But if you learn to game the algorithms, and if the algorithms have some correlation to good writing, gaming the algorithm is actually improving your writing.
For the algorithm to truly be able to detect good writing without loopholes, they'd probably require strong AI. Needless to say, that isn't going to happen. They are going to use some simple heuristics that will be figured out and gamed very quickly. I guarantee someone will be able to create a gobbledegook generator that will nonetheless "pass" the tests.
IMO it's become a real crime that MS still can't follow the simple "Deny All" policy and ask the user if they want to allow before allowing anything to happen.
Agreed completely. I can't understand why so many car manufacturers continue to use old-fashioned, analog-looking gauges (which are actually operated by digital pulses anyway). Analog speedometers should be a thing of the past.
Microsoft suffers TREMENDOUSLY for their keeping the old stuff working.
You're looking at this from a purely technical perspective. From a business perspective, strong backward compatibility is one of the biggest competitive advantages that Microsoft has.
Do companies pay a license fee to be allowed to render jpegs?
No. The baseline JPEG standard was specifically made to be royalty-free. There are some patents (probably expired or near-expiration by now) that covered the arithmetic coding option for JPEG, which is why no one ever used that encoding method and most JPEG software doesn't support it. A couple years ago, a company called Forgent tried to assert a patent on JPEG, but they got beaten back and didn't succeed in extorting any money from anyone.
That's already how things are, and they plan to use those APIs to implement H.264 decoding to avoid shipping the codec (and paying license fees).
The only catch there is that XP does not have that, and won't be getting it. It might be irrelevant in 3-4 more years, but it's certainly very relevant today.
This is not quite true. XP does support DXVA version 1, which allows for some hardware-accelerated decoding, but it is more limited than DXVA 2 which is available in Vista and 7. This page contains details. Specifically, "In DXVA 1, the software decoder must access the API through the video renderer. There is no way to use the DXVA 1 API without calling into the video renderer. This limitation has been removed with DXVA 2." This may be a problem for Firefox depending on what it is doing.
Any PC video hardware made in the last 5 years or so (except the Intel Atom's crappy chipset) supports H.264 (and VC-1) decoding in hardware. This means the license fee was already paid by the video card manufacturer (or Intel/AMD) and all applications should have to do is send the stream to the card via the proper API for decoding.
Almost all modern smartphones and tablets support H.264 decoding in hardware. Likewise, virtually every video card and integrated video chipset made in the past 5 years (with the exception of Intel's Atom) supports H.264 decoding in hardware. There should be nothing to sue over, since the hardware manufacturer already paid the H.264 license fee. All Firefox has to do is send the raw data stream to the hardware using the appropriate API and say "Here, decode this."
Castlevania was harder than Mario, Zelda, or Metroid -- especially the Grim Reaper fight. If you didn't have triple-shot boomerangs, when the Reaper started spamming you with Scythes you were in trouble.
Or you could use Fire Bombs (aka Holy Water) with the Double or Triple Shot. If you aim at the Reaper's platform as he lowers from the ceiling and keep throwing there, he will get stuck and die before he can even create a single scythe.
Castlevania is actually a pretty easy game once you've memorized what happens, because there is very little randomness. Although I can't do it every time, I can often get to the 6th floor without getting hit, and on two occasions I've managed to beat the game without taking any hits.
At the end of the day, that is what separates a game like HL2 or Mass Effect from a game like Angry Birds.
I can almost guarantee you that Angry Birds will stand the test of time far better than Half-Life 2 or Mass Effect. In fact, if there's one single game released in the past 5 years that will be considered a classic two or three decades from now, it's Angry Birds.
Most of us can no more imagine it now than some guy playing Pacman could have foreseen Half-Life 2. But it's coming.
People still play Pac-Man today. Do you think anyone will be playing Half-Life 2 in 2036?
The truth is that game design has for the most part regressed since the NES/SNES era, focusing too much on flashy effects at the expense of gameplay, and dominated by one crappy genre (FPS). The only 3-D games I ever found worth playing were the Zelda series.
Isn't that what progress is supposed to be about: accomplishing the same tasks with less labor?
It's only meaningful progress if the benefits accrue to the average American worker. Otherwise, it's just further lining the pockets of the wealthy.
When productivity gains stop being broadly shared, Luddism starts to make sense. This is why massive concentration of wealth is a bad thing: it pits workers against innovation.
The average American isn't as rich as he/she used to be. This is because income inequality has skyrocketed over the past 30 years. It turns out that opening up a global race-to-the-bottom in working conditions is not compatible with having a secure middle class.
It was only when AMD released the Athlon 64 while Intel was struggling to push the P4 faster that they raced ahead... at that point everyone who knew about technology was saying 'Don't buy Intel, buy AMD, P4 sucks', and no amount of 'unethical tactics' could have kept Intel ahead for long.
Unfortunately, most computers were (and are) bought by users who don't know about technology.
For specific workloads, Itanium is great. It can sustain 2 FP loads, 2 FP stores, and 2 FMA's in a cycle, which means for certain types of DSP-ish workloads, it has more performance per-cycle than just about any other mainstream CPU.
If you have a "DSP-ish" workload, then wouldn't it make more sense to use, you know, a DSP? Or at least the GPGPU capabilities of a video card, which offers some of these same advantages.
AMD has always been at least neck and neck with Intel if they weren't ahead of them, despite all of Intel's dirty tricks
AMD was ahead of Intel between 1999, when they introduced the first Athlon, and 2006, when Intel finally shitcanned Netburst in favor of Conroe and its successors. Since then, they haven't been anywhere near "neck and neck" with Intel. They have gotten beaten decisively in everything except the low-cost sector.
Our testing of everything up to quadcores says that clock for clock, AMD made mincemeat out of Intel.
Tom's Hardware disagrees. Basically, the newest AMD K10 cores are about on par, clock for clock, with a 2006 Core 2 Duo, and get the pants beaten off them by Nehalem and Sandy Bridge.
Now, should I believe Tom's Hardware, or some random Slashdot poster named "postbigbang"?
Intel blows AMD out of the water in gaming benchmarks because their chips are faster. AMD doesn't want the performance market anymore. They want the lame consumer laptops people buy to use Facebook.
Then why did they build the hot-running, power-hungry Bulldozer instead of scaling up Bobcat?
Unfortunately users at my company will still find a way to run them at 800x600
You laugh, but this is actually a serious reason why we don't have high-DPI displays on the mainstream desktop.
Not everyone has perfect 20/20 vision, or the same tolerance for small print. Many users already have problems reading text on existing displays when set to the default of 96 DPI. Unfortunately, the art of DPI scaling on mainstream OSes is still stuck in the dark ages. There are a LOT of poorly-written applications that assume 96 DPI and display badly broken output if anything else is set. Windows 7 is better than XP in its DPI scaling, but even so, it's far from perfect. Windows doesn't even support vector icons! The best you can do is to create a high-quality raster icon at 256x256 and hope it looks OK when downscaled.
This is why so many users run a LCD monitor at less than the recommended resolution. The slight blurriness is better for them than crystal-clear text too small to read, or various graphical nastiness from broken DPI scaling. Just today, in fact, I dealt with such a situation at work. One of our librarians said that some icons in the library management software were appearing all-black. I'd seen this issue before and knew it was due to the software not supporting 120 DPI, which this librarian had set for easier reading. I tried a few different things to see if I could get it to work – I set the "Disable display scaling" option in Compatibility properties, and also tried XP-style DPI scaling as well as the native Windows 7-style scaling. None of this worked. Ultimately, the only fix was to switch back to 96 DPI and run the monitor at a non-native resolution.
As long as this situation continues, monitor makers see no advantage in higher resolutions than 1080p, since so many users will just sacrifice that resolution for readability anyway.
I'd rather just buy sheets of nickel or other metals with my debit card if I feel the need for it, which I don't.
You missed the point. The bullion value of a nickel is slightly higher than its face value. Thus, if you invest in copper and nickel by hoarding nickel coins, the government is essentially selling you the metals at below their market value. (Despite the name, a nickel is 75% copper, and has been since 1866 when they were first minted.)
The way to do this in the U.S. would be as follows:
Impose a 7% national sales tax, payable to the federal government. At the same time, prohibit states and localities from collecting their own sales taxes. The result would be largely revenue-neutral, since the total of state and local sales taxes averages about 7% already.
Have the federal government distribute this money on a regular basis to states (6%) and localities (1%), based on some weighted formula that takes into account population, economic activity, or both.
Require all merchants doing business in the U.S. to post prices inclusive of tax, so what you see is what you pay.
This would have several advantages. It would eliminate the current advantages that online stores have over brick-and-mortar retailers. (Someone buying at Amazon or Newegg would pay a price with the 7% included, just like someone buying at B&N or Fry's.) It would make it easier for consumers to figure out how much something is actually going to cost them out-of-pocket. And you know what? If a business feels that the 99-cent or $4.99 or $9.99 or $99.99 price point is important, they'll figure out a way to reduce the cost of their product so it hits that price point even with tax already included. So, in the long run, it is likely to save consumers money.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you learn to game the algorithms, and if the algorithms have some correlation to good writing, gaming the algorithm is actually improving your writing. For the algorithm to truly be able to detect good writing without loopholes, they'd probably require strong AI. Needless to say, that isn't going to happen. They are going to use some simple heuristics that will be figured out and gamed very quickly. I guarantee someone will be able to create a gobbledegook generator that will nonetheless "pass" the tests.
IMO it's become a real crime that MS still can't follow the simple "Deny All" policy and ask the user if they want to allow before allowing anything to happen.
That's pretty much what UAC already does.
Agreed completely. I can't understand why so many car manufacturers continue to use old-fashioned, analog-looking gauges (which are actually operated by digital pulses anyway). Analog speedometers should be a thing of the past.
Microsoft suffers TREMENDOUSLY for their keeping the old stuff working.
You're looking at this from a purely technical perspective. From a business perspective, strong backward compatibility is one of the biggest competitive advantages that Microsoft has.
Do companies pay a license fee to be allowed to render jpegs?
No. The baseline JPEG standard was specifically made to be royalty-free. There are some patents (probably expired or near-expiration by now) that covered the arithmetic coding option for JPEG, which is why no one ever used that encoding method and most JPEG software doesn't support it. A couple years ago, a company called Forgent tried to assert a patent on JPEG, but they got beaten back and didn't succeed in extorting any money from anyone.
That's already how things are, and they plan to use those APIs to implement H.264 decoding to avoid shipping the codec (and paying license fees). The only catch there is that XP does not have that, and won't be getting it. It might be irrelevant in 3-4 more years, but it's certainly very relevant today.
This is not quite true. XP does support DXVA version 1, which allows for some hardware-accelerated decoding, but it is more limited than DXVA 2 which is available in Vista and 7. This page contains details. Specifically, "In DXVA 1, the software decoder must access the API through the video renderer. There is no way to use the DXVA 1 API without calling into the video renderer. This limitation has been removed with DXVA 2." This may be a problem for Firefox depending on what it is doing.
License requires DRM to be implemented with a straight handshaked path all the way from the video card to the output device
That's the Blu-Ray license requirement, not H.264. It's not relevant to web browsers.
It also is annoying for third world countries and some netbook owners with starter editions of Windows 7 who do not have these codecs.
Windows 7 Starter doesn't support the DXVA API?
Any PC video hardware made in the last 5 years or so (except the Intel Atom's crappy chipset) supports H.264 (and VC-1) decoding in hardware. This means the license fee was already paid by the video card manufacturer (or Intel/AMD) and all applications should have to do is send the stream to the card via the proper API for decoding.
Almost all modern smartphones and tablets support H.264 decoding in hardware. Likewise, virtually every video card and integrated video chipset made in the past 5 years (with the exception of Intel's Atom) supports H.264 decoding in hardware. There should be nothing to sue over, since the hardware manufacturer already paid the H.264 license fee. All Firefox has to do is send the raw data stream to the hardware using the appropriate API and say "Here, decode this."
Go solicit private capital rather than forcing me under the threat of violence to fund your little science projects.
Go move to Somalia if you don't believe in the social contract and the public good.
If this malware resides exclusively in RAM without any footprint on the HDD or BIOS, then how does it survive a cold boot?
Castlevania was harder than Mario, Zelda, or Metroid -- especially the Grim Reaper fight. If you didn't have triple-shot boomerangs, when the Reaper started spamming you with Scythes you were in trouble.
Or you could use Fire Bombs (aka Holy Water) with the Double or Triple Shot. If you aim at the Reaper's platform as he lowers from the ceiling and keep throwing there, he will get stuck and die before he can even create a single scythe.
Castlevania is actually a pretty easy game once you've memorized what happens, because there is very little randomness. Although I can't do it every time, I can often get to the 6th floor without getting hit, and on two occasions I've managed to beat the game without taking any hits.
At the end of the day, that is what separates a game like HL2 or Mass Effect from a game like Angry Birds.
I can almost guarantee you that Angry Birds will stand the test of time far better than Half-Life 2 or Mass Effect. In fact, if there's one single game released in the past 5 years that will be considered a classic two or three decades from now, it's Angry Birds.
Most of us can no more imagine it now than some guy playing Pacman could have foreseen Half-Life 2. But it's coming.
People still play Pac-Man today. Do you think anyone will be playing Half-Life 2 in 2036?
The truth is that game design has for the most part regressed since the NES/SNES era, focusing too much on flashy effects at the expense of gameplay, and dominated by one crappy genre (FPS). The only 3-D games I ever found worth playing were the Zelda series.
All offshore outsourcing is about avoiding moral (and legal) duties to US employees.
Isn't that what progress is supposed to be about: accomplishing the same tasks with less labor?
It's only meaningful progress if the benefits accrue to the average American worker. Otherwise, it's just further lining the pockets of the wealthy.
When productivity gains stop being broadly shared, Luddism starts to make sense. This is why massive concentration of wealth is a bad thing: it pits workers against innovation.
No Start menu? No sale.
The USA isn't as rich as it used to be[...]
In the aggregate, the USA is richer than ever.
The average American isn't as rich as he/she used to be. This is because income inequality has skyrocketed over the past 30 years. It turns out that opening up a global race-to-the-bottom in working conditions is not compatible with having a secure middle class.
It was only when AMD released the Athlon 64 while Intel was struggling to push the P4 faster that they raced ahead... at that point everyone who knew about technology was saying 'Don't buy Intel, buy AMD, P4 sucks', and no amount of 'unethical tactics' could have kept Intel ahead for long.
Unfortunately, most computers were (and are) bought by users who don't know about technology.
For specific workloads, Itanium is great. It can sustain 2 FP loads, 2 FP stores, and 2 FMA's in a cycle, which means for certain types of DSP-ish workloads, it has more performance per-cycle than just about any other mainstream CPU.
If you have a "DSP-ish" workload, then wouldn't it make more sense to use, you know, a DSP? Or at least the GPGPU capabilities of a video card, which offers some of these same advantages.
AMD has always been at least neck and neck with Intel if they weren't ahead of them, despite all of Intel's dirty tricks
AMD was ahead of Intel between 1999, when they introduced the first Athlon, and 2006, when Intel finally shitcanned Netburst in favor of Conroe and its successors. Since then, they haven't been anywhere near "neck and neck" with Intel. They have gotten beaten decisively in everything except the low-cost sector.
Our testing of everything up to quadcores says that clock for clock, AMD made mincemeat out of Intel.
Tom's Hardware disagrees. Basically, the newest AMD K10 cores are about on par, clock for clock, with a 2006 Core 2 Duo, and get the pants beaten off them by Nehalem and Sandy Bridge.
Now, should I believe Tom's Hardware, or some random Slashdot poster named "postbigbang"?
Intel blows AMD out of the water in gaming benchmarks because their chips are faster. AMD doesn't want the performance market anymore. They want the lame consumer laptops people buy to use Facebook.
Then why did they build the hot-running, power-hungry Bulldozer instead of scaling up Bobcat?
Unfortunately users at my company will still find a way to run them at 800x600
You laugh, but this is actually a serious reason why we don't have high-DPI displays on the mainstream desktop.
Not everyone has perfect 20/20 vision, or the same tolerance for small print. Many users already have problems reading text on existing displays when set to the default of 96 DPI. Unfortunately, the art of DPI scaling on mainstream OSes is still stuck in the dark ages. There are a LOT of poorly-written applications that assume 96 DPI and display badly broken output if anything else is set. Windows 7 is better than XP in its DPI scaling, but even so, it's far from perfect. Windows doesn't even support vector icons! The best you can do is to create a high-quality raster icon at 256x256 and hope it looks OK when downscaled.
This is why so many users run a LCD monitor at less than the recommended resolution. The slight blurriness is better for them than crystal-clear text too small to read, or various graphical nastiness from broken DPI scaling. Just today, in fact, I dealt with such a situation at work. One of our librarians said that some icons in the library management software were appearing all-black. I'd seen this issue before and knew it was due to the software not supporting 120 DPI, which this librarian had set for easier reading. I tried a few different things to see if I could get it to work – I set the "Disable display scaling" option in Compatibility properties, and also tried XP-style DPI scaling as well as the native Windows 7-style scaling. None of this worked. Ultimately, the only fix was to switch back to 96 DPI and run the monitor at a non-native resolution.
As long as this situation continues, monitor makers see no advantage in higher resolutions than 1080p, since so many users will just sacrifice that resolution for readability anyway.
I'd rather just buy sheets of nickel or other metals with my debit card if I feel the need for it, which I don't.
You missed the point. The bullion value of a nickel is slightly higher than its face value. Thus, if you invest in copper and nickel by hoarding nickel coins, the government is essentially selling you the metals at below their market value. (Despite the name, a nickel is 75% copper, and has been since 1866 when they were first minted.)
The way to do this in the U.S. would be as follows:
This would have several advantages. It would eliminate the current advantages that online stores have over brick-and-mortar retailers. (Someone buying at Amazon or Newegg would pay a price with the 7% included, just like someone buying at B&N or Fry's.) It would make it easier for consumers to figure out how much something is actually going to cost them out-of-pocket. And you know what? If a business feels that the 99-cent or $4.99 or $9.99 or $99.99 price point is important, they'll figure out a way to reduce the cost of their product so it hits that price point even with tax already included. So, in the long run, it is likely to save consumers money.