I think you've hit the nail on the head. This is the most convincing explanation I've read of what Microsoft is trying to do.
To paraphrase you: Microsoft threatens to sue Novell. Novell, in return for not being sued, agrees to buy patent licenses NOT for themselves but for each individual customer of theirs.
I couldn't agree more. There are a whole lot of things I might spend $600 on, or save up for, but a DRM-loaded locked-down hyped-up POS computer that can only play games ain't one of them.
And there's nothing I'd wait in line for 7 days for... absolutely nothing... okay, maybe a kidney?
Teleportation is science fiction. Antigravity is science fiction. Time travel is science fiction.
Face recognition is definitely NOT science fiction. Humans can do it, as can chimps, dogs, dolphins, horses, to some degree. Computers can sort of do it in restricted situations. Clearly no laws of the universe need to be violated in order to make an effective computer face recognition system...
Also, don't let the kids eat peanuts. They might be allergic. Don't let them eat meat. It's cruel and too fatty. Don't let them eat dairy. See above. Give them only refined carbohydrates, nice and safe. Then sue when they get diabetes =)
Lessee... in elementary school we played Tag, Smear the Queer, Dodgeball, Kick the Girls (!!), and some rather brutal tackle snow football. I was a small scrawny nerd and got plenty of scrapes, bruises, and blows to the head. In retrospect, that was all good cause I needed some toughening up.
Smear the Queer is obviously too politically incorrect to be played anymore, Kick the Girls is not very nice, global warming is going to eliminate snow football, Dodgeball can cause concussions... the only one left is Tag, which is a ridiculously non-dangerous game. Banning tag is going to be unenforceable. Any time one kid starts running, and another starts chasing--there's a game of tag going. Playing games like tag is so primeval and innate that even animals do it.
This reminds me of how my liberal mom decided I shouldn't have any toy guns. I guess she figured if I didn't have toy guns I would be a non-violent, upstanding person! Of course, this just caused me to make my own toy guns, and spend lots of time tinkering with them and thinking about them. Then my friend's dad, who made his own archery equipment, carved us a pair of super awesome rubber-band rifles... and my mom pretty much threw in the towel:-)
I'm personally tired of this over-zealous open-source push. Nvidia is a closed-source company, but they make good products. Stop villainizing Nvidia and evangilizing this open-source madness to everyone. I use Linux (Arch distro - go Arch!) and the hated "closed-source" driver from NVidia because THEY make their cards and THEY make the best drivers for them.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're a potential customer, a company damn well ought to listen to you if they want to sell their products. Open-source drivers are a feature that a lot of users want, whether to use cards on other architectures, to fix bugs sooner, to improve their performance, to audit them for use in security-sensitive deployments, etc.
Lots of users would *LOVE* to punish NVidia for not responding to their desire for open-source drivers, but they really can't... there's no good alternative. ATI drivers are closed-source as well, and that's the only other big player in 3D graphics cards. Now Intel has come out with actual real-live open-source drivers for their 3D graphics cards, and there's been a chorus of folks planning to switch over to them (even though they're rather underpowered compared to the NVidia cards).
NVidia may make pretty good drivers, but I bet they could be made a whole lot better and more versatile by open-sourcing them. I've encountered 4 or 5 NVidia driver bugs on my AMD64 box, and have NEVER found any bug in any other non-experimental open-source Linux device driver.
Seriously, WTF is this ? I can't move my liscenses to a different computer more than once ? And these restrictions on the network usage. "For instance, Home Basic users can't copy ISOs to their hard drives, can't run in a virtualized environment, and can only share files and printers to a maximum of 5 network devices." --- Granted I wouldn't buy Home Basic anyway, but this sounds more like a limited trial version to me.
Just because you don't agree with the JEWS (that's what you mean by neocon, right - you totally give yourself away there), it doesn't mean there is anything corrupt about it.
Jews? What the hell does that have to do with any of this? You've come perilously close to invoking Godwin's Law here!
There may be a lot of Jewish neo-cons, but I don't think there's a sufficiently close association that the one could plausibly be used as a euphemism or slur for the other! Nor did the grandparent poster make any attempt to associate them. What a lame troll. (FWIW: I'm Jewish myself, and fairly prickly about Jewish conspiracy theories)
Yeah, Google hires experts on anything pretty much, I'm told.
Apparently they hired expert ergonomic and industrial designers to figure out how many servers and workstations they could cram into a mobile semi-trailer lab, while still making it comfortable to work in. Kind of a neat optimization problem I think.
The problem with the state of AI today is not that the algorithms are too processor-intensive, it's that they flat-out suck.
Please don't take what you see in games to be state of the art.
Sorry, didn't mean to cast aspersion on AI in general... merely game AI. My point was that game AI algorithms are hopelessly lame, so speeding them up isn't going to help. I'm very much aware of more impressive AI efforts, such as in RoboCup. In games, AI often seems to be an afterthought, whereas in RoboCup AI is pretty much the whole interesting part of the problem.1
Neural nets died down as a fad in academic circles almost 10 years ago. There's a common saying that "Neural nets are the second best way to do everything."... meaning that if you analyze a problem, some other approach almost always turns out to work better.
Well, I wouldn't say that Neural Nets have completely died out. But your point that neural nets are a fuzzy second-best solution is a good one. Basically, neural nets are way too expressive, so they basically become a brute-force route to an "intelligent" solution. Since they're basically a brute-force massively parallel approach, I gave them as an example of a type of AI that might benefit from hardware acceleration.
the coming multi-core revolution may offer some hope. Game programmers are having trouble splitting up graphics routines, so it might be that AI can get the core or two that it deserves when we hit quad-core CPUs.
I'm pretty skeptical that this would make any difference! As you rightly pointed out, most game AI is based on extremely simple FSMs and such. There's no way such algorithms can be easily expanded to use a whole core's worth of CPU power.
Game AI uses little processing power NOT because it can't be spared, but because game programmers typically lack the imagination and expertise to use more complex, CPU-intensive AI algorithms in their games.
Ha! What's even better is that I invented the "Start button" in 1993. Only it was called the "Quik button". It sat in the lower-left corner of the Windows 3.1 Desktop and listed your programs, shut down options, and control panels. I should have sued Microsoft for millions when they came out with Windows 95, but alas I was an 11-year-old;-)
Right, this "AI enhancer" thing is bullshit. Specialized offload cards are only useful when the offloaded task is limited by the ability of the processor to perform specific algorithms at a high speed: e.g. 3D video, TCP packet reassembly, and (maybe) game physics.
AI is not that kind of task. No one has convincingly demonstrated that you can make "smart" human-like AI simply by throwing more processor power at it. Even for a comparative simple deterministic game like chess, the brute-force approach will get bogged down in exponential hell even on a supercomputer... while a good modern chess engine could beat a lot of humans running on an old 386.
The problem with the state of AI today is not that the algorithms are too processor-intensive, it's that they flat-out suck. The only reasonable application of hardware AI acceleration that I can think of would be a massively parallel chip that runs thousands or millions of neural net nodes at once... but this would mainly be a benefit for academic AI research, not for games. I'm pretty sure that most games use simple "heuristic" algorithms for AI, rather than anything complicated like neural nets or Bayesian learning or SVM.
The Segway costs, oh, $5000 and goes about 10 mph maximum. I have three road bikes, including one that would have been around $1200 new, and they all go much faster than a Segway, can go over curves and dirt and such, can be carried up and down stairs easily, don't need to be plugged in, and can carry a lot of cargo with a rack and panniers (30-40 lbs of groceries, no problem). Because I'm in good shape and ride my bikes every day, I hardly notice the effort of riding unless it's on very steep hills over long distances in warm weather.
You want to talk about a technological marvel that's revolutionized personal transportation? Let's talk about the bike some more! The bicycle was the impetus for the creation of good paved roads in the late 19th century, literally paving the way for motorized automobiles. A human on a bicycle is 3 times more fuel-efficient than a walking human... a Prius with 5 passengers is still about 4 times LESS efficient than a walking human. The bicycle was the first major application of precision ball bearings, spoked wheels, roller chain, and pneumatic tires. Modern racing bikes use materials that are far more imaginative and high-tech than those used in the automotive industry: variable-thickness metal tubing, carbon fiber monocoque frames, exotic steel alloys that actually get stronger when they are welded together, ceramic bearings, etc. Furthermore, there are something like 2 billion people in the world today who own and ride bicycles, FAR exceeding the number who use automobiles.
So, uhm, why the hell does anyone care about the Segway? Is it because we are so lazy in the western world that we can't ever bear to exert ourselves to move short distances and in spaces where cars aren't allowed? The Segway solves none of the problems of the bicycle, and it's much slower, much more expensive, and less maneuverable to boot.
That's probably because you're not in very good shape:-)
I live in a slightly hilly area and ride my bikes 5 miles each way to work. It's very refreshing. Often I ride my bike 12 miles to my girlfriend's place, which is a much hillier route. Even more refreshing! It's only a real workout if I take my fixed gear bike... only one gear and NO COASTING.
Cycling is very tiring when you first start doing it regularly, but after you've been at it for a few weeks you become acclimated surprisingly quickly. Bicycle commuting gets you in excellent physical shape and keeps you there.
It's a cool hack, but it's retarded to say that it will end MAC spoofing. It only works because current Wifi transceivers are built with fairly low tolerances to keep costs down, enough that they each have a distinctive radio signature. Want to spoof a Wifi device? Build a very high-quality transceiver that can precisely tune its own signature to the accuracy that's picked up by this hack. It could turn into an escalating war between accurate signature spoofing and accurate signature detection...
Two problems: * Schilling didn't write all the code in cdrtools... though he's quite stubborn about accepting patches, there is some code copyrighted by others in the package. * Schilling didn't relicense ALL the code under the CDDL. He did something retarded: he relicensed the "build system" (e.g. makefiles and the like) under the CDDL while leaving the rest of the code under the GPL. This makes an utter mess, since the GPL requires that the build system be redistributable under the GPL as well.
You don't need backups! Nothing to see here, move along.
Oh come on, your hard drive will never crash. Look at that thing? Sturdy, ain't it? It's built like a tank. They build them better and better every year, not like that old drive of yours that crashed in 1989.
Yeah, well your files aren't that important anyway. What, you're gonna miss some of that porn? Come on, you already have more than you could watch in a lifetime, why not just start fresh? Like you're ever gonna reread those old pathetic emails to your ex-girlfriend anyway. Give it up, man. You don't need backups.
I believe the on-disk content protection for HD-DVD is called AACS. I know that it's not been cracked yet, but I doubt that will be far off either. The goal of all this DRM crap is inherently flawed, and I don't believe there's ever going to be an encryption scheme that goes unbroken for more than a few months.
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Yes, but these UnDER\/ALUED COMPANIES are poised to S * O * A * R!!! 20% is nothing, don't you know these stocks will make it back in a week?
I think you've hit the nail on the head. This is the most convincing explanation I've read of what Microsoft is trying to do.
To paraphrase you: Microsoft threatens to sue Novell. Novell, in return for not being sued, agrees to buy patent licenses NOT for themselves but for each individual customer of theirs.
Devious, devious, DEVIOUS.
I couldn't agree more. There are a whole lot of things I might spend $600 on, or save up for, but a DRM-loaded locked-down hyped-up POS computer that can only play games ain't one of them.
And there's nothing I'd wait in line for 7 days for... absolutely nothing... okay, maybe a kidney?
Teleportation is science fiction. Antigravity is science fiction. Time travel is science fiction.
Face recognition is definitely NOT science fiction. Humans can do it, as can chimps, dogs, dolphins, horses, to some degree. Computers can sort of do it in restricted situations. Clearly no laws of the universe need to be violated in order to make an effective computer face recognition system...
Who modded this "Troll"??? The guy made a totally valid point... sheesh.
Also, don't let the kids eat peanuts. They might be allergic. Don't let them eat meat. It's cruel and too fatty. Don't let them eat dairy. See above. Give them only refined carbohydrates, nice and safe. Then sue when they get diabetes =)
Lessee... in elementary school we played Tag, Smear the Queer, Dodgeball, Kick the Girls (!!), and some rather brutal tackle snow football. I was a small scrawny nerd and got plenty of scrapes, bruises, and blows to the head. In retrospect, that was all good cause I needed some toughening up.
:-)
Smear the Queer is obviously too politically incorrect to be played anymore, Kick the Girls is not very nice, global warming is going to eliminate snow football, Dodgeball can cause concussions... the only one left is Tag, which is a ridiculously non-dangerous game. Banning tag is going to be unenforceable. Any time one kid starts running, and another starts chasing--there's a game of tag going. Playing games like tag is so primeval and innate that even animals do it.
This reminds me of how my liberal mom decided I shouldn't have any toy guns. I guess she figured if I didn't have toy guns I would be a non-violent, upstanding person! Of course, this just caused me to make my own toy guns, and spend lots of time tinkering with them and thinking about them. Then my friend's dad, who made his own archery equipment, carved us a pair of super awesome rubber-band rifles... and my mom pretty much threw in the towel
As far as I'm concerned, if you're a potential customer, a company damn well ought to listen to you if they want to sell their products. Open-source drivers are a feature that a lot of users want, whether to use cards on other architectures, to fix bugs sooner, to improve their performance, to audit them for use in security-sensitive deployments, etc.
Lots of users would *LOVE* to punish NVidia for not responding to their desire for open-source drivers, but they really can't... there's no good alternative. ATI drivers are closed-source as well, and that's the only other big player in 3D graphics cards. Now Intel has come out with actual real-live open-source drivers for their 3D graphics cards, and there's been a chorus of folks planning to switch over to them (even though they're rather underpowered compared to the NVidia cards).
NVidia may make pretty good drivers, but I bet they could be made a whole lot better and more versatile by open-sourcing them. I've encountered 4 or 5 NVidia driver bugs on my AMD64 box, and have NEVER found any bug in any other non-experimental open-source Linux device driver.
Seriously, WTF is this ? I can't move my liscenses to a different computer more than once ? And these restrictions on the network usage. "For instance, Home Basic users can't copy ISOs to their hard drives, can't run in a virtualized environment, and can only share files and printers to a maximum of 5 network devices." --- Granted I wouldn't buy Home Basic anyway, but this sounds more like a limited trial version to me.
Yeah, but for *only $99*, what a bargain!
I can't wait till this goes mainstream. Then I'll be able to watch a video of a solar eclipse and actually get blinded by the image. Coool.
Just because you don't agree with the JEWS (that's what you mean by neocon, right - you totally give yourself away there), it doesn't mean there is anything corrupt about it.
Jews? What the hell does that have to do with any of this? You've come perilously close to invoking Godwin's Law here!
There may be a lot of Jewish neo-cons, but I don't think there's a sufficiently close association that the one could plausibly be used as a euphemism or slur for the other! Nor did the grandparent poster make any attempt to associate them. What a lame troll. (FWIW: I'm Jewish myself, and fairly prickly about Jewish conspiracy theories)
I still don't get it. Can someone explain :-P
So that's what chicks are into these days. Silly me, I thought they were all about differential equations!
Yeah, Google hires experts on anything pretty much, I'm told.
Apparently they hired expert ergonomic and industrial designers to figure out how many servers and workstations they could cram into a mobile semi-trailer lab, while still making it comfortable to work in. Kind of a neat optimization problem I think.
Did anyone else read it as "Walmart leaks prune juice?"
Sorry, didn't mean to cast aspersion on AI in general... merely game AI. My point was that game AI algorithms are hopelessly lame, so speeding them up isn't going to help. I'm very much aware of more impressive AI efforts, such as in RoboCup. In games, AI often seems to be an afterthought, whereas in RoboCup AI is pretty much the whole interesting part of the problem.1
Well, I wouldn't say that Neural Nets have completely died out. But your point that neural nets are a fuzzy second-best solution is a good one. Basically, neural nets are way too expressive, so they basically become a brute-force route to an "intelligent" solution. Since they're basically a brute-force massively parallel approach, I gave them as an example of a type of AI that might benefit from hardware acceleration.
I'm pretty skeptical that this would make any difference! As you rightly pointed out, most game AI is based on extremely simple FSMs and such. There's no way such algorithms can be easily expanded to use a whole core's worth of CPU power.
Game AI uses little processing power NOT because it can't be spared, but because game programmers typically lack the imagination and expertise to use more complex, CPU-intensive AI algorithms in their games.
Ha! What's even better is that I invented the "Start button" in 1993. Only it was called the "Quik button". It sat in the lower-left corner of the Windows 3.1 Desktop and listed your programs, shut down options, and control panels. I should have sued Microsoft for millions when they came out with Windows 95, but alas I was an 11-year-old ;-)
Right, this "AI enhancer" thing is bullshit. Specialized offload cards are only useful when the offloaded task is limited by the ability of the processor to perform specific algorithms at a high speed: e.g. 3D video, TCP packet reassembly, and (maybe) game physics.
AI is not that kind of task. No one has convincingly demonstrated that you can make "smart" human-like AI simply by throwing more processor power at it. Even for a comparative simple deterministic game like chess, the brute-force approach will get bogged down in exponential hell even on a supercomputer... while a good modern chess engine could beat a lot of humans running on an old 386.
The problem with the state of AI today is not that the algorithms are too processor-intensive, it's that they flat-out suck. The only reasonable application of hardware AI acceleration that I can think of would be a massively parallel chip that runs thousands or millions of neural net nodes at once... but this would mainly be a benefit for academic AI research, not for games. I'm pretty sure that most games use simple "heuristic" algorithms for AI, rather than anything complicated like neural nets or Bayesian learning or SVM.
I wrote a computer program to conjugate French verbs around 1993, when I was 11 years old. Prior art :-)
The Segway costs, oh, $5000 and goes about 10 mph maximum. I have three road bikes, including one that would have been around $1200 new, and they all go much faster than a Segway, can go over curves and dirt and such, can be carried up and down stairs easily, don't need to be plugged in, and can carry a lot of cargo with a rack and panniers (30-40 lbs of groceries, no problem). Because I'm in good shape and ride my bikes every day, I hardly notice the effort of riding unless it's on very steep hills over long distances in warm weather.
You want to talk about a technological marvel that's revolutionized personal transportation? Let's talk about the bike some more! The bicycle was the impetus for the creation of good paved roads in the late 19th century, literally paving the way for motorized automobiles. A human on a bicycle is 3 times more fuel-efficient than a walking human... a Prius with 5 passengers is still about 4 times LESS efficient than a walking human. The bicycle was the first major application of precision ball bearings, spoked wheels, roller chain, and pneumatic tires. Modern racing bikes use materials that are far more imaginative and high-tech than those used in the automotive industry: variable-thickness metal tubing, carbon fiber monocoque frames, exotic steel alloys that actually get stronger when they are welded together, ceramic bearings, etc. Furthermore, there are something like 2 billion people in the world today who own and ride bicycles, FAR exceeding the number who use automobiles.
So, uhm, why the hell does anyone care about the Segway? Is it because we are so lazy in the western world that we can't ever bear to exert ourselves to move short distances and in spaces where cars aren't allowed? The Segway solves none of the problems of the bicycle, and it's much slower, much more expensive, and less maneuverable to boot.
That's probably because you're not in very good shape :-)
I live in a slightly hilly area and ride my bikes 5 miles each way to work. It's very refreshing. Often I ride my bike 12 miles to my girlfriend's place, which is a much hillier route. Even more refreshing! It's only a real workout if I take my fixed gear bike... only one gear and NO COASTING.
Cycling is very tiring when you first start doing it regularly, but after you've been at it for a few weeks you become acclimated surprisingly quickly. Bicycle commuting gets you in excellent physical shape and keeps you there.
It's a cool hack, but it's retarded to say that it will end MAC spoofing. It only works because current Wifi transceivers are built with fairly low tolerances to keep costs down, enough that they each have a distinctive radio signature. Want to spoof a Wifi device? Build a very high-quality transceiver that can precisely tune its own signature to the accuracy that's picked up by this hack. It could turn into an escalating war between accurate signature spoofing and accurate signature detection...
Two problems:
* Schilling didn't write all the code in cdrtools... though he's quite stubborn about accepting patches, there is some code copyrighted by others in the package.
* Schilling didn't relicense ALL the code under the CDDL. He did something retarded: he relicensed the "build system" (e.g. makefiles and the like) under the CDDL while leaving the rest of the code under the GPL. This makes an utter mess, since the GPL requires that the build system be redistributable under the GPL as well.
You don't need backups! Nothing to see here, move along.
Oh come on, your hard drive will never crash. Look at that thing? Sturdy, ain't it? It's built like a tank. They build them better and better every year, not like that old drive of yours that crashed in 1989.
Yeah, well your files aren't that important anyway. What, you're gonna miss some of that porn? Come on, you already have more than you could watch in a lifetime, why not just start fresh? Like you're ever gonna reread those old pathetic emails to your ex-girlfriend anyway. Give it up, man. You don't need backups.
I believe the on-disk content protection for HD-DVD is called AACS. I know that it's not been cracked yet, but I doubt that will be far off either. The goal of all this DRM crap is inherently flawed, and I don't believe there's ever going to be an encryption scheme that goes unbroken for more than a few months.