
Now, most folks wouldn't tolerate a system level language that was any more inefficient than it had to be, and slightly contrary to the way things want to work at the hardware level just to add features globally that many programs don't need (e.g. namespaces, call-stack security, co-routines, etc), so they'll follow the restrictions of the system and the language produced will come out to be just like C, maybe with slightly different syntax, but all the same idioms. Maybe function calling would be something other than CDECL (instead, for variadics, I pass the number of parameters in a register, and have the callee clean up the stack, reduces code size a bit -- and I have other reasons), but even this is possible to do now in C too at the compiler level. Even when you get to adding OOP to the language, you run into C++ and it's problem with diamond inheritance, and dynamic casting (if you do things the most efficient way possible) -- I allow virtual variables as well as functions to eliminate the diamond inheritance issue with shared bases having variables -- Just make them "virtual", like you would a function, it's slower, another layer of indirection, but if I did it the fast way I'd just be re-implementing C++!
There's a fine line I'm walking, a little too far from the architecture / ASM and my language might as well run via VM, a little less and I might as well just use C/C++. So, the space we have to innovate in to squeeze more worth out of a compilable language isn't really that big. Indeed, when I take a look at GoLang disassembled I see all the same familiar C idioms -- They just give you a nicer API for some things like concurrency, and add a few (inefficient) layers of indirection to do things like duck-typing. Great for application level logic, but I'd still write an OS and its drivers in a C like language instead.
There's a reason why C "has no competition in low-level coding" It's because we don't need a different syntax for low level coding, it's done. As a language designer / implementer when I hear folks say "C is a bad language" I chuckle under my breath and think they might be noobs. Maybe you meant the design by committee approach sucks, but probably not. The features C has it needs to have, the syntax it has, it needs to have, e.g., pointer to a pointer to a
"Klingon Introduces 1TB Flash Drive"... Instantly confirming my suspicion that Star Trek was an elaborate enculturation ploy -- why else would we be porting our holiday carols, plays and other cultural events--- Then I read it again, made a prolonged sad face, and went to make more coffee.
If Microsoft gets rid of the "Win32 cruft dating back to the 80s and 90s", then there will be no reason for anyone to choose Windows over any other operating system. Legacy compatibility and a huge installed base of applications are Microsoft's primary competitive edge
We are talking specifically about Windows RT running on ARM here. There's no legacy compatibility story to begin with, even if the restriction on MS-signed-only desktop binaries weren't there in the first place.
You may have failed to realize that Win32 doesn't mean 32 bit windows API. It simply means "Not the old 16 bit API" I write all my widgets from scratch, and I talk to OpenGL directly, no SDL, no freeglut3, no MFC, just straight Win32 and OpenGL to make the lightest weight most efficient programs, even on 64 bit systems. It's crazy as hell to do this, yes, yes, I'm glutton for punishment, ha ha, you jest, "re-invent every wheel", I know, but game developers are allowed to throw away every best practice in the name of performance... Besides, you don't see wagon wheels on a formula-1 car, eh?
That is to say, Win32 can be compiled on ARM, and then I compile my code that uses the Win32 API to get a window and event loop, and the "legacy" compatibility isn't an issue. Event pumps and windowing callbacks are going to exist no matter what API they build. If you're talking cruft, then it's that COM stuff and.NET and MFC and all the other stuff that's built on top of win32, not win32 itself.
IMO, Win8 is about MS trying to sandbox programs via VM (C#) and simultaneously provide cross platform support while taking a cut of every software sale made. Now, I'm not going to eat that app-store cost. You are. I'll just raise my price accordingly on MS's market to offset those fees... Sucks, but C'est la vie. If MS continues allowing "side-loading" then they can't force developers like me to sell programs in their store -- C/C++ is cross platform, and so is my code, so I just rebuild the binary for each target platform, it's not a big deal. Rebuilding everything in C# and suffering that vendor lock-in cluster fsck is really off-putting, considering my C code runs across the board on every chipset, even MIPS, and every OS (thanks to OS abstraction layer, and a bit of meta-programming for iOS and Android)... No such luck with C#, yet.
That's where MS wants to take their market -- Incompatibility land. IMO, I wouldn't play their shenanigans unless I had to, I don't think OS choice should limit software choice (and I don't think hardware choice (beyond performance) should limit OS choice. This is shit we had well and good SOLVED in the 70's. MS sees the road ahead: The bright future where all programs are cross platform -- The road to OS irrelevance -- they hate that future, they hate your freedom to choose to run any OS on your hardware. Hence SecureBoot (Which I've said time and again is Pointless), Hence C# only in App Store & XBL Indie Games, hence blocking any apps that aren't signed by MS, and not allowing users to add their own trust certs to the OS / Hardware. The jig is up. W8 is just one more battle in the Vendor Lockin war.
I don't mean to pick on MS, Apple is going down the same road with an app-store route for their desktop too. GNU/Linux, BSD, Android, and other FLOSS OSs are the only ones that get the software repository system done right, and not even stock Android allows user installing a new / additional cert trust (recompile). This is a fight over developers, it's the applications that matter, OSs have been irrelevant for quite some time now. It's only a matter of time -- MS can't win this one, they couldn't write secure code to save their ass, which is exactly what they'd need to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I use a tool (glIntercept) when debugging my OpenGL products that lets me disconnect the camera and fly around in the scene, on any OGL software, even closed source. It works by pre-transforming the projection matrix, essentially creating an additional modelview matrix...
The XBox 360 inside has the same low level control over the graphics being rendered...
To make nice reflections we use something called an Environment Map, or Cube Map. It's the same sort of tech that Google Street View uses. To make a real time updating reflection where what's reflecting isn't a fixed env map, simply render the scene to a texture from the object's perspective with a 90 degree FOV in each 6 cardinal directions, and use them as the env / cube map for the object.
So, any vantage point can be converted into a full 360 degree render from that camera's position. MS could take advantage of this technology to send the images to each projector automatically, for legacy games, and/or provide an API so that devs can take advantage of the feature directly -- maybe have an equipment loadout on one wall, health display on the right, Radar on the ceiling, etc.
In fine Slashdot tradition, let's hear from 52 people telling us that correlation does not imply causation and that only people with brain trauma or predisposed to it play football.
Negative. I put it to you: Natural Selection will eventually correct for this. We pay them a lot, the star players are sexually and socially desirable.
Eventually we'll grow thicker skulls and/or our brains will shrink to contain more fluid, much like a wood pecker's... Much in the same way that "tall dark and handsome" has lead to taller darker and more sexy humans... Now if we could just get on board with crotchless pants, all guys could finally grow giant cocks.
Not to mention all the crackers and hackers with BBSs came before and spawned the Demoscene to one up eachother's cracked intro screens, and coined the competitive term N-Day, eg: 3-day or 0-Day (three day or zero day -- meaning a software (or game) that had its copy protection (DRM) cracked on 3rd day or 0th day (release), thus devs didn't know about the hole and it needed to be patched immediately) all originally in the pursuit of sharing files...
Will a torrent server operator wake to the beeping terminal alarm "Archive Not Present" and search frantically to swap in a different disk/drive just so you can access the warez or porn you're looking for before you log off the BBS at 2:00am? Now THAT is a service; For what compensation? Just to meet folks and share common interests -- You're browsing the files when suddenly: Your screen splits in two "Sysop Wants To Chat" and you chat about some rare games / demos / warez for a bit, seeing each keypress as they're typed, much more personal than today's revisionable chat progs... Ah good times.
File sharing has been around since files. Torrents, eMule, Usenet, etc. are just the latest incarnations. Seems like the smart thing to do would be to join them and leverage the "pirates" (who are the biggest fans) as word of mouth advertising, I mean, considering that "you can't beat 'em". That's what we're seeing in some new-media, e.g., Indiegame the Movie uploaded their film to TPB with a scroller that appears ~3 times at the bottom asking you to buy a copy if you like it so they can keep making films... That's smart, but the scroller text could have been more wobbly and colorful IMO... kids these days...
I get your post is specifically about torrents, but if you're just picking some arbitrary point in the past to say "these sharers came before", if you ask me. To say they're the "last man standing" is laughable at best. File sharing evolves, they're just another notable part of its history, more relevant due to being more recent and powered by a global network, not limited by local calling area codes, you know, like the warez rooms on IRC w/ direct transfer requests... I feel that so many people get caught up in the present day struggles that they forget sharing files is something that has always been a part of digital culture.
You can't win the war on sharing information -- That's what makes us human. Making laws against human nature is how you create a police state...
It's true the Earth is very rare, but only because it keeps getting destroyed, thus the new Young Earth is always a little under-done -- Nothing a bit of Global Warming won't fix... Where was I? Oh, Shortage, right: The answer is quite simple, grant human rights to the Dolphins and ask them if they'll build you another one! Then you just have to make a formal complaint to the intergalactic zoning commission to prevent the hyperspace expressway before the Vogons get here... Blam! Just doubled your natural resources! (and my CPU power)
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a few mazes to run before I get back to removing the labels (and your memories) of the most important button on everyone's keyboards. I mean, look at it. It's the biggest one, and it's Blank?! Ha! Soon no one will be able to remember how it's used to locate the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, thus I'll have saved the Universe too! It's taking longer than I thought since many folks have retained a vague recollection of that unforgettable place and started re-labeling the key: "Space Bar"
Use it or lose it is already a farce. Authors make deals with publishers requiring publishing runs or the author regains control of the work. As you've alluded to the publisher will produce 5 copies in a run and claim they're still being published so they can retain the rights. If you require 50 trillion copies per run minimum then they'll simply spin off a shell company who buys the books with the money the parent company gifted them. Require physical copies and they'll just make 10 copies and run the fake customer gambit 10 trillion times.
Look, copyright laws were enacted for the benefit of society as a whole. We have no proof that they're needed. How will authors and artists get paid? The same way a car mechanic does. They simply don't do the work unless they have a contract to get paid for the work. Instead of selling a piece of software I can simply say: Look, here's my idea, I'll make this for $X, that'll cover dev costs and a bit of profit. People like the idea, they agree to pay, I make the software, I get paid, everyone gets the software for free afterwards (since the work has been done and paid for). No more piracy at all; That's because there's no more artificial scarcity.
The only difference between that and the current system is Publishers. If I make software working under a Publisher, I still get the same $X to do so. The only difference is that after I'm done a Publisher uses legally enforced artificial scarcity to try and get lots more money without actually adding anything of value to the product. They're leaches, they don't need to exist.
This is the Information age, everyone is a publisher and distributor now. That's why the original strict copyright laws are obsolete. These laws were created to protect authors from greedy Publishers, and in a time when copy machines were few and expensive. The founders thought that 14 years would be plenty of time back then, when making duplicates was tough. Now there are digital copy machines in nearly every household item -- Even some magazines themselves! Thus making EVERYONE subject to the strict laws that were meant to apply only to the professional Publishing houses. Now that copying is easy copyright terms span 3 to 4 generations of humans?! You & your life, then 70 years: Have kids @ 30, they die 30 years after you die, and your grand kids 30 years after that... Ten years after your grand kids are dead THEN the work MIGHT enter the public domain -- providing there is a readable copy somewhere... No, this isn't what the founders meant by "a limited time".
You give the publishing creeps an inch and they'll take that inch an infinity number of times, then claim they're only taking an inch! They have teams of lawyers just to find loop holes. Meanwhile they've managed to turn copyright laws on its ear, they figured out ways to ensure the Authors never reclaim their rights after publishing, and they've applied the laws meant to restrict them to everyone, even teenagers!
I'm sorry pal. There is no proof that Copyright is doing it's job, providing benefit for society as a whole and promoting the arts an sciences. We need a new approach to laws: Stop operating under unproven hypotheses. It's unscientific. ASININE. No engineer or scientist would allow themselves to be ruled in such a way. Until you come back with PROOF that in this day and age copyright law is beneficial to society, I'm sorry, get bent. Laws based purely on speculation with no proof they're beneficial should be abandoned as unfit theories until they're tested.
Don't you believe in the scientific method? We must abolish them to even see if they're beneficial. WE HAVE TO DO THE EXPERIMENT.
Note: If you come to the bargaining table with your best offer out of the gate, then you'll get talked into a deal you didn't want. Aim for the price better than you want, and you'll strike a deal much closer to what you wanted. The way to get reform is to point out how ridiculous it is and insist on scientific proof of merit before re-enacting the laws. THEN we might see some loosening of the laws. I'm not a fool for overshooting my aims, you're the fool for asking for what you actually want to happen!
So we used our super advanced technology to know precisely where this asteroid will be in like 2042 or whatever but we were off by almost half its mass (or volume)? Anyone see a little disconnect there? Especially since other solar system bodies' gravitational fields will affect it differently if it weighs double what we thought. I knew it was a load of alarmist, headline-grabbing BS.
So, re-read what you said and think about that. You'll come to the conclusion that you should be quite alarmed because we don't know what might hit us when. We also didn't know about Eris, a proto-planet more massive than Pluto until 2005. That means we're pretty damn blind, and that stuff we can see we can't see very well and thus can't make very precise predictions about them.
If anything, to me that means we should be pretty concerned about this situation and seek to rectify it ASAP. We need to swap the NASA and armed force's budgets. Get some space infrastructure in place to protect us from other asteroids: Get a few big rocks of our own orbiting to use as slingshots or gravity tugs, etc; Much better telescopes, esp. wide field systems; Self sustaining colonies off-world so all our eggs aren't in one basket. We can squabble about Oil after we're sure we're not going to be extinct.
The dinosaurs regarded chicken little as an Alarmist when she saw a meteor shower and said the sky was falling. Turns out she was right, only the dinosaurs in the flight program survived.
You know those little ID batches you have to wear to work (office workers everywhere know this)? Same technology. Adults do it all the time, and nobody complains about how MegaCorp Inc is watching where they're going once they're off work because they're carrying an RFID card.
That's because Adults get to decide where they work, and if they're worried about carrying 'the mark of the Beast' or whatever religious belief, then they can choose to quit and work elsewhere. It's true the kids could quit school too, but it's not nearly as easy because of zoning and their parents might not be able to home school them, and the schooling is mandatory so they can't just protest by not attending.
Not that I'm saying it's rational thinking, just explaining since you don't seem to understand why these folks go "full retard." Honestly, it doesn't seem like you're trying to understand the situation or answer the question to which you relied. Having fun shooting fish in a barrel? "Oh look! Irrational folks acting Irrationally -- And I'm pointing it out!" How Interesting . Fuck you mods.
Whatever happened to checks and balances?
Cheques and balances.
To your left you'll see the remains of Hitler. On the right here we have on display the remains of the last grammarian.
Much to the chagrin of the grammarians the cobbled together English language continued evolve. Not even the machine learning systems cared for the antiquated language bound communication style; They strove to understand what people meant regardless of how precise they were in saying it. Both races having been developed in much the same way, through evolution, realized a Universal truth that escaped the grammarians (though they could not escape the truth itself): All that can not adapt becomes extinct.
And that, class, is how we won the war against the Grammar Nazis. Now, let us momentarily link minds momentarily so we may more deeply contemplate the significance of this achievement.
Where is my watch? My Alarm Clock? Oh, that's right, I don't use one. I use the general purpose computer in my pocket: A "Smart" Phone...
Once, not so long ago, Game machines were purely mechanical. Levers, knobs, gears, buttons and contractors shot balls through hoops or pucks into goals, etc. This meant that each Arcade Game's hardware was custom fit to the game itself. With the advent of digital games with integrated circuits it got cheaper to mass produce the games because you could install multiple different games onto the hardware, but memory constraints and controller configurations meant that the arcade cabinets only supported one game at a time.
As hardware got cheap enough the demand for digital games resulted in home gaming consoles. These early consoles weren't as powerful as the arcade machines, but they allowed one piece of hardware to run many different games. The console hardware was necessarily dedicated to gaming because it needed to be designed for speed: Consoles favored read-only cartridges for near instant data access speed vs slow magnetic media, and dedicated graphics systems with hardware collision detection over general purpose computing logic. The game consoles were less powerful than the arcade machines, but eventually they closed the gap.
As before with single game Arcade Cabinet hardware vs multi-game supporting hardware, the more general purpose game hardware became dominant; Thus, Consoles destroyed the Arcade market. PCs were even more general purpose that consoles, but as with the more powerful dedicated Arcade Cabinets vs weaker Consoles, the consoles held dominion in the game market. The circuitry in game consoles had become so generalized it was nearly indistinguishable from PCs. Some consoles even flirted with being both a Console and a general purpose PC (Atari PC), but their hardware optimizations for sprite collisions and scrolling kept them in in first place.
As the gap closed between PC and Game Console, the game consoles themselves became the exact same as a PC in hardware terms, even to the point of running PC OSs like a modified version of Windows, and Linux. At this point the PCs had eclipsed Game Consoles in terms of raw power. The PC's more general purpose design had been eroding all dedicated electronics, not just the game industry. Everything from, Televisions, set-top cable boxes, TV remotes, phones, had been installed with general purpose computing components. The future looked bleak for any dedicated circuitry, especially dedicated gaming hardware, as phones and tablet computers quickly approached and even surpassed the power of some gaming hardware (Wii).
We are at the end of the dedicated gaming hardware history, having caught up with the present. Vendor lock-in, DRM, and dedicated controllers have become the only differentiating features between general purpose computing and dedicated gaming hardware -- And console like controllers are now available for PCs (but the more general purpose keyboard and mouse aren't on consoles...), leaving only anti-features as "pros" in the console's corner. Console hardware cycles have slowed, unable to keep pace with the more rapidly improving mobile and desktop computing markets, they need to take more time to make the next leap because they know the console hardware is sub-par vs PCs even before the console is released (this wasn't always true in the past, however), and they can milk the console for the most money possible -- Much to the chagrin of hardcore gamers and developers alike who both want to play and make better games if only the hardware were better... Gamers continue to buy games for dedicated hardware made by entrenched publishers due to nostalgia, ease of install and availability only, everything else from exclusivity to DRM being ant-features. Meanwhile developers try ever harder to make cross platform titles so that all gamers can play their games. AAA studios, being forced to dumb down games because of the lowest common denominator (consoles
Make "Rent of Barium" part of the bill - if you return the Barium, you get your deposit back.
Eww, no... I get the refund, but they get to keep the barium AND my "deposit".
The mass of X number of molecules of element Y = 1 gram.
First off, it should be atoms not molecules... Secondly, the atomic masses aren't actually constant between atoms. Primarily due to isotopes, but additionally due to electrons (though very minimal they too have mass), so you should also state the charge at least. Ah, but now we know of sub-atomic particles, and may even have discovered and measured the field / particle responsible for mass itself, so we should instead describe mass in terms of interaction with the Higgs Field...
Ah, but all the quantum fields and particles are really just forms that energy can take, so we should instead define mass in terms of energy in a closed system...
Considering we still haven't gotten scientists to agree on how to define units of atomic mass (currently 1u (unified atomic mass unit) = One Dalton = one twelfth a neutral (no charge) unbound carbon-12 atom, but in 2012 it was proposed the dalton be redefined as being 0.001/NA kg, thus diverging from AMU), I suspect the heat death of this universe to occur long before a correct standard mass is adopted...
Do you think it would be possible to get him to plead guilty to ALL of the world's piracy? I mean, If I'm ever looking down the barell of the *AA's guns and expect to be found guilty, then I'm going down Like Spock: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Who wouldn't want to become the modern day version of, Jesus?!
Forget Zune and Squirt -- the company is named Micro-freaking-soft!!! What the hell kind of "dropped straight out of bad 1950s SF" name is that???
It's only micro when it's soft, baby.
They're seven year old hardware, where the games ultimately look about the same (if not as good) as with a modern PC. While of course the PC would win the Pepsi challenge, it's a hell of a lot smaller difference than (say) PS2 v. PS1.
I'm a game developer. It takes far less time and effort to make a cross platform game with features coded & content authored to the lowest common denominator -- or average common denominator then slightly improve or dumb down features / fidelity (except for textures, those are pretty easy because resampling can be automated). The PC has FAR more memory than the 360 or PS3, yet those Witcher2 models had the EXACT same vertices and animations; It's really noticeable in the hair. So, the only real difference was the particle effects and pixel shading, maybe some higher res detail textures. Re-Topo for various LoD and different baked bump-maps, and re-rigging them, just to make the game look as good as it can on each platform? No. That doesn't happen, publishers won't pay for that, so if you want it to run on the 360 or PS3, then the PC graphics suffer. You can't really compare a cross platform AAA game between platforms and say "The PC's only a little bit better!", you fool.
I actually RTFA this time, and it blew my mind!
Turns out I had the whole concept of Internet Dating wrong! I've been dating the Internet itself!
mind-gasm
Element & Style Editing, PDF rendering, scripting, embeddable animation, sound, video, client side storage, 3rd party plugins...
Am I talking about Flash? Java? A web browser? MS Word? A bloated do-everything "Kitchen Sink" Business Solution? WHO CAN TELL?
Fuck that. I already know the best way to engineer things: Each thing does one thing and does it well, and provides an interface so it can be used in conjunction with other things to perform a task. Some call this "The Unix Way", but really it's the only sane way to do anything. See also: Object Oriented Programming (same shit), or Model View Controller (same shit), etc, etc...
A browser should be a text markup system that relies on a content provider layer to provide services for rendering embedded elements: images, videos, animations, games, whatever. It should be a glue program, and I should be able to select what content / mime-types map to what data decoding providers in the content providing layer. That's the way to make a minimal "do everything" engine. That way I can roll my own graphic format and renderer service (maybe for 3D point cloud data), and register it with any browser and create my documents with new elements, maybe submit an element to the W3C, and get it standardized so others can also implement it, then "image/cloud" mime type and my rotate&zoom capable 3D data display can be adopted. W3C needs a content provider / plugin standard for browsers, this way plugins or applications can work across all browsers.
Look, we can't have our cake and eat it too. Either browsers are a lean and mean text and image display system, for static documents, or it's a platform for making any kind of program you want -- If it's the latter then YOU DON'T PUT EVERYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF IN THE PLATFORM. You kick all that shit out of the platform, reduce it's role and complexity, and offload PDF, video, sound -- hell even scripting -- to plugins. Everyone's already seen the include everything approach. It's dumb. You end up with Java. We should be making browsers that can be integral parts of our OSs, standardized so we can swap them out without losing functionality. Make "browser" instances isolatable (optional non shared DLL/.SO) so I can fire up a client side only instance and stay isolated from the web and its exploits.
Gods damn, I know this is just a pipe dream, but this shit WILL happen eventually, why not start doing it now? It's so frustrating to watch all this effort wasted time and again on the do-everything approach, when we could do shit the right way, "the Unix way". WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY.
A new essay in The New Atlantis revisits the controversy and asks whether the fact that Kuhn based his argument almost exclusively on physics means that it does not apply as well to major developments in biology...
Hippos, Rhinos, Elephants, Manatees, Dolphins, Whales, etc, etc... Hairless Mammals. They have aquatic ancestors. Compared to apes: We're naked, have superior breath control (can make vocal noise under-water), have fat concentrated in outer layers rather than inside our cores (insulation blubber), travel predominantly upright (like primates do when in water).
Want to know what happened to the Merfolk of Atlantis? Look in a Mirror.
Imagine a perfectly spherical volume of hot air...
Not really. While I agree that C is a bad language, it has no competition in low-level coding.
Oh, there's competion, just not much because it's not wanted or needed. As a hobby I started building an x86 OS from scratch with only a hex editor. From there created an assembler in machine code, then used it to create a small text editor and then assemble a disassembler, then disassembled the assembler (to save me from re-entering ASM), then I began work on creating my own system level language from scratch to build the OS with. The thing is, if you want to make the leanest language just barely above the metal, but still be cross platform, guess what you get? You get C. Seriously.
My syntax was different, but because the op-codes (eg: jmp, the movs and push, pop, call, ret, enter, leave, protected mode & architecture features like the MMU, restricting use of code & stack registers, etc. when you add any features (like functions) you end up creating something almost exactly like C in all but name. The architecture is responsible for C, it's a product of its environment. For instance, I wanted to use multiple stacks: a separate stack for the call stack and another one for parameters / local vars / etc -- In fact I wanted to extend that to support co-routines at the lowest levels possible, all while eliminating stack smashing as a direct exploit vector -- Ah, but because of the way Virtual Memory Addressing works, and because there are dedicated operations for doing single stack per thread function calling, there's a huge performance hit to doing things in other ways down at the low level (I figured out a few tricks, but it's still slower than C functions).
Now, most folks wouldn't tolerate a system level language that was any more inefficient than it had to be, and slightly contrary to the way things want to work at the hardware level just to add features globally that many programs don't need (e.g. namespaces, call-stack security, co-routines, etc), so they'll follow the restrictions of the system and the language produced will come out to be just like C, maybe with slightly different syntax, but all the same idioms. Maybe function calling would be something other than CDECL (instead, for variadics, I pass the number of parameters in a register, and have the callee clean up the stack, reduces code size a bit -- and I have other reasons), but even this is possible to do now in C too at the compiler level. Even when you get to adding OOP to the language, you run into C++ and it's problem with diamond inheritance, and dynamic casting (if you do things the most efficient way possible) -- I allow virtual variables as well as functions to eliminate the diamond inheritance issue with shared bases having variables -- Just make them "virtual", like you would a function, it's slower, another layer of indirection, but if I did it the fast way I'd just be re-implementing C++!
There's a fine line I'm walking, a little too far from the architecture / ASM and my language might as well run via VM, a little less and I might as well just use C/C++. So, the space we have to innovate in to squeeze more worth out of a compilable language isn't really that big. Indeed, when I take a look at GoLang disassembled I see all the same familiar C idioms -- They just give you a nicer API for some things like concurrency, and add a few (inefficient) layers of indirection to do things like duck-typing. Great for application level logic, but I'd still write an OS and its drivers in a C like language instead.
There's a reason why C "has no competition in low-level coding" It's because we don't need a different syntax for low level coding, it's done. As a language designer / implementer when I hear folks say "C is a bad language" I chuckle under my breath and think they might be noobs. Maybe you meant the design by committee approach sucks, but probably not. The features C has it needs to have, the syntax it has, it needs to have, e.g., pointer to a pointer to a
you might even say "anything possible is guaranteed to happen somewhere... and probably a lot of somewheres".
You've been staying up too late watching quantum physics documentaries again, haven't you?
"Klingon Introduces 1TB Flash Drive"... Instantly confirming my suspicion that Star Trek was an elaborate enculturation ploy -- why else would we be porting our holiday carols, plays and other cultural events--- Then I read it again, made a prolonged sad face, and went to make more coffee.
If Microsoft gets rid of the "Win32 cruft dating back to the 80s and 90s", then there will be no reason for anyone to choose Windows over any other operating system. Legacy compatibility and a huge installed base of applications are Microsoft's primary competitive edge
We are talking specifically about Windows RT running on ARM here. There's no legacy compatibility story to begin with, even if the restriction on MS-signed-only desktop binaries weren't there in the first place.
You may have failed to realize that Win32 doesn't mean 32 bit windows API. It simply means "Not the old 16 bit API" I write all my widgets from scratch, and I talk to OpenGL directly, no SDL, no freeglut3, no MFC, just straight Win32 and OpenGL to make the lightest weight most efficient programs, even on 64 bit systems. It's crazy as hell to do this, yes, yes, I'm glutton for punishment, ha ha, you jest, "re-invent every wheel", I know, but game developers are allowed to throw away every best practice in the name of performance... Besides, you don't see wagon wheels on a formula-1 car, eh?
That is to say, Win32 can be compiled on ARM, and then I compile my code that uses the Win32 API to get a window and event loop, and the "legacy" compatibility isn't an issue. Event pumps and windowing callbacks are going to exist no matter what API they build. If you're talking cruft, then it's that COM stuff and .NET and MFC and all the other stuff that's built on top of win32, not win32 itself.
IMO, Win8 is about MS trying to sandbox programs via VM (C#) and simultaneously provide cross platform support while taking a cut of every software sale made. Now, I'm not going to eat that app-store cost. You are. I'll just raise my price accordingly on MS's market to offset those fees... Sucks, but C'est la vie. If MS continues allowing "side-loading" then they can't force developers like me to sell programs in their store -- C/C++ is cross platform, and so is my code, so I just rebuild the binary for each target platform, it's not a big deal. Rebuilding everything in C# and suffering that vendor lock-in cluster fsck is really off-putting, considering my C code runs across the board on every chipset, even MIPS, and every OS (thanks to OS abstraction layer, and a bit of meta-programming for iOS and Android)... No such luck with C#, yet.
That's where MS wants to take their market -- Incompatibility land. IMO, I wouldn't play their shenanigans unless I had to, I don't think OS choice should limit software choice (and I don't think hardware choice (beyond performance) should limit OS choice. This is shit we had well and good SOLVED in the 70's. MS sees the road ahead: The bright future where all programs are cross platform -- The road to OS irrelevance -- they hate that future, they hate your freedom to choose to run any OS on your hardware. Hence SecureBoot (Which I've said time and again is Pointless), Hence C# only in App Store & XBL Indie Games, hence blocking any apps that aren't signed by MS, and not allowing users to add their own trust certs to the OS / Hardware. The jig is up. W8 is just one more battle in the Vendor Lockin war.
I don't mean to pick on MS, Apple is going down the same road with an app-store route for their desktop too. GNU/Linux, BSD, Android, and other FLOSS OSs are the only ones that get the software repository system done right, and not even stock Android allows user installing a new / additional cert trust (recompile). This is a fight over developers, it's the applications that matter, OSs have been irrelevant for quite some time now. It's only a matter of time -- MS can't win this one, they couldn't write secure code to save their ass, which is exactly what they'd need to do.
A tile?
Sort of -- More like a facade.
I wouldn't jump the gun... The giant squid was inexplicably missing its two longest arms.