Why would Valve bother requiring the specification? That's fucking not even close to what I suggested. All the the specifications do is create a couple of fixed QA targets for developers (in addition to the normal PC range) and the ability for users to use those targets. The PCs would be branded as Valve Certified, the games QA'd for them would be Tested On Valve Certified PCs... and that would be the end of it.
They don't have to develop console style hardware, they just need to hammer down specifications for a PC reference design... by having some reference designs with all driver updates being handled by Steam developers could target those platforms for QA and people who want as trouble free gaming as possible on the PC could just stick to a PC complying to Valve's specifications.
Exactly right... Microsoft tried to do some of this when they still were pushing PCs, but before it could get off the ground the XBOX came in. Valve is in the perfect position to launch PC reference designs and certification services, maybe offer a QA service and some kind of quality brand to "guarantee" the software runs well on the reference design and meets some basic PC development standards (ie. no hard coded aspect ratios, all buttons can be remapped, mouse AND gamepad support etc) which so often get fucked up by console ports.
Instead Gabe keeps getting in bed with more enemies only interested in embracing them to extinguish them...
Nixon had to get off the gold standard because oil production in the US ran out of steam. The UK's economy is now tanking because North Sea oil peaked (and which don't have the luxury of owning the global reserve currency). Peak oil is here, it's been here for decades...
This guy can't drill oil at low prices... it's the increased price which is making shale oil profitable, and then only just (which is why he's crying for subsidies, to make even less easily recovered oil profitable). There are security reasons to have your own oil supply, but cheap it's never going to become again.
Wind/Solar and "synthetic natural gas" [sic] have much a better chance of getting large cost reductions going forward.
A TI DSP starter kit will cost you more, 450$ is pretty much par for the course.
Just because it uses asynchronous logic doesn't mean sequential consistency is ever violated from the ISA point of view... obscure timing errors will occur for the same reason they almost always do, bad programming.
Flywheel and batteries are expensive and resource intensive, water reservoirs capable of holding significant amounts of energy (ie. hydroelectric dams) are of limited availability.
All the MPEG-LA members are too chickenshit to commit their patents. There is nothing for WebM to fix, since no patent number has ever been mentioned.
The MPEG-LA members know better than most that patent litigation is a complete fucking crapshoot, everything is far too interconnected for any real judgement to be made... it all comes down to whether the scribbles on a piece of paper from a random bunch of inbreds in Texas looks more like guilty or not guilty. They are riding the gravy train with the patent pool and they aren't going to jeopardize that in litigation against Google.
Apart from Microsoft there is no one who offers indemnification, not Apple (they offered to pay legal fees in the Lodsys case, which is something entirely different) and certainly not MPEG-LA... a WebM developer is as safe from litigation as a H.264 developer in the end, in both cases they are protected by the commercial interest of the parties behind the standards without any outright guarantees.
As for whether it's clear that WebM is not trampling in MPEG-LA patents... over a year without a single patent number being mentioned is clear enough for me.
It's empty money, it's far easier for money to stop flowing (which it will very soon, a new crisis is inevitable) than it is for trade of necessities to do so. A national economy build on the profits of a finance sector is far out on a limb.
Everyone is over-leveraged at the moment except for the few ultra-rich who are pure creditors, it's the only way to keep up paper profits up while consumption and production are tanking... of course there will be a reckoning unless the economy catches up, which it won't. The banks are all set up to fall in the near future... the ultra-rich will mop up the collateral (they'll still lose a lot of money, but they'll end up owning a lot more m2 of land).
Steamrollers can't be hedged... if you are getting much better returns than treasuries in an efficient market with no inside information you're running much bigger risks, period.
We shouldn't shut it down, but we should disallow them to use government guaranteed deposits for it. Deposit banks should not be allowed to use their depositor money for leveraged investments or derivatives.
A solar thermal plant burning into the ground doesn't put radioactive waste into groundwater and the air... it's not the sodium (not a salt by the way) which is the problem perse, it's the combination of the sodium with a reactor. Core catchers are actually substantially harder and more expensive to build for sodium cooled reactors, since the sodium is so good at eating through stuff.
Gen4 reactors simply aren't ready for prime time... and the most attractive one (MSR) is farthest away. You're not going to get appreciable power out of them in a decade without cutting corners.
Which would have meant a huge waste problem and rapid Uranium use... if you are going to invest in nuclear you have to invest in Thorium breeders, less waste and a more plentiful fuel. The R&D and construction would not have happened in a decade though, it's just so much harder to scale up than solar thermal because of completely necessary diligence.
A solar thermal plant melting the central tower because of shoddy engineering is an unfortunate loss... a molten sodium cooled breeder springing a good leak and melting down into the ground is a huge fucking disaster. MSRs have more inherent safety, but are even farther from readiness.
Subsidizing research is relatively cheap... of course paying students and phds some negligible wages and a few million for equipments and experiments isn't going to create sufficient money for lobbyists or sweet jobs for exiting government employees...
Meh, if I have to choice between the risk of leaks and sodium fires... I'll choose the leaks. If we have to bet on Nuclear lets bet on MSR (like China did) rather than IFR. Personally though I think it's unwise to factor in cost reductions for Nuclear, but not for Solar. The problem with nuclear economically for the private industry is that without government guarantees there is a huge risk of renewable technology overtaking them... this more than regulations is what is keeping them back.
Nuclear is cheap, but renewables are now in the same order of magnitude... and has far more potential for cost savings and rapid scalability. If say Scitech Solar or TiO2 ceramic hydrogen generation works out well nuclear plants in construction could instantly become so much trash.
When the majority of the central heating in your country runs off gas in the first place you're pretty much screwed any way... the grid is unlikely to be designed for everyone rushing out and plugging in space heaters, nuclear or no nuclear.
The next generation of nuclear power the industry wants to push on us are not an evolution of classical water reactors (which are the building block of the Nuclear safety record) nor the relatively safe MSR (atmospheric wise, although still potentially quite disastrous for local groundwater).
The next generation the nuclear industry is championing are molten sodium cooled breeders... NIMBY.
Forgetting about the cross national border effects for a moment... wind to hydro is actually a great example of alternative energy working well. The former is cheap but unreliable, the latter is cheap and reversible but lacks inflow... match made in heaven.
For the cost of both Bush wars you could build enough solar thermal plants to get equivalent power to the entire electricity production in the united states and build a HVDC distribution network... now present solar thermal technology is still a bit lacking in storage time, but if the US really wanted to (moonshot or Manhattan project type wanting to) I doubt that would present much of a hurdle.
The US has the resources and technology to become completely energy independent in a decade, with renewable energy... TPTB have just become so good at propaganda that any politicians running on actual community values (rather than pretend community values based on a magical invisible hand) has no chance of accomplishing anything any more.
Slashdot Mirror
People buy a PC for a lot of reasons ...
Why would Valve bother requiring the specification? That's fucking not even close to what I suggested. All the the specifications do is create a couple of fixed QA targets for developers (in addition to the normal PC range) and the ability for users to use those targets. The PCs would be branded as Valve Certified, the games QA'd for them would be Tested On Valve Certified PCs ... and that would be the end of it.
They don't have to develop console style hardware, they just need to hammer down specifications for a PC reference design ... by having some reference designs with all driver updates being handled by Steam developers could target those platforms for QA and people who want as trouble free gaming as possible on the PC could just stick to a PC complying to Valve's specifications.
Exactly right ... Microsoft tried to do some of this when they still were pushing PCs, but before it could get off the ground the XBOX came in. Valve is in the perfect position to launch PC reference designs and certification services, maybe offer a QA service and some kind of quality brand to "guarantee" the software runs well on the reference design and meets some basic PC development standards (ie. no hard coded aspect ratios, all buttons can be remapped, mouse AND gamepad support etc) which so often get fucked up by console ports.
Instead Gabe keeps getting in bed with more enemies only interested in embracing them to extinguish them ...
Nixon had to get off the gold standard because oil production in the US ran out of steam. The UK's economy is now tanking because North Sea oil peaked (and which don't have the luxury of owning the global reserve currency). Peak oil is here, it's been here for decades ...
This guy can't drill oil at low prices ... it's the increased price which is making shale oil profitable, and then only just (which is why he's crying for subsidies, to make even less easily recovered oil profitable). There are security reasons to have your own oil supply, but cheap it's never going to become again.
Wind/Solar and "synthetic natural gas" [sic] have much a better chance of getting large cost reductions going forward.
A TI DSP starter kit will cost you more, 450$ is pretty much par for the course.
Just because it uses asynchronous logic doesn't mean sequential consistency is ever violated from the ISA point of view ... obscure timing errors will occur for the same reason they almost always do, bad programming.
Flywheel and batteries are expensive and resource intensive, water reservoirs capable of holding significant amounts of energy (ie. hydroelectric dams) are of limited availability.
If everyone had the same morality we wouldn't be arguing about abortion so much.
All the MPEG-LA members are too chickenshit to commit their patents. There is nothing for WebM to fix, since no patent number has ever been mentioned.
The MPEG-LA members know better than most that patent litigation is a complete fucking crapshoot, everything is far too interconnected for any real judgement to be made ... it all comes down to whether the scribbles on a piece of paper from a random bunch of inbreds in Texas looks more like guilty or not guilty. They are riding the gravy train with the patent pool and they aren't going to jeopardize that in litigation against Google.
Apart from Microsoft there is no one who offers indemnification, not Apple (they offered to pay legal fees in the Lodsys case, which is something entirely different) and certainly not MPEG-LA ... a WebM developer is as safe from litigation as a H.264 developer in the end, in both cases they are protected by the commercial interest of the parties behind the standards without any outright guarantees.
As for whether it's clear that WebM is not trampling in MPEG-LA patents ... over a year without a single patent number being mentioned is clear enough for me.
It's empty money, it's far easier for money to stop flowing (which it will very soon, a new crisis is inevitable) than it is for trade of necessities to do so. A national economy build on the profits of a finance sector is far out on a limb.
Everyone is over-leveraged at the moment except for the few ultra-rich who are pure creditors, it's the only way to keep up paper profits up while consumption and production are tanking ... of course there will be a reckoning unless the economy catches up, which it won't. The banks are all set up to fall in the near future ... the ultra-rich will mop up the collateral (they'll still lose a lot of money, but they'll end up owning a lot more m2 of land).
Steamrollers can't be hedged ... if you are getting much better returns than treasuries in an efficient market with no inside information you're running much bigger risks, period.
We shouldn't shut it down, but we should disallow them to use government guaranteed deposits for it. Deposit banks should not be allowed to use their depositor money for leveraged investments or derivatives.
As someone said above, making an unidirectional UDP connection is quite trivial.
A solar thermal plant burning into the ground doesn't put radioactive waste into groundwater and the air ... it's not the sodium (not a salt by the way) which is the problem perse, it's the combination of the sodium with a reactor. Core catchers are actually substantially harder and more expensive to build for sodium cooled reactors, since the sodium is so good at eating through stuff.
Gen4 reactors simply aren't ready for prime time ... and the most attractive one (MSR) is farthest away. You're not going to get appreciable power out of them in a decade without cutting corners.
The fact you assume he uses an accountant to find tax dodges as a given says something about you.
Which would have meant a huge waste problem and rapid Uranium use ... if you are going to invest in nuclear you have to invest in Thorium breeders, less waste and a more plentiful fuel. The R&D and construction would not have happened in a decade though, it's just so much harder to scale up than solar thermal because of completely necessary diligence.
A solar thermal plant melting the central tower because of shoddy engineering is an unfortunate loss ... a molten sodium cooled breeder springing a good leak and melting down into the ground is a huge fucking disaster. MSRs have more inherent safety, but are even farther from readiness.
Subsidizing research is relatively cheap ... of course paying students and phds some negligible wages and a few million for equipments and experiments isn't going to create sufficient money for lobbyists or sweet jobs for exiting government employees ...
Meh, if I have to choice between the risk of leaks and sodium fires ... I'll choose the leaks. If we have to bet on Nuclear lets bet on MSR (like China did) rather than IFR. Personally though I think it's unwise to factor in cost reductions for Nuclear, but not for Solar. The problem with nuclear economically for the private industry is that without government guarantees there is a huge risk of renewable technology overtaking them ... this more than regulations is what is keeping them back.
Nuclear is cheap, but renewables are now in the same order of magnitude ... and has far more potential for cost savings and rapid scalability. If say Scitech Solar or TiO2 ceramic hydrogen generation works out well nuclear plants in construction could instantly become so much trash.
When the majority of the central heating in your country runs off gas in the first place you're pretty much screwed any way ... the grid is unlikely to be designed for everyone rushing out and plugging in space heaters, nuclear or no nuclear.
Spent MOX fuel is not reprocessed itself ... so the waste savings are pretty poor.
Molten sodium fire hazards ... as I said above, NIMBY.
The next generation of nuclear power the industry wants to push on us are not an evolution of classical water reactors (which are the building block of the Nuclear safety record) nor the relatively safe MSR (atmospheric wise, although still potentially quite disastrous for local groundwater).
The next generation the nuclear industry is championing are molten sodium cooled breeders ... NIMBY.
Forgetting about the cross national border effects for a moment ... wind to hydro is actually a great example of alternative energy working well. The former is cheap but unreliable, the latter is cheap and reversible but lacks inflow ... match made in heaven.
For the cost of both Bush wars you could build enough solar thermal plants to get equivalent power to the entire electricity production in the united states and build a HVDC distribution network ... now present solar thermal technology is still a bit lacking in storage time, but if the US really wanted to (moonshot or Manhattan project type wanting to) I doubt that would present much of a hurdle.
The US has the resources and technology to become completely energy independent in a decade, with renewable energy ... TPTB have just become so good at propaganda that any politicians running on actual community values (rather than pretend community values based on a magical invisible hand) has no chance of accomplishing anything any more.