SaarCOR was getting about 10 FPS for Quake3 with a minimal FPGA-based implementation of a hardware raytracer running at less than 100 MHz with a fraction of the gate budget of a modern GPU... in 2005. Raytracing is highly scalable - it's an "embarrassingly parallelizable" problem - so if nVidia is really working on raytracing hardware they could well be able to beat Intel to the punch.
"I'll be interested in discussing a bigger question, though: 'When will hardware graphics pipelines become sufficiently programmable to efficiently implement ray tracing and other global illumination techniques?'. I believe that the answer is now, and more so from now on! As GPUs become increasingly programmable, the variety of algorithms that can be mapped onto the computing substrate of a GPU becomes ever broader.
As part of this quest, I routinely ask artists and programmers at movie and special effects studios what features and flexibility they will need to do their rendering on GPUs, and they say that they could never render on hardware! What do they use now: crayons? Actually, they use hardware now, in the form of programmable general-purpose CPUs. I believe that the future convergence of realistic and real-time rendering lies in highly programmable special-purpose GPUs."
Very interesting. A couple of years later he was arguing against special purpose GPUs for ray tracing, and for the use of "General Purpose GPUs", and the new nVidia 8xxx series seem to be following that path... away from dedicated rendering pipelines and towards a GPU that's more like a highly parallel CPU.
For example, the meeting in Norway was not to approve or disapprove of OOXML, it was to determine if there had been any irregularities in the Norway vote.
Between the time of the original vote and now new information about the proposal has been published by the various voting groups. How exactly is it regular for this second ballot to be strictly based on the voting process?
This reminds me of the time I was at a neighborhood committee meeting and the bloke running the meeting basically told everyone to hold questions until they'd finished some procedural matters, then a friend of his called for a vote before the question period, and anyone who tried to object was told they were out of order, and finally the question period was called off because the vote had been taken. Apparently the people who had questions about the vote were supposed to have recited some "rules of order" mantra earlier and the guy running the meeting was the only expert weasel.
All this was technically legitimate according, but it was blatant abuse of a loophole in the rules.
The situation in Norway seems to be similar.
I would like to see your argument for why this kind of chicanery should be considered "regular".
Microsoft, and everyone else, has to implement OOXML fully if the EU says they do.
1. That's what people said about FIPS-151. The POSIX subsystem was carefully designed to just satisfy FIPS-151 while being as limited an implementation as they could get away with.
2. There's no reason that they have to implement it on any specific schedule. It doesn't matter to Microsoft if it takes them five, ten, or twenty years to implement it fully... they only need to be able to promise that an implementation is under development or waiting on approval.
3. If Microsoft can finagle the approval process for the standard, finagling the approval process for implementations is child's play.
But you're the one that said in an earlier comment that you have friends with huge downloaded music collections and that you yourself pay for your music.
I suspect you might want to compare my name with the name of the person you think I am.
I, on the other hand, research my music well before buying it and therefore buy albums that are enjoyable all the way through. And since that music is invariably older stuff, then it suggests to me that the quality of modern music is generally lower than older stuff.
What that suggests to me is that your taste happens to more closely match that of an earlier period of popular music.
You can copy something from a degrading medium to a non-degrading one and it sounds the same. Remastering is about using modern technology to improve the sound quality of the original.
Or to get a digital recording AT ALL from recordings that were originally mastered in analog.
How does that make you feel knowing you pay for all yours legally, just as I do?
How I feel about it has nothing to do with the quality or disposability of the music.
I doubt anyone on Slashdot is going to admit that they buy the mass-produced plastic music that is in the charts.
I'll admit it. I've bought popular music, many times. I've even bought music by boy bands. Some popular music is popular because it's, well, actually good!
so you are defending something that you yourself are not a part of. Why?
First they came for the Communists, - but I was not a communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, - but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, - but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.
-- Pastor Martin Niemöller
The RIAA aren't the Nazis, but on the other hand I'm only defending modern music from criticism, not smuggling people out of concentration camps.
Like I said in the OP, absolutely loads of [old music is available today]
Really? Tell me where I can get a remastered copy of Minus 10 and Counting, or any of the other tapes I bought over the decades that have (apparently) been lost. If 5% of the music released the same month as Led Zeppelin IV is still available, I'll eat your hat (not mine, I don't like how my conditioner tastes).
If 1% of the music being released today is available in 40 years that'll still leave more tracks for your grandchildren to select from when they're crotchety old fogeys bemoaning the mass-produced plastic music of 2058 than you've got available now, because there's so much more mass-produced plastic music... sorry, I mean classics... to choose from.
And it won't *need* to be remastered, digital music doesn't degrade.
Note: to attempt to head off comments like a vast array of (presumably illegally downloaded) music I will note that so far as I can recall the only time I have ever used a P2P service was for the purpose of fetching legal install CDs for open source software. The core of my digital music collection is ripped from my own tapes and CDs, supplemented with purchases from eMusic and iTunes, and samples from artist's websites via MP3 blogs.
how come the charts are filled with turgid crap? We're constantly being told that the 18-25s buy most of the music after all...
"Bah, Humbug, kids today listen to such trash. There hasn't been any good music since Joplin died.
"Scott Joplin, that is."
I don't know how old you are, but there were older folks saying exactly the same thing about your beloved Beatles and Led Zeppelin, and *their* parents and grandparents were decrying that terrible stuff they were listening to in the 30s and 40s. Further back, there was a riot at the opening of Stravinski's Rite of Spring in 1913, but by 1940 Disney was using it in Fantasia.
Oh, and Scott Joplin died in 1817. So I guess Stravinski made the cut.
I'm still listening to albums like Led Zeppelin IV and Sgt. Peppers that were released 35 and 40 years ago respectively that I will probably continue listening to until the day I die.
How much music released 35 and 40 years ago is still available today?
How much old music is only available now because it's so cheap to distribute it online?
Microsoft doesn't HAVE to implement OOXML, all they have to do is have a standard that smells like Office "in the works" for the folks who need a checkmark against "standard file format" to keep buying Office.
It's just like the way they implemented POSIX to satisfy FIPS-151. They produced a deliberately crippled POSIX subsystem and later when it turned out they actually needed a working UNIX environment on NT they bought the company that had implemented one.
compare news from a blog versus news from a newspaper.
You're comparing the wrong units. If I read the newspaper, if I were really fanatical about it, I could imagine subscribing to maybe two daily and three or four weekend papers. Most people read one. In the same time I would read a dozen or more blogs, easily, without trying.
A blogger is like a reporter, not a whole newspaper staff. Compare a newspaper to a dozen blogs, if you want to compare them.
i think you'll find you'll put more trust in the newspaper than the blog.
Not for 15 years have I been willing to trust the newspapers over the net of a million lies. Because there's truth in those lies. And over and over again newspapers have proven themselves no more worthy of my trust than the net.
now try to find a way to get news to you in a way more trustworthy than the newspaper.
I don't have to. I'm not arguing that the net is better, I'm arguing that it's no worse.
in the end, you'll still be turning to them as the most trustworrhy source of information in the pile of untrustworthy sources before you
It's been 15 years now since I've done that.
your criticism of the trustworthiness of newsreporting would have more validity if there were some magical method of newsreporting that was superior.
Straw man. You're still trying to get me to defend a position I haven't taken, and I'm not going to fall for that hoary old trick. To be able to argue that the newspapers are no more trustworthy than the blogs, I merely need to be able to argue that the blogs are at worse, no worse.
Again, I'm not criticizing the papers, I'm criticizing the people who trust them more than they should.
Do they? Not if someone had to compare screen caps to prove it.
in the compressed images, you can see the artifacts.
Artifacts in screen captures don't necessarily mean noticeable artifacts in moving video. Screen captures in NTSC look like crap, far far worse than you "really" see when watching TV, thanks to the persistence of vision.
Don't forget that the makeup of teams, the behavior of other players, and even the rules of baseball all depend on what happens in the game. If someone was setting a 109-game hitting streak in the 1890s, then they would be facing more determined pitchers and probably better pitchers by the time they were more than 20 or 30 games into the run. It seems pretty good odds that would have changed their batting average for that year.:)
How are real hitting streaks distributed in time? Do they bunch up in the 1800s and early 1900s the way their simulations did?
Were there changes in the rules between the 1890s and the 1940s that might have reduced the effect of this kind of feedback mechanism?
Collectively they are not that different. I'll get back to that in a second.
Reporters have the benefit of being schooled and trained, and the nature of their assignments is proportional to their competence, experience, and reputation.
Reporters are trained in reporting, but they're often NOT trained in what they are reporting on. There's just too much they'd have to learn, so usually they're experts in reporting but amateurs in the subject of the story.
Bloggers are usually not trained in reporting, but are very often experts in the field they are blogging about.
Add to that layers of fact-checkers, editors and everyone else all the way up the chain to the general public
For bloggers, that happens after publication. So you get to see it, and you get to see when the fact checking fails. Now individual members of the public may not be very good at this, but there are thousands, tens of thousand, even millions of times as many of them.
And there may also be many times more bloggers blogging on a subject than there are reporters reporting on it.
that hardly compares to the what's required to cover the news of the day
Possibly so. My point is not that bloggers can replace reporters, but rather that the idea that we should more or less automatically trust the hidden editing that goes on inside a newspaper more than the public debate that goes on in a blog. I'm not objecting to the newspaper, I'm objecting to the trust.
Can we ever have anything better than the illusion of trust?
Sure. Not having the illusion of trust. I don't mean having real trust, I mean having a realistic appreciation of how much trust is really appropriate.
what you attribute to malicious intent, i attribute to accident.
In the very message you are responding to I twice made the point that there is no need for malicious intent to be present. Let me try saying that again in other words:
Even in the absence of malicious intent, even in a world where every reporter and editor is honest, and always has been honest, the trust that the original poster claimed newspapers provided is an illusion. My point is that it is better to doubt what you read whether you can see the debate and discussion and errors and biases or not.
can you honestly expect us to do any better?
On the whole, no. But at least if you can see the game of "telephone" as it happens, if you have the record of the reporter at hand when you read the article, if you can see other people (including, perhaps, the original source) responding and correcting errors in the article, then at least the possibility of being able to figure out how much you really can trust exists.
My objection is not to the fact that this happens, but to the way the original poster's comment about "Trust" implied that somehow newspapers had some mechanism to keep it from happening. I don't believe they do, but rather I believe that they are better at hiding it.
I think you have misunderstood something, or I haven't got the point across well enough, or I indeed got distracted by the examples. Though my experience with newspapers over the past 30 years has been that they seem all too often to not be making effective use of the resources available to them.
Bloggers are never going to have the resources of newspaper journalists.
Probably not. On the other hand bloggers have resources that newspaper journalists don't. Numbers, for one. Expertise in the material they're blogging about, for another.
But more to the point, this whole discussion under the title "Newspapers Are Dying" is very much about the loss of resources available to newspaper journalists! There are fewer papers, they have less money, and morale is low.
That's the reason why I suggested a better question at the end of my article: will (or maybe even "how soon will") bloggers be forced to pick up the slack, and how much will they be able to?
what you call an illusion of trust i would relabel as an honest attempt at trust.
Whether they are honest or not (and you know, I hope, they aren't always honest) doesn't change the fact that the result is an illusion. I've blogged about that before... the chain from the witnesses and primary sources to the front page is often a game of telephone. The difference is that when it happens on a blog you get to see the whole thing, and can go back to find where the fellow turned "The Bugblatter Beast makes a good meal of visiting tourists" into "The Bugblatter Beast makes a good meal for visiting tourists".
Whether they're honest or not, their biases inform their idea of what impartiality means. A reporter on Fox News and a reporter at Pacifica Radio may both think they're being impartial, but they're not.
And, again, they're NOT always honest. And, again, whether they are or not... the result is the same. You shouldn't trust what you read in the newspapers any more than you should trust what you read on the Internet. The difference is that on the Internet you CAN get more of the information you need to inform your own best attempt at an unbiased opinion.
The BIG difference between the newspaper writers and the bloggers is funding and resources. How many bloggers are there embedded in Iraq for instance?
Counting the Iraqi bloggers, military bloggers, and contractors?
How many have the resources, capital, lawyers, and clout to investigate Watergate, or The Pentagon Papers?
How many newspapers have done that kind of investigative reporting in the past 20 years? If they had been doing it a few years ago, we might not be in Iraq in the first place.
I don't recall hearing about any bloggers able to get into the white house press room (but hey, traditional journalists haven't exactly been all that great when they ARE there).
Not yet, no, but that's not because they don't have the resources. If it was just money someone would have bought their way in by now. It's because they're not seen as reporters, kind of a catch-22 situation.
My point is that the bloggers aren't going to ever replace professional journalists.
I don't know if they will be able to or not. The more interesting question is, will they have to do it anyway?
One thing to consider is that some languages are better suited to supporting good libraries than others. Early binding and the way templates are implemented makes C++ hard to design reusable versionable libraries for. Explicit message passing and late binding in scripting languages and in languages like Objective C make it easier to build and support good libraries.
Another is that once most of your program is written in canned libraries and components, the remaining glue doesn't really need the performance of compiled code and early binding.
So people are simply more likely to create good libraries in languages where you need them, and in languages where they flow naturally from the language design. In C++ you have to wait for standards committees.
Newspapers provide an illusion of trust, but too much of the time that's all it is. An illusion. The people working for the newspapers aren't all that different from the people writing blogs.
There aren't as many total lunatics in newsrooms, maybe, but reporters and editors all have their agendas no matter how much they want to hide it, and the veneer of objectivity washes away as soon as you see a story in the paper where you actually know some of the facts, where you know enough to tell if they're objective or accurate.
The biggest difference between the Internet and the papers is that here you get to see all the political sausage-making out in the open... not hidden in the editor's office and the story room.
I want something I can write in, scribble on, throw in a backpack without fear of it being broken.
I don't write in novels. I do in text books and reference books.
You simply use the best tool for the job.
Paperback: I can carry one book, and it doesn't really fit in my pocket, so I have to throw it in my backpack and it gets stolen. Luckily it's cheap, so I can buy another copy.
PDA: I can carry 50 (or 500) books in my Clie, they fit in my pocket, I've carried my Clie in my pocket for several years now without damaging it, though I was worried about the loose flap at first the screen has proven a lot tougher than my previous handheld's. In the same time I've thoroughly trashed a number of paperbacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, a typo! I die! I die! All die! Oh the embarrassment!
SaarCOR was getting about 10 FPS for Quake3 with a minimal FPGA-based implementation of a hardware raytracer running at less than 100 MHz with a fraction of the gate budget of a modern GPU... in 2005. Raytracing is highly scalable - it's an "embarrassingly parallelizable" problem - so if nVidia is really working on raytracing hardware they could well be able to beat Intel to the punch.
More comments from David Kirk.
I would be very interested in what he learned between 2002 and 2004 that led him to argue so eloquently against Phillip Slusallek. I'd also like to know what Professor Slusallek is doing at nVidia, where he's "working with the research group on the future of realtime ray tracing".
For example, the meeting in Norway was not to approve or disapprove of OOXML, it was to determine if there had been any irregularities in the Norway vote.
Between the time of the original vote and now new information about the proposal has been published by the various voting groups. How exactly is it regular for this second ballot to be strictly based on the voting process?
This reminds me of the time I was at a neighborhood committee meeting and the bloke running the meeting basically told everyone to hold questions until they'd finished some procedural matters, then a friend of his called for a vote before the question period, and anyone who tried to object was told they were out of order, and finally the question period was called off because the vote had been taken. Apparently the people who had questions about the vote were supposed to have recited some "rules of order" mantra earlier and the guy running the meeting was the only expert weasel.
All this was technically legitimate according, but it was blatant abuse of a loophole in the rules.
The situation in Norway seems to be similar.
I would like to see your argument for why this kind of chicanery should be considered "regular".
Microsoft, and everyone else, has to implement OOXML fully if the EU says they do.
1. That's what people said about FIPS-151. The POSIX subsystem was carefully designed to just satisfy FIPS-151 while being as limited an implementation as they could get away with.
2. There's no reason that they have to implement it on any specific schedule. It doesn't matter to Microsoft if it takes them five, ten, or twenty years to implement it fully... they only need to be able to promise that an implementation is under development or waiting on approval.
3. If Microsoft can finagle the approval process for the standard, finagling the approval process for implementations is child's play.
But you're the one that said in an earlier comment that you have friends with huge downloaded music collections and that you yourself pay for your music.
I suspect you might want to compare my name with the name of the person you think I am.
I, on the other hand, research my music well before buying it and therefore buy albums that are enjoyable all the way through. And since that music is invariably older stuff, then it suggests to me that the quality of modern music is generally lower than older stuff.
What that suggests to me is that your taste happens to more closely match that of an earlier period of popular music.
You can copy something from a degrading medium to a non-degrading one and it sounds the same. Remastering is about using modern technology to improve the sound quality of the original.
Or to get a digital recording AT ALL from recordings that were originally mastered in analog.
How I feel about it has nothing to do with the quality or disposability of the music.
I doubt anyone on Slashdot is going to admit that they buy the mass-produced plastic music that is in the charts.
I'll admit it. I've bought popular music, many times. I've even bought music by boy bands. Some popular music is popular because it's, well, actually good!
so you are defending something that you yourself are not a part of. Why?
The RIAA aren't the Nazis, but on the other hand I'm only defending modern music from criticism, not smuggling people out of concentration camps.
Like I said in the OP, absolutely loads of [old music is available today]
Really? Tell me where I can get a remastered copy of Minus 10 and Counting, or any of the other tapes I bought over the decades that have (apparently) been lost. If 5% of the music released the same month as Led Zeppelin IV is still available, I'll eat your hat (not mine, I don't like how my conditioner tastes).
If 1% of the music being released today is available in 40 years that'll still leave more tracks for your grandchildren to select from when they're crotchety old fogeys bemoaning the mass-produced plastic music of 2058 than you've got available now, because there's so much more mass-produced plastic music
And it won't *need* to be remastered, digital music doesn't degrade.
Note: to attempt to head off comments like a vast array of (presumably illegally downloaded) music I will note that so far as I can recall the only time I have ever used a P2P service was for the purpose of fetching legal install CDs for open source software. The core of my digital music collection is ripped from my own tapes and CDs, supplemented with purchases from eMusic and iTunes, and samples from artist's websites via MP3 blogs.
how come the charts are filled with turgid crap? We're constantly being told that the 18-25s buy most of the music after all...
"Bah, Humbug, kids today listen to such trash. There hasn't been any good music since Joplin died.
"Scott Joplin, that is."
I don't know how old you are, but there were older folks saying exactly the same thing about your beloved Beatles and Led Zeppelin, and *their* parents and grandparents were decrying that terrible stuff they were listening to in the 30s and 40s. Further back, there was a riot at the opening of Stravinski's Rite of Spring in 1913, but by 1940 Disney was using it in Fantasia.
Oh, and Scott Joplin died in 1817. So I guess Stravinski made the cut.
I'm still listening to albums like Led Zeppelin IV and Sgt. Peppers that were released 35 and 40 years ago respectively that I will probably continue listening to until the day I die.
How much music released 35 and 40 years ago is still available today?
How much old music is only available now because it's so cheap to distribute it online?
That was what I wanted to know too. How much of the 4G is actually available after the XP install and the mandatory swapfile are accounted for?
Microsoft doesn't HAVE to implement OOXML, all they have to do is have a standard that smells like Office "in the works" for the folks who need a checkmark against "standard file format" to keep buying Office.
It's just like the way they implemented POSIX to satisfy FIPS-151. They produced a deliberately crippled POSIX subsystem and later when it turned out they actually needed a working UNIX environment on NT they bought the company that had implemented one.
compare news from a blog versus news from a newspaper.
You're comparing the wrong units. If I read the newspaper, if I were really fanatical about it, I could imagine subscribing to maybe two daily and three or four weekend papers. Most people read one. In the same time I would read a dozen or more blogs, easily, without trying.
A blogger is like a reporter, not a whole newspaper staff. Compare a newspaper to a dozen blogs, if you want to compare them.
i think you'll find you'll put more trust in the newspaper than the blog.
Not for 15 years have I been willing to trust the newspapers over the net of a million lies. Because there's truth in those lies. And over and over again newspapers have proven themselves no more worthy of my trust than the net.
now try to find a way to get news to you in a way more trustworthy than the newspaper.
I don't have to. I'm not arguing that the net is better, I'm arguing that it's no worse.
in the end, you'll still be turning to them as the most trustworrhy source of information in the pile of untrustworthy sources before you
It's been 15 years now since I've done that.
your criticism of the trustworthiness of newsreporting would have more validity if there were some magical method of newsreporting that was superior.
Straw man. You're still trying to get me to defend a position I haven't taken, and I'm not going to fall for that hoary old trick. To be able to argue that the newspapers are no more trustworthy than the blogs, I merely need to be able to argue that the blogs are at worse, no worse.
Again, I'm not criticizing the papers, I'm criticizing the people who trust them more than they should.
Except people do notice.
Do they? Not if someone had to compare screen caps to prove it.
in the compressed images, you can see the artifacts.
Artifacts in screen captures don't necessarily mean noticeable artifacts in moving video. Screen captures in NTSC look like crap, far far worse than you "really" see when watching TV, thanks to the persistence of vision.
This point, by the way, was also in TFA.
There's no feedback here.
:)
Don't forget that the makeup of teams, the behavior of other players, and even the rules of baseball all depend on what happens in the game. If someone was setting a 109-game hitting streak in the 1890s, then they would be facing more determined pitchers and probably better pitchers by the time they were more than 20 or 30 games into the run. It seems pretty good odds that would have changed their batting average for that year.
How are real hitting streaks distributed in time? Do they bunch up in the 1800s and early 1900s the way their simulations did?
Were there changes in the rules between the 1890s and the 1940s that might have reduced the effect of this kind of feedback mechanism?
Perhaps we don't really need HDTV if you can reduce the image quality that much without it being noticed.
Individually, perhaps, but collectively, no.
Individually they are not that different.
Collectively they are not that different. I'll get back to that in a second.
Reporters have the benefit of being schooled and trained, and the nature of their assignments is proportional to their competence, experience, and reputation.
Reporters are trained in reporting, but they're often NOT trained in what they are reporting on. There's just too much they'd have to learn, so usually they're experts in reporting but amateurs in the subject of the story.
Bloggers are usually not trained in reporting, but are very often experts in the field they are blogging about.
Add to that layers of fact-checkers, editors and everyone else all the way up the chain to the general public
For bloggers, that happens after publication. So you get to see it, and you get to see when the fact checking fails. Now individual members of the public may not be very good at this, but there are thousands, tens of thousand, even millions of times as many of them.
And there may also be many times more bloggers blogging on a subject than there are reporters reporting on it.
that hardly compares to the what's required to cover the news of the day
Possibly so. My point is not that bloggers can replace reporters, but rather that the idea that we should more or less automatically trust the hidden editing that goes on inside a newspaper more than the public debate that goes on in a blog. I'm not objecting to the newspaper, I'm objecting to the trust.
Can we ever have anything better than the illusion of trust?
Sure. Not having the illusion of trust. I don't mean having real trust, I mean having a realistic appreciation of how much trust is really appropriate.
what you attribute to malicious intent, i attribute to accident.
In the very message you are responding to I twice made the point that there is no need for malicious intent to be present. Let me try saying that again in other words:
Even in the absence of malicious intent, even in a world where every reporter and editor is honest, and always has been honest, the trust that the original poster claimed newspapers provided is an illusion. My point is that it is better to doubt what you read whether you can see the debate and discussion and errors and biases or not.
can you honestly expect us to do any better?
On the whole, no. But at least if you can see the game of "telephone" as it happens, if you have the record of the reporter at hand when you read the article, if you can see other people (including, perhaps, the original source) responding and correcting errors in the article, then at least the possibility of being able to figure out how much you really can trust exists.
My objection is not to the fact that this happens, but to the way the original poster's comment about "Trust" implied that somehow newspapers had some mechanism to keep it from happening. I don't believe they do, but rather I believe that they are better at hiding it.
I think you have misunderstood something, or I haven't got the point across well enough, or I indeed got distracted by the examples. Though my experience with newspapers over the past 30 years has been that they seem all too often to not be making effective use of the resources available to them.
Bloggers are never going to have the resources of newspaper journalists.
Probably not. On the other hand bloggers have resources that newspaper journalists don't. Numbers, for one. Expertise in the material they're blogging about, for another.
But more to the point, this whole discussion under the title "Newspapers Are Dying" is very much about the loss of resources available to newspaper journalists! There are fewer papers, they have less money, and morale is low.
That's the reason why I suggested a better question at the end of my article: will (or maybe even "how soon will") bloggers be forced to pick up the slack, and how much will they be able to?
what you call an illusion of trust i would relabel as an honest attempt at trust.
Whether they are honest or not (and you know, I hope, they aren't always honest) doesn't change the fact that the result is an illusion. I've blogged about that before... the chain from the witnesses and primary sources to the front page is often a game of telephone. The difference is that when it happens on a blog you get to see the whole thing, and can go back to find where the fellow turned "The Bugblatter Beast makes a good meal of visiting tourists" into "The Bugblatter Beast makes a good meal for visiting tourists".
Whether they're honest or not, their biases inform their idea of what impartiality means. A reporter on Fox News and a reporter at Pacifica Radio may both think they're being impartial, but they're not.
And, again, they're NOT always honest. And, again, whether they are or not... the result is the same. You shouldn't trust what you read in the newspapers any more than you should trust what you read on the Internet. The difference is that on the Internet you CAN get more of the information you need to inform your own best attempt at an unbiased opinion.
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/harlan.html (1998)
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/bunk.html (2004)
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/io/cringe.html (2006)
The BIG difference between the newspaper writers and the bloggers is funding and resources. How many bloggers are there embedded in Iraq for instance?
Counting the Iraqi bloggers, military bloggers, and contractors?
How many have the resources, capital, lawyers, and clout to investigate Watergate, or The Pentagon Papers?
How many newspapers have done that kind of investigative reporting in the past 20 years? If they had been doing it a few years ago, we might not be in Iraq in the first place.
I don't recall hearing about any bloggers able to get into the white house press room (but hey, traditional journalists haven't exactly been all that great when they ARE there).
Not yet, no, but that's not because they don't have the resources. If it was just money someone would have bought their way in by now. It's because they're not seen as reporters, kind of a catch-22 situation.
My point is that the bloggers aren't going to ever replace professional journalists.
I don't know if they will be able to or not. The more interesting question is, will they have to do it anyway?
One thing to consider is that some languages are better suited to supporting good libraries than others. Early binding and the way templates are implemented makes C++ hard to design reusable versionable libraries for. Explicit message passing and late binding in scripting languages and in languages like Objective C make it easier to build and support good libraries.
Another is that once most of your program is written in canned libraries and components, the remaining glue doesn't really need the performance of compiled code and early binding.
So people are simply more likely to create good libraries in languages where you need them, and in languages where they flow naturally from the language design. In C++ you have to wait for standards committees.
Newspapers provide an illusion of trust, but too much of the time that's all it is. An illusion. The people working for the newspapers aren't all that different from the people writing blogs.
There aren't as many total lunatics in newsrooms, maybe, but reporters and editors all have their agendas no matter how much they want to hide it, and the veneer of objectivity washes away as soon as you see a story in the paper where you actually know some of the facts, where you know enough to tell if they're objective or accurate.
The biggest difference between the Internet and the papers is that here you get to see all the political sausage-making out in the open... not hidden in the editor's office and the story room.
I want something I can write in, scribble on, throw in a backpack without fear of it being broken.
I don't write in novels. I do in text books and reference books.
You simply use the best tool for the job.
Paperback: I can carry one book, and it doesn't really fit in my pocket, so I have to throw it in my backpack and it gets stolen. Luckily it's cheap, so I can buy another copy.
PDA: I can carry 50 (or 500) books in my Clie, they fit in my pocket, I've carried my Clie in my pocket for several years now without damaging it, though I was worried about the loose flap at first the screen has proven a lot tougher than my previous handheld's. In the same time I've thoroughly trashed a number of paperbacks.
If he has to use video to explain why patents don't suck, I'll give it a miss. Transcript, anyone?
So use the GPL2. Sheesh.
The only good thing the hackers/jailbreakers have done is to push Apple to develop the SDK faster, and put more emphasis on security.
They put more emphasis on locking it harder. That has very little to do with security.