I used to be part of that community, and every month or so, someone would show up on the forums, asking how to patch FFVII to keep Aeris alive past Disc 1. For some reason that popped into my head when writing that comment. I don't even know if the site's still up.
Since retroactive bans are generally looked down upon, sane countries wouldn't try to ban porn from non.xxx domains. Insane countries, like Iran or maybe even China, might give it a shot, but here's the thing:
No government controls the Internet. America has the most influence, undoubtedly, but even they can't mandate something like that.
Really, the most any government will do is block access to the entire.xxx TLD. Since those that would do so probably are already, the only real effect would be making certain porn sites more obviously pornographic. A URL like, say, aerisdies.com doesn't look like a pornsite. It looks like a Final Fantasy fansite, probably focused on a certain character's death. If you visit it, however, you see that it's a pretty large collection of anime porn.
That's the only goal. Making porn a bit more obvious. It makes it easier to block, but it also makes it a bit more available. If you were just browsing randomly and saw a URL, you might go "Hey, an.xxx site. I could use some porn about now. *click*". That's all it will do. Make porn stand out as porn.
Sure, why not? Obviously, if everyone is murdering someone, that person needs some homiciding.
Seriously though, quite often the speed limits have nothing to do with safety. There's one road that you could easily do 60 on, that's limited to 45. I suspect the reason is the way police budgets work. As in, speeding tickets pay for the other jobs the police do.
I'm actually OK with granting MS this patent, because this is a terrible idea. These "animated fonts" are going to be worse than Comic Sans. Most people have difficulty reading text moving in any way besides scrolling, and even that can cause problems.
If MS gets essentially a monopoly on this, then once they realize how retarded it is, nobody will be using them.
I've seen this before, except for an application that made more sense: GPUs. A GPU instruction is almost never critical. Errors writing pixel values will just result in minor static, and GPUs are actually far closer to needing this sort of thing. The highest-end GPUs draw far more power than the highest-end CPUs, and heating problems are far more common.
It may even improve results. If you lower the power by half for the least significant bit, and by a quarter for the next-least, you've cut power 3% for something invisible to humans. In fact, a slight variation in the rendering could make the end result look more like our flawed reality.
A GPU can mess up and not take down the whole computer. A CPU can. What happens when the error hits during a syscall? During bootup? While doing I/O?
Except that, for the same chip model, increased frequency does increase speed. If you take two processors that are identical save for the frequency, the one with the higher frequency will be faster. Unless there's a massive bottleneck elsewhere, in which case they will perform at the same speed. Ignoring hardware damage from doing it wrong, you cannot slow your system down by upping the clock speed on your processor.
Yes, frequency is nearly useless when comparing vastly different designs, but that's not the issue at hand. If this were comparing the new i7 to the new Phenom, it would be relevant. But we're comparing i7s to i7s, where different frequencies are reliable indicators.
The Larrabee chips actually looked pretty good. There was a lot of hype, especially from Intel. They demoed things like Quake Wars running a custom real-time ray-tracing renderer at a pretty decent resolution. Being able to use even a partial x86 ISA for shaders would have been a massive improvement as well, both in capabilities and performance.
From what I've been able to piece together, the problem wasn't even the hardware, it was the drivers. Apparently, writing what amounts to a software renderer for OpenGL/DirectX that got good performance was beyond them.
Another part was an odd insistence on doing all the rendering in software, even stuff like texel lookup and blitting, but that's another story.
Linux already extinguished mainstream BSD. It did as much to kill SCO as the lawsuit. It killed HURD. Face it: Linux got critical mass first, and wiped out a lot of the open-source competition. By Android, it's likely to kill a bunch of cellphone OSs, maybe even Palm, possibly even iPhoneOS.
Which is not, in fact, a bad thing. If anything, we need to unify Linux even more, so it can start killing some commercial systems. I'd love to see it wipe out the commercial Unices. Hell, I wouldn't cry over it killing OS X. And I've already planned the party for when it kills Windows.
Look at the companies that are siding with Google on this. Apple. Mozilla. Even Microsoft is siding with them. And this is after just a few days. Who knows which companies will defect to the other side?
This isn't Thermopylae, where it was a few versus millions. This is Midway, or Operation Barbarossa. This is a full-blown patent war in the making.
For some experiments, 1% might be attributable to error. I've never done practical particle physics, though. Does this fall under experimental error, or is stuff like this usually re-creatable to seventeen decimal places?
I may not know much science, but I do know that margin of error is important.
I came down with the flu, I checked WebMD, it said not to bother going in to doctor unless the symptoms persisted or I became dehydrated. So yes, at least one person has followed the instructions not to go to the doctor.
Heh, I actually did something like that, except in Oblivion. On my second playthrough, I just added every mod I thought looked good. I ended up with extremely crazy stuff, like having both a Legend of Zelda outfit and WW2 Wehrmacht uniforms. Riding a dragon around a rebuilt Kvatch was pretty cool though. It was fun for a second playthrough, but it annihilated the mood.
Too true. Game design is one of the things open source does not do well. Open-source clones are often superior, purely on technical grounds, but fully original open-source games tend to be less fun than commercial ones.
Why is this? Simple. Game design is an art, and a complex one at that. Open-source works well for technical tasks. The Linux kernel is one of the most stable ever, Apache is the best web server I know of, and Firefox is my preferred browser. Open-source fails at artistic tasks simply because the end result is designed by a committee, not a single vision.
I'm working on a game myself right now, and I fully plan to release the engine code as open-source. I will not, however, be making it an open-source project, because then, instead of one unified artistic direction, there will be dozens, pulling the game in different ways.
Game design is not, as most people imagine, a simple task. It takes experience and judgment, knowing not only what to add but what NOT to add. When making Wolfenstein 3D, they originally implemented things like dragging corpses into corners and searching through pockets. These were cut not because they were themselves bad, but because they conflicted with the other elements of the game. If you were to open-source a game without a strong player base with strict ideas of what belongs in the game and what does not, you will end up with a jumbled mess of ideas.
Perhaps, however, an MMO could be made to work. If you limit most contributors to only making new quests and dungeons, it might work. Large-scale balancing and other major changes should be limited to a few people, less than a hundred.
Just like every feature, Microsoft is years behind. SVG is ten years old, with most other browsers supporting it for at least five years. HTML5 video tags have been supported for almost a year. Fast Javascript has been important since about 2006.
Microsoft has always been slow to add features, then announces them as revolutionary when they've been in other products for years.
Look at hardware-accelerated compositing. OS X had it since 2002. Windows didn't add that until Vista in 2006.
Virtual memory has been known since 1960, although the PC couldn't use that until the 80286 in 1982. Windows didn't support disk-based virtual memory until 1995. Preemptive multitasking is similar: it had been used in mainframes since 1969, and AmigaOS introduced it to home computers in 1985, ten years before Windows partially supported it.
Microsoft has always been behind in technical matters. The best thing to do on Windows is to replace whatever you want with better alternatives. The only area they're ahead on is game support, and that's not entirely their doing.
As a Catholic myself, I can assure you that the Church bureaucracy makes every other organization seem small. It's not even the left and right hands working in opposite directions, it's the three left hands disagreeing with the two right hands and the foot. The head has very little idea what's going on, and several sections outright ignore it, or at least filter out whatever they disagree with.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to be part of that community, and every month or so, someone would show up on the forums, asking how to patch FFVII to keep Aeris alive past Disc 1. For some reason that popped into my head when writing that comment. I don't even know if the site's still up.
Since retroactive bans are generally looked down upon, sane countries wouldn't try to ban porn from non .xxx domains. Insane countries, like Iran or maybe even China, might give it a shot, but here's the thing:
No government controls the Internet. America has the most influence, undoubtedly, but even they can't mandate something like that.
Really, the most any government will do is block access to the entire .xxx TLD. Since those that would do so probably are already, the only real effect would be making certain porn sites more obviously pornographic. A URL like, say, aerisdies.com doesn't look like a pornsite. It looks like a Final Fantasy fansite, probably focused on a certain character's death. If you visit it, however, you see that it's a pretty large collection of anime porn.
That's the only goal. Making porn a bit more obvious. It makes it easier to block, but it also makes it a bit more available. If you were just browsing randomly and saw a URL, you might go "Hey, an .xxx site. I could use some porn about now. *click*". That's all it will do. Make porn stand out as porn.
Sure, why not? Obviously, if everyone is murdering someone, that person needs some homiciding.
Seriously though, quite often the speed limits have nothing to do with safety. There's one road that you could easily do 60 on, that's limited to 45. I suspect the reason is the way police budgets work. As in, speeding tickets pay for the other jobs the police do.
I'm actually OK with granting MS this patent, because this is a terrible idea. These "animated fonts" are going to be worse than Comic Sans. Most people have difficulty reading text moving in any way besides scrolling, and even that can cause problems.
If MS gets essentially a monopoly on this, then once they realize how retarded it is, nobody will be using them.
I've seen this before, except for an application that made more sense: GPUs. A GPU instruction is almost never critical. Errors writing pixel values will just result in minor static, and GPUs are actually far closer to needing this sort of thing. The highest-end GPUs draw far more power than the highest-end CPUs, and heating problems are far more common.
It may even improve results. If you lower the power by half for the least significant bit, and by a quarter for the next-least, you've cut power 3% for something invisible to humans. In fact, a slight variation in the rendering could make the end result look more like our flawed reality.
A GPU can mess up and not take down the whole computer. A CPU can. What happens when the error hits during a syscall? During bootup? While doing I/O?
Except that, for the same chip model, increased frequency does increase speed. If you take two processors that are identical save for the frequency, the one with the higher frequency will be faster. Unless there's a massive bottleneck elsewhere, in which case they will perform at the same speed. Ignoring hardware damage from doing it wrong, you cannot slow your system down by upping the clock speed on your processor.
Yes, frequency is nearly useless when comparing vastly different designs, but that's not the issue at hand. If this were comparing the new i7 to the new Phenom, it would be relevant. But we're comparing i7s to i7s, where different frequencies are reliable indicators.
The Larrabee chips actually looked pretty good. There was a lot of hype, especially from Intel. They demoed things like Quake Wars running a custom real-time ray-tracing renderer at a pretty decent resolution. Being able to use even a partial x86 ISA for shaders would have been a massive improvement as well, both in capabilities and performance.
From what I've been able to piece together, the problem wasn't even the hardware, it was the drivers. Apparently, writing what amounts to a software renderer for OpenGL/DirectX that got good performance was beyond them.
Another part was an odd insistence on doing all the rendering in software, even stuff like texel lookup and blitting, but that's another story.
Linux already extinguished mainstream BSD. It did as much to kill SCO as the lawsuit. It killed HURD. Face it: Linux got critical mass first, and wiped out a lot of the open-source competition. By Android, it's likely to kill a bunch of cellphone OSs, maybe even Palm, possibly even iPhoneOS.
Which is not, in fact, a bad thing. If anything, we need to unify Linux even more, so it can start killing some commercial systems. I'd love to see it wipe out the commercial Unices. Hell, I wouldn't cry over it killing OS X. And I've already planned the party for when it kills Windows.
Look at the companies that are siding with Google on this. Apple. Mozilla. Even Microsoft is siding with them. And this is after just a few days. Who knows which companies will defect to the other side?
This isn't Thermopylae, where it was a few versus millions. This is Midway, or Operation Barbarossa. This is a full-blown patent war in the making.
For some experiments, 1% might be attributable to error. I've never done practical particle physics, though. Does this fall under experimental error, or is stuff like this usually re-creatable to seventeen decimal places?
I may not know much science, but I do know that margin of error is important.
I came down with the flu, I checked WebMD, it said not to bother going in to doctor unless the symptoms persisted or I became dehydrated. So yes, at least one person has followed the instructions not to go to the doctor.
I think you overestimate the average Texan's ability to count.
You know, back when it was the US and the Republic of Texas?
Getting a girlfriend is a non-trivial problem.
Heh, I actually did something like that, except in Oblivion. On my second playthrough, I just added every mod I thought looked good. I ended up with extremely crazy stuff, like having both a Legend of Zelda outfit and WW2 Wehrmacht uniforms. Riding a dragon around a rebuilt Kvatch was pretty cool though. It was fun for a second playthrough, but it annihilated the mood.
Too true. Game design is one of the things open source does not do well. Open-source clones are often superior, purely on technical grounds, but fully original open-source games tend to be less fun than commercial ones.
Why is this? Simple. Game design is an art, and a complex one at that. Open-source works well for technical tasks. The Linux kernel is one of the most stable ever, Apache is the best web server I know of, and Firefox is my preferred browser. Open-source fails at artistic tasks simply because the end result is designed by a committee, not a single vision.
I'm working on a game myself right now, and I fully plan to release the engine code as open-source. I will not, however, be making it an open-source project, because then, instead of one unified artistic direction, there will be dozens, pulling the game in different ways.
Game design is not, as most people imagine, a simple task. It takes experience and judgment, knowing not only what to add but what NOT to add. When making Wolfenstein 3D, they originally implemented things like dragging corpses into corners and searching through pockets. These were cut not because they were themselves bad, but because they conflicted with the other elements of the game. If you were to open-source a game without a strong player base with strict ideas of what belongs in the game and what does not, you will end up with a jumbled mess of ideas.
Perhaps, however, an MMO could be made to work. If you limit most contributors to only making new quests and dungeons, it might work. Large-scale balancing and other major changes should be limited to a few people, less than a hundred.
Where will Superman change his costume?
They're kids on the inside
Just like every feature, Microsoft is years behind. SVG is ten years old, with most other browsers supporting it for at least five years. HTML5 video tags have been supported for almost a year. Fast Javascript has been important since about 2006.
Microsoft has always been slow to add features, then announces them as revolutionary when they've been in other products for years.
Look at hardware-accelerated compositing. OS X had it since 2002. Windows didn't add that until Vista in 2006.
Virtual memory has been known since 1960, although the PC couldn't use that until the 80286 in 1982. Windows didn't support disk-based virtual memory until 1995. Preemptive multitasking is similar: it had been used in mainframes since 1969, and AmigaOS introduced it to home computers in 1985, ten years before Windows partially supported it.
Microsoft has always been behind in technical matters. The best thing to do on Windows is to replace whatever you want with better alternatives. The only area they're ahead on is game support, and that's not entirely their doing.
Most states, gun shows can waive background checks. There's legislation in the line to fix that.
"...now they're banning toy guns, AND THEY'RE GONNA KEEP THE FUCKIN' REAL ONES!"
In some places, it's harder to buy Grand Theft Auto than to buy a shotgun. Some legislator apparently thought Carlin was being serious.
As a Catholic myself, I can assure you that the Church bureaucracy makes every other organization seem small. It's not even the left and right hands working in opposite directions, it's the three left hands disagreeing with the two right hands and the foot. The head has very little idea what's going on, and several sections outright ignore it, or at least filter out whatever they disagree with.
Who said logic had anything to do with the Internet?
Democracy is a form of government that ensures we are governed as well as we deserve.
And how often do you do any 3d interaction on your main computer, let alone your cell phone?