Perhaps I've misunderstood the proposed space elevator, or I've misunderstood your post, or perhaps you've read too many sci-fi books - but according to the article we're talking about a tether 15 kilometers long. The diameter of the earth at the equator is roughly 42000 kilometers. You would need 2800 cables that length, laid neatly end to end, just to get around the earth *once*. I don't see how it could "wrap around the entire Earth".
99% of browsers show you the destination sites name when you float the mouse over the link (except the tacky sites that make pathetic attempts to hide the href with javascript.) Effectively 100% of browsers show you the name of the site you're at, ALL THE TIME, on the screen (e.g. I can see very clearly I'm on slashdot.) So if you were on microsoft.com and are now at ticketmaster.com, you can see it, it is in no way hidden from the user at all.
Moreover, even the vast majority of technically illiterate web surfers understand this incredibly basic point - you cannot possibly even attempt to argue that most people would not be able to realise that. Sorry, if a lawyer attempts to argue that people aren't capable of figuring out which site they're visiting, he/she is delivering one enormous collective insult to the intelligences of many people. If MS had embedded the ticket-master stuff (e.g. the way crit.org might show a web site) or stuck the ticketmaster pages inside frames, then perhaps they can be shown to have made a deliberate attempt to hide the fact that people were at ticketmasters site. But then that would be a totally different issue from mere hyperlinks. The address bar is a pretty fundamental notion in a web-browser, not some advanced thing that only technical type of people understand.
A hyperlink is a URL and is nothing like a quote, neither legally, nor in any other frame of perception of reality. A hyperlink is like a reference in a book (remember those "bibliography"/"references" sections in dead-tree books?) These are not illegal, and are certainly not copyright violations.
No type of hyperlink can be a copyright infringement, since a URL cannot be copyrighted. A URL is equivalent to a book name and author name, or perhaps its ISBN number. And deep-linking is something totally different - that's like copying a chunk of somebody elses work in amongst your own work, which would probably be more like the MS/ticketmaster case.
A large percentage of the type of books I like to buy are simply no longer in print and cannot be obtained except as used books (e.g. old Pogo comics and many other classic comic strip collections.) I'd be happy to buy such books as new, if they were available, but publishing companies generally have absolutely no interest in reprinting books, even ones that are still in fair demand, strangely enough. Probably they regard it as "high-risk" to reprint a book. So where should I obtain copies of older books, if the publishing companies don't want to sell me a new one, but don't want me to get my hands on an old one either?
This seems similar to me to the companies like Sega that aggressively continue to defend their rights to old arcade games available on emulators like mame, even though they have no interest whatsoever in making money from that IP.
Every CD drive I've ever seen can not be opened without at least power attached, with the exception of some earlier Creative drives I've seen, which had a tiny hole in which you could insert a sharp object if the drive door had somehow gotten stuck. I'm sure there are some drives that can open and close without power, as you point out, but they form an extremely tiny minority of drives out there, so my quote sticks, it's still stupid. I cannot imagine that the author and all editors of the manual had only ever in their lives encountered drives that could open and close freely while powered off. HIFI's also pretty much work the same way.
The point, however, is that you can't get an image of any group of people by interviewing just one of them
I dont think anyone here thought that you could. Speaking for myself anyway, I certainly did not get the impression that anybody was trying to do that. The "computer nerds" that I know are an incredibly diverse bunch of people with quite a range of different interests other than computers.
"You are comparing the BEST of yesterday's pop music to the WORST of today's pop music"
No he is not, you are wrong. Although you would be correct in saying N Sync is amongst the worst of todays music, that is beside the point here - see, back then, the Beatles were one of the biggest things you would hear on the radio or see on TV. Today, crap like N Sync is. He is simply comparing the biggest most popular bands from then to the biggest most popular bands now, which is a very good way (in fact the only way) of comparing the quality of the music now to the quality of the music then. What does it help to compare the Beatles to some virtually unknown but incredibly good band of today? The whole point is that it isn't the incredibly good band of today that you see on TV (like it was in the Beatle's day) but rather it is the recording-industry manufactured stuff that is plastered all over mass-media.
"Yesterday": Popular band (beatles) = relatively good music.
Today: Popular band (N Sync) = relatively crap music.
That's the difference.
You can argue that music is all about personal taste, but sorry, I can't see how the songs that N Sync produces can be regarded as requiring any vaguely significant amount of talent to write. They are just streams of cliches pinched from Mills and Boons books, aimed at teenage girls.
"Do you plan to spend your life on the only things that are real in that their existance is not linked to sensation, ideas, or do you plan to waste it on the temporal surroundings?"
This entire question is loaded. You've posed the question in a way that prefers a specific response - there is noticeable bias towards a certain answer which you want to hear, and you even seem to want to influence his beliefs - you're delivering a pitch.
Who would realistically answer this question with "yes I want to waste my life" when the question is posed like that? I might, but only because (a) your technique is transparent and (b) I'm confident about knowing what I want from life. But perhaps you hoped that this person is young and impressionable and that you could influence him? It's the same technique used by con-artists and salesmen: starting their pitch with a question that any normal person can only answer one way (stupid questions like "would you say no to earning $100,000 a month" and similar such crap that you see so much in telemarketing, spam etc. )
Nonetheless, I'm sure this guy can think for himself, and is capable of making his own decisions. If he wants to be materialistic and make good money for himself (and maybe a family in the future) and be able to retire with a decent pension, as "boring" and "normal" and "a waste of a life" as that may seem to you, he should be free to make that choice without your implicit judgments.
I would add to that list the point that the new hard drives provide no new benefits to consumers that the old ones didn't - rather, they actually provide less for consumers. (And at a higher cost - HD manufacturers cannot possibly make the new ones at = the cost they make current ones at; plus there will be a variety of additional cost burdens on OEMs, IT departments etc.)
Any hard-drives that don't conform to this standard will be in high demand
I doubt it. Most people are probably too clueless to know the difference, and anyway buy their PC's ready-made from OEM's like Dell, so if the OEM's bite, we're screwed. When told about any limitations inherent in the "evil" hard disks, most people would not even have the capacity to have the creative thought that things could be different. Consider that most Win9X users think that crashing and freezing is some sort of inherent thing that computers just do. They simply do not have the mental frame of reference of any alternatives to realise that that is not the case. How many people understand hard disk technology? Most people probably couldn't even tell you, if you opened up their computer, which part is the hard disk. A few years from now, most people are not going to have any idea that hard disks do not just inherently have to have those built-in draconian limitations.
On the whole, people swallow what is stuffed down their throats. A statistically insignifcant percentage of people might make a noise and have a tiny boycott, but it won't make so much as a dent on bottom lines. Maybe I'm just pessimistic, but I don't see why this crap will be any different.
On the other hand, DIVX pretty much died, and I see this as quite similar to DIVX. So maybe there is some hope.
I don't think this person is a troll, really, just a bit ignorant and naive. One of the main issues resolves around "fair use", a consumer right, which this technology removes - i.e. you don't have to be pirating for this to be an issue, it affects the majority of law-abiding citizens. This is just on the surface though, the technology has a reasonable amount of orwellian potential. Also, there is no reason for this technology to exist - like DIVX, it provides NO benefit to the consumer - all it does is increase the cost and reduce the flexibility of current hard disks. There is no positive reason for the existence of this software.
Actually I'm quite sick of hearing the "if you aren't doing anything wrong you shouldn't have anything to worry about" argument. Keep in mind that in about half of the States it is still essentially illegal, for example, to be gay. So maybe that won't affect you when they come around to install the cameras in your house, you'll still be spouting the "not doing anything wrong" line, but these things do affect many people who are not guilty of "wrong".
I haven't noticed anybody around here claiming that this is a big deal. Just another bit of scientific research that some/. readers may find interesting, but certainly not "a big deal". Did someone here tell you it was a big deal?
So similarly, if Microsoft decided that only "Microsoft-approved" software (simple examples, no web browsers or office suites other than IE and Office would qualify as "approved") could run on Windows from now on, this would be completely OK with you? You wouldn't see it is as a problem? Everybody should just not use their service?
Of course, MS being a monopoly, this is perhaps a different situation to that of BMG/Napster. Nonetheless merger mania is likely to produce many more monopolies in the future, some of which have the potential to stifle economies for decades (e.g. Time/Warner/AOL would have a lot of potential here..)
Legally you are completely correct though, the concept of censorship does not apply to companies. Antitrust+anticompetitive, yes, but this clearly isn't the case here. The anti-nazi-propaganda laws here do however appear to come from the government.
Sorry, but your argument is just plain dumb^H^H^H^H (more euphemestic word.. hmm.. incorrect? Dunno..) anyway, I'll explain:
Not everybody wants to be a teacher - but that does not mean they do not have a right to demand that their children receive a high-quality education - especially not if that education is payed for by their tax money and is an expected service in exchange for paying taxes.
If you start to extend your argument to a number of other public services it actually becomes ridiculous enough to parody itself: "if you're unhappy with the high crime rate don't just complain about it, become a policemen"; "if you're unhappy with the fire control services, don't just complain about it, go out and become a firemen"; "if you don't like the quality of the roads, go out and repair the potholes yourself" etc etc.
This whole line of thought is clearly nonsensical. Sorry, but taxpayers *do* have a right to complain about substandard services. Each person *cannot* possibly be "doers" in every single field that they feel has room for improvement. It's simply not possible. Should people only be allowed to complain about problems that they themselves are actively working on?
I have a bad habit of bashing my mouse down on the table when I'm losing.. which luckily I've almost taught myself to not do anymore.. but I've broken a few mice doing it. My logitech mouse has been pretty dang tough though, it's taken a heavy beating, and still (sort of) works. Microsoft mice are pretty pathetic though. I slammed one down just once and it was permanently stuffed.
"The employer has the ability to be just as easily screwed as the employee"
Sorry, but an employee merely leaving for greener pastures does NOT automatically qualify as 'screwing the employer'. Sometimes it is, but that would be for other reasons, not simply because the employee left.
Sorry, I don't get this bit of moderation. The worst I could think up was maaaaaybe 'off-topic', but not really even. I can't quite tell why the above post was 'flamebait', either.
"Or do you think that temp positions should come with job security? I mean, for god's sake, they're temps. They're supposed to be short timers."
Fine, but were those temps offered a choice between full-time and temp work, or were the positions themselves only available to temps?
If many more computer companies started offering only positions labelled as "temp" positions just to get away with providing fewer benefits, and it became increasingly harder and harder to find *any* computer jobs that weren't simply labelled as "temp" jobs, I'm sure you'd probably also agree that this doesn't sound like fair practice. Many computer companies just follow Microsoft's practices, so I'd be quite surprised if no other companies had also started trying to do this after MS did it.
So the problem with the ruling is it doesn't prevent 'abuse' of temps - the 'abuse' remains, but it merely really is temporary. Why would Microsoft pay all the benefits for a full-time worker when those positions can be more cheaply filled by hiring temps? As long as employees still have the choice it's probably OK, but many don't.
"To turn this into a "us vs. shareholders" thing is not really the point. You're probably already a shareholder"
I don't think he was trying to imply that this is an "us vs shareholders" thing. I think his point in stating that was more general, that they are only interested in making money. Of course, there is nothing wrong with making money in itself, but I think he was suggesting (and it happens to be the case) that these companies rip off the people whose IP they are making money from, the artists. Also this is, as you suggest, essentially a monopolistic plan to extort money from consumers..
Re:"hardly any depth" ?? This is pure marketing BS
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"better than yours (seen your homepage)."
hehe.. yup, Dave Gnukem is pretty much stagnant, I haven't actually worked on it in literally a year, so I can't argue with you there (actually my entire web page is essentially stagnant, it's not a high enough priority in my life right now - my point is, my web page isn't exactly an accurate reflection of what I'm doing.) It's not mentioned on my web page, but I'm currently working on a 3d game with a friend of mine, a networked FPS (OpenGL for gfx, sockets for network, DS for sound etc). It's coming along quite well at the moment, if it gets anywhere close to a finished game we'll be putting up a web-page for it and I'll link to it. Also most of my time goes to my work, which as it happens is 3d graphics simulations, incl. networked (mostly, military and industrial training simulators..) so I'm not completely clueless..
Re:"hardly any depth" ?? This is pure marketing BS
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"By introducing better hidden surface removal"
Oh please, you've just given your own lack of knowledge away right here. Do you even know what a z-buffer is? Or are you suggesting nVidia have some *revolutionary* branch-off from z/w-buffers? Or, wait, don't tell me, they've invented (drum roll..) *back face culling*, right!? Perhaps you actually meant to say something like "they've optimized the amount of geometry information that needs to be sent to that card by creating higher-level primitives such as curved surfaces, meaning less data to go over the bus (as a simple example, the new sprite primitives in directx8)".. but I don't think you meant to say that, because it doesn't sound like you know very much about this yourself.
"If you don't know what it is, maybe you should not voice an opinion in the first place"
"Complex" does not imply "lots of triangles" in my book. If they meant "lots of triangles" they shouldn't have said "complex". Anyway, any moron knows that fill rate has become a far bigger bottleneck than number of triangles since the introduction of the first GeForce. Your poly count has absolutely nothing to do with "complexity" (go look up the word in a dictionary if you want to confirm that).
A q3a scene might be defined as complex: multi-texturing, lots of renderstate/texture stage state manipulation, multi-pass rendering etc. Making q3a-style curved surfaces hardware primitives might speed up games like quake, and perhaps this is the direction they're trying to go. "Complex geometry" isn't some specific 3d graphics terminology, it's some vague, undefined marketing BS, and that was my point.
The P4 is pretty mediocre at current clock speeds, but a big advantage of it's design is it's apparent ability to handle high clock speeds that the P3 can't. So the P4 may not look too hot now, but Intel is expecting to get it up to 2GHz by the end of 2001, if they can do that they have a winner.
Most people don't seem very adept at the whole "long-term thinking" thing, particularly with technology product releases.. but people should really try look ahead a little on this one.
I pretty much agree with your third paragraph.. there just isn't the time to spend hand-crafting P4 assembler optimizations for 3d gfx (which I do for a living btw.. ).. but the compiler should at least be making some attempt to use those instructions, if asked. Of course, we use MSVC, MS tends to not be very leading-edge in this regard.
"hardly any depth" ?? This is pure marketing BS ..
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This "secret document" sounds more to me like a press release crafted by their marketing department. Actually it smells extremely badly of something designed to manipulate stock prices, or at the very least to calm nervous shareholders.
"In environments where there are low detail scenes (large triangles, simple geometry, hardly any depth)) the NV20 is only twice as fast as the Geforce 2 Ultra"
What the hell does "hardly any depth" mean? What they are trying to say here, without it sounding too bad, is that although T&L ops are quite a bit quicker, fill rate is and will still remain your 3D app bottleneck.
"The performance of the chip doubles when handling geometrical data"
Uh, what the heck is "geometrical data"? 3D polygons as opposed to 2D polygons? ?? All your 3D geometry data is "geometrical data", whether the scene is simple or complex. Also I don't know where they get the number "7" if they say here also that the performance only doubles.
So the new chip sounds good, yes, but you can forget about it being 7 times faster, that is 100% pure marketing BS. Sounds like they've upped the clock and optimized the T&L engine and antialiasing. I might believe double the speed, but "7 times faster" goes way beyond lies.
What is "complex geometry" anyway? A polygon is a polygon.. multi-textured maybe? Sheez, I dunno, this whole article appears to have been written by a 1st year marketing student with zero technical knowledge.
Re:Get automatically sorted out
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Spambot Poisoner
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I am currently webmaster where I work, and I do fairly regularly get shitmail at the webmaster@ address.
On my website I spell out my email address as it would be spoken, i.e. djoffe at geocities dot com. It's not that common (never seen anyone else do that) so I'm hoping spambots can't figure it out.
I can't think of a single case in the history of civilisation of colonizing a piece of territory hasn't involved bloodshed. When australia was colonized they hunted down the native aborigines. When the USA was 'discovered' there was war with the native red indians (and oh yes, attempted religous conversion.) The colonization of South America by the spanish etc involved genocide (and oh yes attempted religous conversion). Slaves were brought from africa to the americas (and oh yes, attempted religous conversion.) The colonization of South Africa by europeans involved war as well as attempted genocide of the natives (and of course attempted religous conversion.) The middle east situation speaks for itself. This is just a tiny handful of examples. Genocide appears to be some sort of "normal" human behaviour. I can't think of one single case in history where the arrival of a new group of people resulted simply in peaceful coexistence with native peoples.
In fact, as far as I can tell, when humans discover ANY new place that has existing sentient living things on it, there are two things we do to those living things:
Try convert them to 'our' religion (historically this has typically been Christianity.)
Kill them.
I wish that I could come up with some reason why it's going to be different when we start encountering alien races, but I can't..
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I've misunderstood the proposed space elevator, or I've misunderstood your post, or perhaps you've read too many sci-fi books - but according to the article we're talking about a tether 15 kilometers long. The diameter of the earth at the equator is roughly 42000 kilometers. You would need 2800 cables that length, laid neatly end to end, just to get around the earth *once*. I don't see how it could "wrap around the entire Earth".
99% of browsers show you the destination sites name when you float the mouse over the link (except the tacky sites that make pathetic attempts to hide the href with javascript.) Effectively 100% of browsers show you the name of the site you're at, ALL THE TIME, on the screen (e.g. I can see very clearly I'm on slashdot.) So if you were on microsoft.com and are now at ticketmaster.com, you can see it, it is in no way hidden from the user at all.
Moreover, even the vast majority of technically illiterate web surfers understand this incredibly basic point - you cannot possibly even attempt to argue that most people would not be able to realise that. Sorry, if a lawyer attempts to argue that people aren't capable of figuring out which site they're visiting, he/she is delivering one enormous collective insult to the intelligences of many people. If MS had embedded the ticket-master stuff (e.g. the way crit.org might show a web site) or stuck the ticketmaster pages inside frames, then perhaps they can be shown to have made a deliberate attempt to hide the fact that people were at ticketmasters site. But then that would be a totally different issue from mere hyperlinks. The address bar is a pretty fundamental notion in a web-browser, not some advanced thing that only technical type of people understand.
A hyperlink is a URL and is nothing like a quote, neither legally, nor in any other frame of perception of reality. A hyperlink is like a reference in a book (remember those "bibliography"/"references" sections in dead-tree books?) These are not illegal, and are certainly not copyright violations.
No type of hyperlink can be a copyright infringement, since a URL cannot be copyrighted. A URL is equivalent to a book name and author name, or perhaps its ISBN number. And deep-linking is something totally different - that's like copying a chunk of somebody elses work in amongst your own work, which would probably be more like the MS/ticketmaster case.
A large percentage of the type of books I like to buy are simply no longer in print and cannot be obtained except as used books (e.g. old Pogo comics and many other classic comic strip collections.) I'd be happy to buy such books as new, if they were available, but publishing companies generally have absolutely no interest in reprinting books, even ones that are still in fair demand, strangely enough. Probably they regard it as "high-risk" to reprint a book. So where should I obtain copies of older books, if the publishing companies don't want to sell me a new one, but don't want me to get my hands on an old one either?
This seems similar to me to the companies like Sega that aggressively continue to defend their rights to old arcade games available on emulators like mame, even though they have no interest whatsoever in making money from that IP.
Every CD drive I've ever seen can not be opened without at least power attached, with the exception of some earlier Creative drives I've seen, which had a tiny hole in which you could insert a sharp object if the drive door had somehow gotten stuck. I'm sure there are some drives that can open and close without power, as you point out, but they form an extremely tiny minority of drives out there, so my quote sticks, it's still stupid. I cannot imagine that the author and all editors of the manual had only ever in their lives encountered drives that could open and close freely while powered off. HIFI's also pretty much work the same way.
The point, however, is that you can't get an image of any group of people by interviewing just one of them
I dont think anyone here thought that you could. Speaking for myself anyway, I certainly did not get the impression that anybody was trying to do that. The "computer nerds" that I know are an incredibly diverse bunch of people with quite a range of different interests other than computers.
"You are comparing the BEST of yesterday's pop music to the WORST of today's pop music"
No he is not, you are wrong. Although you would be correct in saying N Sync is amongst the worst of todays music, that is beside the point here - see, back then, the Beatles were one of the biggest things you would hear on the radio or see on TV. Today, crap like N Sync is. He is simply comparing the biggest most popular bands from then to the biggest most popular bands now, which is a very good way (in fact the only way) of comparing the quality of the music now to the quality of the music then. What does it help to compare the Beatles to some virtually unknown but incredibly good band of today? The whole point is that it isn't the incredibly good band of today that you see on TV (like it was in the Beatle's day) but rather it is the recording-industry manufactured stuff that is plastered all over mass-media.
"Yesterday": Popular band (beatles) = relatively good music.
Today: Popular band (N Sync) = relatively crap music.
That's the difference.
You can argue that music is all about personal taste, but sorry, I can't see how the songs that N Sync produces can be regarded as requiring any vaguely significant amount of talent to write. They are just streams of cliches pinched from Mills and Boons books, aimed at teenage girls.
"Do you plan to spend your life on the only things that are real in that their existance is not linked to sensation, ideas, or do you plan to waste it on the temporal surroundings?"
This entire question is loaded. You've posed the question in a way that prefers a specific response - there is noticeable bias towards a certain answer which you want to hear, and you even seem to want to influence his beliefs - you're delivering a pitch.
Who would realistically answer this question with "yes I want to waste my life" when the question is posed like that? I might, but only because (a) your technique is transparent and (b) I'm confident about knowing what I want from life. But perhaps you hoped that this person is young and impressionable and that you could influence him? It's the same technique used by con-artists and salesmen: starting their pitch with a question that any normal person can only answer one way (stupid questions like "would you say no to earning $100,000 a month" and similar such crap that you see so much in telemarketing, spam etc. )
Nonetheless, I'm sure this guy can think for himself, and is capable of making his own decisions. If he wants to be materialistic and make good money for himself (and maybe a family in the future) and be able to retire with a decent pension, as "boring" and "normal" and "a waste of a life" as that may seem to you, he should be free to make that choice without your implicit judgments.
"Let people know the following: 1. These ..."
I would add to that list the point that the new hard drives provide no new benefits to consumers that the old ones didn't - rather, they actually provide less for consumers. (And at a higher cost - HD manufacturers cannot possibly make the new ones at = the cost they make current ones at; plus there will be a variety of additional cost burdens on OEMs, IT departments etc.)
Any hard-drives that don't conform to this standard will be in high demand
I doubt it. Most people are probably too clueless to know the difference, and anyway buy their PC's ready-made from OEM's like Dell, so if the OEM's bite, we're screwed. When told about any limitations inherent in the "evil" hard disks, most people would not even have the capacity to have the creative thought that things could be different. Consider that most Win9X users think that crashing and freezing is some sort of inherent thing that computers just do. They simply do not have the mental frame of reference of any alternatives to realise that that is not the case. How many people understand hard disk technology? Most people probably couldn't even tell you, if you opened up their computer, which part is the hard disk. A few years from now, most people are not going to have any idea that hard disks do not just inherently have to have those built-in draconian limitations.
On the whole, people swallow what is stuffed down their throats. A statistically insignifcant percentage of people might make a noise and have a tiny boycott, but it won't make so much as a dent on bottom lines. Maybe I'm just pessimistic, but I don't see why this crap will be any different.
On the other hand, DIVX pretty much died, and I see this as quite similar to DIVX. So maybe there is some hope.
I don't think this person is a troll, really, just a bit ignorant and naive. One of the main issues resolves around "fair use", a consumer right, which this technology removes - i.e. you don't have to be pirating for this to be an issue, it affects the majority of law-abiding citizens. This is just on the surface though, the technology has a reasonable amount of orwellian potential. Also, there is no reason for this technology to exist - like DIVX, it provides NO benefit to the consumer - all it does is increase the cost and reduce the flexibility of current hard disks. There is no positive reason for the existence of this software.
Actually I'm quite sick of hearing the "if you aren't doing anything wrong you shouldn't have anything to worry about" argument. Keep in mind that in about half of the States it is still essentially illegal, for example, to be gay. So maybe that won't affect you when they come around to install the cameras in your house, you'll still be spouting the "not doing anything wrong" line, but these things do affect many people who are not guilty of "wrong".
"Why is this such a big deal?"
I haven't noticed anybody around here claiming that this is a big deal. Just another bit of scientific research that some /. readers may find interesting, but certainly not "a big deal". Did someone here tell you it was a big deal?
So similarly, if Microsoft decided that only "Microsoft-approved" software (simple examples, no web browsers or office suites other than IE and Office would qualify as "approved") could run on Windows from now on, this would be completely OK with you? You wouldn't see it is as a problem? Everybody should just not use their service?
Of course, MS being a monopoly, this is perhaps a different situation to that of BMG/Napster. Nonetheless merger mania is likely to produce many more monopolies in the future, some of which have the potential to stifle economies for decades (e.g. Time/Warner/AOL would have a lot of potential here ..)
Legally you are completely correct though, the concept of censorship does not apply to companies. Antitrust+anticompetitive, yes, but this clearly isn't the case here. The anti-nazi-propaganda laws here do however appear to come from the government.
Sorry, but your argument is just plain dumb^H^H^H^H (more euphemestic word .. hmm .. incorrect? Dunno ..) anyway, I'll explain:
Not everybody wants to be a teacher - but that does not mean they do not have a right to demand that their children receive a high-quality education - especially not if that education is payed for by their tax money and is an expected service in exchange for paying taxes.
If you start to extend your argument to a number of other public services it actually becomes ridiculous enough to parody itself: "if you're unhappy with the high crime rate don't just complain about it, become a policemen"; "if you're unhappy with the fire control services, don't just complain about it, go out and become a firemen"; "if you don't like the quality of the roads, go out and repair the potholes yourself" etc etc.
This whole line of thought is clearly nonsensical. Sorry, but taxpayers *do* have a right to complain about substandard services. Each person *cannot* possibly be "doers" in every single field that they feel has room for improvement. It's simply not possible. Should people only be allowed to complain about problems that they themselves are actively working on?
I have a bad habit of bashing my mouse down on the table when I'm losing .. which luckily I've almost taught myself to not do anymore .. but I've broken a few mice doing it. My logitech mouse has been pretty dang tough though, it's taken a heavy beating, and still (sort of) works. Microsoft mice are pretty pathetic though. I slammed one down just once and it was permanently stuffed.
"The employer has the ability to be just as easily screwed as the employee"
Sorry, but an employee merely leaving for greener pastures does NOT automatically qualify as 'screwing the employer'. Sometimes it is, but that would be for other reasons, not simply because the employee left.
Sorry, I don't get this bit of moderation. The worst I could think up was maaaaaybe 'off-topic', but not really even. I can't quite tell why the above post was 'flamebait', either.
"Or do you think that temp positions should come with job security? I mean, for god's sake, they're temps. They're supposed to be short timers."
Fine, but were those temps offered a choice between full-time and temp work, or were the positions themselves only available to temps?
If many more computer companies started offering only positions labelled as "temp" positions just to get away with providing fewer benefits, and it became increasingly harder and harder to find *any* computer jobs that weren't simply labelled as "temp" jobs, I'm sure you'd probably also agree that this doesn't sound like fair practice. Many computer companies just follow Microsoft's practices, so I'd be quite surprised if no other companies had also started trying to do this after MS did it.
So the problem with the ruling is it doesn't prevent 'abuse' of temps - the 'abuse' remains, but it merely really is temporary. Why would Microsoft pay all the benefits for a full-time worker when those positions can be more cheaply filled by hiring temps? As long as employees still have the choice it's probably OK, but many don't.
"To turn this into a "us vs. shareholders" thing is not really the point. You're probably already a shareholder"
I don't think he was trying to imply that this is an "us vs shareholders" thing. I think his point in stating that was more general, that they are only interested in making money. Of course, there is nothing wrong with making money in itself, but I think he was suggesting (and it happens to be the case) that these companies rip off the people whose IP they are making money from, the artists. Also this is, as you suggest, essentially a monopolistic plan to extort money from consumers ..
"better than yours (seen your homepage)."
hehe .. yup, Dave Gnukem is pretty much stagnant, I haven't actually worked on it in literally a year, so I can't argue with you there (actually my entire web page is essentially stagnant, it's not a high enough priority in my life right now - my point is, my web page isn't exactly an accurate reflection of what I'm doing.) It's not mentioned on my web page, but I'm currently working on a 3d game with a friend of mine, a networked FPS (OpenGL for gfx, sockets for network, DS for sound etc). It's coming along quite well at the moment, if it gets anywhere close to a finished game we'll be putting up a web-page for it and I'll link to it. Also most of my time goes to my work, which as it happens is 3d graphics simulations, incl. networked (mostly, military and industrial training simulators ..) so I'm not completely clueless ..
"By introducing better hidden surface removal"
Oh please, you've just given your own lack of knowledge away right here. Do you even know what a z-buffer is? Or are you suggesting nVidia have some *revolutionary* branch-off from z/w-buffers? Or, wait, don't tell me, they've invented (drum roll ..) *back face culling*, right!? Perhaps you actually meant to say something like "they've optimized the amount of geometry information that needs to be sent to that card by creating higher-level primitives such as curved surfaces, meaning less data to go over the bus (as a simple example, the new sprite primitives in directx8)" .. but I don't think you meant to say that, because it doesn't sound like you know very much about this yourself.
"If you don't know what it is, maybe you should not voice an opinion in the first place"
"Complex" does not imply "lots of triangles" in my book. If they meant "lots of triangles" they shouldn't have said "complex". Anyway, any moron knows that fill rate has become a far bigger bottleneck than number of triangles since the introduction of the first GeForce. Your poly count has absolutely nothing to do with "complexity" (go look up the word in a dictionary if you want to confirm that).
A q3a scene might be defined as complex: multi-texturing, lots of renderstate/texture stage state manipulation, multi-pass rendering etc. Making q3a-style curved surfaces hardware primitives might speed up games like quake, and perhaps this is the direction they're trying to go. "Complex geometry" isn't some specific 3d graphics terminology, it's some vague, undefined marketing BS, and that was my point.
The P4 is pretty mediocre at current clock speeds, but a big advantage of it's design is it's apparent ability to handle high clock speeds that the P3 can't. So the P4 may not look too hot now, but Intel is expecting to get it up to 2GHz by the end of 2001, if they can do that they have a winner.
Most people don't seem very adept at the whole "long-term thinking" thing, particularly with technology product releases .. but people should really try look ahead a little on this one.
I pretty much agree with your third paragraph .. there just isn't the time to spend hand-crafting P4 assembler optimizations for 3d gfx (which I do for a living btw .. ) .. but the compiler should at least be making some attempt to use those instructions, if asked. Of course, we use MSVC, MS tends to not be very leading-edge in this regard.
This "secret document" sounds more to me like a press release crafted by their marketing department. Actually it smells extremely badly of something designed to manipulate stock prices, or at the very least to calm nervous shareholders.
"In environments where there are low detail scenes (large triangles, simple geometry, hardly any depth)) the NV20 is only twice as fast as the Geforce 2 Ultra"
What the hell does "hardly any depth" mean? What they are trying to say here, without it sounding too bad, is that although T&L ops are quite a bit quicker, fill rate is and will still remain your 3D app bottleneck.
"The performance of the chip doubles when handling geometrical data"
Uh, what the heck is "geometrical data"? 3D polygons as opposed to 2D polygons? ?? All your 3D geometry data is "geometrical data", whether the scene is simple or complex. Also I don't know where they get the number "7" if they say here also that the performance only doubles.
So the new chip sounds good, yes, but you can forget about it being 7 times faster, that is 100% pure marketing BS. Sounds like they've upped the clock and optimized the T&L engine and antialiasing. I might believe double the speed, but "7 times faster" goes way beyond lies.
What is "complex geometry" anyway? A polygon is a polygon .. multi-textured maybe? Sheez, I dunno, this whole article appears to have been written by a 1st year marketing student with zero technical knowledge.
I am currently webmaster where I work, and I do fairly regularly get shitmail at the webmaster@ address.
On my website I spell out my email address as it would be spoken, i.e. djoffe at geocities dot com. It's not that common (never seen anyone else do that) so I'm hoping spambots can't figure it out.
I can't think of a single case in the history of civilisation of colonizing a piece of territory hasn't involved bloodshed. When australia was colonized they hunted down the native aborigines. When the USA was 'discovered' there was war with the native red indians (and oh yes, attempted religous conversion.) The colonization of South America by the spanish etc involved genocide (and oh yes attempted religous conversion). Slaves were brought from africa to the americas (and oh yes, attempted religous conversion.) The colonization of South Africa by europeans involved war as well as attempted genocide of the natives (and of course attempted religous conversion.) The middle east situation speaks for itself. This is just a tiny handful of examples. Genocide appears to be some sort of "normal" human behaviour. I can't think of one single case in history where the arrival of a new group of people resulted simply in peaceful coexistence with native peoples.
In fact, as far as I can tell, when humans discover ANY new place that has existing sentient living things on it, there are two things we do to those living things:
I wish that I could come up with some reason why it's going to be different when we start encountering alien races, but I can't ..