For any solution where you only need to be fast enough to keep 1 user from thinking it's slow (you can take dozens of milliseconds, that's almost forever), you can do a good implementation even in 8 bits. Plus, as a sibling post pointed out, you can use a dedicated true random source (and LCG 32 plus an entropy source will be better than most physical dice). The early BASICs just didn't bother, plus the field has come a long way in 30 years.
It's incredibly hard to generate truly random numbers in software running on a machine designed to produce finite answers which are the SAME every time
Well-funded groups of researchers given years to work regularly solve "incredibly hard" problems - that's most of modern science. Since RNGs are important to crypto, this problem had a basically unlimited budget and plenty of interest from the private sector crypto guys, and it has been solved quite well.
So you want to replace a physical device which can be observed by all involved, with some unknown program buried in some black box
Unknown program? No. But well-reviewed open source is fine.
, I can tell you that software-based "pseudo-" random number generators aren't really good enough for competition use
Cryptographically secure PRNGs are certainly good enough for competition use, plus you can always add true randomness. They're also quite computationally expensive, which is why they don't get used often in computer games. PRNGs good enough for most gaming - really, anything where there's not a lot of money riding on the outcome - are fast and easy. This is a very well researched field, thanks to its importance to crypto, and there are true-random solutions provably better than physical dice, if it doesn't have to be cheap (heck, the good PRNGs are better than most physical dice, unless you use all the protocols casinos use).
The early PC BASICs all had flawed RNGs this way - every 8-bit system had some similar flaw IIRC. I remember the diagonal bands from the TRS-80. The C-64 had the ability for strong randomness, but it wasn't part of RND() (I'm pretty sure C-64 BASIC had the best of the 8-bit world though).
Very fast, lightweight, "good enough for a game" pseudo-randomness is really easy with a 32-bit system, but gets more complicated with smaller registers.
Counter-intuitively, most actual programs run slower in 64-bit, because the advantage from all the new registers doesn't overcome the penalty for the object code and many objects in memory being 2x the size, so only half as much fits in CPU cache. Depends on the program, of course, but stuff running faster in 64-bit is surprisingly rare outside of number-crunching.
So it's not really a standard, just a way to say "insert proprietary module here, which may or may not actually be compatible with the content".
It is certainly a standard: it's a standard that defines the interface for the DRM plugin. It contains the proprietary module needed to only the plugin, instead of all of Silverlight or all of Flash, and so is a huge win.
You don't ever want to specify the crypto used in a standard anyhow, because crypto changes faster than standards. I worked on the standard for encrypted tape drives. You don't specify stuff like "use AES", you specify stuff like "describing supported encryption methods" and "process to select the protocol used for key exchange". If you stupidly standardize on "use Diffie Hellman for key exchange" and then it turns out that there's a critical flaw in Diffie Hellman, then you're basically an idiot who's written a useless standard. (Or insert DVD/Bluray crack here, but I know little of those).
So, the most you ever do is standardize the interface to select the crypto bits (and the data exchange and that trivial stuff), not the behavior of the crypto bits, unlike the rest of a standard.
OK, sometimes you have to go to blogs related to the news to find the commenters pointing out that the story lacked even the basic fact-checking of Google and Wikipedia, but I've seen the same on the story itself
"Journalism" isn't "what reporters do", but narration of the "facts on the ground". Facts in quotes, since shortly after an event, when the news is hot, we rarely know the truth of anything. (Heck, is Obama a Muslim? I think he's more of a Muslim than Bill Clinton was a Christian: that's a religious group he wouldn't mind political support from, isn't going to actively antagonize, and will occasionally give a nod to in a speech.)
Comments sections often call out mistakes in reporting (and it's basically all mistakes, as you'll know if you've ever been involved in something reported, or especially if you've been interviewed), or add details or contrary points of view. That's journalism.
They have everything to due with free expression, which is ultimately the point of journalism. Given your posting history, I suspect you usually agree with the official narrative the papers generally print instead of the truth, and get upset when people point out that it's all BS, so I can understand your emotional response here. But you should still support free expression, even when you disagree with it.
Yes, I am bemoaning the loss of the plasma screen, I still think it has the best blacks, but still.
I bought a 60" plasma screen last year. It has terrific blacks, from the panel itself, to a special non-glare coating, to a "round down" function to handle the case where the HDMI stream ends up encoding black as "almost black", and forcing it back to black.
Plasma TVs vanished from the bottom-end, but they still exist. OLED might genuinely replace plasma, though.
My home theater setup is a 60" plasma screen attached to my laptop. It's only used as a display panel, but it works fine for that (text isn't great, but movies are). I enjoy a real home theater setup over any tablet or whatever. I doubt that use is going away.
I think the big failure is that "Smart TVs" just aren't quite good enough to replace the "TV sticks", or at least not at a competitive price. But a big dumb display panel that looks great; that I want.
There are three parties in the US now: * The Left, not materially represented in Congress, but Bernie Sanders is an example of a Left politician. * The Right, not materially represented in Congress, but Ben Carson is an example of a Right politician. * The Donor Party, which includes the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans in government (at least at the federal level), and which gets great and responsive representation.
Our government is very attentive and responsive to the best interest of the constituents who sent them to office. The problem is those constituents are the big money donors, not the people who are voting Democrat or Republican.
It's structurally possible to fix this though primary elections, and by "primary-ing out" incumbents. But we, the voters, need to start caring more about evicting the Donor Party guys than about whether Left or Right win. The Donor Party games us every year by calling the non-Donor Party guys "extremists" for daring to represent what the people actually want. Can we stop caring about how the mainstream media describes candidates? I'm doubtful, but it's possible.
It was established legal tradition in Britain for some time before the US war for independence that people were allowed to own guns because, even though hunting was illegal, guns weren't only for hunting, they could be used to defend one's home. It was common in the colonies (where everyone had guns, and hunting was legal) that every man was required to bring his gun to church on Sunday, in case a group of men with guns was required for any purpose. These guns were expected to be serviceable military weapons - a tradition going back to the late medieval period, where every man was required to own a weapon of war in case that was needed (and swords were very cheaply available after the plague, so real military weapons, not farm implements, were expected).
There are still several modern nations in which every man of age is required to own a modern military rifle (issued by the government). This idea that somehow the "right to keep and bear arms" excludes modern military small arms is a very modern contrivance, and not at all the intent of the Second Amendment. Heck, not just small arms - even 100 years ago cannon were typically bought for the town by the wealthy, and taken off to war when needed.
It's a very simple idea with centuries of legal tradition behind it: a free man has the right to own a gun, and not just for hunting, but actual military small arms. Totalitarian states disarm their subjects to prevent uprisings. Free societies have an armed populace to keep the government nervous about uprisings. It really is that fundamental.
You have to get licensed to own a gun, drive a car, and you have to register to vote.
You do not have to get licensed to own a gun, at least in states that show the slightest respect for the US Constitution. You do not have to get licensed to drive a car, unless you want to drive it in public places (and even then, driving farm equipment on farm-to-market roads doesn't require a license, as that was seen as an undue burden). You don't, in practice, have to register to vote, unless you live somewhere that requires an ID to vote - and most states see an ID as an undue burden.
You don't need a pilots license to fly a plane (well, most planes), if you stay at low altitude and away form airports. You shouldn't need to register to own a drone, or to fly one as long as you stay at low altitude and away from airports.
The best TV display panels come attached to smart TV B, and even mid-line TVs use a fast processor to avoid motion artifacts, so the smart TV BS is just piled on.
However, it's not like your TV is going to start using your wi-fi without configuring it. I'm not much worried about it spying.
There's a serious risk that in low-Earth orbit if one has enough debris it could cause a cascade of destruction where debris hits satellites breaking them up into more debris which hits more satellites and so on. Such a cascade is called Kessler Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . If this happens it could render many orbits unusable for years.
It would be a pain, but there is some drag in LEO and small debris won't last forever. Also, you almost never get a stable orbit from a random trajectory. If you actually start blowing shit up in space, most of the shrapnel is going to be in an obit that intersects the Earth, or dense atmosphere (or even possibly escapes, if you're blowing shit up real good).
deliberately destroying satellites should maybe be considered a war crime
The winners decide what's a war crime, and that mostly consists of "being needlessly dickish to the winner". It's rather fundamental that the group with a monopoly on force decides what constitutes a crime. Treaties and tradition about what's allowed in war are mostly about winners swearing off stuff that didn't work well anyhow. (BTW, the last enemy the US fought that agreed to the Geneva Convention was the Nazis - none of our enemies for the past 70 years gave a shit about Western ideals and "war crimes".)
3 movies for such a short story was what killed it. I mean did it have to take 1 whole movie just reach the damn mountain?
That's key, but they also failed because the tone was wrong (and inconsistent). The Hobbit was a kids book back when those were allow to get scary - a fun adventure story with some dark moments for our hero. Our hero was clearly Bilbo: it was his narrative, and his character arc. The places where the tone got dark were specifically the places where he needed to grow, and find to courage to overcome the new difficulty. The mix of fun adventure and dark moments made perfect sense.
This was a very different tone than LOTR, which was fundamentally a war story for adults. The Hobbit film just didn't understand that, and rushed production is no excuse. The film never really felt like Bilbo's journey "there and back again." Almost all the filler was dark and dramatic, so much so that the original fun parts of the book were now jarring and inconsistent in the movie. The inclusion of a kooky Radagast could have worked with the original story, but felt completely out of place in the film.
But dammit, lose the cartoon rabbits. From the SW prequel trilogy and Jar Jar to the Hobbit and the rabbit sled, I support a Constitutional Amendment banning cartoon rabbits in prequel movies!
It's totally intuitive to discover new commands! Just type "man -k <keyword>"
CLIs will never be discoverable. UIs with menus and especially context (right-click) menus were great for discoverability. A UI where there's no menus, no confirmation that a change took effect, and no universal way to undo? No thanks.
Last I checked, Tesla's market cap was 1/4th of Ford's. Yeah, I think they have a bright future, but that's beyond optimistic with so many risks to Tesla future. Good product has little to do with good stock.
Regardless, having to install an old operating system is not what I'd call backwards compatibility.
Whatever the game is, Good Old Games will have it eventually. They have lots of very early games with goofy requirements, that run effortlessly in my 64-bit Win7 gaming machine.
Games written for 10-years-ago Windows tend to run fine with the emulation built into Win7. Games that actually followed the MS rules to ensure compatibility (rare, but they exist) from last millennium work. Starcraft released 17 years ago and still works. I'm not sure if I can drop in my Diablo CD from 19 years ago (haven't tried it), but the download I bought from Blizzard works fine. I think I've run Warcraft 1, from 21 years ago, straight from the CD on my current PC, but I could be thinking of the previous one.
That all sounds like amazing backwards compatibility to me.
I suspect you might well be surprised at the hardware used by people who use Slashdot. With a few exceptions, I think the majority of people here seem quite intelligent and logical but have somewhat of an aversion to change and unnecessary innovations.
Speaking purely for myself, I built my computer in 2011 with a i5 2500k and maxed out the RAM. Then I spent £60 on a low end graphics card because - why spend more when I have a console for gaming and a media player (WDTV at the time) for watching downloaded shows and movies?
I might be in the minority, but I don't think it will be a tiny minority.
What kind of geek builds a low-power PC? The only acceptable answer is "a broke geek"; otherwise turn in your geek card.
When I built my computer in 2011, I built a tiny god. It had all the fast, and 12 cooling fans. This summer I dropped in a new graphics card and it's still in the top 10% of benchmarks (and has half as many fans, a single new card was faster than my old SLI setup). I'm thinking about liquid cooling for my next build, not because extreme overclocking is the best way to get a fast system, but because I'm a geek, dammit.
Slashdot Mirror
For any solution where you only need to be fast enough to keep 1 user from thinking it's slow (you can take dozens of milliseconds, that's almost forever), you can do a good implementation even in 8 bits. Plus, as a sibling post pointed out, you can use a dedicated true random source (and LCG 32 plus an entropy source will be better than most physical dice). The early BASICs just didn't bother, plus the field has come a long way in 30 years.
It's incredibly hard to generate truly random numbers in software running on a machine designed to produce finite answers which are the SAME every time
Well-funded groups of researchers given years to work regularly solve "incredibly hard" problems - that's most of modern science. Since RNGs are important to crypto, this problem had a basically unlimited budget and plenty of interest from the private sector crypto guys, and it has been solved quite well.
So you want to replace a physical device which can be observed by all involved, with some unknown program buried in some black box
Unknown program? No. But well-reviewed open source is fine.
, I can tell you that software-based "pseudo-" random number generators aren't really good enough for competition use
Cryptographically secure PRNGs are certainly good enough for competition use, plus you can always add true randomness. They're also quite computationally expensive, which is why they don't get used often in computer games. PRNGs good enough for most gaming - really, anything where there's not a lot of money riding on the outcome - are fast and easy. This is a very well researched field, thanks to its importance to crypto, and there are true-random solutions provably better than physical dice, if it doesn't have to be cheap (heck, the good PRNGs are better than most physical dice, unless you use all the protocols casinos use).
The early PC BASICs all had flawed RNGs this way - every 8-bit system had some similar flaw IIRC. I remember the diagonal bands from the TRS-80. The C-64 had the ability for strong randomness, but it wasn't part of RND() (I'm pretty sure C-64 BASIC had the best of the 8-bit world though).
Very fast, lightweight, "good enough for a game" pseudo-randomness is really easy with a 32-bit system, but gets more complicated with smaller registers.
That does explain a lot... as a D1 only has one surface it would have to be spherical
I have a d1 in my dice bag! It's a "1" pool ball from one of those miniature pool sets - just the right size.
Counter-intuitively, most actual programs run slower in 64-bit, because the advantage from all the new registers doesn't overcome the penalty for the object code and many objects in memory being 2x the size, so only half as much fits in CPU cache. Depends on the program, of course, but stuff running faster in 64-bit is surprisingly rare outside of number-crunching.
So it's not really a standard, just a way to say "insert proprietary module here, which may or may not actually be compatible with the content".
It is certainly a standard: it's a standard that defines the interface for the DRM plugin. It contains the proprietary module needed to only the plugin, instead of all of Silverlight or all of Flash, and so is a huge win.
You don't ever want to specify the crypto used in a standard anyhow, because crypto changes faster than standards. I worked on the standard for encrypted tape drives. You don't specify stuff like "use AES", you specify stuff like "describing supported encryption methods" and "process to select the protocol used for key exchange". If you stupidly standardize on "use Diffie Hellman for key exchange" and then it turns out that there's a critical flaw in Diffie Hellman, then you're basically an idiot who's written a useless standard. (Or insert DVD/Bluray crack here, but I know little of those).
So, the most you ever do is standardize the interface to select the crypto bits (and the data exchange and that trivial stuff), not the behavior of the crypto bits, unlike the rest of a standard.
Citation?
Exactly!
OK, sometimes you have to go to blogs related to the news to find the commenters pointing out that the story lacked even the basic fact-checking of Google and Wikipedia, but I've seen the same on the story itself
"Journalism" isn't "what reporters do", but narration of the "facts on the ground". Facts in quotes, since shortly after an event, when the news is hot, we rarely know the truth of anything. (Heck, is Obama a Muslim? I think he's more of a Muslim than Bill Clinton was a Christian: that's a religious group he wouldn't mind political support from, isn't going to actively antagonize, and will occasionally give a nod to in a speech.)
Comments sections often call out mistakes in reporting (and it's basically all mistakes, as you'll know if you've ever been involved in something reported, or especially if you've been interviewed), or add details or contrary points of view. That's journalism.
They have everything to due with free expression, which is ultimately the point of journalism. Given your posting history, I suspect you usually agree with the official narrative the papers generally print instead of the truth, and get upset when people point out that it's all BS, so I can understand your emotional response here. But you should still support free expression, even when you disagree with it.
Plasma? What is this, 1998?
Fairly new plasma. Still beats any LCD screen for movies. OLED might win in the end, but those were ~$10k at the time, so I didn't bother to compare.
Yes, I am bemoaning the loss of the plasma screen, I still think it has the best blacks, but still.
I bought a 60" plasma screen last year. It has terrific blacks, from the panel itself, to a special non-glare coating, to a "round down" function to handle the case where the HDMI stream ends up encoding black as "almost black", and forcing it back to black.
Plasma TVs vanished from the bottom-end, but they still exist. OLED might genuinely replace plasma, though.
My home theater setup is a 60" plasma screen attached to my laptop. It's only used as a display panel, but it works fine for that (text isn't great, but movies are). I enjoy a real home theater setup over any tablet or whatever. I doubt that use is going away.
I think the big failure is that "Smart TVs" just aren't quite good enough to replace the "TV sticks", or at least not at a competitive price. But a big dumb display panel that looks great; that I want.
There are three parties in the US now:
* The Left, not materially represented in Congress, but Bernie Sanders is an example of a Left politician.
* The Right, not materially represented in Congress, but Ben Carson is an example of a Right politician.
* The Donor Party, which includes the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans in government (at least at the federal level), and which gets great and responsive representation.
Our government is very attentive and responsive to the best interest of the constituents who sent them to office. The problem is those constituents are the big money donors, not the people who are voting Democrat or Republican.
It's structurally possible to fix this though primary elections, and by "primary-ing out" incumbents. But we, the voters, need to start caring more about evicting the Donor Party guys than about whether Left or Right win. The Donor Party games us every year by calling the non-Donor Party guys "extremists" for daring to represent what the people actually want. Can we stop caring about how the mainstream media describes candidates? I'm doubtful, but it's possible.
It was established legal tradition in Britain for some time before the US war for independence that people were allowed to own guns because, even though hunting was illegal, guns weren't only for hunting, they could be used to defend one's home. It was common in the colonies (where everyone had guns, and hunting was legal) that every man was required to bring his gun to church on Sunday, in case a group of men with guns was required for any purpose. These guns were expected to be serviceable military weapons - a tradition going back to the late medieval period, where every man was required to own a weapon of war in case that was needed (and swords were very cheaply available after the plague, so real military weapons, not farm implements, were expected).
There are still several modern nations in which every man of age is required to own a modern military rifle (issued by the government). This idea that somehow the "right to keep and bear arms" excludes modern military small arms is a very modern contrivance, and not at all the intent of the Second Amendment. Heck, not just small arms - even 100 years ago cannon were typically bought for the town by the wealthy, and taken off to war when needed.
It's a very simple idea with centuries of legal tradition behind it: a free man has the right to own a gun, and not just for hunting, but actual military small arms. Totalitarian states disarm their subjects to prevent uprisings. Free societies have an armed populace to keep the government nervous about uprisings. It really is that fundamental.
You have to get licensed to own a gun, drive a car, and you have to register to vote.
You do not have to get licensed to own a gun, at least in states that show the slightest respect for the US Constitution. You do not have to get licensed to drive a car, unless you want to drive it in public places (and even then, driving farm equipment on farm-to-market roads doesn't require a license, as that was seen as an undue burden). You don't, in practice, have to register to vote, unless you live somewhere that requires an ID to vote - and most states see an ID as an undue burden.
You don't need a pilots license to fly a plane (well, most planes), if you stay at low altitude and away form airports. You shouldn't need to register to own a drone, or to fly one as long as you stay at low altitude and away from airports.
The best TV display panels come attached to smart TV B, and even mid-line TVs use a fast processor to avoid motion artifacts, so the smart TV BS is just piled on.
However, it's not like your TV is going to start using your wi-fi without configuring it. I'm not much worried about it spying.
Now I prefer that it remain pretty and nice from a code point of view, even at the cost of "adoption by the majority of users."
Didn't that ship sail long ago? Ubuntu, Gnome, etc, etc, all chasing adoption at the expense of what made Linux special for years now.
There's a serious risk that in low-Earth orbit if one has enough debris it could cause a cascade of destruction where debris hits satellites breaking them up into more debris which hits more satellites and so on. Such a cascade is called Kessler Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . If this happens it could render many orbits unusable for years.
It would be a pain, but there is some drag in LEO and small debris won't last forever. Also, you almost never get a stable orbit from a random trajectory. If you actually start blowing shit up in space, most of the shrapnel is going to be in an obit that intersects the Earth, or dense atmosphere (or even possibly escapes, if you're blowing shit up real good).
deliberately destroying satellites should maybe be considered a war crime
The winners decide what's a war crime, and that mostly consists of "being needlessly dickish to the winner". It's rather fundamental that the group with a monopoly on force decides what constitutes a crime. Treaties and tradition about what's allowed in war are mostly about winners swearing off stuff that didn't work well anyhow. (BTW, the last enemy the US fought that agreed to the Geneva Convention was the Nazis - none of our enemies for the past 70 years gave a shit about Western ideals and "war crimes".)
3 movies for such a short story was what killed it. I mean did it have to take 1 whole movie just reach the damn mountain?
That's key, but they also failed because the tone was wrong (and inconsistent). The Hobbit was a kids book back when those were allow to get scary - a fun adventure story with some dark moments for our hero. Our hero was clearly Bilbo: it was his narrative, and his character arc. The places where the tone got dark were specifically the places where he needed to grow, and find to courage to overcome the new difficulty. The mix of fun adventure and dark moments made perfect sense.
This was a very different tone than LOTR, which was fundamentally a war story for adults. The Hobbit film just didn't understand that, and rushed production is no excuse. The film never really felt like Bilbo's journey "there and back again." Almost all the filler was dark and dramatic, so much so that the original fun parts of the book were now jarring and inconsistent in the movie. The inclusion of a kooky Radagast could have worked with the original story, but felt completely out of place in the film.
But dammit, lose the cartoon rabbits. From the SW prequel trilogy and Jar Jar to the Hobbit and the rabbit sled, I support a Constitutional Amendment banning cartoon rabbits in prequel movies!
It's totally intuitive to discover new commands! Just type "man -k <keyword>"
CLIs will never be discoverable. UIs with menus and especially context (right-click) menus were great for discoverability. A UI where there's no menus, no confirmation that a change took effect, and no universal way to undo? No thanks.
Luxury brands are. And Tesla is a luxury brand - compare them to how Mercedes treats you if you buy an S Class, not how GM treats you.
Last I checked, Tesla's market cap was 1/4th of Ford's. Yeah, I think they have a bright future, but that's beyond optimistic with so many risks to Tesla future. Good product has little to do with good stock.
Regardless, having to install an old operating system is not what I'd call backwards compatibility.
Whatever the game is, Good Old Games will have it eventually. They have lots of very early games with goofy requirements, that run effortlessly in my 64-bit Win7 gaming machine.
Games written for 10-years-ago Windows tend to run fine with the emulation built into Win7. Games that actually followed the MS rules to ensure compatibility (rare, but they exist) from last millennium work. Starcraft released 17 years ago and still works. I'm not sure if I can drop in my Diablo CD from 19 years ago (haven't tried it), but the download I bought from Blizzard works fine. I think I've run Warcraft 1, from 21 years ago, straight from the CD on my current PC, but I could be thinking of the previous one.
That all sounds like amazing backwards compatibility to me.
I suspect you might well be surprised at the hardware used by people who use Slashdot. With a few exceptions, I think the majority of people here seem quite intelligent and logical but have somewhat of an aversion to change and unnecessary innovations.
Speaking purely for myself, I built my computer in 2011 with a i5 2500k and maxed out the RAM. Then I spent £60 on a low end graphics card because - why spend more when I have a console for gaming and a media player (WDTV at the time) for watching downloaded shows and movies?
I might be in the minority, but I don't think it will be a tiny minority.
What kind of geek builds a low-power PC? The only acceptable answer is "a broke geek"; otherwise turn in your geek card.
When I built my computer in 2011, I built a tiny god. It had all the fast, and 12 cooling fans. This summer I dropped in a new graphics card and it's still in the top 10% of benchmarks (and has half as many fans, a single new card was faster than my old SLI setup). I'm thinking about liquid cooling for my next build, not because extreme overclocking is the best way to get a fast system, but because I'm a geek, dammit.