Even if the invading power does not mind killing LOTS of people, it can be difficult. Consider the soviet invasion of Afghanistan: The Soviets reportedly razed entire villages to deprive the guerilla of support. But even so, they could not get rid of the resistance and eventually preferred to retreat.
A pretty good explanation, but item transfers (including looting, dropping stuff...) should really be atomic operations, with immediate database update. That should be a blanket solution against other dupe exploits too. Use the checkpoints for stuff like position and health. Not for items.
Noone cares about whether he's taking with him the tens of hours of coaching with GCC. All the time he spent doing Graph theory with free software. Hours with a program like Haskell. GCC. cpp. All the so-called fucking IP that he's taken from free/oss to Microsoft So what? The Open Source community accepts copyright (and relies on it with the GPL) but believes that ideas should be free. And free also means that you can keep using your skills in a proprietary environment. So there is nothing wrong with someone from the Open Source crowd taking a job at Microsoft.
But you still depend on valve keeping Steam running. If they ever shut it down, the offline modus will reportedly only work for a limited time. For me that is reason enough not to buy HL2 at full price. If I see it on the rummage table for 10 euros some day, however, I might get it.
As others said before me, Valve is in a much stronger position than most developers. Half-Life is hugely popular and if EA does not want the deal, others might be happy to jump in. Thus, I guess you won't have to worry about EA dictating terms to Valve.
What is your time worth? Whenever I install a new system from scratch, it takes me about a day to get it the way I want it. If time is worth $50/hour, 8 hours of time alone is $400. So one is left with two choices: 1) spend $400 in labour to fix the box, or 2) spend $400 to buy a totally new box (in which case they can give the old one to their geek nephew to wipe clean and install Linux on).
That is fine if you like the preinstalled setup. But usually I dislike a few things about how the shop has set it up. Which ends with me reinstalling the machine anyway. So option 2) would cost me $400 for the hardware plus 8 hours of time.
Exactly. Turning their consoles into a general purpose computing platform would leave them two options 1) Stay closed source and replace at least M$ Office and the browser with their own developments. Time-consuming and expensive. 2) Use Open Source and give away control of the platform completely (once you allow Linux and GCC, people can run next to everything). It would be interesting to see how version 2) plays out, when a big company tries to do it. Think something like the PlayStation3 as a combination of easy-to-use game console and general purpose computer, with general USB support for all sorts of periphery.
Our customers pay us for our compiler for use on Intel systems and we specifically say in the license/contract that we won't support our compiler on anything else If so, why bother with the GI ID at all? If someone uses Intel optimized code on AMD and it breaks, you could always say "not supported". I guess that would be easier to defend in court than the different codepaths. It would also reduce the overall program size, making the Intel compiler look better.
I've read the previous story about Intel compilers creating slow AMD Code http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/12/13 20202&tid=142&tid=118&tid=123 and several people confirm it. So AMD will probably win that lawsuit. But that may take a few years, and in the meantime it would be smart to ensure independent development of a good compiler for AMD processors. Supporting GCC might be a good way to do it.
Smart business move? Yes. Consequence free actions are generally good ones. Until a slap on the wrist becomes substantial, they can do whatever they want. Depends on the outcome of the lawsuit. While government-initiated antitrust cases tend to be settled for symbolic fines (remember Microsoft?), damages in lawsuits between companies are sometimes pretty high. When googling for an example, I found some old news about the settlement between Sun and Microsoft: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1560909,00.as p Quote: The settlement, which stems from a lawsuit Sun filed in 2002, will include Microsoft continuing to support Sun's Java Virtual Machine, as well as Microsoft paying $700 million to Sun to resolve pending antitrust issues and $900 million more to resolve patent issues. 700 million on the antitrust part of this settlement. Won't kill a company like Intel but it is not exactly cheap. Another one is http://www.webhosting.info/news/1/ibm-wins-$850m-s ettlement-from-microsoft_0701058182.htm where Microsoft pays $775m plus some free software to IBM.
Maybe on part of the publisher, but I wonder why the Supreme Court of British Columbia granted the injunction. The natural reaction would be "tough luck, now live with the early reviews that might show up". While this may be nice publicity for Raincoast, it also looks like the court is brown-nosing big business. Not good for citizens' trust into justice.
Actually, I was suggesting that the subway system is one big target with many entrances that need to be covered with equal diligence. I was further suggesting that this might not happen due to the limited nature of governmental spending. As a result, the terrorists might drive with their bomb from some non-supervised suburb station right into the supposedly well-guarded city subway tunnels.
This does not mean "displacement" is always useless, but I suggest that it is not practical in case of the subway system.
It would be easier to not concider building a wall if you didn't feel like you were blocking the path of a bomb. It's cold, I know, but these people are paranoid. They are not only paranoid, but greedy on top of it. Consider the small map in the following BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/31111 59.stm It would actually be cheaper to build the wall at the border of the West bank (because it would be much shorter). Israel also could avoid much criticism by building the wall entirely on its own territory, the way East Germany did during the cold war. While that barrier was still viewed as inhumane tool for denying freedom to East German citizens, nobody could accuse the German Democratic Republic of stealing other nations' land for building it.
Second, and most importantly, the poeple that had settled the land to cause this commotion in the first place, are pretty much all dead or in the process. How does it make sense to say it's "their fault" if none of the original people are involved?
Unfortunately, Israel taking land from arabs has not stopped. Even in the last 10 years, there have been recurring reports in the media about yet another jewish settlement on previously palestine soil. The latest and ongoing example is the building of the wall between Israel and the West bank, which happens to separate many Arab farmers from their land.
If such antics had stopped a few decades ago, I believe the situation would be much defused by now.
In this case, you would have to secure ALL stations at a really high price. Otherwise the bomber gets aboard at a remote suburb without scanner, sets the bomb off in the city, and the bad guys will just laugh at the stupid cops.
Considering the shortsightedness of typical politicians, "less critical" stations will be left out to save money and the above is exactly what will happen.
Modern languages are all about protecting the programmer from having power. They limit the programmer, tying him or her down. This was done because so many programmers are idiots, true, but never forget that the problems modern languages were meant to solve are all people problems, not computer problems.
There is a lot of truth in this, but I think C makes it a little too easy to shoot yourself in the knee by accident. Personally, I prefer languages that allow you to do anything but requires you to announce your intentions, for instance with explicit typecasts when you mix variable types that do usually not mix. Object Pascal comes pretty close to my ideals (it is a bit too fussy about allowed vs. illegal typecasts). Unlike C, Object Pascal is pretty good at throwing compiler errors in most situations that stem from confusing things. If you actually want to do the supposedly erroneus thing, there are usually mechanisms to get around the errors. Only pointer arithmetics in Object Pascal are a PITA, here you have to go through real contortions to get things done.
Most "average" people who own a few shares do not really have the time and knowledge to follow the company policy and use their votes accordingly. As a result, the votes remain unused unless they are delegated to some fonds manager. I don't know the details about US retirement fonds, but for the companies' shares I bought through my bank (in Germany), I regularly get nice letter that says in effect "Won't you give us authority to vote on the shareholder's meeting for you?" I don't do that on principle, and on one occasion I have voted myself against overly generous boni for management. But I suspect I am part of a minority there.
A formal ratification as "constitution" (which may be a misleading term, it still seems more like a contract between states) would have politically strengthened the European Constitution to a point where reforming the EU would have been next to impossible. Some minor improvements in the power of parliament are not enough to compensate for this.
Why can't the two models coexist on a network? Use IPv6 as you used the net before, without guaranteed Quality Of Service - pay the same rates as before. Open a connection with guaranteed Quality Of Service - pay some more for having part of the net's capacity reserved for you.
The end result of a game loop is a new video frame. So much HAS to be ready to go in a dependable amount of time, adding threads only complicates the situation. The problem isn't just lazy programmers.
After thinking about it a little more, I think that things like AI and most scripts CAN miss a few video frames without hurting the game. -In opponent AI, you don't really want enemies that react within 30 milliseconds. They would hopelessly outclass human players. A random reaction time in the 500-1000 millisecond timeframe will do better for most purposes. -Scripts that trigger things like the spawning of new enemies can also take a bit longer. The above timeframe will be more than sufficient, because the in-game situation will not change that much within 1-2 seconds.
Are all the developers going to spend an extra development year rebuilding their game engines? Hell no. There's food that needs to be put on tables today, not tomorrow. Sooner or later they will have to, because otherwise they won't be able to fully utilize the multicore processors of the new consoles. You might get away with using only one core if you develop fast and release your game before others, who did rebuild their game engine, release something more spectacular. But eventually, someone will use the full potential of the processor and make you look bad in comparison.
The article at Tom's compares an overclocked Pentium M to Athlon 64 FX and the PIV Extreme Edition running at standard clock speed. Tom's also uses an Athlon 64 FX with the now-obsolete Clawhammer chip in 130nm, which makes AMD look bad in the power dissipation test.
A Pentium M does perform quite nicely, even when compared to desktop processors. Consider http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/. While the results at Tom's Hardware were achieved with overclocking to 2.5 GHz, that clock speed seems not unreasonable for a 65nm version. Now imagine a dual-core version, and Yonah might indeed be impressingly fast. That is, if Intel will deliver it on time. If there is a year of delay or so, AMD might cook up something even better in the meantime.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the invading power does not mind killing LOTS of people, it can be difficult. Consider the soviet invasion of Afghanistan:
The Soviets reportedly razed entire villages to deprive the guerilla of support. But even so, they could not get rid of the resistance and eventually preferred to retreat.
A pretty good explanation, but item transfers (including looting, dropping stuff...) should really be atomic operations, with immediate database update. That should be a blanket solution against other dupe exploits too.
Use the checkpoints for stuff like position and health. Not for items.
Noone cares about whether he's taking with him the tens of hours of coaching with GCC. All the time he spent doing Graph theory with free software. Hours with a program like Haskell. GCC. cpp. All the so-called fucking IP that he's taken from free/oss to Microsoft
So what? The Open Source community accepts copyright (and relies on it with the GPL) but believes that ideas should be free. And free also means that you can keep using your skills in a proprietary environment.
So there is nothing wrong with someone from the Open Source crowd taking a job at Microsoft.
It is very difficult to repair the brain of a coder who has been exposed to any form of BASIC, whether visual, dot-net, object or other.
That would make Commodore one of the worst causes of lost productivity, via their once hugely-popular C64 with builtin BASIC.
But you still depend on valve keeping Steam running. If they ever shut it down, the offline modus will reportedly only work for a limited time. For me that is reason enough not to buy HL2 at full price.
If I see it on the rummage table for 10 euros some day, however, I might get it.
As others said before me, Valve is in a much stronger position than most developers. Half-Life is hugely popular and if EA does not want the deal, others might be happy to jump in.
Thus, I guess you won't have to worry about EA dictating terms to Valve.
What is your time worth? Whenever I install a new system from scratch, it takes me about a day to get it the way I want it. If time is worth $50/hour, 8 hours of time alone is $400. So one is left with two choices:
1) spend $400 in labour to fix the box, or 2) spend $400 to buy a totally new box (in which case they can give the old one to their geek nephew to wipe clean and install Linux on).
That is fine if you like the preinstalled setup. But usually I dislike a few things about how the shop has set it up. Which ends with me reinstalling the machine anyway. So option 2) would cost me $400 for the hardware plus 8 hours of time.
Exactly. Turning their consoles into a general purpose computing platform would leave them two options
1) Stay closed source and replace at least M$ Office and the browser with their own developments. Time-consuming and expensive.
2) Use Open Source and give away control of the platform completely (once you allow Linux and GCC, people can run next to everything).
It would be interesting to see how version 2) plays out, when a big company tries to do it. Think something like the PlayStation3 as a combination of easy-to-use game console and general purpose computer, with general USB support for all sorts of periphery.
Our customers pay us for our compiler for use on Intel systems and we specifically say in the license/contract that we won't support our compiler on anything else
If so, why bother with the GI ID at all? If someone uses Intel optimized code on AMD and it breaks, you could always say "not supported".
I guess that would be easier to defend in court than the different codepaths. It would also reduce the overall program size, making the Intel compiler look better.
I've read the previous story about Intel compilers creating slow AMD Code3 20202&tid=142&tid=118&tid=123
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/12/1
and several people confirm it. So AMD will probably win that lawsuit.
But that may take a few years, and in the meantime it would be smart to ensure independent development of a good compiler for AMD processors. Supporting GCC might be a good way to do it.
Smart business move? Yes. Consequence free actions are generally good ones. Until a slap on the wrist becomes substantial, they can do whatever they want.s p s ettlement-from-microsoft_0701058182.htm
Depends on the outcome of the lawsuit. While government-initiated antitrust cases tend to be settled for symbolic fines (remember Microsoft?), damages in lawsuits between companies are sometimes pretty high. When googling for an example, I found some old news about the settlement between Sun and Microsoft:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1560909,00.a
Quote:
The settlement, which stems from a lawsuit Sun filed in 2002, will include Microsoft continuing to support Sun's Java Virtual Machine, as well as Microsoft paying $700 million to Sun to resolve pending antitrust issues and $900 million more to resolve patent issues.
700 million on the antitrust part of this settlement. Won't kill a company like Intel but it is not exactly cheap.
Another one is
http://www.webhosting.info/news/1/ibm-wins-$850m-
where Microsoft pays $775m plus some free software to IBM.
Maybe on part of the publisher, but I wonder why the Supreme Court of British Columbia granted the injunction. The natural reaction would be "tough luck, now live with the early reviews that might show up".
While this may be nice publicity for Raincoast, it also looks like the court is brown-nosing big business. Not good for citizens' trust into justice.
Actually, I was suggesting that the subway system is one big target with many entrances that need to be covered with equal diligence. I was further suggesting that this might not happen due to the limited nature of governmental spending. As a result, the terrorists might drive with their bomb from some non-supervised suburb station right into the supposedly well-guarded city subway tunnels.
This does not mean "displacement" is always useless, but I suggest that it is not practical in case of the subway system.
It would be easier to not concider building a wall if you didn't feel like you were blocking the path of a bomb. It's cold, I know, but these people are paranoid.1 59.stm
They are not only paranoid, but greedy on top of it. Consider the small map in the following BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3111
It would actually be cheaper to build the wall at the border of the West bank (because it would be much shorter).
Israel also could avoid much criticism by building the wall entirely on its own territory, the way East Germany did during the cold war. While that barrier was still viewed as inhumane tool for denying freedom to East German citizens, nobody could accuse the German Democratic Republic of stealing other nations' land for building it.
Second, and most importantly, the poeple that had settled the land to cause this commotion in the first place, are pretty much all dead or in the process. How does it make sense to say it's "their fault" if none of the original people are involved?
Unfortunately, Israel taking land from arabs has not stopped. Even in the last 10 years, there have been recurring reports in the media about yet another jewish settlement on previously palestine soil. The latest and ongoing example is the building of the wall between Israel and the West bank, which happens to separate many Arab farmers from their land.
If such antics had stopped a few decades ago, I believe the situation would be much defused by now.
In this case, you would have to secure ALL stations at a really high price. Otherwise the bomber gets aboard at a remote suburb without scanner, sets the bomb off in the city, and the bad guys will just laugh at the stupid cops.
Considering the shortsightedness of typical politicians, "less critical" stations will be left out to save money and the above is exactly what will happen.
Modern languages are all about protecting the programmer from having power. They limit the programmer, tying him or her down. This was done because so many programmers are idiots, true, but never forget that the problems modern languages were meant to solve are all people problems, not computer problems.
There is a lot of truth in this, but I think C makes it a little too easy to shoot yourself in the knee by accident. Personally, I prefer languages that allow you to do anything but requires you to announce your intentions, for instance with explicit typecasts when you mix variable types that do usually not mix.
Object Pascal comes pretty close to my ideals (it is a bit too fussy about allowed vs. illegal typecasts).
Unlike C, Object Pascal is pretty good at throwing compiler errors in most situations that stem from confusing things. If you actually want to do the supposedly erroneus thing, there are usually mechanisms to get around the errors. Only pointer arithmetics in Object Pascal are a PITA, here you have to go through real contortions to get things done.
Most "average" people who own a few shares do not really have the time and knowledge to follow the company policy and use their votes accordingly.
As a result, the votes remain unused unless they are delegated to some fonds manager.
I don't know the details about US retirement fonds, but for the companies' shares I bought through my bank (in Germany), I regularly get nice letter that says in effect "Won't you give us authority to vote on the shareholder's meeting for you?"
I don't do that on principle, and on one occasion I have voted myself against overly generous boni for management. But I suspect I am part of a minority there.
A formal ratification as "constitution" (which may be a misleading term, it still seems more like a contract between states) would have politically strengthened the European Constitution to a point where reforming the EU would have been next to impossible.
Some minor improvements in the power of parliament are not enough to compensate for this.
Why can't the two models coexist on a network?
Use IPv6 as you used the net before, without guaranteed Quality Of Service - pay the same rates as before.
Open a connection with guaranteed Quality Of Service - pay some more for having part of the net's capacity reserved for you.
The end result of a game loop is a new video frame. So much HAS to be ready to go in a dependable amount of time, adding threads only complicates the situation. The problem isn't just lazy programmers.
After thinking about it a little more, I think that things like AI and most scripts CAN miss a few video frames without hurting the game.
-In opponent AI, you don't really want enemies that react within 30 milliseconds. They would hopelessly outclass human players. A random reaction time in the 500-1000 millisecond timeframe will do better for most purposes.
-Scripts that trigger things like the spawning of new enemies can also take a bit longer. The above timeframe will be more than sufficient, because the in-game situation will not change that much within 1-2 seconds.
Are all the developers going to spend an extra development year rebuilding their game engines? Hell no. There's food that needs to be put on tables today, not tomorrow.
Sooner or later they will have to, because otherwise they won't be able to fully utilize the multicore processors of the new consoles. You might get away with using only one core if you develop fast and release your game before others, who did rebuild their game engine, release something more spectacular.
But eventually, someone will use the full potential of the processor and make you look bad in comparison.
The article at Tom's compares an overclocked Pentium M to Athlon 64 FX and the PIV Extreme Edition running at standard clock speed. Tom's also uses an Athlon 64 FX with the now-obsolete Clawhammer chip in 130nm, which makes AMD look bad in the power dissipation test.
:
In other news, LostCircuits has successfully overclocked a Venice core-based Athlon64-3800+
http://www.lostcircuits.com/cpu/amd_venice/
These results look impressive too, and I don't think AMD is beaten yet.
Mostly correct, except that 939 systems support ECC just fine
You are right. I must have confused something there.
A Pentium M does perform quite nicely, even when compared to desktop processors. Consider http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/.
While the results at Tom's Hardware were achieved with overclocking to 2.5 GHz, that clock speed seems not unreasonable for a 65nm version. Now imagine a dual-core version, and Yonah might indeed be impressingly fast.
That is, if Intel will deliver it on time. If there is a year of delay or so, AMD might cook up something even better in the meantime.