That's why manufacturers who trust in their products offer an extended warranty that's covered in the price of the product. For a device like the XBOX, I would at least expect 1 year, otherwise I'd assume it is cheap crap.
Yes, they ARE having problems at the moment. I joined Neocron 1 two months ago and really liked the FPS/Cyberpunk theme, but I'm hesitating to upgrade my account to NC2 because of the all bugs and the inept payment provider. I do, however, still hope for improvment. Maybe I'll re-join in a few months. If Reakktor isn't bankrupt by then.
Actually, the "stolen" GPL code will only become "illegal" when the user employs it in ways that are not compatible with the GPL. For instance, by using it in a closed source program. At this point the copyright holder can sue him, but not before. Redistributing GPL code is explicitly allowed by the GPL.
A modchip is not acting as a replacement part. It does not 'unlock' or permit operation of the console. The purpose of a modchip is to bypass the signing mechanism used to prevent you from playing pirated games.
There are other uses for modchips, too. The XBox Linux Project, http://www.xbox-linux.org/ shows a way to turn the XBox into a Linux desktop that will not play XBox games at all but can be used for "normal" computing use.
Re:Sacrifice hardware for the good of software?
on
How Cheap Can A PC Be?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, it is an amazing fact that sometimes higher prices make people think they get more for their money. I've noticed this a few years ago when looking for a new job: After a few unsuccessful attempts with demanding moderate wages, I followed the advice of a personnel consultant and raised my price by 10%. Soon after, I had a job;-)
Even if it is not the fastest, 100% X11 compatibility, open source drivers and good signal quality (don't forget the DVI port for TFTs) could give it the same status Matrox had for a long time in the Windows world: Not the fastest, but a really good card for office use and fast _enough_ for last year's games.
Have you done the same experiment with win2k pro with either SP1 or SP2? It's only fair since boxes are shipping with both service packs. I don't disagree with you, i've noted that buying a PC equiped with winxp home edition to this day still will get infected right out of the box. I've not observed this under SP2.
I _have_ tried this with Win2k pro SP4, maybe a year ago. The machine got infected right away by the MSBlast virus. Actually, it was an involuntary experiment: It was known at the time that SP4 alone was no sufficient protection, you also needed a certain post-SP4 hotfix for the RPC service. Unfortunatlely, I forgot that one when I installed the machine.
Remember that the world does NOT subscribe to the American idea of freedom and democracy. There are rights we have in the US that you do not in other free countries, and rights they have that we do not.
Do not underestimate the second part of your statement. Post 9/11, the USA have gone way too far in ignoring the civil rights of their own citizens, and it is far worse for those who are NOT US citizens but happen to get involved in some US versus "Rest Of World" conflict.
Right now, I am happy to live in Germany rather than the USA, despite some unhealthy tendencies I see here as well (government desiring excessive internet surveillance).
When I talk to customers and they say, "Hey, we can get better TCO with Linux," they're not always saying better than Windows. They're saying better than Unix.
Hardly surprising. For a customer migrating from a commercial UNIX version, the switch to the UNIX-like Linux will probably be much easier than the switch to Windows. In this case, the difficulty of switching to a completely different environment works against Microsoft. But this merely balances out some of the Windows environments, whose owners find the switch to Linux too difficult.
I'm a mechanical engineering student myself, and I already realize a lot of what you're saying, but keep in mind that the speed of sound changes along with a change in pressure. Thermo/fluids wasn't my strong suit, but I think that it's possible to make it go supersonic by just using enough pressure. Think about this: an explosive supersonic projectile is nothing more than REALLY high pressure gasses (with different properties, but still...)
Speed of sound does change not much with pressure, but significantly with temperature. In a rifle, you have pretty hot gases which leads to a higher speed of sound.
Of course it is limited if you stick to Pentium4-style energy guzzlers (and I'm really curious how Intel will handle the heat from a dual-core Prescott). To a slightly lesser extent, the same applies to the Athlon64. But if the individual cores are designed for low energy consumption, putting more of them on the die becomes feasible. For instance, four Dothan (the new Pentium M) CPUs would have a total power consumption of about 80 W. Not too much for conventional cooling. Beyond four cores, I'd expect other problems to show up as well, like the shared bandwith to RAM being not enough for all cores. So a four core-CPU will probably remain the realistic maximum in the next years.
Fact 1: The most important factor in software work is not the tools or techniques used by the programmers, but rather the quality of the programmers themselves.
A really good programmer knows which of his tools and techniques are appropriate for the problem at hand. A few simple examples:
-Spaghetti code has its place in small experiments. The sort you hack up in a few hours and might throw away afterwards. -Object-oriented programming will help you to keep large projects organized. -Scripts are fine for small tasks, but don't expect them to have great performance.
Of course, there may be the problem that your pointy-haired boss insists on $LatestHypeTechnique. But otherwise, competent people will choose the right tools on their own.
The total result might be similar to two processors having a 64bit memory controller each. If you look at the P-Ratings of socket 754 versus socket 939, 64bit memory controller vs. 128bit seems to make roughly a 10% difference in performance. Thus, I would expect a dual-core Opteron to be slightly slower than a two processor design where each CPU has its own memory.
If Valve is worth their salt, they'll have to move to limit the information sent to players, giving them only what they should be able to observe and nothing more. Sending only the character positions you can directly observe would be one method, which would destroy wallhacks, but leaves aimbots unscathed. I think the only good way to counter aimbots longterm is to offload rendering to a server, but that's borderline insane. Both of these suggestions mean an increase in lag, but that's what we get for using a system where failures to transmit mean waiting for random milliseconds.
This strategy is frequently discussed w.r.t. cheating, moving more stuff onto the server side, but that's impractical for performance reasons. Performance (network in particular) is pretty important in games.
The first suggestion (sending only the character positions you can directly observe) would actually reduce the network load, since the amount of data to send would shrink. Of course, this would come at the expense of requiring more CPU power on the server side, as the server would have to do visibility calculations for every player in the game.
They should have run the two operating systems on identical (PC) hardware. After all, the x86 platform is the original platform of Linux too, and probably the best supported. So this would be fair to both systems. Thus, the hardware costs would be a draw and the cost comparison would actually be about software.
France has a rather large muslim minority. Recently, the mutual hatred between muslims and Israel from the middle east conflict seems to show up as antisemitism among these people. I believe this to be a much larger problem than a few guys trading old SS uniforms.
Sorry to burst your bubble but not only is it possible but I think Namesys as a company should consider it. Heck I personally would pay for a better file system under NT/2K/XP/2K5. My employer would pay even more and MS heck the skies the limit. Might be a good idea IF they hold all of the copyrights. Reiser FS is open source, so it is possible that others outside of Namesys have contributed as well.
Actually, the raw data you get from a CCD is better than the raw data you would get from the back of the human retina. The retinal is covered with blood vessels, has a big hole in it (the blind spot), had a great deal of noise (phosphene activity).
On the other hand, the human eye has pretty good resolution in the point of best vision, something like an arc minute. At the same time, it offers motion detection over a rather large arc. This allows you to notice something happening at the edge of your field of vision. Let us assume for a moment that you want to emulate these features with a "standard" CCD that has a uniform resolution over its surface. The field of vision shall be 90 degrees horizontally. You would then need a resolution of 90*60 by (let's assume the traditional 4:3 ratio) 90*45 pixels. That would be a 5400x4050 pixel CCD. AFAIK such CCDs do exist, but at a size that would not fit into a human eye.
Considering noise, most of today's cameras still need a flash or a floodlight to make decent pictures at night. So add some low-light amplification to your CCD, if you want to compete with the human eye;-)
Bottom line: Technology has to improve some more before it can give better results than a human eye from an eyeball-sized camera.
If we could just replace all 'dirtier' power sources with newer cleaner technologies, that would be great but I suspect that the more practical direction will be to just add new power facilities on top of existing ones. More power for the world means quicker resource consumption. This is not something we should be happy about, because it compromises our ability to live on earth in the long term.
The problem with the 'dirtier' power sources aka oil and coal will probably solve itself within a few decades. While oil will not run out worldwide, the easily exploitable reserves in the middle east WILL do so. That will lead to oil getting way more expensive, and assuming we have a clean and cheap energy source, it will displace oil wherever possible. Read: In every stationary application. Traffic will probably go last, as the energy density of a tank full of gasoline is hard to match.
The greater scheme of it all; they can say that this code is simply "flawed". Better than saying it, they can let people opinionate it ("hey, Intel's usually on top of the benchmarks.. there's gotta be something wrong with that code"). Will not work with everyone. If AMD executes the same code at impressive speed, enough people will think "ouch, Intel has fucked up this time".
Of couse, this requires the enemy to have reasonably advanced electronics. I guess the suits will work well against low-tech enemies like the taliban. Then the success will get to the generals' heads, followed by a nasty surprise against a more capable opponent.
School == Socialistic Institution. It doesn't matter who thought of it first, it gets distributed equally. In that case, it's OK. School is for learning, not for building patent portfolios;-)
Also, require an implementation to be submitted along with patent applications (to help prevent patenting things to prevent others from doing it).
You just described the whole point behind a patent: the ability to restrict others.
Maybe he should have written "the ability to restrict others without doing something useful yourself". Filing patents for something you actually sell is OK as defense of your income. Patents without actual innovation are a problem and should be killed.
How about this: we keep the patent system the way it is, but actually let the system KEEP the fees it collects Fair enough, but let it pay for its failures as well. For instance, make the patent office pay some of the legal costs if a patent is declared invalid in court. That would give some incentive to do the job well.
That might happen anyway to increase profits. Example from another industry: In Germany, Daimler-Chrysler is currently threatening to move car production away from the Sindelfingen factory and fire lots of people, if the workers do not agree to cuts in their payment. The fact that Mercedes is quite profitable nonwithstanding.
I've noticed THAT when trying Project Entropia. But I do not see why this would be inevitable. Considering that I usually had less than a total of 30 mobs/NPCs/other players in visible range, but I DID have a ASDL connection with 1000 kbit/s downstream, I would have expected at least the same performance as when playing Counterstrike over a modem. PE, however, had significantly more lag. Maybe their servers are too slow for the workload, but I don't see why it is impossible to get good performance from an MMORPG.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why manufacturers who trust in their products offer an extended warranty that's covered in the price of the product.
For a device like the XBOX, I would at least expect 1 year, otherwise I'd assume it is cheap crap.
Yes, they ARE having problems at the moment.
I joined Neocron 1 two months ago and really liked the FPS/Cyberpunk theme, but I'm hesitating to upgrade my account to NC2 because of the all bugs and the inept payment provider.
I do, however, still hope for improvment. Maybe I'll re-join in a few months. If Reakktor isn't bankrupt by then.
Actually, the "stolen" GPL code will only become "illegal" when the user employs it in ways that are not compatible with the GPL. For instance, by using it in a closed source program.
At this point the copyright holder can sue him, but not before. Redistributing GPL code is explicitly allowed by the GPL.
A modchip is not acting as a replacement part. It does not 'unlock' or permit operation of the console. The purpose of a modchip is to bypass the signing mechanism used to prevent you from playing pirated games.
There are other uses for modchips, too. The XBox Linux Project, http://www.xbox-linux.org/ shows a way to turn the XBox into a Linux desktop that will not play XBox games at all but can be used for "normal" computing use.
Yes, it is an amazing fact that sometimes higher prices make people think they get more for their money. I've noticed this a few years ago when looking for a new job: ;-)
After a few unsuccessful attempts with demanding moderate wages, I followed the advice of a personnel consultant and raised my price by 10%. Soon after, I had a job
Even if it is not the fastest, 100% X11 compatibility, open source drivers and good signal quality (don't forget the DVI port for TFTs) could give it the same status Matrox had for a long time in the Windows world:
Not the fastest, but a really good card for office use and fast _enough_ for last year's games.
Have you done the same experiment with win2k pro with either SP1 or SP2? It's only fair since boxes are shipping with both service packs. I don't disagree with you, i've noted that buying a PC equiped with winxp home edition to this day still will get infected right out of the box. I've not observed this under SP2.
I _have_ tried this with Win2k pro SP4, maybe a year ago. The machine got infected right away by the MSBlast virus.
Actually, it was an involuntary experiment:
It was known at the time that SP4 alone was no sufficient protection, you also needed a certain post-SP4 hotfix for the RPC service. Unfortunatlely, I forgot that one when I installed the machine.
Remember that the world does NOT subscribe to the American idea of freedom and democracy. There are rights we have in the US that you do not in other free countries, and rights they have that we do not.
Do not underestimate the second part of your statement. Post 9/11, the USA have gone way too far in ignoring the civil rights of their own citizens, and it is far worse for those who are NOT US citizens but happen to get involved in some US versus "Rest Of World" conflict.
Right now, I am happy to live in Germany rather than the USA, despite some unhealthy tendencies I see here as well (government desiring excessive internet surveillance).
From the linked article:
When I talk to customers and they say, "Hey, we can get better TCO with Linux," they're not always saying better than Windows. They're saying better than Unix.
Hardly surprising. For a customer migrating from a commercial UNIX version, the switch to the UNIX-like Linux will probably be much easier than the switch to Windows.
In this case, the difficulty of switching to a completely different environment works against Microsoft. But this merely balances out some of the Windows environments, whose owners find the switch to Linux too difficult.
I'm a mechanical engineering student myself, and I already realize a lot of what you're saying, but keep in mind that the speed of sound changes along with a change in pressure. Thermo/fluids wasn't my strong suit, but I think that it's possible to make it go supersonic by just using enough pressure. Think about this: an explosive supersonic projectile is nothing more than REALLY high pressure gasses (with different properties, but still...)
Speed of sound does change not much with pressure, but significantly with temperature. In a rifle, you have pretty hot gases which leads to a higher speed of sound.
Of course it is limited if you stick to Pentium4-style energy guzzlers (and I'm really curious how Intel will handle the heat from a dual-core Prescott). To a slightly lesser extent, the same applies to the Athlon64.
But if the individual cores are designed for low energy consumption, putting more of them on the die becomes feasible. For instance, four Dothan (the new Pentium M) CPUs would have a total power consumption of about 80 W. Not too much for conventional cooling.
Beyond four cores, I'd expect other problems to show up as well, like the shared bandwith to RAM being not enough for all cores. So a four core-CPU will probably remain the realistic maximum in the next years.
Fact 1: The most important factor in software work is not the tools or techniques used by the programmers, but rather the quality of the programmers themselves.
A really good programmer knows which of his tools and techniques are appropriate for the problem at hand. A few simple examples:
-Spaghetti code has its place in small experiments. The sort you hack up in a few hours and might throw away afterwards.
-Object-oriented programming will help you to keep large projects organized.
-Scripts are fine for small tasks, but don't expect them to have great performance.
Of course, there may be the problem that your pointy-haired boss insists on $LatestHypeTechnique. But otherwise, competent people will choose the right tools on their own.
Well that still wouldn't thwart aimbots, except for opponents behind walls. But you're not as interested in those anyway.
Counterstrike, for instance, allows players to shoot through thin walls. An aimbot (or merely wallhack) is VERY annoying in that kind of game.
The total result might be similar to two processors having a 64bit memory controller each.
If you look at the P-Ratings of socket 754 versus socket 939, 64bit memory controller vs. 128bit seems to make roughly a 10% difference in performance.
Thus, I would expect a dual-core Opteron to be slightly slower than a two processor design where each CPU has its own memory.
If Valve is worth their salt, they'll have to move to limit the information sent to players, giving them only what they should be able to observe and nothing more. Sending only the character positions you can directly observe would be one method, which would destroy wallhacks, but leaves aimbots unscathed. I think the only good way to counter aimbots longterm is to offload rendering to a server, but that's borderline insane. Both of these suggestions mean an increase in lag, but that's what we get for using a system where failures to transmit mean waiting for random milliseconds.
This strategy is frequently discussed w.r.t. cheating, moving more stuff onto the server side, but that's impractical for performance reasons. Performance (network in particular) is pretty important in games.
The first suggestion (sending only the character positions you can directly observe) would actually reduce the network load, since the amount of data to send would shrink.
Of course, this would come at the expense of requiring more CPU power on the server side, as the server would have to do visibility calculations for every player in the game.
They should have run the two operating systems on identical (PC) hardware. After all, the x86 platform is the original platform of Linux too, and probably the best supported. So this would be fair to both systems.
Thus, the hardware costs would be a draw and the cost comparison would actually be about software.
France has a rather large muslim minority. Recently, the mutual hatred between muslims and Israel from the middle east conflict seems to show up as antisemitism among these people.
I believe this to be a much larger problem than a few guys trading old SS uniforms.
Sorry to burst your bubble but not only is it possible but I think Namesys as a company should consider it. Heck I personally would pay for a better file system under NT/2K/XP/2K5. My employer would pay even more and MS heck the skies the limit.
Might be a good idea IF they hold all of the copyrights. Reiser FS is open source, so it is possible that others outside of Namesys have contributed as well.
Actually, the raw data you get from a CCD is better than the raw data you would get from the back of the human retina. The retinal is covered with blood vessels, has a big hole in it (the blind spot), had a great deal of noise (phosphene activity).
;-)
On the other hand, the human eye has pretty good resolution in the point of best vision, something like an arc minute. At the same time, it offers motion detection over a rather large arc. This allows you to notice something happening at the edge of your field of vision.
Let us assume for a moment that you want to emulate these features with a "standard" CCD that has a uniform resolution over its surface. The field of vision shall be 90 degrees horizontally. You would then need a resolution of 90*60 by (let's assume the traditional 4:3 ratio) 90*45 pixels.
That would be a 5400x4050 pixel CCD. AFAIK such CCDs do exist, but at a size that would not fit into a human eye.
Considering noise, most of today's cameras still need a flash or a floodlight to make decent pictures at night. So add some low-light amplification to your CCD, if you want to compete with the human eye
Bottom line:
Technology has to improve some more before it can give better results than a human eye from an eyeball-sized camera.
If we could just replace all 'dirtier' power sources with newer cleaner technologies, that would be great but I suspect that the more practical direction will be to just add new power facilities on top of existing ones. More power for the world means quicker resource consumption. This is not something we should be happy about, because it compromises our ability to live on earth in the long term.
The problem with the 'dirtier' power sources aka oil and coal will probably solve itself within a few decades. While oil will not run out worldwide, the easily exploitable reserves in the middle east WILL do so.
That will lead to oil getting way more expensive, and assuming we have a clean and cheap energy source, it will displace oil wherever possible. Read:
In every stationary application. Traffic will probably go last, as the energy density of a tank full of gasoline is hard to match.
The greater scheme of it all; they can say that this code is simply "flawed". Better than saying it, they can let people opinionate it ("hey, Intel's usually on top of the benchmarks.. there's gotta be something wrong with that code").
Will not work with everyone. If AMD executes the same code at impressive speed, enough people will think "ouch, Intel has fucked up this time".
Of couse, this requires the enemy to have reasonably advanced electronics. I guess the suits will work well against low-tech enemies like the taliban.
Then the success will get to the generals' heads, followed by a nasty surprise against a more capable opponent.
School == Socialistic Institution. It doesn't matter who thought of it first, it gets distributed equally. ;-)
In that case, it's OK. School is for learning, not for building patent portfolios
Also, require an implementation to be submitted along with patent applications (to help prevent patenting things to prevent others from doing it).
You just described the whole point behind a patent: the ability to restrict others.
Maybe he should have written "the ability to restrict others without doing something useful yourself".
Filing patents for something you actually sell is OK as defense of your income. Patents without actual innovation are a problem and should be killed.
How about this: we keep the patent system the way it is, but actually let the system KEEP the fees it collects
Fair enough, but let it pay for its failures as well. For instance, make the patent office pay some of the legal costs if a patent is declared invalid in court. That would give some incentive to do the job well.
That might happen anyway to increase profits. Example from another industry:
In Germany, Daimler-Chrysler is currently threatening to move car production away from the Sindelfingen factory and fire lots of people, if the workers do not agree to cuts in their payment. The fact that Mercedes is quite profitable nonwithstanding.
I've noticed THAT when trying Project Entropia. But I do not see why this would be inevitable.
Considering that I usually had less than a total of 30 mobs/NPCs/other players in visible range, but I DID have a ASDL connection with 1000 kbit/s downstream, I would have expected at least the same performance as when playing Counterstrike over a modem.
PE, however, had significantly more lag. Maybe their servers are too slow for the workload, but I don't see why it is impossible to get good performance from an MMORPG.