Cambridge Uni. Assassins Guild. One enterprising guy dropped a massive polystyrene block on his target's head from a balcony (it was a safe, basically).
There was talk of starting a game of "Brutus Deluxe" at my high school. Unfortunately, Columbine happened and it seemed like a bad idea. So, anybody know where to go to get in on a game in the US? I'm in Denver, but I'm unfortunately not going to a University now. That's where I tend to hear about these sorts of things...
I think the demand simply isn't there, I wouldn't blame the technology. The majority of people wouldn't see the point, or understand the possibilities. Many people still struggle with TV remotes...
By and large, people want to spend money on their plasma displays, not "uber-consoles".
Personally, I think that part of the problem is that companies have completely and utterly failed to promote the idea of a home server. I have an old Alphaserver with about.5 TB of storage. Nothing really fancy. It sits in a corner in our back room. It's only like 600 MHz, and single CPU, so a modern Mac Mini is probably faster. It runs Debian. Most slashdotters probably have similar boxes.
Semi-techies who visit consider it absolutely mind blowing.
I can use my desktop PC to browse for torrents that look interesting. Then, I save them into a folder shared on my network with Samba. The torrent application running 24/7 on the server sees the torrent is in the "active" folder and automatically starts downloading it. I can turn off my PC, and the server in the backroom keeps on going. I can log into my server from work (I use ssh) to move torrents from my "pending" directory to "active" so that they will be done by the time I get home. Then, when I want to watch my downloaded anime or whatever, I have an iBook that lives by the TV. I can play the video files over the wireless network. The server also has a free name on a subdomain from one of the dynamic hostname services. So, I can host web pages and whatnot. I also have gallery2 installed so that friends and family can see my vacation pictures and whatnot.
Now, most slashdotters who read this are yawning. We all know that this is pretty easy (for us) to set up. "apt-get install gallery2" is not really that hard. But, for the people who use a computer but have never set up a network, it is completely mind blowing.
Now imagine a cheap server-appliance. It runs linux, and has a simple web based configuration interface. You don't plug in a monitor. You just plug it into your network, and access it via web browser and samba. It has a few really simple buttons in the web administration interface for starting and stopping services like bit torrent. It downloads and installs security updates automatically. It's big. Bigger than a Mac Mini, at least. It's designed to be really easy to add drives to. Should probably have at least 5 or so bays for 3.5" drives. The system is set up with LVM and RAID-5 (or so), so that when you install a drive it automatically grows your storage volume, so the user doesn't have to worry about partitions or anything -- just "72% full" or whatever. The web interface will show you when torrents are done,how they are coming along, etc., and the system will automatically move completed torrents from "in_progress" to "done" folders.
Now, along side this is sold a rather-thin client which plugs into the TV, has mplayer installed, is silent, and is easy to operate with a remote control.
Currently, any efforts I have seen in this direction are DRM encumbered pieces of poop that a user has to hack horribly if they want to do anything interesting with. They are useless as a general computer, and you can't SSH into them or anything. What i'm thinking is more along the lines of an iServe. Between a dumb appliance and an XServe. Once you have an easy common share for all your media, media center PC's are much much much more interesting. I can't sit in my room and watch what is stored on a standard media center PC in the living room. I can't use my PC to easily organise the files on the media center PC. I could get a media center PC, use it as a PC - then use an X box as a MEdia center extender. But, even that isn't going far enough with the idea.
People fear the idea of having a server. The notion of a computer that you can't sit down and type at is infinitely confusing to the non techie. But, it's just a good marketing campaign aw
The amount of time it would take to bring Virtual PC to Intel would be roughly equivalent to creating the product from scratch
This is such bullshit, it makes my head hurt - considering the following:
1. Virtual PC runs on Windows
Ummm... How about:
2. Virtual PC was a Mac product before MS bought it, when they managed to port it to a new architecture and OS without any major problems. So, they probably still own all the Mac OS glue code they would need to make it work, and it's just a matter of updating in and integrating it with the existing Intel virtualisation...
Nnnnoooooo - it's *not* domain squatting. The following cut'n'pasted from wikipedia: -
According to the U.S. federal law known as the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, Cybersquatting is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The cybersquatter then offers the domain to the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at an inflated price, an act which some deem to be extortion.
They're not domain squatting.
Ummm.... Yes, they are. They are using domain names with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. They are domain squatting against any Cameroonian organisation that people might try to visit by going to one of the wild carded URL's. They are also typosquatting against all Cameroonian organisation with web sites. They are also typosquatting against all of.com. It isn't an either / xor thing.
Well, considering the definition of planemo as anything with planetary mass not orbiting a star... A sufficiently large space station / space ship would qualify as a planemo. So, unfortunately, that joke doesn't really apply here. It is, however, still "no moon.":)
I've stayed in hotels in Dijon, Rennes, Saclay and Paris. Not once did they ask to see it for more than just the photo ID (I kept the passport). I've stayed in two different hotels in Dublin, same story, etc...
I'm the first to admit that WESTERN europe is not the same as the rest of europe. I imagine in Germany or Poland or some such the rules may be diff.
Tom
Yeah, think less along the lines of Paris, and more along the lines of Bratislava. It's a pretty huge difference once you get a bit further east. There are some countries that still call there security service the KGB.
I've been at hotels in Ireland, France and England and never once gave them my passport. I might use it as ID e.g. to prove I'm me. But they don't keep it.
Most of the time they don't care. They just swipe your credit card and are glad to take your money....
Tom
I can't think of which ones off the top of my head, but I know there are places where you are expected to surrender the passport to the hotel. I was surprised to read about it, too. I think I may have run across it at some point in my travels as well. Don't recall for sure.
No, NURBS aren't supported in hardware, but bezier patches are. It would be great if OpenGL supported them as well as some chipsets do. You can't do everything with bezier curves that you can do with NURBS, but you can get pretty darn close.
I've been reading about some of the proposals for "OpenGL 3.0." Apparently, there is talk of a "primitive shader." Haven't been able to find much information about it yet, but it may well allow arbitrary curved surfaces defined by shaders. I could also just be reading too much into what I've read...
Granted, OpenGL extensions aren't that bad, for the reasons you cited. I'm just tired of supporting ATI-specific *and* Nvidia-specific extensions. The vendor-specific junk has got to go.
I feel your pain. However, fortunately the vendor-specific-junk *does* go. Sometimes it takes a little while, but it all works pretty well. With Direct X, you don't get any access to new features until MS decides on a release. Then, they change a lot in the next release, etc. So, instead of having a way to do things for each vendor, you have a way to do things for each version. OpenGL takes the opposite route. Once it gets rolled into the standard, it will be quite stable. I don't think either solution is much worse than the other, but I do prefer the OpenGL way.
OpenGL has been stagnate for quite some time. Most of the newer features of 3D cards have only been accessible with their horrible extensions interface. Well, it's not horrible, but it's not ideal either. At a minimum, better support for pixel shaders (nearly a decade old feature) is much desired. Better support for NURBS & subdivision surfaces (without using evaluators) would rock. I doubt that things like this are on the agenda.
How much better support for pixel shaders do you want? glsl is a quite nice shading language. I agree that it would be nice to see direct support for curved surfaces. But, the hardware doesn't really support them either, so it's going to be hard to get NURBS supported directly by OpenGL any time soon...
As for the highest end features being accessible thorugh extensions... Isn't that better than them being completely unavailable until a new version comes out? How do your propose a vendor exposes some whizzy new functionality?
We chose x86 before PPC existed. We stuck with x86 for a variety of reasons, including very good performance, wide availability of systems, ability to run old software, and reasonable price. PPC wasn't and isn't clearly better (at least not in every regard.) RISC didn't prove to be better than CISC when transistor budgets rose, and decode units started taking up a tiny amount of die space. RISC also tends to take more space for the instruction stream, so CISC makes better use of instruction fetch bandwidth.
We chose VHS over BetaMax
We chose the less proprietary, more widely available format over the one that didn't hold as much content.
We chose 8VSB over OFDM (for HDTV Broadcasting)
This wasn't much of a consumer choice. (And, I'm not familiar enough with the technology to assess the relative merits.) It isn't like there was a time when some TV's and stations in the US used one format, and some used another, resulting in a format war and the market deciding. This is kind of a non sequiter in the Blu-Ray / HDDVD format war analogy list.
We chose CDMA over GSM (only just now starting to change)
Admittedly, the consumers did have some impact with this. Some very educated consumers know which carrier is using which network, and consider this very important. But, again, infrastructure had to be rolled out before consumers could get in on any decision making.
So, yes, the US is not the ultimate technology leader. But, when there is a consumer format war, there is often some reason behind the winner. Just claiming the loser was "best" leaves out a lot.
I've heard stories about how the medical profession was so enamored with radioactive tools for healing. Xrays to look inside the body. The way radiation exposure could kill unwanted bacteria. The cool soothing greenish glow of radioactive clocks and other tools. They came up with implementations of using radiation before understanding what it was doing. Today, looking back at the lack of understanding seems crazy; we'd never do something like that again. Would we?
Of course we would. The only other way is to have test groups that literally span multiple generations to see if any harmful effects occur. (To see if you cause Alzheimers in your children, for example.) In practice, waiting to be 100% sure with a medical treatment is completely infeasible. Sure, it's possible that a new treatment will kill some people. But, how many people will die in the next hundred years while we wait to be sure it's safe?
actually they use flv's.. but the point is I don't have to read the annoying phrase "windows media 10 required"
I don't know for absolute sure, but I have used wget to get the video files, and file tells me it is an AVI, so I think that your parent poster is right. I rename them to.avi, and have no trouble playing them on my windows box.
I dunno how different an FLV is from an AVI, given how FLV is related to the priprietary evil stinking pile of dookie called "Flash." (See, I put "Flash," in quotes just like the press release did with "tag," because I refuse to accept it as being an actual word.)
That's an odd criticism of UAC. With XP, if you run as a limited-access user, it simply prevents you from deleting the All Users shortcuts at all. Of course Vista's UAC would require a password for that. You don't have permission to modify that folder.
Yes, you would think that somebody would realise that the problem is that it's impossible to differentiate between things on your personal desktop, and things on every desktop. They need some sort of visual flair on items that apply to all users. Likewise, it should be possible to hide items that are on every desktop, but you don't need on yours. Now, the "improvement" is that anybody logged in as an admin will delete icons off everybody's desktop without ever realising it, or having any easy way to check. My days are being unimpressed with Microsoft are certainly coming to a middle...
Not many years ago (with gcc), I got an 80% speed improvement just by rewriting a medium sized function to assembly. Granted, it was a function which was in itself, half C code, half inline assembly, which might hinder gcc a bit. But it's also important to note that if the function had been written in pure C code, the compiler wouldn't have generated better code anyway since it wouldn't use MMX opcodes... Last I checked, MMX code is only generated from pure C in modern compilers when it's quite obvious that it can be used, such as in short loops doing simple arithmetic operations.
An expert assembly programmer in a CPU which he knows well can still do much better than a compiler.
I'm not going to disagree with you out of hand, because I don't think you are wrong exactly, but I would like to add some extra caution for readers who may be more gung ho with assembly than is best. A well-seasoned assembly programmer can absolutely write faster code than a C compiler -- for a specific chip. A friend of mine is currently working on a database that has a ton of very low level assembly optimisations. These optimisations were all fantastic on the 486. However, modern CPU's work quite differently than 486's did. Assumptions about what instructions are slow, and what are fast no longer apply. It would be very easy to write some nice portable, easy to read and maintain C that runs much faster than all that perfectly optimised assembly --0 if you are going to run it on a P4 instead of a 486.
If you are going to use assembly "optimisations," you have to understand that you will have to basically rewrite the assembly every time another new CPU microarchitecture comes out. If you are doing something that will be certainly dead, or no longer performance sensitive in three years, then this may not matter. Another example I can think of is when OpenGL first started to become common on PC's, but almost nobody had hardware OpenGL accelerators. A lot of people scoffed at OpenGL because it was to 'heavy weight,' because it had features they didn't need. So, they spent a bunch of time and effort writing their "perfectly optimised" software rasterisers (which were indeed faster than the OpenGL reference rasteriser). Then, their customers all got TNT2's, and wondered why the "perfectly optimised" software ran so much slower than the software which used "excessively heavy" OpenGL.
In other words, do the simplest best solution first. Then, if it isn't good enough, make your "perfectly optimised" version as an additional path, not as the only choice. Your perfectly optimised version will be hard to maintain, and hard to reoptimise in a few months.
Console gamers get consoles because they can't deal with installing video card drivers. Did the author really thing they were programmers, much less compiler programmers?
Considering that Gamasutra is the website for Game Developer Magazine... Yes, I think the author really did expect that an appreciable percentage of his readers would be programmers.
I wonder if I can talk them out of the late fees again.
ob. family guy : I knew I shouldn't have taped over that rental... "Eagle was the name of the lander. There, I just saved you three boring, boobless hours."
So why have the GPU do AA at all? Why not put a dedicated antialiasing CPU into monitors? GPUs would push polygons and shaders which is what they do best, and the monitor could use some kind of algorithm to pretty-up textures, reduce jaggy edges, and smooth fonts. It could work in games and on the desktop. Maybe it could scale up a video card running at 800x600 to appear smooth at 1600x1200.
You do AA on the GPU because that's the only place you can do it. It's like Z-buffering. It happens when you draw the polygons, or it doesn't. If the image is jaggy, then no amount of post processing and filtering is going to properly reconstruct the way the image was supposed to be. You can blur it a bit, and filter it, but that always introduces some degree of artifacting. (which may or may not be worse than the aliasing depending on the algorithm and the content being filtered...)
And, if it is easy to add monitor hardware to do it, then you can just add that same theoretical hardware to the GPU, and not need to invent a whole new way for GPU's to talk to the monitors. (To tell the monitor what needs to be filtered, etc. I don't want my word processing to get blurred by the monitor, for example, so the GPU would need some way of identifying which regions on screen need to be filtered!
The system doesn't have any easy way to identify that I have made a C source file vs. a Java source file vs. a python file
Well, it should ask you then. Of course, in Unix there are the "magic" characters at the begining of the file.
Well, when should it ask me? How exactly should the asking work? Do I get asked about the file type for every single file I get from FTP? And, the magic numbers at the start of a file don't always work, for example, what magic characters does a C source file start with? How about C++? If you run file on a source file, it will just report that it seems to be some sort of plain text. You need some sort of metadata stored in addition to the contents of the file in order to identify it. This metadata scheme should also be compatible with existing programs. (Otherwise it is sort of useless) So, really, some sort of encoding in the file name seems like a logical solution. Far from perfect, but it does work. A prefix of a dot indicates it ought to be hidden from general listings. A suffix after a dot indicates a file type.
Not true. I used names with no extension for my Wordstar files back in DOS days. Since that's what most of my files were, I made that the simplest. Directories usually had no extension, but you could have if you wanted (some programs did that for their private data).
Winows 9x and above though do enforce rules on extensions; but worst of all, hide some, or all, of them by default. Thus Anna-Kournikova.jpg.exe. The old Mac OS had it right, the filetype flags were not user-created or normally visible, though you could get tools to hack them if you wanted.
I somewhat disagree. When you are using big proprietary applications, like MS Word, then it is natural that you will default to saving as a Word document, and the user doesn't need to be involved. But, what file type should be the default when I save a file from vi? The system doesn't have any easy way to identify that I have made a C source file vs. a Java source file vs. a python file (If we decide the filename suffixes no longer have semantic meaning). And, it should be possible to build 'foreign' programs with out too much trouble, so adding extra UI to vi to allow setting of the metadata isn't an answer. The solution for metadata has to be easily user accessible. MIME types are rather cumbersome, but I suppose might be acceptable. Maybe we need something like a chtype utility to match chown, where I can do something like: # chtype mysourcefile JAVA Or, possibly, some sort of syntax where metadata can be stored as part of the file name, allowing any portable program to interact with it: fopen ("/path/to/mysourcefile/?/type=JAVA", "w");
And, in the GUI, if we give up on extensions, I shouldn't need a special utility to fiddle with the type of a file. It should be very obviously exposed and editable in the "properties" or "get info..." tab/panel/window/whatever for the file.
If you don't have this level of transparency and easy editability, then the old skool Mac OS style metadata for content and creator codes are less than worthless as an "upgrade."
Hmm. I just realized that this is a potential problem -- a major potential problem -- with the OSX and now Vista (and, I believe, some Linux) GUI security paradigms. We're training people to be ready to enter their administrator passwords whenever they're prompted to. And Ma & Pa User won't know when this is a good thing. Especially when badly behaved programs like Adobe's suite raise dialog after dialog during updating. What's to stop EvilSoftCo from creating a program that, during its first-time startup, just creates a dialog box that matches the standard one, and gathers your password?
Bah, you think too hard. Take a screenshot of the Vista authentication dialog box, and put it as a form on a website. Most users wouldn't even realise it isn't a real window. No need to go to the bother of having them download a binary. Then, just install whatever you want remotely.
I recently switched to mac OSX, partly because my windows machine finally gave up the ghost. I have to admit that the mac is much smoother than windows, and it's nice to not have to worry about maleware and run and anti-virus constantly. However in my experiance OSX is a little less stable than XP, my mac system crashes or locks up about every other week, while windows crashed on me about once every 4 months. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Its also a pain in the arse to have to re-learn everything, for example I still can't figure out how to get an equation to pretty print to a jpg on a mac.
It's entirely possible that your particular usage pattern is tickling a particular bug in OS-X, but you may also have some sort of a hardware issue. OS-X shouldn't be any less stable than XP. My OS-X boxes actually stay up longer than my XP box. (Though, that XP box also has some issues when under Linux, so I don't know that I can blame XP. My current hunch is overheating, probably related to the video card...) Anyhow, you may want to see if you have any hardware diagnostic disks or something to test your Mac. Especially the RAM. RAM makes annoying intermittent seemingly random crashes. And, it's easy to replace.
In the context. Japanese has the same issue and that's how they deal with it. Besides, it would vastly increase the odds of constructing puns.
The Japanese also have the kanji. This is basically similar to how we have dfferent spellings for things. Our distinct spellings come from different source languages of borrowed words, and different root words. The kanji similarly are different if the word represents a different idea but has the same sound.
But while we're on the subject, I do wonder why a woman asserting her independence by refusing to take her husband's name when getting married feels perfectly comfortable carrying her father's name. According to the Wikipedia article, the practice is generally in decline, but for those of us old enough to remember the shrill "I'm no one's property" arguments before the notion became politically correct and commonplace, the irony lingers. Even funnier if you've been through divorce court.
I have always expected that there would be a movement where a man and woman get married and pick a new family name. It just seemed logical to me. Neither party has to take the other's name, and they also get to share a common family name which would symbolise the bond. Hasn't happened yet, but I still figure it might. Especially if gay marriage takes off. Then, how do you decide who's name to take? Flip a coin?
I would like to see a few more test groups added to this. How about the average pot smoking teenager, the girl putting makeup on, and my personal favorite that I saw recently... a woman brushing her teeth!
Also, I want to see a study of how much reading while driving impairs your ability. I want to know how much more dangerous I make my drive home, so I can calculate if the probable time savings are likely worth it...:)
Slashdot Mirror
There was talk of starting a game of "Brutus Deluxe" at my high school. Unfortunately, Columbine happened and it seemed like a bad idea. So, anybody know where to go to get in on a game in the US? I'm in Denver, but I'm unfortunately not going to a University now. That's where I tend to hear about these sorts of things...
Personally, I think that part of the problem is that companies have completely and utterly failed to promote the idea of a home server. I have an old Alphaserver with about .5 TB of storage. Nothing really fancy. It sits in a corner in our back room. It's only like 600 MHz, and single CPU, so a modern Mac Mini is probably faster. It runs Debian. Most slashdotters probably have similar boxes.
Semi-techies who visit consider it absolutely mind blowing.
I can use my desktop PC to browse for torrents that look interesting. Then, I save them into a folder shared on my network with Samba. The torrent application running 24/7 on the server sees the torrent is in the "active" folder and automatically starts downloading it. I can turn off my PC, and the server in the backroom keeps on going. I can log into my server from work (I use ssh) to move torrents from my "pending" directory to "active" so that they will be done by the time I get home. Then, when I want to watch my downloaded anime or whatever, I have an iBook that lives by the TV. I can play the video files over the wireless network. The server also has a free name on a subdomain from one of the dynamic hostname services. So, I can host web pages and whatnot. I also have gallery2 installed so that friends and family can see my vacation pictures and whatnot.
Now, most slashdotters who read this are yawning. We all know that this is pretty easy (for us) to set up. "apt-get install gallery2" is not really that hard. But, for the people who use a computer but have never set up a network, it is completely mind blowing.
Now imagine a cheap server-appliance. It runs linux, and has a simple web based configuration interface. You don't plug in a monitor. You just plug it into your network, and access it via web browser and samba. It has a few really simple buttons in the web administration interface for starting and stopping services like bit torrent. It downloads and installs security updates automatically. It's big. Bigger than a Mac Mini, at least. It's designed to be really easy to add drives to. Should probably have at least 5 or so bays for 3.5" drives. The system is set up with LVM and RAID-5 (or so), so that when you install a drive it automatically grows your storage volume, so the user doesn't have to worry about partitions or anything -- just "72% full" or whatever. The web interface will show you when torrents are done,how they are coming along, etc., and the system will automatically move completed torrents from "in_progress" to "done" folders.
Now, along side this is sold a rather-thin client which plugs into the TV, has mplayer installed, is silent, and is easy to operate with a remote control.
Currently, any efforts I have seen in this direction are DRM encumbered pieces of poop that a user has to hack horribly if they want to do anything interesting with. They are useless as a general computer, and you can't SSH into them or anything. What i'm thinking is more along the lines of an iServe. Between a dumb appliance and an XServe. Once you have an easy common share for all your media, media center PC's are much much much more interesting. I can't sit in my room and watch what is stored on a standard media center PC in the living room. I can't use my PC to easily organise the files on the media center PC. I could get a media center PC, use it as a PC - then use an X box as a MEdia center extender. But, even that isn't going far enough with the idea.
People fear the idea of having a server. The notion of a computer that you can't sit down and type at is infinitely confusing to the non techie. But, it's just a good marketing campaign aw
Ummm... How about:
2. Virtual PC was a Mac product before MS bought it, when they managed to port it to a new architecture and OS without any major problems. So, they probably still own all the Mac OS glue code they would need to make it work, and it's just a matter of updating in and integrating it with the existing Intel virtualisation...
Ummm.... Yes, they are. They are using domain names with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. They are domain squatting against any Cameroonian organisation that people might try to visit by going to one of the wild carded URL's. They are also typosquatting against all Cameroonian organisation with web sites. They are also typosquatting against all of
Well, considering the definition of planemo as anything with planetary mass not orbiting a star... A sufficiently large space station / space ship would qualify as a planemo. So, unfortunately, that joke doesn't really apply here. It is, however, still "no moon." :)
Yeah, think less along the lines of Paris, and more along the lines of Bratislava. It's a pretty huge difference once you get a bit further east. There are some countries that still call there security service the KGB.
I can't think of which ones off the top of my head, but I know there are places where you are expected to surrender the passport to the hotel. I was surprised to read about it, too. I think I may have run across it at some point in my travels as well. Don't recall for sure.
I've been reading about some of the proposals for "OpenGL 3.0." Apparently, there is talk of a "primitive shader." Haven't been able to find much information about it yet, but it may well allow arbitrary curved surfaces defined by shaders. I could also just be reading too much into what I've read...
Granted, OpenGL extensions aren't that bad, for the reasons you cited. I'm just tired of supporting ATI-specific *and* Nvidia-specific extensions. The vendor-specific junk has got to go.
I feel your pain. However, fortunately the vendor-specific-junk *does* go. Sometimes it takes a little while, but it all works pretty well. With Direct X, you don't get any access to new features until MS decides on a release. Then, they change a lot in the next release, etc. So, instead of having a way to do things for each vendor, you have a way to do things for each version. OpenGL takes the opposite route. Once it gets rolled into the standard, it will be quite stable. I don't think either solution is much worse than the other, but I do prefer the OpenGL way.
Anyhow, check this out and ponder OpenGL 3.0...
http://www.gamedev.net/columns/events/gdc2006/art
How much better support for pixel shaders do you want? glsl is a quite nice shading language. I agree that it would be nice to see direct support for curved surfaces. But, the hardware doesn't really support them either, so it's going to be hard to get NURBS supported directly by OpenGL any time soon...
As for the highest end features being accessible thorugh extensions... Isn't that better than them being completely unavailable until a new version comes out? How do your propose a vendor exposes some whizzy new functionality?
We chose x86 before PPC existed. We stuck with x86 for a variety of reasons, including very good performance, wide availability of systems, ability to run old software, and reasonable price. PPC wasn't and isn't clearly better (at least not in every regard.) RISC didn't prove to be better than CISC when transistor budgets rose, and decode units started taking up a tiny amount of die space. RISC also tends to take more space for the instruction stream, so CISC makes better use of instruction fetch bandwidth.
We chose the less proprietary, more widely available format over the one that didn't hold as much content.
This wasn't much of a consumer choice. (And, I'm not familiar enough with the technology to assess the relative merits.) It isn't like there was a time when some TV's and stations in the US used one format, and some used another, resulting in a format war and the market deciding. This is kind of a non sequiter in the Blu-Ray / HDDVD format war analogy list.
Admittedly, the consumers did have some impact with this. Some very educated consumers know which carrier is using which network, and consider this very important. But, again, infrastructure had to be rolled out before consumers could get in on any decision making.
So, yes, the US is not the ultimate technology leader. But, when there is a consumer format war, there is often some reason behind the winner. Just claiming the loser was "best" leaves out a lot.
Of course we would. The only other way is to have test groups that literally span multiple generations to see if any harmful effects occur. (To see if you cause Alzheimers in your children, for example.) In practice, waiting to be 100% sure with a medical treatment is completely infeasible. Sure, it's possible that a new treatment will kill some people. But, how many people will die in the next hundred years while we wait to be sure it's safe?
Actually, I think it's working -- try googling for "site:senate.gov corporate whore"
You only get four hits, and Hatch's site is one of them. It made me smile.
I don't know for absolute sure, but I have used wget to get the video files, and file tells me it is an AVI, so I think that your parent poster is right. I rename them to
I dunno how different an FLV is from an AVI, given how FLV is related to the priprietary evil stinking pile of dookie called "Flash." (See, I put "Flash," in quotes just like the press release did with "tag," because I refuse to accept it as being an actual word.)
Yes, you would think that somebody would realise that the problem is that it's impossible to differentiate between things on your personal desktop, and things on every desktop. They need some sort of visual flair on items that apply to all users. Likewise, it should be possible to hide items that are on every desktop, but you don't need on yours. Now, the "improvement" is that anybody logged in as an admin will delete icons off everybody's desktop without ever realising it, or having any easy way to check. My days are being unimpressed with Microsoft are certainly coming to a middle...
I'm not going to disagree with you out of hand, because I don't think you are wrong exactly, but I would like to add some extra caution for readers who may be more gung ho with assembly than is best. A well-seasoned assembly programmer can absolutely write faster code than a C compiler -- for a specific chip. A friend of mine is currently working on a database that has a ton of very low level assembly optimisations. These optimisations were all fantastic on the 486. However, modern CPU's work quite differently than 486's did. Assumptions about what instructions are slow, and what are fast no longer apply. It would be very easy to write some nice portable, easy to read and maintain C that runs much faster than all that perfectly optimised assembly --0 if you are going to run it on a P4 instead of a 486.
If you are going to use assembly "optimisations," you have to understand that you will have to basically rewrite the assembly every time another new CPU microarchitecture comes out. If you are doing something that will be certainly dead, or no longer performance sensitive in three years, then this may not matter. Another example I can think of is when OpenGL first started to become common on PC's, but almost nobody had hardware OpenGL accelerators. A lot of people scoffed at OpenGL because it was to 'heavy weight,' because it had features they didn't need. So, they spent a bunch of time and effort writing their "perfectly optimised" software rasterisers (which were indeed faster than the OpenGL reference rasteriser). Then, their customers all got TNT2's, and wondered why the "perfectly optimised" software ran so much slower than the software which used "excessively heavy" OpenGL.
In other words, do the simplest best solution first. Then, if it isn't good enough, make your "perfectly optimised" version as an additional path, not as the only choice. Your perfectly optimised version will be hard to maintain, and hard to reoptimise in a few months.
Considering that Gamasutra is the website for Game Developer Magazine... Yes, I think the author really did expect that an appreciable percentage of his readers would be programmers.
ob. family guy : I knew I shouldn't have taped over that rental... "Eagle was the name of the lander. There, I just saved you three boring, boobless hours."
You do AA on the GPU because that's the only place you can do it. It's like Z-buffering. It happens when you draw the polygons, or it doesn't. If the image is jaggy, then no amount of post processing and filtering is going to properly reconstruct the way the image was supposed to be. You can blur it a bit, and filter it, but that always introduces some degree of artifacting. (which may or may not be worse than the aliasing depending on the algorithm and the content being filtered...)
And, if it is easy to add monitor hardware to do it, then you can just add that same theoretical hardware to the GPU, and not need to invent a whole new way for GPU's to talk to the monitors. (To tell the monitor what needs to be filtered, etc. I don't want my word processing to get blurred by the monitor, for example, so the GPU would need some way of identifying which regions on screen need to be filtered!
Well, when should it ask me? How exactly should the asking work? Do I get asked about the file type for every single file I get from FTP? And, the magic numbers at the start of a file don't always work, for example, what magic characters does a C source file start with? How about C++? If you run file on a source file, it will just report that it seems to be some sort of plain text. You need some sort of metadata stored in addition to the contents of the file in order to identify it. This metadata scheme should also be compatible with existing programs. (Otherwise it is sort of useless) So, really, some sort of encoding in the file name seems like a logical solution. Far from perfect, but it does work. A prefix of a dot indicates it ought to be hidden from general listings. A suffix after a dot indicates a file type.
I somewhat disagree. When you are using big proprietary applications, like MS Word, then it is natural that you will default to saving as a Word document, and the user doesn't need to be involved. But, what file type should be the default when I save a file from vi? The system doesn't have any easy way to identify that I have made a C source file vs. a Java source file vs. a python file (If we decide the filename suffixes no longer have semantic meaning). And, it should be possible to build 'foreign' programs with out too much trouble, so adding extra UI to vi to allow setting of the metadata isn't an answer. The solution for metadata has to be easily user accessible. MIME types are rather cumbersome, but I suppose might be acceptable. Maybe we need something like a chtype utility to match chown, where I can do something like:
# chtype mysourcefile JAVA
Or, possibly, some sort of syntax where metadata can be stored as part of the file name, allowing any portable program to interact with it:
fopen ("/path/to/mysourcefile/?/type=JAVA", "w");
And, in the GUI, if we give up on extensions, I shouldn't need a special utility to fiddle with the type of a file. It should be very obviously exposed and editable in the "properties" or "get info..." tab/panel/window/whatever for the file.
If you don't have this level of transparency and easy editability, then the old skool Mac OS style metadata for content and creator codes are less than worthless as an "upgrade."
The Japanese also have the kanji. This is basically similar to how we have dfferent spellings for things. Our distinct spellings come from different source languages of borrowed words, and different root words. The kanji similarly are different if the word represents a different idea but has the same sound.
I have always expected that there would be a movement where a man and woman get married and pick a new family name. It just seemed logical to me. Neither party has to take the other's name, and they also get to share a common family name which would symbolise the bond. Hasn't happened yet, but I still figure it might. Especially if gay marriage takes off. Then, how do you decide who's name to take? Flip a coin?
Also, I want to see a study of how much reading while driving impairs your ability. I want to know how much more dangerous I make my drive home, so I can calculate if the probable time savings are likely worth it...