I'm perfectly fine with games having arbitrary rules designed to make them amusing. I just don't understand why people get so emotionally involved with the 'natural'-ness of the ones for sports, while they are just fine with any old variation of other sorts of games, so long as they are agreed upon.
People get kicked out of chess tournaments for breaking the rules and using AI assists; people get hauled in front of Congress for using steroids in baseball...
My understanding is that displayport is royalty free(unless you include HDCP support, which most do, and Sony certainly wouldn't be one to skip), so I don't know what the thought process was. Just Sony being Sony, I assume.
Unfortunately, for reasons best known to Sony's inscrutable penchant for pulling proprietary weirdness out of the jaws of standardization, their Thunderbolt dock connects to a modified USB port, rather than Apple's preferred modified mini-displayport... W.T.F.
A great many athletes end up horribly unhealthy. Some of the more adventurous doping can chew you up quickly and unpleasantly; but high-level athletic performance will grind you down good and hard in the long run.
The one where even "what you were born with" seems to break down into pure handwaving is Women's high-level stuff. All the really weird phenotypes show up there: XYYs, Chimeras, burly intersex specimens of various flavors, all sorts of obscure genetic and phenotypic curiosities that definitely aren't XY males; but really, really rub people the wrong way as "women"...
I've never understood the nigh-jesuitical levels of logic chopping(with not infrequent descent into mere hand-waving) that go on surrounding "fair" and "unfair" advantages in high level sports.
You've got a tiny number of heavily selected freaks of nature, endowed by various quirks of heredity with highly atypical phenotypes, augmented by years or decades of carefully designed training, controlled diet, etc. whose handlers cry out every time somebody has the temerity to shoot a little synthetic testosterone instead of just expressing freakish amounts of it naturally "Oh, no! We have to set a good example for the kids! Professional athletes are just regular folks who get a good night's rest and eat their wheaties!". Similar things come up with, say, hemoglobin concentrations: Does your blood contain more iron than most steel alloys because your ancestors were the spacesuit people who live at 50,000 feet above sea level? No problem, come right in! Does your blood contain more iron than most steel alloys because your doctor has been extracting and re-injecting it? Banhammer!
There's actually an entire(rather obscure) industry of external PCI and PCIe connector products: ATI had their stab with the XGP, which unfortunately foundered because it only ever appeared in a few systems of no particular interest. Nvidia, to this day, has an external PCIe connector card for their higher-end Tesla products, for their legacy D870 enclosure or their current S2050 rackmount(both of which used a 16x PCIe interface card+proprietary cable to allow a normal desktop/workstation to connect to an external enclosure containing up to 4 Tesla cards). Various smaller outfits have had external PCI backplanes available for users who absolutely needed to run specialized ADC cards or similar industry-specific stuff on SFF workstations or laptops in the field. The Magma guys have been at it for a while now...
The question is not of Apple being innovative, which they wouldn't be; but whether Apple will, through force of just deciding that this is the new baseline, create a market large enough that such expansion gear won't be obscure, expensive specialty hardware...
You don't have to keep up with the state of the art(which would be impossible on any reasonably long timescale), you just have to ensure that whatever you do record is a subset, or a rediscoverable backwater, of the state of the art.
In this case, for instance, the fact that the computing of the future uses metastate quantum-entagled unobtanium photonic lattices or whatever doesn't make binary logic false, just outdated. Anybody from the future who is sufficiently enthused may find our level of development rather pathetic; but working out the basic elements of binary logic would depend on the same mathematical principles that it did when Boole worked it out in the 1840s.
It isn't exactly protocol agnostic, it's essentially an external 4x PCIe cable. Assuming the device in question doesn't flip out at finding itself a bit further than usual from the PCIe controller, there is certainly a lot of stuff you can plug in to it(with the addition of a case and one of those fancy custom Intel converter chips); but it isn't "agnostic"...
Given modern CnC/laser engraving tech, I'm assuming that 'rosetta stoning' some technical standards onto suitably chosen rocks would be as cheap, or cheaper, then ever. A competent hacker could probably knock out a 'pseudo-printer' driver that takes arbitrary print jobs and churns out control signals for an engraving system fairly quickly, at which point you'd just need a bunch of stone tablets chosen for geologic durability.
It wouldn't be cheap; but so long as the standard survived, or was infer-able, an optical disk reader in working condition would be merely a convenience:
Using the microscopy capabilities of the present, much less the future(assuming we aren't fighting wars for canned goods and desperately holding off the murderous rat-men, in which case it probably doesn't matter), getting a complete image of the pits and lands on the disc surface would merely be a matter of considerable tedium. From there, with knowledge of the standard, it would be an image processing task to recover the data(and, of course, those would have to be stored in a known format, not some encrypted nonsense that depends on a keyserver that went offline during the transgene crusades of 2031)...
The same is largely true of magnetic media. Having a device that costs $20, hangs off a contemporary bus, and is designed to handle the medium sure is handy; but a microscope and some patience is a functional substitute.
Oh, I'm hardly going to deny that the cheap seats have some significant reliability issues at times. I was more commenting on the fact that, in those cases where the cheap seats turn out to be good enough, people rush to treat them as a novel phenomenon even when they are just a DIY/jury-rigged version of something that you've been able to get out of the expensive side of the menu for ages...
Lovely stuff, usually called "cache" or "embedded DRAM". Low Latency. High Speed. Bowel-looseningly expensive in any significant quantity. Even money-no-object designs like Power7s have fairly puny amounts of the stuff.
In some embedded applications(smartphones and friends, most notably) "Package on Package" designs with a RAM die packaged on top of the CPU are pretty popular; but that is largely about board space savings, the two dice aren't actually coupled much more closely(which allows them to be tested separately, thus improving yields). With more general-purpose motherboards, the savings from omitting DIMM slots tend not to make up for the inflexibility of inventory. Devices where there are only a small number of necessary memory configurations(ie. graphics cards) generally attach memory directly, to save on connectors, routing, and signal issues; but the economics of motherboards are trickier...
There are legitimate questions to be asked about how many resources we should spend commemorating/preserving the past, vs. letting the past be past and spending forward; but to the degree that comemmoration/celebration/recognition of the past is a worthwhile enterprise, Bletchley park has always seemed mysteriously neglected.
The work done there was extraordinarily vital in terms of signals intelligence and cryptography, and not having that done would have hampered the Allied war effort significantly. The fact that that work also included some groundbreaking CS and early computing machine work is just icing on the cake. There are other WWII sites with many more casualties; but the only other WWII R&D developments that can even fall in the same order of magnitude are the Manhattan Project, Penicillin mass-production, and possibly Radar(The cavity magnetron: defeated Hitler and produces delicious popcorn in minutes!).
Letting the past keep to itself is a self-consistent position, albeit not one I endorse; but any sort of historical preservation of WWII stuff that doesn't have Bletchley park well up there seems downright ill-formed...
If history is to be believed, they will ignore the possibility that anything without a NATO stock number and a terrifying price tag could possibly be an issue and, once the contrary is proven in the field, will start talking about 'Improvised Surveillance Devices"...
In my capacity as a Certified Solution Architect(tm), I often warned that The Cloud was suitable only for dynamic workloads. But did you listen? Oh, no, you just went and let your static workloads build up in the Cloud, increasing TCO and, now, bringing down Disaster on your heads!
Can anybody explain for me why the state of BT, even on devices that amount to general purpose computers, is so fucked compared to other common interconnects?
I understand that, when one or both devices communicating are likely to be embedded ones for which driver update is impractical or impossible, the specification of assorted "Protocols" is desireable(and extremely convenient, as in the case of USB's "Classes"). What I don't understand, though, is why the various BT protocols seem to be so device/driver dependent. Some dongles support protocol X, others don't, others do with a cracked copy of BlueSoliel Y or higher...
Why is it up to the bluetooth device, or to its driver, to support high-level protocols(even on PCs) rather than just handling the low-level link stuff and letting the OS or userspace handle the clever stuff? It seems vaguely like discovering that your NIC is handling SIP in-driver, and if you happen to buy the wrong one, VOIP just won't work. I can understand why a maker of embedded chipsets might produce an IC combining a NIC with some VOIP-centered DSP stuff and an application processor, for the convenience of people building VOIP handsets and such; but encountering such a thing in a PC would be a bit of a shock.
Unfortunately, the example did a fairly terrible job on some very simple fill-in-the-blanks-and-supply-some-grammar style short answers. Not a heartening showing....
How dare they let their petty concerns over whether they get a pittance or a laughable pittance from Verizon's bloated coffers interfere with my right to vapid chatter?
Unless they've made some impressive advances in natural-language interpretation in the past few years that haven't trickled out into other products, I'm a bit puzzled as to how this scheme is supposed to work.
Even the (comparatively much easier) tasks of spelling and grammar checking result in a fairly steady stream of mistakes from computer systems. I can't exactly summon much optimism for the likely outcome of such a system trying to distinguish between a paper with a well supported thesis and a paper that contains some declarative statements, a few quotations, and the word "therefore" at intervals.
On the plus side, it should be pretty trivial to get the machines to do the same lousy job without the slightest consideration of the student's name/status/cuteness/willingness to flatter the professor; but what use is purely objective execution of lousy work?
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Are you suggesting that they will be wrong?
I'm perfectly fine with games having arbitrary rules designed to make them amusing. I just don't understand why people get so emotionally involved with the 'natural'-ness of the ones for sports, while they are just fine with any old variation of other sorts of games, so long as they are agreed upon.
People get kicked out of chess tournaments for breaking the rules and using AI assists; people get hauled in front of Congress for using steroids in baseball...
My understanding is that displayport is royalty free(unless you include HDCP support, which most do, and Sony certainly wouldn't be one to skip), so I don't know what the thought process was. Just Sony being Sony, I assume.
Unfortunately, for reasons best known to Sony's inscrutable penchant for pulling proprietary weirdness out of the jaws of standardization, their Thunderbolt dock connects to a modified USB port, rather than Apple's preferred modified mini-displayport... W.T.F.
A great many athletes end up horribly unhealthy. Some of the more adventurous doping can chew you up quickly and unpleasantly; but high-level athletic performance will grind you down good and hard in the long run.
The one where even "what you were born with" seems to break down into pure handwaving is Women's high-level stuff. All the really weird phenotypes show up there: XYYs, Chimeras, burly intersex specimens of various flavors, all sorts of obscure genetic and phenotypic curiosities that definitely aren't XY males; but really, really rub people the wrong way as "women"...
I've never understood the nigh-jesuitical levels of logic chopping(with not infrequent descent into mere hand-waving) that go on surrounding "fair" and "unfair" advantages in high level sports.
You've got a tiny number of heavily selected freaks of nature, endowed by various quirks of heredity with highly atypical phenotypes, augmented by years or decades of carefully designed training, controlled diet, etc. whose handlers cry out every time somebody has the temerity to shoot a little synthetic testosterone instead of just expressing freakish amounts of it naturally "Oh, no! We have to set a good example for the kids! Professional athletes are just regular folks who get a good night's rest and eat their wheaties!". Similar things come up with, say, hemoglobin concentrations: Does your blood contain more iron than most steel alloys because your ancestors were the spacesuit people who live at 50,000 feet above sea level? No problem, come right in! Does your blood contain more iron than most steel alloys because your doctor has been extracting and re-injecting it? Banhammer!
There's actually an entire(rather obscure) industry of external PCI and PCIe connector products: ATI had their stab with the XGP, which unfortunately foundered because it only ever appeared in a few systems of no particular interest. Nvidia, to this day, has an external PCIe connector card for their higher-end Tesla products, for their legacy D870 enclosure or their current S2050 rackmount(both of which used a 16x PCIe interface card+proprietary cable to allow a normal desktop/workstation to connect to an external enclosure containing up to 4 Tesla cards). Various smaller outfits have had external PCI backplanes available for users who absolutely needed to run specialized ADC cards or similar industry-specific stuff on SFF workstations or laptops in the field. The Magma guys have been at it for a while now...
The question is not of Apple being innovative, which they wouldn't be; but whether Apple will, through force of just deciding that this is the new baseline, create a market large enough that such expansion gear won't be obscure, expensive specialty hardware...
You don't have to keep up with the state of the art(which would be impossible on any reasonably long timescale), you just have to ensure that whatever you do record is a subset, or a rediscoverable backwater, of the state of the art.
In this case, for instance, the fact that the computing of the future uses metastate quantum-entagled unobtanium photonic lattices or whatever doesn't make binary logic false, just outdated. Anybody from the future who is sufficiently enthused may find our level of development rather pathetic; but working out the basic elements of binary logic would depend on the same mathematical principles that it did when Boole worked it out in the 1840s.
It isn't exactly protocol agnostic, it's essentially an external 4x PCIe cable. Assuming the device in question doesn't flip out at finding itself a bit further than usual from the PCIe controller, there is certainly a lot of stuff you can plug in to it(with the addition of a case and one of those fancy custom Intel converter chips); but it isn't "agnostic"...
Given modern CnC/laser engraving tech, I'm assuming that 'rosetta stoning' some technical standards onto suitably chosen rocks would be as cheap, or cheaper, then ever. A competent hacker could probably knock out a 'pseudo-printer' driver that takes arbitrary print jobs and churns out control signals for an engraving system fairly quickly, at which point you'd just need a bunch of stone tablets chosen for geologic durability.
Whether anybody would bother is much less clear.
No problem, we can just burn some bitcoin hashes to these new "stone-like" disks and pay the royalties that way...
Just whip the scribes harder. They were advertised as "52x" on the box, and by god they'll put out 52x or die trying!
It wouldn't be cheap; but so long as the standard survived, or was infer-able, an optical disk reader in working condition would be merely a convenience:
Using the microscopy capabilities of the present, much less the future(assuming we aren't fighting wars for canned goods and desperately holding off the murderous rat-men, in which case it probably doesn't matter), getting a complete image of the pits and lands on the disc surface would merely be a matter of considerable tedium. From there, with knowledge of the standard, it would be an image processing task to recover the data(and, of course, those would have to be stored in a known format, not some encrypted nonsense that depends on a keyserver that went offline during the transgene crusades of 2031)...
The same is largely true of magnetic media. Having a device that costs $20, hangs off a contemporary bus, and is designed to handle the medium sure is handy; but a microscope and some patience is a functional substitute.
Oh, I'm hardly going to deny that the cheap seats have some significant reliability issues at times. I was more commenting on the fact that, in those cases where the cheap seats turn out to be good enough, people rush to treat them as a novel phenomenon even when they are just a DIY/jury-rigged version of something that you've been able to get out of the expensive side of the menu for ages...
Lovely stuff, usually called "cache" or "embedded DRAM". Low Latency. High Speed. Bowel-looseningly expensive in any significant quantity. Even money-no-object designs like Power7s have fairly puny amounts of the stuff.
In some embedded applications(smartphones and friends, most notably) "Package on Package" designs with a RAM die packaged on top of the CPU are pretty popular; but that is largely about board space savings, the two dice aren't actually coupled much more closely(which allows them to be tested separately, thus improving yields). With more general-purpose motherboards, the savings from omitting DIMM slots tend not to make up for the inflexibility of inventory. Devices where there are only a small number of necessary memory configurations(ie. graphics cards) generally attach memory directly, to save on connectors, routing, and signal issues; but the economics of motherboards are trickier...
There are legitimate questions to be asked about how many resources we should spend commemorating/preserving the past, vs. letting the past be past and spending forward; but to the degree that comemmoration/celebration/recognition of the past is a worthwhile enterprise, Bletchley park has always seemed mysteriously neglected.
The work done there was extraordinarily vital in terms of signals intelligence and cryptography, and not having that done would have hampered the Allied war effort significantly. The fact that that work also included some groundbreaking CS and early computing machine work is just icing on the cake. There are other WWII sites with many more casualties; but the only other WWII R&D developments that can even fall in the same order of magnitude are the Manhattan Project, Penicillin mass-production, and possibly Radar(The cavity magnetron: defeated Hitler and produces delicious popcorn in minutes!).
Letting the past keep to itself is a self-consistent position, albeit not one I endorse; but any sort of historical preservation of WWII stuff that doesn't have Bletchley park well up there seems downright ill-formed...
If history is to be believed, they will ignore the possibility that anything without a NATO stock number and a terrifying price tag could possibly be an issue and, once the contrary is proven in the field, will start talking about 'Improvised Surveillance Devices"...
True enough. I was just trying to eke out a static + clouds = lighting joke.
In my capacity as a Certified Solution Architect(tm), I often warned that The Cloud was suitable only for dynamic workloads. But did you listen? Oh, no, you just went and let your static workloads build up in the Cloud, increasing TCO and, now, bringing down Disaster on your heads!
Can anybody explain for me why the state of BT, even on devices that amount to general purpose computers, is so fucked compared to other common interconnects?
I understand that, when one or both devices communicating are likely to be embedded ones for which driver update is impractical or impossible, the specification of assorted "Protocols" is desireable(and extremely convenient, as in the case of USB's "Classes"). What I don't understand, though, is why the various BT protocols seem to be so device/driver dependent. Some dongles support protocol X, others don't, others do with a cracked copy of BlueSoliel Y or higher...
Why is it up to the bluetooth device, or to its driver, to support high-level protocols(even on PCs) rather than just handling the low-level link stuff and letting the OS or userspace handle the clever stuff? It seems vaguely like discovering that your NIC is handling SIP in-driver, and if you happen to buy the wrong one, VOIP just won't work. I can understand why a maker of embedded chipsets might produce an IC combining a NIC with some VOIP-centered DSP stuff and an application processor, for the convenience of people building VOIP handsets and such; but encountering such a thing in a PC would be a bit of a shock.
Why is BT so weird?
Unfortunately, the example did a fairly terrible job on some very simple fill-in-the-blanks-and-supply-some-grammar style short answers. Not a heartening showing....
The fact that my original post wasn't trivially identified as sarcasm rather unnerves me...
Bloody hell. If I were paying for college and learned that Dr. GREP, LSB, POSIX. was doing the grading of my work I'd be seriously pissed.
An essay graded by buzzword analysis is really just a fill-in-the-blanks where you have to supply your own connective grammar...
How dare they let their petty concerns over whether they get a pittance or a laughable pittance from Verizon's bloated coffers interfere with my right to vapid chatter?
Unless they've made some impressive advances in natural-language interpretation in the past few years that haven't trickled out into other products, I'm a bit puzzled as to how this scheme is supposed to work.
Even the (comparatively much easier) tasks of spelling and grammar checking result in a fairly steady stream of mistakes from computer systems. I can't exactly summon much optimism for the likely outcome of such a system trying to distinguish between a paper with a well supported thesis and a paper that contains some declarative statements, a few quotations, and the word "therefore" at intervals.
On the plus side, it should be pretty trivial to get the machines to do the same lousy job without the slightest consideration of the student's name/status/cuteness/willingness to flatter the professor; but what use is purely objective execution of lousy work?