Does AGP offer *any* advantage?
on
Tackling AGP 8X
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Please forgive my ignorance. This is an honest question.
At the time that AGP first came out, I was under the impression that its primary advantage was to allow a direct pipeline to system memory, if you ran out of on-board RAM.
Then RAM got really REALLY cheap, and we went from 4-8MB onboard to 32MB, almost overnight. Now you can get video cards with 64MB and even 128MB.
I can't imagine games using more than 128MB of texture RAM, and so I have to wonder why AGP is still being developed. What else does it offer?
Anyone who comes directly to Linux and assumes that XF86 is a reasonable implementation of X11 seems to fall into this trap.
The fact is that X11 is a lovely and elegant platfrom-neutral graphical layer. XF86 is a botched implementation of it. Linux itself isn't particularly well suited to a clean implementation of X11, and the managers that run on top of XF86 in Linux are horrid bits of bloatware (albeit, nifty ones).
Go find an old SunOS system, and discover just how effect the X11 architecture is. Look at how well it runs on something comparable to a 80286. THEN come back to XF86 and wonder why they messed it up so horribly.
Hmm. Well I'd say the Xeon argument is true, but not entirely appropriate. The chip is very well understood at different levels by different people, who collectively understand it completely. The fact that a single person doesn't know it completely shouldn't be relevant, since what we're putting it against (intelligence) is a black box. The chips have been built up from basic principles to a complex system, which more or less necessitates understanding the processes we're creating. Intelligence on the other hand, is an already complete (maybe?:-) system that we're trying to get a handle on.
Regardless...
The Turing Test is probably a valid measure of intelligence, but it must be without limits. If someone says to me, 'talk to this entity about weather patterns for five minutes and tell me if it's a computer,' then I don't call that a valid test. Let me kick back, have a beer, and have a normal conversation with the mystery entity. If I can't tell after that, then maybe I'll call it intelligent. But at the same time, he's going to have to come up with some non-predictive behaviour, and that's a tough one to manage.
First you are saying that to determine the intelligence of a system you must first understand it.
No, I never said that. I said that we don't currently understand our intelligence all that well. I would say, however, that to reproduce intelligence, we have to understand what it is.
As for machine intelligence, I fully believe that it's a possible thing. In fact, let me reiterate what I believe.
1) I do not think that intelligence (as we commonly use the word) consists of pure number crunching.
2) Therefore, what computers do right now when they play Chess or Go is not intelligent--it's 'just' math.
3) In order to develop machines that I'd call truly intelligent, we must move beyond mere number crunching. Kramnik, for instance, can judge about 3 moves per second in a chess game. Deep Fritz does a few hundred thousand, I'd guess. If straight number crunching were intelligence, then nobody on the planet could beat Fritz if it was given a mere one second allowed per move.
See, that's the crux of the matter: How can poor, pathetic Kramnik with his laughable 3 moves/second eval rate manage to hold his own against Deep Fritz?
I don't think it's anything particularly mystic, but I do think it goes beyond current math. Fuzzy logic is a glance in the right direction, but we'll have to develop whole new fields of logic to comprehend how the brain does its thing.
You seem to disagree. What are your thoughts on the matter?
Well that's a bit of a misleading analogy now, isn't it?
Aerospace wasn't then, isn't now, and likely won't soon be a consumer-driven industry. Most people aren't going to deal with three dimensions in their morning commute--flying a plane is substantially more difficult stuff than driving a car. Also, during the time you're speaking of, WWII and the cold war were the driving factors. Nothing drives development like fear!
Secondly, you're dealing with stuff that is on the cutting edge of physical boundaries. Breaking the speed of sound was a big technical hurdle, and is still a non-trivial event. Items like friction, wind resistance, fuel costs and usefulness all play a factor here too. It just wouldn't make any sense to have commuter vehicles that went as fast as 500 km/h, when we don't have the infrastructure or skill (or necessity) to support it. Computing will start to run into the quantum wall soon, but it's not a _brick_ wall.
Finally, you're exaggerating massively. The atmospheric state-of-the-art went from about mach 0.8 in the early 1940s, to about mach 2.5 in the late 1960s (SR-71 is what I'm thinking of here) If we call that a factor of three in 25 years, then in the early 90s there should have been the capability of hitting ~mach 7.5. The first reports of the Aurora spyplane came out in 1989, and it's calculated to do mach6, which is pretty decently close.
And um...MORE finally (heh), you're looking at one massive burst in an industry, which isn't typical of its growth. Computing speed has been increasing at a fairly steady rate since the dawn of the integrated circuit, if not before.
So we have a market-driven, steady growth technology with no immediate barriers (fundamental physics or lack of purpose). I think it'll keep going until we at least hit the realm of ~10-100 molecule 'computers' on the consumer's desktop.
Yeah, and I can tell you just how much validity I associate with IQ tests, too.:-)
I guess I'm using "intelligence" here as a means of measuring the computer's ability to _think_ through a chess problem, rather than "calculate" through a mathematical problem.
What's the difference between thought and calculation? That's a damned good question. You're quite right--we don't know enough about how the mind works to answer it, and hence to properly differentiate between the two. In that particular context, my comment doesn't stand.
I would suspect, though, that 'intelligence' can't be an entirely dedicated process. I don't expect that a computer which could play an 'intelligent' game of chess (i.e. one which can win based on some process other than brute-force calculation that we would call 'reason'), without also being able to at least carry on a conversation with a person, or speculate on the unknown. (the past or the future, for instance)
Bottom line: I don't think that human intelligence is mere calculation, nor that it can ever be approached by mere calculation. Of course by the time I retire, I may be proven wrong.
OK first of all, I don't moderate my own posts. You have a problem with how I was moderated? Don't blame me for that!
Secondly, Go WILL, beyond any shadow of a doubt, be brute-forced, barring the complete meltdown of technological society as a whole. Technology as a whole is growing at a roughly exponential rate, and eventually we'll catch up to the complexity of Go. Not anytime soon, but eventually. It's ugly, it's inefficient, but it's going to be possible (and inevitable) eventually.
As for the "geek" in my name, take a deep breath, and look at it again. It says _sword_geek, refering to my fencing days. "Geek" as a word has evolved beyond taped glasses and pocket protector-wearing mathematicians.
And speaking of math, I'm not sure what's not exponential about 2^x. Maybe it's just because I don't have a clue.
Not that Moore's law directly talks about speed of computers anyways. He was predicting the density of transistors on a chip, which you'd know if you read a bit about the subject(!). Computers are getting faster somewhat ahead of this curve, because we're also learning how to design them more efficiently, with things like large multi-path accessible caches, etc. etc.
Realistically, Go will be 'psuedo-brute-force' won by a computer long before we have the computing power to brute force it, and in fact, that's what Chess computers do right now. There are 361 different points on a Go board, but anyone who plays can list about 10-15 reasonable opening moves, and the rest will be ignored by a computer as much as they are by a real person.
Brute force? No. Intelligent play? Not really. The only point I was making to the original poster was that 'solving' Go in this way won't be any more intellectually interesting than the current state of the art in Chess computers. Go _currently_ is more interesting of a computing problem than Chess, simply because we've nowhere near the computing power required to approach anything like a brute force solution, except in the endgame.
I suspected as much. It seemed too weird to be anything but a joke.
As for Kasparov, he was always an arrogant jackass, long before computer chess games. He agreed to play Deep Blue without bothering to stipulate conditions, partly because he never considered a computer a threat.
He accused other players of behaving badly. He insulted people. I seem to remember him getting into a scuffle with a reporter, after he lost.
I _can_ blame Kasparov for anything that I want.:-) I can _legitimately_ blame him for whining about not having the foresight to consider what might be done during his match. (especially since it wasn't the first time he'd played against a computer)
All of which has nothing to do with Kramnik, but well...yeah.
On the one hand, I agree. Go is clearly a much more difficult game to program than Chess is, simply by the open nature of the game.
But computers are getting faster at an enormous rate. In ten years, it may be possible to have a Go program that plays at a 9Dan level, through brute force. Will that be more intelligent than these chess computers? Not in my mind.
We have to consider how the program works to judge how "intelligent" it is. If a Go program could play at a very high level with _today's_ technology, then it would have to have some sembalance of intelligence. If a Chess computer could have beat the grandmasters in 1970, then it would have been with intelligence rather than brute force.
With Chess computers heading towards a finite solution, Go will be the next target; and when the Go computers are able to beat the world's best, it'll be no more or less impressive than this, if they once again use brute force math to do it.
Kasparov was a whiner, a jerk, and a bad sport. This was known long before he started competing against computers.
Kramnik, on the other hand, has given chess a good name again. He's been polite to those around him, and conceded his mistakes when he's made them.
What did he do? He didn't say a word about the rumoured Shakespeare taunting, as far as I can tell. If he did (and it was true), he could probably get Fritz disqualified entirely; but instead, he's playing chess to the best of his abilities.
What you propose will either (a) not work, or (b) get you into deep legal trouble, at least in the US, Canada, and as far as I know, all of the UK.
If you have $20k in cash and $20k in debt, you have a net worth of $0, which won't get you approved for a mortgage on that apartment. Business or residential, you'll still need that mortgage, and the banks WILL find your debt.
Unless, of course, you're planning on hiding it from them. Then you'll be committing fraud, and you still won't get away with it.
First of all, my background is that of a 'skeptical audiophile' with some non-trivial learning in electronics. If I had the money, I'd be running Bryston, Classe', etc.; the audiophile companies who back their sound with engineering. I've ABX'd (formally and informally) many bits of equipment, and heard substantial differences between amps, preamps, cd players, and all other sources.[1]
I say to you doubters that the CD format in its original form is as near to perfect as is possible with two channels.
HOWEVER, The excecution of a given CD is often quite poor. CDs are, let's not forget, relatively new technology; and more so now than ever before, the record companies are trying to make a quick buck without really working on the sound quality. The Great Old Classic (tm) albums were usually rushed to CD in the beginning of the format, where they got a really great noise floor but everything else got screwed up. Brubeck says in the article that 'Time Out' sounded much better on the SACD than on the original CD. Small wonder, since the original CD was only an average reproduction of the analog masters, or the (more) original vinyl.
If Miles Davis were alive, I'd be interested in hearing what he had to say about an SACD version of 'Kind of Blue' vs. the latest CD issue. There were three vinyl and four CD releases of that album before the current 'regular' release, and absolutely none of them have sounded as good as the latest CD. It is a breathtaking example of how good the CD format can get (with 40 year old analog masters, no less!), when proper care is put into it.
I'll say it again: There is nothing inherently wrong with the CD format. The occasional person who detects a lack of 'airiness' in a top quality CD vs. top quality vinyl of the same recording, is hearing a very low level of random-phase and random-channel noise. That's right, that airiness is your noise floor poking up into the very threshold of your hearing ability.
I won't dispute that vinyl at its best sounds brilliant, or that it sounds better than 90% of CDs out there, but the CD format is capable of (a) reproducing sound more accurately than vinyl ever will, and (b) reproducing sound more accurately than the human ear can hear.
As a tiny aside, consider that the same argument has been put forth against transistor amps, even though their shortcomings have long since been pushed to several orders of magnitude beyond any mammal's hearing.
[1] As for differences in cables, I've read (and done!) the math: If you can hear differences in cables in a properly controlled test, then you need new equipment! Get rid of that Naim stuff, and those tube amps, and get something that's engineered well!
It's the same thing. Ever played Nerf Arena? You have nerf guns and shoot different types of foam darts. It's entirely different from UT where you blow people up, and yet...
It's a FPS. Your mod would still be a FPS, regardless of what you're shooting. (blanks?:-> ) Yeah, it'd definitely be fun and I'd download it, but it's just a FPS mod.
The original poster's idea was interesting--actually have a game that's based on sex. There were a few for a while, but they went nowhere.
To a certain extent, I can understand the problem of having hundreds of thousands of auctions...
This is a reasonable statement, and quite easy to agree with. (and yes, I know that Hemos went on to negate this phrase)
Don't.
It is unquestionably a massive and difficult undertaking to deal with fraud when you're operating on an eBay-like scale. It is also a primary purpose of their existence. eBay MUST deal with fraud at whatever cost (create a whole infrastructure for it if necessary--remember that only a few short years ago there existed no online auctions at all!), or they're simply not doing their job.
Not intended as a rant or finger-pointing here. I just don't want to see them get away with sliding if they're trying to.
It's true that both have approximately equal rights to the name. Given that, it seems like access to a domainname should be allowed on a first come, first served basis.
Furthermore, consider the nature of the web in 1994. Netscape 0.9 BETA was only released in October of that year, and was optimised for 14.4kb modems. Microsoft was busy trying to write Windows 4.0, which still (at that point) didn't have a built-in TCP/IP stack. Not many people were expecting the web to be much more than then next generation of usenet. Corporate trampling of individuals seemed to be a lot less aggressive (and a lot less) than it is now. Cybersquatting didn't even exist yet, and if the possibilty occurred to someone, it certainly didn't seem likely that the ruling bodies would be owned by corporate interests in five years.
Furthermore, Nissan Cars didn't twig onto the internet for five years! Things picked up very quickly, and they should have taken action before 1999, if they wanted to be taken seriously.
FURTHERMORE, this is not, and never has been a cybersquatting issue, since Uzi Nissan has, since the very beginning, acted in good faith. In other words, the names have been used to promote his businesses of the same name, and those businesses have strung back to before he registered the domains.
On his website, Uzi Nissan has a pointer to the Nissan Motor Co. Nowhere in my brief perusal could I see the huge rant against Nissan that I'd be tempted to post.
Basically, both entities started with roughly equivalent rights to the name. Uzi Nissan has done everything right; whereas Nissan Motor has done everything wrong, and is now trying to use the courts to fix their blunders.
That pretty much describes the behaviour of the RIAA, except for the bits which are better described by skunk or snake. (specifically, a boa constrictor)
Yep, let's come up with as many ways to support Microsoft, and increase their sales as we can.
That's all that's being done here.
Nobody is going to play with Linux on an Xbox, except the hardcore Linux geeks--the ones who zealously hunt down retailers who sell machines without a MS OS on them. (not to mention trying to get refunds from MS for unused licenses)
Now they've got a reason to run out and buy an Xbox? That's just peachy!
Have fun. I'll be running OSes on my computers, and leaving the game consoles to others.
OK, a typical service contract (not just from Sun, from ANYONE!) prohibits adding to or modifying the equipment without Sun's approval. This qualifies.
HOWEVER, probably 30-40% of systems under contract out there are technically in violation. Sun doesn't care. The client doesn't care. The techs don't care. Everyone is happy. Furthermore, let's make the (fairly safe) assumption that this guy has worked with Sun, has a good rapport with the field techs, etc. etc. In that case, he probably phoned up the field techs, said "hey, I'm going to do this. Any problems?" and the field techs said, "Hell no! Can we come and watch you power it up?" No problem--implicit agreement.
But those clauses _are_ in there, and they're there to avoid problems like eBay happening again. (You cannot buy a Sunfire 15k without a service contract now, because of how eBay messed up their server farm.)
All I intended was a cautionary point. I'm not saying that he's likely to get any flak at all from Sun, but on paper--by the legal contract--this will violate his service contract.
That's all.
As an aside, the Sun guys are generally great to deal with.
Oh, Sun (or whoever) would honour the contract, but they'd also point out that the client violated the contract (rendering it null and void), leaving them with no responsibility.
...and then we go back to video cameras and tape decks.
If I can hear it, I can record it. If I can see it, I can copy it.
Until decryption gets wired directly into our brains, we'll find a way of copying it, and the harder the companies try to block it, the more creative (and successful, and accurate) the copies will be.
I visited the link. I saw what he did. I agree that it ain't much, and isn't really a case mod.
I also said that it WILL violate the service contract, and I say it again.
Adding anything to a case can affect computers in small ways. Heat production, EM interference, and ventilation blocking. These aren't going to product any significat heat, but are they blocking the airflow ports? Is it on the same power supplies as the 15k?
Also, if someone does this to their machine, what else have they done? Brought in some used 3rd party memory? Bought a used CPU off of eBay?
This might not be a problem in and of itself, but it's a good indicator that the computer is NOT one you want to work on, if you can avoid it. Sun feels the same way, and won't let you get away with stuff like this on an Enterprise service contract.
...or at least the service contract I'm assuming they bought.
I do service contract support for Sun gear, and on the high end stuff they (sun) would definitly have the option of walking away from one of these things on a service call. Personally, I know I'd be tempted to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Please forgive my ignorance. This is an honest question.
At the time that AGP first came out, I was under the impression that its primary advantage was to allow a direct pipeline to system memory, if you ran out of on-board RAM.
Then RAM got really REALLY cheap, and we went from 4-8MB onboard to 32MB, almost overnight. Now you can get video cards with 64MB and even 128MB.
I can't imagine games using more than 128MB of texture RAM, and so I have to wonder why AGP is still being developed. What else does it offer?
It's only a feature if the ability to change true resolution/desktop size is also implemented. Otherwise, it's a bug, or a design flaw.
Hmm. Well then, you believe wrong.
Anyone who comes directly to Linux and assumes that XF86 is a reasonable implementation of X11 seems to fall into this trap.
The fact is that X11 is a lovely and elegant platfrom-neutral graphical layer. XF86 is a botched implementation of it. Linux itself isn't particularly well suited to a clean implementation of X11, and the managers that run on top of XF86 in Linux are horrid bits of bloatware (albeit, nifty ones).
Go find an old SunOS system, and discover just how effect the X11 architecture is. Look at how well it runs on something comparable to a 80286. THEN come back to XF86 and wonder why they messed it up so horribly.
Hmm. Well I'd say the Xeon argument is true, but not entirely appropriate. The chip is very well understood at different levels by different people, who collectively understand it completely. The fact that a single person doesn't know it completely shouldn't be relevant, since what we're putting it against (intelligence) is a black box. The chips have been built up from basic principles to a complex system, which more or less necessitates understanding the processes we're creating. Intelligence on the other hand, is an already complete (maybe? :-) system that we're trying to get a handle on.
Regardless...
The Turing Test is probably a valid measure of intelligence, but it must be without limits. If someone says to me, 'talk to this entity about weather patterns for five minutes and tell me if it's a computer,' then I don't call that a valid test. Let me kick back, have a beer, and have a normal conversation with the mystery entity. If I can't tell after that, then maybe I'll call it intelligent. But at the same time, he's going to have to come up with some non-predictive behaviour, and that's a tough one to manage.
First you are saying that to determine the intelligence of a system you must first understand it.
No, I never said that. I said that we don't currently understand our intelligence all that well. I would say, however, that to reproduce intelligence, we have to understand what it is.
As for machine intelligence, I fully believe that it's a possible thing. In fact, let me reiterate what I believe.
1) I do not think that intelligence (as we commonly use the word) consists of pure number crunching.
2) Therefore, what computers do right now when they play Chess or Go is not intelligent--it's 'just' math.
3) In order to develop machines that I'd call truly intelligent, we must move beyond mere number crunching. Kramnik, for instance, can judge about 3 moves per second in a chess game. Deep Fritz does a few hundred thousand, I'd guess. If straight number crunching were intelligence, then nobody on the planet could beat Fritz if it was given a mere one second allowed per move.
See, that's the crux of the matter: How can poor, pathetic Kramnik with his laughable 3 moves/second eval rate manage to hold his own against Deep Fritz?
I don't think it's anything particularly mystic, but I do think it goes beyond current math. Fuzzy logic is a glance in the right direction, but we'll have to develop whole new fields of logic to comprehend how the brain does its thing.
You seem to disagree. What are your thoughts on the matter?
Well that's a bit of a misleading analogy now, isn't it?
Aerospace wasn't then, isn't now, and likely won't soon be a consumer-driven industry. Most people aren't going to deal with three dimensions in their morning commute--flying a plane is substantially more difficult stuff than driving a car. Also, during the time you're speaking of, WWII and the cold war were the driving factors. Nothing drives development like fear!
Secondly, you're dealing with stuff that is on the cutting edge of physical boundaries. Breaking the speed of sound was a big technical hurdle, and is still a non-trivial event. Items like friction, wind resistance, fuel costs and usefulness all play a factor here too. It just wouldn't make any sense to have commuter vehicles that went as fast as 500 km/h, when we don't have the infrastructure or skill (or necessity) to support it. Computing will start to run into the quantum wall soon, but it's not a _brick_ wall.
Finally, you're exaggerating massively. The atmospheric state-of-the-art went from about mach 0.8 in the early 1940s, to about mach 2.5 in the late 1960s (SR-71 is what I'm thinking of here) If we call that a factor of three in 25 years, then in the early 90s there should have been the capability of hitting ~mach 7.5. The first reports of the Aurora spyplane came out in 1989, and it's calculated to do mach6, which is pretty decently close.
And um...MORE finally (heh), you're looking at one massive burst in an industry, which isn't typical of its growth. Computing speed has been increasing at a fairly steady rate since the dawn of the integrated circuit, if not before.
So we have a market-driven, steady growth technology with no immediate barriers (fundamental physics or lack of purpose). I think it'll keep going until we at least hit the realm of ~10-100 molecule 'computers' on the consumer's desktop.
Yeah, and I can tell you just how much validity I associate with IQ tests, too. :-)
I guess I'm using "intelligence" here as a means of measuring the computer's ability to _think_ through a chess problem, rather than "calculate" through a mathematical problem.
What's the difference between thought and calculation? That's a damned good question. You're quite right--we don't know enough about how the mind works to answer it, and hence to properly differentiate between the two. In that particular context, my comment doesn't stand.
I would suspect, though, that 'intelligence' can't be an entirely dedicated process. I don't expect that a computer which could play an 'intelligent' game of chess (i.e. one which can win based on some process other than brute-force calculation that we would call 'reason'), without also being able to at least carry on a conversation with a person, or speculate on the unknown. (the past or the future, for instance)
Bottom line: I don't think that human intelligence is mere calculation, nor that it can ever be approached by mere calculation. Of course by the time I retire, I may be proven wrong.
OK first of all, I don't moderate my own posts. You have a problem with how I was moderated? Don't blame me for that!
Secondly, Go WILL, beyond any shadow of a doubt, be brute-forced, barring the complete meltdown of technological society as a whole. Technology as a whole is growing at a roughly exponential rate, and eventually we'll catch up to the complexity of Go. Not anytime soon, but eventually. It's ugly, it's inefficient, but it's going to be possible (and inevitable) eventually.
As for the "geek" in my name, take a deep breath, and look at it again. It says _sword_geek, refering to my fencing days. "Geek" as a word has evolved beyond taped glasses and pocket protector-wearing mathematicians.
And speaking of math, I'm not sure what's not exponential about 2^x. Maybe it's just because I don't have a clue.
Not that Moore's law directly talks about speed of computers anyways. He was predicting the density of transistors on a chip, which you'd know if you read a bit about the subject(!). Computers are getting faster somewhat ahead of this curve, because we're also learning how to design them more efficiently, with things like large multi-path accessible caches, etc. etc.
Realistically, Go will be 'psuedo-brute-force' won by a computer long before we have the computing power to brute force it, and in fact, that's what Chess computers do right now. There are 361 different points on a Go board, but anyone who plays can list about 10-15 reasonable opening moves, and the rest will be ignored by a computer as much as they are by a real person.
Brute force? No. Intelligent play? Not really. The only point I was making to the original poster was that 'solving' Go in this way won't be any more intellectually interesting than the current state of the art in Chess computers. Go _currently_ is more interesting of a computing problem than Chess, simply because we've nowhere near the computing power required to approach anything like a brute force solution, except in the endgame.
Gary? Is that you?
I suspected as much. It seemed too weird to be anything but a joke.
:-) I can _legitimately_ blame him for whining about not having the foresight to consider what might be done during his match. (especially since it wasn't the first time he'd played against a computer)
As for Kasparov, he was always an arrogant jackass, long before computer chess games. He agreed to play Deep Blue without bothering to stipulate conditions, partly because he never considered a computer a threat.
He accused other players of behaving badly. He insulted people. I seem to remember him getting into a scuffle with a reporter, after he lost.
I _can_ blame Kasparov for anything that I want.
All of which has nothing to do with Kramnik, but well...yeah.
Hmm.
On the one hand, I agree. Go is clearly a much more difficult game to program than Chess is, simply by the open nature of the game.
But computers are getting faster at an enormous rate. In ten years, it may be possible to have a Go program that plays at a 9Dan level, through brute force. Will that be more intelligent than these chess computers? Not in my mind.
We have to consider how the program works to judge how "intelligent" it is. If a Go program could play at a very high level with _today's_ technology, then it would have to have some sembalance of intelligence. If a Chess computer could have beat the grandmasters in 1970, then it would have been with intelligence rather than brute force.
With Chess computers heading towards a finite solution, Go will be the next target; and when the Go computers are able to beat the world's best, it'll be no more or less impressive than this, if they once again use brute force math to do it.
What are you on about???
Kasparov was a whiner, a jerk, and a bad sport. This was known long before he started competing against computers.
Kramnik, on the other hand, has given chess a good name again. He's been polite to those around him, and conceded his mistakes when he's made them.
What did he do? He didn't say a word about the rumoured Shakespeare taunting, as far as I can tell. If he did (and it was true), he could probably get Fritz disqualified entirely; but instead, he's playing chess to the best of his abilities.
Or am I wrong?
Rather than modding this down, I'll reply.
What you propose will either (a) not work, or (b) get you into deep legal trouble, at least in the US, Canada, and as far as I know, all of the UK.
If you have $20k in cash and $20k in debt, you have a net worth of $0, which won't get you approved for a mortgage on that apartment. Business or residential, you'll still need that mortgage, and the banks WILL find your debt.
Unless, of course, you're planning on hiding it from them. Then you'll be committing fraud, and you still won't get away with it.
Forget this advice. Just go travelling!
First of all, my background is that of a 'skeptical audiophile' with some non-trivial learning in electronics. If I had the money, I'd be running Bryston, Classe', etc.; the audiophile companies who back their sound with engineering. I've ABX'd (formally and informally) many bits of equipment, and heard substantial differences between amps, preamps, cd players, and all other sources.[1]
I say to you doubters that the CD format in its original form is as near to perfect as is possible with two channels.
HOWEVER, The excecution of a given CD is often quite poor. CDs are, let's not forget, relatively new technology; and more so now than ever before, the record companies are trying to make a quick buck without really working on the sound quality. The Great Old Classic (tm) albums were usually rushed to CD in the beginning of the format, where they got a really great noise floor but everything else got screwed up. Brubeck says in the article that 'Time Out' sounded much better on the SACD than on the original CD. Small wonder, since the original CD was only an average reproduction of the analog masters, or the (more) original vinyl.
If Miles Davis were alive, I'd be interested in hearing what he had to say about an SACD version of 'Kind of Blue' vs. the latest CD issue. There were three vinyl and four CD releases of that album before the current 'regular' release, and absolutely none of them have sounded as good as the latest CD. It is a breathtaking example of how good the CD format can get (with 40 year old analog masters, no less!), when proper care is put into it.
I'll say it again: There is nothing inherently wrong with the CD format. The occasional person who detects a lack of 'airiness' in a top quality CD vs. top quality vinyl of the same recording, is hearing a very low level of random-phase and random-channel noise. That's right, that airiness is your noise floor poking up into the very threshold of your hearing ability.
I won't dispute that vinyl at its best sounds brilliant, or that it sounds better than 90% of CDs out there, but the CD format is capable of (a) reproducing sound more accurately than vinyl ever will, and (b) reproducing sound more accurately than the human ear can hear.
As a tiny aside, consider that the same argument has been put forth against transistor amps, even though their shortcomings have long since been pushed to several orders of magnitude beyond any mammal's hearing.
[1] As for differences in cables, I've read (and done!) the math: If you can hear differences in cables in a properly controlled test, then you need new equipment! Get rid of that Naim stuff, and those tube amps, and get something that's engineered well!
I hate to be a stick in the mud, but...
:-> ) Yeah, it'd definitely be fun and I'd download it, but it's just a FPS mod.
bah.
It's the same thing. Ever played Nerf Arena? You have nerf guns and shoot different types of foam darts. It's entirely different from UT where you blow people up, and yet...
It's a FPS. Your mod would still be a FPS, regardless of what you're shooting. (blanks?
The original poster's idea was interesting--actually have a game that's based on sex. There were a few for a while, but they went nowhere.
To a certain extent, I can understand the problem of having hundreds of thousands of auctions...
This is a reasonable statement, and quite easy to agree with. (and yes, I know that Hemos went on to negate this phrase)
Don't.
It is unquestionably a massive and difficult undertaking to deal with fraud when you're operating on an eBay-like scale. It is also a primary purpose of their existence. eBay MUST deal with fraud at whatever cost (create a whole infrastructure for it if necessary--remember that only a few short years ago there existed no online auctions at all!), or they're simply not doing their job.
Not intended as a rant or finger-pointing here. I just don't want to see them get away with sliding if they're trying to.
It's true that both have approximately equal rights to the name. Given that, it seems like access to a domainname should be allowed on a first come, first served basis.
Furthermore, consider the nature of the web in 1994. Netscape 0.9 BETA was only released in October of that year, and was optimised for 14.4kb modems. Microsoft was busy trying to write Windows 4.0, which still (at that point) didn't have a built-in TCP/IP stack. Not many people were expecting the web to be much more than then next generation of usenet. Corporate trampling of individuals seemed to be a lot less aggressive (and a lot less) than it is now. Cybersquatting didn't even exist yet, and if the possibilty occurred to someone, it certainly didn't seem likely that the ruling bodies would be owned by corporate interests in five years.
Furthermore, Nissan Cars didn't twig onto the internet for five years! Things picked up very quickly, and they should have taken action before 1999, if they wanted to be taken seriously.
FURTHERMORE, this is not, and never has been a cybersquatting issue, since Uzi Nissan has, since the very beginning, acted in good faith. In other words, the names have been used to promote his businesses of the same name, and those businesses have strung back to before he registered the domains.
On his website, Uzi Nissan has a pointer to the Nissan Motor Co. Nowhere in my brief perusal could I see the huge rant against Nissan that I'd be tempted to post.
Basically, both entities started with roughly equivalent rights to the name. Uzi Nissan has done everything right; whereas Nissan Motor has done everything wrong, and is now trying to use the courts to fix their blunders.
My verdict goes 100% to Uzi Nissan.
Weasel.
That pretty much describes the behaviour of the RIAA, except for the bits which are better described by skunk or snake. (specifically, a boa constrictor)
Yep, let's come up with as many ways to support Microsoft, and increase their sales as we can.
That's all that's being done here.
Nobody is going to play with Linux on an Xbox, except the hardcore Linux geeks--the ones who zealously hunt down retailers who sell machines without a MS OS on them. (not to mention trying to get refunds from MS for unused licenses)
Now they've got a reason to run out and buy an Xbox? That's just peachy!
Have fun. I'll be running OSes on my computers, and leaving the game consoles to others.
Heh. Excellent post.
OK, a typical service contract (not just from Sun, from ANYONE!) prohibits adding to or modifying the equipment without Sun's approval. This qualifies.
HOWEVER, probably 30-40% of systems under contract out there are technically in violation. Sun doesn't care. The client doesn't care. The techs don't care. Everyone is happy. Furthermore, let's make the (fairly safe) assumption that this guy has worked with Sun, has a good rapport with the field techs, etc. etc. In that case, he probably phoned up the field techs, said "hey, I'm going to do this. Any problems?" and the field techs said, "Hell no! Can we come and watch you power it up?" No problem--implicit agreement.
But those clauses _are_ in there, and they're there to avoid problems like eBay happening again. (You cannot buy a Sunfire 15k without a service contract now, because of how eBay messed up their server farm.)
All I intended was a cautionary point. I'm not saying that he's likely to get any flak at all from Sun, but on paper--by the legal contract--this will violate his service contract.
That's all.
As an aside, the Sun guys are generally great to deal with.
Oh, Sun (or whoever) would honour the contract, but they'd also point out that the client violated the contract (rendering it null and void), leaving them with no responsibility.
...and then we go back to video cameras and tape decks.
If I can hear it, I can record it. If I can see it, I can copy it.
Until decryption gets wired directly into our brains, we'll find a way of copying it, and the harder the companies try to block it, the more creative (and successful, and accurate) the copies will be.
I visited the link. I saw what he did. I agree that it ain't much, and isn't really a case mod.
I also said that it WILL violate the service contract, and I say it again.
Adding anything to a case can affect computers in small ways. Heat production, EM interference, and ventilation blocking. These aren't going to product any significat heat, but are they blocking the airflow ports? Is it on the same power supplies as the 15k?
Also, if someone does this to their machine, what else have they done? Brought in some used 3rd party memory? Bought a used CPU off of eBay?
This might not be a problem in and of itself, but it's a good indicator that the computer is NOT one you want to work on, if you can avoid it. Sun feels the same way, and won't let you get away with stuff like this on an Enterprise service contract.
...or at least the service contract I'm assuming they bought.
I do service contract support for Sun gear, and on the high end stuff they (sun) would definitly have the option of walking away from one of these things on a service call. Personally, I know I'd be tempted to do so.
There's a reason you won't be deciding on major equipment purchases any time soon.