I think you're right about the GPU-in-a-CPU socket. Hypertransport makes all this possible, and how cool would it be to just swap out a chip (and maybe add memory) when upgrading a graphics card? Plus, I'm sure AMD have their eye on all the fancy vector processing that could be done by a properly-connected GPU. I'm thinking for example of video encoding.
Fair enough about the parody element and the inconvenient monster books. But I can tell you there is not a single Hacklopedia of Beasts that is not worth buying. Just the monsters alone are enough to provide a great tone for a campaign. Just don't ask the players at my table about their last encounter with a Bolter. Hillarity ensewed, to be sure (but not for them). The next adventure will require some serious tracking and detective work. But that's just one of hundreds of monsters that can really make make an evening of gaming a memorable event.
Oh, I'm sad to hear that, but it's good of you to have given a shot. I don't have kids but I've played at multi-generational tables and I thought it was a good bonding experience. I hope you give it another shot later, maybe when you notice their interest piqued by something that could be played out in D&D (Pirates, Zombies, Hobbits, etc.).
Let's suppose that "last mile" ISP's start charging information sources (like Google) for good access to users. Since this is worth a lot to online companies, being an ISP will suddenly get lucrative - maybe lucrative enough for real competition to start in every neighborhood. And make no mistake: Google themselves might be one of the competitors. They certainly bought enough dark fibre to run a pretty serious network. The "last mile" would probably be done by WiFi, like in San Francisco. They would suddenly get mobs of users, and even if the users don't pay, Google gets paid for the service they provide, because the rest of the internet is paying Google for the right to have special access to those mobs of users. Net neutrality cuts both ways, please don't doubt that Google has contingency plans. And this sort of a Google should scare the shit out of the traditional ISP. That's because if Google comes to town and all you need to get their fast connection is a special radio receiver, you'll do it. Forget DSL and monthly bills!
Do you realize that the majority of the operating costs of an ISP are in the personalle that you need to handle accounts and payments? Add to these astronomical costs the extra obligation to maintain wires and you'd see how much cheaper it would be for a company to run free municipal WiFi. Now, I never thought such a thing would happen for free without public financing, but then I thought about how life might look after the end of net neutrality, and realized that free Google WiFi would make perfect economic sense, especially in densely-populated, flat areas. "Owning" all those users is an instant goldmine when you can charge Yahoo for "fast lane" access, eBay for the right to make their Skype sound right, Doubleclick for the right to flood them with banners, etc. And not to be underestimated in all this is the fact that if Google owns the last mile, nobody else can yank their chain. What really works for this (hypothetical) Google-ISP is that they would not have to waste resources in shaking down ordinary Joes for money. They'd be shaking down the wealthy data sources instead, players like Vonage and iTunes. I can easily imagine them covering all their costs in this way, and who knows, cities like SF also seem prepared to sweeten the deal with some public money for the "quality of life" improvement that free, municipal WiFi brings to a city.
There might be some risks to Google, but I'd hate to be a telco trying to sell DSL to customers who can get Google WiFi for free. Can you imagine the deals they'd have to offer? I'm talking about cheap, uncapped bandwith, privacy guarantees, plus reliability. Otherwise, nobody would care enough to pay! And, contrary to initial appearances, maybe the customer (at least the urban customer that Google could easily reach) really would win!
I know first hand that it's possible to write excellent combat AI as an ordinary (though long) nested list of conditionals. I'd call that hard-coded intelligence. This is the sort of thing I'm pretty good at (for example, the smart Irenicus in the Ascension mod for BG2, who's deadly without cheating). I have a feeling that most gamers are satisfied by this sort of AI if it's really done well, so that smart NPC's really fight smart.
But real AI has to involve some sort of learning, which is to say, letting game events "write" your behavior script. When would this be useful? The best example I can think of: Entirely stable environments that are "alive". Current games give you staged non-equilibrium situations that get triggered when your PC enters the scene. This sort of thing is just very obvious and unsatisfying if the goal is immersion. What good AI might do is this: before the game is released, the various separate settings might be populated with a bunch of artificial-life characters with specific motivations, needs, preferences, etc. (Maybe like the Sims, except more complex psychologically.) Then the game authors would let this initial system reach an equilibrium their big server. If they don't like the equilibrium that was produced, they tweak the initial AI and try again. Eventually, this will produce in a "natural" way something like a small, functioning village. When a PC enters the village, it will have been in an equilibrium which the actions of the PC will disrupt, almost certainly in unpredictable ways. That is how you give the player a true sense of freedom, like their actions really matter. Somebody like me might wonder: What would happen if I steathily killed the village miller, or gave him a gigantic horde of treasure, etc? That sort of scenario is impossible to play out in current games. And that sucks.
Now granted, writing Artificial Life that reaches an equilibrium similar to a real village, and still manages to react believably when a PC shows up may be a tall order, but I absolutely think it's a goal worth shooting for. For one thing, since many of the A-life interactions will happen in mutual isolation, the processing could be easily broken up into separate threads. Also, it's worth mentioning that this is not an all-or-nothing affair. If the equilibrium state produced at the end of several A-life generations is not exactly what you wanted, it's OK to slightly tweak the end result. The effect will still be much more convincing than the "village/dungeon/colony/factory eternally frozen in a moment until a PC triggers it."
One last bit: If you want to make AI characters seem realistic, maybe a good place to start is with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Start there and build on that foundation. Everybody puts self-preservation ahead of other priorities, and so should AI. Ditto for all the other stuff on the hierarchy. So for example, if a fire I started destroys your hut, you will interrupt your routine to seek shelter, because this is your highest priority. For this, you may need to interact with other A-life, who might offer you a place to stay, financial help, or help with constructing a new hut - all for their own reasons, that depend on how much they like you, how likely they think you are to reciprocate, etc. If you saw me kill the miller, you will tell the other villagers, who may decide to ambush and capture you. How does a game produce that sort of behavior? Well, for one thing, planning requires some sort of awareness of expected consequences. But this should not be hard for a computer to do. It would guess that the PC would resist any attempt at capture, and it can (in the background) play out several "what if" scenarios compare their outcome to the goals of the villagers. This should show that a haphazard attack is a bad idea. Now it may look like I'm asking for a crazy amount of processing power. Maybe, but remember, we'll all have many CPU's to work with in the near future, so the ones that aren't running the game can be computing these "what if" scenarios. Also
I wonder how many people care whether the installation takes 10 minutes or 20. I mean, how much performance or utility would I sacrifice for those 10 saved minutes? None. Sometimes it's a good rule of thumb that longer something takes, the more likely I am to mess it up. But I don't think that's so with water cooling. There is really only one thing to worry about, and that's leaking. If I thought a setup was less likely to leak, I'd be happy to remove the motherboard to install it. Anyway, my point is that this observation about different install times is completely superficial - and the fact it appears on Slashdot, where millions happily tinker with Linux config files, is all the more silly.
I've tried 3e and made exactly the same observations, plus one: aesthetically, the books look like children's books. That's no accident. Children (9-13 y) are the audience, and every aspect of the design is made with that target in mind.
Of course, there is a modern alternative, and it's brilliant: Hackmaster. Really, it's the best fantasy roleplaying system I've ever seen, with rules that never lose track of the fact that the fantasy setting is supposed to feel like a consistent world, not just a backdrop for "awesome characters" to showcase all their "feats and powers." Hackmaster bought the rights to lift certain material from Gygax's AD&D, and it not only keeps that old spirit - it actually adds to it. Don't confuse it with a novelty system - it's really the most playable role-playing game that I've ever been a part of. I campaign with AD&D veterans (most now with Ph.D's) and since we all have the Gygax books, we still officially use that system. However, I (the DM) have supplemented so much of it with ideas borrowed from Hackmaster that it's starting to feel like we're making a transition. First I started with importing some wonderful monsters, then the initiative system, then chunks of the character generation system (really fun and great for roleplaying!).
Hackmaster is a system for people who like roleplaying because they enjoy immersing themselves in consistent, detailed yet fantastic worlds. Many of the things that happen are not flashy. They're mundane, grimy, lifelike (a treasure horde of fine ebony furniture and disturbing silk tapestries for which only one curiously shady art dealer is prepared seek a buyer) and decidedly not pure hero stuff. In sensibility it's just like the first AD&D except even a bit more so.
Sorry, I didn't expect this post to sound like such a plug, but I've made and heard complaints like yours before. My experience is people who say that sort of stuff should consider a flirtation with Hackmaster because when they try, they tend to find compatibility.
The fact that this is practical has made me wonder how well it would work to use a motherboard socket for a GPU. With Hypertransport it would have absolutely direct access to system ram and could help itself to as much as it needed. I would love to be able to use standard CPU heatsinks on a GPU.
But what I find really exciting about this idea is that once the GPU is in the motherboard, I'm sure programmers would find an easy way to use all that logic to do calculations - say, media encoding. Heck, I know they are trying to do this with GPU's on cards, but this would be a much lower latency connection.
I wonder how this would affect total system cost. I mean, I know multi-socket mobos will always cost more, but then again, when the GPU is a chip instead of a card, that should bring costs down. Also, they could ditch all that PCI-e logic and those slots. Upgrading would definitely be cheaper, and can you imagine two socketed GPUs on the mobo running a Hypertransport version of SLi? That might be the fastest, quietest gaming rig ever!
My initial guess would be something like yours, except not intended as funny. I pictured a dual core CPU that looks to the OS like a dual-core CPU, and works like one when the OS gives both cores some work to do. But if the OS only schedules real work for one of the cores, the chip logic kicks in and the entire chip poses as the one core that is being given work. I assume that the posing is doing by some sort of run-ahead or something - that's the big mystery - but anyway, in single-thread apps, the core asked to run the thread somehow covertly gets help from the other core and with this help the task gets done faster.
When you have two cores, it would be a real waste to not let an SMP-optimized program see both of them. That's why I doubt that if this ever becomes a product, it will look to the OS like a single core. But if it really is possible to let two cores cooperate on running a single thread, it would be nice for them to do so when an application is only willing to run as a single thread.
Let's try an analogy: Assume two heads are better than one. But some tasks are explicitly not meant for two heads, say, taking a math test. So say I go in for the test, appearing only as a single "head" to the test-giver (the "interface") but I covertly ask my friend to help me on the side. This makes my result better. Of course if the "interface" explicitly allowed for team work on the test, there would be no reason for the covert (probably inefficient) communication, so we could drop the pretense of being one person. So the analogy is, when a single core is asked to "work alone" on a problem and it can figure out how to get useful help from its friend so the work goes faster, AMD wants to make sure that it really gets the help.
Look, I agree, this was a bad decision by Carter. But someone should remind you that you can't blame Carter and his party for why this is still in effect - they're long out of power! Our leaders just don't care very much about the environment - after all, their terms will be over by the time the shit really hits the fan! I consider myself rather far on the political left but I feel very strongly that we must be building nuclear plants as fast as possible, not only in our own country but also in places like Africa. I say we give our great but ailing manufacturers a contract to mass-produce parts for breeder reactors with on-site, highly-automated fuel reprocessing. Our ultimate goal should be zero burning of fossil fuels for electricity. Yeah, it sounds like a Utopian fantasy and I guess I really do have those tendencies, but ubiquitous fission power is definitely is a part.
I know many people on the left feel differently, but this is one place where their sensible instincts let them down. Nuclear power is big, corporate-industrial, complicated, easily vilified and in general not on the wavelength of the standard hippie. (Hippies get windmills and sunshine, stuff that's small, decentralized and not intimidating.) Many big, centralized things like that really are bad and worth opposing, so if you need a quick rule of thumb, you can do worse. But the rule fails in this case. There is no hippie solution for our power needs, don't talk to me about solar panels and windmills (as a replacement for what we now have). So it's time for the people on the left to judge this issue with their heads and not their guts.
Good post, this is exactly what I was thinking. The heavy elements that are removed during reprocessing are the ones with the really long half-lives. The stuff that remains, like radioactive iodine, is still nasty but decays quickly.
I'm a big fan of breeder reactors, it just seems like the responsible way to treat our fuel. I think the reason they have been sidelined is that we don't want other countries to think that reprocessing is "normal" - so we have to invent some myth about how it's a bad idea. If it became standard practice around the world, it really would make a distinction between civilian and military nuclear power completely disappear. That's arguably bad. But I think belching out soot and carbon dioxide is worse.
I hacked together my own keyboad drawer, to my great satisfaction. I just used two ordinary sliders from a drawer, separated them exactly as far as my keyboard is wide, worked out the optimal wrist-rest position and made that out of wood padded with dense foam and upolstered with velvet. It's classy and ergonomic. I sloped up the keyboard for optimal typing and made its height so that the function keys are about a milimeter below the table surface when the keyboard is pushed in. I also discovered that the sliders are much longer than the keyboard is deep, so I made a handy "secret" compartment behind it where I keep pens. OK, it may not sound cool, but I swear now that I have it that I will never live without this. It's absolutely the perfect typing setup, and nothing I could buy would come close.
I also found that for mousing, it's important to have both my elbow and wrist supported. I solved this by another clever hack: The top drawer of my desk opens and has a gel keyboard wrist-supporter velcroed to the top. My elbow sits on this while the wrist is on the desk itself, cushioned by a gigantic foam mouse pad. This part is a bit sub-optimal because it's a bit of a reach from the perfect keyboard to the mouse, but I have a plan brewing: I mean augment an elbow-rest on my fancy chair and turn it into an elbow-rest-mousepad. That way the mouse will always be in the optimal position no matter where I have my chair.
No, you're wrong. This is not the problem. If MS really worried about this, they would write the OS exactly as they want and get a team to write a WINE-like translation layer for older software. They are perfectly free to do this, most of the software they'd need is they already have, and the reason why they don't is because it's just not hard to support the older incarnations of win32.
Microsoft's problems are much more about their corporate culture and management.
Yeah, I think this is a good point and something that I'm sure Apple is thinking about. Of course, they don't really have to worry about it yet, because all three of their Intel lines so far are very un-customizable (no AGP nor PCI-E slots, for one thing).
That will change once their full desktop computer comes out. It will have slots and it will lead to people whining about how card X works in Windows, "why doesn't it work when I boot into OSX?"
The result: Apple will spend increasingly more energy on OSX drivers for common hardware. Along the way, mistakes will be made, and the reliability of OSX will begin approaching Windows. The drivers with which Apple will need the most help are for graphics cards. Paradoxically, NVidia and ATI will not feel much incentive to do a very good job, because they know that most applications which stress the drivers (i.e. games) will always be run through Windows. Another reason why Apple can't be too accomodating about providing OSX drivers for any-ol-gear is the threat that if they do this too well, it will become too easy to run OSX on home-built hardware.
In any case, I think this issue with drivers will loom very large in future debates about OSX on x86.
Yeah, I also thought Mr. Malyneaux talked a good game, but as far as I can tell, they still haven't written a good game. It was maybe merciful for MS to buy them, now they can subsidize their sucking.
I'm a huge fan of the Firelfy/Serenity mileau and I think it's a wonderful setting for a role-playing game. In fact, I though Firefly had in it more role-playing dynamics than anything that ever appeared on television. In fact, I always tell people who haven't played D&D that it's just like Firefly except with magical swords and monsters.
I think it's no accident that the Firefly party consists of three fighters (each with a different specialization), a healer, a priest, an empath, a mechanic and an "ambassador". The mechanic plays the role the D&D magic-user because only she can rig up things with massive effects. This is the epitome of the balanced adventuring party, and Firefly is the first time such a thing was on television - and it worked really damn well.
So I'm not going to be playing the Serenity RPG because my group is busy enough with D&D. Still, I wanted to applaud the idea.
I don't think the numbers they mentioned reflect the amount of role playing that goes on. They reflect the amount of sales. Now, I'm a fairly heavy role-player, but I'm afraid I don't do much to support the industry from which I derrive so much pleasure. The reason is that they don't offer me anything I need to play my games. The rulebooks I use are the AD&D first edition, supplemented a bit with some ideas from Hackmaster. So yeah, I did spend $60+ on those inspirational Hackmaster books, but that has been my only RPG purchase for many years.
You see, what makes role-playing games fun is creativity, and that's not for sale in a game store. I have brought several new players into the game and they did buy some dice, miniatures and used Player's Handbooks for $10 (I feel like they should cost more!).
All the industry has to offer groups like mine are supplements, but we don't need no stinking supplements. I'm smart enough to compose my own adventures, supplementary spells, items and worlds. My home-made character sheets suit my campaign much better than anything I can buy. I OCR'ed all the spells from the Player's Handbook and Unearthed Arcana (and added a couple of Hackmaster-inspired and home-brewed ones) and I print these for my spell-casting players. To be honest, there are so many supplements now that I feel they allow too much. I think the only reasonable reaction is to revert to the "real" rules, and add to them exactly those things that the DM feels should be there. What are the "real" rules? By far the best candidate is Gygax's unpreverted first edition. It's not perfect, but since people will disagree on what its imperfections are, they should use it as a base and tweak it with sensible house rules.
I have a great group which consists mostly of Ph.D's and advanced graduate students, and this is one of the most fun social things we do. (We also play sports, poker, BBQ, etc.) Still, nobody seems to be making much money from all the fun we have, and I think we like it that way.
I always pictured the light saber to be something like tamed lightning. As it cuts metal, it doesn't melt it from heat but from the actual cutting action of really fast elecrons (or whatever) colliding with and knocking loose whatever the light saber touches. Except it couldn't be electrons because they'd be grounded out by the metal they're cutting, so it's some other sort of particle.
Re:Ballmer needs to stomp his feet and party's ove
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The SLI Godfather
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Your response assumes that NVidia want a war with Microsoft... over the issue of Linux drivers. You must be living in dreamland. If you read the article, you'd see that NVidia are really not very enthusiastic about writing Linux drivers in the first place. They don't seem to need much of an excuse to bow out.
I mean, come on, use your immagination: I was being blunt for the sake of humor. The real email from Ballmer would look like "MS and NV would both profit from a closer software collaboration to optimize Windows driver performance." Sounds a lot more innocent, means the very same thing. NVidia aren't stupid, they understand subtext like anyone else.
You really think NVidia would take MS to court over a threat about a market segment which makes them little, no, or perhaps even negative profit?
Manned exploration is a stupid vanity project
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I guess I understand the pull of putting people on places that seem hard to get to, but we should realize that all this brings us is the gratification of human vanity. Very little else gets done.
Meanwhile, we're becoming dramatically better at robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and long-distance communication. What we can do in 2020 that we couldn't do in 1968 is to send good, smart and relatively cheap robots to the moon, and actually have them build something useful.
If we don't have to worry about human safety and frailty, we can get big projects done for relatively little money. I'm talking about satellite-steered bulldozers, a nice big nuclear powerplant, and a real industrial-scale mining operation. We don't need humans to be there, the moon is close enough for fly-by-wire with reasonable ping times. Sure, once our robots build a reasonably shielded and equipped hotel, we can launch people who can say "been there". But let's first figure out what our goals are and then make sure we're acting to fulfill our goals! I'm almost sure that we're better served by some serious robots than by astronauts on the Moon.
Ballmer needs to stomp his feet and party's over!
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What I learned from TFA is that even mediocre graphics driver support for Linux is hanging by a thread. There are the occasional fortunate (and according to TFA, tenuous) corporate allignments, like HP's funding of NVidia's Linux driver development. Thank you HP! But NVidia themselves come off looking rather indifferent about the Linux drivers issue.
They're in it for the money, and their real customer base consists of Windows gamers. Now, these customers are rather picky about stable and optimized drivers. They read articles about benchmarks, and a driver that squeezes out an extra 5pfs will in many cases make the difference between $300 of revenue or similar money in the pockets of the competitor. That's why NVidia work hard on Windows. It's their lifeline.
We're living in an age when Microsoft doesn't fear Linux on the desktop. They just don't; they think it's a joke. Suppose something happens to change their mind, and they really start competing in their ham-fisted, machiavellian way. They really only need to do one thing to destroy desktop Linux: Make a phone call to NVidia. Ballmer: "Hey, you know all that work you do on Linux drivers that makes you almost no revenue? Well, stop it. Stop it or you will find some rather unfriendly code in Vista sp1. End communication."
That's all it would take. Remember that starting next year, if you don't have a 3D-accelerated desktop, your machine will look like a dinosaur. So never mind Linux games. Just the regular desktop will look and work like crap without the proper GPU acceleration. And proper GPU acceleration on Linux is impossible without the mercy of GPU manufacturers. This is really the greatest Achilles' heel of OSS. Just one phone call by Ballmer (maybe involving a thrown chair) is enough to cut off the air supply of OSS on the desktop. There is no remedy. Linus was writing code for a chip (386) with documented internals. He did a great job. GPU manufacturers won't document the internals, they keep changing anyway, and trying to reverse-engineer something is probably banned by the DMCA.
What the fuck are you talking about? The issue here is that ISP's are threatening to charge money to carry certain data on their own networks. Remember, mr. Libertarian, the ISP owns its wires and can do with them whatever they like. Right? Well, that's not what I think, but if you're dumb enough to be a Libertarian, that's what you have to think.
So if they want to charge money for traffic on their wires, and shut out sources that don't pay up, you are the last person who is entitled to complain. I think this is the perfect place to regulate the actions of corporations. I think the FCC deserves our scorn for refusing to regulate this. They're hurting socitety, undermining equal access and compromising innovation. But this is exactly what you bastard Libertarians have to want them to do. Go move to Somalia, you Libertarian piece of shit. Their government certainly conforms to your ideals better than ours. And stop trying to turn my country into Somalia!
This may sound messed up, but in an age of Yet Another "Madden" Football Game and Zombie Fragger 9 (or whatever), we finally have a game that piqued my interest. I'm not being ironic for once. I doubt there will be an English translation and even if there were, there wouldn't be US servers... but if there were, I really would consider trying it! I mean, it would be free for the people, right?
Doesn't anyone see how this could be fun? Yeah, mending socks doesn't sound like a thrill, but what do you do for XPs when you're weak in a commercial fantasy game? Endlessly stab chickens? How is that more fun? No, I think mending socks in a sweatshop that more of a feel of honest labor.
I think my talent would be in being a newspaper reporter for the government. I'd try my best to sound like this North Korean paper. Really, it would be a blast! And I bet there would be all sorts of neat quests, like stopping burglars, helping fishermen, getting a village to quit smoking... the sort of stuff that would be really refreshing after months of "deliver this scroll to Naldemor and you shall receive this +2 sword and lots of XP!" Yes, it would take a lot of creativity to make this game fun, but I guess I am one of these people who still appreciates creativity.
I did say it would be illegal. Read the parent. I just said it wouldn't be wrong. You might disagree about this particular case, but in general, don't you know the difference?
For now this seems like we're still at a rather primitive stage of the hack. (Still impressive, though, and deserving of the prize money.) The most important next step will be Windows drivers for iMac and MacBook devices. But already, it sounds like an ordinary joe could burn an.ISO and install this without too much trouble.
I'm not your typical w4r3z d00d but this is one case where I do hope the.ISO gets distributed widely and soon. That way, the world's hackers can get started on fixing the remaining issues. In some countries this may be illegal, but I'm almost certain that it's not wrong to do. (Some countries just have bad laws, and besides, sometimes it's right to break even good laws.)
The next round of prize money should be for getting all the devices to work right and at native speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're right about the GPU-in-a-CPU socket. Hypertransport makes all this possible, and how cool would it be to just swap out a chip (and maybe add memory) when upgrading a graphics card? Plus, I'm sure AMD have their eye on all the fancy vector processing that could be done by a properly-connected GPU. I'm thinking for example of video encoding.
Fair enough about the parody element and the inconvenient monster books. But I can tell you there is not a single Hacklopedia of Beasts that is not worth buying. Just the monsters alone are enough to provide a great tone for a campaign. Just don't ask the players at my table about their last encounter with a Bolter. Hillarity ensewed, to be sure (but not for them). The next adventure will require some serious tracking and detective work. But that's just one of hundreds of monsters that can really make make an evening of gaming a memorable event.
Oh, I'm sad to hear that, but it's good of you to have given a shot. I don't have kids but I've played at multi-generational tables and I thought it was a good bonding experience. I hope you give it another shot later, maybe when you notice their interest piqued by something that could be played out in D&D (Pirates, Zombies, Hobbits, etc.).
Do you realize that the majority of the operating costs of an ISP are in the personalle that you need to handle accounts and payments? Add to these astronomical costs the extra obligation to maintain wires and you'd see how much cheaper it would be for a company to run free municipal WiFi. Now, I never thought such a thing would happen for free without public financing, but then I thought about how life might look after the end of net neutrality, and realized that free Google WiFi would make perfect economic sense, especially in densely-populated, flat areas. "Owning" all those users is an instant goldmine when you can charge Yahoo for "fast lane" access, eBay for the right to make their Skype sound right, Doubleclick for the right to flood them with banners, etc. And not to be underestimated in all this is the fact that if Google owns the last mile, nobody else can yank their chain. What really works for this (hypothetical) Google-ISP is that they would not have to waste resources in shaking down ordinary Joes for money. They'd be shaking down the wealthy data sources instead, players like Vonage and iTunes. I can easily imagine them covering all their costs in this way, and who knows, cities like SF also seem prepared to sweeten the deal with some public money for the "quality of life" improvement that free, municipal WiFi brings to a city.
There might be some risks to Google, but I'd hate to be a telco trying to sell DSL to customers who can get Google WiFi for free. Can you imagine the deals they'd have to offer? I'm talking about cheap, uncapped bandwith, privacy guarantees, plus reliability. Otherwise, nobody would care enough to pay! And, contrary to initial appearances, maybe the customer (at least the urban customer that Google could easily reach) really would win!
But real AI has to involve some sort of learning, which is to say, letting game events "write" your behavior script. When would this be useful? The best example I can think of: Entirely stable environments that are "alive". Current games give you staged non-equilibrium situations that get triggered when your PC enters the scene. This sort of thing is just very obvious and unsatisfying if the goal is immersion. What good AI might do is this: before the game is released, the various separate settings might be populated with a bunch of artificial-life characters with specific motivations, needs, preferences, etc. (Maybe like the Sims, except more complex psychologically.) Then the game authors would let this initial system reach an equilibrium their big server. If they don't like the equilibrium that was produced, they tweak the initial AI and try again. Eventually, this will produce in a "natural" way something like a small, functioning village. When a PC enters the village, it will have been in an equilibrium which the actions of the PC will disrupt, almost certainly in unpredictable ways. That is how you give the player a true sense of freedom, like their actions really matter. Somebody like me might wonder: What would happen if I steathily killed the village miller, or gave him a gigantic horde of treasure, etc? That sort of scenario is impossible to play out in current games. And that sucks.
Now granted, writing Artificial Life that reaches an equilibrium similar to a real village, and still manages to react believably when a PC shows up may be a tall order, but I absolutely think it's a goal worth shooting for. For one thing, since many of the A-life interactions will happen in mutual isolation, the processing could be easily broken up into separate threads. Also, it's worth mentioning that this is not an all-or-nothing affair. If the equilibrium state produced at the end of several A-life generations is not exactly what you wanted, it's OK to slightly tweak the end result. The effect will still be much more convincing than the "village/dungeon/colony/factory eternally frozen in a moment until a PC triggers it."
One last bit: If you want to make AI characters seem realistic, maybe a good place to start is with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Start there and build on that foundation. Everybody puts self-preservation ahead of other priorities, and so should AI. Ditto for all the other stuff on the hierarchy. So for example, if a fire I started destroys your hut, you will interrupt your routine to seek shelter, because this is your highest priority. For this, you may need to interact with other A-life, who might offer you a place to stay, financial help, or help with constructing a new hut - all for their own reasons, that depend on how much they like you, how likely they think you are to reciprocate, etc. If you saw me kill the miller, you will tell the other villagers, who may decide to ambush and capture you. How does a game produce that sort of behavior? Well, for one thing, planning requires some sort of awareness of expected consequences. But this should not be hard for a computer to do. It would guess that the PC would resist any attempt at capture, and it can (in the background) play out several "what if" scenarios compare their outcome to the goals of the villagers. This should show that a haphazard attack is a bad idea. Now it may look like I'm asking for a crazy amount of processing power. Maybe, but remember, we'll all have many CPU's to work with in the near future, so the ones that aren't running the game can be computing these "what if" scenarios. Also
I wonder how many people care whether the installation takes 10 minutes or 20. I mean, how much performance or utility would I sacrifice for those 10 saved minutes? None. Sometimes it's a good rule of thumb that longer something takes, the more likely I am to mess it up. But I don't think that's so with water cooling. There is really only one thing to worry about, and that's leaking. If I thought a setup was less likely to leak, I'd be happy to remove the motherboard to install it. Anyway, my point is that this observation about different install times is completely superficial - and the fact it appears on Slashdot, where millions happily tinker with Linux config files, is all the more silly.
Of course, there is a modern alternative, and it's brilliant: Hackmaster. Really, it's the best fantasy roleplaying system I've ever seen, with rules that never lose track of the fact that the fantasy setting is supposed to feel like a consistent world, not just a backdrop for "awesome characters" to showcase all their "feats and powers." Hackmaster bought the rights to lift certain material from Gygax's AD&D, and it not only keeps that old spirit - it actually adds to it. Don't confuse it with a novelty system - it's really the most playable role-playing game that I've ever been a part of. I campaign with AD&D veterans (most now with Ph.D's) and since we all have the Gygax books, we still officially use that system. However, I (the DM) have supplemented so much of it with ideas borrowed from Hackmaster that it's starting to feel like we're making a transition. First I started with importing some wonderful monsters, then the initiative system, then chunks of the character generation system (really fun and great for roleplaying!).
Hackmaster is a system for people who like roleplaying because they enjoy immersing themselves in consistent, detailed yet fantastic worlds. Many of the things that happen are not flashy. They're mundane, grimy, lifelike (a treasure horde of fine ebony furniture and disturbing silk tapestries for which only one curiously shady art dealer is prepared seek a buyer) and decidedly not pure hero stuff. In sensibility it's just like the first AD&D except even a bit more so.
Sorry, I didn't expect this post to sound like such a plug, but I've made and heard complaints like yours before. My experience is people who say that sort of stuff should consider a flirtation with Hackmaster because when they try, they tend to find compatibility.
But what I find really exciting about this idea is that once the GPU is in the motherboard, I'm sure programmers would find an easy way to use all that logic to do calculations - say, media encoding. Heck, I know they are trying to do this with GPU's on cards, but this would be a much lower latency connection.
I wonder how this would affect total system cost. I mean, I know multi-socket mobos will always cost more, but then again, when the GPU is a chip instead of a card, that should bring costs down. Also, they could ditch all that PCI-e logic and those slots. Upgrading would definitely be cheaper, and can you imagine two socketed GPUs on the mobo running a Hypertransport version of SLi? That might be the fastest, quietest gaming rig ever!
When you have two cores, it would be a real waste to not let an SMP-optimized program see both of them. That's why I doubt that if this ever becomes a product, it will look to the OS like a single core. But if it really is possible to let two cores cooperate on running a single thread, it would be nice for them to do so when an application is only willing to run as a single thread.
Let's try an analogy: Assume two heads are better than one. But some tasks are explicitly not meant for two heads, say, taking a math test. So say I go in for the test, appearing only as a single "head" to the test-giver (the "interface") but I covertly ask my friend to help me on the side. This makes my result better. Of course if the "interface" explicitly allowed for team work on the test, there would be no reason for the covert (probably inefficient) communication, so we could drop the pretense of being one person. So the analogy is, when a single core is asked to "work alone" on a problem and it can figure out how to get useful help from its friend so the work goes faster, AMD wants to make sure that it really gets the help.
I know many people on the left feel differently, but this is one place where their sensible instincts let them down. Nuclear power is big, corporate-industrial, complicated, easily vilified and in general not on the wavelength of the standard hippie. (Hippies get windmills and sunshine, stuff that's small, decentralized and not intimidating.) Many big, centralized things like that really are bad and worth opposing, so if you need a quick rule of thumb, you can do worse. But the rule fails in this case. There is no hippie solution for our power needs, don't talk to me about solar panels and windmills (as a replacement for what we now have). So it's time for the people on the left to judge this issue with their heads and not their guts.
I'm a big fan of breeder reactors, it just seems like the responsible way to treat our fuel. I think the reason they have been sidelined is that we don't want other countries to think that reprocessing is "normal" - so we have to invent some myth about how it's a bad idea. If it became standard practice around the world, it really would make a distinction between civilian and military nuclear power completely disappear. That's arguably bad. But I think belching out soot and carbon dioxide is worse.
I also found that for mousing, it's important to have both my elbow and wrist supported. I solved this by another clever hack: The top drawer of my desk opens and has a gel keyboard wrist-supporter velcroed to the top. My elbow sits on this while the wrist is on the desk itself, cushioned by a gigantic foam mouse pad. This part is a bit sub-optimal because it's a bit of a reach from the perfect keyboard to the mouse, but I have a plan brewing: I mean augment an elbow-rest on my fancy chair and turn it into an elbow-rest-mousepad. That way the mouse will always be in the optimal position no matter where I have my chair.
Microsoft's problems are much more about their corporate culture and management.
That will change once their full desktop computer comes out. It will have slots and it will lead to people whining about how card X works in Windows, "why doesn't it work when I boot into OSX?"
The result: Apple will spend increasingly more energy on OSX drivers for common hardware. Along the way, mistakes will be made, and the reliability of OSX will begin approaching Windows. The drivers with which Apple will need the most help are for graphics cards. Paradoxically, NVidia and ATI will not feel much incentive to do a very good job, because they know that most applications which stress the drivers (i.e. games) will always be run through Windows. Another reason why Apple can't be too accomodating about providing OSX drivers for any-ol-gear is the threat that if they do this too well, it will become too easy to run OSX on home-built hardware.
In any case, I think this issue with drivers will loom very large in future debates about OSX on x86.
Yeah, I also thought Mr. Malyneaux talked a good game, but as far as I can tell, they still haven't written a good game. It was maybe merciful for MS to buy them, now they can subsidize their sucking.
I think it's no accident that the Firefly party consists of three fighters (each with a different specialization), a healer, a priest, an empath, a mechanic and an "ambassador". The mechanic plays the role the D&D magic-user because only she can rig up things with massive effects. This is the epitome of the balanced adventuring party, and Firefly is the first time such a thing was on television - and it worked really damn well.
So I'm not going to be playing the Serenity RPG because my group is busy enough with D&D. Still, I wanted to applaud the idea.
You see, what makes role-playing games fun is creativity, and that's not for sale in a game store. I have brought several new players into the game and they did buy some dice, miniatures and used Player's Handbooks for $10 (I feel like they should cost more!).
All the industry has to offer groups like mine are supplements, but we don't need no stinking supplements. I'm smart enough to compose my own adventures, supplementary spells, items and worlds. My home-made character sheets suit my campaign much better than anything I can buy. I OCR'ed all the spells from the Player's Handbook and Unearthed Arcana (and added a couple of Hackmaster-inspired and home-brewed ones) and I print these for my spell-casting players. To be honest, there are so many supplements now that I feel they allow too much. I think the only reasonable reaction is to revert to the "real" rules, and add to them exactly those things that the DM feels should be there. What are the "real" rules? By far the best candidate is Gygax's unpreverted first edition. It's not perfect, but since people will disagree on what its imperfections are, they should use it as a base and tweak it with sensible house rules.
I have a great group which consists mostly of Ph.D's and advanced graduate students, and this is one of the most fun social things we do. (We also play sports, poker, BBQ, etc.) Still, nobody seems to be making much money from all the fun we have, and I think we like it that way.
I always pictured the light saber to be something like tamed lightning. As it cuts metal, it doesn't melt it from heat but from the actual cutting action of really fast elecrons (or whatever) colliding with and knocking loose whatever the light saber touches. Except it couldn't be electrons because they'd be grounded out by the metal they're cutting, so it's some other sort of particle.
I mean, come on, use your immagination: I was being blunt for the sake of humor. The real email from Ballmer would look like "MS and NV would both profit from a closer software collaboration to optimize Windows driver performance." Sounds a lot more innocent, means the very same thing. NVidia aren't stupid, they understand subtext like anyone else.
You really think NVidia would take MS to court over a threat about a market segment which makes them little, no, or perhaps even negative profit?
Meanwhile, we're becoming dramatically better at robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and long-distance communication. What we can do in 2020 that we couldn't do in 1968 is to send good, smart and relatively cheap robots to the moon, and actually have them build something useful.
If we don't have to worry about human safety and frailty, we can get big projects done for relatively little money. I'm talking about satellite-steered bulldozers, a nice big nuclear powerplant, and a real industrial-scale mining operation. We don't need humans to be there, the moon is close enough for fly-by-wire with reasonable ping times. Sure, once our robots build a reasonably shielded and equipped hotel, we can launch people who can say "been there". But let's first figure out what our goals are and then make sure we're acting to fulfill our goals! I'm almost sure that we're better served by some serious robots than by astronauts on the Moon.
They're in it for the money, and their real customer base consists of Windows gamers. Now, these customers are rather picky about stable and optimized drivers. They read articles about benchmarks, and a driver that squeezes out an extra 5pfs will in many cases make the difference between $300 of revenue or similar money in the pockets of the competitor. That's why NVidia work hard on Windows. It's their lifeline.
We're living in an age when Microsoft doesn't fear Linux on the desktop. They just don't; they think it's a joke. Suppose something happens to change their mind, and they really start competing in their ham-fisted, machiavellian way. They really only need to do one thing to destroy desktop Linux: Make a phone call to NVidia. Ballmer: "Hey, you know all that work you do on Linux drivers that makes you almost no revenue? Well, stop it. Stop it or you will find some rather unfriendly code in Vista sp1. End communication."
That's all it would take. Remember that starting next year, if you don't have a 3D-accelerated desktop, your machine will look like a dinosaur. So never mind Linux games. Just the regular desktop will look and work like crap without the proper GPU acceleration. And proper GPU acceleration on Linux is impossible without the mercy of GPU manufacturers. This is really the greatest Achilles' heel of OSS. Just one phone call by Ballmer (maybe involving a thrown chair) is enough to cut off the air supply of OSS on the desktop. There is no remedy. Linus was writing code for a chip (386) with documented internals. He did a great job. GPU manufacturers won't document the internals, they keep changing anyway, and trying to reverse-engineer something is probably banned by the DMCA.
This is the grim lesson I leaned from TFA.
So if they want to charge money for traffic on their wires, and shut out sources that don't pay up, you are the last person who is entitled to complain. I think this is the perfect place to regulate the actions of corporations. I think the FCC deserves our scorn for refusing to regulate this. They're hurting socitety, undermining equal access and compromising innovation. But this is exactly what you bastard Libertarians have to want them to do. Go move to Somalia, you Libertarian piece of shit. Their government certainly conforms to your ideals better than ours. And stop trying to turn my country into Somalia!
Doesn't anyone see how this could be fun? Yeah, mending socks doesn't sound like a thrill, but what do you do for XPs when you're weak in a commercial fantasy game? Endlessly stab chickens? How is that more fun? No, I think mending socks in a sweatshop that more of a feel of honest labor.
I think my talent would be in being a newspaper reporter for the government. I'd try my best to sound like this North Korean paper. Really, it would be a blast! And I bet there would be all sorts of neat quests, like stopping burglars, helping fishermen, getting a village to quit smoking... the sort of stuff that would be really refreshing after months of "deliver this scroll to Naldemor and you shall receive this +2 sword and lots of XP!" Yes, it would take a lot of creativity to make this game fun, but I guess I am one of these people who still appreciates creativity.
I did say it would be illegal. Read the parent. I just said it wouldn't be wrong. You might disagree about this particular case, but in general, don't you know the difference?
I'm not your typical w4r3z d00d but this is one case where I do hope the .ISO gets distributed widely and soon. That way, the world's hackers can get started on fixing the remaining issues. In some countries this may be illegal, but I'm almost certain that it's not wrong to do. (Some countries just have bad laws, and besides, sometimes it's right to break even good laws.)
The next round of prize money should be for getting all the devices to work right and at native speeds.