I got tired of my digital camera running out of juice, so I built an external battery pack.
Instead of two AA batteries inside the camera, I have a line running out to a plastic battery case and 4 D cell batteries. Considering a 4 pack of D's costs about as much as a 4 pack of AA's, it also saves money.
If you've ever wondered what it would be like in a world without intellectual property, trademarks, patents, etc. then you've found it.
Copyright, trademark, and patent law do not stop people from engaging in illegal copying. They provide repercussions for those who do. I'm sure, with a little effort, SL could go a long way towards finding copybot users and banning them or otherwise punishing them, but that doesn't really matter.
What really matters depends on whether or not you take the game seriously.
If you do not take the game seriously, then gamers who pretended or were fooled into believing that artificial scarcity could be imposed on limitlessly copyable information (in order to give information the "feel" of a physical good) were in for a rude surprise from the beginning. It is the same rude surprise experienced by anyone who has ever believed in the fantasy of DRM.
If you do take the game seriously, then there are actually tiny people running around inside your computer with their own little society, and someone has just invented replicator technology straight out of Star Trek. Copybot could be used to make limitless copies of the necessities of life and to distribute them instantly to everyone who needs them. It would be wrong to deny the necessities of life to all of those tiny little people to keep a few people in money-making businesses, especially since money is no longer necessary. What good is money if everyone can have everything they want in as great a quantity as they desire?
The real reason all of those "businesses" are closing is that Second Life made the same incorrect assumption the players did: DRM could work. Instead of setting up a ransom licensing scheme, or a version of the patron system, or some other mechanism to reward player creativity, they went with DRM. Oops.
Indeed, the value of such goods is based only on the recognition of others that they are valuable, unlike the case with, say, money. Wait...
There are no "such goods" in second life; there is only light coming off of your monitor, and that light was put there by a computer processor following directions on your hard disk. Computer directions (instructions) are not goods--they are information.
Information can be duplicated practically for free, so there's no such thing as "scarcity." Honest, real goods on the other hand cannot be duplicated, so they can be scarce. There's no way to give your cake to someone else and eat it too.
Rather, when someone authors an "item" (short list of computer instructions) in Second Life, they are performing a service for everyone else who can play second life by making that item available. Once it's out there, it can (and, according to TFA, will) be duplicated as much as people want.
what's to stop his platters from flopping all over the place?
Probably nothing. According to the article, the company working on the drive technology is Antek Peripherals, Inc. This name means nothing to me, but Cringely mentions Anil, the co-owner of Antek also co-founded SyQuest.
SyQuest briefly marketed and manufacted the SparQ drive, which is in all respects like the Zip drive except that it's famous for failing and taking its cartridges with it. I personally owned a SparQ drive. It died just after the warranty period ended.
I was a kid when that SparQ drive failed. I kept all my data a few of those 1GB disks that the broken drive trashed. Shame on you, Anil.
GNUTella networks send the data through many clients before it reaches its destination. By monitoring this traffic with a modified client, one can get a reasonably good sampling of what users are searching for and/or downloading. [...] But the very nature of these networks do make it possible to obtain useful stats.
Gnutella networks do not work like that. Queries and query hit messages go through the Gnutella mesh network, so it's possible to get some kind of sampling of what people are searching for as well as what responses they're getting to their searches. However,
1. You will not see all of the searches that go through the network.
2. You will only see a tiny, tiny fraction of the hits resulting from the searches that you do see.
But searches do not equal downloads. When was the last time you visited every search result that came up on google?
Actual downloads happen over direct connections between downloaders and uploaders. The Gnutella network has no facility for proxied downloads.
The only clue you will ever get that a transfer may be taking place is in the case that:
1. One of the hosts cannot receive incoming connections for whatever reason (firewall, NAT, etc.).
2. Your computer is between the uploader and the downloader on the Gnutella network.
3. You have already seen the query hit describing the file that somebody is trying to download.
If all of the above happen, you may see a PUSH packet when someone tries to download a file. However,
1. A PUSH packet represents an attempt to start downloading a file under the above conditions. It doesn't mean that the transfer actually completes.
2. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of all downloads will generate a PUSH packet that you can see.
3. In some cases, you may see more than one push packet for a single download, as a result of multisource downloading.
But how do people find out about your excellent quality of service or great product if the people getting paid to talk loudly are all saying it sucks? The system you describe would allow any company to cover another with as much slime as they could buy, which would tend to lead to horrific monopolies - a classic market breakdown effect.
I would hope that if true freedom of speech were available as the grandparent suggested, people would become less gullible.
microsoft's aim in supporting TCPA was to make their code "tamper resistant" by encrypting parts of the OS with pgp style encryption
This is not what TCPA is about. The point of TCPA is that a chip in the computer can create a digitally signed report on the software controlling the machine (i.e. BIOS code, boot loader, kernel, device drivers, OS security policy, and any other pertinent information) and send it out the network interface on demand.
The effect is that in the future when some genius coder cooks up a drop-in replacement for Windows (or something just as desirable), genuine Windows(R) operating systems will be able to shun it because its TPM won't produce a certificate saying that computer.
Microsoft's plan is not to control our computers by denying us easy access to the code they run. Microsoft's plan is to control our computers by ensuring that if we choose to run an OS that they didn't write, we will not be able to interoperate with other computers.
It has a need for package management. To me, this is a fundamental flaw with the design of the operating system. There are other techniques and ideas to handle how software is installed.
A lot of people have bad experiences with package management, but I think they're a symptom of the lack of a true Linux platform.
A package is basically a bunch of files, instructions for installing those files on the computer, and a list of dependencies, so the main difference between a typical windows installer or Mac OSX application and a package for Linux is that the package has numerous, specific dependencies.
Those dependencies reflect an expectation on the part of the application author or packager that it isn't a good idea to simply assume certain basic system components (such as libc or GTK+) will be there by default. And that's a reasonable assumption, given that there are lots of versions of libc, and there are multiple windowing toolkits available rather than a single standard.
In other words, each dependency represents something that can go wrong.
Contrast this with the windows or Mac OS X environments. There are dramatically fewer platforms to support that change much less often, and it's easy to inventory what those systems come with and decide to bundle anything that's necessary and mission.
Why would a movie studio use BitTorrent instead of just allowing someone to download from their site or from, let's say, iMovies by someone like Apple?
I think the question is: why would I be willing to download a movie using BitTorrent instead of from the movie studios directly?
I'd be willing to use BitTorrent to download a linux ISO (in fact, I just did) when the ftp sites are down, but only because I like linux and most of the people who support it do so for no money. When I download using bittorrent, I'm donating my precious upstream bandwidth to prop up the distribution network for someone else's content. I'm fine doing this for Debian, but there's no way I'm going to let the movie studios use my internet connection.
It's my understanding that Steam (the networked client software that's responsible for managing games from Valve like the popular Half-Life 2) works the same way. When Valve releases a bugfix, a few gamers get to download it directly from their servers, but then Steam functions like a peer to peer network where gamers upload the patch to other gamers so that everyone gets it without costing Valve as much money for bandwidth.
I've flirted with the idea of installing Linux on a spare box. Is this nonesense the kind of stuff I should expect?
Yes. Whenever something in Linux (and here I talking about all possible lumps of problem code surrounding the Linux kernel) doesn't work well by default, you'll find that on average the level of knowledge of Linux internals you'll need in order to solve the problem far exceeds what is required in windows. All in all, although Linux has made a lot of progress, it's still in pretty dismal shape when you want to perform certain desktop tasks.
Web browsing? Email? Photo and document editing? Most of the time that's no problem. Adequate, tolerable tools come installed by default. Changing the system configuration? Installing or upgrading software? Now you're in trouble. Most people run into Linux roadblocks when they try to push the limits of the OS so that it's as functional as windows.
Honestly, I cant tell the difference that the additional 25 frames per second makes. If it were the difference between 5fps, and 30fps, *then* I would be able to understand.
And what's the point of having 200+ FPS on a console when regular televisions (NTSC) can only process 29.99 frames per second?
Headroom. If you're getting 200+ fps on a tv, you could double the processing time per frame to make the game that much prettier and still get 100+ fps.
Also, TVs don't operate at 29.99 frames per second. The most correct number for modern color television is 60000/1001 (~59.94) fields per second. From a performance standpoint, it's a small technical detail since each field (odd or even lines) could be considered only half of a frame. However, compared to producing full frames, this display method halves the update latency of the display device.
That said, computer monitors typically display a full frame at a time and start at 60Hz refresh rates.
Why assume that all a gamer wants is graphics?
I'm firmly in the gameplay camp. I'd much rather have a fun game with good gameplay and plot (if applicable) than one with the very latest graphics. Still, there may be something to the continual push for prettier pictures.
I've noticed that I can still have a good time playing a game of (original Half-Life) Team Fortress with my friends. However, I once tried to get them to play one of my favorite games from the same era: Need For Speed 5. It was a total flop, and not because they didn't like racing games. Only a few people liked it, and those were the people who played it when it was new and the graphics were pretty good for their time.
By today's standards, older games (especially those of the 3D variety) look incredibly plain, which, IMHO, makes it harder to get into the experience for the first time. So while there may be no really good reason for the industry as a whole to keep pushing for glitzier graphics at the current rate, individual developers have one.
My wish is for an experienced hacker to port Winamp to Linux the moment the code is open sourced. Will this happen? I do not see any Linux native application that can stand in place of Winamp.
I may be wrong, but I think AOL is only open-sourcing Winamp's AVS and Milkdrop, not Winamp itself. Considering that one of the big draws to "upgrade" to the paid version of Winamp is a compiled-in limitation, AOL certainly seems to have a motive.
As far as Winamp on Linux, you might be surprised to hear that it worked very well under wine the last time I tried it.
The folks at the FCC and MPAA aren't stupid people, and I can't for the life of me understand why they would spend time and resources trying to put in a broadcast flag when history has shown that when end users have versatility available to them, it ultimately helps the MPAA and others. There has to be a good reason, right?
[...]
In light of all this, does anyone know why they're putting up such a fight?
I have two theories. The first is that they want to make people pay per "use" like so many other people have suggested. It gives them more control.
The second is a little more subtle. Listen to an MPAA rep talk about copyright and compare it to the appropriate writings of Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution. The difference, in my view, is that copyright is viewed by one party as enforcing a right (in the sense of the words "human rights") of the copyright holder, whereas it is viewed as an essentially flimsy construction by the others. It has a purpose, but it's an ugly hack designed to get the job done without actually reflecting any deep, basic principle. "Sure, we ought to reward people for doing intellectual work, but we'll do it by forbidding people from taking advantage of the essential fact that there can never be a shortage of copies if there is not a shortage of media and copiers."
I think part of the MPAA's stance has to do with convincing the public that their way of thinking is the right one. Perhaps a forced pay-per-use model wouldn't go over very well right now, and poeple would rebel by installing mod chips and continuing to do what they've always done. There's a great quote from the SciFi novel "Brain Wave" that I think fits the situation perfectly. It's something to the effect of, "The strength of the fence is in the animals not comprehending they can push hard enough to knock it over."
This is exactly what you shouldn't be saying. The article is almost completely empty of details, but if this is Trusted Computing, you REALLY don't want to get sucked into the fantasy that you can keep control of your computer by just buying something else.
You can always switch off TC, so not buying it isn't going to give you any technical benefit. You should boycott it, for sure, but you have to do more than that.
The real power of TC to take away your freedom is in its "attestation" feature. Bascially, when it's activated, a chip on your motherboard will produce digitally signed summaries of the software that has (or has had) control of your computer (e.g. Kernel, drivers, boot loader, bios, stuff running in as-yet-to-be-introduced "Ring -1", etc.). Your computer can produce these on request, but it cannot fake them (e.g. claim to be running Windows 2005 DRM edition when it's actually running Linux).
Now, because TC hasn't yet gotten a foothold, your ability to interoperate with the world is only limited by your software's ability to speak a particular protocol (email, HTTP, whatever). After TC is embedded (and turned on by default) in most computers, other computers can be programmed not to talk to you unless your OS is the one chosen by the company that makes the software that your associates use.
The message is: fit in or butt out.
And once you have to run an unmodified copy of someone else's OS of choice, that's the end of your computer obeying you. In order to maintain your own freedom, you have to make sure that nobody you will ever want to communicate with uses TC hardware.
Please, please don't spread the "I can avoid it by not buying it" misconception.
everyone needs to remember that if the card worked 100% fine with 16 pipelines they would have sold it that way.
This is not always true. Some cards work fine with all 16 pipelines enabled, and nVidia might be locking 4 pipes on 6800 Ultra GPUs to make a volume target in the 6800 non-Ultra market.
However, sometimes the cards really don't work. I tried this trick, and it unlocked the extra 4 pipes yielding a significant performance improvement, but it caused lots of visual artifacts. I promptly set it back to normal.
No, seriously. My point is not that property doesn't exist (although intellectual property is a pretty bad idea). It's that the really interesting question of how to make his idea work is the technical part. Nobody's figured it out yet, and there's a good reason for that.
Active cooling has been standard on graphics cards since the days of the GeForce2. And power connectors have been a staple since the Radeon 9700.
I don't disagree with that, with the exception of the "value" cards of course.
As it turns out, huge ICs with millions of transistors require cooling. And power.
I don't disagree with this, either.
Part of my point is that it's disgusting to observe the methods companies use to erode the quality of life of consumers by tricking them into redefining what they believe normal means. Everytime someone feels good about getting a "discount" by using their Safeway card...it's sickening. Of course, there's a lot to be said for looking for the good in life rather than bad, but that's a different discussion.
The other part is that the reason that graphics cards and CPUs need so much cooling in order to avoid failure is they're running at too high a voltage/clock for the quality of the manufacturing process/part. Sacrificing some speed can reduce power consumption and heat production a whole lot, and honestly, I don't see a whole lot wrong with that. Just look at how modern PC games have squandered the extra processing power available to them creating pretty graphics that, while impressive, are not essential to a really fun game.
All I can say is some folks have more dollars than sense, but that's just MHO.
I remember when the "high end" cards were priced around $200, and that wasn't very long ago at all.
From the article: It employs the same six-pin power input you'd expect on any other high-end PCI Express graphics card, and the board sports a very similar active cooler for its graphics processor.
I also remember when graphics cards didn't require a loud, whining fan to keep from catching on fire, not to mention a secondary power connector direct from the PSU.
What really gets me, though, is how normal firingsquad tries to make it sound. It employs the same six pin power connector and "active cooler" you'd expect. No, I don't expect that. It's bizarre. It's wrong.
Gaming isn't about faster and faster hardware performance. It's about games.
As far as I can tell, the only way out of this mess is to buy used hardware and games two or three years after they're released. By that time, the bugs are ironed out and your friends have already emptied their wallets figuring out what's worth playing.
A "Sorry dude, but I don't think you were reading" is definitely in order.
From the article:
Imposing a cost on spammers isn't exactly unheard of. Return Path Inc. uses financial bonds to improve message delivery and deter spamming. The difference is where the money goes. If a participant in Return Path's Bonded Sender program sends spam and generates enough complaints, the sender's bond gets paid to the Internet Education Foundation, a non-profit Internet advocacy group. And since participation in the program is voluntary, spammers can simply forego the greater rate of deliverability they'd get in the program and rely on volume to overwhelm filters.
The idea of making senders pay conditionally upon the recipient's attitude toward the message is so old and tired that the "market-based" aspect of this solution might as well be absent from the article. The interesting question would be how, technically, to set up such a system.
From near the end of the article: Despite the obstacles, Van Alstyne has faith in the curative power of the market. "If you can assign property rights in the problem, then you get efficient trading on it, then you get a better solution than almost any other possible alternative," he says. "That's why I think it will work."
This is where Van Alstyne really shows that he doesn't get it. If all you have is a hammer...
These are usually Flash animations. Flash is available for Linux, I use it regularly. If these animations require some custom executable, she's better off not opening the attachment.
Agreed.
Not only does OpenOffice.Org handle Word documents, it's free. Your hypothetical old lady has a better chance with Ubuntu than with Windows of opening that recipe, since Word does not come with Windows XP. If you are lucky, it will be bundled by the OEM, but there's no guarantee.
Agreed.
just bought a "10.000 postcards" CD from CompUSA, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, only to discover they don't work on her you-bun-too laptop.
Software requirements apply to everyone. With Windows, our hypothetical old lady has to make sure that she buys for the right Windows version, and that it's not a Mac application.
So a generic 10,000 postcards disc from CompUSA is likely to be a Mac-only application with no windows equivalent either on the same CD or next to it on the shelf?
As for getting the right version of windows, try running an app built for DOS/3.1/NT4/95/98/98SE/ME/2000 on a machine running XP. You'll have a greater number of easy, automatic successes than if you try running a "linux" binary from 1995 on a distro from 2001-2005.
I very much want to see GNU/Linux succeed on the Desktop, but it isn't a platform; windows is.
Slashdot Mirror
..."Partyware" in the subject. That sounded kind of exciting. The iPhone, OTOH, does not.
I got tired of my digital camera running out of juice, so I built an external battery pack.
Instead of two AA batteries inside the camera, I have a line running out to a plastic battery case and 4 D cell batteries. Considering a 4 pack of D's costs about as much as a 4 pack of AA's, it also saves money.
A lot of things have been found just from Google earth. I'd really love to see a similar thing done with all the mars images.
http://www.google.com/mars/
If you've ever wondered what it would be like in a world without intellectual property, trademarks, patents, etc. then you've found it.
Copyright, trademark, and patent law do not stop people from engaging in illegal copying. They provide repercussions for those who do. I'm sure, with a little effort, SL could go a long way towards finding copybot users and banning them or otherwise punishing them, but that doesn't really matter.
What really matters depends on whether or not you take the game seriously.
If you do not take the game seriously, then gamers who pretended or were fooled into believing that artificial scarcity could be imposed on limitlessly copyable information (in order to give information the "feel" of a physical good) were in for a rude surprise from the beginning. It is the same rude surprise experienced by anyone who has ever believed in the fantasy of DRM.
If you do take the game seriously, then there are actually tiny people running around inside your computer with their own little society, and someone has just invented replicator technology straight out of Star Trek. Copybot could be used to make limitless copies of the necessities of life and to distribute them instantly to everyone who needs them. It would be wrong to deny the necessities of life to all of those tiny little people to keep a few people in money-making businesses, especially since money is no longer necessary. What good is money if everyone can have everything they want in as great a quantity as they desire?
The real reason all of those "businesses" are closing is that Second Life made the same incorrect assumption the players did: DRM could work. Instead of setting up a ransom licensing scheme, or a version of the patron system, or some other mechanism to reward player creativity, they went with DRM. Oops.
Indeed, the value of such goods is based only on the recognition of others that they are valuable, unlike the case with, say, money. Wait...
There are no "such goods" in second life; there is only light coming off of your monitor, and that light was put there by a computer processor following directions on your hard disk. Computer directions (instructions) are not goods--they are information.
Information can be duplicated practically for free, so there's no such thing as "scarcity." Honest, real goods on the other hand cannot be duplicated, so they can be scarce. There's no way to give your cake to someone else and eat it too.
Rather, when someone authors an "item" (short list of computer instructions) in Second Life, they are performing a service for everyone else who can play second life by making that item available. Once it's out there, it can (and, according to TFA, will) be duplicated as much as people want.
what's to stop his platters from flopping all over the place?
Probably nothing. According to the article, the company working on the drive technology is Antek Peripherals, Inc. This name means nothing to me, but Cringely mentions Anil, the co-owner of Antek also co-founded SyQuest.
SyQuest briefly marketed and manufacted the SparQ drive, which is in all respects like the Zip drive except that it's famous for failing and taking its cartridges with it. I personally owned a SparQ drive. It died just after the warranty period ended.
I was a kid when that SparQ drive failed. I kept all my data a few of those 1GB disks that the broken drive trashed. Shame on you, Anil.
GNUTella networks send the data through many clients before it reaches its destination. By monitoring this traffic with a modified client, one can get a reasonably good sampling of what users are searching for and/or downloading. [...] But the very nature of these networks do make it possible to obtain useful stats.
Gnutella networks do not work like that. Queries and query hit messages go through the Gnutella mesh network, so it's possible to get some kind of sampling of what people are searching for as well as what responses they're getting to their searches. However,
1. You will not see all of the searches that go through the network.
2. You will only see a tiny, tiny fraction of the hits resulting from the searches that you do see.
But searches do not equal downloads. When was the last time you visited every search result that came up on google?
Actual downloads happen over direct connections between downloaders and uploaders. The Gnutella network has no facility for proxied downloads.
The only clue you will ever get that a transfer may be taking place is in the case that:
1. One of the hosts cannot receive incoming connections for whatever reason (firewall, NAT, etc.).
2. Your computer is between the uploader and the downloader on the Gnutella network.
3. You have already seen the query hit describing the file that somebody is trying to download.
If all of the above happen, you may see a PUSH packet when someone tries to download a file. However,
1. A PUSH packet represents an attempt to start downloading a file under the above conditions. It doesn't mean that the transfer actually completes.
2. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of all downloads will generate a PUSH packet that you can see.
3. In some cases, you may see more than one push packet for a single download, as a result of multisource downloading.
But how do people find out about your excellent quality of service or great product if the people getting paid to talk loudly are all saying it sucks? The system you describe would allow any company to cover another with as much slime as they could buy, which would tend to lead to horrific monopolies - a classic market breakdown effect.
I would hope that if true freedom of speech were available as the grandparent suggested, people would become less gullible.
microsoft's aim in supporting TCPA was to make their code "tamper resistant" by encrypting parts of the OS with pgp style encryption
This is not what TCPA is about. The point of TCPA is that a chip in the computer can create a digitally signed report on the software controlling the machine (i.e. BIOS code, boot loader, kernel, device drivers, OS security policy, and any other pertinent information) and send it out the network interface on demand.
The effect is that in the future when some genius coder cooks up a drop-in replacement for Windows (or something just as desirable), genuine Windows(R) operating systems will be able to shun it because its TPM won't produce a certificate saying that computer.
Microsoft's plan is not to control our computers by denying us easy access to the code they run. Microsoft's plan is to control our computers by ensuring that if we choose to run an OS that they didn't write, we will not be able to interoperate with other computers.
good bandwidth to update and expand
Translation: We're really looking forward to releasing an unfinished game and (perhaps) patching the bugs as you find them.
It has a need for package management. To me, this is a fundamental flaw with the design of the operating system. There are other techniques and ideas to handle how software is installed.
A lot of people have bad experiences with package management, but I think they're a symptom of the lack of a true Linux platform.
A package is basically a bunch of files, instructions for installing those files on the computer, and a list of dependencies, so the main difference between a typical windows installer or Mac OSX application and a package for Linux is that the package has numerous, specific dependencies.
Those dependencies reflect an expectation on the part of the application author or packager that it isn't a good idea to simply assume certain basic system components (such as libc or GTK+) will be there by default. And that's a reasonable assumption, given that there are lots of versions of libc, and there are multiple windowing toolkits available rather than a single standard.
In other words, each dependency represents something that can go wrong.
Contrast this with the windows or Mac OS X environments. There are dramatically fewer platforms to support that change much less often, and it's easy to inventory what those systems come with and decide to bundle anything that's necessary and mission.
Why would a movie studio use BitTorrent instead of just allowing someone to download from their site or from, let's say, iMovies by someone like Apple?
I think the question is: why would I be willing to download a movie using BitTorrent instead of from the movie studios directly?
I'd be willing to use BitTorrent to download a linux ISO (in fact, I just did) when the ftp sites are down, but only because I like linux and most of the people who support it do so for no money. When I download using bittorrent, I'm donating my precious upstream bandwidth to prop up the distribution network for someone else's content. I'm fine doing this for Debian, but there's no way I'm going to let the movie studios use my internet connection.
It's my understanding that Steam (the networked client software that's responsible for managing games from Valve like the popular Half-Life 2) works the same way. When Valve releases a bugfix, a few gamers get to download it directly from their servers, but then Steam functions like a peer to peer network where gamers upload the patch to other gamers so that everyone gets it without costing Valve as much money for bandwidth.
I'm not OK with this.
You're obviously not a gamer
"You call yourself a gamer? You're not a gamer unless you have a GeForce FX 5900!"
--nVidia promotional video
I've flirted with the idea of installing Linux on a spare box. Is this nonesense the kind of stuff I should expect?
Yes. Whenever something in Linux (and here I talking about all possible lumps of problem code surrounding the Linux kernel) doesn't work well by default, you'll find that on average the level of knowledge of Linux internals you'll need in order to solve the problem far exceeds what is required in windows. All in all, although Linux has made a lot of progress, it's still in pretty dismal shape when you want to perform certain desktop tasks.
Web browsing? Email? Photo and document editing? Most of the time that's no problem. Adequate, tolerable tools come installed by default. Changing the system configuration? Installing or upgrading software? Now you're in trouble. Most people run into Linux roadblocks when they try to push the limits of the OS so that it's as functional as windows.
Honestly, I cant tell the difference that the additional 25 frames per second makes. If it were the difference between 5fps, and 30fps, *then* I would be able to understand.
0 0_vide os.html (GeForce FX Experience)
Amen. PC graphics are ridiculously hyped.
"You're not a gamer unless you're playing with a 5900. You call yourself a gamer? Ha ha."
--http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforcefx_59
However...
And what's the point of having 200+ FPS on a console when regular televisions (NTSC) can only process 29.99 frames per second?
Headroom. If you're getting 200+ fps on a tv, you could double the processing time per frame to make the game that much prettier and still get 100+ fps.
Also, TVs don't operate at 29.99 frames per second. The most correct number for modern color television is 60000/1001 (~59.94) fields per second. From a performance standpoint, it's a small technical detail since each field (odd or even lines) could be considered only half of a frame. However, compared to producing full frames, this display method halves the update latency of the display device.
That said, computer monitors typically display a full frame at a time and start at 60Hz refresh rates.
Why assume that all a gamer wants is graphics?
I'm firmly in the gameplay camp. I'd much rather have a fun game with good gameplay and plot (if applicable) than one with the very latest graphics. Still, there may be something to the continual push for prettier pictures.
I've noticed that I can still have a good time playing a game of (original Half-Life) Team Fortress with my friends. However, I once tried to get them to play one of my favorite games from the same era: Need For Speed 5. It was a total flop, and not because they didn't like racing games. Only a few people liked it, and those were the people who played it when it was new and the graphics were pretty good for their time.
By today's standards, older games (especially those of the 3D variety) look incredibly plain, which, IMHO, makes it harder to get into the experience for the first time. So while there may be no really good reason for the industry as a whole to keep pushing for glitzier graphics at the current rate, individual developers have one.
My wish is for an experienced hacker to port Winamp to Linux the moment the code is open sourced. Will this happen? I do not see any Linux native application that can stand in place of Winamp.
I may be wrong, but I think AOL is only open-sourcing Winamp's AVS and Milkdrop, not Winamp itself. Considering that one of the big draws to "upgrade" to the paid version of Winamp is a compiled-in limitation, AOL certainly seems to have a motive.
As far as Winamp on Linux, you might be surprised to hear that it worked very well under wine the last time I tried it.
The folks at the FCC and MPAA aren't stupid people, and I can't for the life of me understand why they would spend time and resources trying to put in a broadcast flag when history has shown that when end users have versatility available to them, it ultimately helps the MPAA and others. There has to be a good reason, right?
[...]
In light of all this, does anyone know why they're putting up such a fight?
I have two theories. The first is that they want to make people pay per "use" like so many other people have suggested. It gives them more control.
The second is a little more subtle. Listen to an MPAA rep talk about copyright and compare it to the appropriate writings of Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution. The difference, in my view, is that copyright is viewed by one party as enforcing a right (in the sense of the words "human rights") of the copyright holder, whereas it is viewed as an essentially flimsy construction by the others. It has a purpose, but it's an ugly hack designed to get the job done without actually reflecting any deep, basic principle. "Sure, we ought to reward people for doing intellectual work, but we'll do it by forbidding people from taking advantage of the essential fact that there can never be a shortage of copies if there is not a shortage of media and copiers."
I think part of the MPAA's stance has to do with convincing the public that their way of thinking is the right one. Perhaps a forced pay-per-use model wouldn't go over very well right now, and poeple would rebel by installing mod chips and continuing to do what they've always done. There's a great quote from the SciFi novel "Brain Wave" that I think fits the situation perfectly. It's something to the effect of, "The strength of the fence is in the animals not comprehending they can push hard enough to knock it over."
Sales: AMD++
This is exactly what you shouldn't be saying. The article is almost completely empty of details, but if this is Trusted Computing, you REALLY don't want to get sucked into the fantasy that you can keep control of your computer by just buying something else.
You can always switch off TC, so not buying it isn't going to give you any technical benefit. You should boycott it, for sure, but you have to do more than that.
The real power of TC to take away your freedom is in its "attestation" feature. Bascially, when it's activated, a chip on your motherboard will produce digitally signed summaries of the software that has (or has had) control of your computer (e.g. Kernel, drivers, boot loader, bios, stuff running in as-yet-to-be-introduced "Ring -1", etc.). Your computer can produce these on request, but it cannot fake them (e.g. claim to be running Windows 2005 DRM edition when it's actually running Linux).
Now, because TC hasn't yet gotten a foothold, your ability to interoperate with the world is only limited by your software's ability to speak a particular protocol (email, HTTP, whatever). After TC is embedded (and turned on by default) in most computers, other computers can be programmed not to talk to you unless your OS is the one chosen by the company that makes the software that your associates use.
The message is: fit in or butt out.
And once you have to run an unmodified copy of someone else's OS of choice, that's the end of your computer obeying you. In order to maintain your own freedom, you have to make sure that nobody you will ever want to communicate with uses TC hardware.
Please, please don't spread the "I can avoid it by not buying it" misconception.
I had to buy the new laser / keyboard combo
Can't logitech figure out a better way to deal with this?
Sounds like they already did.
everyone needs to remember that if the card worked 100% fine with 16 pipelines they would have sold it that way.
This is not always true. Some cards work fine with all 16 pipelines enabled, and nVidia might be locking 4 pipes on 6800 Ultra GPUs to make a volume target in the 6800 non-Ultra market.
However, sometimes the cards really don't work. I tried this trick, and it unlocked the extra 4 pipes yielding a significant performance improvement, but it caused lots of visual artifacts. I promptly set it back to normal.
No, seriously. My point is not that property doesn't exist (although intellectual property is a pretty bad idea). It's that the really interesting question of how to make his idea work is the technical part. Nobody's figured it out yet, and there's a good reason for that.
Active cooling has been standard on graphics cards since the days of the GeForce2. And power connectors have been a staple since the Radeon 9700.
I don't disagree with that, with the exception of the "value" cards of course.
As it turns out, huge ICs with millions of transistors require cooling. And power.
I don't disagree with this, either.
Part of my point is that it's disgusting to observe the methods companies use to erode the quality of life of consumers by tricking them into redefining what they believe normal means. Everytime someone feels good about getting a "discount" by using their Safeway card...it's sickening. Of course, there's a lot to be said for looking for the good in life rather than bad, but that's a different discussion.
The other part is that the reason that graphics cards and CPUs need so much cooling in order to avoid failure is they're running at too high a voltage/clock for the quality of the manufacturing process/part. Sacrificing some speed can reduce power consumption and heat production a whole lot, and honestly, I don't see a whole lot wrong with that. Just look at how modern PC games have squandered the extra processing power available to them creating pretty graphics that, while impressive, are not essential to a really fun game.
All I can say is some folks have more dollars than sense, but that's just MHO.
I remember when the "high end" cards were priced around $200, and that wasn't very long ago at all.
From the article:
It employs the same six-pin power input you'd expect on any other high-end PCI Express graphics card, and the board sports a very similar active cooler for its graphics processor.
I also remember when graphics cards didn't require a loud, whining fan to keep from catching on fire, not to mention a secondary power connector direct from the PSU.
What really gets me, though, is how normal firingsquad tries to make it sound. It employs the same six pin power connector and "active cooler" you'd expect. No, I don't expect that. It's bizarre. It's wrong.
Gaming isn't about faster and faster hardware performance. It's about games.
As far as I can tell, the only way out of this mess is to buy used hardware and games two or three years after they're released. By that time, the bugs are ironed out and your friends have already emptied their wallets figuring out what's worth playing.
From the article:
Imposing a cost on spammers isn't exactly unheard of. Return Path Inc. uses financial bonds to improve message delivery and deter spamming. The difference is where the money goes. If a participant in Return Path's Bonded Sender program sends spam and generates enough complaints, the sender's bond gets paid to the Internet Education Foundation, a non-profit Internet advocacy group. And since participation in the program is voluntary, spammers can simply forego the greater rate of deliverability they'd get in the program and rely on volume to overwhelm filters.
The idea of making senders pay conditionally upon the recipient's attitude toward the message is so old and tired that the "market-based" aspect of this solution might as well be absent from the article. The interesting question would be how, technically, to set up such a system.
From near the end of the article:
Despite the obstacles, Van Alstyne has faith in the curative power of the market. "If you can assign property rights in the problem, then you get efficient trading on it, then you get a better solution than almost any other possible alternative," he says. "That's why I think it will work."
This is where Van Alstyne really shows that he doesn't get it. If all you have is a hammer...
Agreed.
Not only does OpenOffice.Org handle Word documents, it's free. Your hypothetical old lady has a better chance with Ubuntu than with Windows of opening that recipe, since Word does not come with Windows XP. If you are lucky, it will be bundled by the OEM, but there's no guarantee.
Agreed.
Software requirements apply to everyone. With Windows, our hypothetical old lady has to make sure that she buys for the right Windows version, and that it's not a Mac application.
So a generic 10,000 postcards disc from CompUSA is likely to be a Mac-only application with no windows equivalent either on the same CD or next to it on the shelf?
As for getting the right version of windows, try running an app built for DOS/3.1/NT4/95/98/98SE/ME/2000 on a machine running XP. You'll have a greater number of easy, automatic successes than if you try running a "linux" binary from 1995 on a distro from 2001-2005.
I very much want to see GNU/Linux succeed on the Desktop, but it isn't a platform; windows is.