The riaa doesn't exist because the internet works or doesn't work, it exists because people want to listen to music, so your post is out of context.
Look at verisign -- they messed up DNS for a while, but then they fixed it because people were so upset. A government would never be as quick to turn around a bad decision as a corporation concerned with its image.
Once DNS is under government control, the government will have nothing to lose by making bad decisions. Verisign had everything to lose, because people would stop doing business with them if they didn't appreciate their practices.
Since when did 'debate' become a bad thing? What is Slashdot, after all?
No offense to slashdotters out there, but I would not want the slashdot consensus to decide anything that would remotely affect me in any real way. For the things that matter (like who runs DNS, who runs the phone network, who verifies my credit card charges), I want either a unix longbeard who knows what's best, or a greedy corporation with everything to lose. The longbeard will do the smart thing by default, and a greedy corporation will do the right thing because they won't have a business model without a working product.
Clearly this thing shouldn't run linux, but instead some form of MacOS, just because there's no way I can reliably click one of two buttons with my adam's apple, but I could probably manage it with just the one.
A lot of the programming classes at umich have projects graded by an autograder -- specifically you run a script to submit your code, then it compiles it, and runs a bunch of tests to make sure the behavior is right. One of the features of this system is that it checks your submission against every other submission (even past semesters) for that project to see copied pieces of code, even detecting stuff like copies with renanmed variables. And of course every year, we'd hear about groups of people getting caught with all-too-similar code, all with the same set of bugs, etc -- obvious offenders.
I went through this class after class, and it was never a problem for me, because although i trust myself not to cheat, I don't trust others. If other people are getting the same grades as I am without any of the effort, then the grades mean nothing, because they don't separate people based on what they know. Now, sure, my stuff was all programs, and their stuff is papers or something, but in the end what is the difference? The kids that refused to submit their stuff are just spoiled brats looking for attention, and not focused on learning anything.
So basically they've upped the clockrate and bolted more memory for the shaders.
And added a lot of new instructions (like conditional statements and looping) and data types that didn't used to be there (like half, single, full, and maybe double-precision floats). There's also some support for 10 or more bits per color channel nowadays.
Recent advances in video card technology may not be blatantly obvious from the gaming side, although certainly the difference between half-life 2 and half-life will make all of that clear.
The real changes are from the programming side. Pixel and vertex shaders allow a programmer to use the hardware in un-foreseen ways, unlike the fixed-pipeline cards of the past. A lot of graphics programming on the fixed pipeline (GF1) came down to playing with parameters that OpenGL or Direct3D would expose to you -- as in how to look up textures, how to transform your geometry, etc. You say the GF2 came out, and it was "boring". In fact, it's the first generation of slightly programmable video hardware, because it supported hardware bump mapping -- a huge feature used by every modern game, although at the time it was still playing with pre-existing settings.
Nowadays (since the geforce3), a programmer can invent his own parameters to tweak -- a huge step. You say things "dissipated" after that -- completely untrue! With every new generation of video card, the vertex and fragment programs can be longer and more complicated. The next-generation games (hl2, doom3) already use all of this technology, and next-generation consoles (xb2, gc2, ps3) will undoubtedly integrate all of it.
The hours of daylight only matter if you have a window in your office, and depend on that for lighting. Almost every enginering lab I've been in was buried in the middle of a huge building, with maybe a row of covered windows on one side. To make it seem like "work-time", all they have to do is keep the lights on.
Also, if they expect engineers to work at weird hours of the night, surely they will also keep a couple of people around in the cafeteria to cook pizza. And when all else fails, there's always hot pockets. Besides, all the NASA people have probably gone through this sort of schedule-shifting in college, so I'm sure they know all the tricks.
I don't know what cyber-punk future you are living in, but the advances in science necessary for growing usable organs are immense. It's going to take decades of effort on the part of EVERY major research instituation on the planet to accomplish this feat. It won't be done by a black-market scientist in his den on an island, with organs sold to the highest bidder.
It's only hard to place things in 3d if there isn't a clear system for it. If you look at the demo video, it looks like the intended use of 3d-ness of the desktop is actually just being able to turn your application windows sideways to sort of file them away. Certainly, windowshades has much the same effect, but this way you can select what you want faster, both because it's a bigger thing to click on, and because you can visually identify your application instead of having to read the title bar.
My physician already uses one of the small-form-factor laptops with wireless, no tablet PC needed. Certainly he has to sit down to type on it, and no scribbling, but in the end is that such a bad thing? Surely you want your doctor to type things instead of writing them illegibly.
Regarding your college admission office typing loudness example, why not just get quieter keyboards? Most laptops are designed to have nearly silent keys, so why not just get those in the first place instead of a tablet?
A barcode wireless scanner has to be cheaper than a tablet pc anyway...
The only time a tablet can really do better is when a person is constantly walking around and has to enter things into a computer quickly with one hand, and that's a very small market compared to all those people who need a laptop.
Joe Millionaire 2 is about as mainstream as you can get, and since the none of the girls speak english very well, all of their speech was subtitled.
The problem with the cartoon network is that a major part of its target market segment is children who can't read, so you're right, that will probably never be subtitled.
The source code processes at Microsoft are opaque -- nobody knows exactly who is putting what into the source code.
Actually, nobody _outside Microsoft_ knows who is putting what in the source code, as well it should be. Since (let's assume) Microsoft wrote it, paid for it, and owns it, it is their business how they handle it. I have no doubt that within microsoft they have a coherent source control system, and they are quite careful that nobody can slip in a back door. Of course there's plenty of other bugs that might as well be back doors, but admitting to being hacked would be bad for business, and if they can resolve it internally and no-one is the wiser, i think that's fine.
There are a few airline companies that offer live tv for people to watch while on the plane. This probably works the same way -- they have a dish in the cargo compartment somewhere that rotates to compensate for the plane's tilting and whatnot. It goes offline whenever there's too much turbulence or something like that, but most of the time it works fine.
Naturally the car-based service won't work in the lincoln tunnel, or probably even anywhere with a lot of buildings, but it would probably work fine for what it was designed for: something to let the kids watch cartoons while driving someplace out in the burbs where it's all trees and lawns and soccer fields.
The point is that using paper is a lot crappier than using the internet. I can have a gig of data uploaded from my hosting service and not even notice it, but imagine printing a gig's worth of text on rice paper and sending it around via physical mail. A gigabyte by word-of-mouth would take even longer.
While certainly watching two monsters battle it out on the silver screen can be a lot of fun, it can only be fun for so long -- 20 minutes tops. I bet the movie will be an hour and a half or so, and i'm wondering what kind of stupid filler the rest of it is going to be.
Clearly they can't talk to each other (they don't speak the same language probably, and there's no universal translator), and they can't talk to anyone else in an intelligible language. So what's it gonna be? grunts?
By the time you can squeeze a dvd into flash memory, it won't even be necessary. I think that within a few years, cable providers will be offering on-demand programmint out the wazoo, and companies like Blockbuster and Netflix will either go out of business, or change their business model from moving physical data containers (dvd) to their customers, they will host data instead, so ppl can download it. The idea isn't that far off -- you can already order movies in your home/hotel room just by browsing some menus. Right now the selections are relatively limited, but given time i think that can only grow.
A lot of people talk about convergence as the wave of the future, where every device does has pretty much the same capabilities. I think that things are going in a different direction -- the convergence of people's butts to the couch. Right now you might have to go to a store to get a dvd you want, but in our bright future you'll just click your remote, and content will magically appear on your tv. iTunes is doing this for computers now, so video can't be far off.
The reason votes are by secret ballot, is that if it is known who votes for who, then people who voted for somebody unpopular with a gang or something would get beaten up, and might be told of this in advance, thusly skewing the volting results. This might apply to corporations firing employees who vote against company-supported candidates.
A few years ago before LCD screens went into style, nVidia (among others) supported 3d glasses for their video cards. They would work by darkening in front of one eye, refreshing the monitor with the image for that eye, and then darkening the other eye, and refreshing the monitor with the other image.
When the program made a call to draw some triangles or whatever, it would be done to 2 separate framebuffers, and would usually take twice as long. The difference between the two is that the camera viewing options would be slightly different to reflect a different eye position. Then when the program called for a buffer flip, the driver would start displaying the 2 new back buffers, one for each eye. It's really quite a smart system, although it's almost impossible to replicate this behavior with vertex shaders, since the driver doesn't know which input data to the shader is the projection matrix, for example, unlike with the regular fixed-function graphics pipeline.
I imagine that this laptop has a similar setup on the driver side, but instead of having glasses, just displays 2 separate images on the same screen, one aimed at each eye.
Slashdot Mirror
The riaa doesn't exist because the internet works or doesn't work, it exists because people want to listen to music, so your post is out of context.
Look at verisign -- they messed up DNS for a while, but then they fixed it because people were so upset. A government would never be as quick to turn around a bad decision as a corporation concerned with its image.
Once DNS is under government control, the government will have nothing to lose by making bad decisions. Verisign had everything to lose, because people would stop doing business with them if they didn't appreciate their practices.
The system works.
Since when did 'debate' become a bad thing? What is Slashdot, after all?
No offense to slashdotters out there, but I would not want the slashdot consensus to decide anything that would remotely affect me in any real way. For the things that matter (like who runs DNS, who runs the phone network, who verifies my credit card charges), I want either a unix longbeard who knows what's best, or a greedy corporation with everything to lose. The longbeard will do the smart thing by default, and a greedy corporation will do the right thing because they won't have a business model without a working product.
Clearly this thing shouldn't run linux, but instead some form of MacOS, just because there's no way I can reliably click one of two buttons with my adam's apple, but I could probably manage it with just the one.
A lot of the programming classes at umich have projects graded by an autograder -- specifically you run a script to submit your code, then it compiles it, and runs a bunch of tests to make sure the behavior is right. One of the features of this system is that it checks your submission against every other submission (even past semesters) for that project to see copied pieces of code, even detecting stuff like copies with renanmed variables. And of course every year, we'd hear about groups of people getting caught with all-too-similar code, all with the same set of bugs, etc -- obvious offenders.
I went through this class after class, and it was never a problem for me, because although i trust myself not to cheat, I don't trust others. If other people are getting the same grades as I am without any of the effort, then the grades mean nothing, because they don't separate people based on what they know. Now, sure, my stuff was all programs, and their stuff is papers or something, but in the end what is the difference? The kids that refused to submit their stuff are just spoiled brats looking for attention, and not focused on learning anything.
is that George Bush would still pronounce it as NUCULAR.
So basically they've upped the clockrate and bolted more memory for the shaders.
And added a lot of new instructions (like conditional statements and looping) and data types that didn't used to be there (like half, single, full, and maybe double-precision floats). There's also some support for 10 or more bits per color channel nowadays.
You are the only one.
Recent advances in video card technology may not be blatantly obvious from the gaming side, although certainly the difference between half-life 2 and half-life will make all of that clear.
The real changes are from the programming side. Pixel and vertex shaders allow a programmer to use the hardware in un-foreseen ways, unlike the fixed-pipeline cards of the past. A lot of graphics programming on the fixed pipeline (GF1) came down to playing with parameters that OpenGL or Direct3D would expose to you -- as in how to look up textures, how to transform your geometry, etc. You say the GF2 came out, and it was "boring". In fact, it's the first generation of slightly programmable video hardware, because it supported hardware bump mapping -- a huge feature used by every modern game, although at the time it was still playing with pre-existing settings.
Nowadays (since the geforce3), a programmer can invent his own parameters to tweak -- a huge step. You say things "dissipated" after that -- completely untrue! With every new generation of video card, the vertex and fragment programs can be longer and more complicated. The next-generation games (hl2, doom3) already use all of this technology, and next-generation consoles (xb2, gc2, ps3) will undoubtedly integrate all of it.
I think we've finally uncovered SCO's core business model.
We always thought aliens from outer space would descend in flying saucers, but it's actually going to be (possibly illegal) aliens from Russia.
I, for one, welcome our vodka-drinking overlords.
Can they DANCE?
The hours of daylight only matter if you have a window in your office, and depend on that for lighting. Almost every enginering lab I've been in was buried in the middle of a huge building, with maybe a row of covered windows on one side. To make it seem like "work-time", all they have to do is keep the lights on.
Also, if they expect engineers to work at weird hours of the night, surely they will also keep a couple of people around in the cafeteria to cook pizza. And when all else fails, there's always hot pockets. Besides, all the NASA people have probably gone through this sort of schedule-shifting in college, so I'm sure they know all the tricks.
I don't know what cyber-punk future you are living in, but the advances in science necessary for growing usable organs are immense. It's going to take decades of effort on the part of EVERY major research instituation on the planet to accomplish this feat. It won't be done by a black-market scientist in his den on an island, with organs sold to the highest bidder.
You're not exactly right there.
It's only hard to place things in 3d if there isn't a clear system for it. If you look at the demo video, it looks like the intended use of 3d-ness of the desktop is actually just being able to turn your application windows sideways to sort of file them away. Certainly, windowshades has much the same effect, but this way you can select what you want faster, both because it's a bigger thing to click on, and because you can visually identify your application instead of having to read the title bar.
My physician already uses one of the small-form-factor laptops with wireless, no tablet PC needed. Certainly he has to sit down to type on it, and no scribbling, but in the end is that such a bad thing? Surely you want your doctor to type things instead of writing them illegibly.
Regarding your college admission office typing loudness example, why not just get quieter keyboards? Most laptops are designed to have nearly silent keys, so why not just get those in the first place instead of a tablet?
A barcode wireless scanner has to be cheaper than a tablet pc anyway...
The only time a tablet can really do better is when a person is constantly walking around and has to enter things into a computer quickly with one hand, and that's a very small market compared to all those people who need a laptop.
Joe Millionaire 2 is about as mainstream as you can get, and since the none of the girls speak english very well, all of their speech was subtitled.
The problem with the cartoon network is that a major part of its target market segment is children who can't read, so you're right, that will probably never be subtitled.
The source code processes at Microsoft are opaque -- nobody knows exactly who is putting what into the source code.
Actually, nobody _outside Microsoft_ knows who is putting what in the source code, as well it should be. Since (let's assume) Microsoft wrote it, paid for it, and owns it, it is their business how they handle it. I have no doubt that within microsoft they have a coherent source control system, and they are quite careful that nobody can slip in a back door. Of course there's plenty of other bugs that might as well be back doors, but admitting to being hacked would be bad for business, and if they can resolve it internally and no-one is the wiser, i think that's fine.
The problem there is when the extra packets you propose get spoofed themselves, and you're back at square 1.
There are a few airline companies that offer live tv for people to watch while on the plane. This probably works the same way -- they have a dish in the cargo compartment somewhere that rotates to compensate for the plane's tilting and whatnot. It goes offline whenever there's too much turbulence or something like that, but most of the time it works fine.
Naturally the car-based service won't work in the lincoln tunnel, or probably even anywhere with a lot of buildings, but it would probably work fine for what it was designed for: something to let the kids watch cartoons while driving someplace out in the burbs where it's all trees and lawns and soccer fields.
The point is that using paper is a lot crappier than using the internet. I can have a gig of data uploaded from my hosting service and not even notice it, but imagine printing a gig's worth of text on rice paper and sending it around via physical mail. A gigabyte by word-of-mouth would take even longer.
We're all forgetting nvidia's Cg, which actually stands for C for Graphics, and is a language for programming pixel and vertex shaders.
Maybe we need some new acronyms...
Let's not forget the venerable 0xfeedface
While certainly watching two monsters battle it out on the silver screen can be a lot of fun, it can only be fun for so long -- 20 minutes tops. I bet the movie will be an hour and a half or so, and i'm wondering what kind of stupid filler the rest of it is going to be.
Clearly they can't talk to each other (they don't speak the same language probably, and there's no universal translator), and they can't talk to anyone else in an intelligible language. So what's it gonna be? grunts?
By the time you can squeeze a dvd into flash memory, it won't even be necessary. I think that within a few years, cable providers will be offering on-demand programmint out the wazoo, and companies like Blockbuster and Netflix will either go out of business, or change their business model from moving physical data containers (dvd) to their customers, they will host data instead, so ppl can download it. The idea isn't that far off -- you can already order movies in your home/hotel room just by browsing some menus. Right now the selections are relatively limited, but given time i think that can only grow.
A lot of people talk about convergence as the wave of the future, where every device does has pretty much the same capabilities. I think that things are going in a different direction -- the convergence of people's butts to the couch. Right now you might have to go to a store to get a dvd you want, but in our bright future you'll just click your remote, and content will magically appear on your tv. iTunes is doing this for computers now, so video can't be far off.
You might be trolling here, but i'll bite.
The reason votes are by secret ballot, is that if it is known who votes for who, then people who voted for somebody unpopular with a gang or something would get beaten up, and might be told of this in advance, thusly skewing the volting results. This might apply to corporations firing employees who vote against company-supported candidates.
It is a combination.
A few years ago before LCD screens went into style, nVidia (among others) supported 3d glasses for their video cards. They would work by darkening in front of one eye, refreshing the monitor with the image for that eye, and then darkening the other eye, and refreshing the monitor with the other image.
When the program made a call to draw some triangles or whatever, it would be done to 2 separate framebuffers, and would usually take twice as long. The difference between the two is that the camera viewing options would be slightly different to reflect a different eye position. Then when the program called for a buffer flip, the driver would start displaying the 2 new back buffers, one for each eye. It's really quite a smart system, although it's almost impossible to replicate this behavior with vertex shaders, since the driver doesn't know which input data to the shader is the projection matrix, for example, unlike with the regular fixed-function graphics pipeline.
I imagine that this laptop has a similar setup on the driver side, but instead of having glasses, just displays 2 separate images on the same screen, one aimed at each eye.