I wouldn't say so. Mathematics is a set of rules and axioms, but you need physics to help design the set of rules that is useful for modelling real life. You could design a custom mathematical system to be however you want and still be self-consistent, but be completely non-useful for questions involving reality.
I really want to agree with you, but people keep finding ways that obscure, useless little pieces of purely abstract math suddenly explain something interesting about the real world. Sometimes it takes a century or two, sure. But, if you told the first people to work on imaginary numbers how useful their math would be for expressing many engineering things, and how it would be a major tool for engineering students learning to build very real things, well they'd just call you a moron. Likewise, boolean algebra, or any number of other mathematical concepts that make our current world possible and relatively comprehensible.
And this is different from USB how? My Epson printer has a similar function - plug a camera (not sure what kind offhand) into it via the USB port on front and it can print out directly from it without being connected to the PC. I've seen similar functions in other printer brands as well.
When you do this, does the Camera also have the ability to talk to the PC? This is the difference with Firewire. Everything can talk to everything. With USB, they just have a small computer acting as a USB host built into the printer, completely separate from the USB bus used to connect the printer to the computer.
Most websites are hosted on shared servers, without unique IP's. HTTP is fairly unique in accomodating that sort of a setup, but HTTPS really requires a unique server with a unique IP, so that the whole HTTP session can be conducted within the encrypted tunnel.
When IPv6 becomes common, I hope we can start to expect most shared hosting solutions to give a unique IP to each domain, etc., so that HTTPS will work fine on the run of the mill sort of site. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be at all surprised if such a golden age is still a decade away, given the slow adoption rate of IPv6, and then general momentum both at hosting providers, and with non-expert end users to do things as they are already done. (Why change what works?)
Not exactly automated, but I wouldn't exactly call typing 2 lines to be manual labor; and once you've got the sums you really just need the second line.
That assumes that all the PDF's start out valid, and will never be validly changed. What you really want is something like just using ghostscript to render each PDF to a temporary image, and then an automated check to make sure the image isn't 100% blank. (Or, just accepting the result if ghostscript doesn't exit with an error, and assume that the PDF has content. That's even easier. Pretty much just a bash one liner. Well, maybe three or four liner if you want it to be readable...)
This smells like a stunt. Lieberman was probably expecting them to refuse him entirely, and use that to incite outrage to further his agenda. It looks like Youtube saw through it, and took the responsible course of action by fairly applying their community standards. Now Lieberman will have to openly admit that he wants to limit free speech if he wants to push this further, because he can't claim that they're unfairly supporting one viewpoint by keeping the majority of the content which did not violate the standards.
It doesn't just smell like a stunt. No reasonable person could consider it anything else. If he was that concerned about the videos, why not just click the report link, instead of compiling a list of them and announcing them to the world. Thus, delaying informing google, and attracting publicity to the videos before they can be taken down? Yes, it was just an attempt to ruffle feathers and get people hufffy based on vague accusations. And, it means that the modicum of respect I still carried for Lieberman is something he is pushing hard to remove completely.
Well it may just be the other way around: provide better support for (3rd party!) closed formats on a Windows version of Blender (and if possible, only there). How? Let me guess - cut a deal with such a 3rd party and have them provide detailed format specs (privately to Microsoft), and code up a closed-source binary blob only useable by a Windows version of Blender?
My gut reaction was similar. Something like, "how can we get you to use DirectShow API's and such to have some additional file formats transparently supported only on Windows." MS can provide support, so that Blender can deal with system installed codecs, and ASF files, WMF images and Zune content, and whatever else that is pretty easy on Windows, but would be hard to support on other platforms. The more users start posting tutorial scenes with textures and whatnot that are only read by the Windows version of Blender, the more the community is tied to the Windows platform. Possibly even Direct3D API's for dealing with things like ".x" D3D mesh files for geometry.
Frankly, I'm surprised Apple hasn't been way out in front with this. They have QuickTime, which is a set of API's that can be insanely useful for dealing with a whole bunch of different sorts of media content. But, they really only cater to the walled garden of "real" Mac developers. It's a poorly documented API, with terrible sample code. It is also not that hard to use for adding movie support to your own code. I am currently using it on Windows, using OpenGL to display and composite a bunch of layers of video. A good solid API cleanup (which has sort of been happening in fits and starts for years) and a massive documentation and outreach improvement (which seems nowhere in sight) could turn it into something that zillions of programmers use if that have a multimedia program that runs on Mac (or Windows).
If we just need a few years of development to get truly photo-realistic images in real time, then why can't why make those realistic images right now in less than real-time? I mean, sure Hollywood visual effects are great, but they are never perfect. And, that's with a zillion artists working day and night to make frames that often take many hours to render when all is said and done. And, when it comes to people, they aren't even great. Crossing the uncanny valley isn't about FLOPS. It's about creating the content to throw those FLOPS at. It's going to take a long, long time before you have the algorithms in place that can simulate, animate, and render a realistic person. Not that it won't happen. It probably will. I just think we may wind up with hardwrae to run those algorithms before we wind up with those algorithms. So, just pointing at hardware advances and shouting is probably a bit misleading.
My understanding (and IANAA) is that because Apple realizes the revenue from iPhone purchases over the course of two years, they can make changes to the product and it's no big deal. With the touch, they've already accounted for your purchase, so there's some arcane rule that says they can't give you additional functionality without charging you for it. I'm betting the "nominal" fee really will be nominal--like $2 or something.
If this was 1965, and the concept of new features in a software update was strange and bewildering to the accountants, the Sarbanes Oxley excuse might hold some weight. As it is, SOx isn't the reason they are charging. The reason is that somebody figured out that they could convince somebody to blame SOx. Once they realised that had a plausible excuse to get a few bucks, the accountant got a pat on the head, and Apple made a little extra dough. But, there is nothing in the law requiring you to charge for something you would just give for free. Motherboard manufacturers don't have to charge for a BIOS update to support a new CPU, even though it adds a new feature that didn't exist when you bought the board.
Gamers are not the only ones who like 3D acceleration.
Quickly and off the top of my head, here are two big ones: 1. Compiz/Fusion and the like is gaining popularity. 2. Some applications NEED good 3D or they crawl. See Blender for instance.
Of these, I would say gaming would be the least demanding - at least if my assumption that "stable is harder than fast" is correct.
Sure, Blender needs good OpenGL acceleration. But, nobody is going to be that concerned about getting an extra 1 fps in Blender. If proprietary drivers go twice as fast, or ten times as fast, then the open source devs would look like idiots. If the open source ones are ten percent slower, then 99% of people will be completely satisfied. Games are flashy, and they sell cards, and people will complain about getting killed by somebody with a faster machine because it couldn't possibly have anything to do with lack of skill. In Blender, you just need sufficient speed to work. If the guy next to you has an extra 2 fps, it doesn't make him appreciably more productive, and you certainly can't justify needing to display faster than the refresh rate of the monitor in Blender!
Re:Alternative solution for a trusted LAN
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Multi-Threaded SSH/SCP
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I may be speaking out of ignorance, but doesn't that defeat the point of SSH?
SSH is one of those uberutilities that has a surprising amount of usefulness once you dig a bit. Sure, secure telnet functionality is great, and I use it a lot. But, I still use ssh on my own LAN where I don't really care about security. I use sshfs because it is easier and more convenient for me than bothering with Samba. SCP/SFTP to avoid bothering with ftp. I use it for forwarding ports between various machines, and I use it for forwarding X sessions. There are surely ways to accomplish all the same stuff that I use ssh (and the closely related stuff like scp) for without using ssh, but I'd just rather not bother about it.
Defeating the point of ssh is like defeating the point of a morning star. No matter how dull you make the point, the other 99 of them will still clobber you in the face.
Let me ask this way - assuming it didn't already exist, would a half-adder be copyrightable or patentable? Would it make a difference if it were expressed as RTL code or as transistors soldered together? Why? My response is that it is only patentable.
You are making the mistake of assuming there is only one approach to this issue. If you have a purely physical design, then no, you can't copyright that. You can copyright blueprints of it, or an instruction sheet telling how to build it, or a script that procedurally generates a PDF version of the schematic. If you are making chips made from some source code, you could license the chips themselves, and allow somebody to reverse engineer them by taking micrographs and disassembling them and whatnot and then build their own. You could license patents related to the chip and let somebody design their own related part and build that. You could also license the source code directly and let somebody build chips based on that.
You could also copyright and license the notes taken during design meetings, or recordings from the meetings, or internal emails discussing aspects of the design. the fact that hardware is patentable doesn't mean that other stuff related to the hardware doesn't fall under any other aegis, simply because the end result is intended to be a physical knick-knack.
Also IANA3DA, but isnt all the work of the finished rendering done with cpu power? like ray tracing etc. As far as im aware GPUs in 3d are only for having fancy real time graphics in the dev environment so you can see whats going on so pixel perfect quality isnt an issue. So if perfect quality of the GPU isnt relevant what actual benefits am i getting from spending $3499 on a Quadro?
I'm an old school Lightwave guy, and I'm in the process of transitioning to 2D compositing, so I can't claim to have all the Maya/XSI answers. But, in general, yes, all final rendering is done on the CPU. Basically all noteworthy RenderMan Renderers are pure CPU. One interesting distinction would be Gelato, which does use the hardware for certain things, as appropriate. Basically any major Renderer considers a pure software render the "standard" way to do things, with the GPU being an additional option. Things like ray tracing just aren't fast on a GPU. You can do a lot of cool fake effects on a GPU that look great in games, but some stuff with potentially random memory access patterns, and lots of conditionals just suck terribly on GPU. You also get the added benefit in software that it looks the same when rendered on every machine, and you don't have to worry about frames rendered on Nvidia not intercutting with frames rendered on ATi. (though, completely different CPU's can cause issues in RenderFrams - Alpha's used to render some procedural textures slightly differently from x86 in Lightwave, for example - something about a slightly different rabndom number generator, IIRC.)
And, does the big Workstation card matter: Sometimes. Depends on what you are doing. For some people, the hardware AA lines are enough to justify the cost. (AFAIR, the gamer cards still don't do that) Another thing would be overlay planes, and a few other features that aren't quite all there in the gamer cards. If you never use those features, then a cheap card may well be the best solution. I use a GeForce FX-5700 for Lightwave, Blender, and Shake, and had a trial Nuke on here. Works like a charm.
As much fun as it is to bash vista, I'd have to stand and be counted with the whole "had XP, and went out and bought Vista" crowd. For whatever reason, I actually LIKE the whole 'cancel/allow' mechanism that is UAC. I like getting buzzed when someone like Adobe Acrobat Reader decides that they own my system and just sets about installing crap. I like getting alerted with a little dialog box saying 'are you sure you want to do this' when mucking about with system settings.
This is just an honest question, not intended to be a troll. Have you ever used the equivalent authorization interfaces in other Operating Systems? It seems like everybody I know who has used Mac OS X, and had it occasionally ask for a password when doing something with the system, considers the Vista equivalent to be a really poor reimagining. The only people I know who really like the Vista UAC have simply never used Mac OS X, Gnome, or KDE enough to be familiar with those variations on that theme, and simply accept it as "better than nothing, I guess." After all IMHO, a pdf reader going on a rampage is something that I'd consider simply unacceptable, rather than something I'd want to be informed of...
*Simple* speech recognition. I want it to react to a keyword ("Computer", or "House", or similar sci-fi-ey) and then a few simple commands. Sphinx-2 seems ideal, but I'd need good dictionary files.
Be careful what you use as the trigger, or else you won't be able to use the words "House" or "Computer" in any conversation while at home without the house thinking you are trying to command it, and starting the dishwasher or something. I suppose you could always name your house something sci-fi-ish, or fantasy-ish that would never come up in conversations, like "Malthikar." For extra points, establish some sort of visual avatar piped to your TV or something so you can see him while you talk to him.
As for implementation, Mac OS X comes with some sample code for Dictionary based untrained speech recognition. Should do exactly what you want. Since you can give a list of all possible words (the various valid commands) it works better then free-form recognition for general text input. And, you don't have to train it, so anybody who knows the right things to say could work your house. That just leaves having your app do the commands once they are recognized. I'm completely unfamiliar with that end of things, but I know there are home automation doodads which presumably shouldn't be that hard to access from a program.
The training an accuracy seem like things that can be overcome, but I would really like to see a solution for things like punctuation and function keys, things that don't naturally come with speaking. Instead of having to say "delete that" or " delete" it would be nice to just have a button that I can hold down when saying things I want interpreted as commands.
Yes, and to follow along the same line of thought, nobody has ever come out with anything like a speech recogniser designed for programming. Personally, I always figured that a good speech recognition system for both text and commands would need to make use of sounds that don't occur as text. So, you could do something like a special double-whistle to enter command mode, or honk like a goose for undo. Likewise, you could use gibberish words as commands instead of "delete that."
Obviously, it violates the principle that all computers you can talk to should work like Star Trek. But, it seems that just like a command line interface, a spoken interface could be fantastically useful if only somebody would decide that the operator will need some instruction in a few special arcane incantations.
Then, all we'll need is an extension to C so that function prototypes include a way to express the pronunciation of a function name, so a spoken interface IDE could use something like intellisense to parse the API I am using and away we go.
Wait, are you a wizard, or did you misspell smell as spell? I mean, I don't usually nitpick this sort of thing, but when the parent post specifically references spelling or grammar, I feel okay about it. And, well, you did use the word "spell," which IMHO counts as a spelling reference.
Anyhow, just let me know if you spell magic missile on the wind, so I know if I need to duck, or get a dictionary, or something.
And when your software is licensed per processor at (let's say) $100 per cpu, your extra, unwanted, 50 processors quickly become a burden. I'd be willing to pay more for a crippled processor if it saved me money elsewhere, and there was no way to slice up domains to reduce the liability
With parallel hardware having moved from the realm of high end servers to bog standard consumer laptops, per- execution unit licensing may be about to see a sharp decline. It was based on the idea of per-system licenses, when a dual-CPU box was a strange and exotic way to duck the license fee. At this point, singe core systems are starting to become strange an unusual, turning that logic on its head.
Software that retains per-core licenses will simply move to a model of only running in parallel with as many threads/processes as you have paid for, rather than expecting you to license every core in a massively parallel system. Licensing for every physical core only makes sense when the default is a single CPU system, and you would need some specific reason to get parallel hardware. It's no longer logical when your customers will be getting parallel hardware as a matter of course, you just won't stay competitive.
So, worst case scenario, you have a 100 core processor, but your software vendor still has their head up their ass, and you can't move to another platform for some reason. Some people probably will be stuck in exactly this situation, even if I don't think it'll be common, especially if the boss insists that product X is the only way to do it because X-corp takes the boss golfing, and out to fancy lunches for product presentations, etc. So, why wouldn't there be decent partition tools? Current visualization systems will almost get you there. Run your app on a VM with X CPU's, and the app never needs to have any idea that the physical box has X+N CPU's. If the R+D effort proposed for this chip-crippler was instead invested on even better core management tools, it'd be a non issue completely.
With regards to the broader economics, I just don't see chip crippling as a valid path, because it ignores the very reason that we are moving to multi core platforms in the first place. As process technology improves, the "sweet spot" for the number of components on a chip increases, and the cost per component decreases. So, it becomes more and more economical to have ever more complex chips, with ever less economic benefit to having simpler chips. As the optimum chip size balloons, you need more and more complex designs to take advantage of the new blank canvas you have available to you. To take full advantage of the amount of silicon available to a modern design team using a traditional non-parallel CPU, you would need an enormous design team to create something of brain shattering complexity. The resulting design costs would drive up the price of the final chip, and delay it terribly. So, roughly speaking, for only $10,000 a copy, you could have a chip that is single-threaded and runs twice as fast as half of a Core 2 Duo that sells for $100 a copy. So, by moving to a parallel platform, you can use a simpler design, and a smaller design team, and still take advantage of the potential performance of the huge amount of silicon you have available to you. The more cores, the more you can multiply the effectiveness of your design team in the performance of the final design.
So, if it is most economical to have a design team of size X, and to produce a chip large enough to have 100 cores, it won't also be economical to invest a bunch of effort in crippling the design. The base assumption seems to be that a 100 core CPU would be such a dominant cost in the price of the platform that nobody would want to buy it. Instead, I'm pretty sure that if it makes economic sense to make the 100 core CPU, it makes economic sense to sell it with 100 cores, because by that time, the economics of chip design will make it such that a 100 core CPU isn't a dominant cost in the s
I don't think our society remembers being in a time of shortage - and I think that's a problem. It's easy to consume and throw away things if you don't think there will be a problem in getting more, and that attitude is pretty wasteful.
Anybody remember the show "Dinosaurs?"
"What if there aren't any more?" "What do you mean? I'd just go to the store and get more. That's what more means." "But, what if there weren't any left in the whole world, and the store didn't have any?" "Huh, I'm not sure I follow you?"
(conversation with the last surviving member of the most delicious species in the world trying to explain the repurcussions of eating him.)
just about that very nearly happened on a project I worked on in high school. A friend of mine, wearing a Trenchcoat was standing near the school entrance wwith his camera and tripod bags. (Mysterious looking black bags which could plausibly be big enough for guns.) Of course, administrators were already dubious of him because he was known to associate with me, and I had very long hair at that point. Everybody in that town seemed pretty certain that long hair was a clear symptom of raging psychopathy for some reason.
When asked why he was standing around suspiciously, he just managed to catch himself before saying, "I'm waiting for somebody so we can start shooting." I've always wondered what would have happened if he'd had a slight slip of the tongue and talked quicker than he could think on that occasion... Of course, since I was the one he was waiting for, whatever happened, it'd've been to the both of us.
But as to 4th/5th, I did mean the 5th. I disagree that the Constitution does not give us a right to privacy from individuals.
It's reasonable (though not exclusively correct) to say that the Constitution doesn't have anything to do with a right to privacy from individuals. The Constitution can be viewed purely as a document which defines the federal government and grants the government specific powers. The assumption in this view (which was apparently held by some, but not all of the founding fathers), is that people have inherent rights. They exist independent of any paper, or government, or anything else. The constitution is just a document written by a bunch of free people who already had a bunch of rights to create an entity and grant it only a specific set of rights. Since the framers had all inherent rights, they naturally had the right to create a government, and to define what rights it had. So, you would have an inherent right to privacy, and the only thing mentioned in the bill of rights amounts to, "by the way, we didn't specifically grant this new organisation authority to invade our privacy, so just to be absolutely fucking clear, this new government thingie does not have the authority to arbitrarily invade our privacy."
Likewise, how the first ammendment just talks about "congress shall pass no law..." Which wasn't meant to imply that state legislatures ought to, the text was just written that nobody would be dumb enough to create a state constitution which would grant a state the power to fuck with people's freedom of speech. Even so, we now have court cases where "our first amendment rights" can be used to overturn idiotic state laws.
So, while a right to privacy from other individuals is certainly consistent with the constitution, one strict reading would make it clear that the constitution doesn't address our rights -- it only addresses the rights we chose to grant to the federal government.
Obviously, this view was never unanimous, and is now often considered archaic.
Note that I am not an Obama supporter so this cannot be construed as bias.
(quote) it's almost impossible to pin him down on a lot of issues (end quote) Someone obviously has not looked very hard... why, there's a whole Wikipedia page devoted to his political positions, as with all the candidates.
I think I've looked harder than the vast majority of people I've talked to. Indeed, my feeling that he is hard to pin down is largely derived from having read that very page! For example, I said "Some of his statements are about how great big government programs which will necessarily distort the market are great. Sometimes he says the free market is super important." I refer you to the very link you provide which says both:
'Speaking before the National Press Club in April 2005, he defended the New Deal social welfare policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt...'
and also
'Obama wrote: "we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market...'
Big government social welfare policies are inconsistent with a free market. Big government programs like that and Keynes style planned economy policies distort the markets they interact with. That's not to say one way or the other is best, but a free market can't involve major influence of government, just as a matter of the definition of a free market.
In my previous post, I also said: "Carbon is bad, but he won't say whether or not he thinks building nukes is a good idea for reducing carbon emissions."
And, again, I refer you to that wikipedia page, which has the quote from Obama which directly inspired that statement:
"...it is reasonable - and realistic - for nuclear power to remain on the table for consideration."
So, he won't say, "I have considered nukes and they are [good | bad]." He's saying he doesn't support nuclear power, but he doesn't support not considering them. That's not really saying anything about the subject because he is deferring considering them. Until some unspecified point.
If you really look at a lot of what he says, you find soft inconsistencies, and really vague and noncommital stuff. And, hope. frankly, his waffling in order to avoid letting anybody disagreeing with him offend me more than if I disagreed with him. My two personal favorites in the current race as Ron Paul and Edwards, who have wildly different ideas about how best to move forward, but are at least willing to tell you what their ideas are. I'd love to see Edwards and Paul get into a really gritty, lengthy *debate* of a lot of the issues, like fiscal policy. I don't mean the dog and pony shows on TV that we have taken to calling debates. I mean a good solid meeting of disagreeing minds to respectfully present differing perspectives.
Sure, Paul is a batshit insane, and Edwards supports a larger government than I would hope for. Even so, they seem to call it like they see it. Which, I find more appealing than calling it like... HOPE!
Sure, there are other candidates who have been more specific than Obama, so just being specific isn't the only thing I look for in a candidate. I'm just not into evil, or saving the children, or 9-11, or McCain's war policy.
Anyhow, this is a dead discussion at this point, so I don't know if this will actually ever be read. Just figured I'd clarify my perspective a bit. Obviously, whoever you like in this race, the important thing is that your vote gets counted, whatever it is. So, feel free to disagree with me on everything except that.:)
Sure, lots of people write new stuff in C all the time. But, even if nobody did that, there are still a ton of people with existing C codebases that they are still working with. IIRC, Win32, Carbon, and GTK+ are all C API's, even if they have bindings to other languages. Lots of video and multimedia stuff is done in C, like the Dirac reference implimentation, gstreamer, ffmpeg, etc. When people talk about how C is dead, and nobody writes anything in C, they generally mean that higher level languages are used to glue together a bunch of C.
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"To find out if she has a boyfriend" is one of the good reasons to tap her phone, right?
I really want to agree with you, but people keep finding ways that obscure, useless little pieces of purely abstract math suddenly explain something interesting about the real world. Sometimes it takes a century or two, sure. But, if you told the first people to work on imaginary numbers how useful their math would be for expressing many engineering things, and how it would be a major tool for engineering students learning to build very real things, well they'd just call you a moron. Likewise, boolean algebra, or any number of other mathematical concepts that make our current world possible and relatively comprehensible.
When you do this, does the Camera also have the ability to talk to the PC? This is the difference with Firewire. Everything can talk to everything. With USB, they just have a small computer acting as a USB host built into the printer, completely separate from the USB bus used to connect the printer to the computer.
Most websites are hosted on shared servers, without unique IP's. HTTP is fairly unique in accomodating that sort of a setup, but HTTPS really requires a unique server with a unique IP, so that the whole HTTP session can be conducted within the encrypted tunnel.
When IPv6 becomes common, I hope we can start to expect most shared hosting solutions to give a unique IP to each domain, etc., so that HTTPS will work fine on the run of the mill sort of site. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be at all surprised if such a golden age is still a decade away, given the slow adoption rate of IPv6, and then general momentum both at hosting providers, and with non-expert end users to do things as they are already done. (Why change what works?)
That assumes that all the PDF's start out valid, and will never be validly changed. What you really want is something like just using ghostscript to render each PDF to a temporary image, and then an automated check to make sure the image isn't 100% blank. (Or, just accepting the result if ghostscript doesn't exit with an error, and assume that the PDF has content. That's even easier. Pretty much just a bash one liner. Well, maybe three or four liner if you want it to be readable...)
It doesn't just smell like a stunt. No reasonable person could consider it anything else. If he was that concerned about the videos, why not just click the report link, instead of compiling a list of them and announcing them to the world. Thus, delaying informing google, and attracting publicity to the videos before they can be taken down? Yes, it was just an attempt to ruffle feathers and get people hufffy based on vague accusations. And, it means that the modicum of respect I still carried for Lieberman is something he is pushing hard to remove completely.
My gut reaction was similar. Something like, "how can we get you to use DirectShow API's and such to have some additional file formats transparently supported only on Windows." MS can provide support, so that Blender can deal with system installed codecs, and ASF files, WMF images and Zune content, and whatever else that is pretty easy on Windows, but would be hard to support on other platforms. The more users start posting tutorial scenes with textures and whatnot that are only read by the Windows version of Blender, the more the community is tied to the Windows platform. Possibly even Direct3D API's for dealing with things like ".x" D3D mesh files for geometry.
Frankly, I'm surprised Apple hasn't been way out in front with this. They have QuickTime, which is a set of API's that can be insanely useful for dealing with a whole bunch of different sorts of media content. But, they really only cater to the walled garden of "real" Mac developers. It's a poorly documented API, with terrible sample code. It is also not that hard to use for adding movie support to your own code. I am currently using it on Windows, using OpenGL to display and composite a bunch of layers of video. A good solid API cleanup (which has sort of been happening in fits and starts for years) and a massive documentation and outreach improvement (which seems nowhere in sight) could turn it into something that zillions of programmers use if that have a multimedia program that runs on Mac (or Windows).
Because you don't shop at finer cheese shops. (Mmmm... Venezuelan Beaver Cheese!)
If we just need a few years of development to get truly photo-realistic images in real time, then why can't why make those realistic images right now in less than real-time? I mean, sure Hollywood visual effects are great, but they are never perfect. And, that's with a zillion artists working day and night to make frames that often take many hours to render when all is said and done. And, when it comes to people, they aren't even great. Crossing the uncanny valley isn't about FLOPS. It's about creating the content to throw those FLOPS at. It's going to take a long, long time before you have the algorithms in place that can simulate, animate, and render a realistic person. Not that it won't happen. It probably will. I just think we may wind up with hardwrae to run those algorithms before we wind up with those algorithms. So, just pointing at hardware advances and shouting is probably a bit misleading.
If this was 1965, and the concept of new features in a software update was strange and bewildering to the accountants, the Sarbanes Oxley excuse might hold some weight. As it is, SOx isn't the reason they are charging. The reason is that somebody figured out that they could convince somebody to blame SOx. Once they realised that had a plausible excuse to get a few bucks, the accountant got a pat on the head, and Apple made a little extra dough. But, there is nothing in the law requiring you to charge for something you would just give for free. Motherboard manufacturers don't have to charge for a BIOS update to support a new CPU, even though it adds a new feature that didn't exist when you bought the board.
Sure, Blender needs good OpenGL acceleration. But, nobody is going to be that concerned about getting an extra 1 fps in Blender. If proprietary drivers go twice as fast, or ten times as fast, then the open source devs would look like idiots. If the open source ones are ten percent slower, then 99% of people will be completely satisfied. Games are flashy, and they sell cards, and people will complain about getting killed by somebody with a faster machine because it couldn't possibly have anything to do with lack of skill. In Blender, you just need sufficient speed to work. If the guy next to you has an extra 2 fps, it doesn't make him appreciably more productive, and you certainly can't justify needing to display faster than the refresh rate of the monitor in Blender!
SSH is one of those uberutilities that has a surprising amount of usefulness once you dig a bit. Sure, secure telnet functionality is great, and I use it a lot. But, I still use ssh on my own LAN where I don't really care about security. I use sshfs because it is easier and more convenient for me than bothering with Samba. SCP/SFTP to avoid bothering with ftp. I use it for forwarding ports between various machines, and I use it for forwarding X sessions. There are surely ways to accomplish all the same stuff that I use ssh (and the closely related stuff like scp) for without using ssh, but I'd just rather not bother about it.
Defeating the point of ssh is like defeating the point of a morning star. No matter how dull you make the point, the other 99 of them will still clobber you in the face.
You are making the mistake of assuming there is only one approach to this issue. If you have a purely physical design, then no, you can't copyright that. You can copyright blueprints of it, or an instruction sheet telling how to build it, or a script that procedurally generates a PDF version of the schematic. If you are making chips made from some source code, you could license the chips themselves, and allow somebody to reverse engineer them by taking micrographs and disassembling them and whatnot and then build their own. You could license patents related to the chip and let somebody design their own related part and build that. You could also license the source code directly and let somebody build chips based on that.
You could also copyright and license the notes taken during design meetings, or recordings from the meetings, or internal emails discussing aspects of the design. the fact that hardware is patentable doesn't mean that other stuff related to the hardware doesn't fall under any other aegis, simply because the end result is intended to be a physical knick-knack.
I'm an old school Lightwave guy, and I'm in the process of transitioning to 2D compositing, so I can't claim to have all the Maya/XSI answers. But, in general, yes, all final rendering is done on the CPU. Basically all noteworthy RenderMan Renderers are pure CPU. One interesting distinction would be Gelato, which does use the hardware for certain things, as appropriate. Basically any major Renderer considers a pure software render the "standard" way to do things, with the GPU being an additional option. Things like ray tracing just aren't fast on a GPU. You can do a lot of cool fake effects on a GPU that look great in games, but some stuff with potentially random memory access patterns, and lots of conditionals just suck terribly on GPU. You also get the added benefit in software that it looks the same when rendered on every machine, and you don't have to worry about frames rendered on Nvidia not intercutting with frames rendered on ATi. (though, completely different CPU's can cause issues in RenderFrams - Alpha's used to render some procedural textures slightly differently from x86 in Lightwave, for example - something about a slightly different rabndom number generator, IIRC.)
And, does the big Workstation card matter: Sometimes. Depends on what you are doing. For some people, the hardware AA lines are enough to justify the cost. (AFAIR, the gamer cards still don't do that) Another thing would be overlay planes, and a few other features that aren't quite all there in the gamer cards. If you never use those features, then a cheap card may well be the best solution. I use a GeForce FX-5700 for Lightwave, Blender, and Shake, and had a trial Nuke on here. Works like a charm.
This is just an honest question, not intended to be a troll. Have you ever used the equivalent authorization interfaces in other Operating Systems? It seems like everybody I know who has used Mac OS X, and had it occasionally ask for a password when doing something with the system, considers the Vista equivalent to be a really poor reimagining. The only people I know who really like the Vista UAC have simply never used Mac OS X, Gnome, or KDE enough to be familiar with those variations on that theme, and simply accept it as "better than nothing, I guess." After all IMHO, a pdf reader going on a rampage is something that I'd consider simply unacceptable, rather than something I'd want to be informed of...
Be careful what you use as the trigger, or else you won't be able to use the words "House" or "Computer" in any conversation while at home without the house thinking you are trying to command it, and starting the dishwasher or something. I suppose you could always name your house something sci-fi-ish, or fantasy-ish that would never come up in conversations, like "Malthikar." For extra points, establish some sort of visual avatar piped to your TV or something so you can see him while you talk to him.
As for implementation, Mac OS X comes with some sample code for Dictionary based untrained speech recognition. Should do exactly what you want. Since you can give a list of all possible words (the various valid commands) it works better then free-form recognition for general text input. And, you don't have to train it, so anybody who knows the right things to say could work your house. That just leaves having your app do the commands once they are recognized. I'm completely unfamiliar with that end of things, but I know there are home automation doodads which presumably shouldn't be that hard to access from a program.
Yes, and to follow along the same line of thought, nobody has ever come out with anything like a speech recogniser designed for programming. Personally, I always figured that a good speech recognition system for both text and commands would need to make use of sounds that don't occur as text. So, you could do something like a special double-whistle to enter command mode, or honk like a goose for undo. Likewise, you could use gibberish words as commands instead of "delete that."
Obviously, it violates the principle that all computers you can talk to should work like Star Trek. But, it seems that just like a command line interface, a spoken interface could be fantastically useful if only somebody would decide that the operator will need some instruction in a few special arcane incantations.
Then, all we'll need is an extension to C so that function prototypes include a way to express the pronunciation of a function name, so a spoken interface IDE could use something like intellisense to parse the API I am using and away we go.
Well, that's what we do at tech review sites that stretch their articles as long as possible for the most number of ad impressions...
Wait, are you a wizard, or did you misspell smell as spell? I mean, I don't usually nitpick this sort of thing, but when the parent post specifically references spelling or grammar, I feel okay about it. And, well, you did use the word "spell," which IMHO counts as a spelling reference.
Anyhow, just let me know if you spell magic missile on the wind, so I know if I need to duck, or get a dictionary, or something.
With parallel hardware having moved from the realm of high end servers to bog standard consumer laptops, per- execution unit licensing may be about to see a sharp decline. It was based on the idea of per-system licenses, when a dual-CPU box was a strange and exotic way to duck the license fee. At this point, singe core systems are starting to become strange an unusual, turning that logic on its head.
Software that retains per-core licenses will simply move to a model of only running in parallel with as many threads/processes as you have paid for, rather than expecting you to license every core in a massively parallel system. Licensing for every physical core only makes sense when the default is a single CPU system, and you would need some specific reason to get parallel hardware. It's no longer logical when your customers will be getting parallel hardware as a matter of course, you just won't stay competitive.
So, worst case scenario, you have a 100 core processor, but your software vendor still has their head up their ass, and you can't move to another platform for some reason. Some people probably will be stuck in exactly this situation, even if I don't think it'll be common, especially if the boss insists that product X is the only way to do it because X-corp takes the boss golfing, and out to fancy lunches for product presentations, etc. So, why wouldn't there be decent partition tools? Current visualization systems will almost get you there. Run your app on a VM with X CPU's, and the app never needs to have any idea that the physical box has X+N CPU's. If the R+D effort proposed for this chip-crippler was instead invested on even better core management tools, it'd be a non issue completely.
With regards to the broader economics, I just don't see chip crippling as a valid path, because it ignores the very reason that we are moving to multi core platforms in the first place. As process technology improves, the "sweet spot" for the number of components on a chip increases, and the cost per component decreases. So, it becomes more and more economical to have ever more complex chips, with ever less economic benefit to having simpler chips. As the optimum chip size balloons, you need more and more complex designs to take advantage of the new blank canvas you have available to you. To take full advantage of the amount of silicon available to a modern design team using a traditional non-parallel CPU, you would need an enormous design team to create something of brain shattering complexity. The resulting design costs would drive up the price of the final chip, and delay it terribly. So, roughly speaking, for only $10,000 a copy, you could have a chip that is single-threaded and runs twice as fast as half of a Core 2 Duo that sells for $100 a copy. So, by moving to a parallel platform, you can use a simpler design, and a smaller design team, and still take advantage of the potential performance of the huge amount of silicon you have available to you. The more cores, the more you can multiply the effectiveness of your design team in the performance of the final design.
So, if it is most economical to have a design team of size X, and to produce a chip large enough to have 100 cores, it won't also be economical to invest a bunch of effort in crippling the design. The base assumption seems to be that a 100 core CPU would be such a dominant cost in the price of the platform that nobody would want to buy it. Instead, I'm pretty sure that if it makes economic sense to make the 100 core CPU, it makes economic sense to sell it with 100 cores, because by that time, the economics of chip design will make it such that a 100 core CPU isn't a dominant cost in the s
Anybody remember the show "Dinosaurs?"
"What if there aren't any more?"
"What do you mean? I'd just go to the store and get more. That's what more means."
"But, what if there weren't any left in the whole world, and the store didn't have any?"
"Huh, I'm not sure I follow you?"
(conversation with the last surviving member of the most delicious species in the world trying to explain the repurcussions of eating him.)
just about that very nearly happened on a project I worked on in high school. A friend of mine, wearing a Trenchcoat was standing near the school entrance wwith his camera and tripod bags. (Mysterious looking black bags which could plausibly be big enough for guns.) Of course, administrators were already dubious of him because he was known to associate with me, and I had very long hair at that point. Everybody in that town seemed pretty certain that long hair was a clear symptom of raging psychopathy for some reason.
When asked why he was standing around suspiciously, he just managed to catch himself before saying, "I'm waiting for somebody so we can start shooting." I've always wondered what would have happened if he'd had a slight slip of the tongue and talked quicker than he could think on that occasion... Of course, since I was the one he was waiting for, whatever happened, it'd've been to the both of us.
It's reasonable (though not exclusively correct) to say that the Constitution doesn't have anything to do with a right to privacy from individuals. The Constitution can be viewed purely as a document which defines the federal government and grants the government specific powers. The assumption in this view (which was apparently held by some, but not all of the founding fathers), is that people have inherent rights. They exist independent of any paper, or government, or anything else. The constitution is just a document written by a bunch of free people who already had a bunch of rights to create an entity and grant it only a specific set of rights. Since the framers had all inherent rights, they naturally had the right to create a government, and to define what rights it had. So, you would have an inherent right to privacy, and the only thing mentioned in the bill of rights amounts to, "by the way, we didn't specifically grant this new organisation authority to invade our privacy, so just to be absolutely fucking clear, this new government thingie does not have the authority to arbitrarily invade our privacy."
Likewise, how the first ammendment just talks about "congress shall pass no law..." Which wasn't meant to imply that state legislatures ought to, the text was just written that nobody would be dumb enough to create a state constitution which would grant a state the power to fuck with people's freedom of speech. Even so, we now have court cases where "our first amendment rights" can be used to overturn idiotic state laws.
So, while a right to privacy from other individuals is certainly consistent with the constitution, one strict reading would make it clear that the constitution doesn't address our rights -- it only addresses the rights we chose to grant to the federal government.
Obviously, this view was never unanimous, and is now often considered archaic.
I think I've looked harder than the vast majority of people I've talked to. Indeed, my feeling that he is hard to pin down is largely derived from having read that very page! For example, I said "Some of his statements are about how great big government programs which will necessarily distort the market are great. Sometimes he says the free market is super important." I refer you to the very link you provide which says both:and also
Big government social welfare policies are inconsistent with a free market. Big government programs like that and Keynes style planned economy policies distort the markets they interact with. That's not to say one way or the other is best, but a free market can't involve major influence of government, just as a matter of the definition of a free market.
In my previous post, I also said: "Carbon is bad, but he won't say whether or not he thinks building nukes is a good idea for reducing carbon emissions."
And, again, I refer you to that wikipedia page, which has the quote from Obama which directly inspired that statement:
So, he won't say, "I have considered nukes and they are [good | bad]." He's saying he doesn't support nuclear power, but he doesn't support not considering them. That's not really saying anything about the subject because he is deferring considering them. Until some unspecified point.
If you really look at a lot of what he says, you find soft inconsistencies, and really vague and noncommital stuff. And, hope. frankly, his waffling in order to avoid letting anybody disagreeing with him offend me more than if I disagreed with him. My two personal favorites in the current race as Ron Paul and Edwards, who have wildly different ideas about how best to move forward, but are at least willing to tell you what their ideas are. I'd love to see Edwards and Paul get into a really gritty, lengthy *debate* of a lot of the issues, like fiscal policy. I don't mean the dog and pony shows on TV that we have taken to calling debates. I mean a good solid meeting of disagreeing minds to respectfully present differing perspectives.
Sure, Paul is a batshit insane, and Edwards supports a larger government than I would hope for. Even so, they seem to call it like they see it. Which, I find more appealing than calling it like... HOPE!
Sure, there are other candidates who have been more specific than Obama, so just being specific isn't the only thing I look for in a candidate. I'm just not into evil, or saving the children, or 9-11, or McCain's war policy.
Anyhow, this is a dead discussion at this point, so I don't know if this will actually ever be read. Just figured I'd clarify my perspective a bit. Obviously, whoever you like in this race, the important thing is that your vote gets counted, whatever it is. So, feel free to disagree with me on everything except that.
Sure, lots of people write new stuff in C all the time. But, even if nobody did that, there are still a ton of people with existing C codebases that they are still working with. IIRC, Win32, Carbon, and GTK+ are all C API's, even if they have bindings to other languages. Lots of video and multimedia stuff is done in C, like the Dirac reference implimentation, gstreamer, ffmpeg, etc. When people talk about how C is dead, and nobody writes anything in C, they generally mean that higher level languages are used to glue together a bunch of C.