I completely concur. I don't think the right to exchange information is holy or somehow a human right which you're suggesting here. Consider slander, spam, or malicious information. Malicious information is for instance a virus, or even something as simple as telling a very gullible person that to cure his headache he merely needs to jump off that tower there...
Given the obvious advantages of free information flow (it is for instance the underpinning of a free market, and necessary also for a "democratic" society), I'ld say information should not be needlessly restricted unless there is a very good reason for it.
Supposedly, copyrights/patents are a required to encourage the production of new knowledge.
I would say it's clear that they do encourage some creation of knowledge. By their very nature, however, they also limit it's applicability and extension, therefore also discouraging the creation of such knowledge. Furthermore, I think a better system could be instituted.
Given that copyrights use market dynamics to encourage creation, whilst those dynamics work only in situations of scarcity, and that information itself (not the distribution thereof!) is not scarce, we can conclude that a system that tries to encourage new knowledge without enforcing scarcity would be optimal, as doing so would bring encouragement without destroying the actual point of the knowledge in the first place.
People regularly comment on the fact that communism (specifically in Russia) collapsed because it (it being the abstract administrative process that is communism) is a fundamentally bad match in the real world (in which resources are scarce). Generally it's not so widely noted that the same could be said of our current Intellectual Property mess.
Fortunately, we already have a mechanism to support non-scarce goods (aka social goods) in our society! Subsidizing knowledge production is a far superior solution... and we already do it to some extent with schools, art grants, universities, etc etc etc.
The question then becomes: how to divide such grants? I don't have an easy answer to that but a model ala de references by academic papers (or for that matter hyperlinks in the net) comes to mind.
To draw an analogy: in our current situation, knowledge is exclusively controlled by it's creator, which is comparable to how a completely "closed" internet portal would control its content and display information and news depending mostly on how much it can pay to create or buy that information from some news service or equivalent. The subsidized model which supports knowledge creation is more like the net at large with hyperlinks forming the votes for who's cool and who's not. Even without a framework specifically designed to support it, google seems capable to extract useful information from those votes:-).
A very sane comment you make; it would probably be a good idea to apply this principle to a lot more things around. Make things cost what they cost and no bullshit. I like it:-).
However, in order to make things cost "what they cost" you do need to tax/subsidise them to take into account the side effect the item has on society.
An efficient capitalist system is not a untaxed market but a market in which transactions are subsidised and taxed to reflect that whatever you buy or sell has impact on others.
[Concequently, all rap music should be heavily taxed, it's extremely annoying:-)] --Eamon
Obviously none of this makes sense without the actual contract; however in principle the original poster was right: if IBM had the license to copy unix and did so then invalidating IBM's right to copy unix merely does that. it doesn't, not without special contracts and EULA style things invalidate the users contracts, which weren't illegally acquired. The comparison that you copy windows whilst unlicensed to do so, and sell your copy, doesn't hold as the "contract" (IANAL) between you and your buyer wasn't legal in the first place - in IBM's case they were though.
As much as I agree with you I don't the the article gives sufficient grounding for the accusation. First of all, driver optimizations that are specific to a certain type of 3d-engine or even a particular 3d-engine of even a particular application of that 3d-engine aren't per-se a bad thing; it's certainly the case that nVidia and ATI probably take specific account of Q3 and UT2003 engines in their drivers - if that account for a large part of their usage, it would be insane not too. As such, a benchmark that isn't optimized (also in the software section) isn't a very realistic reflection of reality. I believe there was a discussion on tom's hardware of the 3dmark2003 benchmark which wasn't very positive - or rather an analysis of nVidia's accusations and futuremarks responses. I personally did not find futuremark very convincing in their own defense. So 3dmark2003 scores really don't interest me a bit. Give me real games any day.
A while back ATI had specifically "optimized" Quake3 at the expense of image quality. Obviously this isn't acceptable; If nVidia does that (and to a certain extent they did - on all cards their aniso quality was lower that the radeons' before the detonator FX) This section of the accusation - that the optimzations caused rendering problems, is more serious. However, the reasons given in the article are pure conjecture, and are just as likely to simply be bugs. Anyhow; it's not unbelivable that optimizations might cause bugs - that's merely bad engineering - the issue is whether nVidia realized it or not. If an optimizations works 99% of the time, you've got to realize that you need to use another method for the remaining 1%, and that can be quite hard.
In conclusion; I find the accusation overly broad, and unfounded to boot.
I had something like that - two servers with 240GB raid arrays (well one with a 240GB Raid 0 and another with 230GB JBOD setup). In many was they backed each other up, so in case one array died I woulnd't lose everything... Of course, then I had 3 (!!) drives die within three weeks, and it's all all all gone *sniff*:-). One of em was an IBM known not to be real safe (one of those GXP75's) But the real killers were the twin WD1200JB's for the Raid array which died simultaneously due to a cheap crappy annoying power supply (a temporary Power Supply I had in for a month or so until I got a better one).
That was one expensive mistake, both in time (I've reripped most stuff now but still), collection (stuff from "friends"), and $$... oh well...
Well, I took a peek at the site and the site's source code (It's in haskell). It's almost certainly real (I don't have an interpreter or compiler for Haskell98 atm), in that it really does work... And it compresses well to boot! I'm switching.
You pay taxes to the government to for example build a good number of roads you'll never ride on. It would seem fairer if only people actually using those roads would pay for them.
Doing so however means that people won't use them as much as they could, which is wasteful as once they're built it's folly to discourage people to use something when the marginal cost of such usage is nil (beyond other costs such as bandwidth on the internet and gasoline/extra stree maintanence for the roadnet). Asking a fee from all downloaders and not from nondownloaders, and you will strongly discourage downloading anything, even if it doesn't actually cost anything more than bandwidth!
A better idea would be to raise the fee with user income (this could be less that linear though). It's a tax, treat it like one.
You appeal to your right not to participate in music downloading and thus conclude that this concept shouldn't become law as it is because what you don't use you shouldn't pay for.
That makes no sense; I hardly download music but the question is what-if. If programs like napster could be openly developed I'm sure it would become a lot easier and I - and maybe you - would.
In addition, what's really interesting isn't the gain to particular individuals, but the net gain/loss to the well-being of the public at large. A system which pays artists via sales could potentially fix the single biggest flaw of intellectual property laws; namely that once discovered/composed/developed, the distribution costs become virtually nil. The only purpose of IP laws in the first place is to promote creation of such content, and if that can be done without the side effect of limiting it's otherwise simple distribution, then that's great!
To conclude, you give a purely selfish argument why not to introduce this tax (which is what it is) which furthermore doesn't hold water ("would you" download music not "do you"). Your rhetorical question merely distracts from the fact that you have no other argument against this concept or its benefits. The suggestion that you are a good law-abiding citizen and whomever you are replying to isn't reeks.
As an aside, 150 million users != 150 million customers; many of those people would be sharing an internet connection (families), some might have several connections (at work, in college, and at home for me).
Superficially, taxes are annoying simply because we have to pay them, and I have no love of paying taxes any more than I have love of paying RIAA for music.
However, a free market which is unregulated will almost by definition fail; The very reason that markets work so well, namely that they rely on selfish agents also points to their flaw (namely that they rely on selfish agents). The classic (and perhaps somewhat outdated) example of this is a lighthouse: A particular shipping firm might decide to install a lighthouse for their personal benefit; however doing so carries benefits for other shipping firms as well. You want a system which builds lighthouses whenever the total benefit to society exceeds the total cost: not that they are built when the selfish benefit exceeds the selfish cost. Legaslation is the only way to distort the market away from it's "natural" form into a more ideal market.
So, I'm all for an efficient government (which we don't have), but paranoia against legaslation is also counterproductive.
Intellectual property laws were introduced to foster creativity. If that same goals can be achieved by a more direct means (a tax on internet users), without the cost that IP brings (namely that art/knowledge is selfishly withheld even though the cost of distribution is virtually nil), then
I'm all for!
--Eamon Just believe me, thinking involves not just believing anyone.
I find it hard to believe the XBox you mention caught on fire... And please, if it's serious, do you have any evidence? I can hardly believe microsoft would knowingly kill their reputation by selling dangerous equipment.
Actually, at least according to the anand tech article, you're incorrect in assuming that consoles come with specialized which would make them easier to program for. PS2 apparently came without a c-compiler, and though I have little knowledge about consoles in particular, c is still king for most embedded applications.
I only have limited OpenGL and assembler experience, but I've seen the instruction set that the vertex shader's in the X-Box use, and they are orders of magnitude simpler (and correspondingly less flexible) than implementing such vertex transformations in x86 assembler. (This has nothing to do with the x86 architecture, it's simply that NormalizedCrossProduct EBX, EAX, ECX (psuedocode) is a lot easier than working out a normalized cross product manually, though the vagaries of the x86 FPU won't help.) Given the fact that the x86 architecture is old, as is DirectX, it should be much and much easier to program for this familiar platform, especially now that it's got a unified memory architecture.
The XBox is a console in the sense that it has hardware stability; you know exactly what you're coding for, and a PC in simplicity. I'ld expect it to be a great hit in the game-programming industry...
And as to the amount of memory, while it's true that one can make good games in little ram, some things like hi-res images, animated textures, music clips, hi-poly geometry, and whatever else I'm forgetting do take a lot of ram, and it would be sad if that turned out to be the limiting factor. A smartly structured game which loads game code and story on the fly, perhaps even compressed in some way, with code reuse done well can be very small. It's just that extra ram never hurts...
I'm not sure about this, but I think that the reason for previous generation of consoles success was hardware+software stability, and definitly not the tools supplied by the manufacturer. Those tend to be great for the PC. A small simple platform has the advantage in testing (java: write once, run anywhere - sound familiar?) and complexity. The coders don't need to worry whether the user has win95 or the osr2 version, and that is GREAT.
Unfortunately this outdated-browser analysis is worthless, for several reasons - all of which boil down to the small amout of actual testing done. A faster, more representative machine would have been useful as well. And I don't need an analysis of browsers way back when on a machine from way back when and then some:-).
But should you doubt me:
First off, I think the one most deciding factor in the choice of a browser if how well it displays pages - whether corrupt, IE5.5 optimized, javascript enabled, CSS2.0 or ancient, my browser first and foremost needs to WORK. This isn't even touched upon here! The stability of the browser, in my opinion a part of usability, needs to be tested.
A browser doesn't need to be all that fast either just "fast enough". And, not only is "fast enough" a subjective measure, it includes things such as responsiveness while loading, total page loading time, time to create a new window, time to "scetch" a first outline onscreen and more. Many pages can be very usable with only 10% loaded. By the time you're done reading the first paragraph the rest can be loaded. In addition, speed will vary depending on processor speed and type, memory availability, and network bandwidth. A fast browser which gains speed with bad incremental display could be worse than a slower version in which you can start reading immediately. Furthermore, the internet extends beyond slashdot... some HTML elements may render in varying speed depending on the browser used.
Speed is a hard thing to measure. This analysis isn't nearly complete enough to be at all useful.
Startup time is effected by things such as program size (if too much else is loaded, a 32meg machine might well be swapping skewing the image drastically), speed ratio between hard drive and processor, and VERY importantly, dependance on shared libraries. Konqueror for instance might seem much faster when running KDE already... and the same goes for the other browsers too though I don't immediately know which libraries they use. Notice how fast those "second instances" pop up...
Finally, this is a pretty lame attempt to harvest slashdot links by using a slashdot page in a linux browser test...:-(
Rather, I would ask the other way around: When will there be a usable XML alternative to latex?
LaTeX is bound by numerous fundamental problem. Tecnically, it's multi-pass requirements make it slow and inefficient, and from a usability perspective, it lacks a lot of functionality that is trivial in html.
For example, tables in latex are wimpy compared to those in html: Giving columns and rows in a mixture of fixed width and relative width is easy in html, and impossible in latex. Try making a table in latex that has one left-aligned column, and two other paragraph columns which divide the remaining space 60%-40%. (paragraph columns require a fixed size, so this can't be done, or it needs to be done by eye, which reminds me of word-perfect like tabs for layout).
But the biggest problem is its macro-based nature. If your begin{section} end{section} tags are not well nested... the program cannot warn you abouyt this, but rather is likely to generate confusingly incorrect output or crash with and error message at a seemingly random point later in the file (I have done this several times). XML is much easier to parse and much, much easier to extend.
But let's not forget that XML is really about a logical tree structure - not really about the actual markup. If you think that certain types of documents would benefit from the (non-negligible) effort of a different markup, you can certainly define a serialization of the XML data in non-standard (for example, latex-like) form.
XML is often called a subset of SGML - but its actually a lot more than that because of its information structure.
Latex was nice while it lasted - but time for change has certainly come.
Rambus is indeed junk - however the idea isn't bad, and address fundamental problems of the SDRAM interface. By putting chips in series, a much higher clock frequency can be obtained, as the signals do not go out of phase so easily (the higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, the more phase variation is introduced by the same distance variation...) For platforms likely to be very bandwidth limited and not latency - such as a PS-2 - Rambus is quite likely superior.
Additionally, let's not forget that rambus is also dieing because of intel's laughable chipsets, which need some fundamental rewireing to support such a different memory philosophy.
Don't get me wrong - Rambus is a bad buying idea, and the company is highly associal - but the idea is a good, and eventually necessary one. The memory of the future might not be RDRAM, but it certainly won't be any form of SDRAM.
e.g. 600MHz DDR SDRAM has half a wavelength of 25 centimeters - So that's how far apart signals will be. Signals certainly don't normally arrive at the same time in a clock cycle (this depends on where the memory is getting it from, whether a bank switch occurs, etc.) that's already a very, very, small margin in _theory_. And in practice it's going to be very hard - I'ld think. The fastest DDR SDRAM around is about half as fast, at the moment.
Given Intel's recent history and AMD's, I question the reason you trust Intel MORE. AMD has been consistently offering faster and cheaper products - and has been less plagued by vapor-silicon, or retraction. In general, AMD has shown itself far more capable than Intel - recently.
If I understand you correctly, you want AMD and Intel to relax the tempo a bit.
No way!
Speed increases may be more incremental at the moment, but on a per year basis, this competition has really sped up developement. Also, an unstable chip is not hell (though intel should really have known better, considering the 1133 failed consistently on a linux kernel compilation:-)) - You just don't have to buy the newest of the new.
An interesting point you make is that companies lose money because of retracted releases. On the one hand, the P-1133 retraction did cost intel (not much) money, however AMD's retraction cost them nothing - the chips weren't even in production yet.
On the way to faster chips there are some dead ends - so what?
The issue of a better architechture is not as simple as you make it out to be. It is not only that there are large investments in x86 and great market opportunities due to the large customer base, but also the fact that so much research has gone into them that indeeed the x86 is the fastest architecture on the block for many applications.
Specifically, in integer math the x86 chip is no doubt by far the best - even more so as its rather cheap compared to competitors.
Many of the big x86 problems - small number of registers, bad bus architecture, not a load/store memory system - are greatly alleviated by good caching, in which case the x86 needs to compete on the microarchitecture level not the ISA.
I agree that x86 is a bad thing, but it is certainly not a killer.
Furthermore, I think its important to face the fact that software developement cost is probably the biggest expense around, and it is simply better to have a compatible chip for old software than it is to get a new thing - even if the new thing is a bit faster - because speed is just one factor in the whole equation.
Change should come - but the x86 shouldn't be abandoned, rather a transmeta-like approach of emulation is called for.
Your statement makes no sense: First of all, the electoral votes are allocated to states based on population, so, the electoral college system actually makes this sort of domination EASIER - after all, now you only need 51% in the most populous few states (I don't know how many you need, but not many).
Another problem with this system is the fact that it empowers the individual voter far too much. This means that situations like these, in which a ridiculously small portion of the country (palm beach county) decide for the entire country happen far too often. For example look at holland... it has a far greater variety of parties too - meaning that the power is distributed in a much better fashion.
The electoral college argument is that it means the winners need to appeal to several groups. Well, the electoral college is also responsible for the lack of choice. You see, the people voting for Ralph Nader in retrospect should have voted for Gore - after all, Nader did not win anything, so they effectively harmed Gore's chances thus supporting Bush. In a system which simply counts individual votes, such as in many other places in the world, parties are forced to form coalitions to be able to nominate a president, making the representation much better than the electoral college system.
Furthermore, People sometimes think that the electoral college system prevents the majority from simply stamping the rest - after all, politicians must also appeal to minorities to win certain counties. However, if the people in the majority actually would be swayed by actions which disrespect others, A politician selling to them would be guaranteed to win at least 50% of the votes (it's pretty simple) That obviously doesn't work - so politicians need to seek support from various groups. In a non-electoral college system that is equally so - otherwise they will need to form a coalition which also solves the problem just fine.
Finally, the districts are not spread onto a randomized population! This can cause serious distortion:
Let's take a simple example, three regions a,b,c, and three voting groups, X-49,Y-30,Z-20, thus a total of 99 "people units".
each region is equally large (for simplicity).
a: Y-17,X-14,Z-2
b: Y-13,X-11,Z-9
c: Y-0,X-24,Z-9
Y wins all out and gets to dominate. And it isn't even 50% large, and furthermore, actually smaller than X!
So, depending on how your voters happen to be distributed, the electoral college favours you or not. This is unfair.
I am American. America is arguably the earliest democracy. But lets face it - America's voting system is an early beta version of the Good Thing (tm) (don't even get me started on campaign financing - that's much worse than EC stuff...).
Is Malicious intent Evil? Whatever I dislike I tend to do things about with malicious intent.
Furthermore, corporations certainly do not deserve the same amount of protection from verbal abuse as people do - and I think that even people shouldn't be overly protected. If I think somebody is a disgusting fat slob, I want to be able to say that. In public. However, people deserve some protection against extreme harassment - but never to the extent that the opinion expressed in the harassment becomes occluded.
It's simple really, expression should be protected. Obviously this is not the case.
A strong dislike of guinness should be expressable over the internet - and it guinness is trying to prevent that.
Though I appreciate your approach I still think your conclusion - that the patent might be valid is not warrented. Then there is the entirely other issue of use of patents, which isn't clear cut at all. But, given that patents are a fact of life, what is wrong with amazons patent?
Really, why were cookies developed in the first place? They were developed to enable sessions to be persistent (to my knowledge). This enables you to do stuff like automatically log on to a service such as slashdot, your web-email provider, whatever. Depending on what you do on the web, you can use this identity thing in different ways.
It's simply a combination in utterly trivial manner of existing ideas, moreover, these idea's were made to be used together.
Hyperlinks came first. Amazon was not involved. Quite a useful idea. dynamic web pages - the CGI idea - came next. CGI was intended for things such as an online store, or a message board, or in general a way to get program output easily to the web. Obviously, programs that need to communicate with a wide population really make use of this most - such as a store. Amazon couldn't get a patent on using CGI to this end, and they were not involved in CGI's developement. They weren't around at the time. Next come cookies. I don't know whether amazon already existed or not, but the ovious purpose by the "inventor" was to make sessions persistent, so that a user doesn't need to identify himself. It also makes intra-session persistence easier, but it is by no means really necessary. Amazon used cookies exactly as intended. Why should they they be rewarded for that.
After all, it was 3M who got the patent on post-its not the first person to use them.
And obviously, if patents didn't exist in the first place, certain things would be very different. For many people, it would not make a difference. For those regions in which huge investments are necessary for one advance (medicine, for instance) things would go a lot slower. But realize also that the increased freedom means you'll have a lot more people developing, so who knows whether this is a good or bad thing... and finally, the government should take an active part in funding and supporting research. It already does, but remove patents and increase support... who knows. I certainly think that the duration of patents bu much more so copyrights should be much shorter - and even shorter depending on the region. Things that take longer to develope should be protected more than those that take shorter.
Ahh.. but we're not sure yet, are we. You'll just need to find somebody to actually understand it, then go pick up that Nobel (get ready for a small wait though...)
I wouldn't right off Daikatana so soon.
It'll probably flop for the wrong reasons - marketing BULL. It doesn't make much difference that it took 'em years to make, the game did get done. But I won't be buying it.
However, say they made a sequel the way they finished the first? They might make a technically up to date, good game - but more importantly, the public opinion would be more favourable.
Personally, I think the Q2 engine is more than good enough to support a good game. It isn't anything special anymore, but it is probably comparable to UT's. Course, in Q2 they just didn't make cool enough textures or use the colored lighting wisely or have a bit of creative change - but Daikatana might have that, and indeed, the storyline sound extremely good - something definitely interesting to me in a single player game.
So, I would say, don't write it off yet... esp not any sequels.
Your opinion highlights a major problem with corporate funding.
For one, I fully understand the wish for universities to profit from their discoveries. But they shouldn't. The danger is that research will be guided by what is profitable and what is useful in the short term, and not by what merits further understanding. Trust me, corporations will gladly research things that are directly applicable AND likely to be economically worthwhile. It isn't necessary to further support that. But truly ground-breaking research - as hard as it is to do even in a university - can't be judged by the money it makes.
When you decide that earning money is OK for a university or faculty, they'll try to do so. It's natural and entirely to be expected: funding is generally always needed in universities. And if it's not, having a larger team of researchers is always nice, or a better lab and so on. So there are very good reasons to want to make extra money off their inventions. But that also supports research into applicable sciences more than fundamental research or even literature, and social sciences and whatnot.
To cite an overused example: how was the internet developed? By the army - and that's no coincidence, because they can afford not to make a profit. People (like me:-) ) ridicule the star wars effort, but realise that the experience and knowledge it brings about is likely to do more good to mankind that those two extra stealth bombers...
For the same reasons that you don't want a reviewer payed by those that he reviews, you don't want a scientist payed by corporations. There is a bonafide conflict of interests going on here.
Perhaps a way around this is by requiring all such profits to be 100% taxed and the money the government makes off this may only be used for funding education and research - this would be a Good Thing. However, per university or worse yet per faculty funding will unfairly unbalance research.
I'm not exactly an emacs fan, but I find the basic functionality not that hard to use... In case you haven't given up yet, here's a lightning course.
Basic typeing and arrow keys work as expected.
Then I use search a lot: C-s.
undo is shift-underscore.
replace is (OBVIOUSLY...) M-%
cut can be achieved by C-space at one and and C-w (wipe) at the other. Copy is the same but M-w. Paste (yank) is C-y. Any M-y's after C-y's paste things that used to be cut/copied, very neat as you never lose any text. C-k cuts the rest of the line.
And of course quit is C-x C-c
then there are some long commands I use a lot
M-x enters minibuffer fo command typing
line-number-mode shows line numbers
sgml-mode, cc-mode, c-mode, html-mode etc go into those appropriate modes so you can use:
font-lock-mode for syntax highlighting.
Obviously there's much more, but that's 99.9% of what I use. Can be learned in 15 mins, really. stick it to the side of your screen.
Single pixel spacing doe not have it's own good purposes. Design the logical layout and then apply style. I sure prefer simple sites to sites that are so obfusciated as to need one pixel spacing...
Slashdot Mirror
I completely concur. I don't think the right to exchange information is holy or somehow a human right which you're suggesting here. Consider slander, spam, or malicious information. Malicious information is for instance a virus, or even something as simple as telling a very gullible person that to cure his headache he merely needs to jump off that tower there...
:-).
Given the obvious advantages of free information flow (it is for instance the underpinning of a free market, and necessary also for a "democratic" society), I'ld say information should not be needlessly restricted unless there is a very good reason for it.
Supposedly, copyrights/patents are a required to encourage the production of new knowledge.
I would say it's clear that they do encourage some creation of knowledge. By their very nature, however, they also limit it's applicability and extension, therefore also discouraging the creation of such knowledge. Furthermore, I think a better system could be instituted.
Given that copyrights use market dynamics to encourage creation, whilst those dynamics work only in situations of scarcity, and that information itself (not the distribution thereof!) is not scarce, we can conclude that a system that tries to encourage new knowledge without enforcing scarcity would be optimal, as doing so would bring encouragement without destroying the actual point of the knowledge in the first place.
People regularly comment on the fact that communism (specifically in Russia) collapsed because it (it being the abstract administrative process that is communism) is a fundamentally bad match in the real world (in which resources are scarce). Generally it's not so widely noted that the same could be said of our current Intellectual Property mess.
Fortunately, we already have a mechanism to support non-scarce goods (aka social goods) in our society! Subsidizing knowledge production is a far superior solution... and we already do it to some extent with schools, art grants, universities, etc etc etc.
The question then becomes: how to divide such grants? I don't have an easy answer to that but a model ala de references by academic papers (or for that matter hyperlinks in the net) comes to mind.
To draw an analogy: in our current situation, knowledge is exclusively controlled by it's creator, which is comparable to how a completely "closed" internet portal would control its content and display information and news depending mostly on how much it can pay to create or buy that information from some news service or equivalent. The subsidized model which supports knowledge creation is more like the net at large with hyperlinks forming the votes for who's cool and who's not. Even without a framework specifically designed to support it, google seems capable to extract useful information from those votes
A very sane comment you make; it would probably be a good idea to apply this principle to a lot more things around. Make things cost what they cost and no bullshit. I like it :-).
:-)]
However, in order to make things cost "what they cost" you do need to tax/subsidise them to take into account the side effect the item has on society.
An efficient capitalist system is not a untaxed market but a market in which transactions are subsidised and taxed to reflect that whatever you buy or sell has impact on others.
[Concequently, all rap music should be heavily taxed, it's extremely annoying
--Eamon
Obviously none of this makes sense without the actual contract; however in principle the original poster was right: if IBM had the license to copy unix and did so then invalidating IBM's right to copy unix merely does that. it doesn't, not without special contracts and EULA style things invalidate the users contracts, which weren't illegally acquired. The comparison that you copy windows whilst unlicensed to do so, and sell your copy, doesn't hold as the "contract" (IANAL) between you and your buyer wasn't legal in the first place - in IBM's case they were though.
:-)
anyhow
--Eamon
As much as I agree with you I don't the the article gives sufficient grounding for the accusation. First of all, driver optimizations that are specific to a certain type of 3d-engine or even a particular 3d-engine of even a particular application of that 3d-engine aren't per-se a bad thing; it's certainly the case that nVidia and ATI probably take specific account of Q3 and UT2003 engines in their drivers - if that account for a large part of their usage, it would be insane not too. As such, a benchmark that isn't optimized (also in the software section) isn't a very realistic reflection of reality. I believe there was a discussion on tom's hardware of the 3dmark2003 benchmark which wasn't very positive - or rather an analysis of nVidia's accusations and futuremarks responses. I personally did not find futuremark very convincing in their own defense. So 3dmark2003 scores really don't interest me a bit. Give me real games any day.
A while back ATI had specifically "optimized" Quake3 at the expense of image quality. Obviously this isn't acceptable; If nVidia does that (and to a certain extent they did - on all cards their aniso quality was lower that the radeons' before the detonator FX) This section of the accusation - that the optimzations caused rendering problems, is more serious. However, the reasons given in the article are pure conjecture, and are just as likely to simply be bugs. Anyhow; it's not unbelivable that optimizations might cause bugs - that's merely bad engineering - the issue is whether nVidia realized it or not. If an optimizations works 99% of the time, you've got to realize that you need to use another method for the remaining 1%, and that can be quite hard.
In conclusion; I find the accusation overly broad, and unfounded to boot.
--Eamon
I had something like that - two servers with 240GB raid arrays (well one with a 240GB Raid 0 and another with 230GB JBOD setup). In many was they backed each other up, so in case one array died I woulnd't lose everything... :-). One of em was an IBM known not to be real safe (one of those GXP75's) But the real killers were the twin WD1200JB's for the Raid array which died simultaneously due to a cheap crappy annoying power supply (a temporary Power Supply I had in for a month or so until I got a better one).
Of course, then I had 3 (!!) drives die within three weeks, and it's all all all gone *sniff*
That was one expensive mistake, both in time (I've reripped most stuff now but still), collection (stuff from "friends"), and $$... oh well...
--Eamon
Well, I took a peek at the site and the site's source code (It's in haskell). It's almost certainly real (I don't have an interpreter or compiler for Haskell98 atm), in that it really does work... And it compresses well to boot! I'm switching.
You pay taxes to the government to for example build a good number of roads you'll never ride on. It would seem fairer if only people actually using those roads would pay for them.
Doing so however means that people won't use them as much as they could, which is wasteful as once they're built it's folly to discourage people to use something when the marginal cost of such usage is nil (beyond other costs such as bandwidth on the internet and gasoline/extra stree maintanence for the roadnet). Asking a fee from all downloaders and not from nondownloaders, and you will strongly discourage downloading anything, even if it doesn't actually cost anything more than bandwidth!
A better idea would be to raise the fee with user income (this could be less that linear though). It's a tax, treat it like one.
You appeal to your right not to participate in music downloading and thus conclude that this concept shouldn't become law as it is because what you don't use you shouldn't pay for.
That makes no sense; I hardly download music but the question is what-if. If programs like napster could be openly developed I'm sure it would become a lot easier and I - and maybe you - would.
In addition, what's really interesting isn't the gain to particular individuals, but the net gain/loss to the well-being of the public at large. A system which pays artists via sales could potentially fix the single biggest flaw of intellectual property laws; namely that once discovered/composed/developed, the distribution costs become virtually nil. The only purpose of IP laws in the first place is to promote creation of such content, and if that can be done without the side effect of limiting it's otherwise simple distribution, then that's great!
To conclude, you give a purely selfish argument why not to introduce this tax (which is what it is) which furthermore doesn't hold water ("would you" download music not "do you"). Your rhetorical question merely distracts from the fact that you have no other argument against this concept or its benefits. The suggestion that you are a good law-abiding citizen and whomever you are replying to isn't reeks.
As an aside, 150 million users != 150 million customers; many of those people would be sharing an internet connection (families), some might have several connections (at work, in college, and at home for me).
--Eamon
Superficially, taxes are annoying simply because we have to pay them, and I have no love of paying taxes any more than I have love of paying RIAA for music.
However, a free market which is unregulated will almost by definition fail; The very reason that markets work so well, namely that they rely on selfish agents also points to their flaw (namely that they rely on selfish agents). The classic (and perhaps somewhat outdated) example of this is a lighthouse: A particular shipping firm might decide to install a lighthouse for their personal benefit; however doing so carries benefits for other shipping firms as well. You want a system which builds lighthouses whenever the total benefit to society exceeds the total cost: not that they are built when the selfish benefit exceeds the selfish cost. Legaslation is the only way to distort the market away from it's "natural" form into a more ideal market.
So, I'm all for an efficient government (which we don't have), but paranoia against legaslation is also counterproductive.
Intellectual property laws were introduced to foster creativity. If that same goals can be achieved by a more direct means (a tax on internet users), without the cost that IP brings (namely that art/knowledge is selfishly withheld even though the cost of distribution is virtually nil), then
I'm all for!
--Eamon
Just believe me, thinking involves not just believing anyone.
I find it hard to believe the XBox you mention caught on fire... And please, if it's serious, do you have any evidence? I can hardly believe microsoft would knowingly kill their reputation by selling dangerous equipment.
Actually, at least according to the anand tech article, you're incorrect in assuming that consoles come with specialized which would make them easier to program for. PS2 apparently came without a c-compiler, and though I have little knowledge about consoles in particular, c is still king for most embedded applications.
I only have limited OpenGL and assembler experience, but I've seen the instruction set that the vertex shader's in the X-Box use, and they are orders of magnitude simpler (and correspondingly less flexible) than implementing such vertex transformations in x86 assembler. (This has nothing to do with the x86 architecture, it's simply that NormalizedCrossProduct EBX, EAX, ECX (psuedocode) is a lot easier than working out a normalized cross product manually, though the vagaries of the x86 FPU won't help.) Given the fact that the x86 architecture is old, as is DirectX, it should be much and much easier to program for this familiar platform, especially now that it's got a unified memory architecture.
The XBox is a console in the sense that it has hardware stability; you know exactly what you're coding for, and a PC in simplicity. I'ld expect it to be a great hit in the game-programming industry...
And as to the amount of memory, while it's true that one can make good games in little ram, some things like hi-res images, animated textures, music clips, hi-poly geometry, and whatever else I'm forgetting do take a lot of ram, and it would be sad if that turned out to be the limiting factor. A smartly structured game which loads game code and story on the fly, perhaps even compressed in some way, with code reuse done well can be very small. It's just that extra ram never hurts...
I'm not sure about this, but I think that the reason for previous generation of consoles success was hardware+software stability, and definitly not the tools supplied by the manufacturer. Those tend to be great for the PC. A small simple platform has the advantage in testing (java: write once, run anywhere - sound familiar?) and complexity. The coders don't need to worry whether the user has win95 or the osr2 version, and that is GREAT.
Unfortunately this outdated-browser analysis is worthless, for several reasons - all of which boil down to the small amout of actual testing done. A faster, more representative machine would have been useful as well. And I don't need an analysis of browsers way back when on a machine from way back when and then some :-).
:-(
But should you doubt me:
First off, I think the one most deciding factor in the choice of a browser if how well it displays pages - whether corrupt, IE5.5 optimized, javascript enabled, CSS2.0 or ancient, my browser first and foremost needs to WORK. This isn't even touched upon here! The stability of the browser, in my opinion a part of usability, needs to be tested.
A browser doesn't need to be all that fast either just "fast enough". And, not only is "fast enough" a subjective measure, it includes things such as responsiveness while loading, total page loading time, time to create a new window, time to "scetch" a first outline onscreen and more. Many pages can be very usable with only 10% loaded. By the time you're done reading the first paragraph the rest can be loaded. In addition, speed will vary depending on processor speed and type, memory availability, and network bandwidth. A fast browser which gains speed with bad incremental display could be worse than a slower version in which you can start reading immediately. Furthermore, the internet extends beyond slashdot... some HTML elements may render in varying speed depending on the browser used.
Speed is a hard thing to measure. This analysis isn't nearly complete enough to be at all useful.
Startup time is effected by things such as program size (if too much else is loaded, a 32meg machine might well be swapping skewing the image drastically), speed ratio between hard drive and processor, and VERY importantly, dependance on shared libraries. Konqueror for instance might seem much faster when running KDE already... and the same goes for the other browsers too though I don't immediately know which libraries they use. Notice how fast those "second instances" pop up...
Finally, this is a pretty lame attempt to harvest slashdot links by using a slashdot page in a linux browser test...
Rather, I would ask the other way around: When will there be a usable XML alternative to latex?
LaTeX is bound by numerous fundamental problem. Tecnically, it's multi-pass requirements make it slow and inefficient, and from a usability perspective, it lacks a lot of functionality that is trivial in html.
For example, tables in latex are wimpy compared to those in html: Giving columns and rows in a mixture of fixed width and relative width is easy in html, and impossible in latex. Try making a table in latex that has one left-aligned column, and two other paragraph columns which divide the remaining space 60%-40%. (paragraph columns require a fixed size, so this can't be done, or it needs to be done by eye, which reminds me of word-perfect like tabs for layout).
But the biggest problem is its macro-based nature. If your begin{section} end{section} tags are not well nested... the program cannot warn you abouyt this, but rather is likely to generate confusingly incorrect output or crash with and error message at a seemingly random point later in the file (I have done this several times). XML is much easier to parse and much, much easier to extend.
But let's not forget that XML is really about a logical tree structure - not really about the actual markup. If you think that certain types of documents would benefit from the (non-negligible) effort of a different markup, you can certainly define a serialization of the XML data in non-standard (for example, latex-like) form.
XML is often called a subset of SGML - but its actually a lot more than that because of its information structure.
Latex was nice while it lasted - but time for change has certainly come.
Rambus is indeed junk - however the idea isn't bad, and address fundamental problems of the SDRAM interface. By putting chips in series, a much higher clock frequency can be obtained, as the signals do not go out of phase so easily (the higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, the more phase variation is introduced by the same distance variation...) For platforms likely to be very bandwidth limited and not latency - such as a PS-2 - Rambus is quite likely superior.
Additionally, let's not forget that rambus is also dieing because of intel's laughable chipsets, which need some fundamental rewireing to support such a different memory philosophy.
Don't get me wrong - Rambus is a bad buying idea, and the company is highly associal - but the idea is a good, and eventually necessary one. The memory of the future might not be RDRAM, but it certainly won't be any form of SDRAM.
e.g. 600MHz DDR SDRAM has half a wavelength of 25 centimeters - So that's how far apart signals will be. Signals certainly don't normally arrive at the same time in a clock cycle (this depends on where the memory is getting it from, whether a bank switch occurs, etc.) that's already a very, very, small margin in _theory_. And in practice it's going to be very hard - I'ld think. The fastest DDR SDRAM around is about half as fast, at the moment.
Given Intel's recent history and AMD's, I question the reason you trust Intel MORE. AMD has been consistently offering faster and cheaper products - and has been less plagued by vapor-silicon, or retraction. In general, AMD has shown itself far more capable than Intel - recently.
I really don't see your point
If I understand you correctly, you want AMD and Intel to relax the tempo a bit.
:-)) - You just don't have to buy the newest of the new.
No way!
Speed increases may be more incremental at the moment, but on a per year basis, this competition has really sped up developement. Also, an unstable chip is not hell (though intel should really have known better, considering the 1133 failed consistently on a linux kernel compilation
An interesting point you make is that companies lose money because of retracted releases. On the one hand, the P-1133 retraction did cost intel (not much) money, however AMD's retraction cost them nothing - the chips weren't even in production yet.
On the way to faster chips there are some dead ends - so what?
The issue of a better architechture is not as simple as you make it out to be. It is not only that there are large investments in x86 and great market opportunities due to the large customer base, but also the fact that so much research has gone into them that indeeed the x86 is the fastest architecture on the block for many applications.
Specifically, in integer math the x86 chip is no doubt by far the best - even more so as its rather cheap compared to competitors.
Many of the big x86 problems - small number of registers, bad bus architecture, not a load/store memory system - are greatly alleviated by good caching, in which case the x86 needs to compete on the microarchitecture level not the ISA.
I agree that x86 is a bad thing, but it is certainly not a killer.
Furthermore, I think its important to face the fact that software developement cost is probably the biggest expense around, and it is simply better to have a compatible chip for old software than it is to get a new thing - even if the new thing is a bit faster - because speed is just one factor in the whole equation.
Change should come - but the x86 shouldn't be abandoned, rather a transmeta-like approach of emulation is called for.
Your statement makes no sense: First of all, the electoral votes are allocated to states based on population, so, the electoral college system actually makes this sort of domination EASIER - after all, now you only need 51% in the most populous few states (I don't know how many you need, but not many).
Another problem with this system is the fact that it empowers the individual voter far too much. This means that situations like these, in which a ridiculously small portion of the country (palm beach county) decide for the entire country happen far too often. For example look at holland... it has a far greater variety of parties too - meaning that the power is distributed in a much better fashion.
The electoral college argument is that it means the winners need to appeal to several groups. Well, the electoral college is also responsible for the lack of choice. You see, the people voting for Ralph Nader in retrospect should have voted for Gore - after all, Nader did not win anything, so they effectively harmed Gore's chances thus supporting Bush. In a system which simply counts individual votes, such as in many other places in the world, parties are forced to form coalitions to be able to nominate a president, making the representation much better than the electoral college system.
Furthermore, People sometimes think that the electoral college system prevents the majority from simply stamping the rest - after all, politicians must also appeal to minorities to win certain counties. However, if the people in the majority actually would be swayed by actions which disrespect others, A politician selling to them would be guaranteed to win at least 50% of the votes (it's pretty simple) That obviously doesn't work - so politicians need to seek support from various groups. In a non-electoral college system that is equally so - otherwise they will need to form a coalition which also solves the problem just fine.
Finally, the districts are not spread onto a randomized population! This can cause serious distortion:
Let's take a simple example, three regions a,b,c, and three voting groups, X-49,Y-30,Z-20, thus a total of 99 "people units".
each region is equally large (for simplicity).
a: Y-17,X-14,Z-2
b: Y-13,X-11,Z-9
c: Y-0,X-24,Z-9
Y wins all out and gets to dominate. And it isn't even 50% large, and furthermore, actually smaller than X!
So, depending on how your voters happen to be distributed, the electoral college favours you or not. This is unfair.
I am American. America is arguably the earliest democracy. But lets face it - America's voting system is an early beta version of the Good Thing (tm) (don't even get me started on campaign financing - that's much worse than EC stuff...).
Is Malicious intent Evil? Whatever I dislike I tend to do things about with malicious intent.
Furthermore, corporations certainly do not deserve the same amount of protection from verbal abuse as people do - and I think that even people shouldn't be overly protected. If I think somebody is a disgusting fat slob, I want to be able to say that. In public. However, people deserve some protection against extreme harassment - but never to the extent that the opinion expressed in the harassment becomes occluded.
It's simple really, expression should be protected. Obviously this is not the case.
A strong dislike of guinness should be expressable over the internet - and it guinness is trying to prevent that.
Though I appreciate your approach I still think your conclusion - that the patent might be valid is not warrented. Then there is the entirely other issue of use of patents, which isn't clear cut at all. But, given that patents are a fact of life, what is wrong with amazons patent?
Really, why were cookies developed in the first place? They were developed to enable sessions to be persistent (to my knowledge). This enables you to do stuff like automatically log on to a service such as slashdot, your web-email provider, whatever. Depending on what you do on the web, you can use this identity thing in different ways.
It's simply a combination in utterly trivial manner of existing ideas, moreover, these idea's were made to be used together.
Hyperlinks came first. Amazon was not involved. Quite a useful idea. dynamic web pages - the CGI idea - came next. CGI was intended for things such as an online store, or a message board, or in general a way to get program output easily to the web. Obviously, programs that need to communicate with a wide population really make use of this most - such as a store. Amazon couldn't get a patent on using CGI to this end, and they were not involved in CGI's developement. They weren't around at the time. Next come cookies. I don't know whether amazon already existed or not, but the ovious purpose by the "inventor" was to make sessions persistent, so that a user doesn't need to identify himself. It also makes intra-session persistence easier, but it is by no means really necessary. Amazon used cookies exactly as intended. Why should they they be rewarded for that.
After all, it was 3M who got the patent on post-its not the first person to use them.
And obviously, if patents didn't exist in the first place, certain things would be very different. For many people, it would not make a difference. For those regions in which huge investments are necessary for one advance (medicine, for instance) things would go a lot slower. But realize also that the increased freedom means you'll have a lot more people developing, so who knows whether this is a good or bad thing... and finally, the government should take an active part in funding and supporting research. It already does, but remove patents and increase support... who knows. I certainly think that the duration of patents bu much more so copyrights should be much shorter - and even shorter depending on the region. Things that take longer to develope should be protected more than those that take shorter.
Ahh.. but we're not sure yet, are we. You'll just need to find somebody to actually understand it, then go pick up that Nobel (get ready for a small wait though...)
--EMN
I wouldn't right off Daikatana so soon.
It'll probably flop for the wrong reasons - marketing BULL. It doesn't make much difference that it took 'em years to make, the game did get done. But I won't be buying it.
However, say they made a sequel the way they finished the first? They might make a technically up to date, good game - but more importantly, the public opinion would be more favourable.
Personally, I think the Q2 engine is more than good enough to support a good game. It isn't anything special anymore, but it is probably comparable to UT's. Course, in Q2 they just didn't make cool enough textures or use the colored lighting wisely or have a bit of creative change - but Daikatana might have that, and indeed, the storyline sound extremely good - something definitely interesting to me in a single player game.
So, I would say, don't write it off yet... esp not any sequels.
Your opinion highlights a major problem with corporate funding.
For one, I fully understand the wish for universities to profit from their discoveries. But they shouldn't. The danger is that research will be guided by what is profitable and what is useful in the short term, and not by what merits further understanding. Trust me, corporations will gladly research things that are directly applicable AND likely to be economically worthwhile. It isn't necessary to further support that. But truly ground-breaking research - as hard as it is to do even in a university - can't be judged by the money it makes.
When you decide that earning money is OK for a university or faculty, they'll try to do so. It's natural and entirely to be expected: funding is generally always needed in universities. And if it's not, having a larger team of researchers is always nice, or a better lab and so on. So there are very good reasons to want to make extra money off their inventions. But that also supports research into applicable sciences more than fundamental research or even literature, and social sciences and whatnot.
To cite an overused example: how was the internet developed? By the army - and that's no coincidence, because they can afford not to make a profit. People (like me:-) ) ridicule the star wars effort, but realise that the experience and knowledge it brings about is likely to do more good to mankind that those two extra stealth bombers...
For the same reasons that you don't want a reviewer payed by those that he reviews, you don't want a scientist payed by corporations. There is a bonafide conflict of interests going on here.
Perhaps a way around this is by requiring all such profits to be 100% taxed and the money the government makes off this may only be used for funding education and research - this would be a Good Thing. However, per university or worse yet per faculty funding will unfairly unbalance research.
I'm not exactly an emacs fan, but I find the basic functionality not that hard to use... In case you haven't given up yet, here's a lightning course.
Basic typeing and arrow keys work as expected.
Then I use search a lot: C-s.
undo is shift-underscore.
replace is (OBVIOUSLY...) M-%
cut can be achieved by C-space at one and and C-w (wipe) at the other. Copy is the same but M-w. Paste (yank) is C-y. Any M-y's after C-y's paste things that used to be cut/copied, very neat as you never lose any text. C-k cuts the rest of the line.
And of course quit is C-x C-c
then there are some long commands I use a lot
M-x enters minibuffer fo command typing
line-number-mode shows line numbers
sgml-mode, cc-mode, c-mode, html-mode etc go into those appropriate modes so you can use:
font-lock-mode for syntax highlighting.
Obviously there's much more, but that's 99.9% of what I use. Can be learned in 15 mins, really. stick it to the side of your screen.
Also useful is the tutorial C-h t
Single pixel spacing doe not have it's own good purposes. Design the logical layout and then apply style. I sure prefer simple sites to sites that are so obfusciated as to need one pixel spacing...