More to the point, how long are QR codes on a tombstone going to be readable?
When I visited England, I visited several churches and graveyards. Some of them were barely legible, after sitting out in the rain (and acid rain) for centuries. I know QR codes have a lot of error correction on them, but are they going to be readable after 1cm of stone has eroded away?
1) Hire the best people. The best people are always self-motivating: I know if *I* worked at Valve, I wouldn't have time to waste on/., I'd be too busy doing awesome things. And play-testing the new (Half-Life|Portal|Left 4 Dead|Team Fortress|Counter-Strike|Day of Defeat|Ricochet).
2) Salaries are employee-decided. They periodically get a bunch of people together to review your salary. So that means if you waste the company's time, you don't get paid as much as the guy who won the company 50+ GOTY awards.
From all reports, that results in a very competitive environment. When you hire the best, they all fight to become the best of the best.
Indeed. I have a copy of the Windows CE 6 source code (or perhaps partial source code - I haven't tried to compile it) on an external drive somewhere. When I graduated, I went through our MSDNAA site and grabbed everything that looked interesting.
I'd be violating all kinds of licenses if I were to release it, probably even if I read it at this point. But they don't exactly guard their source all that well.
Weird, the Pinto was mentioned in my class as well. Of course, that chapter could be summed up as "it may save you twenty fucking cents per unit totaling to millions over the whole run, but it's still the life of a human fucking being for chrissake! Do the Right Thing, not the Profitable Thing!"
It's a Creative Commons license. It's like GPL, except designed for broader works than code (the GPL has many sections dealing with code- and program-specific things).
In particular, it's the BY-SA license. There are a number of CC licenses, with significant differences; these are marked by which "features" they include. BY means "with attribution" - you have to list who you took the original version from. SA means "share-alike" - any derivative work is also subject to the same license (making it a viral license like the GPL).
The other features are NC, "non-commercial", meaning you can't try to make money off it, and ND, "no derivatives", meaning you can only replicate the original, not modify it.
As it is just the BY-SA license, not BY-ND, they really have no leg to stand on, suing someone for making a derivative work.
My high school had an Engineering Ethics class, mandatory for all students in a tech-related major. One of the case studies was the Pentium FDIV bug, and how Intel handled it. Other case studies included Tacoma Narrows, Chernobyl, and a bunch of other forgettable ones.
I graduated HS in '09. So "my generation" may be learning about it in a history class rather than through usage, but we *are* learning about it.
In other words, "no, YOU get off the lawn, old man!"
Hard caps on carbon output, slowly being lowered. Each corporation that outputs carbon (with certain modifications - the carbon emitted by vehicles is controlled separately) is initially capped at whatever they output in the year before the law is passed. It then decreases by 2% per year until it has reached a "controllable" level. Every five years, have regulators re-examine the distribution and make tweaks, but at no point can the total carbon output increase year-over-year. Make the fines for breaking this truly massive - billions of dollars.
I'm not going to say "no exceptions", but the exceptions should only be for a damn good reason. For instance, space launch - we basically have no low-carbon alternatives to rockets.
Meanwhile, replace all public coal, oil and gas power plants, with whatever makes sense for that area (preferably geothermal or hydroelectric (well-proven "green" technologies), failing that solar, tidal or wind (where the load is small enough to be met by those) or nuclear (only where necessary to meet demand - preferably paired with a hydroelectric plant)). And of course, if we get fusion working, do that.
As for vehicular carbon, that gets softer caps. Start with an emissions standard - no new vehicle of X type may emit more than Y carbon per mile/kilometer/megacubit, and no vehicle of X type may emit more than Y carbon per year (possibly estimated using distance traveled and the average carbon output). The former applies to manufacturers, the latter to individuals. Breaking the per-year emissions brings additional tax penalties. Both slowly decrease over time.
That *will* solve Global Warming, if it is able to be solved. It might trash the economy in the short-term, and it might be too late to prevent major climate change, but it would work.
They may have words to make it an acronym, but trust me - if the Joes were to see trucks with the word "VIPR" on them, stopping American citizens with no cause, there would be some *serious* lasers going on within seconds.
"Viper"? Seriously? Is the entire TSA just some big joke that got out of control, a "hey, let's make a government agency so obviously evil that they *have* to do something about it!", but nobody ever realized it's a joke so they keep ramping it up until they're using Cobra names for everything and we *still* haven't caught on.
Because *threats* get more publicity than *action*. Especially when the action is this simple (force HTTPS), but the threat is phrased as something more complex (defeat the government's system).
I still have it downloaded, I just need to get around to it.
Problem is, I'm plowing through my Steam backlog right now. There was a site I was pointed at that reads your Steam profile (if it's public) and shows you how many of your games you've never played. I had 60% untouched - over a hundred games.
Right now, I have *downloaded*, but not touched, Alan Wake, Assassin's Creed 2, Bastion, Bioshock 2, Dear Esther, Fallout: New Vegas, Far Cry 2, Gotham City Imposters, Grand Theft Auto 4, Nexuiz, On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 3, and The Witcher 2. That's not counting Mass Effect 2, which I never finished due to extremely untimely hardware failure, Batman: Arkham City where I still need to play Harley Quinn's Revenge and many of the side missions, and A Reckless Disregard For Gravity, which I have not finished either. Or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which I made it through a a dozen chapters before deciding I hated. And then there's the many other games I haven't even downloaded yet.
So you can see why AC2 isn't jumping to the top of the playlist again - I just have far too many games to get through. I'll give it another shot sometime - I at least play through a few chapters before deciding a game isn't worth my time.
That's not the only game to try something like that. Battlefield 2 tried to install Gamespy Comrade, but I found you can cancel out of the installation, but it will continue on. It still tries to install it every time, but I can just deny the UAC prompt for the installer and be on my way.
I bought Assassin's Creed 2 on sale a while back, even downloaded it a few weeks ago, but only recently tried to play it.
Holy crap, did it take forever. First it had to install roughly twenty million different runtimes and libraries. Then it had to install some "UPlay" bullshit. Then that had to update itself, despite having been just installed. Then it had to "update" the game, something I would have thought Steam would do automatically (I'd bet money that someone at Ubisoft had to actually force Steam to not update it, rather than it being some failing on Steam's side).
After waiting about twenty minutes for this all to go on, I gave up. Cancelled it out, started a different game ("Stacking") and was in-game within a minute.
Yeah, them getting rid of their pointless DRM is good even if all it changes is how long it takes to start playing.
Now if only EA would actually learn to let their customers access the DLC they paid for without going through more hoops than the average basketball...
450mm wafers don't mean 450mm products. It means you can fit 50% more chips onto a single wafer - you just upped your production rate by 50%. More than that, actually - because that's the diameter, not the area. The area just went up by 225%, assuming I did my math right.
A large chip right now is 150mm^2. So now instead of fitting 450 of them onto one wafer, you can fit 1000 of them. Bam. Productivity just doubled. Small CPUs are in the 70mm^2 range, and other chips are even smaller.
Going slightly off-topic, can Intel and AMD start deprecating i386, to save transistors? They could do it on stages. First, release CPUs where half of the cores implement i386 on microcode, and the other half implement i386 in full speed; then, release CPUs where half of the cores implement i386 in microcode, and the other half do not implement i386 at all; then, get rid of i386.
That's a horrible idea, for several reasons.
First, they already implement it "in microcode". They implement 16-bit and 64-bit in microcode as well - no modern (ie. post-2000) processor actually implements x86 in hardware. They all implement some secret RISC-like internal architecture, and translate x86 code into that on-the-fly. Gives you the benefits of CISC and the benefits of RISC, with relatively few drawbacks.
Second, you don't want to have different core implementations on different cores. That's just asking for trouble. And if you've gone through the work of making an x32 "emulator" or whatever, why use it on only some cores? People specifically looking for 32-bit support will ignore your product; people who don't care about 32-bit support won't get anything out of having half the cores support it "for reals".
Third, they can't remove x86-32 completely. They can't even remove x86-16 completely - every processor on the shelf right now turns on in 16-bit mode. Either the BIOS/EFI runs some commands to set it into 32-bit and then 64-bit mode, or the bootloader does.
The 32-bit architecture is known, variously, as "x86", "x86-32", "x32", "i386", "i686", or "IA-32".
The 64-bit architecture is known, variously, as "x64", "x86-64", "Intel 64", "IA-32e" ("IA-64" was taken by Itanium), "AMD64", "EM64T", and I think VIA has their own name for it.
Intel, obviously, uses the term "Intel 64" in marketing, "IA-32e" in technical writing. AMD obviously uses "AMD64", but as they were the first, many open-source projects were started under that name, and the term remains in use for historical purposes. Proprietary software tends to use the vendor-neutral "x64", while technical literature tends to use the more precise "x86-64" (as it is, after all, not the only 64-bit architecture around).
4. They're both lying 5. AntiSec isn't deliberately lying, but were misinformed (eg. the list was actually used by $sinisterGovernmentAgency, but they were masquerading as FBI for some sinister reason) 6. The FBI isn't deliberately lying, but those speaking were misinformed (eg. it was part of some project spearheaded by some upstart who didn't get authorization)
Okay, so let's try improving K/M to fix those weaknesses, rather than trying to start from scratch, or trying to improve the gamepad.
Keyboard, with analog key inputs. That lets you control your movement rate more finely. For general typing, that might control the repeat rate - or it could just be ignored, treated as a digital input. That would also necessitate removing any limits on simultaneous keypresses - current keyboards often cannot handle more than 5-8 keys at once (with exceptions).
And while I disagree with your assessment of the mouse as a controller, I will note that there are already controllers that use a gamepad-like thumbstick rather than an optical tracker or ball.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, looking for stupid and/or awesome names. Eg. a certain "Manley Powers", died in the 16th century IIRC.
More to the point, how long are QR codes on a tombstone going to be readable?
When I visited England, I visited several churches and graveyards. Some of them were barely legible, after sitting out in the rain (and acid rain) for centuries. I know QR codes have a lot of error correction on them, but are they going to be readable after 1cm of stone has eroded away?
Their solution to that?
1) Hire the best people. The best people are always self-motivating: I know if *I* worked at Valve, I wouldn't have time to waste on /., I'd be too busy doing awesome things. And play-testing the new (Half-Life|Portal|Left 4 Dead|Team Fortress|Counter-Strike|Day of Defeat|Ricochet).
2) Salaries are employee-decided. They periodically get a bunch of people together to review your salary. So that means if you waste the company's time, you don't get paid as much as the guy who won the company 50+ GOTY awards.
From all reports, that results in a very competitive environment. When you hire the best, they all fight to become the best of the best.
The difference is, those were banning specific sites. This is a request to ban *any* negative mention of a specific person.
Indeed. I have a copy of the Windows CE 6 source code (or perhaps partial source code - I haven't tried to compile it) on an external drive somewhere. When I graduated, I went through our MSDNAA site and grabbed everything that looked interesting.
I'd be violating all kinds of licenses if I were to release it, probably even if I read it at this point. But they don't exactly guard their source all that well.
Weird, the Pinto was mentioned in my class as well. Of course, that chapter could be summed up as "it may save you twenty fucking cents per unit totaling to millions over the whole run, but it's still the life of a human fucking being for chrissake! Do the Right Thing, not the Profitable Thing!"
...Three Mile Island, Centralia, the Aral Sea...
It's a Creative Commons license. It's like GPL, except designed for broader works than code (the GPL has many sections dealing with code- and program-specific things).
In particular, it's the BY-SA license. There are a number of CC licenses, with significant differences; these are marked by which "features" they include. BY means "with attribution" - you have to list who you took the original version from. SA means "share-alike" - any derivative work is also subject to the same license (making it a viral license like the GPL).
The other features are NC, "non-commercial", meaning you can't try to make money off it, and ND, "no derivatives", meaning you can only replicate the original, not modify it.
As it is just the BY-SA license, not BY-ND, they really have no leg to stand on, suing someone for making a derivative work.
Probably more than you think.
My high school had an Engineering Ethics class, mandatory for all students in a tech-related major. One of the case studies was the Pentium FDIV bug, and how Intel handled it. Other case studies included Tacoma Narrows, Chernobyl, and a bunch of other forgettable ones.
I graduated HS in '09. So "my generation" may be learning about it in a history class rather than through usage, but we *are* learning about it.
In other words, "no, YOU get off the lawn, old man!"
How about this solution:
Hard caps on carbon output, slowly being lowered. Each corporation that outputs carbon (with certain modifications - the carbon emitted by vehicles is controlled separately) is initially capped at whatever they output in the year before the law is passed. It then decreases by 2% per year until it has reached a "controllable" level. Every five years, have regulators re-examine the distribution and make tweaks, but at no point can the total carbon output increase year-over-year. Make the fines for breaking this truly massive - billions of dollars.
I'm not going to say "no exceptions", but the exceptions should only be for a damn good reason. For instance, space launch - we basically have no low-carbon alternatives to rockets.
Meanwhile, replace all public coal, oil and gas power plants, with whatever makes sense for that area (preferably geothermal or hydroelectric (well-proven "green" technologies), failing that solar, tidal or wind (where the load is small enough to be met by those) or nuclear (only where necessary to meet demand - preferably paired with a hydroelectric plant)). And of course, if we get fusion working, do that.
As for vehicular carbon, that gets softer caps. Start with an emissions standard - no new vehicle of X type may emit more than Y carbon per mile/kilometer/megacubit, and no vehicle of X type may emit more than Y carbon per year (possibly estimated using distance traveled and the average carbon output). The former applies to manufacturers, the latter to individuals. Breaking the per-year emissions brings additional tax penalties. Both slowly decrease over time.
That *will* solve Global Warming, if it is able to be solved. It might trash the economy in the short-term, and it might be too late to prevent major climate change, but it would work.
They may have words to make it an acronym, but trust me - if the Joes were to see trucks with the word "VIPR" on them, stopping American citizens with no cause, there would be some *serious* lasers going on within seconds.
As the ISS isn't actually all that high up, they'll probably re-enter in a few weeks and burn up within seconds.
"Viper"? Seriously? Is the entire TSA just some big joke that got out of control, a "hey, let's make a government agency so obviously evil that they *have* to do something about it!", but nobody ever realized it's a joke so they keep ramping it up until they're using Cobra names for everything and we *still* haven't caught on.
At this point, I think I'd rather have the terrorists than the TSA.
Because *threats* get more publicity than *action*. Especially when the action is this simple (force HTTPS), but the threat is phrased as something more complex (defeat the government's system).
I still have it downloaded, I just need to get around to it.
Problem is, I'm plowing through my Steam backlog right now. There was a site I was pointed at that reads your Steam profile (if it's public) and shows you how many of your games you've never played. I had 60% untouched - over a hundred games.
Right now, I have *downloaded*, but not touched, Alan Wake, Assassin's Creed 2, Bastion, Bioshock 2, Dear Esther, Fallout: New Vegas, Far Cry 2, Gotham City Imposters, Grand Theft Auto 4, Nexuiz, On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 3, and The Witcher 2. That's not counting Mass Effect 2, which I never finished due to extremely untimely hardware failure, Batman: Arkham City where I still need to play Harley Quinn's Revenge and many of the side missions, and A Reckless Disregard For Gravity, which I have not finished either. Or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which I made it through a a dozen chapters before deciding I hated. And then there's the many other games I haven't even downloaded yet.
So you can see why AC2 isn't jumping to the top of the playlist again - I just have far too many games to get through. I'll give it another shot sometime - I at least play through a few chapters before deciding a game isn't worth my time.
That may be one usage, probably even the proper one, but I have seen "x32" used for what was clearly plain x86-32.
My Asus M50vm had that ability, back in '08, '09, one of those years.
It sucked, of course, but "working commercially-available implementation" should be hell of prior art.
Yup.
That's not the only game to try something like that. Battlefield 2 tried to install Gamespy Comrade, but I found you can cancel out of the installation, but it will continue on. It still tries to install it every time, but I can just deny the UAC prompt for the installer and be on my way.
I bought Assassin's Creed 2 on sale a while back, even downloaded it a few weeks ago, but only recently tried to play it.
Holy crap, did it take forever. First it had to install roughly twenty million different runtimes and libraries. Then it had to install some "UPlay" bullshit. Then that had to update itself, despite having been just installed. Then it had to "update" the game, something I would have thought Steam would do automatically (I'd bet money that someone at Ubisoft had to actually force Steam to not update it, rather than it being some failing on Steam's side).
After waiting about twenty minutes for this all to go on, I gave up. Cancelled it out, started a different game ("Stacking") and was in-game within a minute.
Yeah, them getting rid of their pointless DRM is good even if all it changes is how long it takes to start playing.
Now if only EA would actually learn to let their customers access the DLC they paid for without going through more hoops than the average basketball...
450mm wafers don't mean 450mm products. It means you can fit 50% more chips onto a single wafer - you just upped your production rate by 50%. More than that, actually - because that's the diameter, not the area. The area just went up by 225%, assuming I did my math right.
A large chip right now is 150mm^2. So now instead of fitting 450 of them onto one wafer, you can fit 1000 of them. Bam. Productivity just doubled. Small CPUs are in the 70mm^2 range, and other chips are even smaller.
Going slightly off-topic, can Intel and AMD start deprecating i386, to save transistors? They could do it on stages.
First, release CPUs where half of the cores implement i386 on microcode, and the other half implement i386 in full speed; then, release CPUs where half of the cores implement i386 in microcode, and the other half do not implement i386 at all; then, get rid of i386.
That's a horrible idea, for several reasons.
First, they already implement it "in microcode". They implement 16-bit and 64-bit in microcode as well - no modern (ie. post-2000) processor actually implements x86 in hardware. They all implement some secret RISC-like internal architecture, and translate x86 code into that on-the-fly. Gives you the benefits of CISC and the benefits of RISC, with relatively few drawbacks.
Second, you don't want to have different core implementations on different cores. That's just asking for trouble. And if you've gone through the work of making an x32 "emulator" or whatever, why use it on only some cores? People specifically looking for 32-bit support will ignore your product; people who don't care about 32-bit support won't get anything out of having half the cores support it "for reals".
Third, they can't remove x86-32 completely. They can't even remove x86-16 completely - every processor on the shelf right now turns on in 16-bit mode. Either the BIOS/EFI runs some commands to set it into 32-bit and then 64-bit mode, or the bootloader does.
It's really just that naming is a mess.
The 32-bit architecture is known, variously, as "x86", "x86-32", "x32", "i386", "i686", or "IA-32".
The 64-bit architecture is known, variously, as "x64", "x86-64", "Intel 64", "IA-32e" ("IA-64" was taken by Itanium), "AMD64", "EM64T", and I think VIA has their own name for it.
Intel, obviously, uses the term "Intel 64" in marketing, "IA-32e" in technical writing. AMD obviously uses "AMD64", but as they were the first, many open-source projects were started under that name, and the term remains in use for historical purposes. Proprietary software tends to use the vendor-neutral "x64", while technical literature tends to use the more precise "x86-64" (as it is, after all, not the only 64-bit architecture around).
4. They're both lying
5. AntiSec isn't deliberately lying, but were misinformed (eg. the list was actually used by $sinisterGovernmentAgency, but they were masquerading as FBI for some sinister reason)
6. The FBI isn't deliberately lying, but those speaking were misinformed (eg. it was part of some project spearheaded by some upstart who didn't get authorization)
Okay, so let's try improving K/M to fix those weaknesses, rather than trying to start from scratch, or trying to improve the gamepad.
Keyboard, with analog key inputs. That lets you control your movement rate more finely. For general typing, that might control the repeat rate - or it could just be ignored, treated as a digital input. That would also necessitate removing any limits on simultaneous keypresses - current keyboards often cannot handle more than 5-8 keys at once (with exceptions).
And while I disagree with your assessment of the mouse as a controller, I will note that there are already controllers that use a gamepad-like thumbstick rather than an optical tracker or ball.