The best thing about Tron (apart from the use of computer graphics) was the idea of programs being sentient beings in their own little world, looking at their User as a personal deity. (I guess this was back when it was assumed that each program only had one user!)
Anyway, if they make a sequel, I hope we get to see what, say, Microsoft Word would look like as a sentient being. I imagine something like "Pizza the Hut" in SpaceBalls...
I used Performer for a year and a half at a previous job and it is excellent! I'm glad to see they're porting it to Linux. Now I just have to get after them about a BeOS port...:)
Anyone care to hazard a guess how much energy can be extracted from your typing fingers, relative to how much energy the laptop consumes?
Personally I think this is just a way to get people to spend more on laptop repairs... ("uh-oh, battery's low, I'd better start smacking this thing around!")
It seems to me that the only workable model for online music distribution is a voluntary, shareware style system. It's no use trying to force your users to pay for the music; any scheme you could come up with is trivial to defeat (by resampling the music if nothing else), so copy protection schemes only serve to irritate and alienate your legitimate users.
So how about this: Encode in each mp3 file some kind of (PGP-signed) account information linked to the author(s) of the song. Then, whenever the song is playing, there can be a panel in the player's GUI that lights up and says something like:
"You have listened to this song 17 times. License fee for this song is 5 cents per listen, up to a maximum of one dollar. Click here to pay the license fee and support your favorite music!"
When you click, the program deducts some money from your account (credit card or whatever) and adds it to that of the musician.
Of course, users would be free to ignore this message as long as they wanted, but that's no worse than the current system--pirates won't pay no matter what. On the other hand, I think there are a lot of people out there who *would* pay for the music they enjoy, if it was dead-easy and hassle free to do so.
> but why in the bloody hell would anyone pay $2500 for a stupid robot dog? IT ISN'T REAL PEOPLE.
What are you talking about? It's perfectly real. It's not a dream. It's not a hologram. It's a 100% genuine robotic dog. In this case, what people are paying for is "robotic", not "dog".
It's not the language that's the problem, it's the fact that you're running the program via an interpreter (aka your Java VM). Compile the Java to native code and you should get better results.
>RIAA will somehow manage to add a tariff on HDs, >tapes, floppy disks, RW CDs and MO media, etc. >for copyright infringement "reimbursement", or >increase the ones they have in place already.
And this will just make pirating worse. After all, who will agree to pay for a CD if they already "paid for it" when they bought their magnetic media?
Microsoft AmigaBasic was Godawful... slow and buggy as hell. The clever M$ programmers decided that since the 68000 could only access a 24 bit address space, they could use the upper 8 bits of each pointer to store data. Needless to say this made for "interesting" behavior on 68020 and newer systems...
Multiple monitors, auto poweron/off, SCSI, the ability to boot from any drive you connect(except the new fruity colored machines), RISC processing, a complete GUI these are all things that Apple's Engineers brought to the market YEARS before HewlettComPackarDell even though of them.
All true, but down at the core--no preemptive multitasking, and no memory protection. That part of the OS, at least, remains primitive. Mac OS/X oughtta fix that, though.
Not to mention the problems that arise when your home appliances start demanding time on your phone line... "Dear, can you call your friend back later? I want to watch a movie". Modems were bad enough!
Why is this sinister?
on
Robotic Dogs
·
· Score: 1
> Replacing life with a simulation of life is sinister. It's just my opinion.
Is it more sinister than forcing an animal to live in captivity, denying it the opportunity to reproduce, and eventually taking it to the vet to be involuntarily killed--just to satisfy your own misdirected parenting instincts? Arguably not.
> It's a machine. It will never be happy to see you, it will never feel "good" or enjoy "praise", it will just go through the algorithms that makes you think it did.
How do you know your current pets aren't doing the same thing?
> Your theory is correct, but I know it takes light 8 minutes to reach us from the sun, That means it is less from earth to mars. 45 minutes is a long time-- to long. But your point is well made none the less.
45 minutes may be too long, but it seems to me that when Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun, it could be at least 16 minutes.
>This sounds an awfully lot like the excuse that a lot of software pirates use to justify their illegal activities. "This is far more expensive than I can afford, and so if I hadn't pirated it, I wouldn't have bought it anyway.. so nobody is losing anything." It's an interesting claim, but it's hardly valid (try using that after being arrested for grand theft auto.)
While in general I disapprove of software piracy, it should be pointed out that grand theft auto is not a good analogy. When you steal a car, the rightful owner doesn't have it anymore. When you illegally copy software, you haven't taken it away from anybody.
That's my Bill--always the do-gooder, fighting for the privacy of his customers against the evil government. Glad he's got the best interests of his customers at heart, even if it means the court-ordered end of his lock on the market...
3D can benefit from multiple CPUs--I used to use SGI's Performer on a quad-processor Onyx, and Performer is able to automatically split the rendering pipeline up so that each stage runs on its own CPU.
CPU #0 -> app process (simulation update) CPU #1 -> cull process (bounding volumes) CPU #2 -> draw process (pushing commands to 3D card) CPU #3 -> dbase & collision processes (scenery paging and asynchronous collision detection)
Very cool, although I suspect there wouldn't be as much speedup on a PC, which doesn't have the musclebound memory bandwidth that the SGIs do. Well, maybe on the new SGI PC's it would... gotta get me one of those;^)
The "pervasive multithreading" basically means that the system APIs are written with a multithreaded model in mind, and often spawn background threads that are mostly transparent to the user of the class, but allow for more efficient usage of multiple CPUs nonetheless. The standard window class, for example, spawns two threads automatically, in addition to the user thread that instantiated the window object.
The system APIs also include a standardized threading and message-passing model which is very easy to use, which means that even mediocre programmers (like myself;)) can write multithreaded code without too much pain.
Since most BeOS subsystems will use multithreading behind their APIs (whether the programmer asks for it or not), and since the multithreading capabilities are so well integrated and easy to use, it's very uncommon to find a BeOS program that isn't multithreaded. Hence, the multithreading is "pervasive".
How about a machine with the thickness of the notebooks described, but with the width and height of a "regular" notebook? That would give you a bigger keyboard and display, but still be fairly lightweight. I'd be tempted to buy one...
... or if you don't have Linux/*BSD installed on your 505, a guy in Japan (whose name escapes me) has hacked up a little Windows program that you can download that will automatically copy your BeOS R4 CD onto a spare BFS partition for you. It worked great for me!
It's not like the seller started his Ultima gaming as an investment--he was presumably playing for fun. Say he got good, built up a nice character or two, then got bored and now wants to do something else with his time. If he can make some money off of his no-longer used characters, I say more power to him.
Of course, I think the buyer is probably missing the point of on-line gaming--it's the journey, not the destination!
>Of course Windows is 'easier to use' for most people. It was built from the ground up for 'user friendliness'. (user candy)
This, of course, isn't true either--Windows wasn't "built from the ground up" for anything. Maybe you could say it was "an afterthought, hacked to run as a shell on top of DOS and be user friendly".
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The best thing about Tron (apart from the use of computer graphics) was the idea of programs being sentient beings in their own little world, looking at their User as a personal deity. (I guess this was back when it was assumed that each program only had one user!)
Anyway, if they make a sequel, I hope we get to see what, say, Microsoft Word would look like as a sentient being. I imagine something like "Pizza the Hut" in SpaceBalls...
I used Performer for a year and a half at a previous job and it is excellent! I'm glad to see they're porting it to Linux. Now I just have to get after them about a BeOS port... :)
Anyone care to hazard a guess how much energy can be extracted from your typing fingers, relative to how much energy the laptop consumes?
Personally I think this is just a way to get people to spend more on laptop repairs... ("uh-oh, battery's low, I'd better start smacking this thing around!")
It seems to me that the only workable model for online music distribution is a voluntary, shareware style system. It's no use trying to force your users to pay for the music; any scheme you could come up with is trivial to defeat (by resampling the music if nothing else), so copy protection schemes only serve to irritate and alienate your legitimate users.
So how about this: Encode in each mp3 file some kind of (PGP-signed) account information linked to the author(s) of the song. Then, whenever the song is playing, there can be a panel in the player's GUI that lights up and says something like:
"You have listened to this song 17 times. License fee for this song is 5 cents per listen, up to a maximum of one dollar. Click here to pay the license fee and support your favorite music!"
When you click, the program deducts some money from your account (credit card or whatever) and adds it to that of the musician.
Of course, users would be free to ignore this message as long as they wanted, but that's no worse than the current system--pirates won't pay no matter what. On the other hand, I think there are a lot of people out there who *would* pay for the music they enjoy, if it was dead-easy and hassle free to do so.
Does anyone else think such a thing could work?
> but why in the bloody hell would anyone pay $2500 for a stupid robot dog? IT ISN'T REAL PEOPLE.
What are you talking about? It's perfectly real. It's not a dream. It's not a hologram. It's a 100% genuine robotic dog. In this case, what people are paying for is "robotic", not "dog".
>A Hitachi or some other computers company got busted for "Dumping". That is, selling the good
for less than it costs to produce.
Of course, this is exactly what practically every Internet software company's strategy is--give away the product to gain market share.
>Guess java isn't the right tool for the job :)
It's not the language that's the problem, it's the fact that you're running the program via an interpreter (aka your Java VM). Compile the Java to native code and you should get better results.
> So, let's just call it theft.
If you really want to be correct, it's "violating the license agreement".
>RIAA will somehow manage to add a tariff on HDs,
>tapes, floppy disks, RW CDs and MO media, etc.
>for copyright infringement "reimbursement", or
>increase the ones they have in place already.
And this will just make pirating worse. After all, who will agree to pay for a CD if they already "paid for it" when they bought their magnetic media?
Microsoft AmigaBasic was Godawful... slow and buggy as hell. The clever M$ programmers decided that since the 68000 could only access a 24 bit address space, they could use the upper 8 bits of each pointer to store data. Needless to say this made for "interesting" behavior on 68020 and newer systems...
All true, but down at the core--no preemptive multitasking, and no memory protection. That part of the OS, at least, remains primitive. Mac OS/X oughtta fix that, though.
Not to mention the problems that arise when your home appliances start demanding time on your phone line... "Dear, can you call your friend back later? I want to watch a movie". Modems were bad enough!
> Replacing life with a simulation of life is sinister. It's just my opinion.
Is it more sinister than forcing an animal to live in captivity, denying it the opportunity to reproduce, and eventually taking it to the vet to be involuntarily killed--just to satisfy your own misdirected parenting instincts? Arguably not.
> It's a machine. It will never be happy to see you, it will never feel "good" or enjoy "praise", it will just go through the algorithms that makes you think it did.
How do you know your current pets aren't doing the same thing?
> Your theory is correct, but I know it takes light 8 minutes to reach us from the sun, That means it is less from earth to mars. 45 minutes is a long time-- to long. But your point is well made none the less.
45 minutes may be too long, but it seems to me that when Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun, it could be at least 16 minutes.
>This sounds an awfully lot like the excuse that a lot of software pirates use to justify their illegal activities. "This is far more expensive than I can afford, and so if I hadn't pirated it, I wouldn't have bought it anyway .. so nobody is losing anything." It's an interesting claim, but it's hardly valid (try using that after being arrested for grand theft auto.)
While in general I disapprove of software piracy, it should be pointed out that grand theft auto is not a good analogy. When you steal a car, the rightful owner doesn't have it anymore. When you illegally copy software, you haven't taken it away from anybody.
That's my Bill--always the do-gooder, fighting for the privacy of his customers against the evil government. Glad he's got the best interests of his customers at heart, even if it means the court-ordered end of his lock on the market...
Feh.
You mean, will people believe it causes tumors?
I suppose that is up to the people.
So probably, yes.
3D can benefit from multiple CPUs--I used to use SGI's Performer on a quad-processor Onyx, and Performer is able to automatically split the rendering pipeline up so that each stage runs on its own CPU.
;^)
CPU #0 -> app process (simulation update)
CPU #1 -> cull process (bounding volumes)
CPU #2 -> draw process (pushing commands to 3D card)
CPU #3 -> dbase & collision processes (scenery paging and asynchronous collision detection)
Very cool, although I suspect there wouldn't be as much speedup on a PC, which doesn't have the musclebound memory bandwidth that the SGIs do. Well, maybe on the new SGI PC's it would... gotta get me one of those
The "pervasive multithreading" basically means that the system APIs are written with a multithreaded model in mind, and often spawn background threads that are mostly transparent to the user of the class, but allow for more efficient usage of multiple CPUs nonetheless. The standard window class, for example, spawns two threads automatically, in addition to the user thread that instantiated the window object.
;)) can write multithreaded code without too much pain.
The system APIs also include a standardized threading and message-passing model which is very easy to use, which means that even mediocre programmers (like myself
Since most BeOS subsystems will use multithreading behind their APIs (whether the programmer asks for it or not), and since the multithreading capabilities are so well integrated and easy to use, it's very uncommon to find a BeOS program that isn't multithreaded. Hence, the multithreading is "pervasive".
How about a machine with the thickness of the notebooks described, but with the width and height of a "regular" notebook? That would give you a bigger keyboard and display, but still be fairly lightweight. I'd be tempted to buy one...
... or if you don't have Linux/*BSD installed on your
505, a guy in Japan (whose name escapes me) has hacked
up a little Windows program that you can download that
will automatically copy your BeOS R4 CD onto a spare
BFS partition for you. It worked great for me!
It's not like the seller started his Ultima gaming
as an investment--he was presumably playing for fun.
Say he got good, built up a nice character or two, then
got bored and now wants to do something else with his
time. If he can make some money off of his no-longer
used characters, I say more power to him.
Of course, I think the buyer is probably missing the
point of on-line gaming--it's the journey, not the
destination!
>Of course Windows is 'easier to use' for most people. It was built from the ground up for 'user friendliness'. (user candy)
This, of course, isn't true either--Windows wasn't "built from the ground up" for anything. Maybe you could say it was "an afterthought, hacked to run as a shell on top of DOS and be user friendly".
> IT has to be good if 95% of the computers in the world run it.
"Eat feces, 200 trillion maggots can't be wrong"