Who knows? Maybe having the 800-pound gorilla fight some battles for you isn't all bad
There is a "method" to abusing stupid patents, if you have them. Firstly, you only go after big, rich companies who can afford to pay up if they have to (e.g. MS). Secondly, you have to find the right price point for "licensing" your "technology", which means that it must be enough to make you very rich, but must be low enough to make it worth the other companies' whiles to just pay up rather than get involved in expensive litigation. As far as I can tell, companies are often willing to pay up as long as the price is relatively reasonable. For Microsoft, well, I don't know what that might be, perhaps 50000$/month? I don't know. Anyway, this is pretty much the scheme followed by others in the past, e.g. Unisys for gif's, and British Telecomm for hyperlinks.. usually they'll have some stupid press release along the lines of "we're going to be nice and "let" the general public use this technology, but we will go after some companies using it". So McAfee may get away with it at the end of the day, consumers subscribing to ASP's may pay perhaps a few cents more per month, while some McAfee execs go shopping for yachts and private jets.
This patent seems somehow incredibly obvious to me:/
Re:"hardly any depth" ?? This is pure marketing BS
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Nvidia's NV20
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Troll.. you are the one that sounds like you dont know what youre talking about. Two big triangles overlapping have a lot more overdraw than 10000 tiny triangles overlapping. Overdraw is measured in pixels, not triangles, and apart from backface culling and polygon sorting there is fuckall your card can do to stop it, thats mostly a software issue. He is correct otherwise, 3d graphics don't talk about scene complexity and defnitely not about 'hardly any depth', which means nothing.
"Let's face it all they have been doing any more is shrinking die sizes by going to smaller processes and adding instructions"
Strange, that sounds like exactly what they've always been doing - in fact, that is what they've always been doing, since the 8086 - adding instructions, shrinking die sizes, and optimizing CPU speed internally (they haven't stopped doing that either, considering Williamette's (sp?) internal risc-like architecture).
Perhaps I've missed something basic, but you seem to imply that there was a time when Intel was somehow doing more than just shrinking die and adding instructions.. if so, what was it? 286/386 protected mode was probably the only major addition ever in the entire line.
If Carnivore was only doing what they say it is doing, then there would be absolutely no reason whatsoever for the FBI to keep information about the system so closed and secret (it's easy enough to get around anyway, with encryption). It's as simple as that.
So then, the real question is not if they are doing something they shouldn't be, but what?
"Your computer video card that you're running right now probably can get comparable polys. What? You're saying that you've tested and you cant?"
Of course it can't - you will never get as many polys on a non-GeForce PC as you will on a GeForce-based PC, simply because CPU is the bottleneck - vertices have to be transformed on the CPU. Also, ever heard of "fill rate"? That's another factor. The bus speed on a GeForce card means it can simply draw everything it draws, much quicker. Who wants to use 320x240? Have you tried to play a game like Q3A at 320x240? It's a joke - you need the resolution.
And your stupid "27fps" argument - 3D games look much worse than TV at the same frame rate, simply because television images are blurrier and "ghost", creating artifical "motion blur". That doesn't happen on a PC with a 3D acceleration, 27fps looks terrible - not only that, but you need a higher update rate to react quickly enough to threats in the game - ask anyone who plays seriously - it makes a huge difference. Also you sit further away from a TV, and you don't need to aim a crosshair at somebody who is only 5 pixels high even at 1024x768, when you're watching TV.
Your arguments are bogus, and you lack technical knowledge - either that or you're just trolling.
Chances are that the X-box will be released with nVidia's next-generation GPU (after the GeForce2), which I assure you will last at least two to three years before it starts to seem slow (heck, game developers (with the exception of Carmack because he designs games to work with "tomorrow"'s graphics cards) can't even keep up with the rate at which 3D cards are improving - by the time the first games trickle onto the market that take full advantage of the GeForce, nVidia will have their next GPU out. And after that 2 to 3 years, XBox2 will come out, even faster.
"The high poly rates have a drawback though"
So just what is that drawback? You make high poly rates sound like a bad thing, but you never say why. Perhaps that's because you don't know what you are talking about.
I want the XBox to suck as much as the next guy, and I desperately want the project to fail, mainly because the moment MS gains dominance in any market, the quality of everything in that market deteriorates badly. They fsck everything up. But if they do ever release the XBox, it will be damned fast, and the technology in it won't be instantly obsolete.
It's beginning to seem to me like nVidia is essentially, "the next SGI". SGI seems to have lost much of their sense of direction, while in a few years (if things keep going the way they are) nVidia will basically be the dominant 3D graphics processor maker.
Which implies that the future of OpenGL lies in how important it is to nVidia to keep OpenGL on par with Direct3D. Somebody has to - Direct3D is already overtaking OpenGL, featurewise (barring GL extensions - extensions are nice, but if they're not part of the official API then they're seriously iffy.) SGI doesn't seem to have much interest in creating an OpenGL version 2. Maybe nVidia might? One can hope.
"Why would they want to do that? There's no real reason that I can think of, unless they want to destroy the U.S. economy in one fell stroke"
Remember the recent troubles in Yugoslovia? Think back.. what was one of the very first things the government did? Answer: They eliminated the media - literally destroying newspaper publishers, radio stations etc.
This is just one example, but quite frankly, the first thing to go in any war is freedom of the press, no matter what country you live in, and whether or not you think your country is "on the good side".
The US government currently has the television media pretty much under wraps as far as propaganda and control go... but they don't quite have that control on the Internet. They need that sort of control over the media the next time they go to war, so that they can convince the American people that China (or whoever it's going to be) is evil enough to deserve getting nuked.
Whenever industry technologies change, certain sets of skills become obsolete, and people are always quick to complain how such changes put so many people out of jobs.
What these people never seem to think about or mention is the millions of new jobs that get created around the new technology. The industrial revolution, the computer revolution, blah blah blah - everyone cried/cries about how everybody's jobs were/are going to be replaced be machines. It hasn't happened - last I heard unemployment in the USA was at an incredibly low 4%, and there are many openings still for people skilled with computers. Whatever technology replaces gasoline (or "petrol" as we call it in our country) will also create many new jobs.
I'm sorry for the people who end up with obsolete skills and can't get a job. It is bad. But that is the type of world we live in. I'm a C++ programmer - and I realize (and accept) that within the next 20 years, all the skills I've acquired may be nearly worthless. If I'm lucky it won't happen in my career-lifetime, but if not, then I will either have to adapt, or lose out. Tough. Life doesn't give handouts.
"a way that will not result in the economies of several countries being tossed down the toilet which will further result in war"
You seem to forget that a number of wars have actually been caused by the world's dependence on oil, and the power that comes with controlling vast amounts of the oil supply. You are right, though, that it is likely that decreasing dependence on oil will result in some military instability (most likely in the middle east) as those countries lose much of their economic power. But you can't stop change - technology will eliminate our dependency on oil. So these changes must be dealth with. Wars were fought in the past over salt, but now salt is a common, cheap commodity - so nobody has to die over it. In the future, energy will also be a common, cheap commodity. You can't stop this sort of change from happening.
I agree with your last sentiments - whatever replaces gasoline must be cheaper than gasoline, and benefit "end-users". But part of the point the article poster made was that those high prices may be artifically created by oil industry bribes. I for one don't doubt it one bit - there is absolutely no way that that sort of thing would not happen, considering how many billions of dollars are at stake. No oil industry executive would just sit back and let their industry collapse, they'll be doing whatever is within their power to keep their stronghold. That is not beneficial to the average American, I assure you.
The thing is, there is nothing new or strange about reviews being bought - it happens every day by huge companies like MS, Sun, Apple, whatever.
So I wouldn't be too surprised if it did happen with Linux.
But what bothers me is not that it might happen, it's that suddenly journalists are talking about the fact that it happens. I can't recall ever reading one single article (about computers) anywhere claiming that "Microsoft buys it's reviews" or "Big Company XYZ bought this or other review" - and yet suddenly a number of journalists are ranting that Linux reviews are bought.
Why the double standard? Where does it suddenly come from?
Perhaps those articles themselves were bought, by an entity with an interest in seeing Linux fail...
Paranoid, maybe I am.. I don't believe anything I read anymore, except maybe if it's in a scientific journal..:/ Just yesterday a local pharmaceutical company admitted to having paid lobby groups to lobby for cheaper medicines.. this sort of thing happens every day, and quite frankly, I don't know what is and what isn't believable anymore - so I just don't believe anything.
I suspect you are mistaken. The output of a GPL'd program does not fall under the GPL.
Consider bison (http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/biso n.html (which has (as well as yacc) been around a while so this issue is nothing new)) which generates C code.. this is from the bison documentation:
As of Bison version 1.24, we have changed the distribution terms for yyparse to permit using Bison's output in non-free programs. Formerly, Bison parsers could be used only in programs that were free software.
The other GNU programming tools, such as the GNU C compiler, have never had such a requirement. They could always be used for non-free software. The reason Bison was different was not due to a special policy decision; it resulted from applying the usual General Public License to all of the Bison source code
Considering the sheer number of "legit" Napster users (often 500,000 and up) one's chances of getting a screwed up song is probably pretty small. And if any of the 499,999 "legitimate" users happen to d/l a crap song, they'd just delete it almost immediately the first time they listen to it (how many mp3 collectors do you know that would leave those files in their collection?). So these songs are not going to spread, they'll fizzle out, and thus won't pollute Napster very much, unless thousands of users start getting bored enough to put messed up songs on Napster (unlikely, most people have better things to do than spend hours/days creating bogus songs - how many people care that much about the copyright issue, which is vague at best?)
I suspect that (just like the idea mentioned here the other day about putting ads in mp3's) this won't have any noticeable impact on Napster or on mp3 trading at all. Applying some simple Darwinian theory on natural selection, "good" songs have a fitness function with a higher survival/reproduction rate, and "bad" songs will have a very low survival/reproduction rate. Thus "bad" songs will fail to thrive in the environment.
"Just because we leave alcohol and tobacco poorly unregulated (for the reasons mentioned above), should we make the same mistake with gambling?"
I don't know, I feel the opposite way - I think that all of the above should be unregulated. If people want to destroy their lives by becoming crack addicts, or kill themselves slowly with cigarettes, or throw away their rent money on gambling, then they should be allowed to. It's their problem if they're too stupid/naive/gullible and/or too psychologically messed up to make choices that won't mess up their lives. As long as they don't harm me doing so, I'm not bothered.
Most smokers start smoking in school (and continue in adulthood because they're addicted), and there are generally two reasons they start: (1) it's cool to smoke, and (2) it's forbidden. If you take away (2), then (1) disappears because it wouldn't be cool anymore to smoke, since there would be no point (kids smoke to defy authority - it's natural for kids to defy authority, it's part of the adolescence phase, we can't stop that) I suspect that if you take away the "forbidden fruit" aspect of things like smoking, then most kids would think a little harder about it before they just picked up cigarettes and started smoking. (Have you ever tried to start smoking? It's not easy to start - you have to be quite motivated to put yourself through that. I tried once and I nearly threw up - I couldn't finish a single cigarette.) You have to figure out why kids are so motivated then, and remove that motivation. Much of that motivation is "smoking is not allowed, so lets do it to defy authority".
Only a tiny percentage of smokers start smoking after the age of 20. If tobacco companies can't continually recruit children, their multi-billion dollar business would die.
People either do drugs/smoking/alcohol etc because it's "forbidden fruit", or because they have psychological problems and are messed up. Regulating everything may limit the options for self-destruction that the latter group has, but it won't take away their self-destructive tendencies, and it won't solve their underlying problems. Those problems should be tackled, not the symptoms (e.g. drug addiction).
Of course, if we made it OK for kids to smoke, then there would still be the problem of advertising to kids, some of which are fairly susceptible to the influence of advertising (many of them aren't though.) I'd like to think that the solution lies partially in educating children, and partially in allowing them to make their own choices. I'd like to think that if you treat kids more like adults, then they react to that by behaving more like adults, and realising that their actions have consequences, and taking responsibility for that. If you don't teach kids to make decisions, you end up with adults who can't make decisions.
"Gambling and going to the movies are not the same thing. Gambling is addictive, it has destroyed families, lives, and fortunes"
Funny, smoking is addictive, and has destroyed millions of families and lives.. I don't see the government jumping in there to ban it (don't bother citing the current case against Philip Morris - that is by no means an effort to ban smoking, just to obtain damage compensation, big difference..)
Gambling is a psychological addiction, not a biological one. I don't know of any other psychologically addictive activities that have been banned. Besides, the majority of people who try gambling do *not* end up addicted (compare with smoking - 9 out of 10 people who try smoking become addicted - thats more addictive than cocaine, which has a 1 out of 6 addiction rate, and alcohol comes in at 1 out of 10). Can you ban everyone from doing something, just because some people can't control themselves? I don't think thats ever been done before. (Don't bother citing the infamous prohibition in the 20's - alcoholism is a disease (complete with genetic tendency), not a psychological addiction.
I think the real reason gambling is illegal in so many places has more to do with the fact that the bible frowns on it, and most Americans are fairly conservative and religous. I for one cannot think of any purely moral objections to gambling.
Of course I'm not saying that casino's aren't corrupt, and that gambling hasn't destroyed peoples lives. But people self-destruct willingly, and more often than not those people already have self-destructive tendencies, and gambling is just one of many possible ways for people to realize these tendencies. But the solution is not to get rid of the symptoms (e.g. by banning gambling), but to cure the underlying problem (these people need psychological help - locking the slot machines away from them isn't going to fix that.)
The same goes for high-school shootings - there are many simple solutions that involve symptomatic treatment of the problem (e.g. by banning guns, tightening gun control etc.) - and while these "solutions" might help get rid of the "symptom" of school shootings, they haven't touched on the cause of those symptoms - e.g. unhappy, alienated teenagers with untreated mental illness. Suicide is currently the third-leading cause of death in the western world, and is poised to move into 2nd place by 2020 - we must be doing something wrong, as a society. But anyway, I'm going way off on a tangent here..
I doubt it would work. It is currently pretty easy to find any popular song on Napster (granted it's slightly harder to find those not-so-common songs, but usually still possible), so why would I, if I wanted a song, willingly download a version with an advert in, when I can just get "the real thing" from Napster?
You might argue now that I probably wouldn't know when I start downloading which versions have ads in and which don't. But I'm willing to bet that nearly no Napster users would put songs with ads in them in their uploads directory, so 99% of the songs on Napster would be ad-free anyway.
Because it's so simple to get an ad-free version of a song from Napster, even if one did manage to accidentally download a song with an ad in, it's easy enough to just download a "pure" version of the song again.
Basically, some simple Darwinian-style "natural selection" would ensure that songs with ads in don't survive in the Napster environment.
"In other words, when people hurt themselves it is only a first step towards them starting to hurt other people"
What you're saying is that you should label people as criminals (e.g. by banning gambling) before they have even done anything wrong, just because "they might do something wrong". This is wrong. If somebody starts hurting someone else to pay off a gambling debt, then the crime is not having gotten into debt, it's the actual hurting of others, and whatever form that hurt takes should be punished.
If you could show some statistics that a significant percentage of gamblers (i.e. above 80%) will go on to hurt others because they gambled, then you might maybe have an argument - but you will never be able to show that, because it just isn't true. You cannot infringe on the rights of millions of people just because a few others might cause problems - that is ridiculous.
Your arguments apply quite broadly - you might use your point to argue that guns should be banned because a percentage of people who buy guns go on to commit crimes with them. Buying a gun isn't a crime, but hurting somebody with the gun may be (if not self-defense).. punish the crime.
There is no way you will ever manage to prove that the act of gambling shows intent to hurt others.
I suspect the real reason that gambling is illegal in so many places is because the bible frowns on it. I can't see any other problem with it.
It's a selfish, twisted, flawed philosophy, evident of weak thinking and small souls
Please tell me the logical path you took to get from "selfish philosophy" to "weak thinking and small souls".
I for one can't see the connection, and quite frankly, the last line of your post makes you sound quite similar to rabid fundamentalist Christians. I find your implication that people's souls can quantified, compared (and judgments derived), quite repugnant. Moreover, passing such a judgment on someone purely because they have a few noble but naive ideas about security is irrational.. some might even call it "weak thinking".. your emotions have the better of you.
That's bandwidth vs latency.. the latency (amount of time spent by the computer processing the overhead of sending/receiving packets) slows down your copying to some maximum (3.6M/sec is pretty good on 100M LAN... I did some file transfer tests (SMB) and got about 1.5M/sec from Win98 to Win98, and about 2.5M/sec copying from Win2K to Win98 (goes to show, I think, what a difference there actually is between Win9X and WinNT's networking..).
Basically adding more bandwidth above 100 MB isn't going to increase the speed of your transfers much (you're probably sending bigger packets with 1000mbit fiber, whereas the max ethernet frame size on 100MB LAN is 1500bytes, so the overhead per packet should be less, so you should end up with faster transfers, but they won't be that much faster, since there is still more overhead on the hard disk, processing interrupts etc..)
Mainly what you gain by increasing the bandwidth is that the network won't saturate as quickly.. i.e. with 100MB ethernet you might have 2 to 4 people copying files when it'll start to slow down.. but gigabit ethernet will allow more people to be doing 3.8M/sec at once (just as an example).
Re:Slashdot really posted this inaccurate crap.
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Pirate DNS?
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Most of the problems you point out with Usenet are due to the fact that it is incredibly high-volume (over 1GB a day), significantly more so than DNS.
Re:Slashdot really posted this inaccurate crap.
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Pirate DNS?
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"You have to have a centralized database that matches the Domain name with the IP address, that the name servers use. If you don't have a cantralized database, the name servers would spend weeks at a time downloading records from thousands of othe servers"
That's crap. I don't think you know what you are talking about. How do you think usenet works? Current DNS's anyway have to download thousands of records. Not having a centralized server makes it harder for the database to be consistent, but it wouldn't be slower. It would just give less predictable results, and would be subject to influence by people with alterior motives (e.g. mapping www.microsoft.com to www.linux.org or something) - but it's possible to do exactly that with the current DNS system anyway, so so what?
"That's funny. Almost governmental, giving with one hand what you take away with the other"
Well the fact is that my examples were true, and they were by no means the only ones. Matt Shephard, for example, may be one of the more well-publicised incidents, but certainly not the only one. I hardly think it is altogether safe to rule out that one will never be the next victim - so while using those examples was over-provocative (see next paragraph), the fact remains that there is an existing danger.
The chances of falling victim to something like that are still pretty small though - but probability has little to do with fear levels. Most people are terrified of sharks, yet the chances of dying from a bee sting are higher than from shark attack. Many people are terrified of flying, yet have no problem with driving, yet the chances of dying in an airplane accident are a few orders of magnitude smaller than your chances of dying in a car accident. Yet thats how the human brain "reasons":/ . So based on that those examples may well cause an exaggerated amount of fear in people - yet you can't deny that those examples are true. So nothing strange about it.
I found your post a little ambiguous, quite frankly, so I couldn't quite determine quite what your position was on privacy - but you did seem to imply that the majority of people have nothing worth hiding anyway. Based on an assumption like that it would be easy enough for someone else to make the argument that people who are hiding something are doing something wrong, so I just didn't want anyone to walk away with that idea..
OK.. I'll go with your point. And yes, choosing the "worst case scenario" (of murderous zealots) as my example was over-provocative (although true in general).
But I think you underestimate the number of people who are currently living with something or other that they prefer to keep secret (be it mental illness, homosexuality, whatever) for fear of how others would react, or whatever other reason they have. I am willing to bet that a number of people you know - perhaps even people close to you - have secrets like this. I know women who have kept the fact that they are clinically depressed from their own husbands for over a decade now. This is not as unbelievable as it sounds, it's quite common. Most parents of depressed children don't know their children are depressed. Browse the alt.support.depression newsgroup for a while (if its still going, I was last there years ago).. there are thousands of people like this.
Much of the same applies to gay people.. given the statistics on depression and homosexuality alone, I would venture a guess that at least 10% of people walking around do, unlike you, have something that they should be able to choose to keep secret. While not a majority, that's a significant number.
To what extent their fears are justified, I don't know - but the fact is, these people choose to keep these things secret. And that choice should remain a right. I've often heard it argued here on/. (and elsewhere) that "if you demand privacy then you must be doing something wrong". That attitude stems from ignorance.
During the next century, technology will develop the potential to completely annihilate (sp?) privacy; we should be pushing for more privacy.. if we just let things be, our privacy will diminish.. if we push for more, then we may be lucky and break even.
"Let's say someone did tap my phone. What will they use the information for? Will they attempt to blackmail me with information regarding cheating on my diet? What would they expect to gain? My assets are few. I try to live my life peaceably with others and within the limitations of the law"
Consider yourself one of the lucky people whose behaviour just happens to fit in with society accepts.
Consider that in many states in the US it is still illegal to have gay sex, for example. Consider yourself lucky you are straight (I'm assuming you are, otherwise you might feel differently than your post indicates.) Remember that not only would being gay be illegal in many states, but there are plenty of employers who would actually fire someone for being gay, and there are quite a number who would brutally murder you for being gay. Similarly, people who support abortion are also often the victims of zealous murderous fundamentalists.
There are plenty of people who would discriminate against others for being mentally ill, e.g. being clinically depressed. Many people have been fired after their employers found out about it. You can argue all you like about labor laws and discrimination laws - but in the real world, it is not easy (particularly if you don't have in-demand skills as computer nerds like us are lucky enough to have) to fight this sort of discrimination. Lawyers are expensive, lawsuits take a heavy emotional and financial toll, and the facts are often gray enough for someone's case to be lost against better lawyers.
I'm a reasonably experience C++ programmer, so I'm open about having depression (I am straight though, the gay thing was just an example:).. I'm sure if I got fired because of it I would still be able to find another job elsewhere. But I count myself one of the lucky few in that regard.
My point is that some people often have valid reason to hide something, even if the reason they have to hide it is society itself, unfortunately. Nobody is likely to brutally murder you for cheating on your diet, but there are people who would if they know you were gay. And if they knew you were an atheist (yes, this happens.. I recently read about a prominent atheist who was kidnapped and then was never seen again.) Any number of things.
Profiling technology is currently fairly limited and expensive, but in the next 10 to 40 years it will become extremely cheap, prevasive and intelligent. There already exists software that can do both facial and behaviour recognition from a video, and that software will only get cheaper and better. So will cameras.
Slashdot Mirror
bootp is a protocol for assigning IP addresses to computers on a LAN based on MAC address. How do you "download" something with bootp?
Yup...but can you point to a web-based installer prior to 1998?
You don't have to prove prior art if the method outlined in a patent is obvious to a practioner skilled in the field, like this one.
Who knows? Maybe having the 800-pound gorilla fight some battles for you isn't all bad
There is a "method" to abusing stupid patents, if you have them. Firstly, you only go after big, rich companies who can afford to pay up if they have to (e.g. MS). Secondly, you have to find the right price point for "licensing" your "technology", which means that it must be enough to make you very rich, but must be low enough to make it worth the other companies' whiles to just pay up rather than get involved in expensive litigation. As far as I can tell, companies are often willing to pay up as long as the price is relatively reasonable. For Microsoft, well, I don't know what that might be, perhaps 50000$/month? I don't know. Anyway, this is pretty much the scheme followed by others in the past, e.g. Unisys for gif's, and British Telecomm for hyperlinks .. usually they'll have some stupid press release along the lines of "we're going to be nice and "let" the general public use this technology, but we will go after some companies using it". So McAfee may get away with it at the end of the day, consumers subscribing to ASP's may pay perhaps a few cents more per month, while some McAfee execs go shopping for yachts and private jets.
This patent seems somehow incredibly obvious to me :/
Troll .. you are the one that sounds like you dont know what youre talking about. Two big triangles overlapping have a lot more overdraw than 10000 tiny triangles overlapping. Overdraw is measured in pixels, not triangles, and apart from backface culling and polygon sorting there is fuckall your card can do to stop it, thats mostly a software issue. He is correct otherwise, 3d graphics don't talk about scene complexity and defnitely not about 'hardly any depth', which means nothing.
"Let's face it all they have been doing any more is shrinking die sizes by going to smaller processes and adding instructions"
Strange, that sounds like exactly what they've always been doing - in fact, that is what they've always been doing, since the 8086 - adding instructions, shrinking die sizes, and optimizing CPU speed internally (they haven't stopped doing that either, considering Williamette's (sp?) internal risc-like architecture).
Perhaps I've missed something basic, but you seem to imply that there was a time when Intel was somehow doing more than just shrinking die and adding instructions .. if so, what was it? 286/386 protected mode was probably the only major addition ever in the entire line.
If Carnivore was only doing what they say it is doing, then there would be absolutely no reason whatsoever for the FBI to keep information about the system so closed and secret (it's easy enough to get around anyway, with encryption). It's as simple as that.
So then, the real question is not if they are doing something they shouldn't be, but what?
"Your computer video card that you're running right now probably can get comparable polys. What? You're saying that you've tested and you cant?"
Of course it can't - you will never get as many polys on a non-GeForce PC as you will on a GeForce-based PC, simply because CPU is the bottleneck - vertices have to be transformed on the CPU. Also, ever heard of "fill rate"? That's another factor. The bus speed on a GeForce card means it can simply draw everything it draws, much quicker. Who wants to use 320x240? Have you tried to play a game like Q3A at 320x240? It's a joke - you need the resolution.
And your stupid "27fps" argument - 3D games look much worse than TV at the same frame rate, simply because television images are blurrier and "ghost", creating artifical "motion blur". That doesn't happen on a PC with a 3D acceleration, 27fps looks terrible - not only that, but you need a higher update rate to react quickly enough to threats in the game - ask anyone who plays seriously - it makes a huge difference. Also you sit further away from a TV, and you don't need to aim a crosshair at somebody who is only 5 pixels high even at 1024x768, when you're watching TV.
Your arguments are bogus, and you lack technical knowledge - either that or you're just trolling.
Chances are that the X-box will be released with nVidia's next-generation GPU (after the GeForce2), which I assure you will last at least two to three years before it starts to seem slow (heck, game developers (with the exception of Carmack because he designs games to work with "tomorrow"'s graphics cards) can't even keep up with the rate at which 3D cards are improving - by the time the first games trickle onto the market that take full advantage of the GeForce, nVidia will have their next GPU out. And after that 2 to 3 years, XBox2 will come out, even faster.
"The high poly rates have a drawback though"
So just what is that drawback? You make high poly rates sound like a bad thing, but you never say why. Perhaps that's because you don't know what you are talking about.
I want the XBox to suck as much as the next guy, and I desperately want the project to fail, mainly because the moment MS gains dominance in any market, the quality of everything in that market deteriorates badly. They fsck everything up. But if they do ever release the XBox, it will be damned fast, and the technology in it won't be instantly obsolete.
It's beginning to seem to me like nVidia is essentially, "the next SGI". SGI seems to have lost much of their sense of direction, while in a few years (if things keep going the way they are) nVidia will basically be the dominant 3D graphics processor maker.
Which implies that the future of OpenGL lies in how important it is to nVidia to keep OpenGL on par with Direct3D. Somebody has to - Direct3D is already overtaking OpenGL, featurewise (barring GL extensions - extensions are nice, but if they're not part of the official API then they're seriously iffy.) SGI doesn't seem to have much interest in creating an OpenGL version 2. Maybe nVidia might? One can hope.
"telnet: Warning: -x ignored, no ENCRYPT support"
Hehe .. just tried this from my Win2K box to my Linux box:
:)
"Why would they want to do that? There's no real reason that I can think of, unless they want to destroy the U.S. economy in one fell stroke"
Remember the recent troubles in Yugoslovia? Think back .. what was one of the very first things the government did? Answer: They eliminated the media - literally destroying newspaper publishers, radio stations etc.
This is just one example, but quite frankly, the first thing to go in any war is freedom of the press, no matter what country you live in, and whether or not you think your country is "on the good side".
The US government currently has the television media pretty much under wraps as far as propaganda and control go ... but they don't quite have that control on the Internet. They need that sort of control over the media the next time they go to war, so that they can convince the American people that China (or whoever it's going to be) is evil enough to deserve getting nuked.
Whenever industry technologies change, certain sets of skills become obsolete, and people are always quick to complain how such changes put so many people out of jobs.
What these people never seem to think about or mention is the millions of new jobs that get created around the new technology. The industrial revolution, the computer revolution, blah blah blah - everyone cried/cries about how everybody's jobs were/are going to be replaced be machines. It hasn't happened - last I heard unemployment in the USA was at an incredibly low 4%, and there are many openings still for people skilled with computers. Whatever technology replaces gasoline (or "petrol" as we call it in our country) will also create many new jobs.
I'm sorry for the people who end up with obsolete skills and can't get a job. It is bad. But that is the type of world we live in. I'm a C++ programmer - and I realize (and accept) that within the next 20 years, all the skills I've acquired may be nearly worthless. If I'm lucky it won't happen in my career-lifetime, but if not, then I will either have to adapt, or lose out. Tough. Life doesn't give handouts.
"a way that will not result in the economies of several countries being tossed down the toilet which will further result in war"
You seem to forget that a number of wars have actually been caused by the world's dependence on oil, and the power that comes with controlling vast amounts of the oil supply. You are right, though, that it is likely that decreasing dependence on oil will result in some military instability (most likely in the middle east) as those countries lose much of their economic power. But you can't stop change - technology will eliminate our dependency on oil. So these changes must be dealth with. Wars were fought in the past over salt, but now salt is a common, cheap commodity - so nobody has to die over it. In the future, energy will also be a common, cheap commodity. You can't stop this sort of change from happening.
I agree with your last sentiments - whatever replaces gasoline must be cheaper than gasoline, and benefit "end-users". But part of the point the article poster made was that those high prices may be artifically created by oil industry bribes. I for one don't doubt it one bit - there is absolutely no way that that sort of thing would not happen, considering how many billions of dollars are at stake. No oil industry executive would just sit back and let their industry collapse, they'll be doing whatever is within their power to keep their stronghold. That is not beneficial to the average American, I assure you.
The thing is, there is nothing new or strange about reviews being bought - it happens every day by huge companies like MS, Sun, Apple, whatever.
So I wouldn't be too surprised if it did happen with Linux.
But what bothers me is not that it might happen, it's that suddenly journalists are talking about the fact that it happens. I can't recall ever reading one single article (about computers) anywhere claiming that "Microsoft buys it's reviews" or "Big Company XYZ bought this or other review" - and yet suddenly a number of journalists are ranting that Linux reviews are bought.
Why the double standard? Where does it suddenly come from?
Perhaps those articles themselves were bought, by an entity with an interest in seeing Linux fail ...
Paranoid, maybe I am .. I don't believe anything I read anymore, except maybe if it's in a scientific journal .. :/ Just yesterday a local pharmaceutical company admitted to having paid lobby groups to lobby for cheaper medicines .. this sort of thing happens every day, and quite frankly, I don't know what is and what isn't believable anymore - so I just don't believe anything.
I suspect you are mistaken. The output of a GPL'd program does not fall under the GPL.
Consider bison (http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/biso n.html (which has (as well as yacc) been around a while so this issue is nothing new)) which generates C code .. this is from the bison documentation:
So there you have it.
Considering the sheer number of "legit" Napster users (often 500,000 and up) one's chances of getting a screwed up song is probably pretty small. And if any of the 499,999 "legitimate" users happen to d/l a crap song, they'd just delete it almost immediately the first time they listen to it (how many mp3 collectors do you know that would leave those files in their collection?). So these songs are not going to spread, they'll fizzle out, and thus won't pollute Napster very much, unless thousands of users start getting bored enough to put messed up songs on Napster (unlikely, most people have better things to do than spend hours/days creating bogus songs - how many people care that much about the copyright issue, which is vague at best?)
I suspect that (just like the idea mentioned here the other day about putting ads in mp3's) this won't have any noticeable impact on Napster or on mp3 trading at all. Applying some simple Darwinian theory on natural selection, "good" songs have a fitness function with a higher survival/reproduction rate, and "bad" songs will have a very low survival/reproduction rate. Thus "bad" songs will fail to thrive in the environment.
"Just because we leave alcohol and tobacco poorly unregulated (for the reasons mentioned above), should we make the same mistake with gambling?"
I don't know, I feel the opposite way - I think that all of the above should be unregulated. If people want to destroy their lives by becoming crack addicts, or kill themselves slowly with cigarettes, or throw away their rent money on gambling, then they should be allowed to. It's their problem if they're too stupid/naive/gullible and/or too psychologically messed up to make choices that won't mess up their lives. As long as they don't harm me doing so, I'm not bothered.
Most smokers start smoking in school (and continue in adulthood because they're addicted), and there are generally two reasons they start: (1) it's cool to smoke, and (2) it's forbidden. If you take away (2), then (1) disappears because it wouldn't be cool anymore to smoke, since there would be no point (kids smoke to defy authority - it's natural for kids to defy authority, it's part of the adolescence phase, we can't stop that) I suspect that if you take away the "forbidden fruit" aspect of things like smoking, then most kids would think a little harder about it before they just picked up cigarettes and started smoking. (Have you ever tried to start smoking? It's not easy to start - you have to be quite motivated to put yourself through that. I tried once and I nearly threw up - I couldn't finish a single cigarette.) You have to figure out why kids are so motivated then, and remove that motivation. Much of that motivation is "smoking is not allowed, so lets do it to defy authority".
Only a tiny percentage of smokers start smoking after the age of 20. If tobacco companies can't continually recruit children, their multi-billion dollar business would die.
People either do drugs/smoking/alcohol etc because it's "forbidden fruit", or because they have psychological problems and are messed up. Regulating everything may limit the options for self-destruction that the latter group has, but it won't take away their self-destructive tendencies, and it won't solve their underlying problems. Those problems should be tackled, not the symptoms (e.g. drug addiction).
Of course, if we made it OK for kids to smoke, then there would still be the problem of advertising to kids, some of which are fairly susceptible to the influence of advertising (many of them aren't though.) I'd like to think that the solution lies partially in educating children, and partially in allowing them to make their own choices. I'd like to think that if you treat kids more like adults, then they react to that by behaving more like adults, and realising that their actions have consequences, and taking responsibility for that. If you don't teach kids to make decisions, you end up with adults who can't make decisions.
"Gambling and going to the movies are not the same thing. Gambling is addictive, it has destroyed families, lives, and fortunes"
Funny, smoking is addictive, and has destroyed millions of families and lives .. I don't see the government jumping in there to ban it (don't bother citing the current case against Philip Morris - that is by no means an effort to ban smoking, just to obtain damage compensation, big difference ..)
Gambling is a psychological addiction, not a biological one. I don't know of any other psychologically addictive activities that have been banned. Besides, the majority of people who try gambling do *not* end up addicted (compare with smoking - 9 out of 10 people who try smoking become addicted - thats more addictive than cocaine, which has a 1 out of 6 addiction rate, and alcohol comes in at 1 out of 10). Can you ban everyone from doing something, just because some people can't control themselves? I don't think thats ever been done before. (Don't bother citing the infamous prohibition in the 20's - alcoholism is a disease (complete with genetic tendency), not a psychological addiction.
I think the real reason gambling is illegal in so many places has more to do with the fact that the bible frowns on it, and most Americans are fairly conservative and religous. I for one cannot think of any purely moral objections to gambling.
Of course I'm not saying that casino's aren't corrupt, and that gambling hasn't destroyed peoples lives. But people self-destruct willingly, and more often than not those people already have self-destructive tendencies, and gambling is just one of many possible ways for people to realize these tendencies. But the solution is not to get rid of the symptoms (e.g. by banning gambling), but to cure the underlying problem (these people need psychological help - locking the slot machines away from them isn't going to fix that.)
The same goes for high-school shootings - there are many simple solutions that involve symptomatic treatment of the problem (e.g. by banning guns, tightening gun control etc.) - and while these "solutions" might help get rid of the "symptom" of school shootings, they haven't touched on the cause of those symptoms - e.g. unhappy, alienated teenagers with untreated mental illness. Suicide is currently the third-leading cause of death in the western world, and is poised to move into 2nd place by 2020 - we must be doing something wrong, as a society. But anyway, I'm going way off on a tangent here ..
I doubt it would work. It is currently pretty easy to find any popular song on Napster (granted it's slightly harder to find those not-so-common songs, but usually still possible), so why would I, if I wanted a song, willingly download a version with an advert in, when I can just get "the real thing" from Napster?
You might argue now that I probably wouldn't know when I start downloading which versions have ads in and which don't. But I'm willing to bet that nearly no Napster users would put songs with ads in them in their uploads directory, so 99% of the songs on Napster would be ad-free anyway.
Because it's so simple to get an ad-free version of a song from Napster, even if one did manage to accidentally download a song with an ad in, it's easy enough to just download a "pure" version of the song again.
Basically, some simple Darwinian-style "natural selection" would ensure that songs with ads in don't survive in the Napster environment.
"In other words, when people hurt themselves it is only a first step towards them starting to hurt other people"
What you're saying is that you should label people as criminals (e.g. by banning gambling) before they have even done anything wrong, just because "they might do something wrong". This is wrong. If somebody starts hurting someone else to pay off a gambling debt, then the crime is not having gotten into debt, it's the actual hurting of others, and whatever form that hurt takes should be punished.
If you could show some statistics that a significant percentage of gamblers (i.e. above 80%) will go on to hurt others because they gambled, then you might maybe have an argument - but you will never be able to show that, because it just isn't true. You cannot infringe on the rights of millions of people just because a few others might cause problems - that is ridiculous.
Your arguments apply quite broadly - you might use your point to argue that guns should be banned because a percentage of people who buy guns go on to commit crimes with them. Buying a gun isn't a crime, but hurting somebody with the gun may be (if not self-defense) .. punish the crime.
There is no way you will ever manage to prove that the act of gambling shows intent to hurt others.
I suspect the real reason that gambling is illegal in so many places is because the bible frowns on it. I can't see any other problem with it.
It's a selfish, twisted, flawed philosophy, evident of weak thinking and small souls
Please tell me the logical path you took to get from "selfish philosophy" to "weak thinking and small souls".
I for one can't see the connection, and quite frankly, the last line of your post makes you sound quite similar to rabid fundamentalist Christians. I find your implication that people's souls can quantified, compared (and judgments derived), quite repugnant. Moreover, passing such a judgment on someone purely because they have a few noble but naive ideas about security is irrational .. some might even call it "weak thinking" .. your emotions have the better of you.
That's bandwidth vs latency .. the latency (amount of time spent by the computer processing the overhead of sending/receiving packets) slows down your copying to some maximum (3.6M/sec is pretty good on 100M LAN ... I did some file transfer tests (SMB) and got about 1.5M/sec from Win98 to Win98, and about 2.5M/sec copying from Win2K to Win98 (goes to show, I think, what a difference there actually is between Win9X and WinNT's networking ..).
Basically adding more bandwidth above 100 MB isn't going to increase the speed of your transfers much (you're probably sending bigger packets with 1000mbit fiber, whereas the max ethernet frame size on 100MB LAN is 1500bytes, so the overhead per packet should be less, so you should end up with faster transfers, but they won't be that much faster, since there is still more overhead on the hard disk, processing interrupts etc ..)
Mainly what you gain by increasing the bandwidth is that the network won't saturate as quickly .. i.e. with 100MB ethernet you might have 2 to 4 people copying files when it'll start to slow down .. but gigabit ethernet will allow more people to be doing 3.8M/sec at once (just as an example).
Most of the problems you point out with Usenet are due to the fact that it is incredibly high-volume (over 1GB a day), significantly more so than DNS.
That's crap. I don't think you know what you are talking about. How do you think usenet works? Current DNS's anyway have to download thousands of records. Not having a centralized server makes it harder for the database to be consistent, but it wouldn't be slower. It would just give less predictable results, and would be subject to influence by people with alterior motives (e.g. mapping www.microsoft.com to www.linux.org or something) - but it's possible to do exactly that with the current DNS system anyway, so so what?
"That's funny. Almost governmental, giving with one hand what you take away with the other"
Well the fact is that my examples were true, and they were by no means the only ones. Matt Shephard, for example, may be one of the more well-publicised incidents, but certainly not the only one. I hardly think it is altogether safe to rule out that one will never be the next victim - so while using those examples was over-provocative (see next paragraph), the fact remains that there is an existing danger.
The chances of falling victim to something like that are still pretty small though - but probability has little to do with fear levels. Most people are terrified of sharks, yet the chances of dying from a bee sting are higher than from shark attack. Many people are terrified of flying, yet have no problem with driving, yet the chances of dying in an airplane accident are a few orders of magnitude smaller than your chances of dying in a car accident. Yet thats how the human brain "reasons" :/ . So based on that those examples may well cause an exaggerated amount of fear in people - yet you can't deny that those examples are true. So nothing strange about it.
I found your post a little ambiguous, quite frankly, so I couldn't quite determine quite what your position was on privacy - but you did seem to imply that the majority of people have nothing worth hiding anyway. Based on an assumption like that it would be easy enough for someone else to make the argument that people who are hiding something are doing something wrong, so I just didn't want anyone to walk away with that idea ..
Anyway, we seem to generally agree here .. cheers.
OK .. I'll go with your point. And yes, choosing the "worst case scenario" (of murderous zealots) as my example was over-provocative (although true in general).
But I think you underestimate the number of people who are currently living with something or other that they prefer to keep secret (be it mental illness, homosexuality, whatever) for fear of how others would react, or whatever other reason they have. I am willing to bet that a number of people you know - perhaps even people close to you - have secrets like this. I know women who have kept the fact that they are clinically depressed from their own husbands for over a decade now. This is not as unbelievable as it sounds, it's quite common. Most parents of depressed children don't know their children are depressed. Browse the alt.support.depression newsgroup for a while (if its still going, I was last there years ago) .. there are thousands of people like this.
Much of the same applies to gay people .. given the statistics on depression and homosexuality alone, I would venture a guess that at least 10% of people walking around do, unlike you, have something that they should be able to choose to keep secret. While not a majority, that's a significant number.
To what extent their fears are justified, I don't know - but the fact is, these people choose to keep these things secret. And that choice should remain a right. I've often heard it argued here on /. (and elsewhere) that "if you demand privacy then you must be doing something wrong". That attitude stems from ignorance.
During the next century, technology will develop the potential to completely annihilate (sp?) privacy; we should be pushing for more privacy .. if we just let things be, our privacy will diminish .. if we push for more, then we may be lucky and break even.
"Let's say someone did tap my phone. What will they use the information for? Will they attempt to blackmail me with information regarding cheating on my diet? What would they expect to gain? My assets are few. I try to live my life peaceably with others and within the limitations of the law"
Consider yourself one of the lucky people whose behaviour just happens to fit in with society accepts.
Consider that in many states in the US it is still illegal to have gay sex, for example. Consider yourself lucky you are straight (I'm assuming you are, otherwise you might feel differently than your post indicates.) Remember that not only would being gay be illegal in many states, but there are plenty of employers who would actually fire someone for being gay, and there are quite a number who would brutally murder you for being gay. Similarly, people who support abortion are also often the victims of zealous murderous fundamentalists.
There are plenty of people who would discriminate against others for being mentally ill, e.g. being clinically depressed. Many people have been fired after their employers found out about it. You can argue all you like about labor laws and discrimination laws - but in the real world, it is not easy (particularly if you don't have in-demand skills as computer nerds like us are lucky enough to have) to fight this sort of discrimination. Lawyers are expensive, lawsuits take a heavy emotional and financial toll, and the facts are often gray enough for someone's case to be lost against better lawyers.
I'm a reasonably experience C++ programmer, so I'm open about having depression (I am straight though, the gay thing was just an example :) .. I'm sure if I got fired because of it I would still be able to find another job elsewhere. But I count myself one of the lucky few in that regard.
My point is that some people often have valid reason to hide something, even if the reason they have to hide it is society itself, unfortunately. Nobody is likely to brutally murder you for cheating on your diet, but there are people who would if they know you were gay. And if they knew you were an atheist (yes, this happens .. I recently read about a prominent atheist who was kidnapped and then was never seen again.) Any number of things.
Profiling technology is currently fairly limited and expensive, but in the next 10 to 40 years it will become extremely cheap, prevasive and intelligent. There already exists software that can do both facial and behaviour recognition from a video, and that software will only get cheaper and better. So will cameras.