I can think of at least a few off the top of my head... ClearType was a product of MS Research, and MS SQL server is competitive in the database market because of work done by MS Research. I would bet that SQL server profits alone more than cover their research lab's budget.
I was wondering why your comment sounded so good to me, and then I found this comment from 4 years ago.
Sigh. I should have gotten into hardware and graphics instead of operating systems and storage. Any game companies out there want to hire an expert C programmer with a solid math background that has only a tiny bit of graphics programming experience? I adapt quickly!
That's exactly the kind of little detail that makes the difference between convincing and totally fake. Microsoft! nVidia! Listen up.... Check out this guy's image and make it easier for game developers to use that effect!
That looks terrible. Sure I can't give you an example of something that is signifigantly better, but dirty textures don't fix that plastic feeling. What brick wall have you ever seen with a perfectly straight edge like that? What wall has ever gotten all pixelated when you get close in real life?
I think we have the technology nescicary to handle the data that would be required at the speeds that would be required, but nobody is focusing on things like smoothly increasing the resolution of a texture as it gets closer to the camera, or making it so that the edge of an object isn't a perfectly straight line, or simple curve. We could probably even work it such that an object changes from a large flat texture mapped surface to a complex object when you get close enough to know the difference with todays hardware. That's the kind of stuff that I want to see. Any engine writers out there listening?
Something else that bothers me is intersections of objects. They're all too perfect. Look at those railings in the screenshot you linked? The connections aren't mechanically believable. Sure, it would take the guy creating the scene way longer to have complex intersections, but it would add so much more realism. What I've seen of Doom 3 looks like the people there care about this kind of thing, so there's some hope, but I don't think that many developers have the same patience when it comes to setting release dates.
...something I said almost 4 years ago. In fact, that comment was about 3dfx technology that began to address this exact problem right before nVidia bought them and killed it. All most people care about is framerates, polygons per second, and fill rates. When is the blood going to run down the wall when you shoot somebody? when are we going to have soft edges? Texture and bump maps don't help when you get to the intersection of two surfaces, and it's the biggest thing standing in the way of a believable scene in a 3d engine.
I was referring to the lack of options in purchasing core system parts (processor, memory, etc)
Ok, I gave you the motherboard. Sure, you only have one choice, and you have many with your Athlon 64 (well, perhaps only two if you're counting chipsets...), but what's this about processors and memory? Macs and PCs use the same memory. I don't see how there's a lack of options there. Also, while intel has announced an x86-64 compatable processor, it doesn't exist yet, and when it does, it won't be compatable with your Athlon 64 in any way but in the instruction set. So you, as well as all the G5 owners out there, only have one choice for your processor right now. That's the *same number of options*. It also ignores the fact that with the previous generations of PPC chips, there were two manufacturers of compatable chips that you could use as plugin replacements in your system.
it also keeps the price of components for the PC down.
So, excluding the motherboard, if all the components are the same as the ones used in PCs, how do you figure mac parts are more expensive?
Oh, and if you want to pick nits:
Firstly - go see how many motherboard options you have when building your OWN G4 from parts.
If you only care about it being a G4, and not a Mac (which by definition is only made by Apple. It's their trademark). There are *at least* seven manufacturers of ATX sized motherboards that you can plug G3 and/or G4 processors into. I have 3 of them. They exist. Last I checked there were only five socket 940 boards available out there. None of them are cheap either...
Excluding the motherboard (and even this is debateable. Go try and get a programming manual for your VIA chip), what exactly is proprietary about the Mac that isn't about your Athlon 64? I look inside mine and see a standard AGP video card, PCI SCSI adapter, IDE hard drive and DVD drive, everyday ordinary USB ports, standard audio jacks, regular ordinary ethernet, the same memory that PCs use... I look up on my shelf and I see programming manuals for all the parts inside the machine I care about. The instruction sets of the processors are different, but everything else isn't any less standard than your machine.
Someday you'll grow up, get a job, and have way less free time to "get your hands" dirty. Your time budget will shrink and your financial budget will grow. Then perhaps you'll appreciate that you can spend a few hundred extra dollars to get a machine like a mac.
Ok, so remove the optical drive from one of those portable DVD players and add a hard drive.... There's another few hundred dollars. Where does the rest of that money go?
People always complain about Apple, but does Microsoft make anything that's not overpriced? Hardware, software, it doesn't matter. It all costs too much for what it is. $700 for one of these things? Even those little portable DVD players are down in the $300 range now.
I can't find anybody anywhere that is saying you won't be able to stick a 939 pin Athlon in an 940 pin socket. Plus, Opteron chips will still use the 940 pin platform. You'll be able to upgrade still if you buy now. The only downside is that you'll have to use Registered ECC memory.
The hospital nearest my house (Emerson Hospital, Concord, MA) has a no-cellphones policy in and around the buildings. There are even little signs about the potential for interferance with equipment.
There is also a cell tower on the roof of the main building.
Sometimes a cellphone ban (or some other seemingly ramdom policy) actually is the result of people thinking they know what is best when they really don't. If you want to get me started on the subject, let me know. I'll get off topic and tell you a little story about town government, stupid people, and road salt.
In 30 minutes, I copied the hard drive data to a CD, verified it was the keyboard connector, and returned the items to the owner for FREE. I was rewarded with a $50 gift card to Best Buy.
You lucky bastard. When I'm honest and helpful I usually get rewarded by having my phone number given out to friends, and tons of people asking me for help. Not an excuse to be dishonest, mind you, but reason enough to deny somebody help. If only Chuck were real...
So by informed do you mean "gives all the info about nVidia and is just plain wrong about ATI?" Tom's Hardware Guide hasn't written a credible article since back around 1998. I don't know how anybody can read an article that says you can't play multi-head games on an ATI card (which is just plain false, and has been for at least a few years under windows and practically forever under MacOS and Linux). For quite some time it was true about OpenGL based games, but I believe you can even play those games multi-head now. DirectX games have always been able to use multiple monitors on the Radeon cards.
I guess it shouldn't be surprising though, because when I read that article there was an nVidia ad on every page.
But note: if the goal is to "legitimize" p2p so that artists get paid, how would you do it?
I would do nothing, since the exchange of information between two individuals is already a legitimate practice.
Of course, based on the hypothetical "solutions" you're suggesting, the real question you're looking to answer is "How do you maintain the viability of selling recordings?". If the people who stand to benefit from that can't figure it out, then let them go out of business. Performers can go back to making their money the way they have throughout the majority of human history: Live performances, and commissioned works. The best part about this? The money will be well spread amongst musicians instead of making a small few vastly wealthy and screwing everybody else. The idea of being able to create a recording and have it be an endless fountain of wealth with no more input of labor from the creator was broken anyway. Nobody deserves a free lunch.
You're willing to pay that much more every month to not be without CBS for a few days? No wonder I can't afford cable. Good thing DirecTV still has all the channels I want and costs exactly HALF of the expanded basic rate that Comcast charges in my area.
assuming your data transfer rate is 20 meg per second
Linear reads? Striped volumes? Try 260 MB/second. For linear reads on a well laid out stripe set with a sufficient number of volumes, your bottleneck should be the interconnect. In this case that's 2Gbit Fibre Channel. Hard drives can be quick if you don't care about random access.
Yeah, but with Sprint you can move and keep your old number. I've moved out of area code twice since I got my 508 numer, and I still have it. I haven't lived in the 508 area code for 4 years. If I went to get a new number, they'd make me get a local one, but once you've got a number they let you keep it.
Probably not. You probably want a draconian and socialistic regulation, and you porbably don't understand that it would undermine freedom.
closed aand dismantled just because they don't "Make enough profit"
Businesses that make a profit are never closed because they don't make "enough" profit. If they are closed it's because their liability outweighs the profits (and they are effectively unprofitable) or because the value of the company would earn more invested elsewhere (the opportunity cost is greater than the profits and as such the company is unprofitable). Investing the money elsewhere means somebody somewhere else gets a job. The society as a whole benefits from this even if the individual employees of that company don't.
A protectionist policy stagnates progress. This "greed" you talk about is what drives innovation and motivates people to do better. As for getting skills that can't be outsourced, you can, but either only temporarily as a white collar worker, or by doing something that's not transportable. If you were a mechanic, for example, you wouldn't be outsourced, because a mechanic in India can't fix cars in southern california. If you're not willing to adapt though, eventually you'll wind up at the bottom of the pay scale. There are plenty of those jobs available in the US right now and people don't fill them because they're "worth more than that". Well guess what? They aren't anymore.
Nowhere in the bill of rights or any of our laws does it say you are entitled to a high paying job, and for good reason. Something of value equal to what you want to earn has to be created somewhere or the fountain of wealth will dry up. If the cost of producing what you used to produce goes down in some other part of the world, what you were creating no longer has the same value, and you can no longer be paid the same for it. If you can't get a job that pays what you want it to while creating whatever you used to create (be it a tangable product, a service, or somthing else) it's time for you to take a pay cut, or learn new skills. The world changes too quickly now for people to have the luxury of not haveing to adapt, and we shouldn't have to slow that pace down because a tiny percentage of the population (less than 10%) doesn't care to or can't adapt.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of at least a few off the top of my head... ClearType was a product of MS Research, and MS SQL server is competitive in the database market because of work done by MS Research. I would bet that SQL server profits alone more than cover their research lab's budget.
I was wondering why your comment sounded so good to me, and then I found this comment from 4 years ago.
Sigh. I should have gotten into hardware and graphics instead of operating systems and storage. Any game companies out there want to hire an expert C programmer with a solid math background that has only a tiny bit of graphics programming experience? I adapt quickly!
That's exactly the kind of little detail that makes the difference between convincing and totally fake. Microsoft! nVidia! Listen up.... Check out this guy's image and make it easier for game developers to use that effect!
That looks terrible. Sure I can't give you an example of something that is signifigantly better, but dirty textures don't fix that plastic feeling. What brick wall have you ever seen with a perfectly straight edge like that? What wall has ever gotten all pixelated when you get close in real life?
I think we have the technology nescicary to handle the data that would be required at the speeds that would be required, but nobody is focusing on things like smoothly increasing the resolution of a texture as it gets closer to the camera, or making it so that the edge of an object isn't a perfectly straight line, or simple curve. We could probably even work it such that an object changes from a large flat texture mapped surface to a complex object when you get close enough to know the difference with todays hardware. That's the kind of stuff that I want to see. Any engine writers out there listening?
Something else that bothers me is intersections of objects. They're all too perfect. Look at those railings in the screenshot you linked? The connections aren't mechanically believable. Sure, it would take the guy creating the scene way longer to have complex intersections, but it would add so much more realism. What I've seen of Doom 3 looks like the people there care about this kind of thing, so there's some hope, but I don't think that many developers have the same patience when it comes to setting release dates.
...something I said almost 4 years ago. In fact, that comment was about 3dfx technology that began to address this exact problem right before nVidia bought them and killed it. All most people care about is framerates, polygons per second, and fill rates. When is the blood going to run down the wall when you shoot somebody? when are we going to have soft edges? Texture and bump maps don't help when you get to the intersection of two surfaces, and it's the biggest thing standing in the way of a believable scene in a 3d engine.
This totally neglects TiVo's patent portfolio. They're far from sunk. As it is they don't make hardware...
I was referring to the lack of options in purchasing core system parts (processor, memory, etc)
Ok, I gave you the motherboard. Sure, you only have one choice, and you have many with your Athlon 64 (well, perhaps only two if you're counting chipsets...), but what's this about processors and memory? Macs and PCs use the same memory. I don't see how there's a lack of options there. Also, while intel has announced an x86-64 compatable processor, it doesn't exist yet, and when it does, it won't be compatable with your Athlon 64 in any way but in the instruction set. So you, as well as all the G5 owners out there, only have one choice for your processor right now. That's the *same number of options*. It also ignores the fact that with the previous generations of PPC chips, there were two manufacturers of compatable chips that you could use as plugin replacements in your system.
it also keeps the price of components for the PC down.
So, excluding the motherboard, if all the components are the same as the ones used in PCs, how do you figure mac parts are more expensive?
Oh, and if you want to pick nits:
Firstly - go see how many motherboard options you have when building your OWN G4 from parts.
If you only care about it being a G4, and not a Mac (which by definition is only made by Apple. It's their trademark). There are *at least* seven manufacturers of ATX sized motherboards that you can plug G3 and/or G4 processors into. I have 3 of them. They exist. Last I checked there were only five socket 940 boards available out there. None of them are cheap either...
You're also getting _propriatary_ hardware
Excluding the motherboard (and even this is debateable. Go try and get a programming manual for your VIA chip), what exactly is proprietary about the Mac that isn't about your Athlon 64? I look inside mine and see a standard AGP video card, PCI SCSI adapter, IDE hard drive and DVD drive, everyday ordinary USB ports, standard audio jacks, regular ordinary ethernet, the same memory that PCs use... I look up on my shelf and I see programming manuals for all the parts inside the machine I care about. The instruction sets of the processors are different, but everything else isn't any less standard than your machine.
Someday you'll grow up, get a job, and have way less free time to "get your hands" dirty. Your time budget will shrink and your financial budget will grow. Then perhaps you'll appreciate that you can spend a few hundred extra dollars to get a machine like a mac.
Ok, so remove the optical drive from one of those portable DVD players and add a hard drive.... There's another few hundred dollars. Where does the rest of that money go?
People always complain about Apple, but does Microsoft make anything that's not overpriced? Hardware, software, it doesn't matter. It all costs too much for what it is. $700 for one of these things? Even those little portable DVD players are down in the $300 range now.
I can't find anybody anywhere that is saying you won't be able to stick a 939 pin Athlon in an 940 pin socket. Plus, Opteron chips will still use the 940 pin platform. You'll be able to upgrade still if you buy now. The only downside is that you'll have to use Registered ECC memory.
The hospital nearest my house (Emerson Hospital, Concord, MA) has a no-cellphones policy in and around the buildings. There are even little signs about the potential for interferance with equipment.
There is also a cell tower on the roof of the main building.
Sometimes a cellphone ban (or some other seemingly ramdom policy) actually is the result of people thinking they know what is best when they really don't. If you want to get me started on the subject, let me know. I'll get off topic and tell you a little story about town government, stupid people, and road salt.
In 30 minutes, I copied the hard drive data to a CD, verified it was the keyboard connector, and returned the items to the owner for FREE. I was rewarded with a $50 gift card to Best Buy.
You lucky bastard. When I'm honest and helpful I usually get rewarded by having my phone number given out to friends, and tons of people asking me for help. Not an excuse to be dishonest, mind you, but reason enough to deny somebody help. If only Chuck were real...
So by informed do you mean "gives all the info about nVidia and is just plain wrong about ATI?" Tom's Hardware Guide hasn't written a credible article since back around 1998. I don't know how anybody can read an article that says you can't play multi-head games on an ATI card (which is just plain false, and has been for at least a few years under windows and practically forever under MacOS and Linux). For quite some time it was true about OpenGL based games, but I believe you can even play those games multi-head now. DirectX games have always been able to use multiple monitors on the Radeon cards.
I guess it shouldn't be surprising though, because when I read that article there was an nVidia ad on every page.
Hah! Nice troll.
Those people are already breaking an existing law. No debate required over what new laws need to be passed.
But note: if the goal is to "legitimize" p2p so that artists get paid, how would you do it?
I would do nothing, since the exchange of information between two individuals is already a legitimate practice.
Of course, based on the hypothetical "solutions" you're suggesting, the real question you're looking to answer is "How do you maintain the viability of selling recordings?". If the people who stand to benefit from that can't figure it out, then let them go out of business. Performers can go back to making their money the way they have throughout the majority of human history: Live performances, and commissioned works. The best part about this? The money will be well spread amongst musicians instead of making a small few vastly wealthy and screwing everybody else. The idea of being able to create a recording and have it be an endless fountain of wealth with no more input of labor from the creator was broken anyway. Nobody deserves a free lunch.
$0.06? Holy crap!
I pay $0.19.
Makes your math come out a bit different, huh?
The answer starts with a dollar sign and is followed by lots of numbers.
You're willing to pay that much more every month to not be without CBS for a few days? No wonder I can't afford cable. Good thing DirecTV still has all the channels I want and costs exactly HALF of the expanded basic rate that Comcast charges in my area.
assuming your data transfer rate is 20 meg per second
Linear reads? Striped volumes? Try 260 MB/second. For linear reads on a well laid out stripe set with a sufficient number of volumes, your bottleneck should be the interconnect. In this case that's 2Gbit Fibre Channel. Hard drives can be quick if you don't care about random access.
Dish wants to pick and choose what they want to air
Over their own network? God forbid.
You could whitelist those senders so they didn't have to perform the computation.
Either way, a patent encumbered system is unacceptable, no matter how technologically sound it is.
Far too high.
Yeah, but with Sprint you can move and keep your old number. I've moved out of area code twice since I got my 508 numer, and I still have it. I haven't lived in the 508 area code for 4 years. If I went to get a new number, they'd make me get a local one, but once you've got a number they let you keep it.
any viable business should not be closed
Are recommending <gasp> pro-business legislation?
Probably not. You probably want a draconian and socialistic regulation, and you porbably don't understand that it would undermine freedom.
closed aand dismantled just because they don't "Make enough profit"
Businesses that make a profit are never closed because they don't make "enough" profit. If they are closed it's because their liability outweighs the profits (and they are effectively unprofitable) or because the value of the company would earn more invested elsewhere (the opportunity cost is greater than the profits and as such the company is unprofitable). Investing the money elsewhere means somebody somewhere else gets a job. The society as a whole benefits from this even if the individual employees of that company don't.
A protectionist policy stagnates progress. This "greed" you talk about is what drives innovation and motivates people to do better. As for getting skills that can't be outsourced, you can, but either only temporarily as a white collar worker, or by doing something that's not transportable. If you were a mechanic, for example, you wouldn't be outsourced, because a mechanic in India can't fix cars in southern california. If you're not willing to adapt though, eventually you'll wind up at the bottom of the pay scale. There are plenty of those jobs available in the US right now and people don't fill them because they're "worth more than that". Well guess what? They aren't anymore.
Nowhere in the bill of rights or any of our laws does it say you are entitled to a high paying job, and for good reason. Something of value equal to what you want to earn has to be created somewhere or the fountain of wealth will dry up. If the cost of producing what you used to produce goes down in some other part of the world, what you were creating no longer has the same value, and you can no longer be paid the same for it. If you can't get a job that pays what you want it to while creating whatever you used to create (be it a tangable product, a service, or somthing else) it's time for you to take a pay cut, or learn new skills. The world changes too quickly now for people to have the luxury of not haveing to adapt, and we shouldn't have to slow that pace down because a tiny percentage of the population (less than 10%) doesn't care to or can't adapt.