The V1 did not use "Pulse Detonation". It was a pulse-jet engine that relied on a pulsing deflagration process to produce thrust. Not to be a complete jerk, but you would have known this had you actually read the article.
The difference between detonation and deflagration is a matter of how fast the fuel burns. Deflagration, which is what happens in your car, is a buringing of the fuel that is fast but is still not faster that the speed of sound. A true detonation is a burning of fuel that creates a blast wave that travels faster than the speed of sound.
Consequently, this is what happens in cars when you use fuel with too low an octane rating for the engine's compression ratio. The whole purpose of the octane rating is to tell you how easy it is to make the fuel detonate as opposed to deflagrate. Piston engines are designed to run using deflagration because the piston can't physically respond fast enought to a true detonation. This causes a knocking sound that signals the fact that your engine is gradually destroying it's self.
This can happen when you use low octane fuel in an average car engine or when you use medium octane fuel in a high performance engine that has a high compression ratio. In other words, people add things like supechargers and turbochargers to cars in order to improve the compression ration and, thus, the performance. Some people actually put sensors in their engines to figure out exactly how close to detonating their fuel is so that they can raise their compression ratio as high as humanly possible without actually causing detonation. I think those are called Hall or Hal sensors, but I could be wrong about that.
To bring it back to the topic of the V1, the article does mention that the designers of the V1 were originally hoping to reach some form of detonation but eventually settle for the slower, and less fuel efficient, deflagration process because they just could not achieve it. In the end it is probably for the best, or I should say the worst for the allies, that they gave up on detonation.
One of the big problems for V1 style pulse-jet designs is that they rely on valves to allow fuel and air into the combustion chamber. Because the combustion cycle of those engines (even when resticted to deflagration) is so fast, they were forced to rely of extremely light valves in order to be able to have them open and close rapidly enough (for the same reason that a heavy piston can't handle the forces of detonating fuel).
Unfortunaly, light weight valves like that (even ones made with today's alloys) just can't stand up to being beaten around like that for very long which gives those kinds of engines extremely short lifetimes (on the order of hours at the most). From what I've heard the V1 would often fail before it even traveled long enough to reach the island of Britain. Had they been able to create a true detonantion process in the engine, chance are that it would have lasted for a much much shorter amount of time thus making the engine almost useless.
You know, I think he might have actually been asking the question because he didn't know the answer. I know this might be a shock to you, but some people may not have learned the exact same things as you have and that doesn't make them deserve your attitude.
Why is this "Insightful"? Its a one line comment with a derogatory statement and no actual content.
he, I could have sworn I remember needing to pay a special fee in the beginning. Ah, well. It was a long time ago and I don't remember (I wasn't the one paying the bills back then;-) ) It was defintely an awsome game, especially for the time it was released.
Actually, it can't even claim to be the first MMORPG. Long before M59 (at least it felt long at the time because I was in Junior High/high school). There was a game, by a name you might just recognize, called Neverwinter Nights. It was only available through AOL and was, until it became really outdated, one of AOL's premium games that you had to pay extra for. The server could handle something like 500 people online at a time and was based on the graphics engine used in the old SSI AD&D "Gold Box" games. (Pools of Darkness, Pools of Radiance, Secret of the Silver Blades, etc.) While I can't be sure that there wasn't something around before it, I remember thinking that it was ahead of its time. On the other hand, while the original Neverwinter Nights did come first it may be possible for M59 to claim bragging rights as the first 3D MMORPG.
The only other MMORPG from around the same time period I can think of was Sierra's "The Realm" which, if I'm not mistaken also came out slightly before M59. It had 2d graphics and was closer, in my opinion, to a graphical chat room than an actual game but it did have combat (barely). I remember joking with a friend of mine in High School that Sierra must have had the Janitor write the game because the graphics didn't even come close to the 3d graphics they were using in the Space Quest/King's Quest games of the time. I remember that, at least for initial release, the combat was held in a separate screen that world travel and that the graphics looked like something you'd see on an 8-bit NES or an old 8088/286 system.
I do have to say though that it is kinda good to see them keeping the game around. There isn't anthing all that ground breaking in some of the more reasent MMORPGs like UO, EQ, AC, and some of the others to make a need to throw away the server code of M59. Kinda sad really, if you think about it, that those games have advanced so little in terms of server flexibility and gameplay. I remember playing the the beta for a short time and it was definetly fun even on a slow modem connection.
I don't know about the other Linux vendors but (as was mentioned by the main poster) SCO has publicly accused Red Hat in particular. This might give them grounds.
That is a valid point. However, it sounds as though they are already running 100% Microsoft and are looking to make the switch away from it. In which case, they're already defying the difficulties you are describing.
Actually, the other possibility is that they are looking at the over-all PR picture and figure that the loss in profits is worth not getting the bad PR of having a whole nation convert over to OSS. In which case it could be looked at as a great deal from the Munich government's prospective because they could always make the switch to Linux later if MS starts trying to tie them down.
I think it shows even more strongly the wisdom of the Munich government in their decision to take government software out of the hands of a proprietary company.
You seem to think there are only two possible reasons for Red Hat to stay silent. Either you think they're letting it blow over or you think its an admission of guilt. Isn't that view a little narrow-minded. There is, at least, one other reason for Red Hat not to get involved.
Lawsuits are expensive. Even if they know they could win a slander case against SCO why would they bother. If SCO's business is doing as badly as everyone seems to think it is then suing them would be like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Considering that they probably wouldn't make their legal fees back, much less profit from it, why would they bother starting a legal suit when they can let IBM handle the case. In the end, they can always start a suit later if they decide it's worth the effort.
Granted, IANAL so I don't know all the ramifications of putting off starting a slander suit but I don't see any reason they would have to rush into it.
Actually, those plots are almost direct rip-offs of a 50's or 60's movie I watched on TV once. It was set in the South Pacific during World War II. One of the big name 50's/60's action stars (I'm not very familiar with the names of actors from that time period but I've seen this guy before in other major movies from that time) was playing a Navy pilot who gets stranded on a small island with a Japanese pilot. At first they hate each other but they have to work together to survive. By the end of the movie they manage to develop a basic friendship. Of course, this is the point in the movie where the whole thing goes kind of Twilight zonish and they are both killed in a bombing run just after they become friends and just before the end of the war. Personally I found it to be a depressing ending which is why, I guess, most of the examples you gave ended up having a more positive ending where at least someone gets something out of it (as is the case with, at least, Enemy Mine where the alien gets killed but the human goes on to help develop good will between the two cultures).
The only real problem with that is that by the time someone has the money to buy one of these things they, most likely, arent running an older IDE setup. Even if they were, they could easily afford an add-in PCI card to get full ATA-100/133 support. This is more of a toy for someone that already has the fastest system they can get and wan't some way to make it even faster no matter what the cost.
In the box titled "Older Stuff" on the right side of the main page there is a link called "older stuff". In there you can find a search option for searching through old news posts. Even if there weren't a search option built into Slashdot for the users to access, it isn't hard to design one using the features already built into mySQL (its an inherent part of any SQL database).
As for the parent post, I love how any dissenting opinion, no matter how decently written, gets moded into oblivion as flamebait by anyone that disagrees.
Well, hard drives do have a decent amount of shock resistance. Also, you could put a layer of styrafoam between the hard drives to absorb shock. Also, when you deal with CD-Rs, you may not have to think about shock but you will have to think about scratches. Assuming you planned on storing the CD-Rs on spindles, it would take up a decent amount of space if you tried to place a layer of, even thin, soft material between each CD-R.
As for storing it, I've already stored the.doc file I typed up the original post in though I doubt this will ever be practical concidering the extremely high overhead and the fact that most applications would demand far better latency than a 16+ hour ping.;-)
I know I'll probably get moded "off topic" but the truth is it really is on topic.
What we need is a new option in Slashdot user preferences that doesn't show articles that have already been posted to the front page. That way people with a memory don't have to wade through the re-posts that happen frequently enough to be annoying. The most annoying part of it is that most of the time you have to spend a decent amount of time just trying to figure out if its an update on a previously posted topic or just another re-post of the exact same article.
Of course the much simpler way to handle it would be to force Slashdot editors to, at the very least, search the archives for any articles that contain the exact same URL linked to in the potential article. I doubt it would be very hard to code it in as a hard wired feature of slash that just automatically searches the body of all back news pieces. Then it could simply list off any articles that posses the same link making it really easy for an editor to see repeat posts before they make it to the front page. Heck even a manual search of the archives before posting every new article would be enough to catch most re-posts and it wouldn't take much time.
The only problem with the auto search idea is that there are plenty of times where commercial web sites like intel.com get linked to. In this case there could simply be a list of well know URLs (predominantly the base URL for corporations and other large organizations). Any links in a potential article that are included in the list could be excluded from the search.
This, of course, says nothing for the, oh so hard, cut-and-paste of all articles into MS Word (or any similar editor with a spell checker) that should also be mandatory for any web site that calls itself a news source. I find myself straying from the main point of the post now though.
This has been an opinion post sprinkled with a little bit of annoyance that this issue keeps getting ignored by the Slashdot editorial staff no matter how many times it gets mentioned in threads. It was not intended as a troll or as flame-bait.
Well, as someone else in this thread mentioned there is no reason you couldn't use the passenger compartment as cargo space which makes your only real limit the plane's max cargo weight. It was also mentioned that the max cargo capacity of a 747 is ~113,000Kg meaning ~6.3 million CDs (9Kg/500CDs). This means that you could carry ~4,095 TB (32,760 Tb) per trip. That comes to ~ 1.1375 Tb/second bandwidth between New York and Paris.
I was thinking about it and I believe it would be more efficient to use hard drives instead of CDs. In particular the largest IDE hard drives listed on pricewatch.com are 160GB Maxtor 5400rpm ATA 133/100 drives selling for ~$235.00. IDE drives are both the largest drives on the market as well as the least expensive per MB. Using the drive's weight off of the Maxtor web site (0.580Kg) you can carry 194,827 drives on a 747. This means a total of ~31,172.41 TB (2,493,793.31 Tb) of data onboard. On the same trip from New York to Paris this would make the bandwidth ~8.659 Tb/second
While it sounds pretty impressive, there is a down side. The hard drives have a per MB cost of ~$0.00146875 while the CDs cost ~$0.000238461 per MB. On the other hand, with the hard drives there would be no need to purchase the ~125,000 CD-ROM drives for the receiving side and the 125,000 CD-RW drives for the sending side (assuming you were only going one way, otherwise its 250,000 CD-RW drives). You would only need to purchase the systems to plug the drives into which would be needed either way. Also, the vastly increased transfer rates for the hard drives would decrease loading and unloading times. In the end, the most expensive part of this whole affair would probably end up being the costs associated with the 747 itself (purchase/rental, fuel, crew, etc.). If you were to add the cost of extra equipment, the plane, labor, etc. to the equation when calculating cost per meg I think you'd end up coming out ahead with the hard drives. Another alternative would be to use DVD-RW disks which, at 4.7 GB per disk, come out costing $0.000382978 per MB.
None of these calculations take into account the sheer number of coasters that are likely to be produced while trying to burn that many CD-Rs. Also, they don't account for the fact that, at these quantities, all this computer equipment could most likely be purchased directly from the respective manufacturers at the same cost retailers pay for it.
I would love to have some information on what it would realistically cost to run an airline that did nothing but this and see if it could be made even close to economical for extremely large file transfers. Unfortunately, I don't really know where to start looking for costs relate to running a 747 or paying for the labor and I don't really have the time to research it. Maybe I'll save it for another day when I get really board.;-)
BTW - Another nice advantage of using hard drives instead of CD-Rs is that you can re-use the hard drives.
Actually, it is lower level than that. Vertex and Pixel shaders are independent of OpenGL or Direct3D. They are short pieces of code compiled down to a special, limited, machine language understood by the video card. The programmer sets a certain shader up as a state change and then uses glVertex() or drawIndexedPimitive() to render the geometry. When each vertex is rendered, the shader code is performed on it.
You are right, however, that cg is a tool on the programmer's end. Like any mid-to-high level programming language, it is designed to make it easier for the developer to write code as opposed to having to write all shaders in difficult to understand/read shader assembly. This will, hopefully, allow a game developer who isn't as big a hardcore coder as someone like John Carmack to create shader effects in a reasonable amount of time. It will also allow coders who are that good to prototype shader ideas faster and figure out if they'll work.
One of the things a lot of people seem to be missing is that this is a special language used only for shader design. Vertex shaders area lot like inline assembly functions in C or C++. They are small pieces of code that do a short string of operations over and over again in hardware.
It makes a lot of sense to base it off of C for a number of reasons. First, most game programmers are familiar with C or C++. Second, and more important, there are extreme limitations on the size of shaders. Vertex shaders have a limit of 128 ops on a geforce card. This is just base ops and can go away real fast when you use macro commands (which are composites of multiple ops) as are most likely available in cg. Future cards will, no doubt, increase the number of ops allowed per shader but it will be a while before we see shaders that are large enough to find any use for OOP features. If we do find a time where some OOP features would be handy then I'm sure they could add basic OOP functionality similar to C++.
The actual assembly language used by the present generation of shader supporting video chips has no support for loops and only marginal support for conditional statements (meaning no explicit jmp op). Since this is the code that the cg compiler compiles down to, they can't add those features to the language. It makes some sense because shaders are meant to be short and sweet. Event though they are hardware accelerated, they get run so many times that even a shader that uses only the max number of ops (which is now at 128 ops for NVIDIA chips) is considered pretty slow. If loops were added it would slow the system down even more. When they say those features are "eventually planned to be supported" they mean that they'll be supported by a future generation of hardware (most likely the directX9 compatible chips).
Yes, they have never shipped complete drivers for the GeForce or future hardware and they give no indication that they ever will.
I have never claimed otherwise on either of these counts.
As for the non-confidential nature of patents, I believe I covered that satisfactorily in my rebuttal to one of the other responses to my post.
If you re-read the original post I was responding to, you will notice that the question that is being discussed is which hardware is best supported by the software, not which software best supports a free system. In fact that was the crux of my point. When asked a simple technical question about which software works best; personal agendas, such as supporting free software, have no place in an honest answer except as an addendum. Saying that ATI and Matrox cards are better isn't true as far as performance is concerned on x86 Linux systems. To say differently simply because you want to manipulate someone into avoiding a company you dislike for personal reasons is dishonest. Wouldn't it be more satisfying to convince someone to do the "right thing" even after they know the straight facts about performance?
It is very possibly that these patents are threaded throughout the code or that there are a few patents that encompass a vast portion of the code. Either way, it would make releasing source code that made any kind of sense almost impossible. Also, assuming they could release something that made some sense why would they? Think about what this would accomplish. All it would do is provide driver writers with hints on how to recreate the patented portions of the code. This would be NVIDIA supporting the subversion of a business partner's intellectual property. Even if they weren't directly breaking their patent agreements, I can easily see them being sued over it. To top it all off, is this a good thing for the OSS community? To have driver writers for Linux committing patent theft? The OSS community is made up of talented programmers. This would make any of those talented programmers that took part in NVIDIA video card driver writing into pirates. Its really wouldn't be that much different from Microsoft using a piece of GPL code in one of their products without acknowledging it. Besides, if they did release limited source code as a token gesture to the OSS community they'd get called on it the same way they got derided for releasing obfuscated source code of the first generation of Linux 3D drivers they released.
You are right, patents are "open source" in that they are a matter of public record. However, as has been stated in a reply to this post which for some reason has been moded down to 0, this doesn't mean that NVIDIA has the right to give out a product making use of those patents for anyone to freely modify. I'm sure there would be serious issues if they tried to license it with something like the GPL or even the BSD license. Whatever agreements NVIDIA entered into to get the use of those patents certainly doesn't give them the right to tell a whole community that it can use those patents in a derivative work such as improved drivers. This all ignores the possibility that trade secrets are also included in the technology.
OSS zealots will most likely mod me down for saying this, but most of it is the truth mixed with a little bit of my own opinion.;-)
It always bothers me a little when I hear people say stuff like this. The truth is, as has been stated by NVIDIA many times, that there are patents shared by NVIDIA with other companies that have been used in the development of they video cards. One of these companies is, most likely, SGI. They can't open source their drivers without violating confidentiality agreements and opening themselves to, justified, lawsuits.
Yes they only release binary drivers, and it would be much nicer if they would release the source as well but when it comes right down to it their drivers are vastly better than any other 3D drivers out there. Unlike all other Linux drivers for 3D cards NVIDIA's drivers are about equivalent in performance with their windows counterparts (this is as of the last time I saw a benchmark, I've heard rumors that they may be faster now). Granted, this doesn't help people on non-x86 Linux or on a *BSD (and no, I don't believe *BSD is dying.:-p ) but you are being slightly less than honest when you give out a blanket statement to people that ATI or Matrox is best supported. That person is asking you for information and, instead, you are giving them your opinion dressed up to look like fact. A more truthful way to answer that question would be to ask them what kind or hardware/OS they plan on using and then to tell them that NVIDIA is best supported for x86 Linux and that ATI Matrox are best supported for all other platforms. If you must push your own OSS agenda, then follow up the statement with an explanation of why you think people should support ATI and Matrox because of the way in which they support the OSS community.
Well, that's just my $0.02. I personally believe in OSS, though I don't really believe in the extremism of people like RMS. I also believe that there is a place in the world for non-OSS in certain places as well as understanding for companies that simply are incapable of supporting OSS for external reasons beyond their control (such as legal reasons). I don't mean for this to come off as a flame so much as a friendly rebuttal.:-)
IANAL, but fom what everything I've heard you can copyright source code but you can't copyright the compiled binaries and the interface between the server and the game. Unless the people programming the bnetd software somehow got their hands on a copy of Blizzard's Battle.net sourcecode (which I highly doubt) then what they are doing is called Reverse engineering.
There is nothing illegal with reverse engineering a product as long as you do it without inside information (like a look at the source code). The only way reverse engineering could be illegal is if Blizzard has a Patent on some of the things Battle.net can do (which they would have laid claim to in the e-mail if they did).
Your example are totally wrong. As I mentioned before, software copyright only covers the source code and not the binary code. As for the lightbulb, you are comparing a Patent (which by now has probably expired so while you can't patent the ligthbulb, you probably _can_ produce and sell lightbulbs if you wanted to) to a copyright. These are totally different things and are treated radically differently under the law.
Blizzard has no right to be doing this. They have no legal leg to stand on if this ever goes to court but, then again, they're relying on the fact that it'll never go to court. This is a case of Blizzard using its status as a wealthy corporation to bully some people by threatening to sue. They know that the ISP will just reflexively pull the site down and that these guys can't afford to go to court.
Yes they do require a different skill set, but the point of the analogy was that they are both tasks that the vast majority of end users (for both products) would be incapable of accomplishing. They are also tasks that are complex enough, in their own way, that it'd be absurd to suggest that an end user should be responsible for fixing the problem on their own even if the whole world knew how to install breaks or program a computer.
OSS advocates have spent a long time trying to get companies to use OSS software for business ventures. If they want to compete with the commercial software world then they have to expect to be treated the same way by things like buyer protection laws. Ideally, any new law should only be aplicable in cases of _gross_ negligence (like the almost monthly security holes that are found in MS OSs and take forever to be fixed). The OSS movement has a substantial emphasis on security. Any Linux disto or app that would fall under this kind of law would deserve to fail.
Slashdot Mirror
The V1 did not use "Pulse Detonation". It was a pulse-jet engine that relied on a pulsing deflagration process to produce thrust. Not to be a complete jerk, but you would have known this had you actually read the article.
The difference between detonation and deflagration is a matter of how fast the fuel burns. Deflagration, which is what happens in your car, is a buringing of the fuel that is fast but is still not faster that the speed of sound. A true detonation is a burning of fuel that creates a blast wave that travels faster than the speed of sound.
Consequently, this is what happens in cars when you use fuel with too low an octane rating for the engine's compression ratio. The whole purpose of the octane rating is to tell you how easy it is to make the fuel detonate as opposed to deflagrate. Piston engines are designed to run using deflagration because the piston can't physically respond fast enought to a true detonation. This causes a knocking sound that signals the fact that your engine is gradually destroying it's self.
This can happen when you use low octane fuel in an average car engine or when you use medium octane fuel in a high performance engine that has a high compression ratio. In other words, people add things like supechargers and turbochargers to cars in order to improve the compression ration and, thus, the performance. Some people actually put sensors in their engines to figure out exactly how close to detonating their fuel is so that they can raise their compression ratio as high as humanly possible without actually causing detonation. I think those are called Hall or Hal sensors, but I could be wrong about that.
To bring it back to the topic of the V1, the article does mention that the designers of the V1 were originally hoping to reach some form of detonation but eventually settle for the slower, and less fuel efficient, deflagration process because they just could not achieve it. In the end it is probably for the best, or I should say the worst for the allies, that they gave up on detonation.
One of the big problems for V1 style pulse-jet designs is that they rely on valves to allow fuel and air into the combustion chamber. Because the combustion cycle of those engines (even when resticted to deflagration) is so fast, they were forced to rely of extremely light valves in order to be able to have them open and close rapidly enough (for the same reason that a heavy piston can't handle the forces of detonating fuel).
Unfortunaly, light weight valves like that (even ones made with today's alloys) just can't stand up to being beaten around like that for very long which gives those kinds of engines extremely short lifetimes (on the order of hours at the most). From what I've heard the V1 would often fail before it even traveled long enough to reach the island of Britain. Had they been able to create a true detonantion process in the engine, chance are that it would have lasted for a much much shorter amount of time thus making the engine almost useless.
-GameMaster
You know, I think he might have actually been asking the question because he didn't know the answer. I know this might be a shock to you, but some people may not have learned the exact same things as you have and that doesn't make them deserve your attitude.
Why is this "Insightful"? Its a one line comment with a derogatory statement and no actual content.
he, I could have sworn I remember needing to pay a special fee in the beginning. Ah, well. It was a long time ago and I don't remember (I wasn't the one paying the bills back then ;-) ) It was defintely an awsome game, especially for the time it was released.
Actually, it can't even claim to be the first MMORPG. Long before M59 (at least it felt long at the time because I was in Junior High/high school). There was a game, by a name you might just recognize, called Neverwinter Nights. It was only available through AOL and was, until it became really outdated, one of AOL's premium games that you had to pay extra for. The server could handle something like 500 people online at a time and was based on the graphics engine used in the old SSI AD&D "Gold Box" games. (Pools of Darkness, Pools of Radiance, Secret of the Silver Blades, etc.) While I can't be sure that there wasn't something around before it, I remember thinking that it was ahead of its time. On the other hand, while the original Neverwinter Nights did come first it may be possible for M59 to claim bragging rights as the first 3D MMORPG.
The only other MMORPG from around the same time period I can think of was Sierra's "The Realm" which, if I'm not mistaken also came out slightly before M59. It had 2d graphics and was closer, in my opinion, to a graphical chat room than an actual game but it did have combat (barely). I remember joking with a friend of mine in High School that Sierra must have had the Janitor write the game because the graphics didn't even come close to the 3d graphics they were using in the Space Quest/King's Quest games of the time. I remember that, at least for initial release, the combat was held in a separate screen that world travel and that the graphics looked like something you'd see on an 8-bit NES or an old 8088/286 system.
I do have to say though that it is kinda good to see them keeping the game around. There isn't anthing all that ground breaking in some of the more reasent MMORPGs like UO, EQ, AC, and some of the others to make a need to throw away the server code of M59. Kinda sad really, if you think about it, that those games have advanced so little in terms of server flexibility and gameplay. I remember playing the the beta for a short time and it was definetly fun even on a slow modem connection.
I don't know about the other Linux vendors but (as was mentioned by the main poster) SCO has publicly accused Red Hat in particular. This might give them grounds.
That is a valid point. However, it sounds as though they are already running 100% Microsoft and are looking to make the switch away from it. In which case, they're already defying the difficulties you are describing.
Actually, the other possibility is that they are looking at the over-all PR picture and figure that the loss in profits is worth not getting the bad PR of having a whole nation convert over to OSS. In which case it could be looked at as a great deal from the Munich government's prospective because they could always make the switch to Linux later if MS starts trying to tie them down.
I think it shows even more strongly the wisdom of the Munich government in their decision to take government software out of the hands of a proprietary company.
You seem to think there are only two possible reasons for Red Hat to stay silent. Either you think they're letting it blow over or you think its an admission of guilt. Isn't that view a little narrow-minded. There is, at least, one other reason for Red Hat not to get involved.
Lawsuits are expensive. Even if they know they could win a slander case against SCO why would they bother. If SCO's business is doing as badly as everyone seems to think it is then suing them would be like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Considering that they probably wouldn't make their legal fees back, much less profit from it, why would they bother starting a legal suit when they can let IBM handle the case. In the end, they can always start a suit later if they decide it's worth the effort.
Granted, IANAL so I don't know all the ramifications of putting off starting a slander suit but I don't see any reason they would have to rush into it.
Yea, they're more like the market's target. (Sorry, bad joke)
Actually, those plots are almost direct rip-offs of a 50's or 60's movie I watched on TV once. It was set in the South Pacific during World War II. One of the big name 50's/60's action stars (I'm not very familiar with the names of actors from that time period but I've seen this guy before in other major movies from that time) was playing a Navy pilot who gets stranded on a small island with a Japanese pilot. At first they hate each other but they have to work together to survive. By the end of the movie they manage to develop a basic friendship. Of course, this is the point in the movie where the whole thing goes kind of Twilight zonish and they are both killed in a bombing run just after they become friends and just before the end of the war. Personally I found it to be a depressing ending which is why, I guess, most of the examples you gave ended up having a more positive ending where at least someone gets something out of it (as is the case with, at least, Enemy Mine where the alien gets killed but the human goes on to help develop good will between the two cultures).
The only real problem with that is that by the time someone has the money to buy one of these things they, most likely, arent running an older IDE setup. Even if they were, they could easily afford an add-in PCI card to get full ATA-100/133 support. This is more of a toy for someone that already has the fastest system they can get and wan't some way to make it even faster no matter what the cost.
In the box titled "Older Stuff" on the right side of the main page there is a link called "older stuff". In there you can find a search option for searching through old news posts. Even if there weren't a search option built into Slashdot for the users to access, it isn't hard to design one using the features already built into mySQL (its an inherent part of any SQL database).
As for the parent post, I love how any dissenting opinion, no matter how decently written, gets moded into oblivion as flamebait by anyone that disagrees.
-GameMaster
Well, hard drives do have a decent amount of shock resistance. Also, you could put a layer of styrafoam between the hard drives to absorb shock. Also, when you deal with CD-Rs, you may not have to think about shock but you will have to think about scratches. Assuming you planned on storing the CD-Rs on spindles, it would take up a decent amount of space if you tried to place a layer of, even thin, soft material between each CD-R.
.doc file I typed up the original post in though I doubt this will ever be practical concidering the extremely high overhead and the fact that most applications would demand far better latency than a 16+ hour ping. ;-)
As for storing it, I've already stored the
-GameMaster
I know I'll probably get moded "off topic" but the truth is it really is on topic.
What we need is a new option in Slashdot user preferences that doesn't show articles that have already been posted to the front page. That way people with a memory don't have to wade through the re-posts that happen frequently enough to be annoying. The most annoying part of it is that most of the time you have to spend a decent amount of time just trying to figure out if its an update on a previously posted topic or just another re-post of the exact same article.
Of course the much simpler way to handle it would be to force Slashdot editors to, at the very least, search the archives for any articles that contain the exact same URL linked to in the potential article. I doubt it would be very hard to code it in as a hard wired feature of slash that just automatically searches the body of all back news pieces. Then it could simply list off any articles that posses the same link making it really easy for an editor to see repeat posts before they make it to the front page. Heck even a manual search of the archives before posting every new article would be enough to catch most re-posts and it wouldn't take much time.
The only problem with the auto search idea is that there are plenty of times where commercial web sites like intel.com get linked to. In this case there could simply be a list of well know URLs (predominantly the base URL for corporations and other large organizations). Any links in a potential article that are included in the list could be excluded from the search.
This, of course, says nothing for the, oh so hard, cut-and-paste of all articles into MS Word (or any similar editor with a spell checker) that should also be mandatory for any web site that calls itself a news source. I find myself straying from the main point of the post now though.
This has been an opinion post sprinkled with a little bit of annoyance that this issue keeps getting ignored by the Slashdot editorial staff no matter how many times it gets mentioned in threads. It was not intended as a troll or as flame-bait.
-GameMaster
Well, as someone else in this thread mentioned there is no reason you couldn't use the passenger compartment as cargo space which makes your only real limit the plane's max cargo weight. It was also mentioned that the max cargo capacity of a 747 is ~113,000Kg meaning ~6.3 million CDs (9Kg/500CDs). This means that you could carry ~4,095 TB (32,760 Tb) per trip. That comes to ~ 1.1375 Tb/second bandwidth between New York and Paris.
;-)
I was thinking about it and I believe it would be more efficient to use hard drives instead of CDs. In particular the largest IDE hard drives listed on pricewatch.com are 160GB Maxtor 5400rpm ATA 133/100 drives selling for ~$235.00. IDE drives are both the largest drives on the market as well as the least expensive per MB. Using the drive's weight off of the Maxtor web site (0.580Kg) you can carry 194,827 drives on a 747. This means a total of ~31,172.41 TB (2,493,793.31 Tb) of data onboard. On the same trip from New York to Paris this would make the bandwidth ~8.659 Tb/second
While it sounds pretty impressive, there is a down side. The hard drives have a per MB cost of ~$0.00146875 while the CDs cost ~$0.000238461 per MB. On the other hand, with the hard drives there would be no need to purchase the ~125,000 CD-ROM drives for the receiving side and the 125,000 CD-RW drives for the sending side (assuming you were only going one way, otherwise its 250,000 CD-RW drives). You would only need to purchase the systems to plug the drives into which would be needed either way. Also, the vastly increased transfer rates for the hard drives would decrease loading and unloading times. In the end, the most expensive part of this whole affair would probably end up being the costs associated with the 747 itself (purchase/rental, fuel, crew, etc.). If you were to add the cost of extra equipment, the plane, labor, etc. to the equation when calculating cost per meg I think you'd end up coming out ahead with the hard drives. Another alternative would be to use DVD-RW disks which, at 4.7 GB per disk, come out costing $0.000382978 per MB.
None of these calculations take into account the sheer number of coasters that are likely to be produced while trying to burn that many CD-Rs. Also, they don't account for the fact that, at these quantities, all this computer equipment could most likely be purchased directly from the respective manufacturers at the same cost retailers pay for it.
I would love to have some information on what it would realistically cost to run an airline that did nothing but this and see if it could be made even close to economical for extremely large file transfers. Unfortunately, I don't really know where to start looking for costs relate to running a 747 or paying for the labor and I don't really have the time to research it. Maybe I'll save it for another day when I get really board.
BTW - Another nice advantage of using hard drives instead of CD-Rs is that you can re-use the hard drives.
- GameMaster
Actually, it is lower level than that. Vertex and Pixel shaders are independent of OpenGL or Direct3D. They are short pieces of code compiled down to a special, limited, machine language understood by the video card. The programmer sets a certain shader up as a state change and then uses glVertex() or drawIndexedPimitive() to render the geometry. When each vertex is rendered, the shader code is performed on it.
You are right, however, that cg is a tool on the programmer's end. Like any mid-to-high level programming language, it is designed to make it easier for the developer to write code as opposed to having to write all shaders in difficult to understand/read shader assembly. This will, hopefully, allow a game developer who isn't as big a hardcore coder as someone like John Carmack to create shader effects in a reasonable amount of time. It will also allow coders who are that good to prototype shader ideas faster and figure out if they'll work.
-GameMaster
One of the things a lot of people seem to be missing is that this is a special language used only for shader design. Vertex shaders area lot like inline assembly functions in C or C++. They are small pieces of code that do a short string of operations over and over again in hardware.
It makes a lot of sense to base it off of C for a number of reasons. First, most game programmers are familiar with C or C++. Second, and more important, there are extreme limitations on the size of shaders. Vertex shaders have a limit of 128 ops on a geforce card. This is just base ops and can go away real fast when you use macro commands (which are composites of multiple ops) as are most likely available in cg. Future cards will, no doubt, increase the number of ops allowed per shader but it will be a while before we see shaders that are large enough to find any use for OOP features. If we do find a time where some OOP features would be handy then I'm sure they could add basic OOP functionality similar to C++.
-GameMaster
The actual assembly language used by the present generation of shader supporting video chips has no support for loops and only marginal support for conditional statements (meaning no explicit jmp op). Since this is the code that the cg compiler compiles down to, they can't add those features to the language. It makes some sense because shaders are meant to be short and sweet. Event though they are hardware accelerated, they get run so many times that even a shader that uses only the max number of ops (which is now at 128 ops for NVIDIA chips) is considered pretty slow. If loops were added it would slow the system down even more. When they say those features are "eventually planned to be supported" they mean that they'll be supported by a future generation of hardware (most likely the directX9 compatible chips).
-GameMaster
Yes, NVIDIA does not document their hardware.
Yes, they have never shipped complete drivers for the GeForce or future hardware and they give no indication that they ever will.
I have never claimed otherwise on either of these counts.
As for the non-confidential nature of patents, I believe I covered that satisfactorily in my rebuttal to one of the other responses to my post.
If you re-read the original post I was responding to, you will notice that the question that is being discussed is which hardware is best supported by the software, not which software best supports a free system. In fact that was the crux of my point. When asked a simple technical question about which software works best; personal agendas, such as supporting free software, have no place in an honest answer except as an addendum. Saying that ATI and Matrox cards are better isn't true as far as performance is concerned on x86 Linux systems. To say differently simply because you want to manipulate someone into avoiding a company you dislike for personal reasons is dishonest. Wouldn't it be more satisfying to convince someone to do the "right thing" even after they know the straight facts about performance?
-Daedalus
It is very possibly that these patents are threaded throughout the code or that there are a few patents that encompass a vast portion of the code. Either way, it would make releasing source code that made any kind of sense almost impossible. Also, assuming they could release something that made some sense why would they? Think about what this would accomplish. All it would do is provide driver writers with hints on how to recreate the patented portions of the code. This would be NVIDIA supporting the subversion of a business partner's intellectual property. Even if they weren't directly breaking their patent agreements, I can easily see them being sued over it. To top it all off, is this a good thing for the OSS community? To have driver writers for Linux committing patent theft? The OSS community is made up of talented programmers. This would make any of those talented programmers that took part in NVIDIA video card driver writing into pirates. Its really wouldn't be that much different from Microsoft using a piece of GPL code in one of their products without acknowledging it. Besides, if they did release limited source code as a token gesture to the OSS community they'd get called on it the same way they got derided for releasing obfuscated source code of the first generation of Linux 3D drivers they released.
-Daedalus
You are right, patents are "open source" in that they are a matter of public record. However, as has been stated in a reply to this post which for some reason has been moded down to 0, this doesn't mean that NVIDIA has the right to give out a product making use of those patents for anyone to freely modify. I'm sure there would be serious issues if they tried to license it with something like the GPL or even the BSD license. Whatever agreements NVIDIA entered into to get the use of those patents certainly doesn't give them the right to tell a whole community that it can use those patents in a derivative work such as improved drivers. This all ignores the possibility that trade secrets are also included in the technology.
-GameMaster
OSS zealots will most likely mod me down for saying this, but most of it is the truth mixed with a little bit of my own opinion. ;-)
:-p ) but you are being slightly less than honest when you give out a blanket statement to people that ATI or Matrox is best supported. That person is asking you for information and, instead, you are giving them your opinion dressed up to look like fact. A more truthful way to answer that question would be to ask them what kind or hardware/OS they plan on using and then to tell them that NVIDIA is best supported for x86 Linux and that ATI Matrox are best supported for all other platforms. If you must push your own OSS agenda, then follow up the statement with an explanation of why you think people should support ATI and Matrox because of the way in which they support the OSS community.
:-)
It always bothers me a little when I hear people say stuff like this. The truth is, as has been stated by NVIDIA many times, that there are patents shared by NVIDIA with other companies that have been used in the development of they video cards. One of these companies is, most likely, SGI. They can't open source their drivers without violating confidentiality agreements and opening themselves to, justified, lawsuits.
Yes they only release binary drivers, and it would be much nicer if they would release the source as well but when it comes right down to it their drivers are vastly better than any other 3D drivers out there. Unlike all other Linux drivers for 3D cards NVIDIA's drivers are about equivalent in performance with their windows counterparts (this is as of the last time I saw a benchmark, I've heard rumors that they may be faster now). Granted, this doesn't help people on non-x86 Linux or on a *BSD (and no, I don't believe *BSD is dying.
Well, that's just my $0.02. I personally believe in OSS, though I don't really believe in the extremism of people like RMS. I also believe that there is a place in the world for non-OSS in certain places as well as understanding for companies that simply are incapable of supporting OSS for external reasons beyond their control (such as legal reasons). I don't mean for this to come off as a flame so much as a friendly rebuttal.
-GameMaster
IANAL, but fom what everything I've heard you can copyright source code but you can't copyright the compiled binaries and the interface between the server and the game. Unless the people programming the bnetd software somehow got their hands on a copy of Blizzard's Battle.net sourcecode (which I highly doubt) then what they are doing is called Reverse engineering.
There is nothing illegal with reverse engineering a product as long as you do it without inside information (like a look at the source code). The only way reverse engineering could be illegal is if Blizzard has a Patent on some of the things Battle.net can do (which they would have laid claim to in the e-mail if they did).
Your example are totally wrong. As I mentioned before, software copyright only covers the source code and not the binary code. As for the lightbulb, you are comparing a Patent (which by now has probably expired so while you can't patent the ligthbulb, you probably _can_ produce and sell lightbulbs if you wanted to) to a copyright. These are totally different things and are treated radically differently under the law.
Blizzard has no right to be doing this. They have no legal leg to stand on if this ever goes to court but, then again, they're relying on the fact that it'll never go to court. This is a case of Blizzard using its status as a wealthy corporation to bully some people by threatening to sue. They know that the ISP will just reflexively pull the site down and that these guys can't afford to go to court.
-GameMaster
Congrats,
Best of wishes.
Yes they do require a different skill set, but the point of the analogy was that they are both tasks that the vast majority of end users (for both products) would be incapable of accomplishing. They are also tasks that are complex enough, in their own way, that it'd be absurd to suggest that an end user should be responsible for fixing the problem on their own even if the whole world knew how to install breaks or program a computer.
OSS advocates have spent a long time trying to get companies to use OSS software for business ventures. If they want to compete with the commercial software world then they have to expect to be treated the same way by things like buyer protection laws. Ideally, any new law should only be aplicable in cases of _gross_ negligence (like the almost monthly security holes that are found in MS OSs and take forever to be fixed). The OSS movement has a substantial emphasis on security. Any Linux disto or app that would fall under this kind of law would deserve to fail.
-GameMaster