Actually I do remember that, because I worked for a game company at the time and handled with hardware developer relations. I have also worked for a video card manufacturer, so I know that angle too.
The games that are bundled with video cards are very often optimized for that card in one way or another. Typically, the games are an enhanced version of the regular game that uses some advanced feature of the card, say DualHead or EMBM on a Matrox G400, or vertex and pixel shaders on an nVidia GeForce 3 (I believe Giants: Citizen Kubuto falls into this category). So this is nothing new.
The thing is that you don't need the latest and greatest video card in order to play the current greatest games.
How many games last year that required Direct3D 8.x support? One, I believe. (The latest EverQuest add-on). nVidia introduced us to vertex and pixel shaders almost a year ago, and we're only now seeing games that can use them. The vast majority of 3D games today run perfectly well on a Kyro II. For over a year after the Voodoo I came out, 3D games were still being shipped with a software rendering option.
This is always the state of affairs in games. The hardware manufacturers want game developers to make games that make the public buy their cards, but the game publishers want the developers to spend time (and money) on features that will sell more games. And more games will not be sold if the hardware's install base is 50,000.
So the greatest games will always lag beind hardware. So buy older hardware and save yourself a bundle. The GeForce 3 Ti200 still plays *everything* really fast.
You can't draw the conclusions you want from your post-scarcity model because your model is flawed.
Your post-scarcity model implicitly assumes that the only things worth being paid in are material, and that software is somehow outside of this. If software is not outside, then it can be trivially constructed and thus cannot be restricted. If it is outside of this, then we have determined something that is naturally scarce (because it cannot be created trivially) and thus subject to normal rules of supply and demand.
In this case, because I have created something non-trivial, I expect to be paid for it. If nothing else exists, I can be paid for it in other non-trivial pieces of software. But a society that cannot trivially create software will have a number of of other natural scarcities, including (I imagine) sex, entertainment, and power (over other people). And currency will exist so that I perform these trades smoothly.
The true non-scarcity society will exist not because material goods are available to all, but because *anything* can be trivially constructed. And even then, I suspect, humans will try to find ways to distinguish themselves from their peers. If nothing else, they will want to be the first on their block to think of something new to be trivially constructed.
While its true that people will try to overcome the "blades" portion of this model, this does not lead to the conclusion that the model will naturually fall out of favour.
For example, the razor blade market is quite mature, yet no-one is selling significant numbers of expensive razons + cheap blades. The home inkjet printer market is also heading towards cheaper printers and expensive cartridges (or grey-market refills).
I believe that the trick lies in the perception of expense. Send not too much money not too often, and the model works just fine.
"How much 'eye-to-eye gaze' do you have to have to be normal?" asks Lotspeich. "How do you define what 'marked' is? In shades of gray, when does black become white?"
The real meat behind the Cat is coherence, which deals with the amount of quantum interaction between an object and the rest of the universe. Perhaps unfortunately (for quantum literature, anyway), cats interact way too much to ever wholly enter an indeterminate quantum state.
1) It costs money, but only so much as you need for a copy of Acrobat.
2) They are probably more interested in reaching the maximum number of people as opposed to toeing the Open Format party line. As such, PDF reaches those of us with Windows and Mac machines, and Postscript is for the *nix crowd.
3) They are not interested in having you edit their publications. As such, they have published in a printable format, not an editable one.
4) Most importantly, layout is all important. HTML was designed with the purpose of leaving layout of the document at the ultimate discretion of the browser. That's bad, especially if you have to save your mathematical formulae as PNGs in order to get them to display properly. Postscript and PDF are layout formats; what you see is what your reader sees.
What I'm waiting to see is the DMCA and backdoor legislation put in a locked room together so they can fight it out.
If DMCA proponent uses some form of watermarking (essentially steganography) then they have to provide ways for the goverment to get at the raw digital information. This means that the backdoor software violates the DMCA.
However, the backdoor software could be just a PGP decoder. Does that make all PGP programs illegal?
Thank you for bringing the ad on www.MonsterHut.com to our attention. This
ad was produced without our knowledge. Actually we never heard of the site
until we received your e-mail today. Our legal team will be in touch with
MonsterHut.com to rectify this potentially illegal situation and to
instruct them to promptly take this ad down.
We value your business and hope in no way this incident has changed your
opinion of Hertz. Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Joseph Torpey
Manager, Interactive Marketing
The Hertz Corporation
Re:Where's the outrage for the other crap going on
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 1
I would have thought it was obvious, but this is a geek/nerd site. As such, readers are interested in geek/nerd issues. In general, the overcrowding of California prisons, the legalization of currently controlled narcotic substances, and penalties for illegal nonviolent crimes are not geek/nerd issues.
To suggest that because we support a cause peripheral to yours we must support yours with the same enthusiasm is a) naive, b) self-defeating, and c) illogical.
Or perhaps Ranger's IP sniffer, the copyright material detector, or the MPAA database don't work up to snuff. Because this entire action was conducted as a private affair, the accused does not get to face his accusers (the software).
It's worth pointing out that Henry Mintzberg thinks that most MBA students are the wrong people (people who think they can manage a business they know nothing about) there for the wrong reasons (to get a high-paying job fast). The right people are those who need to make organization-level decisions about a business that they know intimately, and who already have the leadership and management skills.
In virtually every company I've worked for the developers scorned the sales, marketing, and exec people for making the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons, and the developers inevitably paid the price in unpaid overtime, cranky customers, and irate stockholders. Now, MBA in hand, you will get to make those decisions and your developers will conclude that, unlike every other MBA they've seen, you're making the right decisions for the right reasons. No, really.
He has inflicted his ill-researched morality and his ill-researched games technology prowess on Salon readers before. That he has shot off his mouth in a hypocritical rant against the sexual marketing aspects of E3 ("I can't stand its emphasis on sex, but I have to go! Really!") should come as a surprise to no-one.
I'm going to concur with most of the other decent posts: co-op is there to teach you practical stuff they don't teach in school: work is often boring, lots of time is spent doing activities in support of your main task, and people don't trust those who are unproven.
The very best co-op positions combine two aspects: they teach you l33t bizne55 sk1llz while not letting you screw up anything important. Let me illustrate.
I'm a senior programmer, and my rule of thumb is: Don't give an intern programmer any programming job that you can't afford to completely re-write once they've left. That means no time-critical tasks and nothing important that can't be put off until afterwards.
This is because the skills that they need to make good programs are exactly the ones that we need to teach them: design, documentation, style, and maintainability.
Hopefully by the time they leave they will have acquired some skill in those areas. But even if they did, the code they wrote to learn them is probably crap. If it's flawless then you can count yourself lucky and integrate it. If it's crap, you can count yourself an idiot if you counted upon it being flawless.
A game artist is anyone to whom you it must be explained that 126 is not a power of 2.
Re:Holy shit! This guy has the same lame idea I do
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 1
Anyway, he never made an objection to GUI's in general...he objected to a system which never lets you go beyond the GUI.
I have to disagree. He's railing against more than the lack of availability of command lines and access to the internals. He's railing against the fact that it isn't a fundamental part of every user's interaction with their computer.
MOGLEN:[I have nothing against a GUI in which]every window there's some dialogue to have with some linguistic entity.
WORTHINGTON: There's a command prompt in every window.
MOGLEN: Exactly.... [A current GUI] represents a very downmarket view of the way people and machines ought to interact.
He believes that full human/computer interaction should take place in the impoverished region of context-free languages. And I believe it should take place in the far richer area of GUIs, natural (context-sensitive) languages, and eventually thought.
Re:Holy shit! This guy has the same lame idea I do
on
The Encryption Wars
·
· Score: 2
In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple's first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology's primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that.
I've been trying to express this thought for years and haven't been able to phrase it half as well. The mac gui really does emotionally and intellectually regress those that use it.
While the objective of "help people think in more precise and clear ways" is admirable, the methodology (censorship) is not. Essentially he is promoting the idea that access to computers should be limited to those who have passed the exam of procedural thought. This is not unlike withholding citizenship from those who hold a certain religious or ideological viewpoint.
Firstly the GUI should be lauded, as it has enabled the introduction of computers, the simple directory structure of which requires logical thought, to a set of people who otherwise would have remained in the computer and logical dark.
Secondly, it is the zenith of arrogance to assume that the sum objectives of computers can be met with procedural languages. Would Toy Story have been done without GUI-based art programs? No.
Finally, if the purpose of a computer language (and extrapolated to a GUI) is to translate human intent (rich language) into computer action (poor language), should not as much of that work as possible be done by the computer, and not by the human? Is there anyone reading Slashdot who thinks that datajacks, which would translate human thought into computer action, would be a bad idea?
I think their opinion is principally head by would-be techocrats bitter when they saw their technology lead and investment eroded by a better interface.
If any attempts to download or transfer the source code were made, such activity was not recorded in Microsoft's logs, Miller said, adding that it is unlikely any source code files were copied because of their immense size.
Good grief! What were they writing? Software bloat as a protection against theft?
Code size plus Microsoft Visual SourceSafe does equal security. Anyone who has used VSS knows that updating a moderate size project can be a "go away and eat lunch while it finishes" proposition. Doing a "Get Latest Version" from scratch on the Win98SE project is more likely "go away for fourteen sleeps."
This sounds like it will soon become a lose-lose situation for 20%-50% of the british populace, and only win-win for the perfectly healthy. That is not what insurance is about.
When insurance was invented it was a way to share unpredictable, catastrophic risk amongst its owners. Insurance has mutated from that purpose and it's time to make a distinction.
On one hand, it's worthwhile for countries to offer a minimum set of services to everyone. This is for a variety of reasons including financial, political, and social. This is the best way to ensure equality as it can incorporate many cost savings beyond normal insurance, such as reduced drug costs.
On the other hand, in the realms beyond minimum services, I'm all in favour of life and health insurance companies dividing up the risk pool according to statistical data. I don't want to share my health insurance premiums with smokers, my life insurance premiums with terminally ill people, or my car insurance premiums with people who speed and have collisions. I don't owe those people anything.
When I go shopping for insurance, I want a product that is a good reflection of the risk/payout ratio for me.
Insurance should be used for its original purpose: unpredictable financially catastrophic problems. When the probability is well known people should insure themselves. When its a matter of equality public policy should be enacted, but not by enforcing consolidation of risk by private insurance companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I do remember that, because I worked for a game company at the time and handled with hardware developer relations. I have also worked for a video card manufacturer, so I know that angle too.
The games that are bundled with video cards are very often optimized for that card in one way or another. Typically, the games are an enhanced version of the regular game that uses some advanced feature of the card, say DualHead or EMBM on a Matrox G400, or vertex and pixel shaders on an nVidia GeForce 3 (I believe Giants: Citizen Kubuto falls into this category). So this is nothing new.
The thing is that you don't need the latest and greatest video card in order to play the current greatest games.
How many games last year that required Direct3D 8.x support? One, I believe. (The latest EverQuest add-on). nVidia introduced us to vertex and pixel shaders almost a year ago, and we're only now seeing games that can use them. The vast majority of 3D games today run perfectly well on a Kyro II. For over a year after the Voodoo I came out, 3D games were still being shipped with a software rendering option.
This is always the state of affairs in games. The hardware manufacturers want game developers to make games that make the public buy their cards, but the game publishers want the developers to spend time (and money) on features that will sell more games. And more games will not be sold if the hardware's install base is 50,000.
So the greatest games will always lag beind hardware. So buy older hardware and save yourself a bundle. The GeForce 3 Ti200 still plays *everything* really fast.
You can't draw the conclusions you want from your post-scarcity model because your model is flawed.
Your post-scarcity model implicitly assumes that the only things worth being paid in are material, and that software is somehow outside of this. If software is not outside, then it can be trivially constructed and thus cannot be restricted. If it is outside of this, then we have determined something that is naturally scarce (because it cannot be created trivially) and thus subject to normal rules of supply and demand.
In this case, because I have created something non-trivial, I expect to be paid for it. If nothing else exists, I can be paid for it in other non-trivial pieces of software. But a society that cannot trivially create software will have a number of of other natural scarcities, including (I imagine) sex, entertainment, and power (over other people). And currency will exist so that I perform these trades smoothly.
The true non-scarcity society will exist not because material goods are available to all, but because *anything* can be trivially constructed. And even then, I suspect, humans will try to find ways to distinguish themselves from their peers. If nothing else, they will want to be the first on their block to think of something new to be trivially constructed.
While its true that people will try to overcome the "blades" portion of this model, this does not lead to the conclusion that the model will naturually fall out of favour.
For example, the razor blade market is quite mature, yet no-one is selling significant numbers of expensive razons + cheap blades. The home inkjet printer market is also heading towards cheaper printers and expensive cartridges (or grey-market refills).
I believe that the trick lies in the perception of expense. Send not too much money not too often, and the model works just fine.
Both Anandtech and Tom's Hardware have done reviews recently that involve motherboards that use the VIA KT266A chip, which handles Durons and Athlons.
It also completely ignores the genetic correlation. Is MMT administration gentetically determined?
Well, duh. 128, 128, 128.
The idea that observation destroys states is an unfortunate one that is false. In no case should one think of consciousness as physically producing a change in the state of a system.
The real meat behind the Cat is coherence, which deals with the amount of quantum interaction between an object and the rest of the universe. Perhaps unfortunately (for quantum literature, anyway), cats interact way too much to ever wholly enter an indeterminate quantum state.
1) It costs money, but only so much as you need for a copy of Acrobat.
2) They are probably more interested in reaching the maximum number of people as opposed to toeing the Open Format party line. As such, PDF reaches those of us with Windows and Mac machines, and Postscript is for the *nix crowd.
3) They are not interested in having you edit their publications. As such, they have published in a printable format, not an editable one.
4) Most importantly, layout is all important. HTML was designed with the purpose of leaving layout of the document at the ultimate discretion of the browser. That's bad, especially if you have to save your mathematical formulae as PNGs in order to get them to display properly. Postscript and PDF are layout formats; what you see is what your reader sees.
What I'm waiting to see is the DMCA and backdoor legislation put in a locked room together so they can fight it out.
If DMCA proponent uses some form of watermarking (essentially steganography) then they have to provide ways for the goverment to get at the raw digital information. This means that the backdoor software violates the DMCA.
However, the backdoor software could be just a PGP decoder. Does that make all PGP programs illegal?
Do not ingest before drinking heavily; the consequences are too terrible to think about.
I received this email this afternoon:
Thank you for bringing the ad on www.MonsterHut.com to our attention. This
ad was produced without our knowledge. Actually we never heard of the site
until we received your e-mail today. Our legal team will be in touch with
MonsterHut.com to rectify this potentially illegal situation and to
instruct them to promptly take this ad down.
We value your business and hope in no way this incident has changed your
opinion of Hertz. Thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Joseph Torpey
Manager, Interactive Marketing
The Hertz Corporation
I would have thought it was obvious, but this is a geek/nerd site. As such, readers are interested in geek/nerd issues. In general, the overcrowding of California prisons, the legalization of currently controlled narcotic substances, and penalties for illegal nonviolent crimes are not geek/nerd issues.
To suggest that because we support a cause peripheral to yours we must support yours with the same enthusiasm is a) naive, b) self-defeating, and c) illogical.
Or perhaps Ranger's IP sniffer, the copyright material detector, or the MPAA database don't work up to snuff. Because this entire action was conducted as a private affair, the accused does not get to face his accusers (the software).
Get rid of those #@#$% Todd McFarlane models.
In virtually every company I've worked for the developers scorned the sales, marketing, and exec people for making the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons, and the developers inevitably paid the price in unpaid overtime, cranky customers, and irate stockholders. Now, MBA in hand, you will get to make those decisions and your developers will conclude that, unlike every other MBA they've seen, you're making the right decisions for the right reasons. No, really.
He has inflicted his ill-researched morality and his ill-researched games technology prowess on Salon readers before. That he has shot off his mouth in a hypocritical rant against the sexual marketing aspects of E3 ("I can't stand its emphasis on sex, but I have to go! Really!") should come as a surprise to no-one.
The very best co-op positions combine two aspects: they teach you l33t bizne55 sk1llz while not letting you screw up anything important. Let me illustrate.
I'm a senior programmer, and my rule of thumb is: Don't give an intern programmer any programming job that you can't afford to completely re-write once they've left. That means no time-critical tasks and nothing important that can't be put off until afterwards.
This is because the skills that they need to make good programs are exactly the ones that we need to teach them: design, documentation, style, and maintainability.
Hopefully by the time they leave they will have acquired some skill in those areas. But even if they did, the code they wrote to learn them is probably crap. If it's flawless then you can count yourself lucky and integrate it. If it's crap, you can count yourself an idiot if you counted upon it being flawless.
A game artist is anyone to whom you it must be explained that 126 is not a power of 2.
While the objective of "help people think in more precise and clear ways" is admirable, the methodology (censorship) is not. Essentially he is promoting the idea that access to computers should be limited to those who have passed the exam of procedural thought. This is not unlike withholding citizenship from those who hold a certain religious or ideological viewpoint.
Firstly the GUI should be lauded, as it has enabled the introduction of computers, the simple directory structure of which requires logical thought, to a set of people who otherwise would have remained in the computer and logical dark.
Secondly, it is the zenith of arrogance to assume that the sum objectives of computers can be met with procedural languages. Would Toy Story have been done without GUI-based art programs? No.
Finally, if the purpose of a computer language (and extrapolated to a GUI) is to translate human intent (rich language) into computer action (poor language), should not as much of that work as possible be done by the computer, and not by the human? Is there anyone reading Slashdot who thinks that datajacks, which would translate human thought into computer action, would be a bad idea?
I think their opinion is principally head by would-be techocrats bitter when they saw their technology lead and investment eroded by a better interface.
www.oldharddrivesasantitanktraps.com
Code size plus Microsoft Visual SourceSafe does equal security. Anyone who has used VSS knows that updating a moderate size project can be a "go away and eat lunch while it finishes" proposition. Doing a "Get Latest Version" from scratch on the Win98SE project is more likely "go away for fourteen sleeps."
I can see it now: "Please contact ICI now if you are interested in one of the following careers: Paralegal TV/VCR Repair E-commerce startup
On one hand, it's worthwhile for countries to offer a minimum set of services to everyone. This is for a variety of reasons including financial, political, and social. This is the best way to ensure equality as it can incorporate many cost savings beyond normal insurance, such as reduced drug costs.
On the other hand, in the realms beyond minimum services, I'm all in favour of life and health insurance companies dividing up the risk pool according to statistical data. I don't want to share my health insurance premiums with smokers, my life insurance premiums with terminally ill people, or my car insurance premiums with people who speed and have collisions. I don't owe those people anything. When I go shopping for insurance, I want a product that is a good reflection of the risk/payout ratio for me.
Insurance should be used for its original purpose: unpredictable financially catastrophic problems. When the probability is well known people should insure themselves. When its a matter of equality public policy should be enacted, but not by enforcing consolidation of risk by private insurance companies.