If you really want an analogy, think about it like some stupid people who write confidential information on their hand and then go out in public. Then imagine another, somewhat unscrupulous sharp-eyed person, who looks for such people in public places, and writes down what he reads from their hands. This may not be "nice" but it's certainly not illegal.
If he puts this information to illegal use (fraud, for example) that's a different matter, but just calling a number that you see written on someone's hand or shirt is not an illegal use.
On the other hand, if Apple made something like an IP TV station, they wouldn't be crazy enough to make it accessible only from their mobile devices. I'm quite sure that there would be an interface in the style of iTunes that even works in Windows. But having said that, I don't think the problem is the lack of an installed base with the right hardware. I think the problem is getting this service to work and getting content for it.
In the discrete GPU system as we have it, data gets pulled from memory to the CPU for processing/caching and the result is sent through a bus to the GPU for rendering. Maybe this whole thing took so long because AMD was working out a way to just read that data once, process it in the CPU, and leave it in the L1 cache for the GPU. If this is how it turns out, it really will make things much faster, because no discrete GPU has ever had access to data that's as quickly readable as the L1 cache. Now, maybe it will turn out that you just can't store enough data in L1 to make all the framebuffers and other graphics stuff work. (But maybe you can; since this thing does all the data processing "in one house", you can work through it chunk by L1-cache-sized chunk, and as soon as that stuff is processed and rendered by the Fusion unit, it is sent down the DVI cable and can be forgotten. Rinse and repeat, and you might have a formula for rendering scenes which actually moves very little data over the memory bus.)
Also remember that AMD owns the patents for ZRam. They could realistically make a very large and fast on-die caches with ZRam, and Intel couldn't respond because they don't own the rights and don't use a SOI process like AMD, which is required for ZRam.
I'm not sure about the part about the tests seeming legit, but I do think you make a good point that the tests are at least legit enough to cast light on the shortcomings of the other browsers. But mainly, I want to express my appreciation that you didn't just post another version of the standard (and boring and too easy) Slashdot response. So thank you for actually trying to focus this discussion on the issues. I hope you're not flamed or just ignored, but I'm not holding my breath.
This is pretty insightful. Yes, I think the Flash era is ending, and it will be over at the latest by the time that developer tools for web-standard animation/video are as good as what's now available for Flash. Adobe would be smart if they got ahead on this and made their present Flash tools output something other than Flash. That way they could keep a lot of their customers, perhaps indefinitely, after the Flash era ends. If they don't do this, someone else will take them.
I was thinking the same thing. I would say that the common cause is self-respect. It's what makes your peers and teachers admire you, and it's also what makes you stand up for yourself when bullied. It's much more plausible than the hypothesis that standing up to bullies is what wins you admiration.
Right, but... I'm sure that there is a setting on the robot by which you can tell it to modulate its dynamics and the random rhythmic noise you mention would be even easier to introduce. Then you have the unique quirks of a genuine acoustic instrument, and with this combination, I'm sure a robot can produce music that sounds pretty darn soulful. Of course this requires some extra programming, and there is little hope that the robot would figure out on its own which parts deserve soulful emphasis, delay or whatever. But, I bet that software could be designed to listen to great performances of music and detect and precisely quantify all changes in dynamics and deviations from the metronome. Once this info is added to the score, a sufficiently dexterous robot should be able to reproduce the soulfulness of a great performance by Joshua Bell or whoever. Right? I mean, it's not magic...
When Bill Gates was in charge of the Microsoft empire, his goal was to serve the empire. Once he quit and started thinking full time about how to make the world a better place, he has become a hero of mine. I don't mean that in any ironic sense; there is no other prominent voice in the world which is advocating for all the right stuff the way Gates is. If you want to see Gates at his best, watch his 2010 talk at TED. Almost never do I hear a talk like this, where I am prepared to endorse pretty much every word, down to his enthusiastic advocacy of traveling wave reactors.
Or you could rename your perfectly innocent family photos things like "Kevin Rudd anal fucked by wallbe.jpg" and "Barely legal dingo deep throats Kevin Rudd's tiny cock.jpg".
I would love to have someone organize the absolute sickest (but legal) porn content on a website so that travelers to Australia could inflict this on the customs agents. I'm talking about morbidly obese men being fisted by dwarves in kangaroo outfits, stuff in that league. If you can get enough of these state employees to lose enough lunches, this policy will be reconsidered.
If you live in a city and invest in a decent antenna, you will get enough HDTV programming to cover your typical urge to just be a couch vegetable for a while. The internet and Netflix is a great supplement to this, leaving you with more to watch than ever before.
Actually, Cameron did indeed study physics, and did a lot of engineering. As others have mentioned, he's most likely one of the best-connected people to the community of optical engineers who work on 3D images. He's already proven that he can co-design a pretty effective 3D camera.
And it's not like NASA is putting him in charge of anything. He's being brought in as an adviser, probably on a pretty high level, and as far as I can tell, pro bono. I think that's pretty cool. I have no doubt that he will contribute two or three useful ideas based on his extensive experience. This also serves to promote the narrative of Cameron the technical wizard: Gear he helped design even went to Mars! It makes a great feel-good talking point for him when he's doing the interview circuit for his next movie.
Of course, since most conflicts arise out of competition over resources, I think it's safe to say that we're eons away from filling up the Milky Way with colonies of any type that are going to start stepping on other peoples' toes.
It won't be eons. We could probably colonize the whole galaxy in the span of 100 million years, which is less than 1% of the age of the galaxy. But I can't believe how sanguine you are about the conflict "eons" in the future, like it's no big deal. Are you even trying to imagine its catastrophic scale? I'm picturing like trillions dead per minute. And yeah, to prevent something like that with prudent action now is definitely obligatory, and to put it off because it's distasteful is cowardly.
I'm not recommending that we become Borg, all devoid of individuality or whatever. I want just the opposite: I want each individual to matter a lot, and matter equally. That's exactly why I simply can't accept allowing a war that will wipe out possibly trillions of trillions of these equally valuable individuals. Even if the chance of this war wouldn't be 100% (though I think it's just about 100%), the standard procedure is to multiply the risk by the harm, and in this case it's an absolute no-brainer. If preventing harm is at all a part of morality, it's just obvious that sterilizing potential rivals is far and away the moral thing to do, and letting a conflict happen is disgusting moral cowardice.
As far as ethics goes, I'm not proposing something that's at all contrary to universal human values. I'm saying that faced with a choice between a small and great harm, we should always prefer the smaller. I think that this principle is universal. I don't deny that wiping out a civilization is a harm, but it's a minuscule harm compared to letting the civilization develop.
I would hope that aliens would also be operating by these humane principles, or at least trying to.
Of course you wouldn't want to live on a planet. I never did assume that. But I think it's not wrong to assume that civilizations will always need energy, and no amount of energy will ever be "enough" for the projects they find to be important. After you've built the Dyson sphere around your home star, where will you go for more energy? Another star, of course - and then another. I really can't imagine any technological civilization that made it into space but simply saw no value in colonizing other star systems. Anyway, it only takes one...
I do see what you mean, I don't pretend that I'm comfortable with the similarity of my conclusion to the Bush doctrine (actually, mine is "worse" in a way). I'm not saying that civilizations will inherently want to outdo or conquer each other. I'm only saying that civilizations will inevitably search for more energy than their home star provides, and since even the most boring neighbor star provides energy, they will pretty much inevitably find a way to tap it... and the next one, and so on. So they won't be aiming to have a conflict with other civilizations; this conflict will happen as an unfortunate, unintended consequence of exponential expansion - of tapping the energy of the neighboring star systems, their neighbors, and so on.
Yeah, it's not a perfect analogy. I only recommended the sterilization if we really are the first interstellar colonizers in the galaxy. If we're not, we should willingly check ourselves into the zoo of whoever is more advanced, and definitely make no threatening moves. I agree with you that we might already be the aliens - perhaps we the Earth was seeded with life by some alien civilization. If that were the case, though, many other places should have been as well, and we see no sign of this.
Extermination if pointless. There exists far more resources than any civilization will need. If you can cross the galaxy, you can harness most of the energy from a single star.
Yeah, but what then? Then you realize that if you collected the energy of another star, and its asteroids, you could... do whatever good thing you do with energy, perhaps running software-based consciousnesses, or simulations, or experience machines or whatever. So you just spread out in a spherical pattern from your starting point, occupying all available sources of energy. The shit hits the fan when two civilizations who are spreading in this spherical manner meet. The encounter could end peacefully, but... when they're competing for the same resource, what are the odds?
Even if they did virtualize themselves, which I would fully expect, they would seek more energy to get smarter and... whatever they care about, which we can't imagine, but you can bet it would take computing cycles. And how do you power computing cycles? Partly with hardware, partly with energy, of which there will never be enough in any particular location.
You don't need many assumptions to see that interstellar expansion is pretty much inevitable for any undisturbed technological civilization which does not self-annihilate.
A software based civilization might consist of trillions of trillions of human-level persons, each with the full rights of a person. This makes it especially clear why wars involving civilizations on this scale are far worse morally than wars in which a civilization of billions is wiped out.
Yeah, but how likely is it that they would happen to visit us in an undetectable way? I mean, sure, if they're hiding on purpose... but why should we assume they ALL would be? (Fear of sterilizers is one reason, I suppose.) But the most likely form in which they would first appear would be as a self-replicating probe that hops from system to system and multiplies. Even probes that travel at rather slow speeds would be in every planetary system in the galaxy in 40M years, or three thousandths of the age of the galaxy. So why did nobody do this in all the time we've had?
Slashdot Mirror
If you really want an analogy, think about it like some stupid people who write confidential information on their hand and then go out in public. Then imagine another, somewhat unscrupulous sharp-eyed person, who looks for such people in public places, and writes down what he reads from their hands. This may not be "nice" but it's certainly not illegal.
If he puts this information to illegal use (fraud, for example) that's a different matter, but just calling a number that you see written on someone's hand or shirt is not an illegal use.
I'd like to see some benchmarks with low lighting and your sexy teen girlfriends, but who am I kidding.
On the other hand, if Apple made something like an IP TV station, they wouldn't be crazy enough to make it accessible only from their mobile devices. I'm quite sure that there would be an interface in the style of iTunes that even works in Windows. But having said that, I don't think the problem is the lack of an installed base with the right hardware. I think the problem is getting this service to work and getting content for it.
In the discrete GPU system as we have it, data gets pulled from memory to the CPU for processing/caching and the result is sent through a bus to the GPU for rendering. Maybe this whole thing took so long because AMD was working out a way to just read that data once, process it in the CPU, and leave it in the L1 cache for the GPU. If this is how it turns out, it really will make things much faster, because no discrete GPU has ever had access to data that's as quickly readable as the L1 cache. Now, maybe it will turn out that you just can't store enough data in L1 to make all the framebuffers and other graphics stuff work. (But maybe you can; since this thing does all the data processing "in one house", you can work through it chunk by L1-cache-sized chunk, and as soon as that stuff is processed and rendered by the Fusion unit, it is sent down the DVI cable and can be forgotten. Rinse and repeat, and you might have a formula for rendering scenes which actually moves very little data over the memory bus.)
Also remember that AMD owns the patents for ZRam. They could realistically make a very large and fast on-die caches with ZRam, and Intel couldn't respond because they don't own the rights and don't use a SOI process like AMD, which is required for ZRam.
I'm not sure about the part about the tests seeming legit, but I do think you make a good point that the tests are at least legit enough to cast light on the shortcomings of the other browsers. But mainly, I want to express my appreciation that you didn't just post another version of the standard (and boring and too easy) Slashdot response. So thank you for actually trying to focus this discussion on the issues. I hope you're not flamed or just ignored, but I'm not holding my breath.
This is pretty insightful. Yes, I think the Flash era is ending, and it will be over at the latest by the time that developer tools for web-standard animation/video are as good as what's now available for Flash. Adobe would be smart if they got ahead on this and made their present Flash tools output something other than Flash. That way they could keep a lot of their customers, perhaps indefinitely, after the Flash era ends. If they don't do this, someone else will take them.
I was thinking the same thing. I would say that the common cause is self-respect. It's what makes your peers and teachers admire you, and it's also what makes you stand up for yourself when bullied. It's much more plausible than the hypothesis that standing up to bullies is what wins you admiration.
Right, but... I'm sure that there is a setting on the robot by which you can tell it to modulate its dynamics and the random rhythmic noise you mention would be even easier to introduce. Then you have the unique quirks of a genuine acoustic instrument, and with this combination, I'm sure a robot can produce music that sounds pretty darn soulful. Of course this requires some extra programming, and there is little hope that the robot would figure out on its own which parts deserve soulful emphasis, delay or whatever. But, I bet that software could be designed to listen to great performances of music and detect and precisely quantify all changes in dynamics and deviations from the metronome. Once this info is added to the score, a sufficiently dexterous robot should be able to reproduce the soulfulness of a great performance by Joshua Bell or whoever. Right? I mean, it's not magic...
When Bill Gates was in charge of the Microsoft empire, his goal was to serve the empire. Once he quit and started thinking full time about how to make the world a better place, he has become a hero of mine. I don't mean that in any ironic sense; there is no other prominent voice in the world which is advocating for all the right stuff the way Gates is. If you want to see Gates at his best, watch his 2010 talk at TED. Almost never do I hear a talk like this, where I am prepared to endorse pretty much every word, down to his enthusiastic advocacy of traveling wave reactors.
Or you could rename your perfectly innocent family photos things like "Kevin Rudd anal fucked by wallbe.jpg" and "Barely legal dingo deep throats Kevin Rudd's tiny cock.jpg".
Pretty clever, thanks for the tip! Those border guards must have quite the international collection of porn!
I would love to have someone organize the absolute sickest (but legal) porn content on a website so that travelers to Australia could inflict this on the customs agents. I'm talking about morbidly obese men being fisted by dwarves in kangaroo outfits, stuff in that league. If you can get enough of these state employees to lose enough lunches, this policy will be reconsidered.
By the counting method of hard drive companies, that would almost be a teraperson!
I agree with you, but I think you're being kind.
If you live in a city and invest in a decent antenna, you will get enough HDTV programming to cover your typical urge to just be a couch vegetable for a while. The internet and Netflix is a great supplement to this, leaving you with more to watch than ever before.
Actually, Cameron did indeed study physics, and did a lot of engineering. As others have mentioned, he's most likely one of the best-connected people to the community of optical engineers who work on 3D images. He's already proven that he can co-design a pretty effective 3D camera.
And it's not like NASA is putting him in charge of anything. He's being brought in as an adviser, probably on a pretty high level, and as far as I can tell, pro bono. I think that's pretty cool. I have no doubt that he will contribute two or three useful ideas based on his extensive experience. This also serves to promote the narrative of Cameron the technical wizard: Gear he helped design even went to Mars! It makes a great feel-good talking point for him when he's doing the interview circuit for his next movie.
Um, no. Think harder about your analogies.
Of course, since most conflicts arise out of competition over resources, I think it's safe to say that we're eons away from filling up the Milky Way with colonies of any type that are going to start stepping on other peoples' toes.
It won't be eons. We could probably colonize the whole galaxy in the span of 100 million years, which is less than 1% of the age of the galaxy. But I can't believe how sanguine you are about the conflict "eons" in the future, like it's no big deal. Are you even trying to imagine its catastrophic scale? I'm picturing like trillions dead per minute. And yeah, to prevent something like that with prudent action now is definitely obligatory, and to put it off because it's distasteful is cowardly.
I'm not recommending that we become Borg, all devoid of individuality or whatever. I want just the opposite: I want each individual to matter a lot, and matter equally. That's exactly why I simply can't accept allowing a war that will wipe out possibly trillions of trillions of these equally valuable individuals. Even if the chance of this war wouldn't be 100% (though I think it's just about 100%), the standard procedure is to multiply the risk by the harm, and in this case it's an absolute no-brainer. If preventing harm is at all a part of morality, it's just obvious that sterilizing potential rivals is far and away the moral thing to do, and letting a conflict happen is disgusting moral cowardice.
As far as ethics goes, I'm not proposing something that's at all contrary to universal human values. I'm saying that faced with a choice between a small and great harm, we should always prefer the smaller. I think that this principle is universal. I don't deny that wiping out a civilization is a harm, but it's a minuscule harm compared to letting the civilization develop.
I would hope that aliens would also be operating by these humane principles, or at least trying to.
Of course you wouldn't want to live on a planet. I never did assume that. But I think it's not wrong to assume that civilizations will always need energy, and no amount of energy will ever be "enough" for the projects they find to be important. After you've built the Dyson sphere around your home star, where will you go for more energy? Another star, of course - and then another. I really can't imagine any technological civilization that made it into space but simply saw no value in colonizing other star systems. Anyway, it only takes one...
I do see what you mean, I don't pretend that I'm comfortable with the similarity of my conclusion to the Bush doctrine (actually, mine is "worse" in a way). I'm not saying that civilizations will inherently want to outdo or conquer each other. I'm only saying that civilizations will inevitably search for more energy than their home star provides, and since even the most boring neighbor star provides energy, they will pretty much inevitably find a way to tap it... and the next one, and so on. So they won't be aiming to have a conflict with other civilizations; this conflict will happen as an unfortunate, unintended consequence of exponential expansion - of tapping the energy of the neighboring star systems, their neighbors, and so on.
Yeah, it's not a perfect analogy. I only recommended the sterilization if we really are the first interstellar colonizers in the galaxy. If we're not, we should willingly check ourselves into the zoo of whoever is more advanced, and definitely make no threatening moves. I agree with you that we might already be the aliens - perhaps we the Earth was seeded with life by some alien civilization. If that were the case, though, many other places should have been as well, and we see no sign of this.
Extermination if pointless. There exists far more resources than any civilization will need. If you can cross the galaxy, you can harness most of the energy from a single star.
Yeah, but what then? Then you realize that if you collected the energy of another star, and its asteroids, you could ... do whatever good thing you do with energy, perhaps running software-based consciousnesses, or simulations, or experience machines or whatever. So you just spread out in a spherical pattern from your starting point, occupying all available sources of energy. The shit hits the fan when two civilizations who are spreading in this spherical manner meet. The encounter could end peacefully, but... when they're competing for the same resource, what are the odds?
Even if they did virtualize themselves, which I would fully expect, they would seek more energy to get smarter and ... whatever they care about, which we can't imagine, but you can bet it would take computing cycles. And how do you power computing cycles? Partly with hardware, partly with energy, of which there will never be enough in any particular location.
You don't need many assumptions to see that interstellar expansion is pretty much inevitable for any undisturbed technological civilization which does not self-annihilate.
A software based civilization might consist of trillions of trillions of human-level persons, each with the full rights of a person. This makes it especially clear why wars involving civilizations on this scale are far worse morally than wars in which a civilization of billions is wiped out.
Yeah, but how likely is it that they would happen to visit us in an undetectable way? I mean, sure, if they're hiding on purpose... but why should we assume they ALL would be? (Fear of sterilizers is one reason, I suppose.) But the most likely form in which they would first appear would be as a self-replicating probe that hops from system to system and multiplies. Even probes that travel at rather slow speeds would be in every planetary system in the galaxy in 40M years, or three thousandths of the age of the galaxy. So why did nobody do this in all the time we've had?