Yeah, I call shennanigans on Sony's "marketing machine" being the Dreamcast's downfall. As we can plainly see, Sony's "marketing machine" sucks. The PS2 just had tons of mindshare momentum coming off the PS1, a good performance-per-dollar factor, large library of PS1 games it was (mostly) compatible with, and some good exclusive games.
I assume you're complaining about Intel documents such as this one that show a 1.6x to 3.8x speedup for certain HDTV encoding operations. There are still some likely reasons someone might pick SAD for encoding. One reason might be patent coverage-- the better the algorithm, the more likely it is to be patented these days. Providing a baseline fast algorithm that's part of all future Intel hardware and can be used without patent problems might be nice. Also, just because something can be done "faster in software" doesn't mean it's really faster. If it doesn't use the SIMD pipeline, it's occupying more of the int or fp pipelines and thus may have fewer potential parallelism opportunities and/or stall the pipeline more often. With SAD offloaded onto the SIMD pipeline one could do other things with the other pipelines-- perhaps even a combination of both algorithms running in parallel (assuming sufficient instruction dispatch speed) to get even more speedup.
I think there's a lot of as-yet unrealized potential here, and it will be interesting to see where it leads. It won't be the end-all be-all of encoding, but it will be another arrow in the quiver.
No, actually, I think it's a very good thing. I just wanted to point it out, since it's an important distinction. There is no longer "GPL-ed" code-- all code is either GPLv2, GPLv3, or both, all of which have extremely different implications and ideologies (despite what the FSF claims).
At any rate, one of his goals is to draw attention to the violent content in video games. He is succeeding.
This is one area where Mr. Thompson and the game publishers have the same motive. Since fake violence can be very fun, advertising its presence is like advertising the game. And hey, everyone wins.
The point, though, is that while this guy has the right to protest, he has no constitutional right to barge in on the rally and shout down the speaker at length. Because, guess what? Kerry has the right to assembly as well. While I'm not sure whether a taser was necessary (although I'm not going to second-guess the police in this case), I think it's obvious the police violated nobody's constitutional rights.
If anyone mods you a troll I hope someone else goes back and mods you back up, because I share your views. Fortunately, though, everyone wins. The hack gets some air time and gets his talking points in the headlines, and a politician gets some extra face shots on the pages.
Linux is a great option if you're not interested in additional cost
Only if "cost" is counted in money. I think we need a third "Free as in..." category. Linux is free if your time is worthless, but otherwise seems to incur significant "additional" costs beyond MacOS X (and to a lesser degree Windows). At some point in your career/life you reach a point where you have and are willing to pay the money for someone else to deal with all the random whack-a-mole problems.
I was thinking the same thing about Apple's clang and why they didn't just use it instead. But the latest I've seen on clang seemed to indicate it was still in the early stages of development, and "replacement of GCC" was explicitly listed as a non-objective.
I think having a compiler that's not dependent on FSF's increasingly extremist political views, but it does seem like a lot of work for little actual benefit outside an "insurance policy".
The BSD license requires that any re-publishing of the source code include the BSD license and the original copyright notice. Any use of BSD code that fails to do this is in violation of copyright law. In addition, since at least one provision of GPLv3 conflicts with the BSD license, while it's probably true that BSD allows one to add GPLv2 to it, it's probably not true of GPLv3.
Finally, I don't think it's fair to put the ethical issues aside. The FSF's entire basis of being is their ethical argument about code sharing. To take someone else's code and slap a stamp on it that requires that no one share modifications with the original author seems like it's against everything the FSF stands for.
* Copyright (c) , * All rights reserved. * * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: * * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * * Neither the name of the nor the * names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products * derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
So if any of the BSD source code is used, clause 1 requires that both the original copyright and the 3 conditions appear in any copy of the published source code. It's not clear to me that also adding the GPL is compatible with this.
I've just seen the hillarious results of some of the 'backwards compatable' games on a friend's shiny new 80Gb PS3
When making statements like that, it's important to note what firmware revision your friend was using. Each one seems to add significant new emulation capabilities and knocks a few more titles off the incompatible list. The latest (1.93, which fixes a few glitches in 1.92 released last week) looks pretty nice.
Considering how many titles there were for the PS2 compared to the original XBox though, it's a little disingenuous to compare then by percent. 100% backwards compatibility for XBox probably still wouldn't come close to the number of titles as 50% compatibility for PS2.
I have seen Scientific American versions of several studies that showed that for certain diseases and for certain symptoms, there is no placebo effect. Temperature, physical damage, hydration, etc., tend not to be affected at all. On the other hand, many types of pain has been shown to be very susceptible to placebos, as has anxiety-related symptoms (which can cover broad ranges), strength, and several other symptoms whose magnitude tend to be judged by the patient rather than measured. However, I've heard mixed reports that even some allergies and other reactions that fall somewhere in-between can respond to placebo, so it's hard to say where the boundaries lie. I even saw some suggestion that the placebo effect itself be measured and quantified, and calculated out of trials instead of using an actual placebo anymore, which seems like it's going a little too far, to me.
Sony has another shot at the PS3 bypassing all the others. I haven't looked at the latest numbers, but last I saw the PS2 was still outselling all 3 current-generation consoles. And with backwards compatibility (even the newer software PS3s) very good, the PS3 could still be a sleeper hit if Sony can get the price down and the advertising budget up. They could even create a "movie bundle" that includes a Blu-Ray remote and movie, as opposed to a "game bundle" that includes an extra controller and a game.
Interesting scenario, but other alternatives exist. For example, by the early 90's Apple had been experimenting with an x86 version of MacOS. Without Microsoft's dominance, it's entirely possible Apple could have let it loose and MacOS could have taken over from DR as the GUI caught on. It's also entirely possible that x86 wouldn't have won at all, and one of the myriad other platforms (with superior performance-per-Watt) took over.
In any case, the Web was invented on a NeXT and NCSA Mosaic ran best on UNIX. Macs had MacTCP before Windows could talk the language. I think it's more fair to say that Google came around in spite of Microsoft. Whatever computing platform had gotten popularized, it would have been brought to the people by that company.
I see your argument, but the facts don't seem to actually back it up. By many benchmarks, Linux is currently worse than almost all the closed-source schedulers at handling loads greater than 2.0 on an interactive system and has been for years. The CFS patches seem to mostly close the gap, but I haven't seen many argue it will make Linux better than the alternatives, just let it at least play in the big league ballpark.
Apple still sells iPods with clicky wheels if this is important to you, but the clicky wheel and the huge screen won't both fit, so you have to choose. You can get accessories that let you go forward/back without touching the iPod at all, but of course they cost extra, and most car models these days offer optional iPod integration that lets you control them from the car stereo for car use.
Isn't the PS2 still kicking all 3 consoles butts by a significant margin? Any theory as to why the Wii is doing better has to take that data point into account, too. Since the PS2 is so cheap, it's more indication that it's simply a "fun per dollar" equation, and as the other consoles get cheaper they'll overtake it.
Bandwidth is limited. You can hand-wave and spew hyperbole all you want, but it comes down to priorities. In this case, it's literally first responders vs. watching old broadcast television, because that's where a good chunk of that spectrum is allocated for. I honestly am surprised that you prioritize television over firefighters' lives, but I guess there's one in every crowd.
No, I'm a software guy not in the network business at all.
My company, though, actually restricts access on the wired network without a registered MAC address or two-factor authentication with a checked-out RSA badge. It's still unencrypted, though, so it's ALMOST as secure as our wireless network, and our level of security is unusual.
The typical low-cost wired switch, also, tends to offer no encryption or authentication, while every wireless router these days supports WPA2.
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the glow of reentry is compression heating of the air in front of the meteorite, not the meteorite itself.
Who said it was the meteorite itself that heated the ground water? Compression heating is perfectly capable of it.
Yeah, I call shennanigans on Sony's "marketing machine" being the Dreamcast's downfall. As we can plainly see, Sony's "marketing machine" sucks. The PS2 just had tons of mindshare momentum coming off the PS1, a good performance-per-dollar factor, large library of PS1 games it was (mostly) compatible with, and some good exclusive games.
I assume you're complaining about Intel documents such as this one that show a 1.6x to 3.8x speedup for certain HDTV encoding operations. There are still some likely reasons someone might pick SAD for encoding. One reason might be patent coverage-- the better the algorithm, the more likely it is to be patented these days. Providing a baseline fast algorithm that's part of all future Intel hardware and can be used without patent problems might be nice. Also, just because something can be done "faster in software" doesn't mean it's really faster. If it doesn't use the SIMD pipeline, it's occupying more of the int or fp pipelines and thus may have fewer potential parallelism opportunities and/or stall the pipeline more often. With SAD offloaded onto the SIMD pipeline one could do other things with the other pipelines-- perhaps even a combination of both algorithms running in parallel (assuming sufficient instruction dispatch speed) to get even more speedup.
I think there's a lot of as-yet unrealized potential here, and it will be interesting to see where it leads. It won't be the end-all be-all of encoding, but it will be another arrow in the quiver.
The article mentions coated glass, so I doubt it's foldable.
I suspect it's more likely that you'll see "nonstandard" 802.11n devices, each of which now cost an extra $1 if this patent issue isn't resolved.
No, actually, I think it's a very good thing. I just wanted to point it out, since it's an important distinction. There is no longer "GPL-ed" code-- all code is either GPLv2, GPLv3, or both, all of which have extremely different implications and ideologies (despite what the FSF claims).
At any rate, one of his goals is to draw attention to the violent content in video games. He is succeeding.
This is one area where Mr. Thompson and the game publishers have the same motive. Since fake violence can be very fun, advertising its presence is like advertising the game. And hey, everyone wins.
The point, though, is that while this guy has the right to protest, he has no constitutional right to barge in on the rally and shout down the speaker at length. Because, guess what? Kerry has the right to assembly as well. While I'm not sure whether a taser was necessary (although I'm not going to second-guess the police in this case), I think it's obvious the police violated nobody's constitutional rights.
If anyone mods you a troll I hope someone else goes back and mods you back up, because I share your views. Fortunately, though, everyone wins. The hack gets some air time and gets his talking points in the headlines, and a politician gets some extra face shots on the pages.
For those too lazy to go read the press release, it's GPLv2, not GPLv3.
Linux is a great option if you're not interested in additional cost
Only if "cost" is counted in money. I think we need a third "Free as in..." category. Linux is free if your time is worthless, but otherwise seems to incur significant "additional" costs beyond MacOS X (and to a lesser degree Windows). At some point in your career/life you reach a point where you have and are willing to pay the money for someone else to deal with all the random whack-a-mole problems.
I was thinking the same thing about Apple's clang and why they didn't just use it instead. But the latest I've seen on clang seemed to indicate it was still in the early stages of development, and "replacement of GCC" was explicitly listed as a non-objective.
I think having a compiler that's not dependent on FSF's increasingly extremist political views, but it does seem like a lot of work for little actual benefit outside an "insurance policy".
The BSD license requires that any re-publishing of the source code include the BSD license and the original copyright notice. Any use of BSD code that fails to do this is in violation of copyright law. In addition, since at least one provision of GPLv3 conflicts with the BSD license, while it's probably true that BSD allows one to add GPLv2 to it, it's probably not true of GPLv3.
Finally, I don't think it's fair to put the ethical issues aside. The FSF's entire basis of being is their ethical argument about code sharing. To take someone else's code and slap a stamp on it that requires that no one share modifications with the original author seems like it's against everything the FSF stands for.
So if any of the BSD source code is used, clause 1 requires that both the original copyright and the 3 conditions appear in any copy of the published source code. It's not clear to me that also adding the GPL is compatible with this.
I've just seen the hillarious results of some of the 'backwards compatable' games on a friend's shiny new 80Gb PS3
When making statements like that, it's important to note what firmware revision your friend was using. Each one seems to add significant new emulation capabilities and knocks a few more titles off the incompatible list. The latest (1.93, which fixes a few glitches in 1.92 released last week) looks pretty nice.
Considering how many titles there were for the PS2 compared to the original XBox though, it's a little disingenuous to compare then by percent. 100% backwards compatibility for XBox probably still wouldn't come close to the number of titles as 50% compatibility for PS2.
I have seen Scientific American versions of several studies that showed that for certain diseases and for certain symptoms, there is no placebo effect. Temperature, physical damage, hydration, etc., tend not to be affected at all. On the other hand, many types of pain has been shown to be very susceptible to placebos, as has anxiety-related symptoms (which can cover broad ranges), strength, and several other symptoms whose magnitude tend to be judged by the patient rather than measured. However, I've heard mixed reports that even some allergies and other reactions that fall somewhere in-between can respond to placebo, so it's hard to say where the boundaries lie. I even saw some suggestion that the placebo effect itself be measured and quantified, and calculated out of trials instead of using an actual placebo anymore, which seems like it's going a little too far, to me.
(I'm not a doc)
Sony has another shot at the PS3 bypassing all the others. I haven't looked at the latest numbers, but last I saw the PS2 was still outselling all 3 current-generation consoles. And with backwards compatibility (even the newer software PS3s) very good, the PS3 could still be a sleeper hit if Sony can get the price down and the advertising budget up. They could even create a "movie bundle" that includes a Blu-Ray remote and movie, as opposed to a "game bundle" that includes an extra controller and a game.
Interesting scenario, but other alternatives exist. For example, by the early 90's Apple had been experimenting with an x86 version of MacOS. Without Microsoft's dominance, it's entirely possible Apple could have let it loose and MacOS could have taken over from DR as the GUI caught on. It's also entirely possible that x86 wouldn't have won at all, and one of the myriad other platforms (with superior performance-per-Watt) took over.
In any case, the Web was invented on a NeXT and NCSA Mosaic ran best on UNIX. Macs had MacTCP before Windows could talk the language. I think it's more fair to say that Google came around in spite of Microsoft. Whatever computing platform had gotten popularized, it would have been brought to the people by that company.
I see your argument, but the facts don't seem to actually back it up. By many benchmarks, Linux is currently worse than almost all the closed-source schedulers at handling loads greater than 2.0 on an interactive system and has been for years. The CFS patches seem to mostly close the gap, but I haven't seen many argue it will make Linux better than the alternatives, just let it at least play in the big league ballpark.
Apple still sells iPods with clicky wheels if this is important to you, but the clicky wheel and the huge screen won't both fit, so you have to choose. You can get accessories that let you go forward/back without touching the iPod at all, but of course they cost extra, and most car models these days offer optional iPod integration that lets you control them from the car stereo for car use.
Isn't the PS2 still kicking all 3 consoles butts by a significant margin? Any theory as to why the Wii is doing better has to take that data point into account, too. Since the PS2 is so cheap, it's more indication that it's simply a "fun per dollar" equation, and as the other consoles get cheaper they'll overtake it.
...or buy a cheap digital converter...
Bandwidth is limited. You can hand-wave and spew hyperbole all you want, but it comes down to priorities. In this case, it's literally first responders vs. watching old broadcast television, because that's where a good chunk of that spectrum is allocated for. I honestly am surprised that you prioritize television over firefighters' lives, but I guess there's one in every crowd.
The problem is that for many people, the old stuff (analog TV) is good enough so they don't see any reason to move to digital TV.
Ask them whether they would like first responders such as the firefighters who went into the world trade center to talk to each other...
They didn't take that long to develop, either.
Only, what... 20 years or so of development... NeXTstep came out in the late 80's.
I'm just glad that if another UNIX vendor goes under, more or less, I still won't have to program for Microsoft platforms.
You'll almost certainly have Java still available to you whether or not Sun goes under, now that it's open source.
No, I'm a software guy not in the network business at all.
My company, though, actually restricts access on the wired network without a registered MAC address or two-factor authentication with a checked-out RSA badge. It's still unencrypted, though, so it's ALMOST as secure as our wireless network, and our level of security is unusual.
The typical low-cost wired switch, also, tends to offer no encryption or authentication, while every wireless router these days supports WPA2.