One objection: The Wii does not, in fact, excel at platformers. With the Wiimote held sideways, you have a single not-particularly-comfortable D-pad, two right thumb buttons, a badly-placed uncomfortable trigger under the left side of the controller, and several largely inaccessible buttons in the center. This is barely more control options than the original Nintendo had, and less than any console Nintendo has released since then.
With the Wiimote only, it is capable of platformers, if said platformers are rather simple. As an example: the Wiimote couldn't handle Braid.
With the Classic controller, or a Gamecube controller, it's pretty good. But claiming that the Wiimote "excels at platformers" is misleading at best and pure fanboy fabrication at worst.
(Disclaimer: I own all three current-generation consoles as well as all three last-generation consoles, and consider them to all be excellent consoles for their particular niche of games.)
What do they do? No fuckin' clue - I guess they're some kind of science god, and electrons wouldn't flow without their existence. Saw that ad for weeks driving to work, and at this point it's my standard example of Crappy, Useless Advertising.
Graphics cards were pretty much required in 1998. 3d graphics cards, sure, those were rare and high-end, but there's really not anything about 2d vs. 3d that makes the concept different (for the purposes of this conversation, at least.)
Because...why would you put more processing and thus more heat in one place that already has problems with that?
For the same reason that your CPU isn't spread up among thirty chips distributed throughout your laptop: efficiency and cost. Making one chip is generally cheaper than making two, and the amount of bandwidth inside a single chip is massively higher than what you can do with a northbridge.
And why install an overkill graphics processing unit inside the processor if most people won't use it anyway?
Every latest-generation operating system provides a 3d accelerated desktop. Every latest-generation computer provides the hardware to use it. Programs are going to be taking more and more advantage of that feature.
And why attach it to a part that's waaaaaay harder to upgrade and usually either requires a reactivation or reinstalled of your OS?
See question 1.
And how much harder would graphics hardware driver updates be?
Not at all. For one thing, there wouldn't *be* graphics hardware - it'd be more of a vectorized coprocessor. For another thing, why *would* it be any harder? It's not like people are having horrible trouble updating their USB drivers, even if the USB controller is part of another, larger chip.
And would it overheat laptops a hell of a lot faster by putting more heat in one location? (spoiler alert: yes)
Obviously, if they took existing laptop designs, and slapped a bigger heatsource in the CPU, yes. I'm assuming that computer manufacturers aren't functionally retarded, and they wouldn't do that. (Well, maybe some would, but their computers aren't going to be stable anyway.)
And where would the VGA/DVI output go if there's no graphics card?
The same place it already goes on motherboards that have integrated graphics? It's not like "computers without dedicated graphics cards" is a new concept, unless you've been living in a cave for the last decade.
If you put it somewhere else then why move the graphics processor further away from the outputs?
See question 1. Also, "why not?" - it's not like that extra four inches is going to be a serious problem.
As near as I can tell, your argument comes down to the common logical fallacy:
"They *could* do X. But if they do it the *stupidest way possible*, X is a bad idea. Therefore, X is a bad idea."
When determining whether something is a good idea or not, you have to assume it's going to be done well. If the person in charge of integrating CPUs and GPUs is anything less than a complete unalloyed moron, they'll have come up with solutions to all of those issues of yours.
Or, more likely, a rate ("60 Mbit/minute") along with a buffer ("10MB") which refills at that rate. Using less than the rate? Download forever. Using more than the rate? You get capped when you've eaten through your buffer.
200 gigabytes is a solid, 24/7 downloading at a rate of 80kBps. You are not downloading 200 gigabytes of ads, no matter how many porn sites you have open in your browser.
If someone's downloading 200 gigabytes of webpages every month, they're probably not browsing Slashdot. Rig up HTTP/80 with a standard refilling bandwidth bucket several times larger than anyone really ever uses, and if the bucket runs out, drop their priority back down to "bulk data".
As a bonus, if someone is downloading gigabytes of porn over thepiratebay, their web browsing will still be nice and snappy:D
These problems are not hard to solve.
(For that matter, you could just toss their entire internet connection through said QOS bucket. People downloading 200 gigs will get bad performance. People who aren't, won't. Done.)
She's being victimized by the file traders! And we, the ISPs, are powerless to help! If only there were some way to make Granny's internet connection higher priority. Some kind of . . . service quality protocol. Quality of Service, perhaps. We could call it that. But no such thing exists, of course, because if it did, we'd be using it by now. And we aren't. So.
But even if it did, it would rely on web traffic being easily recognizable. And it isn't! It's not like virtually all web traffic goes through a specific "port" or anything. And it's not like HTTP connections are easy to check for and flag as "higher priority". The technology *just doesn't exist*, and can never be developed. Ever.
And even if that all existed, well, of course it would be impossible to implement it! For reasons I don't feel like explaining right now. Just trust me. And I suppose we *could* just buy more bandwidth but, whoops, that takes too much money! Money which we've spent on . . . uh, we just don't have it. That's right. We don't have it. It's . . . I think someone else has it. Ask them. I guess, instead of solving the problem, we'll just have to whine at the lawmakers until they prop up our badly-designed business. Wait that's not right. Let me try that again. We'll have to complain in news articles and attempt to villainize our customers who foolishly took our contracts as contracts. No, no, no, that's not right at all. Man I just can't think of the proper solution right now.
Well, to make a long story short, we're too cheap to solve the problem QUICK LOOK OVER THERE it's an elderly person who's being inconvenienced by those damn hoodlums again! Think of your grandmother!
First off, tabs. Most people (myself included) like tabs. They're a wonderful organizational tool - on this computer I have six different Firefox windows, each with somewhere between five and thirty tabs. I need some kind of hierarchy just to be able to keep information handy, and the window-tab hierarchy is sufficient for me.
Second, one-process-per-window. It's a great idea to have one process per tab - I suspect the reason we moved away from it for a while was due to efficiency. Now it's coming back, finally.
I agree that one-process-per-window is a bad idea for the exact reasons you say - it's a bad design choice and a bad implementation choice. But tabs as a UI abstraction? Do not take away my tabs, thank you very much. I use them.
Except that, as I said, it is more complicated than that. Assume that at the "end point" you need a specific amount of current. As you increase the voltage, you also increase the resistance at the end point roughly proportionally to keep the same output current. The wire's resistance remains constant, meaning that the wire eats proportionally less of the overall current, making the entire system more efficient.
"Without changing anything else" doesn't work, because other things do change - you have to figure out which points are the constant points, and which aren't. In this theoretical case, the "desired power output" is the constant. (Or rather, it isn't, but if we can prove the wire's absorbed current decreases if the desired power output is held constant, we can also prove there is some point where the wire's absorbed current is constant while the desired power output increases, but that's nastier math and I just got up ten minutes ago.)
Yes, of course there's a reason the high voltage power line is larger than a lamp cord. But there's also a reason it's high voltage, and the reason is that power transmission gets increasingly efficient at higher voltages - at least until you start arcing. Then you're kind of fucked.
I pay $70/month for electricity, in the middle of the SF Bay Area, with several computers on 24/7. Even if I could get free electricity, if I had to move more than half an hour away, I wouldn't do it.
Yes, this could help the situation slightly, but unless power gets massively more expensive it won't be a huge improvement.
Actually, it does (sort of, I seem to remember the math's a little more complicated than that though the theory is sound), but as another reply mentioned, you also need double the insulation.
Considering that a 320gb hard drive is worth somewhere around $100 now, and that the process required to read data off it would theoretically cost more than standard drive recovery - which itself costs in the region of $2k - I highly doubt that anyone is going to take you up on your offer. However, this is not in any way proof that the process doesn't exist, it's just proof that your junky old 320gb hard drive isn't a valuable enough prize.
Depending on where you are, that may not even be illegal. In my area of California the rule is that you must not enter the intersection once the light turns red. If you're one inch in when it turns red? A-OK, that's legal. (As long as you exit the intersection within a reasonable amount of time, otherwise it's considered blocking the intersection.)
Why would nVidia bother with a pin-compatible processor? They already make northbridges - they'd probably just make their own northbridge as well, and start selling motherboard/CPU combos.
Hell, if they do start making CPUs, they're only a few small steps away from a fully nVidia-branded-and-designed hardware platform.
If you can come up with an answer to that, economists worldwide will praise you.
Unfortunately, we simply don't have one. Dollars, while the best thing we have at the moment, are not a linear unit of measurement. If I offered you a 20% chance of getting one quintillion dollars, vs. a 100% chance of getting 100 quadrillion dollars, you'd be a fucking moron not to take the latter, proving quite nicely that the value of a dollar is not linear and therefore is not a proper scale.
That's not to say we really have one, however - in some way, fundamental economics is stuck back in a barter system, in that we can try to compare different units but we don't have a common, single thing to base them all off.
The unit of measurement is simple - it's "value". "Worth". The actual quantizable amounts? Not so simple.
Your spring could leap out of the keyboard and hit someone else in the face. The newspaper you're reading could be caught by a sudden gust of wind, and slice a nearby Nobel prizewinner's artery open!
It is, in fact, as simple to write off as "what are the odds". First, you figure out the odds.
They're reasonably simple to guess at - apple has sold somewhere north of 100 million iPods so far, I'd wildly guess there's at least 30 million Minis around, call it an average of about 1.5 years that they've been around. Out of 45 million iPod-years there have been 14 fires. That's one failure per 3 million iPod-years. Assume a 747 carrying approximately 400 passengers, making a 12-hour flight, all carrying iPods, and there will be about one fire per 5.5 MILLION flights.
That doesn't say how many of those will cause the plane to crash, of course.
And then you compare that to the amount of inconvenience. Is it okay to check iPod Minis in luggage? (It shouldn't be - at least in the cabin, they're not surrounded by clothes!) If it isn't, then suddenly people's vacations become much harder to plan. That's a cost, and a significant one - yes, you can compare "vacations harder to plan" vs "hundreds of people dying", especially when the chance of people dying is that miniscule. Will people be irritated? Will losing his iPod be the one final factor causing someone to go berserk and attack the pilot with a plastic knife from his terrible airplane salad?
It's not just up to us to determine what risks we take. It's up to us to determine what risks everyone takes. You take this responsibility on yourself every time you step into a car, every time you turn on a gas stove, every time you pump your own gas or push a button on an elevator.
Personally, I'll happily take the one-out-of-5.5-million chance of an iPod fire (which may or may not even cause a problem with the plane) every time I make an international flight. I stand about twice as much chance of dying in an car accident every day.
But considering how easy a risk it is to mitigate, it does seem silly not to.
No no no no no.
You could get a paper cut tomorrow from a newspaper in a subway station, and it could get infected, and you could die of gangrene! Easy to fix: ban newspapers in subway stations!
What about that keyboard you're using? Did you know there are springs in keyboards? Did you know that a spring could pop out and go directly into your eye? We'd better ban springs in keyboards, it's easy enough to make horrible springless ones.
The proper way to tell what should be fixed is not how easy it is to mitigate. It's how expensive it is to mitigate versus the value of doing so. And note that neither of those are measured in dollars - they're measured in a much more abstract concept, "worth".
Weigh the chance and danger of an iPod bursting into flame on a plane (extremely low, and extremely low, multiplied together) versus the compounded irritation of every traveler in America being unable to bring the most popular music player on the planet with them on a plane (extremely high, times a huge number.) Sure, it would be easy to fix . . . but it's just not worth it.
Some P2P clients support a "pull links directly from clipboard" feature, where they watch the clipboard for any link with the format they use and automatically download what it's pointing to.
The danger in this - both the parsing, and the downloading - is obvious. I don't believe any clients run downloaded things by default, but it's still potentially quite nasty.
I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make here, but it's rather clear you're just trolling, so, hey! Have fun whacking off in a corner by yourself.
Actually, Supreme Commander uses that space for data, not for graphics - it's a very data-intensive game. Reducing graphics settings doesn't help much if at all. As I said before, I'm pretty sure that all of your claimed knowledge is highly obsolete at this point.
On top of that, even if it *was* just for graphics, RAM is cheap. Computer games are already kind of not worth the cost of the computer, but once you're playing games on a computer, you may as well shell out for a bit more RAM - it'll make everything faster, not just "the games can look better".
Slashdot Mirror
One objection: The Wii does not, in fact, excel at platformers. With the Wiimote held sideways, you have a single not-particularly-comfortable D-pad, two right thumb buttons, a badly-placed uncomfortable trigger under the left side of the controller, and several largely inaccessible buttons in the center. This is barely more control options than the original Nintendo had, and less than any console Nintendo has released since then.
With the Wiimote only, it is capable of platformers, if said platformers are rather simple. As an example: the Wiimote couldn't handle Braid.
With the Classic controller, or a Gamecube controller, it's pretty good. But claiming that the Wiimote "excels at platformers" is misleading at best and pure fanboy fabrication at worst.
(Disclaimer: I own all three current-generation consoles as well as all three last-generation consoles, and consider them to all be excellent consoles for their particular niche of games.)
FUSIONSTORM
MAKING TECHNOLOGY WORK
What do they do? No fuckin' clue - I guess they're some kind of science god, and electrons wouldn't flow without their existence. Saw that ad for weeks driving to work, and at this point it's my standard example of Crappy, Useless Advertising.
Graphics cards were pretty much required in 1998. 3d graphics cards, sure, those were rare and high-end, but there's really not anything about 2d vs. 3d that makes the concept different (for the purposes of this conversation, at least.)
Man, you've got some awful, awful arguments here.
For the same reason that your CPU isn't spread up among thirty chips distributed throughout your laptop: efficiency and cost. Making one chip is generally cheaper than making two, and the amount of bandwidth inside a single chip is massively higher than what you can do with a northbridge.
Every latest-generation operating system provides a 3d accelerated desktop. Every latest-generation computer provides the hardware to use it. Programs are going to be taking more and more advantage of that feature.
See question 1.
Not at all. For one thing, there wouldn't *be* graphics hardware - it'd be more of a vectorized coprocessor. For another thing, why *would* it be any harder? It's not like people are having horrible trouble updating their USB drivers, even if the USB controller is part of another, larger chip.
Obviously, if they took existing laptop designs, and slapped a bigger heatsource in the CPU, yes. I'm assuming that computer manufacturers aren't functionally retarded, and they wouldn't do that. (Well, maybe some would, but their computers aren't going to be stable anyway.)
The same place it already goes on motherboards that have integrated graphics? It's not like "computers without dedicated graphics cards" is a new concept, unless you've been living in a cave for the last decade.
See question 1. Also, "why not?" - it's not like that extra four inches is going to be a serious problem.
As near as I can tell, your argument comes down to the common logical fallacy:
"They *could* do X. But if they do it the *stupidest way possible*, X is a bad idea. Therefore, X is a bad idea."
When determining whether something is a good idea or not, you have to assume it's going to be done well. If the person in charge of integrating CPUs and GPUs is anything less than a complete unalloyed moron, they'll have come up with solutions to all of those issues of yours.
In courts? If they work, I want them used in government. Specifically, elections.
Or, more likely, a rate ("60 Mbit/minute") along with a buffer ("10MB") which refills at that rate. Using less than the rate? Download forever. Using more than the rate? You get capped when you've eaten through your buffer.
200 gigabytes is a solid, 24/7 downloading at a rate of 80kBps. You are not downloading 200 gigabytes of ads, no matter how many porn sites you have open in your browser.
If someone's downloading 200 gigabytes of webpages every month, they're probably not browsing Slashdot. Rig up HTTP/80 with a standard refilling bandwidth bucket several times larger than anyone really ever uses, and if the bucket runs out, drop their priority back down to "bulk data".
As a bonus, if someone is downloading gigabytes of porn over thepiratebay, their web browsing will still be nice and snappy :D
These problems are not hard to solve.
(For that matter, you could just toss their entire internet connection through said QOS bucket. People downloading 200 gigs will get bad performance. People who aren't, won't. Done.)
She's being victimized by the file traders! And we, the ISPs, are powerless to help! If only there were some way to make Granny's internet connection higher priority. Some kind of . . . service quality protocol. Quality of Service, perhaps. We could call it that. But no such thing exists, of course, because if it did, we'd be using it by now. And we aren't. So.
But even if it did, it would rely on web traffic being easily recognizable. And it isn't! It's not like virtually all web traffic goes through a specific "port" or anything. And it's not like HTTP connections are easy to check for and flag as "higher priority". The technology *just doesn't exist*, and can never be developed. Ever.
And even if that all existed, well, of course it would be impossible to implement it! For reasons I don't feel like explaining right now. Just trust me. And I suppose we *could* just buy more bandwidth but, whoops, that takes too much money! Money which we've spent on . . . uh, we just don't have it. That's right. We don't have it. It's . . . I think someone else has it. Ask them. I guess, instead of solving the problem, we'll just have to whine at the lawmakers until they prop up our badly-designed business. Wait that's not right. Let me try that again. We'll have to complain in news articles and attempt to villainize our customers who foolishly took our contracts as contracts. No, no, no, that's not right at all. Man I just can't think of the proper solution right now.
Well, to make a long story short, we're too cheap to solve the problem QUICK LOOK OVER THERE it's an elderly person who's being inconvenienced by those damn hoodlums again! Think of your grandmother!
You're confusing two somewhat-unrelated concepts.
First off, tabs. Most people (myself included) like tabs. They're a wonderful organizational tool - on this computer I have six different Firefox windows, each with somewhere between five and thirty tabs. I need some kind of hierarchy just to be able to keep information handy, and the window-tab hierarchy is sufficient for me.
Second, one-process-per-window. It's a great idea to have one process per tab - I suspect the reason we moved away from it for a while was due to efficiency. Now it's coming back, finally.
I agree that one-process-per-window is a bad idea for the exact reasons you say - it's a bad design choice and a bad implementation choice. But tabs as a UI abstraction? Do not take away my tabs, thank you very much. I use them.
That's pretty entertaining, since it almost exactly describes my shift from monogamous to polygamous. I'm going to have to remember that one.
Except that, as I said, it is more complicated than that. Assume that at the "end point" you need a specific amount of current. As you increase the voltage, you also increase the resistance at the end point roughly proportionally to keep the same output current. The wire's resistance remains constant, meaning that the wire eats proportionally less of the overall current, making the entire system more efficient.
"Without changing anything else" doesn't work, because other things do change - you have to figure out which points are the constant points, and which aren't. In this theoretical case, the "desired power output" is the constant. (Or rather, it isn't, but if we can prove the wire's absorbed current decreases if the desired power output is held constant, we can also prove there is some point where the wire's absorbed current is constant while the desired power output increases, but that's nastier math and I just got up ten minutes ago.)
Yes, of course there's a reason the high voltage power line is larger than a lamp cord. But there's also a reason it's high voltage, and the reason is that power transmission gets increasingly efficient at higher voltages - at least until you start arcing. Then you're kind of fucked.
I pay $70/month for electricity, in the middle of the SF Bay Area, with several computers on 24/7. Even if I could get free electricity, if I had to move more than half an hour away, I wouldn't do it.
Yes, this could help the situation slightly, but unless power gets massively more expensive it won't be a huge improvement.
Actually, it does (sort of, I seem to remember the math's a little more complicated than that though the theory is sound), but as another reply mentioned, you also need double the insulation.
I've seen security researchers say otherwise. I have to admit I believe them more than I believe some dude on Slashdot.
Considering that a 320gb hard drive is worth somewhere around $100 now, and that the process required to read data off it would theoretically cost more than standard drive recovery - which itself costs in the region of $2k - I highly doubt that anyone is going to take you up on your offer. However, this is not in any way proof that the process doesn't exist, it's just proof that your junky old 320gb hard drive isn't a valuable enough prize.
Depending on where you are, that may not even be illegal. In my area of California the rule is that you must not enter the intersection once the light turns red. If you're one inch in when it turns red? A-OK, that's legal. (As long as you exit the intersection within a reasonable amount of time, otherwise it's considered blocking the intersection.)
Bidding wars. :)
Why would nVidia bother with a pin-compatible processor? They already make northbridges - they'd probably just make their own northbridge as well, and start selling motherboard/CPU combos.
Hell, if they do start making CPUs, they're only a few small steps away from a fully nVidia-branded-and-designed hardware platform.
If you can come up with an answer to that, economists worldwide will praise you.
Unfortunately, we simply don't have one. Dollars, while the best thing we have at the moment, are not a linear unit of measurement. If I offered you a 20% chance of getting one quintillion dollars, vs. a 100% chance of getting 100 quadrillion dollars, you'd be a fucking moron not to take the latter, proving quite nicely that the value of a dollar is not linear and therefore is not a proper scale.
That's not to say we really have one, however - in some way, fundamental economics is stuck back in a barter system, in that we can try to compare different units but we don't have a common, single thing to base them all off.
The unit of measurement is simple - it's "value". "Worth". The actual quantizable amounts? Not so simple.
Your spring could leap out of the keyboard and hit someone else in the face. The newspaper you're reading could be caught by a sudden gust of wind, and slice a nearby Nobel prizewinner's artery open!
It is, in fact, as simple to write off as "what are the odds". First, you figure out the odds.
They're reasonably simple to guess at - apple has sold somewhere north of 100 million iPods so far, I'd wildly guess there's at least 30 million Minis around, call it an average of about 1.5 years that they've been around. Out of 45 million iPod-years there have been 14 fires. That's one failure per 3 million iPod-years. Assume a 747 carrying approximately 400 passengers, making a 12-hour flight, all carrying iPods, and there will be about one fire per 5.5 MILLION flights.
That doesn't say how many of those will cause the plane to crash, of course.
And then you compare that to the amount of inconvenience. Is it okay to check iPod Minis in luggage? (It shouldn't be - at least in the cabin, they're not surrounded by clothes!) If it isn't, then suddenly people's vacations become much harder to plan. That's a cost, and a significant one - yes, you can compare "vacations harder to plan" vs "hundreds of people dying", especially when the chance of people dying is that miniscule. Will people be irritated? Will losing his iPod be the one final factor causing someone to go berserk and attack the pilot with a plastic knife from his terrible airplane salad?
It's not just up to us to determine what risks we take. It's up to us to determine what risks everyone takes. You take this responsibility on yourself every time you step into a car, every time you turn on a gas stove, every time you pump your own gas or push a button on an elevator.
Personally, I'll happily take the one-out-of-5.5-million chance of an iPod fire (which may or may not even cause a problem with the plane) every time I make an international flight. I stand about twice as much chance of dying in an car accident every day.
No no no no no.
You could get a paper cut tomorrow from a newspaper in a subway station, and it could get infected, and you could die of gangrene! Easy to fix: ban newspapers in subway stations!
What about that keyboard you're using? Did you know there are springs in keyboards? Did you know that a spring could pop out and go directly into your eye? We'd better ban springs in keyboards, it's easy enough to make horrible springless ones.
The proper way to tell what should be fixed is not how easy it is to mitigate. It's how expensive it is to mitigate versus the value of doing so. And note that neither of those are measured in dollars - they're measured in a much more abstract concept, "worth".
Weigh the chance and danger of an iPod bursting into flame on a plane (extremely low, and extremely low, multiplied together) versus the compounded irritation of every traveler in America being unable to bring the most popular music player on the planet with them on a plane (extremely high, times a huge number.) Sure, it would be easy to fix . . . but it's just not worth it.
Some P2P clients support a "pull links directly from clipboard" feature, where they watch the clipboard for any link with the format they use and automatically download what it's pointing to.
The danger in this - both the parsing, and the downloading - is obvious. I don't believe any clients run downloaded things by default, but it's still potentially quite nasty.
I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make here, but it's rather clear you're just trolling, so, hey! Have fun whacking off in a corner by yourself.
Actually, Supreme Commander uses that space for data, not for graphics - it's a very data-intensive game. Reducing graphics settings doesn't help much if at all. As I said before, I'm pretty sure that all of your claimed knowledge is highly obsolete at this point.
On top of that, even if it *was* just for graphics, RAM is cheap. Computer games are already kind of not worth the cost of the computer, but once you're playing games on a computer, you may as well shell out for a bit more RAM - it'll make everything faster, not just "the games can look better".