Game publishers are like horse breeders complaining about cars.
No, game publishers aren't complaining that people seek other sources of entertainment unlike horse breeders who complained about other sources of transport. They complain that people are playing without paying, people want to eat their cake and have it too by getting the game for free and still have the money to purchase something else. They're complaining that a small portion of the people playing the game - the paying customers - have to fund it for everyone. They're concerned their paying customers will disappear too, after all everyone else gets it for free so why not they too.
Like it or not, there's huge incentive to cheat here. The few dollars I pay for a copy is unlikely to tip the balance of whether they'll make more games or not so the benefit is marginal, while it's a 100% certain savings for me. But if everybody thinks so, there certainly won't be another game because there's nobody left to pay for it. The old copyright wasn't that bad, but PCs and Internet pretty much broke it by instant perfect copies spreading worldwide almost instantly. It's all the ways they've been trying to fix it since with DRM and DMCA-laws and "three strike" laws and lawsuit carpet bombing and so on that has led me to believe getting rid of copyright is by far the lesser evil.
There's a huge difference between knowing how to operate a car well and knowing the finer points of a modern combustion engine. And between knowing how to operate one and realizing your commute mostly spent in slow moving traffic will not in any significant way challenge any modern car. I think the logic works the other way, if you haven't bothered to learn driving it you certainly haven't learned anything else...
Re:What would the impacts of this be for cryptogra
on
Claimed Proof That P != NP
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Really, P = NP would have far reaching implications to security, essentially proving that method of security will never be secure. If it is P != NP, then that means that you can have problems which take longer than polynomial time to calculate but only polynomial time to verify.
I think it's important to realize that even if they are "unresolved problems" of mathematics, it's not like both answers are equally likely like the flip of a coin. For example the Riemann hypothesis states that all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function have real part 1/2. It's true for every non-trivial zero we've ever found, but it's not proven true for all the infinitely many zeros. However, outside of mathematics a proof it's true will be met with "yeah, that's what we thought" and a proof it's false with "OMG what's going on here?". Another example is the prime twin conjecture, are there inifinte pairs like (3,5) (5,7) (11,13) (17,19) and so on. There's very good reason to believe it's true but nobody has able to formally prove it. There's a lot of problems today that appear to support the idea that P != NP, and that's what most people believe the answer is. However, stringing together formal proof that it's so is much harder. If this paper turns out to be true, surely it's a great leap for mathematics but it's the answer that doesn't change the world.
Oh, they have many years to go. I know quite a few people with driving habits that make a 50 mile radius look pathetic. Hell, if you drive the main road north from the capital here in Norway towards the nothern parts of the country, you won't even make it across the Dovre mountain. That is if they deal with temperatures of 0 F and below in the winter. I got a friend who lives in the midwest US, don't think he'll get an electric any time soon either. Yes, maybe it will take over in the cities where people do their short driving, particularly the second car in the family leaving one longhaul family car. But I fully expect a car I buy now to be a bucket of rust well before the gas guzzler is an endangered species.
You must not work with much legacy code. I've dealt with shitty code that is both a couple years old to a many decades old (a mix of C, Fortran, Ada, various assembly, etc). This notion that all old programmers were godlike gurus is mostly myth.
Also a lot of them were gurus in stuff that's not really relevant anymore like saving two bytes of memory here, a function call here and two processor instructions there - at least on the simple C compiler they used in 1987 - at the cost of code clarity, encapsulation and so on. Almost all the spectacular performance failures I see is not due to issues like that, it's that you've created a spaghetti mess and eventually settle for the only solution you found even though it's probably 100x slower than it should have been.
You DO get IP, even if it's free software. Even with the GPL, you could stop distributing old versions and re-license future versions if you control the copyright.
If and only if the project requires copyright assignment, yes. But that is only a small minority of projects and typically projects that almost in their entirety been written by one group or company and has not been superseeded by a community based fork. There's a few projects like that, for example OpenOffice (Sun) and Qt (Nokia) but they're not many. Or actually I think what I had to agree to in order to contribute to Qt I don't think was an assignment, just pretty much a license to let them do anything and everything with it.
The problem with that is since they are Open Source, the project forks and continues on Business as Usual. Look at MySQL for an example. Even if the codebase officially known as MySQL withers on the vine, there's still at least 2 forks I can think of that are viable.
So in the same sentence you manage to say it's fractured into several forks yet at the same time it's business as usual? One of the things businesses look for when they invest in a product is long term viability. Branches forming and withering, names changing, support greatly varying, all of that effectively stops much of the corporate adoption. It's not about killing something forever, if you can throw enough shoes in the machinery then you win long enough to turn a good profit. Just look at Microsoft and Java, all they did to stifle Java more than paid off even though Java still lives on. You can't make it go away but you certainly can slow it down.
This is pretty much what I'm thinking too, you can't just throw up an open source repository and say that's good enough testing. You have to run through a proper process with testing and documentation of all that testing, and if that is proof of sufficient testing then what does open source add to that? Sure, there's the possibility that some random open source review will find flaws that the official, documented process missed but it'd be no necessity. If it was a necessity it would mean the formal process is insufficient to put it to medical use. Or to put it more bluntly, this is "nice to have".
FUD is in general to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about current or future products by unverifiable negative claims, speculation, questioning legal status, exaggerated claims of poor quality and features and that sort of thing. I just don't see how that claim, true or false, generates FUD in the market.
If ESD dated back to the Win3.1 days I might have believed you, but I just looked at the ESD changelog, the initial version is given as April 1998. Are you honestly claiming Win95/98 was not capable of playing multiple sounds at the same time? Because... uh... that's not true. As in... made up. A falsehood. A lie.
I'll add historical revisionism to that list. Linux was never very early with desktop eye candy, sound and that sort of thing. It was a good UNIX clone but the big iron multi-user servers were hardly the greatest example in that respect. It took a long time before there was a simple way to create "normal" desktop users and not just a shell account, I remember having to manually put users in the "audio" group to get sound.
I think there are more possibilities than FTL travel, just not that we'd see. There are realistic propulsion systems for non-FTL craft that could reach other stars in a few thousand years. Damn long time, right? Well, consider that we have mayflies that live less than a day. If they could live to be 100 years like us, that'd be almost forever. Who is to say we can't find ways to become not 130 or 150 years old but many thousands of years old? The universe got time, it's billions of years old and will be good for some more. To us a several thousand year mission makes no sense as it'd be our n*grand-children who'd finish it and technology progresses so fast, but that's not fixed.
Try to imagine us in a thousand years, if the travel time is down to 500 years and we live to be 1000 and there's no quick way to intersellar travel in sight. Of course I'm talking about a science so far out it's just a guess but given how far we've come from 1000 AD to 2000 AD it doesn't seem impossible. We know from cancer cells that it's possible to make human cells divide endlessly, if only we could control it instead of growing uncontrolled tumors. It's possible we could grow new organs from our own DNA, never failing to the heart or lungs giving out. So while on a human time scale his means we won't be colonizing the universe anytime soon, I really don't see it a blocker on cosmological time scales.
Particularly if we forget the romantic notion of traveling space like Star Trek and try imagining a seeder robot with either our frozen DNA or sequenced on site from memory, a first generation bred in an artificial womb and raised by robot parents. Leaving the moral and ethical sides out of it, manned interstellar flight is not an absolute necessity for colonization. Of course we'd have to build robots that are a lot better at dealing with children than what we have today, but again if I say 1000 years out then that's many times longer than we've had computers so far. Or cryogenics, if that ever works. Ultimately I'm not seeing those really hard limits that says we can't populate the galaxy over a few million years. Just don't ask me about intergalactic...
More like that what geeks think aren't that essential to selling computers. It's a bit like selling cars to race drivers (professional workers) or car mechanics (support people). They probably have some very different thoughts about cars than we do, and think the car commercials are quite silly. But the car companies don't care because there's a huge market of soccer moms and dads that need it for their commute and driving kids around. Just like there's a huge market of people that aren't very interested in computers but want to get stuff done using one. Even when it comes to choosing platform the fact that your geek prefers Linux/OpenOffice/Firefox/GIMP doesn't necessarily make it a good idea if your people are all experienced Windows/MS Office/IE/Photoshop users.
Funny enough, if you try bringing your product to Linux you get nothing but hate burn. Try reading the comments to uTorrent coming to Linux and see what I mean. It's 95% "we don't want no closed source shit, too little too late, $torrent-app rules, fuck off". This despite being quite probably the best and certainly the most popular client on Windows, and lots of people might look more favorably on Linux if they didn't have to learn a new application. "Here's Linux, ditch all your old software, but trust me all that G/K stuff is much better" is a WTF to everyone but OSS zealots. For a platform that supposedly promotes choice, it's amazing how militantly hostile some are to giving you one.
I find that depends entirely on the game. Some have entirely too few good strategies and MP becomes more about knowing the "right" way of doing stuff than the fun of trying different things. Humans have unfortunately a very good ability to min-max on a few "best" strategies, while AIs can by programming have different behavior as long as it doesn't end up being pure stupid behavior. I prefer that at least.
It's a basic maxim of the silicon industry that cost is directly proportional to die area. To simplify, you can consider the silicon fab to have a fixed cost per wafer.
You are of course correct, but there's also been a push towards larger and larger wafers, last from 200 mm to 300 mm. Currently they are experimenting with 450 mm wafers, which would increase surface area per wafer by 125%. Additionally they get less cutoff at the edges and less "edge" which usually has the highest defect rate. Undoubtedly effort in this area would go up if reducing the lithography process proves difficult. Just like CPU manufacturers have gone sideways with more cores instead of higher GHz.
As for hard disks, I see the cheapest laptop HDD I can buy is now 160GB and costs about half of the cheapest SSD. Reducing the process from 34nm to 25nm should bring those much, much closer and is due already in Q4 this year. A lot of people will value a snappy computer more than a bigger HDD, if the price starts getting equal. Also perhaps a new life for dual-bay laptops, one SSD + one HDD. Having gotten used to a SSD, I can tell you that going back to work with a HDD as main drive is frustrating...
Back then I didn't have much trouble imagining things the PC couldn't do. I remember when it was an achievement for a PC to be able to play an MP3. Today my PC manages to play back full HD movies, where exactly could it go from there? The most space consuming thing I produce - unlike anything I can download off a torrent - is the videos I make, like when me and a friend went mountain hiking earlier this summer. Even that in 1080p60 (28 Mbit H.264) is only about 32GB per 2.5 hours. And since I try not to bore people to death, some 5-10 minute clips are plenty. A single 2TB drive could contain more than 150 hours of raw video. Music is already hiding in a corner of the disc, and unless you're just collecting them then 10-20GB per game you play for 50+ hours each is also nothing.
The truth is that technology has outpaced production. There's about 3000 BluRay titles to date, which would at most be 3000*50 GB = 150 TB. In practice not everything is filled to capacity so it's actually less. Even if you take all 3.6 million Spotify tracks and give them 5 MB each that only works out to 18 TB. Sure, there's much else you could add but I estimate it'd be no more than 3-500 TB total in all mainstream media combined. Meanwhile IBM has released a 14 PB storage array. Hell, throw up 50 "home servers" with 5x2TB each and you got 500 TB. We got plenty storage and as bandwidth goes up there'll be a turning point where we'd rather just stream and not bother much about local copies at all.
It might be essential but it saddens me a bit how much of a let down the LHC has been. Fermliab however has been a real story of inspiration. I hope we see results from Geneva in the future but so far it's not exactly been inspiring stuff and this decision to shut down everything sounds a bit OTT.
The LHC has beaten the Tevatron for the record of highest energy collision which was around 1 TeV, and they've since completed collisions at 3.5 TeV. True, that's half the planned capability of 7 TeV and they're way behind the original timeline, but the LHC has already broken new ground. Before they shut down they hope to have a decent amount of 3.5 TeV data, then fix shit and still hit their target. I wish all my failures were that good, particularly if I was doing bleeding-edge science no one has done before. I did remember a story about one of the scientists working on that Mars probe that crashed due to the feet/meter thing, she'd been working on it for 7 years which went up in a ball of fire. Now that's failure.
I don't know if this logical fallacy has been named, but a common way of being unscientific without dismissing science - even taking on the mantle of protecting science - is that all the science I agree with is right, and all the science I disagree with is flawed. Greatly exaggerating the flaws is a very common way of dismissing evidence contradicting your beliefs and opinions, and slashdot is not an exception...
Actually, that interpretation to me sounds like nonsense. You can very well copy a DVD image without DeCSS'ing it, and then use DeCSS on-the-fly to play it. The "copy protection" of CSS depends on the CSS key being only in a few approved devices just like this software only works with approved dongles. If it's not a violation of the DMCA to turn an unusable copy into a functional copy, then effective DeCSS doesn't protect against copyright violation either.
Since Windows 7 Home Premium retains for $199.99 it obviously has to run Linux otherwise it would be a $400 PC.
Of course, nobody pays $199. That's some bullshit marketing number that everyone gets huge rebates on, it's 50% off at Newegg and probably 70-80% off if you're Dell or HP or Lenovo. Then they bundle it up with various trialware that the trialware makers pay for to make the net contribution more like $0-50 somewhere. I recently bought be a netbook with the XP netbook edition, which I can swear Microsoft sells for almost nothing to sell Windows, not Linux. Of course I wiped it and installed Linux anyway, but that way they don't need to support it, they don't need to stock another SKU and all in all I don't think I could have gotten it much cheaper anyway. But Microsoft got to count it as another Windows netbook sale...
What Apple has created is almost the perfect perception filter.
A lot of people are more capable than they give themselves credit for, they just like to say "it's too complicated" without even trying to make an effort. But iWhatevers are easy, because "everybody" says that so they actually give it a go. I've had several people show off stuff on their iPhones that I would bet they could do on the Android, but they wouldn't have tried it there. So it's like "all thanks to Apple" and Apple scores.
Likewise, whenever people can't figure something out - and there's plenty to fiddle with that isn't so easy - they assume it's their own fault, because "everybody" says the iWhatevers are so easy. Every other phone would certainly be far too hard for them, but hopefully they'll at least be able to figure out the iPhone in time if they'll even admit they can't make it work. So even on the rebound they become more convinced Apple is the only phone for them.
Apple is walking on their own self-fueled cloud and it's amazing to watch. Like you say, I'm fairly sure most aren't aware that it's happening.
To be honest, you're not saying much new. That P2P is inefficient has been repeated for the last ten years, some doomsday prophets even claimed the Internet would collapse from it. It's not a problem to come up with a caching design, and the implementation is so trivial I could probably have it done within the hour. Well, three hours with multithreading, documentation and proper error handling. However, they can't work unless all the people on your subnet is willing to openly tell their ISP that they want block #421 of the latest Futurama episode, so the server can get it once and give to everyone. Despite that the "problem" largely doesn't exist because we have instead demanded and recieved more bandwidth to compensate. I get 28 Mbit+ with no problem, there's no backbone shortage to speak of.
But now we have the same huge data files passing each other, in opposite directions. This is lame. Especially since USENET got it right. If the "peer to peer" systems weren't so focused on piracy, they could work much better.
Actually, USENET is the wrong design as it tries to push every messages to every news server. The correct design would be to continue to have torrents and pull only requested blocks. That way if nobody cares about hungarian folk music or japanese game shows in my area, it wouldn't take up any bandwidth or disk space here. The right design would be a simple hash-based LRU file cache. Every time a block is requested, it's "refreshed" in the cache and as popularity drops it'll fall off. If the server doesn't have it, it'll try to retrieve and cache it from the next cache server on the path to the peer or ultimately the peer itself. If that sounded complicated, it's really not. It's just that nobody would use it.
Where's the "preaching to the choir" mod? I've used Linux on my primary desktop for over two years now, and know for a fact that "Everything on Ubuntu just works" is bullshit. And 99% of the time you get absolutely no help on how to fix the issue because everybody assumes you're using Windows or the official client and not whatever Linux clone. Like a trivial example, I can't send files in Kopete over MSN at more than 0.5 kB/s, any standard method like ftp or irc or whatever works fine. And the obvious answer is that it's not the software's fault that I'm trying to use a proprietary MS-only protocol that's poorly reverse engineered. But the point is that the world does not revolve around me, everybody else won't adapt to use software that works with me. I'd not recommend to any of my less technical friends to run Linux, sometimes I just have to stop and say "This thing just will not work on Linux". I know that, try working around it and know there's alternative software, WINE, Virtualbox and dual boot, but sometimes I just have to admit there's no application like this for Linux and it doesn't run well on anything but Windows. That's a hard pill to swallow.
Try putting up a list of every fetish and sexual preference you can come up with, then add "have sex with budding 12 year old" to the list. Now without considering legality and punishments, make up own deviancy ranking in terms of questions like "would I rather do scat sex or have a woman fuck me with a strap-on?". If the 12 year old is at the bottom of the list when you're done then you got really odd tastes, lack imagination or is great at lying to yourself. Now take a look around and see how many people do the legal but fucked up kinds of sex that ended up below on your list - voluntarily, as their preference. That will not be an exception. It is only "extreme" because minors have a limited ability to consent, as an age fetish it's quite minor compared to much else. And that doesn't even include jailbait porn, girls who look adult but happen to be under 18...
...anything from a glamour shot of a naked 17-year-old girl to a child being sexually abused could be classified as "child porn". And whilst I don't consider either to be particularly healthy in a civilised society
That 17 year old, you know in most of the world you could legally be banging her right? Just don't take the glamour shot...
Slashdot Mirror
Game publishers are like horse breeders complaining about cars.
No, game publishers aren't complaining that people seek other sources of entertainment unlike horse breeders who complained about other sources of transport. They complain that people are playing without paying, people want to eat their cake and have it too by getting the game for free and still have the money to purchase something else. They're complaining that a small portion of the people playing the game - the paying customers - have to fund it for everyone. They're concerned their paying customers will disappear too, after all everyone else gets it for free so why not they too.
Like it or not, there's huge incentive to cheat here. The few dollars I pay for a copy is unlikely to tip the balance of whether they'll make more games or not so the benefit is marginal, while it's a 100% certain savings for me. But if everybody thinks so, there certainly won't be another game because there's nobody left to pay for it. The old copyright wasn't that bad, but PCs and Internet pretty much broke it by instant perfect copies spreading worldwide almost instantly. It's all the ways they've been trying to fix it since with DRM and DMCA-laws and "three strike" laws and lawsuit carpet bombing and so on that has led me to believe getting rid of copyright is by far the lesser evil.
There's a huge difference between knowing how to operate a car well and knowing the finer points of a modern combustion engine. And between knowing how to operate one and realizing your commute mostly spent in slow moving traffic will not in any significant way challenge any modern car. I think the logic works the other way, if you haven't bothered to learn driving it you certainly haven't learned anything else...
Really, P = NP would have far reaching implications to security, essentially proving that method of security will never be secure. If it is P != NP, then that means that you can have problems which take longer than polynomial time to calculate but only polynomial time to verify.
I think it's important to realize that even if they are "unresolved problems" of mathematics, it's not like both answers are equally likely like the flip of a coin. For example the Riemann hypothesis states that all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function have real part 1/2. It's true for every non-trivial zero we've ever found, but it's not proven true for all the infinitely many zeros. However, outside of mathematics a proof it's true will be met with "yeah, that's what we thought" and a proof it's false with "OMG what's going on here?". Another example is the prime twin conjecture, are there inifinte pairs like (3,5) (5,7) (11,13) (17,19) and so on. There's very good reason to believe it's true but nobody has able to formally prove it. There's a lot of problems today that appear to support the idea that P != NP, and that's what most people believe the answer is. However, stringing together formal proof that it's so is much harder. If this paper turns out to be true, surely it's a great leap for mathematics but it's the answer that doesn't change the world.
Wernstrom announces that the invention deserves "the worst grade imaginable: an A-minus-minus."
Oh, they have many years to go. I know quite a few people with driving habits that make a 50 mile radius look pathetic. Hell, if you drive the main road north from the capital here in Norway towards the nothern parts of the country, you won't even make it across the Dovre mountain. That is if they deal with temperatures of 0 F and below in the winter. I got a friend who lives in the midwest US, don't think he'll get an electric any time soon either. Yes, maybe it will take over in the cities where people do their short driving, particularly the second car in the family leaving one longhaul family car. But I fully expect a car I buy now to be a bucket of rust well before the gas guzzler is an endangered species.
You must not work with much legacy code. I've dealt with shitty code that is both a couple years old to a many decades old (a mix of C, Fortran, Ada, various assembly, etc). This notion that all old programmers were godlike gurus is mostly myth.
Also a lot of them were gurus in stuff that's not really relevant anymore like saving two bytes of memory here, a function call here and two processor instructions there - at least on the simple C compiler they used in 1987 - at the cost of code clarity, encapsulation and so on. Almost all the spectacular performance failures I see is not due to issues like that, it's that you've created a spaghetti mess and eventually settle for the only solution you found even though it's probably 100x slower than it should have been.
You DO get IP, even if it's free software. Even with the GPL, you could stop distributing old versions and re-license future versions if you control the copyright.
If and only if the project requires copyright assignment, yes. But that is only a small minority of projects and typically projects that almost in their entirety been written by one group or company and has not been superseeded by a community based fork. There's a few projects like that, for example OpenOffice (Sun) and Qt (Nokia) but they're not many. Or actually I think what I had to agree to in order to contribute to Qt I don't think was an assignment, just pretty much a license to let them do anything and everything with it.
The problem with that is since they are Open Source, the project forks and continues on Business as Usual. Look at MySQL for an example. Even if the codebase officially known as MySQL withers on the vine, there's still at least 2 forks I can think of that are viable.
So in the same sentence you manage to say it's fractured into several forks yet at the same time it's business as usual? One of the things businesses look for when they invest in a product is long term viability. Branches forming and withering, names changing, support greatly varying, all of that effectively stops much of the corporate adoption. It's not about killing something forever, if you can throw enough shoes in the machinery then you win long enough to turn a good profit. Just look at Microsoft and Java, all they did to stifle Java more than paid off even though Java still lives on. You can't make it go away but you certainly can slow it down.
This is pretty much what I'm thinking too, you can't just throw up an open source repository and say that's good enough testing. You have to run through a proper process with testing and documentation of all that testing, and if that is proof of sufficient testing then what does open source add to that? Sure, there's the possibility that some random open source review will find flaws that the official, documented process missed but it'd be no necessity. If it was a necessity it would mean the formal process is insufficient to put it to medical use. Or to put it more bluntly, this is "nice to have".
Now if uTorrent for Linux was truly excellent, why not, but...
There is no uTorrent for Linux at the moment, only via WINE. The article was about a native version coming, and that was the general reception.
What complete and utter FUD.
FUD is in general to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about current or future products by unverifiable negative claims, speculation, questioning legal status, exaggerated claims of poor quality and features and that sort of thing. I just don't see how that claim, true or false, generates FUD in the market.
If ESD dated back to the Win3.1 days I might have believed you, but I just looked at the ESD changelog, the initial version is given as April 1998. Are you honestly claiming Win95/98 was not capable of playing multiple sounds at the same time? Because... uh... that's not true. As in... made up. A falsehood. A lie.
I'll add historical revisionism to that list. Linux was never very early with desktop eye candy, sound and that sort of thing. It was a good UNIX clone but the big iron multi-user servers were hardly the greatest example in that respect. It took a long time before there was a simple way to create "normal" desktop users and not just a shell account, I remember having to manually put users in the "audio" group to get sound.
I think there are more possibilities than FTL travel, just not that we'd see. There are realistic propulsion systems for non-FTL craft that could reach other stars in a few thousand years. Damn long time, right? Well, consider that we have mayflies that live less than a day. If they could live to be 100 years like us, that'd be almost forever. Who is to say we can't find ways to become not 130 or 150 years old but many thousands of years old? The universe got time, it's billions of years old and will be good for some more. To us a several thousand year mission makes no sense as it'd be our n*grand-children who'd finish it and technology progresses so fast, but that's not fixed.
Try to imagine us in a thousand years, if the travel time is down to 500 years and we live to be 1000 and there's no quick way to intersellar travel in sight. Of course I'm talking about a science so far out it's just a guess but given how far we've come from 1000 AD to 2000 AD it doesn't seem impossible. We know from cancer cells that it's possible to make human cells divide endlessly, if only we could control it instead of growing uncontrolled tumors. It's possible we could grow new organs from our own DNA, never failing to the heart or lungs giving out. So while on a human time scale his means we won't be colonizing the universe anytime soon, I really don't see it a blocker on cosmological time scales.
Particularly if we forget the romantic notion of traveling space like Star Trek and try imagining a seeder robot with either our frozen DNA or sequenced on site from memory, a first generation bred in an artificial womb and raised by robot parents. Leaving the moral and ethical sides out of it, manned interstellar flight is not an absolute necessity for colonization. Of course we'd have to build robots that are a lot better at dealing with children than what we have today, but again if I say 1000 years out then that's many times longer than we've had computers so far. Or cryogenics, if that ever works. Ultimately I'm not seeing those really hard limits that says we can't populate the galaxy over a few million years. Just don't ask me about intergalactic...
More like that what geeks think aren't that essential to selling computers. It's a bit like selling cars to race drivers (professional workers) or car mechanics (support people). They probably have some very different thoughts about cars than we do, and think the car commercials are quite silly. But the car companies don't care because there's a huge market of soccer moms and dads that need it for their commute and driving kids around. Just like there's a huge market of people that aren't very interested in computers but want to get stuff done using one. Even when it comes to choosing platform the fact that your geek prefers Linux/OpenOffice/Firefox/GIMP doesn't necessarily make it a good idea if your people are all experienced Windows/MS Office/IE/Photoshop users.
Funny enough, if you try bringing your product to Linux you get nothing but hate burn. Try reading the comments to uTorrent coming to Linux and see what I mean. It's 95% "we don't want no closed source shit, too little too late, $torrent-app rules, fuck off". This despite being quite probably the best and certainly the most popular client on Windows, and lots of people might look more favorably on Linux if they didn't have to learn a new application. "Here's Linux, ditch all your old software, but trust me all that G/K stuff is much better" is a WTF to everyone but OSS zealots. For a platform that supposedly promotes choice, it's amazing how militantly hostile some are to giving you one.
I find that depends entirely on the game. Some have entirely too few good strategies and MP becomes more about knowing the "right" way of doing stuff than the fun of trying different things. Humans have unfortunately a very good ability to min-max on a few "best" strategies, while AIs can by programming have different behavior as long as it doesn't end up being pure stupid behavior. I prefer that at least.
It's a basic maxim of the silicon industry that cost is directly proportional to die area. To simplify, you can consider the silicon fab to have a fixed cost per wafer.
You are of course correct, but there's also been a push towards larger and larger wafers, last from 200 mm to 300 mm. Currently they are experimenting with 450 mm wafers, which would increase surface area per wafer by 125%. Additionally they get less cutoff at the edges and less "edge" which usually has the highest defect rate. Undoubtedly effort in this area would go up if reducing the lithography process proves difficult. Just like CPU manufacturers have gone sideways with more cores instead of higher GHz.
As for hard disks, I see the cheapest laptop HDD I can buy is now 160GB and costs about half of the cheapest SSD. Reducing the process from 34nm to 25nm should bring those much, much closer and is due already in Q4 this year. A lot of people will value a snappy computer more than a bigger HDD, if the price starts getting equal. Also perhaps a new life for dual-bay laptops, one SSD + one HDD. Having gotten used to a SSD, I can tell you that going back to work with a HDD as main drive is frustrating...
Back then I didn't have much trouble imagining things the PC couldn't do. I remember when it was an achievement for a PC to be able to play an MP3. Today my PC manages to play back full HD movies, where exactly could it go from there? The most space consuming thing I produce - unlike anything I can download off a torrent - is the videos I make, like when me and a friend went mountain hiking earlier this summer. Even that in 1080p60 (28 Mbit H.264) is only about 32GB per 2.5 hours. And since I try not to bore people to death, some 5-10 minute clips are plenty. A single 2TB drive could contain more than 150 hours of raw video. Music is already hiding in a corner of the disc, and unless you're just collecting them then 10-20GB per game you play for 50+ hours each is also nothing.
The truth is that technology has outpaced production. There's about 3000 BluRay titles to date, which would at most be 3000*50 GB = 150 TB. In practice not everything is filled to capacity so it's actually less. Even if you take all 3.6 million Spotify tracks and give them 5 MB each that only works out to 18 TB. Sure, there's much else you could add but I estimate it'd be no more than 3-500 TB total in all mainstream media combined. Meanwhile IBM has released a 14 PB storage array. Hell, throw up 50 "home servers" with 5x2TB each and you got 500 TB. We got plenty storage and as bandwidth goes up there'll be a turning point where we'd rather just stream and not bother much about local copies at all.
It might be essential but it saddens me a bit how much of a let down the LHC has been. Fermliab however has been a real story of inspiration. I hope we see results from Geneva in the future but so far it's not exactly been inspiring stuff and this decision to shut down everything sounds a bit OTT.
The LHC has beaten the Tevatron for the record of highest energy collision which was around 1 TeV, and they've since completed collisions at 3.5 TeV. True, that's half the planned capability of 7 TeV and they're way behind the original timeline, but the LHC has already broken new ground. Before they shut down they hope to have a decent amount of 3.5 TeV data, then fix shit and still hit their target. I wish all my failures were that good, particularly if I was doing bleeding-edge science no one has done before. I did remember a story about one of the scientists working on that Mars probe that crashed due to the feet/meter thing, she'd been working on it for 7 years which went up in a ball of fire. Now that's failure.
I don't know if this logical fallacy has been named, but a common way of being unscientific without dismissing science - even taking on the mantle of protecting science - is that all the science I agree with is right, and all the science I disagree with is flawed. Greatly exaggerating the flaws is a very common way of dismissing evidence contradicting your beliefs and opinions, and slashdot is not an exception...
Actually, that interpretation to me sounds like nonsense. You can very well copy a DVD image without DeCSS'ing it, and then use DeCSS on-the-fly to play it. The "copy protection" of CSS depends on the CSS key being only in a few approved devices just like this software only works with approved dongles. If it's not a violation of the DMCA to turn an unusable copy into a functional copy, then effective DeCSS doesn't protect against copyright violation either.
Since Windows 7 Home Premium retains for $199.99 it obviously has to run Linux otherwise it would be a $400 PC.
Of course, nobody pays $199. That's some bullshit marketing number that everyone gets huge rebates on, it's 50% off at Newegg and probably 70-80% off if you're Dell or HP or Lenovo. Then they bundle it up with various trialware that the trialware makers pay for to make the net contribution more like $0-50 somewhere. I recently bought be a netbook with the XP netbook edition, which I can swear Microsoft sells for almost nothing to sell Windows, not Linux. Of course I wiped it and installed Linux anyway, but that way they don't need to support it, they don't need to stock another SKU and all in all I don't think I could have gotten it much cheaper anyway. But Microsoft got to count it as another Windows netbook sale...
What Apple has created is almost the perfect perception filter.
A lot of people are more capable than they give themselves credit for, they just like to say "it's too complicated" without even trying to make an effort. But iWhatevers are easy, because "everybody" says that so they actually give it a go. I've had several people show off stuff on their iPhones that I would bet they could do on the Android, but they wouldn't have tried it there. So it's like "all thanks to Apple" and Apple scores.
Likewise, whenever people can't figure something out - and there's plenty to fiddle with that isn't so easy - they assume it's their own fault, because "everybody" says the iWhatevers are so easy. Every other phone would certainly be far too hard for them, but hopefully they'll at least be able to figure out the iPhone in time if they'll even admit they can't make it work. So even on the rebound they become more convinced Apple is the only phone for them.
Apple is walking on their own self-fueled cloud and it's amazing to watch. Like you say, I'm fairly sure most aren't aware that it's happening.
To be honest, you're not saying much new. That P2P is inefficient has been repeated for the last ten years, some doomsday prophets even claimed the Internet would collapse from it. It's not a problem to come up with a caching design, and the implementation is so trivial I could probably have it done within the hour. Well, three hours with multithreading, documentation and proper error handling. However, they can't work unless all the people on your subnet is willing to openly tell their ISP that they want block #421 of the latest Futurama episode, so the server can get it once and give to everyone. Despite that the "problem" largely doesn't exist because we have instead demanded and recieved more bandwidth to compensate. I get 28 Mbit+ with no problem, there's no backbone shortage to speak of.
But now we have the same huge data files passing each other, in opposite directions. This is lame. Especially since USENET got it right. If the "peer to peer" systems weren't so focused on piracy, they could work much better.
Actually, USENET is the wrong design as it tries to push every messages to every news server. The correct design would be to continue to have torrents and pull only requested blocks. That way if nobody cares about hungarian folk music or japanese game shows in my area, it wouldn't take up any bandwidth or disk space here. The right design would be a simple hash-based LRU file cache. Every time a block is requested, it's "refreshed" in the cache and as popularity drops it'll fall off. If the server doesn't have it, it'll try to retrieve and cache it from the next cache server on the path to the peer or ultimately the peer itself. If that sounded complicated, it's really not. It's just that nobody would use it.
Where's the "preaching to the choir" mod? I've used Linux on my primary desktop for over two years now, and know for a fact that "Everything on Ubuntu just works" is bullshit. And 99% of the time you get absolutely no
help on how to fix the issue because everybody assumes you're using Windows or the official client and not whatever Linux clone. Like a trivial example, I can't send files in Kopete over MSN at more than 0.5 kB/s, any standard method like ftp or irc or whatever works fine. And the obvious answer is that it's not the software's fault that I'm trying to use a proprietary MS-only protocol that's poorly reverse engineered. But the point is that the world does not revolve around me, everybody else won't adapt to use software that works with me. I'd not recommend to any of my less technical friends to run Linux, sometimes I just have to stop and say "This thing just will not work on Linux". I know that, try working around it and know there's alternative software, WINE, Virtualbox and dual boot, but sometimes I just have to admit there's no application like this for Linux and it doesn't run well on anything but Windows. That's a hard pill to swallow.
Try putting up a list of every fetish and sexual preference you can come up with, then add "have sex with budding 12 year old" to the list. Now without considering legality and punishments, make up own deviancy ranking in terms of questions like "would I rather do scat sex or have a woman fuck me with a strap-on?". If the 12 year old is at the bottom of the list when you're done then you got really odd tastes, lack imagination or is great at lying to yourself. Now take a look around and see how many people do the legal but fucked up kinds of sex that ended up below on your list - voluntarily, as their preference. That will not be an exception. It is only "extreme" because minors have a limited ability to consent, as an age fetish it's quite minor compared to much else. And that doesn't even include jailbait porn, girls who look adult but happen to be under 18...
...anything from a glamour shot of a naked 17-year-old girl to a child being sexually abused could be classified as "child porn". And whilst I don't consider either to be particularly healthy in a civilised society
That 17 year old, you know in most of the world you could legally be banging her right? Just don't take the glamour shot...