I also can't see them using gooey soybeans and lobster brains a theme ingredients either. After all how many ways can you actually cook mac & cheese:-)
Actually, I think it would be great if they gave Iron Chef American a big ol' bowl o' natto to deal with.
Also, it just *won't* be iron chef without morimoto or sakai.
Must disagree. I think Michiba is a better Iron Chef than Morimoto ever was. Same wacky imagination but with so much control that you generally don't notice.
This isn't to say that Morimoto is a bad chef or to start a flame war over who is better. The point is that a good Iron Chef show isn't necessarily defined by particular individuals.
Even if they manage to do this, the estate would still eventually take a big enough chunk out of the movie company in actual and punitive damages to make it unprofitable. I believe there are already cases on record about using celebrity voice impersonators in radio ads, so I don't think movie companies would be dumb enough to try it.
You really expect them to? I've never seen nVidia say "Yeah, we know how to improve image quality, we just don't want to do it because it might make our card slower." All any company does is say what features they DO have and then show how fast it is...they don't list all the features that they could have added (or enabled, or not disabled) if they had wanted to.
Well, what happened according to the German article they linked to was that they dropped their textures from 32-bit to 16-bit when the drivers detected that they were running Quake. This would not happen in the spoofed Quack executable. Doesn't this strike you as a bit shady? People running benchmarks might not notice the degraded quality, but would certainly notice the higher framerates.
On a loosely related note, where'd you pick up a GF3 Ti 500? I just finally got one ordered yesterday because nobody online had any stock of them before then. At least for the Leadtek one I was looking for.
Actually, I found the Visiontek one staring me in the face at Best Buy of all places. Yeah, you can do better than $350, but not by more than 10-15% or so. A bit of an impulse buy, but I decided that being able to get it right then and be able to take it back myself if there was a problem was worth the extra money.
I replaced a Matrox G400 with a GeForce3 Ti 500 earlier this month. Y'know what? I can't tell the difference in 2D quality, and I don't play DVDs on my computer (that's what my DVD player is for). 3D speed is right now where most ground is being broken in video cards. The reason that it's useful to look at framerates over, say, 60 fps is that this generally translates to 'reasonable' framerates with more complicated scenes. If high-performance 3D isn't important to you, then you probably don't need to spend much money on a high-end video card anyway.
Your comment that, "Nvidia has been doing this for years," isn't really fair, anyway. nVidia has always been largely upfront about what rendering techniques are being used. ATi's gaffe here is that they're sacrificing quality for speed and not telling anybody about it. 3D benchmarks try to compare apples to apples as much as possible, but ATi is trying to sneak in an orange.
Reverse engineering of patented inventions is illegal.
Could you explain this one? Patent law makes it illegal to make use of someone else's patent as your own, but I don't see how looking to see how it works would be illegal. Especially since patents are published anyway.
It's not marketing. It's a design decision which also happens to have nice marketing side-effects. Higher clock rates versus a shorter pipeline is just a tradeoff much like CISC versus RISC. Intel's designers felt they could get more total performance out of the processor by lengthening the pipeline so they could clock the processors higher. If it also sounds faster to the consumer, so much the better.
If you're right about how it works, and if record labels go for this scheme, it would be painfully ironic... since what you're describing is almost exactly what they tried to sue mp3.com out of existence for doing.
Not quite. MP3.com was sued for allowing people to download music without the copyright holders' permission. Presumably these guys have worked out a deal giving them permission to do what they say.
What case would that be? A few years ago, the DOJ investigated Intel on antitrust measures. Intel and the DOJ quietly settled out of court; no harm, no fuss. Considering that AMD DOES make an Intel-compatible product with around 20% marketshare, I don't think you can really show that Intel is a monopoly, even if you restrict yourself to looking at Windows-compatible processors.
The previous poster admits that he has no evidence that Intel is doing anything illegal, but assumes that they must be anyway. I find this to be just a teeny bit presumptuous. Intel may have simply offered better terms than AMD. Since Gateway only has to pass the cost of CPUs on to the consumer, I don't think that price/performance is so much the issue as a streamlined manufacturing pipeline and/or a worry about public perception.
Actually, that's not entrapment either. Entrapment would be something along the lines of, "Hey, buddy, I'll give you fifty bucks if you let me test out my new speed gun." I.e., entrapment occurs when the police actually get you to do something you would normally be unwilling to do. There is a bit of a fine line, though.
Unfortunately, this is a bit like saying, "C++ can do anything D3D 8.X does, given proper libraries and hardware support." The purpose of a standardized API is, well, having a standard. If five different vendors implement extensions for a vertex shaders, each using five different extensions used in different ways, what's a developer to do?
Not only that, but it's not like "slow" renderers are going to be standing still while nVidia advances their technology. There is a heckuva lot of room for advancement before we can generate photorealistic images of any arbitrary environment. Wake me up when there's a GeForce that can do stuff like this in real-time (and don't forget the motion blur!), and then we can compare state of the art again.
That's not what a negative index of refraction means. That's just a relative index of refraction less than 1.
I tried to draw a picture of what the light path would look like, but the ASCII art set off the lameness filter.:-(>
Imagine a waist-high block made of a material with a negative IOR, and assume it's transparent (yes, opaque materials still have an IOR). You fire a laser from your hand at some point on the block in front of you. When the light refracts, it actually refracts back toward your feet, rather than the far side of the block.
Here's the kicker, though. The bill is predicated on the assumption that people are too clueless to download and install software themselves. By the same token, then, they ought to be too clueless to deactivate or remove software. The bill actually attempts to mandate censorware, not filterware, if you look at it through the eyeballs of those who drafted it.
Intel has made their intentions clear. They will not be using RDRAM for future chips and will likely not work with Rambus in the future. Intel's not real happy about the lawsuits and they're definately not happy about the price gouging by Rambus. It hurts Intel's business to have to rely on RDRAM. The memory is so expensive, people don't want to use the motherboards.
Wait a minute. Where did this come from? Last I heard, Intel still loved RDRAM.
I don't think the patent can be overturned unless DC tries to enforce it. Which they may be reluctant to do given evidence of prior art. This doesn't have to go to the courts to have real effects.
I remember seeing a modeller available for the Mac, though I don't remember the name. And then, of course, there was Typestry, which was sort of a modeller...
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a multidimensional array. That's an array of arrays. Two different creatures.
Not to mention that I think it was The Light Fantastic, not The Colour of Magic. Nobody's perfect, right?
I also can't see them using gooey soybeans and lobster brains a theme ingredients either. After all how many ways can you actually cook mac & cheese :-)
:-)>
Actually, I think it would be great if they gave Iron Chef American a big ol' bowl o' natto to deal with.
Also, it just *won't* be iron chef without morimoto or sakai.
Must disagree. I think Michiba is a better Iron Chef than Morimoto ever was. Same wacky imagination but with so much control that you generally don't notice.
This isn't to say that Morimoto is a bad chef or to start a flame war over who is better. The point is that a good Iron Chef show isn't necessarily defined by particular individuals.
Except maybe Chen.
Even if they manage to do this, the estate would still eventually take a big enough chunk out of the movie company in actual and punitive damages to make it unprofitable. I believe there are already cases on record about using celebrity voice impersonators in radio ads, so I don't think movie companies would be dumb enough to try it.
Anyone else notice the slashdot.org plug right there in the ruling? That is some awesome free advertising. :)
Um, so you think there will be people out there who care enough about this case to read this ruling in detail without knowing about Slashdot?
You really expect them to? I've never seen nVidia say "Yeah, we know how to improve image quality, we just don't want to do it because it might make our card slower." All any company does is say what features they DO have and then show how fast it is...they don't list all the features that they could have added (or enabled, or not disabled) if they had wanted to.
Well, what happened according to the German article they linked to was that they dropped their textures from 32-bit to 16-bit when the drivers detected that they were running Quake. This would not happen in the spoofed Quack executable. Doesn't this strike you as a bit shady? People running benchmarks might not notice the degraded quality, but would certainly notice the higher framerates.
On a loosely related note, where'd you pick up a GF3 Ti 500? I just finally got one ordered yesterday because nobody online had any stock of them before then. At least for the Leadtek one I was looking for.
Actually, I found the Visiontek one staring me in the face at Best Buy of all places. Yeah, you can do better than $350, but not by more than 10-15% or so. A bit of an impulse buy, but I decided that being able to get it right then and be able to take it back myself if there was a problem was worth the extra money.
I replaced a Matrox G400 with a GeForce3 Ti 500 earlier this month. Y'know what? I can't tell the difference in 2D quality, and I don't play DVDs on my computer (that's what my DVD player is for). 3D speed is right now where most ground is being broken in video cards. The reason that it's useful to look at framerates over, say, 60 fps is that this generally translates to 'reasonable' framerates with more complicated scenes. If high-performance 3D isn't important to you, then you probably don't need to spend much money on a high-end video card anyway.
Your comment that, "Nvidia has been doing this for years," isn't really fair, anyway. nVidia has always been largely upfront about what rendering techniques are being used. ATi's gaffe here is that they're sacrificing quality for speed and not telling anybody about it. 3D benchmarks try to compare apples to apples as much as possible, but ATi is trying to sneak in an orange.
Which is all well and good, but it doesn't explain why reverse engineering patents would be illegal.
Reverse engineering of patented inventions is illegal.
Could you explain this one? Patent law makes it illegal to make use of someone else's patent as your own, but I don't see how looking to see how it works would be illegal. Especially since patents are published anyway.
It's not marketing. It's a design decision which also happens to have nice marketing side-effects. Higher clock rates versus a shorter pipeline is just a tradeoff much like CISC versus RISC. Intel's designers felt they could get more total performance out of the processor by lengthening the pipeline so they could clock the processors higher. If it also sounds faster to the consumer, so much the better.
If you're right about how it works, and if record labels go for this scheme, it would be painfully ironic ... since what you're describing is almost exactly what they tried to sue mp3.com out of existence for doing.
Not quite. MP3.com was sued for allowing people to download music without the copyright holders' permission. Presumably these guys have worked out a deal giving them permission to do what they say.
The previous poster admits that he has no evidence that Intel is doing anything illegal, but assumes that they must be anyway. I find this to be just a teeny bit presumptuous. Intel may have simply offered better terms than AMD. Since Gateway only has to pass the cost of CPUs on to the consumer, I don't think that price/performance is so much the issue as a streamlined manufacturing pipeline and/or a worry about public perception.
Actually, that's not entrapment either. Entrapment would be something along the lines of, "Hey, buddy, I'll give you fifty bucks if you let me test out my new speed gun." I.e., entrapment occurs when the police actually get you to do something you would normally be unwilling to do. There is a bit of a fine line, though.
Unfortunately, this is a bit like saying, "C++ can do anything D3D 8.X does, given proper libraries and hardware support." The purpose of a standardized API is, well, having a standard. If five different vendors implement extensions for a vertex shaders, each using five different extensions used in different ways, what's a developer to do?
Radiance comes immediately to mind for open source. Not-so-open source programs like Blender and BMRT are also good.
Yeah? How long did it take to read your post?
Is that the appeals court upheld that Microsoft is guilty of illegally defending its monopoly. This clears the way for a whole slew of lawsuits.
Not only that, but it's not like "slow" renderers are going to be standing still while nVidia advances their technology. There is a heckuva lot of room for advancement before we can generate photorealistic images of any arbitrary environment. Wake me up when there's a GeForce that can do stuff like this in real-time (and don't forget the motion blur!), and then we can compare state of the art again.
I tried to draw a picture of what the light path would look like, but the ASCII art set off the lameness filter. :-(>
Imagine a waist-high block made of a material with a negative IOR, and assume it's transparent (yes, opaque materials still have an IOR). You fire a laser from your hand at some point on the block in front of you. When the light refracts, it actually refracts back toward your feet, rather than the far side of the block.
Here's the kicker, though. The bill is predicated on the assumption that people are too clueless to download and install software themselves. By the same token, then, they ought to be too clueless to deactivate or remove software. The bill actually attempts to mandate censorware, not filterware, if you look at it through the eyeballs of those who drafted it.
GNOME. Duh!
The article is light on details, but wouldn't cell phones be covered by this patent as well?
Wait a minute. Where did this come from? Last I heard, Intel still loved RDRAM.
I don't think the patent can be overturned unless DC tries to enforce it. Which they may be reluctant to do given evidence of prior art. This doesn't have to go to the courts to have real effects.
I remember seeing a modeller available for the Mac, though I don't remember the name. And then, of course, there was Typestry, which was sort of a modeller...