AMD may not have access to Intel fab tech, but they do have access to IBM fab tech. This may be moving forward more slowly than Intel, but maybe on a more solid foundation with Silicon-on-Insulator. It's true that Intel made more progress in fab tech than people realized. The progress was largely invisible until they started fabbing something better than the dreadful Netburst cores. Now they seem to be way ahead, but for the first time next year, AMD will be able to crank out some serious volume thanks to Fab36.
I wouldn't count AMD out just because they're being beaten this quarter - for the same reason we didn't count Intel out when they were being beaten for years!
The thing that seems clumsy about this design is the separation of the projectile from the ring sled. Since the thing has to suck up some serious acceleration anyway (2000g!), why not just launch it from a linear track that runs up the side of some huge equatorial mountain (say in Equador)? I know one argument has to do with the difficulty of supplying a huge burst of power, but couldn't we just build and charge a whole lot of capacitors or magnetically suspended flywheels?
What I like about the idea of releasing the projectile at a high altitude is that the atmosphere there is much thinner. Also, if it's done on the equator, we get the advatage of getting to use the earth's rotation to speed up the projectile. This isn't to say that smaller launchers like the proposed one would be useless. For launching construction beams, water, food, etc., this would be great. But I think we could do even better and it might not be that much more expensive.
Yeah, I was thinking exactly the same thing: I don't see how this alarm ads anything to your security! I mean, the first thing the thief will do is smash your phone if it starts making a terrible noise. Much better would be this: When it detects that it's stolen, it makes a calls the service provider to check its location - and maybe then reports its own sim card # and model # at an automated police voicemail number. Then it would just get stuck showing the following message: "Please place this phone in a mailbox and mail it to the following address [house address of the local police station]." (I first thought the address could be to your own home, but I don't think you want a thief to know this. And if they think that it is your home address and they mistakenly drive themselves to the police station, that's fine.)
I think this would leave you with a much higher chance of actually recovering the phone after it's been stolen. And isn't that the point? Maybe you have pictures, numbers or other data that you don't want to lose. And that stuff is almost definitely toast if your phone just starts honking like crazy.
I didn't realize that Iran doesn't have its own refineries - actually, it's a little surprising to me. But if you're right and they need to import refined fuel, they're in trouble no matter whether or not it's they or a proxy who closes the Strait. But anyway, if shooting does break out, I'm sure the USA will blockade any fuel shipments to Iran - they will just try to make sure their own ships pass. So if Iran really has no native refining capacity, they're really going to be hurt by a protracted war. But even if they did have refineries, they'd probably get bombed anyway, so....
Yes, it's well known that Iran wants to close the Strait of Hormuz as a wartime retalliation to a preemptive US attack. I'm quite sure they're training for this now. However, we're talking about a mission of the Iranian national army, not some plain-clothed terrorists. And you can believe me, the government of Iran has much better resources for simulation and training than Counterstrike.
As for terrorist groups, the tactical mission of closing the Strait of Hormuz is completely out of reach, and even if it weren't, how's Counterstrike going to help them plan? I imagine that sea-borne terrorists would use light boats or diving gear and place improvised mines into the narrow shipping lanes. So how do you propose they use Counterstrike to plan their mission?
Right, you have no idea. That's because this story, like many others, gets written before anybody thinks about it. This is written simply because it fits the convenient script according to which "They're evil and they're plotting" - which is scare tactic that's supposed to make it easier for us to abandon our freedoms and turn them over to the government.
I think we shouldn't forget that Turnitin is a for-profit company that makes serious money from ill-begotten intellectual property (yours). This is relevant to the whole discussion. The papers written by the students play an essential role in adding value to Turnitin's database. I could sympathize with their anger that someone is profiting from violating their intellectual property rights.
The majority of students are not saints with respect to following US laws on intellectual property. However, no one that I know has ever violated violated someone's copyright in order to make money. If they did, I would think they deserve their fines or jailtime, even if I think current IP laws are less than perfect.
The estimates I've seen for the peak power consumption of the PS3 is around 175W. That's not a negligible power draw. Here in NY I pay 17c/KW-h, so for me to run a PS3 folding machine, I'd be coughing up almost $22/month, or $261 per year. I hope all the children who run this app will get this sum deducted from their allowance!
BTW, I googled to compare my energy costs to the rest of the country. Here is a useful page. Why am I paying three times as much for a kilowatt-hour as a resident of Idaho? Shouldn't costs per resident be lower when the population has a lower density? Or is it that we're being punished for not voting republican?
OK, this is cool. The pictures on the website don't look so great, but then I read about the page with the technical details and they're confident of getting over 1000 Megapixels in their prints. Of course, they use chemical film and scan the results, but the point is, the optics seem to be sufficient. Cool, and thanks for the link!
So does this mean that the lenses are going to get 16 times larger still, as you would need to maintain photon density per pixel levels? That would be pretty damn big, like telescope big! Or maybe they will use multiple lenses? I suppose that you're right, though: Lenses will get bigger. With high-res optics we are bumping up against the boundaries of physics and not of technology. Actually, this left me wondering: what is the effective resolution if IMAX film stock? I've seen the lens on an IMAX camera and it's big, but not too big to be carried up Everest.
They finally have some still cameras that can usefully photograph at such huge megapixel counts, but getting video camera to take more than 20 frames per second is a different story. Besides, it's been my experience, and the experience of many, that the real bottleneck in digital cameras is no longer the pixel count but the optics themselves. By which I mean that pictures with 30Mpix will not look better than pictures at 7Mpix with even upmarket still camera optics these days.
What's more, while all the electronics in digital cameras are quickly improving, the optics are not. The lenses of an expensive camera from the 80's are ground and set every bit as accurately as the lenses on new cameras. This is just not an area with much room for drastic improvements. But if 31Mpix is ever going to pay off, there had better be some drastic improvements in the optics. There isn't much use for the extra pixels if all they show is blur.
Look, you could launch the same objection against any CPU improvement: for most applications, the user won't even notice a difference between the best and, say my "budget" E6300 (overclockable but unoverclocked - I don't need it!). What are the exceptions? Games are one sort of thing where an excellent processor makes a qualitative difference - and media applications are the other. I'm hard-pressed to think of some other mainstream software that tests modern CPUs.
Games are a tough nut to crack. We'll see if game engine coders figure out how to separate threads. All claim that it's proving very hard. For now, your best gaming bang for the buck is still a fast single-core processor.
But the other mainstream application, media encoding, really does profit a great deal from multiple cores. Here, software support is easy. Many audio encoding apps let you run multiple tasks simultaneously, so you can keep arbitrarily many cores at 100% without need for crosstalk.
So my point is, an 80+% improvement in one out of two application categories that still need improving... ain't bad.
Now I think the real quesition is, how much media encoding do you think you're going to do? Because people who don't do much, and don't have a fetish for recent games, have no buisiness getting expensive CPUs. Those people should instead be focusing on reducing power consumption.
Interesting that it's possible. Now the question is: will they actually do it? I mean, if every Sony film release came out on one of these hybrid DVDs and the price was reasonable (and all standard DVD players really could read it), this would help Bluray adoption a great deal. You're much more likely to buy a player if you know you already have HD content at home (and presumably in the video store - for people who still use those).
Maybe it's actually good that there is a format war. Both sides will have to pander to the market, and the fear of losing will hopefully keep them from making the format too crappy for the consumer. Yeah, I know it doesn't seem like that now with all that DRM, but it might have been even worse.
Why would Apple want to add a feature that is only important to an extremely small minority, that may add quite a bit to the overall cost of either the R&D or the unit itself?
Because it might possibly take two engineers two afternoons to get ogg vorbis support working, it would get its own story on Slashdot and generate lots of other very cheap advertising, and it might tip me over the edge to thinking that the iPod is worth the extra money that Apple wants.
If you're advocating that AI only work with the information and "reflexes" available to human players, I wholeheartedly agree. I'm not as scared as you of AI that's too good, because it's always easier to make something worse than better. AI that's too good can be downgraded in many interesting, humanlike ways - like simulated dispositions to panic, or freeze, waste ammo, needlessly conserve ammo, get too close before firing, etc. Basically, you just need to observe what imperfect players do and tell an outstanding AI program to copy our shortomings. On higher levels the shortcomings would be diminished. Again, the Chessmaster series does that. You can set it to play very open and bold games - which makes it somewhat easier to beat, but much more fun to play (I still lose most of the time).
I like the idea about training AI, but in all this, the topic of discussion is about how the AI could act significantly smarter with more real-time processing power. As you mentioned, the game company can pre-train AIs on their own big computers while the game is in production. So in this case too, heavy real-time AI processing does not extra smartness.
Maybe AI code could include some general outlines of "strategies" on various levels of granularity, and the real-time decisions would be about choosing the strategy that best fits the situation. Essential to this is an estimation of the chances that the strategy succeeds, and of the cost of failure. Of course, there would be many ways to implement a strategy like "retreat" or "seek cover and throw grenades," and which implementation best fits the situation would again have to be computed in real time. So if the AI were programmed in this manner, the decisions it would make would improve with increased processing power. For example, evaluating how good a piece of cover a certain overturned table provides depends on your evaluation of the location, equipment and probable future movement of the enemies. What would the PC do if he were controlled by a smart AI? And how well would my cover protect me from that? These are all things the AI might have time to calculate. This is what I meant by "what if" scenarios - there would be many strategies and implementations the AI could consider at any given time, more than what any hardware can calculate. But the more you calculate, the better your decisions are likely to be. If I were writing a game that would have its own processor for AI, I would first develop maybe four intricate AI routines for the PC. Of course the PC won't be controlled by an AI, but the NPCs can consider what the PC would do if he were controlled by any of the 4 AIs and decide on a course of action which best counters what the PC might do.
Well, if game AI worked anything like this, I might really want an AI coprocessor. But so far this is all a pipe-dream. Game AI isn't always hopelessly naive (I programmed some myself!) but it really is just a script of hand-written nested conditionals. A good scripter can get interesting behavior out of NPCs, but not in any way that would be improved by extra AI processing hardware.
A friend of mine bought this card from Woot! for $150. It got shipped in a brown box and was allegedly Dell overstock. He had to take a leap into darkness because nobody at the time was allowed to benchmark the thing, but now it looks like a pretty good purchase!
Most people who game are plugged in behind a router, because they're sharing their internet connection. We know this decreases our ping, but what can we do? Well, if this card were itself a router, we might just have our answer! If it had a single LAN port, or maybe four (they'd fit), the gaming computer could be connected directly into the internet, with the rest of the home network behind it. Firewall and other network services could easily run from the on-card Linux. Really, it wouldn't need extra hardware apart from the ports themselves. Other software features could prioritize ping-sensitive packets like VoIP and game stuff, so that my roommate's bittorrent doesn't interfere with FEAR.
One disadvantage would be that the gaming computer would always need to be turned on for the router to do its job. Or maybe not: the card could have its own 12V plug and get its own power, so it stays on 24/7 even if the hosting computer is turned off. I expect this really could significantly improve ping numbers (vs standard NIC behind a router) plus it would be seriously cool.
I think this is the right question, but it may have an interesting answer. Maybe the way they picture future game AI is similar to present-day chess AI: Chess games evaluate many potential what-if scenarios several moves into the future, and select the one with the best outcome. Clearly, the more processing power is made available to them, the more intelligently they can play.
Maybe future RPG AI could have some similar routines regarding fight/flight decisions, fighting methods and maybe even dialogue. But that would require a pretty universal processor, which would just speak for getting a second CPU. I don't have much hope of this catching on, but I'd welcome it. For one thing, writing AI that can run in a separate process from the rest of the game is something I'd love to see. I want something to keep that second core busy while I'm gaming!
Plus, it would be pretty cool for hardware manufacturers if AIs really got smarter with better hardware (be it CPU or add-in card). That would require big coding changes from the way AI is written now, but I do think those would be changes for the better.
But what the article fails to mention is that all those clicks and movements is exactly what makes that game fun. If you play Civ like me, you play against overwhelming odds (on Deity, the AI cheats terribly) and you proudly flaunt your human ingenuity exactly though applying your limited resources in the most optimal way possible on every level of detail. Figuring out how to efficiently transfer an army of railroad builders to another continent takes a lot of planning and clicking, but these sorts of projects inside the game is what makes it worth playing. I'd like to ask any complainers: where exactly do you see the fun in strategy games, if not in conceiving and executing elaborate and detailed strategies? What sort of a real player complains about the tedium of building an efficient railroad network for transporting troops and goods, when exactly such logistical advantages often mean the difference between victory and defeat?
What are the alternatives, then? Remove all that detail? Oh, I know: How about a big red button that says "apply your human ingenuity in the most optimal way possible". (It would be a big button.) That would certainly save you a lot of mouse clicks. Yeah, that may be what the next generation of strategy games will look like, but I'd rather play Civ.
Now that CPU and GPU manufacturers are finally starting to put power-down-when-idle features into their chips, running them at full load 24/7 makes less sense than ever.
I know they try to justify SETI by saying that you're only donating your "spare cycles". But if you look more carefully, modern computers use 100 Watts to idle and 300 Watts under load. That difference of 200W at US$0.15/kW-hour (my local power rates) comes to THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS PER YEAR of your own money that you donate to the SETI project.
Actually, that's not quite right. It's more like you buy $300 worth of coal every year and burn it with no particular result. Gee, thanks!
I need something explained to me by someone who understands technology. This card has a giant copper heatsink, a big fan, allegedly efficient memory, etc. So why does it get up to 60C while doing nothing?
Ancient video cards (from four years ago) could run Windows beautifully at 1600x1200@85. Even with their 180nm technology, their passive heatsinks barely got warm from it. Now that the circuit density has quadrupled, I would think modern cards could do the same task with even less power consumption, right? Well, obviously not.
So my question is: Are the engineers at ATI just so rude and lazy as to not design a mechanism that turns off all but the necessary parts of the GPU and graphics memory? I'd love to calculate how much coal got burned from people's graphics cards needlessly sucking up power. Really, I'm angry about this! Is it really that hard to design a GPU so that when it's in 2D windows, only the parts necessary for rendering (one 32Meg memory chip and a tiny section of the GPU) get power? Seriously, to have to listen to a GPU fan while writing on Slashdot should be seen by all technically-minded people as a fucking insult.
It's been a long time since a bunch of Canadians made me this mad! But maybe I'm missing something subtle, in which case I'm sure slashtotters will straighten me out.
Renderware is a fucking disaster. The EA-wide push to standardize on it probably cost the company a fortune in development nightmares, missed ship dates, and poor sales due to cut features.
Interesting, I wasn't following these developments. But EA have enough resources to take note of the lessons learned and start from scratch. With all their acquisitions, they certainly have enough smart people on staff... for now.
Seriously, I'm sure the processor in that router is strong enough to handle Skype. Just put a radio transmitter on it and bundle two wireless handsets , and you get what lots of people wish for: Skype without a running computer! (Maybe it should also plug into a regular phone socket so you can use your old phones.)
Here's why it makes sense to do this on a router:
For one thing, everyone's router is always on, so there is nothing extra in the house sucking power. Maybe more relevant: The router, when Skype is being used, can be set to automatically throttle back the up/down bandwith that it's passing to connected computers (or using for its own bittorrent). This helps prevent degradation of Skype quality. And third, this would be totally simple - just plug in the router, tell it your Skype login/pass, and all your contacts are imported (Skype itself stores those things).
The effect with SkypeIn would essentially be: Vonage without the fees (or for $30/year for SkypeIn)... no, better, because Vonage sounds like crap when I'm using unthrotteled bittorrent. This would justify the price of the hardware, and if the manufacturer could keep the costs low, it would also be very good for Skype/eBay and its userbase. Maybe Ebay could subsidize the costs a bit, and offer free SkypeIn for a year, since anyone who buys this will also probably buy SkypeOut minutes eventually.
I guess if there is anything here to wonder at, it's that this game engine consolidation did not gather steam sooner. Maybe EA, who's been vacuuming up small game companies, whanted their newly-acquired employees to maintain a brief sense of independence. But if you're a game company that cranks out dozens of games a year, with almost all of them being 3D in some way, it makes sense to standardize. I would guess their intention with Renderware is to make it a very modular, clean and optimized game engine, so that its core can be used across all the lines of EA games. This will make redundant lots of the back-end people in EA's recent acquisitions. The people who remain will "generate content" for THE game engine.
I'm not sure whether this is bad or good. I was thinking it might make future games feel generic, but then I thought... more than now? Let's hope not. But maybe the generic feel of today's FPSes is that the oft-reused game engines are not quite flexible enough, so the player "recognizes" the engine underneath. Maybe in the future they will fix that.
I played a lot more than my fair share of Dungeon Keeper 2. I think it might have been my favorite computer game. It got to the point where I would design new, super-tough levels for myself, and see if I could still beat them.
There wasn't much missing from DK2. It ran on the Quake2 3D engine; now it might run on the Doom3 engine without challenging modern computers too much. But what it really needs is a deeper AI. The creatures in DK2 were a joy to work with most of the time, but occasionally, the shallowness of their intelligence would show through.
But this was 1998. Today's computers could easily handle a much more complex and lifelike AI. Creatures could be made trainable on a model similar to the monkey in Black and White. Each could develop personalities, attachments, character dispositions, etc. And yes, as an earlier poster said, it would be ideal if the hand of god didn't need to pick them up at all, but instad issue commands, reward and punish. Imagine having a dungeon of monsters with such loyalty and discipline that they defend against invaders all on their own, calling on one another for help, making cover for the fleeing wounded, or holding back enemies while the imps come in to do their work. Man, that would be my new favorite game! And honestly, it might not take a great deal of programming: Just adapt the graphics to a new engine and tweak existing Lionhead AI code, and you're well on your way!
I think it all depends on how charitably AMD will deal with nVidia. If they're allowed the same level of access and allowed to make the same quality chipsets, I think ultimately nVidia will work rather than whine. But this is a great opportunity for Intel to court nVidia. Whether or not they will take it is not clear. Since Intel likes making the chipsets for high-margin mobos themselves, there really isn't much they have to offer to nVidia. What made nVidia work so hard on the nForce chips is that AMD wasn't leaving them with sloppy seconds the way Intel did. This probably will not change.
So it looks to me like nVidia is not really in an optimal bargaining position. As long as AMD continues to treat them half-way reasonably, they will continue to do their best to make good chipsets and fully-compatible graphics cards solutions. And AMD would be stupid to try to break nVidia gear.
So yeah, the first thing I thought of when I read this was that nVidia would retaliate somehow, but now I don't think they have anything to threaten with.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't count AMD out just because they're being beaten this quarter - for the same reason we didn't count Intel out when they were being beaten for years!
What I like about the idea of releasing the projectile at a high altitude is that the atmosphere there is much thinner. Also, if it's done on the equator, we get the advatage of getting to use the earth's rotation to speed up the projectile. This isn't to say that smaller launchers like the proposed one would be useless. For launching construction beams, water, food, etc., this would be great. But I think we could do even better and it might not be that much more expensive.
I think this would leave you with a much higher chance of actually recovering the phone after it's been stolen. And isn't that the point? Maybe you have pictures, numbers or other data that you don't want to lose. And that stuff is almost definitely toast if your phone just starts honking like crazy.
I didn't realize that Iran doesn't have its own refineries - actually, it's a little surprising to me. But if you're right and they need to import refined fuel, they're in trouble no matter whether or not it's they or a proxy who closes the Strait. But anyway, if shooting does break out, I'm sure the USA will blockade any fuel shipments to Iran - they will just try to make sure their own ships pass. So if Iran really has no native refining capacity, they're really going to be hurt by a protracted war. But even if they did have refineries, they'd probably get bombed anyway, so ....
As for terrorist groups, the tactical mission of closing the Strait of Hormuz is completely out of reach, and even if it weren't, how's Counterstrike going to help them plan? I imagine that sea-borne terrorists would use light boats or diving gear and place improvised mines into the narrow shipping lanes. So how do you propose they use Counterstrike to plan their mission?
Right, you have no idea. That's because this story, like many others, gets written before anybody thinks about it. This is written simply because it fits the convenient script according to which "They're evil and they're plotting" - which is scare tactic that's supposed to make it easier for us to abandon our freedoms and turn them over to the government.
The majority of students are not saints with respect to following US laws on intellectual property. However, no one that I know has ever violated violated someone's copyright in order to make money. If they did, I would think they deserve their fines or jailtime, even if I think current IP laws are less than perfect.
BTW, I googled to compare my energy costs to the rest of the country. Here is a useful page. Why am I paying three times as much for a kilowatt-hour as a resident of Idaho? Shouldn't costs per resident be lower when the population has a lower density? Or is it that we're being punished for not voting republican?
OK, this is cool. The pictures on the website don't look so great, but then I read about the page with the technical details and they're confident of getting over 1000 Megapixels in their prints. Of course, they use chemical film and scan the results, but the point is, the optics seem to be sufficient. Cool, and thanks for the link!
So does this mean that the lenses are going to get 16 times larger still, as you would need to maintain photon density per pixel levels? That would be pretty damn big, like telescope big! Or maybe they will use multiple lenses? I suppose that you're right, though: Lenses will get bigger. With high-res optics we are bumping up against the boundaries of physics and not of technology. Actually, this left me wondering: what is the effective resolution if IMAX film stock? I've seen the lens on an IMAX camera and it's big, but not too big to be carried up Everest.
What's more, while all the electronics in digital cameras are quickly improving, the optics are not. The lenses of an expensive camera from the 80's are ground and set every bit as accurately as the lenses on new cameras. This is just not an area with much room for drastic improvements. But if 31Mpix is ever going to pay off, there had better be some drastic improvements in the optics. There isn't much use for the extra pixels if all they show is blur.
Games are a tough nut to crack. We'll see if game engine coders figure out how to separate threads. All claim that it's proving very hard. For now, your best gaming bang for the buck is still a fast single-core processor.
But the other mainstream application, media encoding, really does profit a great deal from multiple cores. Here, software support is easy. Many audio encoding apps let you run multiple tasks simultaneously, so you can keep arbitrarily many cores at 100% without need for crosstalk.
So my point is, an 80+% improvement in one out of two application categories that still need improving... ain't bad.
Now I think the real quesition is, how much media encoding do you think you're going to do? Because people who don't do much, and don't have a fetish for recent games, have no buisiness getting expensive CPUs. Those people should instead be focusing on reducing power consumption.
Maybe it's actually good that there is a format war. Both sides will have to pander to the market, and the fear of losing will hopefully keep them from making the format too crappy for the consumer. Yeah, I know it doesn't seem like that now with all that DRM, but it might have been even worse.
I like the idea about training AI, but in all this, the topic of discussion is about how the AI could act significantly smarter with more real-time processing power. As you mentioned, the game company can pre-train AIs on their own big computers while the game is in production. So in this case too, heavy real-time AI processing does not extra smartness.
Maybe AI code could include some general outlines of "strategies" on various levels of granularity, and the real-time decisions would be about choosing the strategy that best fits the situation. Essential to this is an estimation of the chances that the strategy succeeds, and of the cost of failure. Of course, there would be many ways to implement a strategy like "retreat" or "seek cover and throw grenades," and which implementation best fits the situation would again have to be computed in real time. So if the AI were programmed in this manner, the decisions it would make would improve with increased processing power. For example, evaluating how good a piece of cover a certain overturned table provides depends on your evaluation of the location, equipment and probable future movement of the enemies. What would the PC do if he were controlled by a smart AI? And how well would my cover protect me from that? These are all things the AI might have time to calculate. This is what I meant by "what if" scenarios - there would be many strategies and implementations the AI could consider at any given time, more than what any hardware can calculate. But the more you calculate, the better your decisions are likely to be. If I were writing a game that would have its own processor for AI, I would first develop maybe four intricate AI routines for the PC. Of course the PC won't be controlled by an AI, but the NPCs can consider what the PC would do if he were controlled by any of the 4 AIs and decide on a course of action which best counters what the PC might do.
Well, if game AI worked anything like this, I might really want an AI coprocessor. But so far this is all a pipe-dream. Game AI isn't always hopelessly naive (I programmed some myself!) but it really is just a script of hand-written nested conditionals. A good scripter can get interesting behavior out of NPCs, but not in any way that would be improved by extra AI processing hardware.
A friend of mine bought this card from Woot! for $150. It got shipped in a brown box and was allegedly Dell overstock. He had to take a leap into darkness because nobody at the time was allowed to benchmark the thing, but now it looks like a pretty good purchase!
Most people who game are plugged in behind a router, because they're sharing their internet connection. We know this decreases our ping, but what can we do? Well, if this card were itself a router, we might just have our answer! If it had a single LAN port, or maybe four (they'd fit), the gaming computer could be connected directly into the internet, with the rest of the home network behind it. Firewall and other network services could easily run from the on-card Linux. Really, it wouldn't need extra hardware apart from the ports themselves. Other software features could prioritize ping-sensitive packets like VoIP and game stuff, so that my roommate's bittorrent doesn't interfere with FEAR.
One disadvantage would be that the gaming computer would always need to be turned on for the router to do its job. Or maybe not: the card could have its own 12V plug and get its own power, so it stays on 24/7 even if the hosting computer is turned off. I expect this really could significantly improve ping numbers (vs standard NIC behind a router) plus it would be seriously cool.
Maybe future RPG AI could have some similar routines regarding fight/flight decisions, fighting methods and maybe even dialogue. But that would require a pretty universal processor, which would just speak for getting a second CPU. I don't have much hope of this catching on, but I'd welcome it. For one thing, writing AI that can run in a separate process from the rest of the game is something I'd love to see. I want something to keep that second core busy while I'm gaming!
Plus, it would be pretty cool for hardware manufacturers if AIs really got smarter with better hardware (be it CPU or add-in card). That would require big coding changes from the way AI is written now, but I do think those would be changes for the better.
What are the alternatives, then? Remove all that detail? Oh, I know: How about a big red button that says "apply your human ingenuity in the most optimal way possible". (It would be a big button.) That would certainly save you a lot of mouse clicks. Yeah, that may be what the next generation of strategy games will look like, but I'd rather play Civ.
I know they try to justify SETI by saying that you're only donating your "spare cycles". But if you look more carefully, modern computers use 100 Watts to idle and 300 Watts under load. That difference of 200W at US$0.15/kW-hour (my local power rates) comes to THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS PER YEAR of your own money that you donate to the SETI project.
Actually, that's not quite right. It's more like you buy $300 worth of coal every year and burn it with no particular result. Gee, thanks!
Ancient video cards (from four years ago) could run Windows beautifully at 1600x1200@85. Even with their 180nm technology, their passive heatsinks barely got warm from it. Now that the circuit density has quadrupled, I would think modern cards could do the same task with even less power consumption, right? Well, obviously not.
So my question is: Are the engineers at ATI just so rude and lazy as to not design a mechanism that turns off all but the necessary parts of the GPU and graphics memory? I'd love to calculate how much coal got burned from people's graphics cards needlessly sucking up power. Really, I'm angry about this! Is it really that hard to design a GPU so that when it's in 2D windows, only the parts necessary for rendering (one 32Meg memory chip and a tiny section of the GPU) get power? Seriously, to have to listen to a GPU fan while writing on Slashdot should be seen by all technically-minded people as a fucking insult.
It's been a long time since a bunch of Canadians made me this mad! But maybe I'm missing something subtle, in which case I'm sure slashtotters will straighten me out.
Here's why it makes sense to do this on a router:
For one thing, everyone's router is always on, so there is nothing extra in the house sucking power. Maybe more relevant: The router, when Skype is being used, can be set to automatically throttle back the up/down bandwith that it's passing to connected computers (or using for its own bittorrent). This helps prevent degradation of Skype quality. And third, this would be totally simple - just plug in the router, tell it your Skype login/pass, and all your contacts are imported (Skype itself stores those things).
The effect with SkypeIn would essentially be: Vonage without the fees (or for $30/year for SkypeIn)... no, better, because Vonage sounds like crap when I'm using unthrotteled bittorrent. This would justify the price of the hardware, and if the manufacturer could keep the costs low, it would also be very good for Skype/eBay and its userbase. Maybe Ebay could subsidize the costs a bit, and offer free SkypeIn for a year, since anyone who buys this will also probably buy SkypeOut minutes eventually.
I'm not sure whether this is bad or good. I was thinking it might make future games feel generic, but then I thought... more than now? Let's hope not. But maybe the generic feel of today's FPSes is that the oft-reused game engines are not quite flexible enough, so the player "recognizes" the engine underneath. Maybe in the future they will fix that.
There wasn't much missing from DK2. It ran on the Quake2 3D engine; now it might run on the Doom3 engine without challenging modern computers too much. But what it really needs is a deeper AI. The creatures in DK2 were a joy to work with most of the time, but occasionally, the shallowness of their intelligence would show through.
But this was 1998. Today's computers could easily handle a much more complex and lifelike AI. Creatures could be made trainable on a model similar to the monkey in Black and White. Each could develop personalities, attachments, character dispositions, etc. And yes, as an earlier poster said, it would be ideal if the hand of god didn't need to pick them up at all, but instad issue commands, reward and punish. Imagine having a dungeon of monsters with such loyalty and discipline that they defend against invaders all on their own, calling on one another for help, making cover for the fleeing wounded, or holding back enemies while the imps come in to do their work. Man, that would be my new favorite game! And honestly, it might not take a great deal of programming: Just adapt the graphics to a new engine and tweak existing Lionhead AI code, and you're well on your way!
So it looks to me like nVidia is not really in an optimal bargaining position. As long as AMD continues to treat them half-way reasonably, they will continue to do their best to make good chipsets and fully-compatible graphics cards solutions. And AMD would be stupid to try to break nVidia gear.
So yeah, the first thing I thought of when I read this was that nVidia would retaliate somehow, but now I don't think they have anything to threaten with.