Pardon me while I laugh at some of the numbers being thrown around...
Perfect temperature 17 C (that's 62.6 F)? Do you want me wearing a sweater year round?
Intolerable is >25 C (77 F)? Uh... I keep my house above that in the summer. In fact, I find considerably warmer temperatures perfectly fine if the humidity is low enough. The power companies generally recommend keeping your house no cooler than about 25 C (76-78 F) because when you cool below that you start burning energy fast and 25 C is very well within most people's comfort zones.
All I can think is that you're from a country with a much colder climate than most of the US.
4 All passengers traveling with family members shall have the right to have one adult family member present during all aspects of the screening process.
Also foolish. If they're criminals, leaving them together will allow them to obfuscate any crime, and possibly allow them to overpower or outwit the guards. If they're innocent, leaving them together will encourage reciporcal indignation, slowing down the process.
You don't get it, do you?
The searches are being generated randomly by computer. When it indicates that a 5 year old boy should be searched, they do it. And you're telling me that if I was the boy's parent I couldn't go with him? Instead I'm supposed to tell him to go WITH this strange person for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly to be strip searched?
I don't think so.
And this isn't a baseless complaint either. Shortly after 9/11 a computer triggered a search on a 10 year old boy. The screeners grabbed the kid with his backpack and were taking him behind a screened area to search. The boy's father complained, demanded to be allowed to go with them, they told him he couldn't legally go with them. The boy was trembling and close to crying. Eventually they did let the father come with -- after the father threatened to call the police right then and there and swear out a statement accusing the screeners of child abuse.
They searched the kid again at the gate.
I'm not a parent (yet), but no fucking way are you taking my child out of my sight to be searched. You will have to kill me first.
You apparently haven't read that the ti4600 can render final fantasy in real time.
You didn't read that it was a fraction of the movie's size with a subset of the functions they performed to generate the movie.
And I've read a good bit of Carmack, et. al. - and sorry, even the next generation of cards (R300/NV30) aren't up to cinematography level effects in real time. Digital effects are done at resolutions of roughly 4000x2000 with 48-bit or 64-bit color depths. The top end effects houses do rendering at a sub-pixel level so when things are super-sampled they actually start looking realistic.
They're getting better, but have a long way to go yet.
Re:Whatever it is..Its good
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ATI R300 and R250V
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well when people choose fps numbers over quality
Huh?
What crack are you smoking man? You're claiming that 3dfx had quality? What a load of horsecrap.
3dfx supported only 16-bit color long after nVidia, ATI, Matrox, and PowerVR had moved on to 32-bit color. Their 2D output was even worse than nVidia's, and they had no features other than pure fps.
I had an original 4 MB Voodoo, and I bought a pair of 6 MB V2's. I still saw the writing on the wall when 3dfx ignored the rest of the industry and continued pushing 16-bit and Glide while 32-bit and DirectX/OpenGL were ascendant. Their anti-aliasing sacrificed too much performance for too little advantage, their cards were overpriced, and the chips were designed with such monsterously large traces that they created too much heat and used too much power (yeah - ATI and probably nVidia will now require additional power too.. but these are 0.15 and 0.13 um designs as opposed to the 0.25 beheomoth that 3dfx had).
Also I know Aureal story, what a sad thing in fact. Just by "law" you can "kill" your rival
Although I wish Aureal was still around (and still think A3D is far better than EAX), you still don't get it.
Aureal and 3dfx were already dead. Bankruptcy, selling of goods, and so forth. Competitors bought the intellectual property (read: patents) because it meant they could utilize some of the nifiter features in future products. It sure as hell doesn't mean they have to support the old products - they didn't buy the product lines, plants, existing inventory, etc. And it doesn't mean that someone else couldn't buy all of that and support it.
Did Creative kill Aureal? Essentially. Aureal was a couple years ahead of itself in order to make a break in Creative's stranglehold on the audio market. But Aureal failed to market themselves properly and fell to a much larger, much more market savvy, highly entrenched competitor.
Did nVidia kill 3dfx? Again, essentially. nVidia produced superior products with superior support, pricing, availability, and features. And unseated the 800 lb gorilla of the graphics market. Whining about the fact that 3dfx died only proves that you have no clue just how incompetent a company they really were.
Re:They used �Intel-like� approach to design?!? HA
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ATI R300 and R250V
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· Score: 3, Insightful
How do you know it meant a shittier design? Were you in on any of the design meetings? Didn't think so.
Now, reread the section you misquote so heavily. The reviewer was specifically discussing an Intel-like design in that they hand picked transistors to go in specific places, rather than letting a VLSI design program layout the chip according to how it thinks is best. Intel and others have shown that this strategy - hand tuning critical junctures - can pay off in performance and manufacturing.
Intel's chip designs have been pretty damn amazing for the past two decades. They've frequently been the ones pushing Moore's law (yeah, go ahead and take the obvious whine - "because they needed to, their chips are so inefficient"), and they've eeked a helluva lot more features and performance out of designs than anyone in their right mind expected. Their fabbing is second to none and their processes are emulated industry wide. A 35% yield for a first run Intel design is godawful, but considered spectacular for other companies.
Have they made missteps? Yup. And I largely attribute those to upper management sticking its head deeply up its ass rather than to the engineers. Intel's brass stopped listening to their engineers 4 or 5 years ago. And it's been biting them since. Remains to be seen if they've figured this one out yet.
that MHZ no longer equals performance
No, it doesn't. But it's often a damn good indicator of performance, particularly in the GPU world. Frankly, the only people who know what the clock speeds on the chips are are the geeks who are into this thing. They're not advertised on the packaging.
Re:It'll be MORE interesting by end of the year
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ATI R300 and R250V
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· Score: 2
Yes, but who are they going to have fab a 0.13 um chip? TSMC is (allegedly) going to be full - with nVidia taking up the majority of their capacity. I'm not in the fab business anymore, so I don't follow who's using who. And a 0.13 um fab isn't something you find laying around on the corner. Maybe someone has capacity, but will they be willing to lease it out at terms that are agreeable to ATI?
Odds are they're stuck with.15 um for 6 months or more.
The NV30 probably will need additional power as well - I don't expect a 0.02 um change to reduce power consumption enough to eliminate the need while at the same time adding 10-15% more transistors.
I'd expect the next revision of AGP to seriously bolster the power available from the bus though. 3Dfx hit the wall 2 years ago, and now the non-monsterous die sizes are hitting it too.
What really amazes me is how IBM manages to mangle man pages.
Apparantly the traditional man pages weren't down to IBM standards, so IBM actually paid someone to rewrite them.
In order to get man pages that actually have useful information I now have to surf the web. The ones included with AIX 4.3 are so damn useless and content-free that they're actually misleading at times.
I understand the economics of the theater biz, but please don't claim that you're jacking up prices on concessions because of the people who don't buy them there.
If they reached around into the case and grabbed some food, then it's stealing.
If they brought it in, it's not stealing. It's probably not a lost sale. Odds are, if they didn't bring in their own food, they wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Don't fall into the same logic trap that the RIAA, MPAA, and software industry is when it comes to piracy. Yes, there's a difference here since it's a physical good, but the reality is that there is no deprivation of goods here and to call it stealing is assine.
The reason the food and drink is so expensive is: 1) It is the only realistic revenue stream theaters have, 2) you have a captive audience.
I believe you read the numbers for the R9000 Pro (270/275) as being for the 9700... I don't recall seeing references to 9700 numbers anywhere in the R9k review (but I'm not going back w/ a fine toothed comb now either).
All the rumors for the R300 indicated a GPU clocked at 300+ MHz, with 315, 325, and 350 being the most bandied about numbers.
Re:extra power connection?
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ATI R300 and R250V
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· Score: 3, Informative
The picture on Anandtech clearly shows a pass through connector with a floppy power connection in the middle. So that should solve that.
Honestly though, the past few power supplies I've bought did have a 2nd floppy connector on them. Never figured out what the hell they'd be used for until now though.
Re:It'll be MORE interesting by end of the year
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ATI R300 and R250V
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· Score: 3, Interesting
And if you had read the Anandtech review, you'd see that he comments on these rumors - that they're most likely baseless.
The only product scheduled to come out of ATI by Q4 is the 9500, which is a slower, stripped down R300 for less money.
And by that time it'll have to compete against the NV30, which is allegedly going to blow the R300 away (as it should given the time differences involved).
Now we can all play games at 3x the refresh rate of the monitor.
Sure you can. Hell, you've been able to for years now. Just drop down to the lowest resolution available, turn off all the effects, textures on lowest quality, and look at the not-so-pretty pictures.
What? You want all that? You want fog, bump mapping, realistic lighting, high quality textures, and anti aliased to boot? At 1280x1024? Well, then keep upgrading. Because while the R300 comes closest to that of any card to date, I doubt it'll be able to handle it for long. Real time graphics still aren't even approaching the level of Toy Story, much less that of Final Fantasy (the movie), or (*gasp*) photorealism.
When we can do realtime 3D effects that are indistinguishible from reality, we might be there. We aren't even close yet.
Oh, and you contradict yourself - you ask for disposable form factors and then ask for an open laptop standard. Hint - if it's disposable, it's not going to be open. Unless you're talking about something as silly and trivial as alkaline batteries.
The reason Anand got to post his benchmarks is because he doesn't have actual numbers... just correlated data. The R300 didn't post 256 fps in UT2k3, it just did x% better than a GF4 Ti4600.
Of course, as he points out, the GF4 numbers are available, and it only takes some simple math to extrapolate from there.
The card looks very impressive. It's out 4 months before the NV30. Maybe by then ATI will have drivers worth a crap too.
There is no DRM that I'm aware of in the digital theater market. You download the film from satellite, or get sent it on some physical medium, store it to your local drives, and play it whenever you so wish in whichever theaters you so wish.
Yes, there's undoubtably some degree of digital watermarking at the start, and there are accounting procedures to go through to make sure the studios get their moola, but the studios can't directly control your content or your schedule.
So, assuming this appeal is accepted and you can webcast for free as long as you don't take playlists, what then happens to requests? Can a DJ take a request from a caller and play it over the air and simulcast it over the web? What about picklists on web sites (radio station has a list of their 40 "top" songs, pick and click to request it be played for the 3rd time this hour)?
Welcome to the murk.
I have to side against this appeal... if only because maybe then the radio broadcasters will fight for something vaguely resembling reasonable tariffs. In a purely self-centered way, it doesn't affect me since I don't listen to webcasts anyway. But, on the whole, I think that slapping down the RIAA and getting reasonable tariffs put into place is the Right Thing anyway.
The Doom engine has been GPL'd for, what, 3 years now? Quake was GPL'd about 1.5 years ago, and Quake 2 was GPL'd last December.
Basically, write new engine, wait 6 mos-1 year, GPL old engine.
Want to license an id Software engine for commercial use? Sure, no problem. I think it runs about $1M for the latest and greatest engine (don't know if there are royalties involved as well) or $10k, flat, for an older, GPL'd engine. The key being that you pay $10k and aren't under the GPL, so you don't have to release the modifications back and open up your client to hacks.
Pinball Construction Set did not require the game to play the pinball tables. I know - I released a half dozen or so pinball games out into the BBS scene of the time and you could download them and play them without PCS. I even saw them listed on shareware/freeware disk compendiums a couple years later (which was cool for a 10 year old...)
They're unplayable now -- ignoring the CGA graphics, it was one of those old games that didn't properly handle increased clock rates. Run it on a 386 and you lost the ball instantly because it was running too fast.
There's a modern version available now... Visual Pinball, which seems pretty good. Much more complicated, of course, but we're comparing CGA and 4.77 MHz to SVGA and 400 MHz.
The problem with paying fines is that it begets a system where the rich can simply do what they want as long as they have enough money. Plus, how do you put a price on a human life? How do you deal with non-immediate costs like pollution? What about someone who can't afford to pay the price (e.g. - the captain of the Valdez)?
I knew about the differences between 1st and 2nd degree murder, and if manslaughter is a reterming of 3rd degree, I can grok that too. But it's absurd how light the sentence for manslaughter/3rd degree is in most cases... especially when we're talking about putting people away for life (and when you're talking federal, you're REALLY talking about life... parole is a state thing) for attempted murder. I mean, I can kill someone "accidentilly" and get 3-4 years in jail. But if I hack into a computer system and endanger someone's life I can get decades? Beyond absurd.
Which brings us back to what you said in the first place.
Yes, of course we have laws on the books already that provide for a life sentence in the case of attempted murder... and presumably at a federal level where this is in effect (state level is totally different).
And for quite some time I wondered the same thing a lot of people did on this thread -- why did we need a specific law? Why doesn't current case law apply?
Well, the answer probably is that, in theory, we don't need a law. Current case law does apply. The problem is that too many lawyers push the law to the limits in defense and start weasling around the letter of the law rather than the spirit. How would you like for a legitimate hacker to get off scott free because a lawyer successfully argued that his client didn't attempt to kill an entire town by sabotaging the water control systems, it was the guy who was working there that day and doing his normal job. Irrelevant that the normal control procedures had been subverted.
Silly? Sure. But that's the way the legal system runs at times. This law prevents that kind of crap.
Now, the wiretapping without a warrant is a whole different issue. But people are far too willing to give up their freedom for a false sense of security nowadays. It's very, very sad.
Match the efficiency and performance? Sure. No problem. First, define efficiency in this context. Don't forget to include waste products in your calculations.
Performance? For how big a motor? How long a trip?
The bottom line is that no, we can't build an electric motor with a self-contained power source that has the torque, horsepower, and range of an equivalent gas motor. Yet. So, clearly, we should scrap any attempts to do so and just keep on using internal combustion.
Right. If you think that, go sit with the Luddites - you're just as bad.
As far as your whines about looking like a car - well, there's a few thousand home built electric vehicles that look like cars because they're built from one. There's the new Honda Civic Hybrid which looks just like any other Civic on the road. And there's more coming down the pipe.
As far as your whines that they have to scrap everything - hello! Wake up! You don't HAVE to scrap everything. You can continue building them exactly the way they've been built for 100 years. But why? A major design consideration for the past 100 years has been "where the hell do I put this engine?". Eliminate the engine, the radiator, the fuel tank, the drive train, and so forth and you've eliminated everything outside of the passanger compartment that you had to design for. Sure, you have different stuff that has to come into consideration, but that's the entire point - it's different. You can optimize layouts in a different manner and potentially get a lot of cost and efficiency savings that way. Who said anything about using bicycle tires? Or having the car weigh 500 lbs empty (hint - the fuel cells will weigh more than that, period).
The safety considerations and regulations that have come about in the past 100 years aren't going to be scrapped either (unless, of course, GM manages to get the new vehicle classified as a light truck/SUV -- in which case about half of those safety requirements are scrapped).
There's a $2000 federal income tax deduction available if you buy an alternative fuel vehicle. And yes, hybrid vehicles do qualify.
As far as the loophole you specify -- there are efforts underway to change the wording so that hybrid vehicles do qualify. And some of the companies pushing for the change want a vehicle that uses as little as 2.5% of it's fuel from an "alternative" source to be considered hybrid. That's a load of shit and would actually be counterproductive.
So be careful of what you ask for. You may get it.
Frankly, hybrids shouldn't qualify. It doesn't solve the problem. Unless, of course, you like rewarding half-assed solutions in everything else in life.
The Honda Civic Hybrid is a hybrid fuel vehicle (gas/electric) that looks just like a regular 2003 Honda Civic.
Now you can whine that you don't like the Civic's look, that it's too small, or whatever, but you can't whine that they're all too unconventionally styled.
The funny thing, of course, is that odds are today's hybrids are just ahead of the curve, sytle-wise. And not just for fuel economy reasons. We've been moving toward more rounded shapes for a couple decades now.
I think you hit the nail on the head... the engines that get licensed are those that had successful first-worlds. Look at the various id Software engines, at the Duke Nukem engine, or the Unreal engine. No, they're not RPG engines, but the same basis is there.
And the reason that the engine becomes popular isn't because it has all the gizmos and doodads to do what you want (more often than not you find developers being frustrated by the lack of a feature), but because people played the game and said "wow, cool! How did they do that?" or "that was interesting, but I bet I could change it and make it even better".
Releasing an engine without a world is about as useful as releasing a compiler without programs. It's impressive on an abstract level, but if your goal was to actually get it adopted and used by others you've failed rather miserably.
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Pardon me while I laugh at some of the numbers being thrown around...
Perfect temperature 17 C (that's 62.6 F)? Do you want me wearing a sweater year round?
Intolerable is >25 C (77 F)? Uh... I keep my house above that in the summer. In fact, I find considerably warmer temperatures perfectly fine if the humidity is low enough. The power companies generally recommend keeping your house no cooler than about 25 C (76-78 F) because when you cool below that you start burning energy fast and 25 C is very well within most people's comfort zones.
All I can think is that you're from a country with a much colder climate than most of the US.
4 All passengers traveling with family members shall have the right to have one adult family member present during all aspects of the screening process.
Also foolish. If they're criminals, leaving them together will allow them to obfuscate any crime, and possibly allow them to overpower or outwit the guards. If they're innocent, leaving them together will encourage reciporcal indignation, slowing down the process.
You don't get it, do you?
The searches are being generated randomly by computer. When it indicates that a 5 year old boy should be searched, they do it. And you're telling me that if I was the boy's parent I couldn't go with him? Instead I'm supposed to tell him to go WITH this strange person for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly to be strip searched?
I don't think so.
And this isn't a baseless complaint either. Shortly after 9/11 a computer triggered a search on a 10 year old boy. The screeners grabbed the kid with his backpack and were taking him behind a screened area to search. The boy's father complained, demanded to be allowed to go with them, they told him he couldn't legally go with them. The boy was trembling and close to crying. Eventually they did let the father come with -- after the father threatened to call the police right then and there and swear out a statement accusing the screeners of child abuse.
They searched the kid again at the gate.
I'm not a parent (yet), but no fucking way are you taking my child out of my sight to be searched. You will have to kill me first.
You apparently haven't read that the ti4600 can render final fantasy in real time.
You didn't read that it was a fraction of the movie's size with a subset of the functions they performed to generate the movie.
And I've read a good bit of Carmack, et. al. - and sorry, even the next generation of cards (R300/NV30) aren't up to cinematography level effects in real time. Digital effects are done at resolutions of roughly 4000x2000 with 48-bit or 64-bit color depths. The top end effects houses do rendering at a sub-pixel level so when things are super-sampled they actually start looking realistic.
They're getting better, but have a long way to go yet.
Well when people choose fps numbers over quality
Huh?
What crack are you smoking man? You're claiming that 3dfx had quality? What a load of horsecrap.
3dfx supported only 16-bit color long after nVidia, ATI, Matrox, and PowerVR had moved on to 32-bit color. Their 2D output was even worse than nVidia's, and they had no features other than pure fps.
I had an original 4 MB Voodoo, and I bought a pair of 6 MB V2's. I still saw the writing on the wall when 3dfx ignored the rest of the industry and continued pushing 16-bit and Glide while 32-bit and DirectX/OpenGL were ascendant. Their anti-aliasing sacrificed too much performance for too little advantage, their cards were overpriced, and the chips were designed with such monsterously large traces that they created too much heat and used too much power (yeah - ATI and probably nVidia will now require additional power too.. but these are 0.15 and 0.13 um designs as opposed to the 0.25 beheomoth that 3dfx had).
Also I know Aureal story, what a sad thing in fact. Just by "law" you can "kill" your rival
Although I wish Aureal was still around (and still think A3D is far better than EAX), you still don't get it.
Aureal and 3dfx were already dead. Bankruptcy, selling of goods, and so forth. Competitors bought the intellectual property (read: patents) because it meant they could utilize some of the nifiter features in future products. It sure as hell doesn't mean they have to support the old products - they didn't buy the product lines, plants, existing inventory, etc. And it doesn't mean that someone else couldn't buy all of that and support it.
Did Creative kill Aureal? Essentially. Aureal was a couple years ahead of itself in order to make a break in Creative's stranglehold on the audio market. But Aureal failed to market themselves properly and fell to a much larger, much more market savvy, highly entrenched competitor.
Did nVidia kill 3dfx? Again, essentially. nVidia produced superior products with superior support, pricing, availability, and features. And unseated the 800 lb gorilla of the graphics market. Whining about the fact that 3dfx died only proves that you have no clue just how incompetent a company they really were.
How do you know it meant a shittier design? Were you in on any of the design meetings? Didn't think so.
Now, reread the section you misquote so heavily. The reviewer was specifically discussing an Intel-like design in that they hand picked transistors to go in specific places, rather than letting a VLSI design program layout the chip according to how it thinks is best. Intel and others have shown that this strategy - hand tuning critical junctures - can pay off in performance and manufacturing.
Intel's chip designs have been pretty damn amazing for the past two decades. They've frequently been the ones pushing Moore's law (yeah, go ahead and take the obvious whine - "because they needed to, their chips are so inefficient"), and they've eeked a helluva lot more features and performance out of designs than anyone in their right mind expected. Their fabbing is second to none and their processes are emulated industry wide. A 35% yield for a first run Intel design is godawful, but considered spectacular for other companies.
Have they made missteps? Yup. And I largely attribute those to upper management sticking its head deeply up its ass rather than to the engineers. Intel's brass stopped listening to their engineers 4 or 5 years ago. And it's been biting them since. Remains to be seen if they've figured this one out yet.
that MHZ no longer equals performance
No, it doesn't. But it's often a damn good indicator of performance, particularly in the GPU world. Frankly, the only people who know what the clock speeds on the chips are are the geeks who are into this thing. They're not advertised on the packaging.
Yes, but who are they going to have fab a 0.13 um chip? TSMC is (allegedly) going to be full - with nVidia taking up the majority of their capacity. I'm not in the fab business anymore, so I don't follow who's using who. And a 0.13 um fab isn't something you find laying around on the corner. Maybe someone has capacity, but will they be willing to lease it out at terms that are agreeable to ATI?
.15 um for 6 months or more.
Odds are they're stuck with
The NV30 probably will need additional power as well - I don't expect a 0.02 um change to reduce power consumption enough to eliminate the need while at the same time adding 10-15% more transistors.
I'd expect the next revision of AGP to seriously bolster the power available from the bus though. 3Dfx hit the wall 2 years ago, and now the non-monsterous die sizes are hitting it too.
What really amazes me is how IBM manages to mangle man pages.
Apparantly the traditional man pages weren't down to IBM standards, so IBM actually paid someone to rewrite them.
In order to get man pages that actually have useful information I now have to surf the web. The ones included with AIX 4.3 are so damn useless and content-free that they're actually misleading at times.
I understand the economics of the theater biz, but please don't claim that you're jacking up prices on concessions because of the people who don't buy them there.
If they reached around into the case and grabbed some food, then it's stealing.
If they brought it in, it's not stealing. It's probably not a lost sale. Odds are, if they didn't bring in their own food, they wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Don't fall into the same logic trap that the RIAA, MPAA, and software industry is when it comes to piracy. Yes, there's a difference here since it's a physical good, but the reality is that there is no deprivation of goods here and to call it stealing is assine.
The reason the food and drink is so expensive is: 1) It is the only realistic revenue stream theaters have, 2) you have a captive audience.
I believe you read the numbers for the R9000 Pro (270/275) as being for the 9700... I don't recall seeing references to 9700 numbers anywhere in the R9k review (but I'm not going back w/ a fine toothed comb now either).
All the rumors for the R300 indicated a GPU clocked at 300+ MHz, with 315, 325, and 350 being the most bandied about numbers.
The picture on Anandtech clearly shows a pass through connector with a floppy power connection in the middle. So that should solve that.
Honestly though, the past few power supplies I've bought did have a 2nd floppy connector on them. Never figured out what the hell they'd be used for until now though.
And if you had read the Anandtech review, you'd see that he comments on these rumors - that they're most likely baseless.
The only product scheduled to come out of ATI by Q4 is the 9500, which is a slower, stripped down R300 for less money.
And by that time it'll have to compete against the NV30, which is allegedly going to blow the R300 away (as it should given the time differences involved).
Now we can all play games at 3x the refresh rate of the monitor.
Sure you can. Hell, you've been able to for years now. Just drop down to the lowest resolution available, turn off all the effects, textures on lowest quality, and look at the not-so-pretty pictures.
What? You want all that? You want fog, bump mapping, realistic lighting, high quality textures, and anti aliased to boot? At 1280x1024? Well, then keep upgrading. Because while the R300 comes closest to that of any card to date, I doubt it'll be able to handle it for long. Real time graphics still aren't even approaching the level of Toy Story, much less that of Final Fantasy (the movie), or (*gasp*) photorealism.
When we can do realtime 3D effects that are indistinguishible from reality, we might be there. We aren't even close yet.
Oh, and you contradict yourself - you ask for disposable form factors and then ask for an open laptop standard. Hint - if it's disposable, it's not going to be open. Unless you're talking about something as silly and trivial as alkaline batteries.
The reason Anand got to post his benchmarks is because he doesn't have actual numbers... just correlated data. The R300 didn't post 256 fps in UT2k3, it just did x% better than a GF4 Ti4600.
Of course, as he points out, the GF4 numbers are available, and it only takes some simple math to extrapolate from there.
The card looks very impressive. It's out 4 months before the NV30. Maybe by then ATI will have drivers worth a crap too.
You are presuming control that doesn't exist.
There is no DRM that I'm aware of in the digital theater market. You download the film from satellite, or get sent it on some physical medium, store it to your local drives, and play it whenever you so wish in whichever theaters you so wish.
Yes, there's undoubtably some degree of digital watermarking at the start, and there are accounting procedures to go through to make sure the studios get their moola, but the studios can't directly control your content or your schedule.
But thanks for the paranoid delusions.
So, assuming this appeal is accepted and you can webcast for free as long as you don't take playlists, what then happens to requests? Can a DJ take a request from a caller and play it over the air and simulcast it over the web? What about picklists on web sites (radio station has a list of their 40 "top" songs, pick and click to request it be played for the 3rd time this hour)?
Welcome to the murk.
I have to side against this appeal... if only because maybe then the radio broadcasters will fight for something vaguely resembling reasonable tariffs. In a purely self-centered way, it doesn't affect me since I don't listen to webcasts anyway. But, on the whole, I think that slapping down the RIAA and getting reasonable tariffs put into place is the Right Thing anyway.
The Doom engine has been GPL'd for, what, 3 years now? Quake was GPL'd about 1.5 years ago, and Quake 2 was GPL'd last December.
Basically, write new engine, wait 6 mos-1 year, GPL old engine.
Want to license an id Software engine for commercial use? Sure, no problem. I think it runs about $1M for the latest and greatest engine (don't know if there are royalties involved as well) or $10k, flat, for an older, GPL'd engine. The key being that you pay $10k and aren't under the GPL, so you don't have to release the modifications back and open up your client to hacks.
Pinball Construction Set did not require the game to play the pinball tables. I know - I released a half dozen or so pinball games out into the BBS scene of the time and you could download them and play them without PCS. I even saw them listed on shareware/freeware disk compendiums a couple years later (which was cool for a 10 year old...)
They're unplayable now -- ignoring the CGA graphics, it was one of those old games that didn't properly handle increased clock rates. Run it on a 386 and you lost the ball instantly because it was running too fast.
There's a modern version available now... Visual Pinball, which seems pretty good. Much more complicated, of course, but we're comparing CGA and 4.77 MHz to SVGA and 400 MHz.
Nah, you just have to record the raw video streaming out of the DVI port.
Which means that 1 TB gets you about 10 seconds of video.
The problem with paying fines is that it begets a system where the rich can simply do what they want as long as they have enough money. Plus, how do you put a price on a human life? How do you deal with non-immediate costs like pollution? What about someone who can't afford to pay the price (e.g. - the captain of the Valdez)?
I knew about the differences between 1st and 2nd degree murder, and if manslaughter is a reterming of 3rd degree, I can grok that too. But it's absurd how light the sentence for manslaughter/3rd degree is in most cases... especially when we're talking about putting people away for life (and when you're talking federal, you're REALLY talking about life... parole is a state thing) for attempted murder. I mean, I can kill someone "accidentilly" and get 3-4 years in jail. But if I hack into a computer system and endanger someone's life I can get decades? Beyond absurd.
Which brings us back to what you said in the first place.
Very well put, and very true. And it's why I do think a lot of the legislation regarding crimes and jail time is out of whack.
And I've never understood the various legalese variations between murder and manslaughter and whatever else is out there.
Yes, of course we have laws on the books already that provide for a life sentence in the case of attempted murder... and presumably at a federal level where this is in effect (state level is totally different).
And for quite some time I wondered the same thing a lot of people did on this thread -- why did we need a specific law? Why doesn't current case law apply?
Well, the answer probably is that, in theory, we don't need a law. Current case law does apply. The problem is that too many lawyers push the law to the limits in defense and start weasling around the letter of the law rather than the spirit. How would you like for a legitimate hacker to get off scott free because a lawyer successfully argued that his client didn't attempt to kill an entire town by sabotaging the water control systems, it was the guy who was working there that day and doing his normal job. Irrelevant that the normal control procedures had been subverted.
Silly? Sure. But that's the way the legal system runs at times. This law prevents that kind of crap.
Now, the wiretapping without a warrant is a whole different issue. But people are far too willing to give up their freedom for a false sense of security nowadays. It's very, very sad.
Match the efficiency and performance? Sure. No problem. First, define efficiency in this context. Don't forget to include waste products in your calculations.
Performance? For how big a motor? How long a trip?
The bottom line is that no, we can't build an electric motor with a self-contained power source that has the torque, horsepower, and range of an equivalent gas motor. Yet. So, clearly, we should scrap any attempts to do so and just keep on using internal combustion.
Right. If you think that, go sit with the Luddites - you're just as bad.
As far as your whines about looking like a car - well, there's a few thousand home built electric vehicles that look like cars because they're built from one. There's the new Honda Civic Hybrid which looks just like any other Civic on the road. And there's more coming down the pipe.
As far as your whines that they have to scrap everything - hello! Wake up! You don't HAVE to scrap everything. You can continue building them exactly the way they've been built for 100 years. But why? A major design consideration for the past 100 years has been "where the hell do I put this engine?". Eliminate the engine, the radiator, the fuel tank, the drive train, and so forth and you've eliminated everything outside of the passanger compartment that you had to design for. Sure, you have different stuff that has to come into consideration, but that's the entire point - it's different. You can optimize layouts in a different manner and potentially get a lot of cost and efficiency savings that way. Who said anything about using bicycle tires? Or having the car weigh 500 lbs empty (hint - the fuel cells will weigh more than that, period).
The safety considerations and regulations that have come about in the past 100 years aren't going to be scrapped either (unless, of course, GM manages to get the new vehicle classified as a light truck/SUV -- in which case about half of those safety requirements are scrapped).
Stupid loophole standing in the way of progress.
There's a $2000 federal income tax deduction available if you buy an alternative fuel vehicle. And yes, hybrid vehicles do qualify.
As far as the loophole you specify -- there are efforts underway to change the wording so that hybrid vehicles do qualify. And some of the companies pushing for the change want a vehicle that uses as little as 2.5% of it's fuel from an "alternative" source to be considered hybrid. That's a load of shit and would actually be counterproductive.
So be careful of what you ask for. You may get it.
Frankly, hybrids shouldn't qualify. It doesn't solve the problem. Unless, of course, you like rewarding half-assed solutions in everything else in life.
The Honda Civic Hybrid is a hybrid fuel vehicle (gas/electric) that looks just like a regular 2003 Honda Civic.
Now you can whine that you don't like the Civic's look, that it's too small, or whatever, but you can't whine that they're all too unconventionally styled.
The funny thing, of course, is that odds are today's hybrids are just ahead of the curve, sytle-wise. And not just for fuel economy reasons. We've been moving toward more rounded shapes for a couple decades now.
I think you hit the nail on the head... the engines that get licensed are those that had successful first-worlds. Look at the various id Software engines, at the Duke Nukem engine, or the Unreal engine. No, they're not RPG engines, but the same basis is there.
And the reason that the engine becomes popular isn't because it has all the gizmos and doodads to do what you want (more often than not you find developers being frustrated by the lack of a feature), but because people played the game and said "wow, cool! How did they do that?" or "that was interesting, but I bet I could change it and make it even better".
Releasing an engine without a world is about as useful as releasing a compiler without programs. It's impressive on an abstract level, but if your goal was to actually get it adopted and used by others you've failed rather miserably.