I don't believe he did indicate that he was going to buy that particular DVD, though. He thought LXG-with-special-features was a great deal, so he got it, even though without the LXG-movie-only option he may not have bought LXG at all.
Optional low-priority service. If my ISP provided another IP I could use, with much higher bandwidth but no guarantees of consistent speed, I could use it for bulk downloads and other non-interactive processes while keeping webbrowsing and gameplaying on the "high-priority" IP.
This is assuming that you don't believe in sending ACK packets first, which I do - even if you're not congested, sending ACKs a few milliseconds faster can be a nice benefit.
That's true - it was a hypothetical example. Still, I personally wouldn't do it even if I had two years in jail and got to keep the money. I value my time pretty highly. Others, of course, may feel differently.
And you make bizarre strawman conclusions based on small amounts of data. Yup, you're a liberal!:D
I support appropriate punishments for crimes. Hacking into a school database, not doing anything, and reporting it to the authorities is zero years in prison. Murder, I'd probably place at around 20 years in prison. Hacking into a financial database and stealing billions, yeah, I could get behind 800 years in prison.
The crime, IMHO, is not the important part. The important part is how much damage is done, whether that's measured in fatalities or dollars. And yes, there's an approximate conversion ratio between the two - pretending there isn't is the height of naivety.
If the lost money causes two people to starve to death, or 100 people to die one year earlier than otherwise due to slightly inferior medical care, then you could easily argue that the lost millions is indeed a great cost than a single murder.
If you want a real challenge, try to figure out exactly how much emotional pain and depression is equivalent to one murder.
Sadly, some incentive to others to not follow in the person's footsteps is often helpful. Many people aren't fundamentally good - they're fundamentally selfish, and any legal system that doesn't take this into account is doomed to failure.
If I had some way to push a button and take one dollar from every American in the country, with a 5% chance of getting caught and no penalty besides losing the money I'd gained, I'd honestly probably push it. If the penalty was instead 80 years in prison, I wouldn't. Penalties are important.
The survey also revealed that more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own versus 14% of men.
That does not prove what they're trying to indicate at all. That indicates "women who read blogs are more likely to have one of their own". It doesn't say squat about how many women actually have blogs - if there's five women out there who read blogs, and 100 men, then that's one female-run blog and 14 male-run blogs.
The BSD licenses do not guarantee that the freedoms you have with said code will be preserved.
Yeah it does.
If there's a chunk of code that's BSD-licensed, you will always be able to use it, in any manner you want, without exception. That's guaranteed, forever.
It doesn't guarantee that other bits of code added to it will be free as well. It doesn't guarantee that a complete rewrite of that code will be free. But that particular code is always, always, always free - with both BSD and GPL.
The problem with that is griefers. A lot of high-level players would go after the newbies just for the sake of driving newbies out of the game. That's a bad idea. Having security based in any way on the player's advancement through the game is guaranteed to end up with an incredibly newbie-hostile game, and adding weird artificial barriers creates all sorts of bizarre effects at the borders which are rarely good.
The advantage to Eve's techniques is that even rank newbies can use the most secure methods - in fact, the less secure methods actually take a little further investment. There's no point in the game at which a high-level player can ruin your day at no risk to themselves. More frequently it's the other way around, and that's the way it should be IMHO.
Remember, for a lot of players money isn't the goal - anger is.
I'm going to second the way EVE Online does it. It's quite possible to be nearly 100% safe from gankers in space, even mining. However, there's basically three ways to mine: directly into cargo hold, into secure can, and into jetcan. The third is by far more efficient, but it opens you up to being stolen from.
I like that dynamic. "Here's some options. You can do it safely or quickly. Your choice." And anyone who chooses the "safe" method is, indeed, safe.
And anyone who chooses the "quick" method is liable to be stolen from.
I don't know how that could be done with thievery. Maybe "secure banks" are expensive. Maybe you have the ability to carry X pounds of loot, or buy a backpack that allows you to carry X*5 pounds of loot but can be stolen from. Maybe you can carry "thief traps" around - the equivalent to armed mousetraps - that trigger and hurt or unmask thieves, but they take cargo space. But I like that general risk/reward thing far better than arbitrary level barriers.
("Sorry, evil dude. You can't steal from that person. It's Not Allowed. Why not? Well, we don't really know, it's just impossible!")
Drive to the top of Mt. Wilson above LA, there are a zillion transmitting towers. The TV towers each put out hundreds of kilowatts of rf. If the birds and squirrels up there are doing ok, then it is hard to understand how a cell tower could cause problems.
"In Italy around 40 percent of the barn swallows return each year, whereas the annual survival rate is 15 percent or less for Chernobyl," Mousseau said.
Conclusion: Wildlife bounces back, breeds quickly, and is perfectly willing to live in an area where more than half of their population dies of various radiation-related issues every year. Nobody's claiming that TV towers are anywhere near that deadly (even the tinfoil hat people), and therefore the existence of birds and squirrels near TV towers means approximately zero.
Personally, I agree that these people are crazy. But your logic in proving them so is horribly, horribly flawed.
I very much doubt publishing the interface specs is going to help ATI and Intel.
Why not? My entire point is that the interface is complex and the inner workings of it are finely tuned to the needs of modern graphics accelerators. That's not knowledge you get for free, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if all three of those companies have come up with unique techniques for improvement (as well as missed techniques that the competitors found.)
If they have spent millions of dollars just coming up with an interface specification then they've done something very wrong. The interface specification is also not something they "plan to make money off" - they are making money off the hardware (and would sell the hardware into new markets if they provided such information).
That's true - and, as I mentioned before, the interface spec is an intrinsic part of the hardware. Modern hardware isn't "a chunk of silicon that the computer talks to via a hardware interface". Modern hardware is "a chunk of silicon and software that the userspace applications talk to via a software interface" - like OpenGL, or DirectX, for example. The drivers, and the interface, are part of the product.
That is fundamentally untrue - companies who base their products on Free software do this all the time and seem to do ok.
That actually is untrue. Most (if not all) free software companies make their money off support. The software isn't the product - the support is. Of course they're willing to give the software out for free, and do anything they can to improve it - better software means more people wanting support!
Now, if Redhat (as an example) posted all of their internal Linux documents and troubleshooting procedures online, and provided training for free, and asked that their support workers give out constant free help to random people in the community, then I'd agree that they were giving out their product for free. But Redhat's product isn't the OS. Redhat's product is the support. And that, they guard closely.
In keeping something secret if it doesn't benefit you - I don't see how publishing interface specs harms them.
It doesn't, directly. What it does do is help ATI and Intel quite a bit. That's where the "trade secret" part comes in.
Remember, nVidia isn't just trying to make good video cards. They're trying to make better video cards than anyone else. Giving your competitors the data you've spent millions of dollars coming up with and plan to make money off is very bad from a competitive point of view, and no company does this.
Sure, I can understand that, but you're still fighting the economic incentives.
Most people who buy hefty 3d graphics cards are gamers, and most gamers use Windows. The number of people who buy gaming graphics cards, install them on non-professional Linux boxes, and want them to have good 3d graphics, is approximately zero. (Yes, there's a market for professional workstation-class graphics cards, and I suspect they work just fine on the specific operating system versions with the specific hardware they're designed for. Gaming cards, games, and Bob's Awesome Linux Distribution fit none of those.)
Do you honestly expect nVidia to cripple 99.9% of their market in order to placate 0.1% of it? That's what changing the interface to be "simpler" would do.
Do you honestly expect nVidia to give up trade secrets in order to placate 0.1% of their market? That's what giving up the specs to their no-doubt carefully-tuned-and-precisely-designed PCIe interface would do.
Yes, what we have right now doesn't provide exactly what everyone in the market wants. Sometimes that happens. nVidia doesn't have even close to the financial incentive to open their drivers, and I honestly believe they're making the right financial decision. So, here we are.
And, honestly, it's not like 3d on Linux is completely impossible. As you've mentioned, Intel drivers are open - use Intel GPUs and it'll work just fine. Since you're more interested in open-ness than performance anyway, it shouldn't be a problem.
Some of those are simple data transfer interfaces. Most of those have drivers available at this point, either through reverse-engineering efforts or through actual drivers. Some of those are more complicated (it wouldn't surprise me if much of the printer logic is in software at this point, for example).
The same basic economic forces are pushing a lot of them. Software has to be written once and can be copied forever. CPU cycles, RAM, and bytes are cheap. Why not push more into software, and write all your hardware control as "driver" code?
You can divide drivers into three basic categories - drivers that are provided closed-source at best, drivers that are provided open-source by the manufacturer, and drivers that the manufacturer doesn't need to bother providing open-source because they're so fucking simple. A significant amount of the above falls into the latter category. And some doesn't. Shrug.
But does that mean software that runs on a CPU on the graphics card, or software that runs on the system CPU, stealing cycles from it? The latter is what some manufacturers are doing, and should not be doing.
Why not?
Seriously, why not? Do you honestly think they should be building an entire separate general-purpose CPU, and putting that on the graphics card? If they can achieve better FPS - overall FPS, including what's "stolen" from the CPU - by putting heftier more special-purpose hardware on the video card, and falling back to the CPU for the stuff the video card can't do well, why shouldn't they?
I fork over money for graphics cards because they make my games look better and play better. Fundamentally, I don't much care how they do that.
Yes, obviously, moving more stuff to the graphics card would be faster. It would also be more expensive. If there are better ways for them to use the transistors, it's fine by me.
That interface should be nothing more than the information of what the system and applications expect the graphics card to display, an encapsulation protocol to organize it into messages and responses, and a basic way to stream it across the bus (like PCI-Express x16, for an example with high performance). Those messages may possibly be a reflection of the graphical API calls done by the applications.
What we have these days in designs are the result of companies trying to cut their costs with the consumers be damned. These are bad designs, not so much because they steal CPU power from the consumer's computer, but more so because they create these massively complex interfaces that keep changing all the time, and driver code that is so buggy it is frequently the source of systemwide crashes or data corruption. At least if that buggy code is moved into a process, it can do its thing without taking down the whole system.
But we shouldn't have to be doing that. The hardware specific code should be inside the hardware, running on the CPU that comes as part of that hardware. Upgrades can be provided by the system CPU as a checksummed and, if necessary, cryptographically signed, blob (via a unified firmware image upload interface design that all devices should share that includes device match checks to be sure the correct image is loaded). Then maybe we'll start getting some real value add out of things like video cards, instead of getting cards that result in a net loss of CPU power when added in.
Why? You're making claims, but you're not backing them up.
Here's what I see. I see that I can go to the store and pick up a new graphics card. I can plug it into my computer and suddenly my games run significantly faster. Now, if I have a choice between Card A and Card B, and they're identical in every effective respect except that Card B makes my games run 10% faster with better shadows and uses some nasty techniques to do so that I completely don't have to care about, I'm buying Card B. There might be philosophical arguments to be made about whether Card A or Card B is better, but in all honesty, I see these philosophical arguments as similar to the whole Hurd vs. Linux debate. Okay, Hurd might be "better" - but Linux works.
What they're doing with the cards right now works. They've poured millions of man-hours into making them as fast as humanly possible within budget. If they determine that it's best to use CPU power for some things, make the GPU into a half-FPGA, and use a complex binary protocol that changes based on how the GPU is programmed, and they can make all of that stable - and my computer literally hasn't bluescreened in a year, so I'll give them that much - I think, just maybe, you should respect that they're making the right decisions for the priorities that people have. Which, generally, is game performance per dollar.
If you want to keep metaphorically extolling the virtues of Hurd because it's "better", though, I'm certainly not going to stop you.
Keep in mind how much of a modern graphics card's abilities are now located in software. More than once, a driver update has come out that has *massively* boosted graphics card speed. I suspect that modern graphics cards are really just ultra-high-speed multicore floating-point coprocessors, and most of the scene logic happens on the CPU. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if the interface between CPU and graphics card was a tightly guarded secret - main bus bandwidth, and bandwidth in general, is one of the major bottlenecks on graphics systems right now.
To make it even worse, I'm told that many wifi cards are only legal because they're not open-source. Sound bizarre? When they're sold, they're sold with certain restrictions on frequency and power. These restrictions are located entirely within the drivers. If they distributed open-source drivers, those restrictions would either have to be moved into hardware (expensive) or disabled (causes horrific problems with the FCC.)
We're well past the point where hardware interfaces can be described in half a dozen pages. We're well past the point where "hardware devices" even exist entirely in hardware. Most interesting hardware devices have complex interfaces that depend on functioning backend software.
I've tried it. It works quite well. The game mechanics are moderately simple, but I never found myself saying "man, this lag is so horrible with lots of players". While I feel a lot of their balance ideas could use some tuning, and that the game just doesn't work well unless you're in the largest battles with a good squad, if you do get into a large battle with a good squad you can have a fantastically fun time.
I haven't, honestly. I'm looking at the Wikipedia article and it looks like it's got a lot of stuff that I'm not so interested in, like more reliance on runtime tests and lack of templates.
While I don't write my own templates, I do use them extensively in the STL, and I'd really miss the typesafety of having them. It looks like Objective C is not nearly as obsessive about typesafety as I am.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe just do something anything that actually benefits someone somewhere.
Like entertaining thousands of people, for example?
I don't believe he did indicate that he was going to buy that particular DVD, though. He thought LXG-with-special-features was a great deal, so he got it, even though without the LXG-movie-only option he may not have bought LXG at all.
Optional low-priority service. If my ISP provided another IP I could use, with much higher bandwidth but no guarantees of consistent speed, I could use it for bulk downloads and other non-interactive processes while keeping webbrowsing and gameplaying on the "high-priority" IP.
This is assuming that you don't believe in sending ACK packets first, which I do - even if you're not congested, sending ACKs a few milliseconds faster can be a nice benefit.
That's true - it was a hypothetical example. Still, I personally wouldn't do it even if I had two years in jail and got to keep the money. I value my time pretty highly. Others, of course, may feel differently.
And you make bizarre strawman conclusions based on small amounts of data. Yup, you're a liberal! :D
I support appropriate punishments for crimes. Hacking into a school database, not doing anything, and reporting it to the authorities is zero years in prison. Murder, I'd probably place at around 20 years in prison. Hacking into a financial database and stealing billions, yeah, I could get behind 800 years in prison.
The crime, IMHO, is not the important part. The important part is how much damage is done, whether that's measured in fatalities or dollars. And yes, there's an approximate conversion ratio between the two - pretending there isn't is the height of naivety.
If the lost money causes two people to starve to death, or 100 people to die one year earlier than otherwise due to slightly inferior medical care, then you could easily argue that the lost millions is indeed a great cost than a single murder.
If you want a real challenge, try to figure out exactly how much emotional pain and depression is equivalent to one murder.
Sadly, some incentive to others to not follow in the person's footsteps is often helpful. Many people aren't fundamentally good - they're fundamentally selfish, and any legal system that doesn't take this into account is doomed to failure.
If I had some way to push a button and take one dollar from every American in the country, with a 5% chance of getting caught and no penalty besides losing the money I'd gained, I'd honestly probably push it. If the penalty was instead 80 years in prison, I wouldn't. Penalties are important.
Come on, guys. Get your facts straight.
If there's a chunk of code that's BSD-licensed, you will always be able to use it, in any manner you want, without exception. That's guaranteed, forever.
It doesn't guarantee that other bits of code added to it will be free as well. It doesn't guarantee that a complete rewrite of that code will be free. But that particular code is always, always, always free - with both BSD and GPL.
The problem with that is griefers. A lot of high-level players would go after the newbies just for the sake of driving newbies out of the game. That's a bad idea. Having security based in any way on the player's advancement through the game is guaranteed to end up with an incredibly newbie-hostile game, and adding weird artificial barriers creates all sorts of bizarre effects at the borders which are rarely good.
The advantage to Eve's techniques is that even rank newbies can use the most secure methods - in fact, the less secure methods actually take a little further investment. There's no point in the game at which a high-level player can ruin your day at no risk to themselves. More frequently it's the other way around, and that's the way it should be IMHO.
Remember, for a lot of players money isn't the goal - anger is.
Too many artificial barriers, IMHO.
I'm going to second the way EVE Online does it. It's quite possible to be nearly 100% safe from gankers in space, even mining. However, there's basically three ways to mine: directly into cargo hold, into secure can, and into jetcan. The third is by far more efficient, but it opens you up to being stolen from.
I like that dynamic. "Here's some options. You can do it safely or quickly. Your choice." And anyone who chooses the "safe" method is, indeed, safe.
And anyone who chooses the "quick" method is liable to be stolen from.
I don't know how that could be done with thievery. Maybe "secure banks" are expensive. Maybe you have the ability to carry X pounds of loot, or buy a backpack that allows you to carry X*5 pounds of loot but can be stolen from. Maybe you can carry "thief traps" around - the equivalent to armed mousetraps - that trigger and hurt or unmask thieves, but they take cargo space. But I like that general risk/reward thing far better than arbitrary level barriers.
("Sorry, evil dude. You can't steal from that person. It's Not Allowed. Why not? Well, we don't really know, it's just impossible!")
Drive to the top of Mt. Wilson above LA, there are a zillion transmitting towers. The TV towers each put out hundreds of kilowatts of rf. If the birds and squirrels up there are doing ok, then it is hard to understand how a cell tower could cause problems.
Despite Mutations, Chernobyl Wildlife Is Thriving
"In Italy around 40 percent of the barn swallows return each year, whereas the annual survival rate is 15 percent or less for Chernobyl," Mousseau said.
Conclusion: Wildlife bounces back, breeds quickly, and is perfectly willing to live in an area where more than half of their population dies of various radiation-related issues every year. Nobody's claiming that TV towers are anywhere near that deadly (even the tinfoil hat people), and therefore the existence of birds and squirrels near TV towers means approximately zero.
Personally, I agree that these people are crazy. But your logic in proving them so is horribly, horribly flawed.
I very much doubt publishing the interface specs is going to help ATI and Intel.
Why not? My entire point is that the interface is complex and the inner workings of it are finely tuned to the needs of modern graphics accelerators. That's not knowledge you get for free, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if all three of those companies have come up with unique techniques for improvement (as well as missed techniques that the competitors found.)
If they have spent millions of dollars just coming up with an interface specification then they've done something very wrong. The interface specification is also not something they "plan to make money off" - they are making money off the hardware (and would sell the hardware into new markets if they provided such information).
That's true - and, as I mentioned before, the interface spec is an intrinsic part of the hardware. Modern hardware isn't "a chunk of silicon that the computer talks to via a hardware interface". Modern hardware is "a chunk of silicon and software that the userspace applications talk to via a software interface" - like OpenGL, or DirectX, for example. The drivers, and the interface, are part of the product.
That is fundamentally untrue - companies who base their products on Free software do this all the time and seem to do ok.
That actually is untrue. Most (if not all) free software companies make their money off support. The software isn't the product - the support is. Of course they're willing to give the software out for free, and do anything they can to improve it - better software means more people wanting support!
Now, if Redhat (as an example) posted all of their internal Linux documents and troubleshooting procedures online, and provided training for free, and asked that their support workers give out constant free help to random people in the community, then I'd agree that they were giving out their product for free. But Redhat's product isn't the OS. Redhat's product is the support. And that, they guard closely.
In keeping something secret if it doesn't benefit you - I don't see how publishing interface specs harms them.
It doesn't, directly. What it does do is help ATI and Intel quite a bit. That's where the "trade secret" part comes in.
Remember, nVidia isn't just trying to make good video cards. They're trying to make better video cards than anyone else. Giving your competitors the data you've spent millions of dollars coming up with and plan to make money off is very bad from a competitive point of view, and no company does this.
Sure, I can understand that, but you're still fighting the economic incentives.
Most people who buy hefty 3d graphics cards are gamers, and most gamers use Windows. The number of people who buy gaming graphics cards, install them on non-professional Linux boxes, and want them to have good 3d graphics, is approximately zero. (Yes, there's a market for professional workstation-class graphics cards, and I suspect they work just fine on the specific operating system versions with the specific hardware they're designed for. Gaming cards, games, and Bob's Awesome Linux Distribution fit none of those.)
Do you honestly expect nVidia to cripple 99.9% of their market in order to placate 0.1% of it? That's what changing the interface to be "simpler" would do.
Do you honestly expect nVidia to give up trade secrets in order to placate 0.1% of their market? That's what giving up the specs to their no-doubt carefully-tuned-and-precisely-designed PCIe interface would do.
Yes, what we have right now doesn't provide exactly what everyone in the market wants. Sometimes that happens. nVidia doesn't have even close to the financial incentive to open their drivers, and I honestly believe they're making the right financial decision. So, here we are.
And, honestly, it's not like 3d on Linux is completely impossible. As you've mentioned, Intel drivers are open - use Intel GPUs and it'll work just fine. Since you're more interested in open-ness than performance anyway, it shouldn't be a problem.
Some of those are simple data transfer interfaces. Most of those have drivers available at this point, either through reverse-engineering efforts or through actual drivers. Some of those are more complicated (it wouldn't surprise me if much of the printer logic is in software at this point, for example).
The same basic economic forces are pushing a lot of them. Software has to be written once and can be copied forever. CPU cycles, RAM, and bytes are cheap. Why not push more into software, and write all your hardware control as "driver" code?
You can divide drivers into three basic categories - drivers that are provided closed-source at best, drivers that are provided open-source by the manufacturer, and drivers that the manufacturer doesn't need to bother providing open-source because they're so fucking simple. A significant amount of the above falls into the latter category. And some doesn't. Shrug.
Seriously, why not? Do you honestly think they should be building an entire separate general-purpose CPU, and putting that on the graphics card? If they can achieve better FPS - overall FPS, including what's "stolen" from the CPU - by putting heftier more special-purpose hardware on the video card, and falling back to the CPU for the stuff the video card can't do well, why shouldn't they?
I fork over money for graphics cards because they make my games look better and play better. Fundamentally, I don't much care how they do that.
Yes, obviously, moving more stuff to the graphics card would be faster. It would also be more expensive. If there are better ways for them to use the transistors, it's fine by me.Why? You're making claims, but you're not backing them up.
Here's what I see. I see that I can go to the store and pick up a new graphics card. I can plug it into my computer and suddenly my games run significantly faster. Now, if I have a choice between Card A and Card B, and they're identical in every effective respect except that Card B makes my games run 10% faster with better shadows and uses some nasty techniques to do so that I completely don't have to care about, I'm buying Card B. There might be philosophical arguments to be made about whether Card A or Card B is better, but in all honesty, I see these philosophical arguments as similar to the whole Hurd vs. Linux debate. Okay, Hurd might be "better" - but Linux works.
What they're doing with the cards right now works. They've poured millions of man-hours into making them as fast as humanly possible within budget. If they determine that it's best to use CPU power for some things, make the GPU into a half-FPGA, and use a complex binary protocol that changes based on how the GPU is programmed, and they can make all of that stable - and my computer literally hasn't bluescreened in a year, so I'll give them that much - I think, just maybe, you should respect that they're making the right decisions for the priorities that people have. Which, generally, is game performance per dollar.
If you want to keep metaphorically extolling the virtues of Hurd because it's "better", though, I'm certainly not going to stop you.
Keep in mind that truly modern 3d drivers include, at the very least, an optimizing compiler for pixel and vertex shaders.
I suspect most drivers include far more. We've come a long way since the first Geforce cards.
Keep in mind how much of a modern graphics card's abilities are now located in software. More than once, a driver update has come out that has *massively* boosted graphics card speed. I suspect that modern graphics cards are really just ultra-high-speed multicore floating-point coprocessors, and most of the scene logic happens on the CPU. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if the interface between CPU and graphics card was a tightly guarded secret - main bus bandwidth, and bandwidth in general, is one of the major bottlenecks on graphics systems right now.
To make it even worse, I'm told that many wifi cards are only legal because they're not open-source. Sound bizarre? When they're sold, they're sold with certain restrictions on frequency and power. These restrictions are located entirely within the drivers. If they distributed open-source drivers, those restrictions would either have to be moved into hardware (expensive) or disabled (causes horrific problems with the FCC.)
We're well past the point where hardware interfaces can be described in half a dozen pages. We're well past the point where "hardware devices" even exist entirely in hardware. Most interesting hardware devices have complex interfaces that depend on functioning backend software.
Am I the only person who has the sudden urge to download it and transcode it into mp3? Or even better, DRMed WMV?
:D
But RMS, information wants to be free, and this is just another form for it to freely take!
I've tried it. It works quite well. The game mechanics are moderately simple, but I never found myself saying "man, this lag is so horrible with lots of players". While I feel a lot of their balance ideas could use some tuning, and that the game just doesn't work well unless you're in the largest battles with a good squad, if you do get into a large battle with a good squad you can have a fantastically fun time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer
Always remember that people like this exist everywhere, not just in MMORPGs.
You missed the big one - WoW has centralized dedicated game servers, Halo 3 doesn't.
:)
Obviously, though, this reinforces your point
I'm not a huge fan of functional languages, and I'm also not a huge fan of garbage collection. Haskell, as far as I know, is both.
I haven't, honestly. I'm looking at the Wikipedia article and it looks like it's got a lot of stuff that I'm not so interested in, like more reliance on runtime tests and lack of templates.
While I don't write my own templates, I do use them extensively in the STL, and I'd really miss the typesafety of having them. It looks like Objective C is not nearly as obsessive about typesafety as I am.