> No offence, but the way graphics are handled in most simulators nowadays is afterthought at best. And it shows.
No offense taken. You are wrong, however. Graphics are not an afterthought at all in sims (assuming you have actually used anything modern - oops that's right, your card can't handle them, which was my point). Go and check out the in-cockpit shadows on the A-10C or the Ka-50. BF3's cockpits are lame in comparison (they have nice textures but are essentially static). The soldiers, foliage and environment on BF3 is awesome, but it is still postage stamp sized.
> Has it ever occurred to you that most of graphics engine design is not about looking as realistic as possible, but about making the result as good as possible while cutting as many corners as possible? BF3, as you yourself admit, has been very successful in this endeavour.
Actually this has occurred to me. In case you didn't read my previous post, I'm not just talking about this stuff, I'm implementing it myself. Is this debate theory or practice for you?
> Finally, 1080p as a "minimum" for PC users shows your utter ignorance in the subject. 1080p is a reasonable maximum at the moment, with less then 5% of users actually having a higher resolution (if you count its 16:10 big brother, 1920:1200 in the same category). Source: steam hardware survey.
Fair call. I was going to use the words "hardcore gamers" but I thought it too wanky - so wanted to avoid it. Yes, there are a lot of laptop weenies out there. They are not a factor in my calculations. I care about the people who actually have decent hardware and want a decent experience (eg. the same strategy Apple uses: don't aim for the masses, cherry-pick the high value customers). Many of the people in my circle of gamers have multiple monitors, only a few have less than 1080p. This may not be representative of the gamer population as a whole, but is very representative of my segment (just as you could say that small VGA-like resolutions is typical of the handheld/phone market). We need the power of decent video cards to drive all those pixels (the 'fill rate' becomes even more important than the processing rate with multi-monitors). This was my original point. *You* may not need a decent graphics card, *joe iPad(tm)* doesn't need a decent graphics card, but there are some of *us* out there who do. Hear us roar (meow!:) ).
> Monitoring "every single" thing on every site is impossible
How wrong you are. I suggest you read up about "Lawful Intercept" (which is as backward a term as you can get). The US Feds (FBI,NSA) can watch the world's traffic in real-time thanks to trade laws they have that require friendly non-US countries to install Lawful Intercept gear in their ISPs. The data is then squirreled away in their colossal data farms. What used to be impossible now is completely possible. Plus, many first world countries store the IP traffic that passes their borders. It wouldn't surprise me if this was shared (in the same way signal intelligence is shared via the ECHELON network). Do some Googling about those keywords I've mentioned. Oh, yeah, and welcome to 1984 for real.
lol. The maps in BF3 are *tiny*, just a few km by a few km. The backgrounds are merely animated 'sky domes'.
The equivalent sky dome in a flight simulation is much much more distant than that. nb: BF3 is a 'game', and doesn't cut the mustard in *simulation* terms (that's ok, it's not trying to be a sim, but let's call it what it is). Even Arma2, which is a vastly better in terms of simulation than BF3 of ground combat (which is ok, since Arma2 is a sim and BF3 is merely a game) is weak when it comes to aircraft, the maps are around 10 km by 10 km. In LockOn:Flaming Cliffs 2 the maps span the Black Sea from the Ukraine to Turkey. A game that handles several hundred kilometers in width and length, and it works on machines with as little as 0.5 GB memory, so the developers do know what they are doing in regard to this.
I know *exactly* what LOD is (having written graphics optimization algorithms like this myself, and are in the process of writing my own cross-platform flight simulator for commercial release). That still doesn't address my original response, some of us simply need more GPU horsepower and old cards don't have the memory or bandwidth to handle our needs. Even Battlefield 3 with textures on Ultra requires more than 1 GB of video memory or it will start stuttering after 15 minutes (swapping textures between RAM and VRAM) - I know, since my Radeon 5970 (2 GPU each with 1GB VRAM) does exactly this and I have profiled it with GPUZ. An older card simply can't cope at anti-aliased 1920x1080 ("1080p") or higher resolutions (which is a minimum for the majority of PC gamers these days), mostly because they have such little VRAM compared to newer cards.
Actually, what really matters to performance these days is the amount of video ram you have. It is good you are content with low-end graphics. Many of us are not (if you get the right game it is easy to tell the difference between a low end and high end performing PC gaming system).
Actually, when at altitude the horizon is far more than 20 km distant. Of course it is not rendered at the same level of detail as the close terrain, but the polygons etc for mountains, lakes etc do need to be processed as you can see them 50 nautical miles away from 50 thousand feet. Also remember that the rendering area goes as the square of the distance: double the range means four times the rendering area (yes, you often look behind you when in an aircraft - TrackIR is wonderful). Incidentally, what is probably causing your stuttering is not the processing power of your card, it is the amount of video memory. When textures need to be swapped between main memory and video memory you can see stuttering. Higher levels of anti-aliasing and an-isotropic filtering also gobble memory (in addition to the texture size/quality). GPUZ is a free tool that has graphs/plots that can help diagnose when you run out of video memory. My point still stands, even if the original poster doesn't need a more powerful card for his uses, some of is do.
Learn about Test Driven Development (TDD). You don't need a book on it, simply use Google and learn about its importance for software quality, and learn how to use JUnit. Adopting TDD will change your development process and the way you develop software. Your software will be more correct, more reliable, you'll have an automated suite for maintaining it and your software will be better designed and more modular (required to be more testable). Once you get the "testing religion" your view on good development style will change (and you'll see that a lot of the software development "orthodox" wisdom is actually counter-productive to testing and what really matters when developing reliable software quickly).
Lol. You replaced one old outdated card with another:) My personal experience has been that NVidia has excellent drivers. ATI/AMD have better hardware and better visual quality (NVidia often as strange visual artifacts). Downside of ATI is their drivers are dodgy. It is always a risk upgrading an ATI driver. Sometimes new drivers can break your favourite game until a hotfix comes out (usually takes a fortnight or so). So, whether you go NVidia or AMD depends on what you want (NVidia ease of use) or ATI (more power, better value).
Try a flight simulator like DCS:Black Shark 2 or DCS:A-10C. They will work out any video card pretty hard. So while you may play first person shooters with 300 meter horizons that don't stress your card out, when you get up in the air and have a 20 km horizon your card will be working its guts out.
Please don't take me wrong, I agree with you about the bias of the author. However I would like to point out that generally asbestos sheets are harmless when left alone. Once you start cutting it and creating dust particles out of it then it most definitely is a carcinogen. So, while Allegre was probably wrong to oppose the removal of asbestos what people might be missing is the fact that it is doing things with the asbestos (eg routine renovating or the removal) that could release the carcinogenic particles.
How do I know this? I once asked this question of my country's national laboratory who test asbestos for these things - it is the job of the scientists there to test these things. They other thing they said is that glass fiber insulating material (here they go by the trade name, "Pink Batts") has the same problem as asbestos - actually inert, and safe when left, but creating dust can cause all sorts of probems, including leading to lung cancer/illness. The smoke from cigarettes has the same effect (if we ignore the other chemicals), where the smoke is not particularly (pun intended) reactive but irritates the lungs continuously which causes cancer.
So, Allegre was right and wrong at the same time (right under certain conditions, wrong under others - which made him effectively wrong since the consequences of the dangers of asbestos far outweigh the benefits of using it).
Thanks for taking the time to patiently explain. I understand what you mean and why the judge has chosen to interpret the law in that way. That is not the only way the law could have been interpreted, and I think you'll agree that a significant part of the application of law relies on interpretation of them - there can be more than one way to interpret many laws. Depending on the circumstances, a ruling (even this one) could have gone the other way, since statutes are not absolute laws in the same way as physical laws are (such as Conservation of Momentum - can you tell I'm a former astrophysicist?:) ). So I hope we agree that some part of interpretation of the law is required to be performed by a judge, since the *intent* of laws themselves can be ambiguous and even legal language is not absolutely precise (at least not in the same way that mathematics can be absolutely precise in its definitions). This means that any law does not automatically lead to a particular outcome - sometimes the judge could rule one way or another. My belief is that the judge made a poor decision in this case as he chose to interpret the law in a particular way, which happens to have consequences that are detrimental to creativity and the freedom to create other original works (in a literal sense; since in an abstract sense it can be shown that every work is dependent on previous works and artists for inspiration - this is how art works).
If I can take a different approach I'll try a thought experiment to deconstruct the judges interpretation by logical extension by starting with a small (atomic) unit and building from there. So I'd like you to consider the question, "Would it be ever permissible for someone else to take a photo of Parliament Buildings because they didn't want to pay for an existing postcard/photo of those buildings?". Either you agree, and I'll continue my train of thought, or you disagree and then the logical conclusion is that an implicit monopoly has been granted by "European/civil law interpretation" to the first person to take a photograph of that object. Ok, it's more complicated than that, but we'll get to the complications later. So, the question before you was, "Is it ever permissible for someone else to take a photo of an object because they didn't want to pay for an original copyrighted work of the object?". Much of my argument is my belief that it should be possible to create comparable works because you don't want to pay for an existing work. Consider: you make a nice kitchen table in your garage, similar to those found in shops, because you want to save money - under the interpretation of the law the judge has made you would infringe the copyright of the existing table manufacturers. Sound sensible? it doesn't to me.
Here I'll assume that you came to the conclusion that a second photo of an object like Parliament should not infringe the copyright of the author of the first object. Even if the second creator didn't want to pay the first creator for their photo, and even if the second creator had seen existing works of the Parliament buildings that would still not be infringing on the copyright of the first creator - using a 'literal' interpretation (which is how the copyright laws were intended and enforced until very recently). Ok, now what happens if we add in one more building into the scene? The logical conclusion would be that the merely adding a building would still not prevent someone from taking a non-infringing picture of the same scene. The sum is not more than its parts in this view. However, based on the judge's interpretation at some point composing a scene based on simple objects, even in a very obvious way, adds sufficient 'magic' so that it becomes protected as an "extension of the author's personality". Now how well defined is that last concept? not very, I would imagine. If we accept "extension of the author's personality" a a reason for protection and extend it in a logical manner we find we grant implicit monopolies since 'only van Gough would be allowed
Interesting. But creating *similar* code *is* permitted if you didn't copy any part of the existing code. Moving back to photographs you would have to say the second photographer certainly copied the idea of the first photographer without actually copying the image itself. That is, *none* of the actual first image was using in creating the second - only the idea was used. It is prevention of *copying* that is protected by copyright, not the protection of (non-obvious) ideas, which is covered by patents. The judge here has leapt from saying copyright covers the copying of the expression of an idea (that is, copying any portion of the first photograph) to prevent copying of the idea - an independently created second photograph that uses no (physical/digital etc) portion of the first photograph, only a similar (not same, the shots differ) idea. This is why the ruling is actually a selective interpretation of the copyright law, at odds with the original intent of copyright. But then, it is a legal system, not a justice system.
In the case of code, looking at the code means you will probably copy some part of it into the second, so is more hazardous. By looking at the program from the outside there is no chance you'd be seeing the code - that's why doing this is clearly not a problem.
The second photograph has *no* part of the first. A 'substantial part' would be if the second photographer had some part *taken from the original* in his photograph (eg. as a background, or half the image, or a thumbnail etc etc). Merely duplicating shooting and processing an image *independently* takes no part of the original - this is why the judges ruling is unusual enough to make news - usually making something similar independently is not covered by copyright, as you well know. I guess the judge decided they were too similar - even though the common man would argue the pictures were significantly different - but where will this end? Any picture of Westminster and Big Ben with a bus on it? any picture in grey with a colour highlight? This is why the judge's ruling makes the news.
And what did those stolen documents show? that the US government was not only unethical in many cases it was also breaking or circumventing its own laws. As wrong as it was to steal the documents and leak some sensitive stuff (although care was taken that the more sensitive stuff was redacted) in this case one could possibly argue that the "ends justify the means" - otherwise the possibly illegal and definitely immoral behavior of the US government and agencies would never be exposed. Transparency is needed for good governance yet the US is currently hell-bent on covering up misdeeds rather than not do them in the first place. Exposing this is the only way citizens have to rectify the situation (which is why the thinkers on Slashdot are so concerned about the trajectory the US Government is currently on).
LOL! Why don't people realise that in *every* modern country *all* traffic is currently being monitored by the FBI. The US has used trade treaties and agreements to have "Lawful Intercept" (now there's a misnomer if ever there was one) equipment in the ISPs of all its trading partners. This can be used to watch packets flying around the world in real time (oops, still believe TOR can't be defeated?). The Lawful Intercept installations are recent, but the ECHELON network has been used for half a century to collect signal intelligence. Some of this signal intelligence is shared with the host countries but mostly after the Cold War it is being used to assist US businesses beat competition in the hosting country. This 'seizing of data' is not new and not particular to New Zealand (nb: I'm from New Zealand).
Clearly your understanding of the word "Political Conservative" is different to the rest of the World's. Generally conservatives don't need lobbyists, they are so pro-business (which is the principal factor that differs the political right from the left) that they don't need to - they are already in the corporatist pocket to begin with. Voting Ron Paul will change nothing - believing so is a little naiive. If enough people vote for outsiders like the Pirate Party then real change will come about - for a time until they too become part of the institution in a decade or so.
For it to be akin the second photographer would have had to observed the first photographer. Otherwise, they have just *independently* produced a compatible *interface*. This is why the ruling is so bad - it is taking copyrights into the same realm as patents. With this ruling you cannot *independently* produce something similar but slightly different. I hope this is overturned on appeal - usually the Privy Council has its head screwed on about these things.
Your legal department are dullards. if we ignore patents, you can make a *compatible* interoperable copy of any software provided you didn't use the bits or source of the original. Now, it is much easier to prove this if your guys are not 'tainted' by seeing the other fellows product, but it is not necessarily required - just harder to prove. This has been tested over and over again in court. Consider something like SAMBA. It is designed to be *exactly* like a Windows SMB system, and is permitted to be for the purposes of interoperability. Your lame legal department schmucks should have known this - it is their job to, after all.
Interesting interpretation about photographs, but totally wrong when it comes to software. You can make software that has *exactly* the same interfaces but as long as you didn't copy the bits or the source you are allowed to do it for the purposes of interoperability (eg. why SAMBA lives on despite Microsoft dearly wanting to destroy it many years ago). This has been tested in court and compatible implementations were not found to breach copyright (now with all the idea patent nonsense you would get pinged on that - but not for breaching copyright).
Of course the act talks about "intellectual creation", but does this mean *techniques* are copyrighted ?- no, of course not, they are processes and come under patent law not copyright law. Copyright says you cannot make a *copy* of some one else's photograph without their permission. This will be the content of the law you cite. There is no copyright restriction on taking a *similar* photo by yourself because you are not *copying* the original (and copyright is about *copying*). There may be patent restrictions on the process though. This is why the judge's interpretation is so ludicrous and we are taking umbrage at it - it is an extension of copyright which flies against all the existing cases. This should be appealed to the Privy Council to sort out - the judge has it wrong.
In software (and I believe most engineering disciplines) it is a derivative work if you take the original and modify it. Making an functionally compatible copy is permitted for interoperability reasons. From that point of view making an artistically similar photo without using the original should not breach copyright. In order to breach copyright you need to *make a copy*. Making something similar is not copying. As someone else pointed out, many people confuse the defense of trademarks and patents with breach of copyright - they are not the same!
> Out of sincere curiosity, what is the disadvantage of storing the data as UCS-2 vs UTF8? Is it simply the wasted space associated with the two-byte-per-character encoding?
Thanks for giving me an opportunity to elaborate. UCS-2 is a two-byte encoding ('wide' characters). However, unlike true Unicode characters it cannot expand into 3 or 4 bytes (depending on the encoding) like say. UTF-16 can (2 or 4 bytes). If your product using the database doesn't need to be internationalized then you might as well be using ASCII, but if you decide you'd like to be internationalized then this matters a great deal. For example, the Mainland Chinese government has mandated that software products in tended for Chinese use must support certain characters (those in the character set GB18030) including some which will not squeeze into UCS-2. Hence, if you are designing systems for global use (as I have had the great fortune to do) then MS SQL-Server starts to look worse than Postgresql or Oracle in this regard. You can use SQL Server, but you start having to do 'gymnastics' to handle the possibility that data will come from sources producing more than two-byte characters, eg. mucking around with CLOBs, and then you start to lose some of the useful text operations as they don't work on CLOBS. It's the same deal when you start storing Unicode XML in SQL Server that could have 3 or 4 byte characters (at least that was the case in 2010). All the Microsoft marketing says they support Unicode (the UTF formats) but for SQL Server this actually means double-byte UCS-2 - not the same! Like I said, Postgresql handles UTF properly, which is why I wanted to share my experience in this debate.
>Also, unless you mean something different than what I imagine when you say "arbitrary length text columns", varchar(max)/nvarchar(max)/varbinary(max) are probably what you're looking for.
Postgresql has equivalents to these types (although 2-byte nvarchar unnecessary since varchar can [and should!] be UTF, which is more compact when UTF-8 encoding is chosen but also more flexible for the multi-byte reasons I mentioned previously). These types (and the SQL types) have a maximum upper length. The Postgresql text type is efficient enough for general use but has no length limit. Basically you can treat it as a large CLOB if you need to but you get all the regular text operations work nicely with it. Again, this is Postgresql's flexibility making design easy since you don't have to commit to fixed sizes at the start. On the other hand, MS SQL Server has some nice features, like lightweight 'application locks', so choosing between Postgresql and SQL Server depends on what you need. However, I wanted to point out that the expensive SQL Server actually lacks some fundamental features that the free Postgresql has - since my Microsoft-tech trained folk are totally unaware of this.
Plus, Postgresql has things like "text" columns that work, and can be proper Unicode (not MS SQL-Server's crummy UCS-2, or Unicode haxx blobs where the normal text functions won't work anymore). It also doesn't rape your wallet like Oracle.
In short, Postgresql does Internationalization right. It is easy for MS Sql-Server to be considered fast, when it doesn't have to do many things properly (like proper UTF or arbitrary length text columns, or spatial indexing, or having source available, or costing nothing:) etc etc).
> Or if you try to use the wrong path separator.
Great example I see all too often. This one is a classic signs of a terrible programmer. How hard is it to use File.separator instead of hardcoding "\\" or "/" in your paths?
Basically there are a lot of lazy muppets (or muppet sympathisers) out there who would trash Java rather than accept that it is actually programmer error for putting "Window-isms" into their code. They do this crap in every language and despite Java's "Write once [automated unit test everywhere] run everywhere" actually working (provided you actually give a damn about the code you are writing) they still screw it up. But folks still love to blame Java when it doesn't magically cope with "professionals" (lol) that can't cope with very elementary principals of platform independent development.
Compared to other development platforms (eg. MS C++, C#.NET etc) the influence of Oracle is less important than many people may think. Basically the OpenJDK is more important than Oracle's commerical offering (the successor of the Sun JDK - which is very similar to OpenJDK as they have almost all source code in common). But even if this were not the case the Java 'world' has a lot of alterantives: the IBM JDK, GNU GCJ, Apache Harmony. This means that Oracle can try throw its weight around but it is not as devastating as Microsoft would be in the.NET world. This is one beauty (for end-users/developers) with the Java ecosystem.
Slashdot Mirror
> No offence, but the way graphics are handled in most simulators nowadays is afterthought at best. And it shows.
No offense taken. You are wrong, however. Graphics are not an afterthought at all in sims (assuming you have actually used anything modern - oops that's right, your card can't handle them, which was my point). Go and check out the in-cockpit shadows on the A-10C or the Ka-50. BF3's cockpits are lame in comparison (they have nice textures but are essentially static). The soldiers, foliage and environment on BF3 is awesome, but it is still postage stamp sized.
> Has it ever occurred to you that most of graphics engine design is not about looking as realistic as possible, but about making the result as good as possible while cutting as many corners as possible? BF3, as you yourself admit, has been very successful in this endeavour.
Actually this has occurred to me. In case you didn't read my previous post, I'm not just talking about this stuff, I'm implementing it myself. Is this debate theory or practice for you?
> Finally, 1080p as a "minimum" for PC users shows your utter ignorance in the subject. 1080p is a reasonable maximum at the moment, with less then 5% of users actually having a higher resolution (if you count its 16:10 big brother, 1920:1200 in the same category). Source: steam hardware survey. :) ).
Fair call. I was going to use the words "hardcore gamers" but I thought it too wanky - so wanted to avoid it. Yes, there are a lot of laptop weenies out there. They are not a factor in my calculations. I care about the people who actually have decent hardware and want a decent experience (eg. the same strategy Apple uses: don't aim for the masses, cherry-pick the high value customers). Many of the people in my circle of gamers have multiple monitors, only a few have less than 1080p. This may not be representative of the gamer population as a whole, but is very representative of my segment (just as you could say that small VGA-like resolutions is typical of the handheld/phone market). We need the power of decent video cards to drive all those pixels (the 'fill rate' becomes even more important than the processing rate with multi-monitors). This was my original point. *You* may not need a decent graphics card, *joe iPad(tm)* doesn't need a decent graphics card, but there are some of *us* out there who do. Hear us roar (meow!
Note there is a huge amount of redundancy in most traffic. You don't have to store every single bit, dontcha know?
> Monitoring "every single" thing on every site is impossible
How wrong you are. I suggest you read up about "Lawful Intercept" (which is as backward a term as you can get). The US Feds (FBI,NSA) can watch the world's traffic in real-time thanks to trade laws they have that require friendly non-US countries to install Lawful Intercept gear in their ISPs. The data is then squirreled away in their colossal data farms. What used to be impossible now is completely possible. Plus, many first world countries store the IP traffic that passes their borders. It wouldn't surprise me if this was shared (in the same way signal intelligence is shared via the ECHELON network). Do some Googling about those keywords I've mentioned. Oh, yeah, and welcome to 1984 for real.
lol. The maps in BF3 are *tiny*, just a few km by a few km. The backgrounds are merely animated 'sky domes'.
The equivalent sky dome in a flight simulation is much much more distant than that. nb: BF3 is a 'game', and doesn't cut the mustard in *simulation* terms (that's ok, it's not trying to be a sim, but let's call it what it is). Even Arma2, which is a vastly better in terms of simulation than BF3 of ground combat (which is ok, since Arma2 is a sim and BF3 is merely a game) is weak when it comes to aircraft, the maps are around 10 km by 10 km. In LockOn:Flaming Cliffs 2 the maps span the Black Sea from the Ukraine to Turkey. A game that handles several hundred kilometers in width and length, and it works on machines with as little as 0.5 GB memory, so the developers do know what they are doing in regard to this.
I know *exactly* what LOD is (having written graphics optimization algorithms like this myself, and are in the process of writing my own cross-platform flight simulator for commercial release). That still doesn't address my original response, some of us simply need more GPU horsepower and old cards don't have the memory or bandwidth to handle our needs. Even Battlefield 3 with textures on Ultra requires more than 1 GB of video memory or it will start stuttering after 15 minutes (swapping textures between RAM and VRAM) - I know, since my Radeon 5970 (2 GPU each with 1GB VRAM) does exactly this and I have profiled it with GPUZ. An older card simply can't cope at anti-aliased 1920x1080 ("1080p") or higher resolutions (which is a minimum for the majority of PC gamers these days), mostly because they have such little VRAM compared to newer cards.
Actually, what really matters to performance these days is the amount of video ram you have. It is good you are content with low-end graphics. Many of us are not (if you get the right game it is easy to tell the difference between a low end and high end performing PC gaming system).
Actually, when at altitude the horizon is far more than 20 km distant. Of course it is not rendered at the same level of detail as the close terrain, but the polygons etc for mountains, lakes etc do need to be processed as you can see them 50 nautical miles away from 50 thousand feet. Also remember that the rendering area goes as the square of the distance: double the range means four times the rendering area (yes, you often look behind you when in an aircraft - TrackIR is wonderful). Incidentally, what is probably causing your stuttering is not the processing power of your card, it is the amount of video memory. When textures need to be swapped between main memory and video memory you can see stuttering. Higher levels of anti-aliasing and an-isotropic filtering also gobble memory (in addition to the texture size/quality). GPUZ is a free tool that has graphs/plots that can help diagnose when you run out of video memory. My point still stands, even if the original poster doesn't need a more powerful card for his uses, some of is do.
Learn about Test Driven Development (TDD). You don't need a book on it, simply use Google and learn about its importance for software quality, and learn how to use JUnit. Adopting TDD will change your development process and the way you develop software. Your software will be more correct, more reliable, you'll have an automated suite for maintaining it and your software will be better designed and more modular (required to be more testable). Once you get the "testing religion" your view on good development style will change (and you'll see that a lot of the software development "orthodox" wisdom is actually counter-productive to testing and what really matters when developing reliable software quickly).
Lol. You replaced one old outdated card with another :) My personal experience has been that NVidia has excellent drivers. ATI/AMD have better hardware and better visual quality (NVidia often as strange visual artifacts). Downside of ATI is their drivers are dodgy. It is always a risk upgrading an ATI driver. Sometimes new drivers can break your favourite game until a hotfix comes out (usually takes a fortnight or so). So, whether you go NVidia or AMD depends on what you want (NVidia ease of use) or ATI (more power, better value).
Try a flight simulator like DCS:Black Shark 2 or DCS:A-10C. They will work out any video card pretty hard. So while you may play first person shooters with 300 meter horizons that don't stress your card out, when you get up in the air and have a 20 km horizon your card will be working its guts out.
Please don't take me wrong, I agree with you about the bias of the author. However I would like to point out that generally asbestos sheets are harmless when left alone. Once you start cutting it and creating dust particles out of it then it most definitely is a carcinogen. So, while Allegre was probably wrong to oppose the removal of asbestos what people might be missing is the fact that it is doing things with the asbestos (eg routine renovating or the removal) that could release the carcinogenic particles.
How do I know this? I once asked this question of my country's national laboratory who test asbestos for these things - it is the job of the scientists there to test these things. They other thing they said is that glass fiber insulating material (here they go by the trade name, "Pink Batts") has the same problem as asbestos - actually inert, and safe when left, but creating dust can cause all sorts of probems, including leading to lung cancer/illness. The smoke from cigarettes has the same effect (if we ignore the other chemicals), where the smoke is not particularly (pun intended) reactive but irritates the lungs continuously which causes cancer.
So, Allegre was right and wrong at the same time (right under certain conditions, wrong under others - which made him effectively wrong since the consequences of the dangers of asbestos far outweigh the benefits of using it).
Thanks for taking the time to patiently explain. I understand what you mean and why the judge has chosen to interpret the law in that way. That is not the only way the law could have been interpreted, and I think you'll agree that a significant part of the application of law relies on interpretation of them - there can be more than one way to interpret many laws. Depending on the circumstances, a ruling (even this one) could have gone the other way, since statutes are not absolute laws in the same way as physical laws are (such as Conservation of Momentum - can you tell I'm a former astrophysicist? :) ). So I hope we agree that some part of interpretation of the law is required to be performed by a judge, since the *intent* of laws themselves can be ambiguous and even legal language is not absolutely precise (at least not in the same way that mathematics can be absolutely precise in its definitions). This means that any law does not automatically lead to a particular outcome - sometimes the judge could rule one way or another. My belief is that the judge made a poor decision in this case as he chose to interpret the law in a particular way, which happens to have consequences that are detrimental to creativity and the freedom to create other original works (in a literal sense; since in an abstract sense it can be shown that every work is dependent on previous works and artists for inspiration - this is how art works).
If I can take a different approach I'll try a thought experiment to deconstruct the judges interpretation by logical extension by starting with a small (atomic) unit and building from there. So I'd like you to consider the question, "Would it be ever permissible for someone else to take a photo of Parliament Buildings because they didn't want to pay for an existing postcard/photo of those buildings?". Either you agree, and I'll continue my train of thought, or you disagree and then the logical conclusion is that an implicit monopoly has been granted by "European/civil law interpretation" to the first person to take a photograph of that object. Ok, it's more complicated than that, but we'll get to the complications later. So, the question before you was, "Is it ever permissible for someone else to take a photo of an object because they didn't want to pay for an original copyrighted work of the object?". Much of my argument is my belief that it should be possible to create comparable works because you don't want to pay for an existing work. Consider: you make a nice kitchen table in your garage, similar to those found in shops, because you want to save money - under the interpretation of the law the judge has made you would infringe the copyright of the existing table manufacturers. Sound sensible? it doesn't to me.
Here I'll assume that you came to the conclusion that a second photo of an object like Parliament should not infringe the copyright of the author of the first object. Even if the second creator didn't want to pay the first creator for their photo, and even if the second creator had seen existing works of the Parliament buildings that would still not be infringing on the copyright of the first creator - using a 'literal' interpretation (which is how the copyright laws were intended and enforced until very recently). Ok, now what happens if we add in one more building into the scene? The logical conclusion would be that the merely adding a building would still not prevent someone from taking a non-infringing picture of the same scene. The sum is not more than its parts in this view. However, based on the judge's interpretation at some point composing a scene based on simple objects, even in a very obvious way, adds sufficient 'magic' so that it becomes protected as an "extension of the author's personality". Now how well defined is that last concept? not very, I would imagine. If we accept "extension of the author's personality" a a reason for protection and extend it in a logical manner we find we grant implicit monopolies since 'only van Gough would be allowed
Interesting. But creating *similar* code *is* permitted if you didn't copy any part of the existing code. Moving back to photographs you would have to say the second photographer certainly copied the idea of the first photographer without actually copying the image itself. That is, *none* of the actual first image was using in creating the second - only the idea was used. It is prevention of *copying* that is protected by copyright, not the protection of (non-obvious) ideas, which is covered by patents. The judge here has leapt from saying copyright covers the copying of the expression of an idea (that is, copying any portion of the first photograph) to prevent copying of the idea - an independently created second photograph that uses no (physical/digital etc) portion of the first photograph, only a similar (not same, the shots differ) idea. This is why the ruling is actually a selective interpretation of the copyright law, at odds with the original intent of copyright. But then, it is a legal system, not a justice system.
In the case of code, looking at the code means you will probably copy some part of it into the second, so is more hazardous. By looking at the program from the outside there is no chance you'd be seeing the code - that's why doing this is clearly not a problem.
The second photograph has *no* part of the first. A 'substantial part' would be if the second photographer had some part *taken from the original* in his photograph (eg. as a background, or half the image, or a thumbnail etc etc). Merely duplicating shooting and processing an image *independently* takes no part of the original - this is why the judges ruling is unusual enough to make news - usually making something similar independently is not covered by copyright, as you well know. I guess the judge decided they were too similar - even though the common man would argue the pictures were significantly different - but where will this end? Any picture of Westminster and Big Ben with a bus on it? any picture in grey with a colour highlight? This is why the judge's ruling makes the news.
And what did those stolen documents show? that the US government was not only unethical in many cases it was also breaking or circumventing its own laws. As wrong as it was to steal the documents and leak some sensitive stuff (although care was taken that the more sensitive stuff was redacted) in this case one could possibly argue that the "ends justify the means" - otherwise the possibly illegal and definitely immoral behavior of the US government and agencies would never be exposed. Transparency is needed for good governance yet the US is currently hell-bent on covering up misdeeds rather than not do them in the first place. Exposing this is the only way citizens have to rectify the situation (which is why the thinkers on Slashdot are so concerned about the trajectory the US Government is currently on).
> "Seized data in the last week or so"
LOL! Why don't people realise that in *every* modern country *all* traffic is currently being monitored by the FBI. The US has used trade treaties and agreements to have "Lawful Intercept" (now there's a misnomer if ever there was one) equipment in the ISPs of all its trading partners. This can be used to watch packets flying around the world in real time (oops, still believe TOR can't be defeated?). The Lawful Intercept installations are recent, but the ECHELON network has been used for half a century to collect signal intelligence. Some of this signal intelligence is shared with the host countries but mostly after the Cold War it is being used to assist US businesses beat competition in the hosting country. This 'seizing of data' is not new and not particular to New Zealand (nb: I'm from New Zealand).
Clearly your understanding of the word "Political Conservative" is different to the rest of the World's. Generally conservatives don't need lobbyists, they are so pro-business (which is the principal factor that differs the political right from the left) that they don't need to - they are already in the corporatist pocket to begin with. Voting Ron Paul will change nothing - believing so is a little naiive. If enough people vote for outsiders like the Pirate Party then real change will come about - for a time until they too become part of the institution in a decade or so.
For it to be akin the second photographer would have had to observed the first photographer. Otherwise, they have just *independently* produced a compatible *interface*. This is why the ruling is so bad - it is taking copyrights into the same realm as patents. With this ruling you cannot *independently* produce something similar but slightly different. I hope this is overturned on appeal - usually the Privy Council has its head screwed on about these things.
Your legal department are dullards. if we ignore patents, you can make a *compatible* interoperable copy of any software provided you didn't use the bits or source of the original. Now, it is much easier to prove this if your guys are not 'tainted' by seeing the other fellows product, but it is not necessarily required - just harder to prove. This has been tested over and over again in court. Consider something like SAMBA. It is designed to be *exactly* like a Windows SMB system, and is permitted to be for the purposes of interoperability. Your lame legal department schmucks should have known this - it is their job to, after all.
Interesting interpretation about photographs, but totally wrong when it comes to software. You can make software that has *exactly* the same interfaces but as long as you didn't copy the bits or the source you are allowed to do it for the purposes of interoperability (eg. why SAMBA lives on despite Microsoft dearly wanting to destroy it many years ago). This has been tested in court and compatible implementations were not found to breach copyright (now with all the idea patent nonsense you would get pinged on that - but not for breaching copyright).
Of course the act talks about "intellectual creation", but does this mean *techniques* are copyrighted ?- no, of course not, they are processes and come under patent law not copyright law. Copyright says you cannot make a *copy* of some one else's photograph without their permission. This will be the content of the law you cite. There is no copyright restriction on taking a *similar* photo by yourself because you are not *copying* the original (and copyright is about *copying*). There may be patent restrictions on the process though. This is why the judge's interpretation is so ludicrous and we are taking umbrage at it - it is an extension of copyright which flies against all the existing cases. This should be appealed to the Privy Council to sort out - the judge has it wrong.
In software (and I believe most engineering disciplines) it is a derivative work if you take the original and modify it. Making an functionally compatible copy is permitted for interoperability reasons. From that point of view making an artistically similar photo without using the original should not breach copyright. In order to breach copyright you need to *make a copy*. Making something similar is not copying. As someone else pointed out, many people confuse the defense of trademarks and patents with breach of copyright - they are not the same!
> Out of sincere curiosity, what is the disadvantage of storing the data as UCS-2 vs UTF8? Is it simply the wasted space associated with the two-byte-per-character encoding?
Thanks for giving me an opportunity to elaborate. UCS-2 is a two-byte encoding ('wide' characters). However, unlike true Unicode characters it cannot expand into 3 or 4 bytes (depending on the encoding) like say. UTF-16 can (2 or 4 bytes). If your product using the database doesn't need to be internationalized then you might as well be using ASCII, but if you decide you'd like to be internationalized then this matters a great deal. For example, the Mainland Chinese government has mandated that software products in tended for Chinese use must support certain characters (those in the character set GB18030) including some which will not squeeze into UCS-2. Hence, if you are designing systems for global use (as I have had the great fortune to do) then MS SQL-Server starts to look worse than Postgresql or Oracle in this regard. You can use SQL Server, but you start having to do 'gymnastics' to handle the possibility that data will come from sources producing more than two-byte characters, eg. mucking around with CLOBs, and then you start to lose some of the useful text operations as they don't work on CLOBS. It's the same deal when you start storing Unicode XML in SQL Server that could have 3 or 4 byte characters (at least that was the case in 2010). All the Microsoft marketing says they support Unicode (the UTF formats) but for SQL Server this actually means double-byte UCS-2 - not the same! Like I said, Postgresql handles UTF properly, which is why I wanted to share my experience in this debate.
>Also, unless you mean something different than what I imagine when you say "arbitrary length text columns", varchar(max)/nvarchar(max)/varbinary(max) are probably what you're looking for.
Postgresql has equivalents to these types (although 2-byte nvarchar unnecessary since varchar can [and should!] be UTF, which is more compact when UTF-8 encoding is chosen but also more flexible for the multi-byte reasons I mentioned previously). These types (and the SQL types) have a maximum upper length. The Postgresql text type is efficient enough for general use but has no length limit. Basically you can treat it as a large CLOB if you need to but you get all the regular text operations work nicely with it. Again, this is Postgresql's flexibility making design easy since you don't have to commit to fixed sizes at the start. On the other hand, MS SQL Server has some nice features, like lightweight 'application locks', so choosing between Postgresql and SQL Server depends on what you need. However, I wanted to point out that the expensive SQL Server actually lacks some fundamental features that the free Postgresql has - since my Microsoft-tech trained folk are totally unaware of this.
Well put.
Plus, Postgresql has things like "text" columns that work, and can be proper Unicode (not MS SQL-Server's crummy UCS-2, or Unicode haxx blobs where the normal text functions won't work anymore). It also doesn't rape your wallet like Oracle.
In short, Postgresql does Internationalization right. It is easy for MS Sql-Server to be considered fast, when it doesn't have to do many things properly (like proper UTF or arbitrary length text columns, or spatial indexing, or having source available, or costing nothing :) etc etc).
Use Postgresql, it will make hot girls like you!
Great example I see all too often. This one is a classic signs of a terrible programmer. How hard is it to use File.separator instead of hardcoding "\\" or "/" in your paths?
Basically there are a lot of lazy muppets (or muppet sympathisers) out there who would trash Java rather than accept that it is actually programmer error for putting "Window-isms" into their code. They do this crap in every language and despite Java's "Write once [automated unit test everywhere] run everywhere" actually working (provided you actually give a damn about the code you are writing) they still screw it up. But folks still love to blame Java when it doesn't magically cope with "professionals" (lol) that can't cope with very elementary principals of platform independent development.
Compared to other development platforms (eg. MS C++, C#.NET etc) the influence of Oracle is less important than many people may think. Basically the OpenJDK is more important than Oracle's commerical offering (the successor of the Sun JDK - which is very similar to OpenJDK as they have almost all source code in common). But even if this were not the case the Java 'world' has a lot of alterantives: the IBM JDK, GNU GCJ, Apache Harmony. This means that Oracle can try throw its weight around but it is not as devastating as Microsoft would be in the .NET world. This is one beauty (for end-users/developers) with the Java ecosystem.