still pretty common on top of beige corporateboxen of the world; but not exactly setting the world on fire at retail or in consumer focused offerings
Thats because the resolution set the world on fire many years ago, but we both know that you didn't know that... what with leading off with bullshit like you did.
The reason OnLive gets a pass is because OnLive is a rapidly growing business dominating a completely different market (virtualized gaming) run by a veteran player in the industry, while toCloud is a rinky-dink outfit that has no real prospects for large growth that has to keep telling the world how they are "Virtual Desktop Superheroes" because its so easy to forget.
Indeed. Never use a debit card online for anything, ever. In fact, never use a debit card. Tell your bank that you do not want a debit card when you open a new account. Credit cards have legal protections, while debit cards are only a liability in comparison. The only time using a debit card makes any sense at all is when you have very bad credit, but the solution really isnt to use a debit card.. the solution is to fix your bad credit.
ATM cards are sort of the middle road where they do offer something that a credit card does not, but a simple change in lifestyle (keeping some cash around) makes even them a moot point.
The only option you had was to screw it up and be forced to re-roll, or not.
That may be the only option, but thats not what made it fun. What made it fun was the challenge of getting from your level 1 character to that final stat setup you have in mind. If your final setup requires heavy investment in level 30 skills, for instance, then until level 30 you have a steep hill to climb. Builds like the enchantress in D2 were an achievement in-and-of-themselves, unless you were getting rushed by higher level characters which moots your point (you can hardly complain about a lack of respeccing if you get yourself rushed through the game.)
If you think Diablo 2 (the multiplayer community anyway) was anything more than a perpetual item grind then you are kidding yourself. There was no building or experimenting in D2 because there was no respeccing period.
The only thing true here is the no respeccing. Prior to the expansion that ruined the game there were a dozen builds for each class that could solo Hell Act 4 without anything close to the best gear (which were Rare items, not Uniques, Runewords, or Sets). Only post-expansion is what you are saying true, when everything became immune to several damage types and when not immune was still highly resistant.
You complain about end-game item grinding but that is exactly what respeccing promotes, yet you complain about a lack of respeccing in D2. As far as I am concerned it is easy respeccing has single-handedly ruined multi-player RPG's... turned them into multi-player end-game grinders.
..and being a network administrator would be easier if every box in the universe ran the same version of the same operating system with the same hardware.
..and being an automobile mechanic would be easier if every car used the exact same identical parts as all other cars.
We should care that web developers have to do their job? They get compensated for doing their fucking job. They simply arent part of this equation. Of course web developers want an easier time of it. Duh. Next you'll tell us that the Pope is going to come out against a war.
On the opposite side, if the drug companies no longer develop new treatments; would a non profit based entity (govt, charity) do the work? and if they would then perhaps that is whats best for humanity?
What are the incentives then? Research for the sake of research? Fame without fortune?
Yes, governments throw money at research all the time.. but its a willy-nilly shower of small bundles of cash often for completely insane things. Did you know that a certain kind of beetle will only attempt to mate with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle? Did you want to know? Did you know that you funded this revelation if you live in the UK, America, or Australia?
Government doesnt care, nor is it motivated to maximize the common good.
Because raytracing uses so much less computing resources? Or, because you don't really know what it is?
For very complex scenes, yes it does use less resources. Raytracing grows logarithmically while Rasterization grows linearly. Intel estimates the scene complexity (whats visible) where Raytracing overtakes Rasterization is ~1 million polygons. After that, Rasterization has no chance to compete in efficiency.
The FDIV bug is the most well known because it effected pretty much everything that did lots of FPU work. Everything from games to business applications.
In two cases, the "undocumented" opcodes were really a normal opcode with a "hidden" operand.. "hidden" in the sense that an assembler (such as MASM) normally didnt give you the option to set the operand and filled it in for you (in these cases, the value '10' was forced, as the instructions were typically used for operations on binary coded decimals)
I cut my first x86 assembler teeth on the 80386, and even at that time these "undocumented" instructions were well known.
We are not talking about the start of the function, but the end.
Who is this "we".. are you, the anonymous coward, teamed up with icebike (68054)? Clearly you shouldn't be, since he most definitely stated his belief that a two-parameter function would pop its two input parameters near its final return statement.
anything the function has pushed onto the stack will be on the top of the stack, before the return functions.
What you are saying is not news to me. The problem with your argument is that in the x86-64 calling conventions (which is what the article is talking about) there are plenty of volatile registers to use. To be specific there are 7 general purpose registers (64-bit) as well as 6 SSE registers (128-bit) that are considered volatile. If a function really uses so many registers that it requires saving a few of the non-volatile registers, then the function is also most often going to be so non-trivial that it must maintain 16-byte stack alignment.
Only leaf functions can safely violate the 16-byte alignment rule and are allowed to push and pop willy-nilly, but leaf functions also dont need non-volatile registers themselves because they arent calling anything that might destroy the registers they use. So we are talking about a very narrow situation where the function is (a) A leaf function and (b) Takes many parameters (more than 4, certainly) in order to create the register pressure required to need to spill some of them onto the stack someplace other than the mandatory scratch stack space (for the first 4 arguments) required by the calling convention.
Indeed, even WIN64 uses the same essential calling convention because the hardware itself is designed with it in mind.. specifically the 64-bit structured exception handling requires 16-byte aligned read and write operations by design.
Pop two off the stack and ret to the calling routine seems fairly common to me. Lots of functions use two arguments and are called with near calls in various programming languages.
The target function of the call has no business pushing or popping its arguments, ever. It doesnt work. Never has. The caller pushes the arguments and then in some calling conventions (such as STDCALL) the target function removes them from the stack using the return instruction itself ("ret 8" will remove 8 bytes of parameters) while in others the caller itself is responsible for removing the parameters (such as CDECL)
Let me repeat that what you are describing is not possible. When the target function begins executing, the top of the stack is the return address. A pop will be popping that valuable return address, not the first or last parameter which are under it. To be specific, [esp] is the return address and [esp + 4] is the first or last parameter.
Now don't speak when you dont know what you are talking about. Lets be honest here.. you knew that you didn't... now get off my lawn.
If they knew for sure that it was going to cost many years out of their life I believe they might choose otherwise.
Certainly, but it is not always irrational for a person to be sure that they will get caught yet still commit the crime in some cases.
The people that calculate risk vs reward with regards to crimes are far worse for "society" than the people that just assume that they wont get caught. To this end it is precisely those that profit from crime in a business-like manner that should get the harshest sentences.
Remember that the individual (or corporation!) is in control. They can choose to only commit crimes when they have a positive expectation (using their own metrics of value) over many trials. The conundrum is that it is neither good nor evil to do so. Its simply rational.
Sure, I've got 5k available. That's enough for one good ER visit, maybe a cast and an ambulance ride, or just a few minutes in the OR. $5000 isn't even a drop in the bucket in terms of potential financial liability for healthcare.
Oh brother... you are awfully opinionated and vocal for someone that doesnt know what the hell they are talking about. You do know that you don't know what you are talking about, right?
Catastrophic coverage covers... these very things.. these catastrophes that you are itemizing...
Catastrophic coverage excludes general maintenance health visits.. things that you can afford out of pocket.. not things that cost tens of thousands of dollars...
So not only have you proven that you are being ripped off by being in a general maintenance pool that you arent taking advantage if.. you have proven that you are too ignorant to even know any better even when its explained to you.
Have a nice day forming those opinions and talking about them as if you were in a position of authority when you actually don't even know the basics of the subject you are blabbering about.... what a tool you are.
Without a lot of work being done, PhysX and the like are just a high latency wholly inefficient transaction. Since games must support people that cannot accelerate the physics, they also cannot do lots of it, culminating in PhysX just being that high latency transaction. It becomes just a bullet point on the box, rather than something advantageous.
Maybe in a few more years when games give up on supporting the current mid-range GPU's....
The real advantage to ray tracing is how it scales only logarithmically with scene geometry.
Games (and so forth) are using more and more on-screen polygons, which scales linearly with a rasterization but logarithmically with ray tracing. Ray tracing will inevitably be as efficient for the same quality as rasterization if things continue as they do, and from then on rasterization will never be able to keep up (just like bubble sort cant keep up with any O(N log N) sort for sufficiently large N)
But the real problem with ray tracing is anti-aliasing. All current ray tracers anti-alias by costly super-sampling, and unless the amount of super-samples is extremely high its quite plainly inferior in quality to how rasterizers do it. The solution is to not do ray tracing but instead do whats called beam tracing, but that has its own scaling issues with regard to reflection and refraction (beams that grow to encompass the entire world geometry) that make the current cache issues look like a joke in comparison.
I *need* medical insurance because I *may* get ill.
No, thats not why you need health insurance. You need health insurance because you cannot afford the out of pocket expenses of some illnesses. You seem to have a warped view of the role health insurance plays in society.
Do you have $5000 in the bank? If so, then why do you need coverage for anything that will cost under $5000? The fact is that if you have $5000 in the bank then you do not. Thats why there exists catastrophic health insurance plans.. its for actual smart people that actually know what health insurance is actually for.
You know what the United States health insurance reform mainly did? It made catastrophic coverage "not enough".. its going to be illegal to play it smart.
Slashdot Mirror
Video doesnt explain, but probably he uses taylor series.
Because 1280x1024 is a 17 or 19 inch 4:3 display
No, its 5:4, and has always been 5:4.
still pretty common on top of beige corporateboxen of the world; but not exactly setting the world on fire at retail or in consumer focused offerings
Thats because the resolution set the world on fire many years ago, but we both know that you didn't know that... what with leading off with bullshit like you did.
Refining is the bottleneck. More domestic oil doesnt increase gasoline supply nor does it decrease its demand.
From the link, "We have half as many refineries as we did in 1982, and they're not meeting demands."
The reason OnLive gets a pass is because OnLive is a rapidly growing business dominating a completely different market (virtualized gaming) run by a veteran player in the industry, while toCloud is a rinky-dink outfit that has no real prospects for large growth that has to keep telling the world how they are "Virtual Desktop Superheroes" because its so easy to forget.
Thats the elephant in the room, isn't it.
Your computer from 2005 has at best a Pentium D
No, at best it would have a dual core Athlon 64 or higher end Athlon 64 FX.
Indeed. Never use a debit card online for anything, ever. In fact, never use a debit card. Tell your bank that you do not want a debit card when you open a new account. Credit cards have legal protections, while debit cards are only a liability in comparison. The only time using a debit card makes any sense at all is when you have very bad credit, but the solution really isnt to use a debit card.. the solution is to fix your bad credit.
ATM cards are sort of the middle road where they do offer something that a credit card does not, but a simple change in lifestyle (keeping some cash around) makes even them a moot point.
And why was this re-vote denied?
Just theorizing here..
It seems to me that re-votes could be frowned upon because the act of releasing the results of the first vote might effect the second votes outcome.
The problem isnt this specific vote. The problem is obviously their voting method. Holding a re-vote doesn't address the problem.
The only option you had was to screw it up and be forced to re-roll, or not.
That may be the only option, but thats not what made it fun. What made it fun was the challenge of getting from your level 1 character to that final stat setup you have in mind. If your final setup requires heavy investment in level 30 skills, for instance, then until level 30 you have a steep hill to climb. Builds like the enchantress in D2 were an achievement in-and-of-themselves, unless you were getting rushed by higher level characters which moots your point (you can hardly complain about a lack of respeccing if you get yourself rushed through the game.)
If you think Diablo 2 (the multiplayer community anyway) was anything more than a perpetual item grind then you are kidding yourself. There was no building or experimenting in D2 because there was no respeccing period.
The only thing true here is the no respeccing. Prior to the expansion that ruined the game there were a dozen builds for each class that could solo Hell Act 4 without anything close to the best gear (which were Rare items, not Uniques, Runewords, or Sets). Only post-expansion is what you are saying true, when everything became immune to several damage types and when not immune was still highly resistant.
You complain about end-game item grinding but that is exactly what respeccing promotes, yet you complain about a lack of respeccing in D2. As far as I am concerned it is easy respeccing has single-handedly ruined multi-player RPG's... turned them into multi-player end-game grinders.
It also creates problems for web developers
We should care that web developers have to do their job? They get compensated for doing their fucking job. They simply arent part of this equation. Of course web developers want an easier time of it. Duh. Next you'll tell us that the Pope is going to come out against a war.
On the opposite side, if the drug companies no longer develop new treatments; would a non profit based entity (govt, charity) do the work? and if they would then perhaps that is whats best for humanity?
What are the incentives then? Research for the sake of research? Fame without fortune?
Yes, governments throw money at research all the time.. but its a willy-nilly shower of small bundles of cash often for completely insane things. Did you know that a certain kind of beetle will only attempt to mate with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle? Did you want to know? Did you know that you funded this revelation if you live in the UK, America, or Australia?
Government doesnt care, nor is it motivated to maximize the common good.
I believe the rivalry is between the CIA and the FBI .. and both of them are afraid of the NSA.
Because raytracing uses so much less computing resources? Or, because you don't really know what it is?
For very complex scenes, yes it does use less resources. Raytracing grows logarithmically while Rasterization grows linearly. Intel estimates the scene complexity (whats visible) where Raytracing overtakes Rasterization is ~1 million polygons. After that, Rasterization has no chance to compete in efficiency.
The FDIV bug is the most well known because it effected pretty much everything that did lots of FPU work. Everything from games to business applications.
In two cases, the "undocumented" opcodes were really a normal opcode with a "hidden" operand .. "hidden" in the sense that an assembler (such as MASM) normally didnt give you the option to set the operand and filled it in for you (in these cases, the value '10' was forced, as the instructions were typically used for operations on binary coded decimals)
I cut my first x86 assembler teeth on the 80386, and even at that time these "undocumented" instructions were well known.
We are not talking about the start of the function, but the end.
Who is this "we" .. are you, the anonymous coward, teamed up with icebike (68054)? Clearly you shouldn't be, since he most definitely stated his belief that a two-parameter function would pop its two input parameters near its final return statement.
anything the function has pushed onto the stack will be on the top of the stack, before the return functions.
What you are saying is not news to me. The problem with your argument is that in the x86-64 calling conventions (which is what the article is talking about) there are plenty of volatile registers to use. To be specific there are 7 general purpose registers (64-bit) as well as 6 SSE registers (128-bit) that are considered volatile. If a function really uses so many registers that it requires saving a few of the non-volatile registers, then the function is also most often going to be so non-trivial that it must maintain 16-byte stack alignment.
Only leaf functions can safely violate the 16-byte alignment rule and are allowed to push and pop willy-nilly, but leaf functions also dont need non-volatile registers themselves because they arent calling anything that might destroy the registers they use. So we are talking about a very narrow situation where the function is (a) A leaf function and (b) Takes many parameters (more than 4, certainly) in order to create the register pressure required to need to spill some of them onto the stack someplace other than the mandatory scratch stack space (for the first 4 arguments) required by the calling convention.
My lawn...
Indeed, even WIN64 uses the same essential calling convention because the hardware itself is designed with it in mind.. specifically the 64-bit structured exception handling requires 16-byte aligned read and write operations by design.
Pop two off the stack and ret to the calling routine seems fairly common to me. Lots of functions use two arguments and are called with near calls in various programming languages.
The target function of the call has no business pushing or popping its arguments, ever. It doesnt work. Never has. The caller pushes the arguments and then in some calling conventions (such as STDCALL) the target function removes them from the stack using the return instruction itself ("ret 8" will remove 8 bytes of parameters) while in others the caller itself is responsible for removing the parameters (such as CDECL)
Let me repeat that what you are describing is not possible. When the target function begins executing, the top of the stack is the return address. A pop will be popping that valuable return address, not the first or last parameter which are under it. To be specific, [esp] is the return address and [esp + 4] is the first or last parameter.
Now don't speak when you dont know what you are talking about. Lets be honest here.. you knew that you didn't... now get off my lawn.
512bit calculations aren't that expensive
Yes they are.
If they knew for sure that it was going to cost many years out of their life I believe they might choose otherwise.
Certainly, but it is not always irrational for a person to be sure that they will get caught yet still commit the crime in some cases.
The people that calculate risk vs reward with regards to crimes are far worse for "society" than the people that just assume that they wont get caught. To this end it is precisely those that profit from crime in a business-like manner that should get the harshest sentences.
Remember that the individual (or corporation!) is in control. They can choose to only commit crimes when they have a positive expectation (using their own metrics of value) over many trials. The conundrum is that it is neither good nor evil to do so. Its simply rational.
Sure, I've got 5k available. That's enough for one good ER visit, maybe a cast and an ambulance ride, or just a few minutes in the OR. $5000 isn't even a drop in the bucket in terms of potential financial liability for healthcare.
Oh brother... you are awfully opinionated and vocal for someone that doesnt know what the hell they are talking about. You do know that you don't know what you are talking about, right?
Catastrophic coverage covers... these very things.. these catastrophes that you are itemizing...
Catastrophic coverage excludes general maintenance health visits.. things that you can afford out of pocket.. not things that cost tens of thousands of dollars...
So not only have you proven that you are being ripped off by being in a general maintenance pool that you arent taking advantage if.. you have proven that you are too ignorant to even know any better even when its explained to you.
Have a nice day forming those opinions and talking about them as if you were in a position of authority when you actually don't even know the basics of the subject you are blabbering about.... what a tool you are.
Without a lot of work being done, PhysX and the like are just a high latency wholly inefficient transaction. Since games must support people that cannot accelerate the physics, they also cannot do lots of it, culminating in PhysX just being that high latency transaction. It becomes just a bullet point on the box, rather than something advantageous.
Maybe in a few more years when games give up on supporting the current mid-range GPU's....
The real advantage to ray tracing is how it scales only logarithmically with scene geometry.
Games (and so forth) are using more and more on-screen polygons, which scales linearly with a rasterization but logarithmically with ray tracing. Ray tracing will inevitably be as efficient for the same quality as rasterization if things continue as they do, and from then on rasterization will never be able to keep up (just like bubble sort cant keep up with any O(N log N) sort for sufficiently large N)
But the real problem with ray tracing is anti-aliasing. All current ray tracers anti-alias by costly super-sampling, and unless the amount of super-samples is extremely high its quite plainly inferior in quality to how rasterizers do it. The solution is to not do ray tracing but instead do whats called beam tracing, but that has its own scaling issues with regard to reflection and refraction (beams that grow to encompass the entire world geometry) that make the current cache issues look like a joke in comparison.
I *need* medical insurance because I *may* get ill.
No, thats not why you need health insurance. You need health insurance because you cannot afford the out of pocket expenses of some illnesses. You seem to have a warped view of the role health insurance plays in society.
.. its going to be illegal to play it smart.
Do you have $5000 in the bank? If so, then why do you need coverage for anything that will cost under $5000? The fact is that if you have $5000 in the bank then you do not. Thats why there exists catastrophic health insurance plans.. its for actual smart people that actually know what health insurance is actually for.
You know what the United States health insurance reform mainly did? It made catastrophic coverage "not enough"