Remember all the hoopla over the rumor that they deliberately slowed down the software to let more people feel the warm fuzzies of running a client?
As they say, they have more processing time than they need, so find ways to use it!
A few people may bitch and moan about lower stats, but I say to hell with the people that make stats their first priority. They are the kind who are likely to cheat or run the client on an error-prone over-overclocked (as opposed to overclocking a severely underrated chip) machine, making the extra security measures that slow everything down necessary.
My whole point was that branch prediction can be replaced by expicit pre-branch notification.
Branch prediction now is very stupid. Circuits try to guess, in real time, which branch will be taken. If the C compiler explained to the branch "predictor" that "this will loop 27 times, then stop looping".
Furthermore, explicit cache requests could be compiled. "I'll stay in this function for a while, but I'm also going to call these functions."
With profile-based optimizations and careful design you might never have a cache miss or a branch misprediction.
I've gotta get me one of these, and play around with alternative opcode sets. This is just the coolest toy for exploring computer architecture.
...so it's not a circumvention of copy protection.
It serves no use in preventing people from illegally making DVDs, VHS recordings, or other format conversions. The bits can be copied identically onto other DVDs (with the appropriate manufacturing equipment), the video signal from a DVD viewer is sufficient to create production-quality VHS recordings, and one can video capture entire DVD movies with cheap and easily available computer hardware.
The primary purpose of this encryption was not to prevent copying, but to restrict viewing.
That means only viewing hardware produced under licence, and only in approved regions.
This is reverse engineering for the purpose of breaking the monopoly on DVD viewing devices (whether hardware or software). And the act of reverse engineering was done outside the country, so the US legality of whatever was done to produce the this tool is irrelevant, only the legality of its use and distribution.
Hmm, if around 10% of Altair owners bought his product, then his maximal market was ten times what they were making.
10 * $2/hour = $20/hour, minus overhead, divided between the people in the company...
What a businessman! The highest possible profit came close to janitor wages. I sure can see why people listen to him about how to run a business.
I'm sure he would have done fine if his Mom hadn't gotten him that sweet PC-DOS contract, and his parents didn't provide him with the $50,000 (or was it $20k?) to buy QDOS, and IBM didn't do the actual work of making QDOS into usable PC-DOS and give him back all of their work, providing an extendable near-monopoly and all the money that hired people to do the rest (besides setting a policy of "screw whoever it takes for another buck")...
(warning, gross generalizations ahead! when I talk about women in general I mean the way 90% of them usually behave)
Male gamers go around looking for the best new toys. While they enjoy playing a game while they have it, they are eager to leave it in the dust as soon as something better comes along. We hunt relentlessly for new and more exciting experiences.
Female gamers get hooked on games that they just find lying around, like Solitaire and Tetris. They enjoy that type of game, which tends to be pure game and not an exciting assault on the senses, nor a simulate fantasy. They are reluctant to leave a game unless they truly master it and become bored with it.
How could you advertise to a market like that? Why would they exert the effort to look for another game when they've got a perfectly good one in front of them? How could you even describe the added enjoyment without letting them play the game?
Male-oriented games are easy to advertise, because you can hype the graphics or sound, or hype the incredible AI that will hunt you down like a psychotic genius, or the babes in skimpy outfits, or the realistic flight model, or the perfectly rendered gobbets of flesh that fly when you hit the target. They're not just games, but immersive experiences, and you can tell men just why yours is better than everyone else's.
The only effective game advertising for females is something like the Barbie horse ranch game, because children of either sex are suckers for merchandising.
I can't remember ever seeing that kind of blatant abuse on slashdot before. Coincidence? I think not.
I doubt we'll see him again, I think he's made his point. Nonetheless, I imagine some other fLamer will take up the torch.
The best way to deal with these is never to mention them (well, the best way is to have a trusted and ever-vigilant deleter, who deals only with extremely blatant repeat posts, but this works too). They always get bored and move on.
Remember just how small a portion of the population actually bothers to vote. I think internet-users tend to be better informed and more likely to vote.
Perhaps a more important effect of the internet is the way news and rumors get around. I've heard talk show hosts bring up rumors and facts they've gotten from the internet often enough. We're a minority, but we're an influential one.
Umm, isn't that only true if you say a thing as a witness in court?
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but as a general rule I don't get out the old swearin' bible and swear myself in every time I sit down to write an email.
...is how much faster this thing will run if it's not emulating an x86. It looks pretty hot under the hood, and if, instead of using standard guess-aheads, you can tell it which branch to use as default or even tell it about branches ahead of time (which you often know well before the actual conditional looping operation) so it's not guessing at all.
There's of all kinds of fun I could have with this chip...
I also wonder whether it can multitask between different instruction sets. I guess the task switching overhead would be pretty brutal if there isn't room onchip for multiple instruction sets.
This is a real threat to the networks. As it is right now, they charge the cable companies to rebroadcast their content and get to brag to their advertisers about how many more people the ads are getting to.
If iCraveTV wins, it could really change things. You might start seeing extra channels on your cable box with little Coke and Nike logos and slogans scrolling along the edges. Or you might see local stations showing popular prime time programming, then cutting to some owned/licenced broadcast, hoping people are too lazy to change the channel.
...is that any software patent infringement is obvious to anyone who cares to look for it, whereas in proprietary software it might take a lot of work to find a patent infringement.
Despite the fact that a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse are completely different things, and staring at the full moon would not normally cause damage, it is important to remember that staring at an eclipse can damage your eyes.
More frighteningly, lunar eclipses emit deadly "lunar rays" which affect your brain and make you stupid enough to try to watch it through a welder's mask instead of binoculars.
LithTech/ Linux Press release - Posted 1/19/2000 by Tom Kirkland, WA (January 19, 1999) -
Monolith Productions and Hyperion Software announced today that they have extended an existing licensing agreement to include a port of Monolith's critically acclaimed Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and LithTech 1.0 and 2.0 to the Linux operating system. The Linux port is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2000. Under an initial agreement with Monolith in April, 1999, Hyperion agreed to port Shogo and the LithTech 3D Engine to both the Amiga and Apple Macintosh platforms (http://www.lith.com/corporate/04_28_1 999.html). The existing agreement has now been extended to include Linux for x86 and Power PC processors.
"Porting the LithTech 3D engine to Linux gives licensees and game players one more reason to choose LithTech technology and LithTech-based games" comments Jason Hall, CEO of Monolith Productions. "Our latest agreement with Hyperion continues our quest to provide the highest quality, most versatile 3D engine in the market."
The LithTech 3D Engine, the technology behind Shogo: M.A.D. and upcoming Monolith games Sanity and No One Lives Forever, allows for a full range of cutting edge graphic effects, from spectacular lighting to highly detailed character models. The engine also allows designers to create breath-taking outdoor areas from magnificent mountain ranges to sprawling cities. Current LithTech licensees include Third Law Interactive and New World Computing. Extensive information including FAQ's about LithTech can be found at www.lithtech.com.
Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, inspired by the Japanese "anime" tradition, is an action-packed first-person shooter combining spectacular environments (from neon-lit, futuristic cityscapes to gaping desert ravines and canyons) with a meaningful storyline packed with intriguing characters, plot revelations and huge transforming machines known as mecha.
About Monolith Productions, Inc. Monolith Productions, Inc., based in Kirkland, WA, is focused on combining uncompromising gaming content with the ultimate in high-end gaming technology. Founded by six game developers in 1995, Monolith's passion for programming resulted in the creation of the LithTech 3D Engine. This proprietary software is used in the creation of Monolith products, such as the well-received Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, and is available for license to the wider development community. For the latest news and information on Monolith and it products, visit their Web site at http://www.lith.com.
About Hyperion Software Hyperion is a recently established Belgian-German software house dedicated to bringing high-end PC games to PowerPC based Amiga and Mac computers. Individual members of the Hyperion team have been involved in various commercial and non-commercial projects on the Amiga, Mac, Linux and PC platforms. For any information about Hyperion Software, visit their website at http://www.hyperion-software.com
For ages they've just had terrible designs of their chips. You can actually write software replacements for many of their opcodes that exactly duplicate the function of an opcode but run faster.
I remember that on the original Pentium, it was faster to implement a bit scan (first bit set from one edge) with shifts and masks than to use the BSR or BSL opcodes. Not in some clever way either, but just a standard binary search. This elementary problem could be done by a bright second year engineering student to work in one or two cycles with maybe a hundred gates.
There's just no excuse for that. It's not hard to to implement an opcode so that it just runs a sequence of other opcodes, and it wouldn't have taken much surface at all to be able to bitscan in one cycle.
While this certainly seems to be a reasonable application of patent law, rewarding a genuinely impressive advancement of the state of the art, I wonder what kind of precedent this sets.
After all, this is not a machine or mechanism, but a procedure developed in the course of scientific research.
To what degree will this inhibit research into improvements on the method?
What if somebody patented a medical operation? "I'm sorry, Doctor, if you remove that tumor we'll have to sue you."
You can configure slashdot so you don't have to hear him. Just go to your "preferences" page and click next to his name under the "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" section. It's that simple. If everybody does it, I'm sure he'll stop posting, if not, then there are people who actually want to hear what he says, and don't want to read about how he shouldn't be allowed to post top-level stories.
Really, isn't it a total waste of your (and everybody else's) time to post a message complaining about him when you can just block him from your slashdot display?
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, a counterexample to that old saw.
Or maybe it's just another example of that saying about evil turning on itself.
One evil "upgrade" thwarts another.
Remember all the hoopla over the rumor that they deliberately slowed down the software to let more people feel the warm fuzzies of running a client?
As they say, they have more processing time than they need, so find ways to use it!
A few people may bitch and moan about lower stats, but I say to hell with the people that make stats their first priority. They are the kind who are likely to cheat or run the client on an error-prone over-overclocked (as opposed to overclocking a severely underrated chip) machine, making the extra security measures that slow everything down necessary.
My whole point was that branch prediction can be replaced by expicit pre-branch notification.
Branch prediction now is very stupid. Circuits try to guess, in real time, which branch will be taken. If the C compiler explained to the branch "predictor" that "this will loop 27 times, then stop looping".
Furthermore, explicit cache requests could be compiled. "I'll stay in this function for a while, but I'm also going to call these functions."
With profile-based optimizations and careful design you might never have a cache miss or a branch misprediction.
I've gotta get me one of these, and play around with alternative opcode sets. This is just the coolest toy for exploring computer architecture.
...so it's not a circumvention of copy protection.
It serves no use in preventing people from illegally making DVDs, VHS recordings, or other format conversions. The bits can be copied identically onto other DVDs (with the appropriate manufacturing equipment), the video signal from a DVD viewer is sufficient to create production-quality VHS recordings, and one can video capture entire DVD movies with cheap and easily available computer hardware.
The primary purpose of this encryption was not to prevent copying, but to restrict viewing.
That means only viewing hardware produced under licence, and only in approved regions.
This is reverse engineering for the purpose of breaking the monopoly on DVD viewing devices (whether hardware or software). And the act of reverse engineering was done outside the country, so the US legality of whatever was done to produce the this tool is irrelevant, only the legality of its use and distribution.
Hmm, if around 10% of Altair owners bought his product, then his maximal market was ten times what they were making.
10 * $2/hour = $20/hour, minus overhead, divided between the people in the company...
What a businessman! The highest possible profit came close to janitor wages. I sure can see why people listen to him about how to run a business.
I'm sure he would have done fine if his Mom hadn't gotten him that sweet PC-DOS contract, and his parents didn't provide him with the $50,000 (or was it $20k?) to buy QDOS, and IBM didn't do the actual work of making QDOS into usable PC-DOS and give him back all of their work, providing an extendable near-monopoly and all the money that hired people to do the rest (besides setting a policy of "screw whoever it takes for another buck")...
(warning, gross generalizations ahead! when I talk about women in general I mean the way 90% of them usually behave)
Male gamers go around looking for the best new toys. While they enjoy playing a game while they have it, they are eager to leave it in the dust as soon as something better comes along. We hunt relentlessly for new and more exciting experiences.
Female gamers get hooked on games that they just find lying around, like Solitaire and Tetris. They enjoy that type of game, which tends to be pure game and not an exciting assault on the senses, nor a simulate fantasy. They are reluctant to leave a game unless they truly master it and become bored with it.
How could you advertise to a market like that? Why would they exert the effort to look for another game when they've got a perfectly good one in front of them? How could you even describe the added enjoyment without letting them play the game?
Male-oriented games are easy to advertise, because you can hype the graphics or sound, or hype the incredible AI that will hunt you down like a psychotic genius, or the babes in skimpy outfits, or the realistic flight model, or the perfectly rendered gobbets of flesh that fly when you hit the target. They're not just games, but immersive experiences, and you can tell men just why yours is better than everyone else's.
The only effective game advertising for females is something like the Barbie horse ranch game, because children of either sex are suckers for merchandising.
I can't remember ever seeing that kind of blatant abuse on slashdot before. Coincidence? I think not.
I doubt we'll see him again, I think he's made his point. Nonetheless, I imagine some other fLamer will take up the torch.
The best way to deal with these is never to mention them (well, the best way is to have a trusted and ever-vigilant deleter, who deals only with extremely blatant repeat posts, but this works too). They always get bored and move on.
Remember just how small a portion of the population actually bothers to vote. I think internet-users tend to be better informed and more likely to vote.
Perhaps a more important effect of the internet is the way news and rumors get around. I've heard talk show hosts bring up rumors and facts they've gotten from the internet often enough. We're a minority, but we're an influential one.
They teach it right after straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
Anyway, he'd have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he, indeed, "damn well knew it."
If the law firm is competent, they'd hire a lawyer for these notices about whom they could establish a reasonable possibility of stunning stupidity.
I didn't know you could actually do that. I thought you needed witnesses and a formal court in session. Guess I need to brush up on my legalisms, eh?
Umm, isn't that only true if you say a thing as a witness in court?
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but as a general rule I don't get out the old swearin' bible and swear myself in every time I sit down to write an email.
...is how much faster this thing will run if it's not emulating an x86. It looks pretty hot under the hood, and if, instead of using standard guess-aheads, you can tell it which branch to use as default or even tell it about branches ahead of time (which you often know well before the actual conditional looping operation) so it's not guessing at all.
There's of all kinds of fun I could have with this chip...
I also wonder whether it can multitask between different instruction sets. I guess the task switching overhead would be pretty brutal if there isn't room onchip for multiple instruction sets.
This says nothing about how to turn existing genes on and off, but rather how to design new ones that can be turned on and off.
I wonder what restrictions this puts on the content of the genes...
This is a real threat to the networks. As it is right now, they charge the cable companies to rebroadcast their content and get to brag to their advertisers about how many more people the ads are getting to.
If iCraveTV wins, it could really change things. You might start seeing extra channels on your cable box with little Coke and Nike logos and slogans scrolling along the edges. Or you might see local stations showing popular prime time programming, then cutting to some owned/licenced broadcast, hoping people are too lazy to change the channel.
...is that any software patent infringement is obvious to anyone who cares to look for it, whereas in proprietary software it might take a lot of work to find a patent infringement.
Despite the fact that a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse are completely different things, and staring at the full moon would not normally cause damage, it is important to remember that staring at an eclipse can damage your eyes.
More frighteningly, lunar eclipses emit deadly "lunar rays" which affect your brain and make you stupid enough to try to watch it through a welder's mask instead of binoculars.
"Is it sexual harassment to force a female employee to watch a degrading DVD?"
"The Star Wars movies have been degrading ever since the first ones were released on DVD."
"Rental porn on DVDs pulled from shelves in favor of new, more degrading materials."
...raise your hands!
(wow, that's a lot of hands)
LithTech/ Linux Press release - Posted 1/19/2000 by Tom Kirkland, WA (January 19, 1999) -
Monolith Productions and Hyperion Software announced today that they have extended an existing licensing agreement to include a port of Monolith's critically acclaimed Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and LithTech 1.0 and 2.0 to the Linux operating system. The Linux port is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2000. Under an initial agreement with Monolith in April, 1999, Hyperion agreed to port Shogo and the LithTech 3D Engine to both the Amiga and Apple Macintosh platforms (http://www.lith.com/corporate/04_28_1 999.html). The existing agreement has now been extended to include Linux for x86 and Power PC processors.
"Porting the LithTech 3D engine to Linux gives licensees and game players one more reason to choose LithTech technology and LithTech-based games" comments Jason Hall, CEO of Monolith Productions. "Our latest agreement with Hyperion continues our quest to provide the highest quality, most versatile 3D engine in the market."
The LithTech 3D Engine, the technology behind Shogo: M.A.D. and upcoming Monolith games Sanity and No One Lives Forever, allows for a full range of cutting edge graphic effects, from spectacular lighting to highly detailed character models. The engine also allows designers to create breath-taking outdoor areas from magnificent mountain ranges to sprawling cities. Current LithTech licensees include Third Law Interactive and New World Computing. Extensive information including FAQ's about LithTech can be found at www.lithtech.com.
Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, inspired by the Japanese "anime" tradition, is an action-packed first-person shooter combining spectacular environments (from neon-lit, futuristic cityscapes to gaping desert ravines and canyons) with a meaningful storyline packed with intriguing characters, plot revelations and huge transforming machines known as mecha.
About Monolith Productions, Inc.
Monolith Productions, Inc., based in Kirkland, WA, is focused on combining uncompromising gaming content with the ultimate in high-end gaming technology. Founded by six game developers in 1995, Monolith's passion for programming resulted in the creation of the LithTech 3D Engine. This proprietary software is used in the creation of Monolith products, such as the well-received Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, and is available for license to the wider development community. For the latest news and information on Monolith and it products, visit their Web site at http://www.lith.com.
About Hyperion Software
Hyperion is a recently established Belgian-German software house dedicated to bringing high-end PC games to PowerPC based Amiga and Mac computers. Individual members of the Hyperion team have been involved in various commercial and non-commercial projects on the Amiga, Mac, Linux and PC platforms. For any information about Hyperion Software, visit their website at http://www.hyperion-software.com
Lithtech's site is at lithtech.com not lith.com, which is a dead site.
"Intel sued Cyrix five times, and they never won," he said. "Intel--they just love lawsuits."
For ages they've just had terrible designs of their chips. You can actually write software replacements for many of their opcodes that exactly duplicate the function of an opcode but run faster.
I remember that on the original Pentium, it was faster to implement a bit scan (first bit set from one edge) with shifts and masks than to use the BSR or BSL opcodes. Not in some clever way either, but just a standard binary search. This elementary problem could be done by a bright second year engineering student to work in one or two cycles with maybe a hundred gates.
There's just no excuse for that. It's not hard to to implement an opcode so that it just runs a sequence of other opcodes, and it wouldn't have taken much surface at all to be able to bitscan in one cycle.
While this certainly seems to be a reasonable application of patent law, rewarding a genuinely impressive advancement of the state of the art, I wonder what kind of precedent this sets.
After all, this is not a machine or mechanism, but a procedure developed in the course of scientific research.
To what degree will this inhibit research into improvements on the method?
What if somebody patented a medical operation? "I'm sorry, Doctor, if you remove that tumor we'll have to sue you."
This is a big bite to take for such a kludge, and after it's had time to become something of a standard.
I wonder if they may have lost some of their legal footing by keeping their mouth shut for so long.
The question is whether the bite is too big to survive; I doubt they can defend this in court if a big phone manufacturer decides to fight it.
You can configure slashdot so you don't have to hear him. Just go to your "preferences" page and click next to his name under the "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" section. It's that simple. If everybody does it, I'm sure he'll stop posting, if not, then there are people who actually want to hear what he says, and don't want to read about how he shouldn't be allowed to post top-level stories.
Really, isn't it a total waste of your (and everybody else's) time to post a message complaining about him when you can just block him from your slashdot display?