And in most other countries you aren't worried about the government stealing and reselling most of your secrets anyway. At least not your own government.
The government in india is democratic, but that doesn't make it any less corrupt to the bone. I wouldn't trust anyone in the indian government with my business secrets. Including my own relatives (who are in the civil service).
India is fully entitled to demand wiretap access. Democratic or not. But the whole reason to choose RIM over a competitor in india was precisely because the government couldn't get into the system, because you can't trust people in government to not just steal your secrets and sell them.
Part of the appeal of RIM was that you knew governments weren't out there stealing secrets sent across your network. I understand that India has a legitimate security need to be able to wiretap communications and so on. But this isn't going to 'help' RIM. This takes away the only major competitive advantage they had, which was that using RIM meant you knew no one in the indian government was going to steal your work and sell it to someone else (which is a serious concern in india).
If anything, this just levels the playing field. And that's bad for RIM, because they aren't competitive.
yes, but scaling isn't just purely linear. You're bottlenecked by different things in different scenarios in different games, at different resolutions. Sometimes you're limited by floating point performance on shaders, sometimes memory and so on, and that can change as you turn features on or change the resolution. No one writing directx or OpenGl is worrying about how they behave at 300 fps. They're worried at 120 and below. When you get that far out of the regular use range things that have fixed overhead might start to slow down performance because you're running them 250 times, even though that overhead is insignificant relatively at 60 fps.
At 60 FPS you have just under 16ms per frame, so if you have a function that takes 1 ms (even if it runs in parallel with other code) at a minimum, well at 250 fps that 1ms means a lot more as a percent of a frame than it does at 60 fps. (roughly 1/17 of a frame versus 1/4) Because you don't normally worry about 250 fps scenarios for fixed overhead you're.
Now lets say you have a function that takes 4 ms as fixed overhead. No matter how you optimize your game will never exceed 250 fps. You may never notice the 4ms overhead at 60 fps.
I did. And that's entirely my point. An i7 3930 with a GTX 680 (I have an i7 980 with a GTX 680 for one of my testing machines) doesn't necessarily translate directly to the 60 fps range.
Theoretically if you cut your performance by a factor of 6 you should have directx 9 at 45 fps and OGl at 54 I think, but that's not usually how these things scale. Different parts of the engine will scale differently, and even as the blog says, they had to re-optimize the game for OpenGl, things that have a fixed over head per frame, but different performance characteristics will not scale linearly from 60 - 240 fps. From 60-80... then yes, linear is a good approximation.
Yes and no. When you start getting to the 200 fps range you're talking about overhead in functions that are being called every frame for example, memory throughput, and problems like that. Different functions will have different characteristics, if you're expecting something to be called once a frame but only at 100 frames a second it's very different than if it starts getting called 250 times a second. Functions that are more efficient overhead but less efficient processing might perform better another way, but then you hand them dx9/OGL3.0 processing on a GTX 680 and that's not going to gate their performance at all.
I'm not saying it's meaningless entirely, but it doesn't mean that a slower card will be 45 fps vs 52, or that you'd see the same effect at 6x the resolution, I'm not sure why you'd have 6x the resolution on an nVIDIA setup, since eyefinity is an AMD thing but you get what I'm saying.
" Improvements here might still yield noteworthy FPS on lower end hardware" * (for some reason the quote tags aren't behaving)
this is the difference between a problem being analyzed in big O notation versus the actually profile with numerical coefficients. Somethings will be more efficient overall, somethings will be more efficient in specific ranges. It's not like OpenGl is bad, quite the contrary, it's quite successful, but every game is different, and trying to use one game at 5 or 6x the framerate people actually play at as an indicator that one is superior to the other is misleading at best.
The other issue becomes ease of development, if, for your team, directx is 5% slower, but 10% less development time required that might still be preferable. Left 4 dead 2 has been out for 2 and a half years already, and the people who've been porting it over to linux have been working on it for quite some time.
Why would they? Using old directx 9 code that makes 270 fps is more than good enough, there's no reason to work back to optimize it for directx 11/11.1 etc.
When you're talking about 270 FPS you're into seriously questionable scaling issues, not for reasonable performance ranges. Just because something is more efficient at 200 fps doesn't mean it's more or less efficient at 50. That's the same as saying my car can do 270 kph, and yours can do 315... well yay. But which one is more fuel efficient at 60fps? (And which card, which drivers etc. etc. etc. all of which is secondary when you're talking about performance numbers in those ranges.).
If the company can refuse to hire you because you refused to provide a password, even if they are violating the Facebook TOS, and if there is no legal recourse against that company for how they are behaving then yes, you need the law to clarify its position (which is more what this is).
Worse still is if governments have ruled through various agencies that they *can* ask for your passwords legally - which they probably cannot, and this clarifies that they aren't allowed to do that. Keep in mind that laws will be written to say blandly generally things like 'the police force should use all due diligence to ensure only reputable people are hired', so then some civil servants in an agency will try and interpret 'due diligence' and 'reputable' every year, and s/he doesn't want to get fired for not doing enough diligence.
The law isn't in this to protect the data on your facebook account, which is what you're talking about being able to protect yourself. It's about first protecting you from discrimination for refusing to do something stupid (and potentially illegal), and secondly it's protecting the government (and companies) from being on the losing side of a lawsuit for doing something they shouldn't have been doing.
Governments frequently grapple with the question of what employees are to do if they're given instructions they don't think are lawful or within the terms of their contract. This isn't just 'don't torture people because the vice president said it was ok', it's things protecting employees who demand gloves and sweaters when they work in freezers, or when laws are very very complicated, or overlapping or the like, and who trumps who and so on. You as a prospective employee need to be protected from being punished just because you're following contracts you signed, which was that you wouldn't give up your facebook password when you agreed to facebooks TOS.
If everyone acted the same way, with the same level of outrage, the problem would go away on its own.
No. It could very well go the other direction. If the bureaucracy makes a rule, and no one successfully challenges it (and remember, they might actually be authorized to demand your password if the law granting them authority was unintentionally over reaching) then you need to make new laws. Otherwise demanding your social networking passwords could easily become routinely allowed.
They still know they're testing a car though, why would they try and bring a cheeseburger with them or start trying to text. Demonstrating how stupid those things are is much about finding someone who belligerently believes they can, asking them to prove it, and watching them fail.
European car makers for years resisted putting basic stuff like cup holders in because they didn't think you'd want to do anything but drive. Then some of them experienced north american traffic.
The european mindset about cars has been much more about paying attention to the fucking road than trying to watch a DVD while you sit in a traffic jam for an hour, and that has given then a bit of a leg up on making sure everything you need to be on the road is well thought out.
True, but it depends how the system works. If you're supposed to click to buy button until you see 'transaction accepted' and they double processed the buy button that's messy. If the system said 'request timed out try again' then NASDAQ is in real trouble.
I think the problem is that the compensation fund is no where near adequate to cover the scale of the problem.
The compensation fund is only in the 100 million dollar range. That sounds like a lot of money, but when you're talking about 5 or 6 billion dollars in trading,(or more) 100 million dollars doesn't go very far, especially if it's spread out over multiple parties, i.e. that's for more than just UBS.
In that situation UBS is (probably correctly) taking the position that NASDAQ as a trading entity isn't able to meet it's contractual obligations in repayment for messed up trades, because the fund isn't big enough, and UBS wants all of their money back. Which, if this was a much smaller event they probably would have been entitled to.
Whether or not there's some bigger insurance system here I have no idea. But it seems like the fund NASDAQ has is for as you say problems that turn up routinely. I'm just not sure it's adequate for the scale of the problem of hundreds of millions of dollars in duplicate transactions that can't just be 'reversed' easily, especially since NASDAQ can't take the shares back, sell them and then have enough for compensation.
The challenge should be playing the game, not seeing the game.
That's a good mantra, but it depends very much on what 'playing the game' is supposed to involve. To use the summaries dense jungle example, making it intentionally hard to find your way around can be part of the game. For a more mundane example Left 4 dead 2 has a corn field and a field to a gas station, both of which are intentionally there to disorient you.
Now in that case, of intentionally disorienting the player, you need to give them a way out so they can try again.
How subtle is too subtle in storytelling is a chronic question. Was it clear if dumbledore was gay? Was it even supposed to be (i.e. were there enough hints that you should have been able to pick that out)? These sorts of questions have kept literature teachers in business, and literature in students pulling out their hair for centuries, that we now expand that to real time rendered art isn't all that shocking.
I think gaming might be Microsofts big ace up its sleeve so to speak. Xbox integration in a useful way could move a few million phones potentially. Then you could get into things like save game portability between PC (or Xbox) and your mobile, and that could actually be something that would move units. Assuming people can figure out how to use it.
us in the trenches are predicting a Vista style backlash on win 8
Well obviously. Windows 8 is horrid.
Classic shell is fine for power users, but it's not suitable for most users. (Because most users shouldn't be modding anything about how their OS behaves).
The question is whether or not Windows 8's big integration plan actually materializes any features that people can understand enough to use, and whether or not those features are worth having. As of yet I haven't found any, but that doesn't mean there won't be something.
Well sure. Windows 8 is terrible. But if microsoft can come up with something windows 8 only that drives a specific market to rush out and buy it it could see adoption quickly. Vista didn't really offer anything and was just annoying. Windows 8 is at least fast, but it's UI and organization is beyond terrible.
Yes. But nothing quite like Windows 8 because it hasn't been tried before.
Which if nothing else, is a good argument to try it and see just how easy it is to maintain for your specific piece of software. If it's too much work then windows phone 8 will probably die a quick death and that's the end of the whole discussion. If it isn't too hard then you may as well, since windows phone 8 could take off.
But what was the point of doing things in Libya in the first place
Gaddahfi was a lunatic, and the people were going to try and oust him. Better to be on the winning side in the end. Especially in the case of Gaddahfi, you're better off with pretty much anyone but his chosen successor.
The great strategic game being played here is that the US doesn't want a massive broad pan-arab democratic sweep that could unify the whole of north africa and the middle east. Better to jump in piece meal and support individual revolutions so that the countries stay separate, somewhat distrustful of each other and so on.
The great question of Iran is whether or not they care. They might be happy to take the the israeli's with them and if that means 20 or 30 million persians die in the process well so what.
The soviet union, for all its faults cared very much about not getting their whole population wiped out. Iran... harder to call.
a few different governments over 100 years. And they're certainly at war with israel and have been since the so called revolution took hold.
Besides that, germany and Britain were friends for the better part of 100 years from the early 1800's until the early 1900's. And then came 1914. Times change, strategic relationships change. 100 years ago Persia had maybe 10 million people, today it's more like 85 million, relative to its immediate neighbours that's not a huge shift, but relative to say the european powers thats a major demographic shift.
Slashdot Mirror
And in most other countries you aren't worried about the government stealing and reselling most of your secrets anyway. At least not your own government.
The government in india is democratic, but that doesn't make it any less corrupt to the bone. I wouldn't trust anyone in the indian government with my business secrets. Including my own relatives (who are in the civil service).
India is fully entitled to demand wiretap access. Democratic or not. But the whole reason to choose RIM over a competitor in india was precisely because the government couldn't get into the system, because you can't trust people in government to not just steal your secrets and sell them.
Part of the appeal of RIM was that you knew governments weren't out there stealing secrets sent across your network. I understand that India has a legitimate security need to be able to wiretap communications and so on. But this isn't going to 'help' RIM. This takes away the only major competitive advantage they had, which was that using RIM meant you knew no one in the indian government was going to steal your work and sell it to someone else (which is a serious concern in india).
If anything, this just levels the playing field. And that's bad for RIM, because they aren't competitive.
Well ya, but one can hope they're actually working on left 4 dead 3. Nerds can dream can't we?
yes, but scaling isn't just purely linear. You're bottlenecked by different things in different scenarios in different games, at different resolutions. Sometimes you're limited by floating point performance on shaders, sometimes memory and so on, and that can change as you turn features on or change the resolution. No one writing directx or OpenGl is worrying about how they behave at 300 fps. They're worried at 120 and below. When you get that far out of the regular use range things that have fixed overhead might start to slow down performance because you're running them 250 times, even though that overhead is insignificant relatively at 60 fps.
At 60 FPS you have just under 16ms per frame, so if you have a function that takes 1 ms (even if it runs in parallel with other code) at a minimum, well at 250 fps that 1ms means a lot more as a percent of a frame than it does at 60 fps. (roughly 1/17 of a frame versus 1/4) Because you don't normally worry about 250 fps scenarios for fixed overhead you're.
Now lets say you have a function that takes 4 ms as fixed overhead. No matter how you optimize your game will never exceed 250 fps. You may never notice the 4ms overhead at 60 fps.
Sorry, I measure my own cars performance in flips per second rather than kilometres per hour and I confused myself when typing my post.
Sure, but they don't have something that would tax a GTX 680 down to 60 FPS and be playable on anything else, and be a port from Windows.
I did. And that's entirely my point. An i7 3930 with a GTX 680 (I have an i7 980 with a GTX 680 for one of my testing machines) doesn't necessarily translate directly to the 60 fps range.
Theoretically if you cut your performance by a factor of 6 you should have directx 9 at 45 fps and OGl at 54 I think, but that's not usually how these things scale. Different parts of the engine will scale differently, and even as the blog says, they had to re-optimize the game for OpenGl, things that have a fixed over head per frame, but different performance characteristics will not scale linearly from 60 - 240 fps. From 60-80... then yes, linear is a good approximation.
Apparently I'm not sure either.
Yes and no. When you start getting to the 200 fps range you're talking about overhead in functions that are being called every frame for example, memory throughput, and problems like that. Different functions will have different characteristics, if you're expecting something to be called once a frame but only at 100 frames a second it's very different than if it starts getting called 250 times a second. Functions that are more efficient overhead but less efficient processing might perform better another way, but then you hand them dx9/OGL3.0 processing on a GTX 680 and that's not going to gate their performance at all.
I'm not saying it's meaningless entirely, but it doesn't mean that a slower card will be 45 fps vs 52, or that you'd see the same effect at 6x the resolution, I'm not sure why you'd have 6x the resolution on an nVIDIA setup, since eyefinity is an AMD thing but you get what I'm saying.
" Improvements here might still yield noteworthy FPS on lower end hardware" * (for some reason the quote tags aren't behaving)
this is the difference between a problem being analyzed in big O notation versus the actually profile with numerical coefficients. Somethings will be more efficient overall, somethings will be more efficient in specific ranges. It's not like OpenGl is bad, quite the contrary, it's quite successful, but every game is different, and trying to use one game at 5 or 6x the framerate people actually play at as an indicator that one is superior to the other is misleading at best.
The other issue becomes ease of development, if, for your team, directx is 5% slower, but 10% less development time required that might still be preferable. Left 4 dead 2 has been out for 2 and a half years already, and the people who've been porting it over to linux have been working on it for quite some time.
Why would they? Using old directx 9 code that makes 270 fps is more than good enough, there's no reason to work back to optimize it for directx 11/11.1 etc.
When you're talking about 270 FPS you're into seriously questionable scaling issues, not for reasonable performance ranges. Just because something is more efficient at 200 fps doesn't mean it's more or less efficient at 50. That's the same as saying my car can do 270 kph, and yours can do 315... well yay. But which one is more fuel efficient at 60fps? (And which card, which drivers etc. etc. etc. all of which is secondary when you're talking about performance numbers in those ranges.).
I don't need a law to protect me
If the company can refuse to hire you because you refused to provide a password, even if they are violating the Facebook TOS, and if there is no legal recourse against that company for how they are behaving then yes, you need the law to clarify its position (which is more what this is).
Worse still is if governments have ruled through various agencies that they *can* ask for your passwords legally - which they probably cannot, and this clarifies that they aren't allowed to do that. Keep in mind that laws will be written to say blandly generally things like 'the police force should use all due diligence to ensure only reputable people are hired', so then some civil servants in an agency will try and interpret 'due diligence' and 'reputable' every year, and s/he doesn't want to get fired for not doing enough diligence.
The law isn't in this to protect the data on your facebook account, which is what you're talking about being able to protect yourself. It's about first protecting you from discrimination for refusing to do something stupid (and potentially illegal), and secondly it's protecting the government (and companies) from being on the losing side of a lawsuit for doing something they shouldn't have been doing.
Governments frequently grapple with the question of what employees are to do if they're given instructions they don't think are lawful or within the terms of their contract. This isn't just 'don't torture people because the vice president said it was ok', it's things protecting employees who demand gloves and sweaters when they work in freezers, or when laws are very very complicated, or overlapping or the like, and who trumps who and so on. You as a prospective employee need to be protected from being punished just because you're following contracts you signed, which was that you wouldn't give up your facebook password when you agreed to facebooks TOS.
If everyone acted the same way, with the same level of outrage, the problem would go away on its own.
No. It could very well go the other direction. If the bureaucracy makes a rule, and no one successfully challenges it (and remember, they might actually be authorized to demand your password if the law granting them authority was unintentionally over reaching) then you need to make new laws. Otherwise demanding your social networking passwords could easily become routinely allowed.
They still know they're testing a car though, why would they try and bring a cheeseburger with them or start trying to text. Demonstrating how stupid those things are is much about finding someone who belligerently believes they can, asking them to prove it, and watching them fail.
European car makers for years resisted putting basic stuff like cup holders in because they didn't think you'd want to do anything but drive. Then some of them experienced north american traffic.
The european mindset about cars has been much more about paying attention to the fucking road than trying to watch a DVD while you sit in a traffic jam for an hour, and that has given then a bit of a leg up on making sure everything you need to be on the road is well thought out.
True, but it depends how the system works. If you're supposed to click to buy button until you see 'transaction accepted' and they double processed the buy button that's messy. If the system said 'request timed out try again' then NASDAQ is in real trouble.
I think the problem is that the compensation fund is no where near adequate to cover the scale of the problem.
The compensation fund is only in the 100 million dollar range. That sounds like a lot of money, but when you're talking about 5 or 6 billion dollars in trading,(or more) 100 million dollars doesn't go very far, especially if it's spread out over multiple parties, i.e. that's for more than just UBS.
In that situation UBS is (probably correctly) taking the position that NASDAQ as a trading entity isn't able to meet it's contractual obligations in repayment for messed up trades, because the fund isn't big enough, and UBS wants all of their money back. Which, if this was a much smaller event they probably would have been entitled to.
Whether or not there's some bigger insurance system here I have no idea. But it seems like the fund NASDAQ has is for as you say problems that turn up routinely. I'm just not sure it's adequate for the scale of the problem of hundreds of millions of dollars in duplicate transactions that can't just be 'reversed' easily, especially since NASDAQ can't take the shares back, sell them and then have enough for compensation.
The challenge should be playing the game, not seeing the game.
That's a good mantra, but it depends very much on what 'playing the game' is supposed to involve. To use the summaries dense jungle example, making it intentionally hard to find your way around can be part of the game. For a more mundane example Left 4 dead 2 has a corn field and a field to a gas station, both of which are intentionally there to disorient you.
Now in that case, of intentionally disorienting the player, you need to give them a way out so they can try again.
How subtle is too subtle in storytelling is a chronic question. Was it clear if dumbledore was gay? Was it even supposed to be (i.e. were there enough hints that you should have been able to pick that out)? These sorts of questions have kept literature teachers in business, and literature in students pulling out their hair for centuries, that we now expand that to real time rendered art isn't all that shocking.
After using windows 8 for an hour you'll at least know what not to do.
I think gaming might be Microsofts big ace up its sleeve so to speak. Xbox integration in a useful way could move a few million phones potentially. Then you could get into things like save game portability between PC (or Xbox) and your mobile, and that could actually be something that would move units. Assuming people can figure out how to use it.
us in the trenches are predicting a Vista style backlash on win 8
Well obviously. Windows 8 is horrid.
Classic shell is fine for power users, but it's not suitable for most users. (Because most users shouldn't be modding anything about how their OS behaves).
The question is whether or not Windows 8's big integration plan actually materializes any features that people can understand enough to use, and whether or not those features are worth having. As of yet I haven't found any, but that doesn't mean there won't be something.
Well sure. Windows 8 is terrible. But if microsoft can come up with something windows 8 only that drives a specific market to rush out and buy it it could see adoption quickly. Vista didn't really offer anything and was just annoying. Windows 8 is at least fast, but it's UI and organization is beyond terrible.
Yes. But nothing quite like Windows 8 because it hasn't been tried before.
Which if nothing else, is a good argument to try it and see just how easy it is to maintain for your specific piece of software. If it's too much work then windows phone 8 will probably die a quick death and that's the end of the whole discussion. If it isn't too hard then you may as well, since windows phone 8 could take off.
But what was the point of doing things in Libya in the first place
Gaddahfi was a lunatic, and the people were going to try and oust him. Better to be on the winning side in the end. Especially in the case of Gaddahfi, you're better off with pretty much anyone but his chosen successor.
The great strategic game being played here is that the US doesn't want a massive broad pan-arab democratic sweep that could unify the whole of north africa and the middle east. Better to jump in piece meal and support individual revolutions so that the countries stay separate, somewhat distrustful of each other and so on.
The great question of Iran is whether or not they care. They might be happy to take the the israeli's with them and if that means 20 or 30 million persians die in the process well so what.
The soviet union, for all its faults cared very much about not getting their whole population wiped out. Iran... harder to call.
a few different governments over 100 years. And they're certainly at war with israel and have been since the so called revolution took hold.
Besides that, germany and Britain were friends for the better part of 100 years from the early 1800's until the early 1900's. And then came 1914. Times change, strategic relationships change. 100 years ago Persia had maybe 10 million people, today it's more like 85 million, relative to its immediate neighbours that's not a huge shift, but relative to say the european powers thats a major demographic shift.