I hold no grudges and may even make small conversation should I run into anyone on the street that I knew from high school.
This does not necessarily mean I wish to have them know details about my current life or continue communicating with them in any way.
In many ways you could have called me the "cool" nerd. I knew how to do things that were useful and interesting, and I was fun to hang out with for the most part because I could carry a conversation about most anything. I was a social pariah by choice.
I just wasn't interested in what most of these people had to say and didn't feel it necessary to subject either myself to their babble or them to my false niceties on a regular basis.
Nothing against those people, and I'm not saying I'm better than them, but our interests were in vastly opposite directions. Most people would talk about sports etc... I have yet to sit through an entire game of anything in my entire life, except for a couple of times I went to a game live.
Me and my friends that I actually kept in touch with on the other hand, we built a life-size scorpion out of solid steel, using a 5/8 leaf spring for the bow and a 20 ton winch to draw it.
See? Most would look at me like a madman, or at the very least, slightly looney for doing something like that. We on the other hand just liked making things, we all liked the roman era, and wanted to see if we could embed a rebar bolt into a cliff face with it.
Yes, I'm ok. Are you? Its not good to feign ignorance because you're embarrassed about knowing something. Such as recognizing a(probably bad, text-based) impression of the man who was the inventor of Stop-Acting. Honestly, I don't know anyone who wouldn't recognize that to some extent. Though I may have put the wrong two words together for proper stop-acting syntax...
The Original star trek series has been on reruns so many times theres not a lot of people out there who haven't caught at least part of an episode, and many will remember Shatner just because of that style of acting.
Bad actor? I guess by some standards. Isn't it every actors dream to become famous for acting however? He's certainly achieved that, however it was done, and he still gets acting jobs. Often good acting jobs, because however ridiculous it may seem, he does come off as sincere to a lot of people.
Not everybody will be interested(and thats part of what will actually appeal to some, like myself), but it will get a, most likely rather fanatical, following just out of the cult of personality due to the fact that Shatner used to be Captain Kirk.
I actually have high hopes for this thing. See, the people I wouldn't bother talking to in high school would never sign up for something like this anyways. However there may be a few that I would have liked to talk to that I didn't, that would sign up for something like this.
Generally speaking, a lot of nerds are social pariahs and don't necessarily WANT to talk to anyone they went to high school with. I know I'm in that category. All but for 2 people that I still keep in touch with from back then, I'd just as soon never see or hear from them again.
The whole point is that its social networking for those that don't really like the current social networking. Using facebook is often to these people the same as being in high school again. I had a pretty good high school experience compared to some nerds, but I don't keep in touch with most of those idiots for a reason.
I take that back, facebook is WORSE than being in high school again, because in high school you could ignore people and generally they would leave you alone. On facebook you ignore them and they whine to everyone they know that you're ignoring them and then those people whine at you. Don't look at me like I'm an elitist jerk or something, everyone has a few of those people in their histories.
I have this ridiculous fear that someday we're all going to be subjected to a nuclear winter due to a "Critical App" that causes some important facility to still have IE6 installed.
This is so true. Experimental treatments need to not have quite so many regulations around them. I agree that some regulations are necessary, but there are way way too many. It currently takes something like 10 years to get a drug from development just to the human testing stage plus another 10 to get it to treatment? Plus all of the expenses associated with even getting it into trials?
The whole process seems to be built around people with gobs of money abusing the system to make even more gobs of money. People yelling "Conspiracy" on the stem cell front have a good bloody reason to. Most people don't seem to have a single clue about how MUCH stem cells could potentially CURE. We're talking 10's, even 100's of billions of dollars of current drug/treatment revenue streams disappearing. There are trials in Canada right now that have cured people of cancer. Now, this is anecdotal evidence, but I know one woman who had lung cancer, the only treatment she received was the stem cells. She's cancer free right now. Nothing else would have saved her, the best they could do with other treatments was extend her life.
I mean shit, if they take the gloves off the research on this stuff who even/cares/ if it causes cancer in a few people, the more its used the better it will be understood, the faster it can be adapted and used to treat any new cancers it creates.
Yeah, it was, but it was due to the way the game is programmed to handle things, and it was programmed to take better advantage of multiple cores, little to no testing was done on single core machines. Once the game engine is set up to handle multi-threading to begin with, patching on support for single cores isn't a huge huge deal, but it does add another layer for things to potentially break.
The reason a lot of people chose PCs over Macs originally was because MICROSOFT was more open and friendly. That right there should be enough warning for anyone.
Who's ever needed hardware assisted decode? CPUS have been overpowered enough to handle this without breaking a sweat for ages now.... The only minor problems along the way are the same ones that have always been... some codecs etc relying on some random bit of hardware support that the IGPs don't have currently. Which by the way, has seen issues from way back then, right up to more recently, and the next video format will see it happen again, its just cyclical.
As for the IGPs gaining market share: Yes they did, if you include Laptop/Netbook sales as well. If you include only desktops, GPUs are seeing an increased market share, and if you take the more powerful IGPs that are made more for gaming in laptops and include them in the discrete GPU list(because technically, the higher end ATI/Nvidia ones mostly are, they just share memory) You also see an increase. I'm probably looking at the same studies you are, but I'm interpreting the data differently(I would say more precisely).
Also, Intels most IGPs STILL don't do hardware decode for most stuff. They tacked on h.264 a little while ago and thats it.
One of the trends over the course of 2009 is seeing a lot of people go for more portability in their gaming, which means laptops. That inevitably skews any results in favor of IGPs because thats really the only option. Even the dedicated GPU+Memory solutions are still technically IGP because they're fully integrated with the motherboard etc. Looking at it on the surface is a bad way to look at things. As is the case for many things, the surface is highly deceptive.
The point is that its no more marginal than it always has been. Theres actually been an increase in market share for dedicated GPUs, and market studies are now seeing a large demand for discrete video cards for laptops even.
You sir are the one clutching at straws. Also: The recently for that would have been the P1, I had an old one, and while it definitely wouldn't do anything even remotely high res, but it would play most of the video files I needed it to... because standard resolution sizes were much lower back then anyways. The 800x600 desktop was even still relatively new back then. The IGP has really just evolved with the needs of the lowest common denominator consumer ever since it was first spawned. First one for most of the current(excluding HD) formats was probably the P3 generation of PCs.
Aero was actually a speed bump in the IGP road. Up until then IGP had been plenty of gfx rendering power for anyone not doing a lot of 3d gaming. I may be stretching your memory here but 1080p, even 720p video files have not even been the norm for all that long. There has been no "major advancement" in IGPs, in fact they're just catching back up recently to the utility they had before the advent of Vista and h.264 etc.
Sure the library of games you can play on them is larger, but that will happen regardless as all of the hardware gets more powerful and the games do not.
You make points that are not actually points, then also blame some sort of mythical lack of dev ability to cope with multiple CPU cores when devs actually have their hands tied by target audiences. Multi-threaded game engines have to be built from the ground up to BE multi threaded. This doesn't work well when you want your game to run on single core systems as well(See recent problems with Mass Effect 2 on single core systems for reference) The developers are just now moving away from programming for single core because the larger gaming community, which includes many of your casuals who won't upgrade for 5 years+ after buying a new PC, because their systems CAN actually still run the new games, if slowly, on low settings, are just now getting to the point where those guys are being forced to upgrade, and publishers, and developers both, don't want to jump the gun on cutting out potential markets.
Also: The Phsyx processor more closely resembles a CPU than a GPU, as that is where it is actually taking load from. The CPU used to handle the vast majority of physics calcs so Nvidia got the bright idea to lend a helping hand.
Tell that to AMD who have sold 2 million directx11 GPUs since release. (http://www.dailytech.com/ATI+Sells+Over+2+Million+DirectX+11+GPUs+Celebrates+With+Radeon+Cake/article17349.htm)
IGP are sufficient for 90% of users... but that hasn't changed since back in the Pentium 1 days. Many PCs were equipped with IGP or something that amounted to the same thing but in card form even then.
Also: GPGPU is NOT meant for gfx processing on the fly at all, so it has absolutely nothing to do with devs having to target the lowest common denominator. You even state that its useless except for scientific purposes in your own comment. The entire purpose of the GPGPU move is towards scientific purposes where vast quantities of repeated calcs have to be done. Something that GPUs excel at.
At least get SOME of your facts straight before spouting FUD.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, and I haven't had time to read the entire article, but wouldn't this also bypass the conventional data transmission necessity for quantum communications?
What also irritates is the hordes of gamers/geeks that these folks at Ubisoft and EA(among others) have offering GOOD, REASONABLE advice on how to effectively nullify the casual "copy it from a buddy" pirate while not making it a huge PITA for their actual paying customers.
Honestly, the rest of the pirates they can safely ignore, since these people were either never going to turn into sales figures anyways or they were pirating to demo the product, in which case your sale depends on the quality of the product and the interest that particular person has in your particular product, and DRM can only serve as a deterrent to eventually purchasing your product to this group.
I myself generally fall into the latter category as I pirate-to-demo. I've been burned by too many flashy demos, some of which actually contained fun gameplay/that didn't even exist in the real game/. If the particular title catches my interest, and its NOT bound in 6 different layers of crashing DRM, then I buy it. Over the last 5 years or so I've probably spent in excess of $3k on video games, but I would be labeled as a criminal for it simply because I'm picky and don't like making $40-50+ leaps of faith.
Many of the games I've pirated over the years, I haven't purchased, but most I eventually have. My spending has trailed off over the last year however. Up until recently I was pirating the game, buying it if it was good, then rather than dealing with the headache leaving it in its cellophane and playing my actual working pirated copy... when I saw the mass of people still having problems, and informing the companies about the problems, and the reason for it, I stopped buying from those certain companies.
Now, many will harangue me for still continuing to pirate from those particular companies and *contribute to the problem*, and suggest instead that I forgo playing altogether. This is false and I suspect is being distributed by certain company CEOs/Managers in the hopes of it counteracting the increase in piracy rates these companies are experiencing with the more and more draconic DRM schemes they implement.
So people: PIRATE. Vote with your wallets, don't buy the game, but pirate it instead. If sales figures do not increase, but instead go DOWN as piracy rates INCREASE, eventually the execs will be forced to answer for blowing millions and millions of dollars on schemes and methods that are doing absolutely nothing. The only way to really get the point across is if the stockholders can finally look at it and say "Wow, this crap is costing us millions, and doing absolutely nothing. Its in fact having the opposite of intended effect". Then you'll get publisher reform, and the execs will be forced into abandoning their expensive DRM in favor of something much lighter and more manageable.
"640k (of usable ram) ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates
People try to make these kinds of far-reaching predictions without really thinking it through all the time. This is nothing new, though this guy has less balls than most in that his quotes aren't even concrete enough to truly be ridiculed in the future.
Some, like this one:
"1. No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to."
at least have the decency to be stupid enough for it to be ridiculed right now.
The Internet, as it is, is in perpetual Beta. I don't know about the rest of/. but I like it that way, and its been doing everything I want it to do for several years now. This whole thing is a pile of semi-dated garbage at best, and a thinly veiled promotion of Internet censorship and legalized,/encouraged/ monopolies at worst. The timing and wording of this entire thing shortly after a M$ announcement of a large investment in the cloud too...
Or perhaps my tin foil hat is wedged on a little too tightly this morning.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! Indeed.
I hold no grudges and may even make small conversation should I run into anyone on the street that I knew from high school.
This does not necessarily mean I wish to have them know details about my current life or continue communicating with them in any way.
In many ways you could have called me the "cool" nerd. I knew how to do things that were useful and interesting, and I was fun to hang out with for the most part because I could carry a conversation about most anything. I was a social pariah by choice.
I just wasn't interested in what most of these people had to say and didn't feel it necessary to subject either myself to their babble or them to my false niceties on a regular basis.
Nothing against those people, and I'm not saying I'm better than them, but our interests were in vastly opposite directions. Most people would talk about sports etc... I have yet to sit through an entire game of anything in my entire life, except for a couple of times I went to a game live.
Me and my friends that I actually kept in touch with on the other hand, we built a life-size scorpion out of solid steel, using a 5/8 leaf spring for the bow and a 20 ton winch to draw it.
See? Most would look at me like a madman, or at the very least, slightly looney for doing something like that. We on the other hand just liked making things, we all liked the roman era, and wanted to see if we could embed a rebar bolt into a cliff face with it.
Yes, I'm ok. Are you? Its not good to feign ignorance because you're embarrassed about knowing something. Such as recognizing a(probably bad, text-based) impression of the man who was the inventor of Stop-Acting. Honestly, I don't know anyone who wouldn't recognize that to some extent. Though I may have put the wrong two words together for proper stop-acting syntax...
The Original star trek series has been on reruns so many times theres not a lot of people out there who haven't caught at least part of an episode, and many will remember Shatner just because of that style of acting.
Bad actor? I guess by some standards. Isn't it every actors dream to become famous for acting however? He's certainly achieved that, however it was done, and he still gets acting jobs. Often good acting jobs, because however ridiculous it may seem, he does come off as sincere to a lot of people.
Not everybody will be interested(and thats part of what will actually appeal to some, like myself), but it will get a, most likely rather fanatical, following just out of the cult of personality due to the fact that Shatner used to be Captain Kirk.
I actually have high hopes for this thing. See, the people I wouldn't bother talking to in high school would never sign up for something like this anyways. However there may be a few that I would have liked to talk to that I didn't, that would sign up for something like this.
Generally speaking, a lot of nerds are social pariahs and don't necessarily WANT to talk to anyone they went to high school with. I know I'm in that category. All but for 2 people that I still keep in touch with from back then, I'd just as soon never see or hear from them again.
Plus is freaking SHATNER.
This. Will. Get. Rabid followers. Almost. Instantly.
The whole point is that its social networking for those that don't really like the current social networking. Using facebook is often to these people the same as being in high school again. I had a pretty good high school experience compared to some nerds, but I don't keep in touch with most of those idiots for a reason.
I take that back, facebook is WORSE than being in high school again, because in high school you could ignore people and generally they would leave you alone. On facebook you ignore them and they whine to everyone they know that you're ignoring them and then those people whine at you. Don't look at me like I'm an elitist jerk or something, everyone has a few of those people in their histories.
I have this ridiculous fear that someday we're all going to be subjected to a nuclear winter due to a "Critical App" that causes some important facility to still have IE6 installed.
For the hope of humanity everywhere, please MOD THIS MAN UP.
I'd do it myself but I don't have mod points. :(
As an aside: Slashdot should start using some of these exploits to start flashing "UPGRADE" in big red letters across peoples screens.
Sure, it'll get a few people fired for goofing off at work at first, but then those that are left might actually follow the advice!
Why does it seem like I think that every third or fourth science article I see should be in Idle?
I don't know whats worse, that or the fact that these people are getting paid to produce this research.
This is so true. Experimental treatments need to not have quite so many regulations around them. I agree that some regulations are necessary, but there are way way too many. It currently takes something like 10 years to get a drug from development just to the human testing stage plus another 10 to get it to treatment? Plus all of the expenses associated with even getting it into trials?
The whole process seems to be built around people with gobs of money abusing the system to make even more gobs of money. People yelling "Conspiracy" on the stem cell front have a good bloody reason to. Most people don't seem to have a single clue about how MUCH stem cells could potentially CURE. We're talking 10's, even 100's of billions of dollars of current drug/treatment revenue streams disappearing. There are trials in Canada right now that have cured people of cancer. Now, this is anecdotal evidence, but I know one woman who had lung cancer, the only treatment she received was the stem cells. She's cancer free right now. Nothing else would have saved her, the best they could do with other treatments was extend her life.
I mean shit, if they take the gloves off the research on this stuff who even /cares/ if it causes cancer in a few people, the more its used the better it will be understood, the faster it can be adapted and used to treat any new cancers it creates.
Yay for Troll 2.0
Accuse someone else of trolling while actually trolling yourself.
You can do better, really. I hear some people have upgraded to Troll 4.0 already!
Then again, maybe /you/ can't do better.
This will spawn a whole new generation of wrist-mounted cell phone holders.
I must extend a heartfelt thank you to the EU as well.
As a Canadian I knew that our governments position was not going to influence the overall picture on its own.
Hell, the US even tried to put Canada on its Special 301 watch list over this crap(http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/3911/125/).
Yeah, it was, but it was due to the way the game is programmed to handle things, and it was programmed to take better advantage of multiple cores, little to no testing was done on single core machines. Once the game engine is set up to handle multi-threading to begin with, patching on support for single cores isn't a huge huge deal, but it does add another layer for things to potentially break.
Honestly, its Apple. Is anyone really surprised?
The reason a lot of people chose PCs over Macs originally was because MICROSOFT was more open and friendly. That right there should be enough warning for anyone.
Who's ever needed hardware assisted decode? CPUS have been overpowered enough to handle this without breaking a sweat for ages now.... The only minor problems along the way are the same ones that have always been... some codecs etc relying on some random bit of hardware support that the IGPs don't have currently. Which by the way, has seen issues from way back then, right up to more recently, and the next video format will see it happen again, its just cyclical.
As for the IGPs gaining market share: Yes they did, if you include Laptop/Netbook sales as well. If you include only desktops, GPUs are seeing an increased market share, and if you take the more powerful IGPs that are made more for gaming in laptops and include them in the discrete GPU list(because technically, the higher end ATI/Nvidia ones mostly are, they just share memory) You also see an increase. I'm probably looking at the same studies you are, but I'm interpreting the data differently(I would say more precisely).
Also, Intels most IGPs STILL don't do hardware decode for most stuff. They tacked on h.264 a little while ago and thats it.
One of the trends over the course of 2009 is seeing a lot of people go for more portability in their gaming, which means laptops. That inevitably skews any results in favor of IGPs because thats really the only option. Even the dedicated GPU+Memory solutions are still technically IGP because they're fully integrated with the motherboard etc. Looking at it on the surface is a bad way to look at things. As is the case for many things, the surface is highly deceptive.
The point is that its no more marginal than it always has been. Theres actually been an increase in market share for dedicated GPUs, and market studies are now seeing a large demand for discrete video cards for laptops even.
You sir are the one clutching at straws. Also: The recently for that would have been the P1, I had an old one, and while it definitely wouldn't do anything even remotely high res, but it would play most of the video files I needed it to... because standard resolution sizes were much lower back then anyways. The 800x600 desktop was even still relatively new back then. The IGP has really just evolved with the needs of the lowest common denominator consumer ever since it was first spawned. First one for most of the current(excluding HD) formats was probably the P3 generation of PCs.
Aero was actually a speed bump in the IGP road. Up until then IGP had been plenty of gfx rendering power for anyone not doing a lot of 3d gaming. I may be stretching your memory here but 1080p, even 720p video files have not even been the norm for all that long. There has been no "major advancement" in IGPs, in fact they're just catching back up recently to the utility they had before the advent of Vista and h.264 etc.
Sure the library of games you can play on them is larger, but that will happen regardless as all of the hardware gets more powerful and the games do not.
You make points that are not actually points, then also blame some sort of mythical lack of dev ability to cope with multiple CPU cores when devs actually have their hands tied by target audiences. Multi-threaded game engines have to be built from the ground up to BE multi threaded. This doesn't work well when you want your game to run on single core systems as well(See recent problems with Mass Effect 2 on single core systems for reference) The developers are just now moving away from programming for single core because the larger gaming community, which includes many of your casuals who won't upgrade for 5 years+ after buying a new PC, because their systems CAN actually still run the new games, if slowly, on low settings, are just now getting to the point where those guys are being forced to upgrade, and publishers, and developers both, don't want to jump the gun on cutting out potential markets.
Also: The Phsyx processor more closely resembles a CPU than a GPU, as that is where it is actually taking load from. The CPU used to handle the vast majority of physics calcs so Nvidia got the bright idea to lend a helping hand.
Tell that to AMD who have sold 2 million directx11 GPUs since release. (http://www.dailytech.com/ATI+Sells+Over+2+Million+DirectX+11+GPUs+Celebrates+With+Radeon+Cake/article17349.htm)
IGP are sufficient for 90% of users... but that hasn't changed since back in the Pentium 1 days. Many PCs were equipped with IGP or something that amounted to the same thing but in card form even then.
Also: GPGPU is NOT meant for gfx processing on the fly at all, so it has absolutely nothing to do with devs having to target the lowest common denominator. You even state that its useless except for scientific purposes in your own comment. The entire purpose of the GPGPU move is towards scientific purposes where vast quantities of repeated calcs have to be done. Something that GPUs excel at.
At least get SOME of your facts straight before spouting FUD.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, and I haven't had time to read the entire article, but wouldn't this also bypass the conventional data transmission necessity for quantum communications?
This. I agree with everything stated in parent.
/that didn't even exist in the real game/. If the particular title catches my interest, and its NOT bound in 6 different layers of crashing DRM, then I buy it. Over the last 5 years or so I've probably spent in excess of $3k on video games, but I would be labeled as a criminal for it simply because I'm picky and don't like making $40-50+ leaps of faith.
What also irritates is the hordes of gamers/geeks that these folks at Ubisoft and EA(among others) have offering GOOD, REASONABLE advice on how to effectively nullify the casual "copy it from a buddy" pirate while not making it a huge PITA for their actual paying customers.
Honestly, the rest of the pirates they can safely ignore, since these people were either never going to turn into sales figures anyways or they were pirating to demo the product, in which case your sale depends on the quality of the product and the interest that particular person has in your particular product, and DRM can only serve as a deterrent to eventually purchasing your product to this group.
I myself generally fall into the latter category as I pirate-to-demo. I've been burned by too many flashy demos, some of which actually contained fun gameplay
Many of the games I've pirated over the years, I haven't purchased, but most I eventually have. My spending has trailed off over the last year however. Up until recently I was pirating the game, buying it if it was good, then rather than dealing with the headache leaving it in its cellophane and playing my actual working pirated copy... when I saw the mass of people still having problems, and informing the companies about the problems, and the reason for it, I stopped buying from those certain companies.
Now, many will harangue me for still continuing to pirate from those particular companies and *contribute to the problem*, and suggest instead that I forgo playing altogether. This is false and I suspect is being distributed by certain company CEOs/Managers in the hopes of it counteracting the increase in piracy rates these companies are experiencing with the more and more draconic DRM schemes they implement.
So people: PIRATE. Vote with your wallets, don't buy the game, but pirate it instead. If sales figures do not increase, but instead go DOWN as piracy rates INCREASE, eventually the execs will be forced to answer for blowing millions and millions of dollars on schemes and methods that are doing absolutely nothing. The only way to really get the point across is if the stockholders can finally look at it and say "Wow, this crap is costing us millions, and doing absolutely nothing. Its in fact having the opposite of intended effect". Then you'll get publisher reform, and the execs will be forced into abandoning their expensive DRM in favor of something much lighter and more manageable.
"640k (of usable ram) ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates
/. but I like it that way, and its been doing everything I want it to do for several years now. This whole thing is a pile of semi-dated garbage at best, and a thinly veiled promotion of Internet censorship and legalized, /encouraged/ monopolies at worst. The timing and wording of this entire thing shortly after a M$ announcement of a large investment in the cloud too...
People try to make these kinds of far-reaching predictions without really thinking it through all the time. This is nothing new, though this guy has less balls than most in that his quotes aren't even concrete enough to truly be ridiculed in the future.
Some, like this one:
"1. No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to."
at least have the decency to be stupid enough for it to be ridiculed right now.
The Internet, as it is, is in perpetual Beta. I don't know about the rest of
Or perhaps my tin foil hat is wedged on a little too tightly this morning.