[...] meaning speed would generally be limited by the controller bus, which for PCIe x16 is not a factor), can you name a practical, real world application that would benefit from this? (I'm not saying there isn't, I just really can't think of one).
Pretty much anything with high IO requirements and multiple IO streams ?
Again with the generalizations... One real world example? And remember, the point is that it's NECESSARY to spread 1GB over 50 drives, not that it's just some random collection of drives on a SAN. If that were the case, there would of course be tons of other apps sharing the storage, and no reason it needs to cost so absurdly much.
So if they are on a SAN with that one gig spread across 50 drives, there are some applications that need that speed.
1GB spread out over 50 drives?? Besides the fact that I can't imagine it would be any faster with modern hardware (1GB can easily fit entirely in a battery backed up cache on a RAID controller, meaning speed would generally be limited by the controller bus, which for PCIe x16 is not a factor), can you name a practical, real world application that would benefit from this? (I'm not saying there isn't, I just really can't think of one).
Well, Timothy's comment makes no sense (as usual) anyway. A "rolling stop" at a 4 way stop sign with no other cars present? Really not that big a deal.
But these are not "stop sign cameras". These are red LIGHT cameras. How in hell do you "roll" through a red light?!
"First shalt thou take out the Holy ziploc bag, then shalt thou count to three ounces, no more, no less. Three shall be the number of ounces, and the number ounces shall be three. Four ounces shalt thou not bring, neither thou two ziploc bags, excepting that thou then proceed to check one. Five ounces is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then handest thou thy Holy ziploc bag to thy TSA screener, who being arbitrary in My sight, shall confiscate it anyway."
I'm not begging any questions, read the last paragraph of my statement. As I said, people have different priorities.
I'm not judging any of those priorities, just pointing out that the OP's point about "greener pastures" is all relative. "The grass is always greener..."
Won't happen. Why? While exceptions exist (Zero Punctuation!), these are not people who passed up that position at the New York Times for "Game Informer". They took this job because real journalists won't go near it, and someone told them "you get to play games all day and then write what you think!" These days I'm happy if they can string together a coherent sentence, let alone provide consistency or objectiveness in their reviews:)
Well, regarding the cost, I guess it depends on the game. I fine with paying $50 for a game (and more for add-ons) if they provide 30-40 hours or more of entertainment (some still do!) $2 an hour? Sounds good to me. Go see a first run movie and it's at least $6 an hour now.
If you don't want to pay that much, then wait a while and pick it up used for 1/'2 that... just like waiting for a movie to come out on DVD/BD.
Honestly, I might have agreed with you 15 years ago, I guess now that the value of my free time is worth so much more than the cost of the game or movie that consumes it, I just don't care anymore:) Though obviously the majority agrees, otherwise these games and movies wouldn't succeed in the marketplace...
Google may have won "Best Employer" in the US, but they would be considered McDonald's level in Scandinavia and a lot of the western european countries.
Except for the fact that a whole bunch of those "McDonald's" employees are now multi-millionaires. And those that missed the IPO boat are still getting paid WAY more than their equivalent in Sweden. Except for the vacation time (which is a definite lifestyle difference - most engineers I know in the US have 1/2 that much, but never use it all anyway), all of those other perks are more than made up for (ie you can pay for them yourself and still be ahead) by the higher salary.
But hey, people have different priorities. I work with a bunch of engineers originally from a few different Northern/Western European countries with similar working conditions, and they all say they are here because they LIKE the faster pace of the work and the extra disposable income...
Much larger number of programmers are gainfully employed, and there are thousands of openings for software engineers in the SF Bay Area alone. Does anyone really want the ones who can't get hired reviewing mission critical code anyway?
Well, buffering only works if your buffer is large enough to hold any drop below the average bitrate over the length of the content.
Normally this is just needed to deal with spikes in the content bitrate or temporary networking issues. But if, for example, the content averages 1.2Mbps and you have 1Mbps, you need to have buffered at least (200Kbps * seconds of video) before you start playback. This is possible (though painful as you may have to wait a long time) on a computer, but if you are using a networked TV or BD player with no HDD it's probably not practical (you can only buffer to RAM, which won't be enough over a 2 hour movie).
In this discussion people need to think beyond their laptops:) IP/Internet connectivity will some day (and in some cases already is) replace phone service, cable TV, radio broadcasting, etc. But to do that it will have to be sufficient to look and behave approximately the same as those existing services do right now, and that's going to require at least 3-4Mbps for mediocre HD, double that to start looking really good.
Actually, it is correct. Streaming is a subset of downloading with specific constraints due to the content being consumed in real time, requiring a minimum average bitrate over a buffering window.
This is a critical distinction given the fact that the primary way that the average consumer will be watching Internet video is on a television via a player (Netflix, Vudu, Cinemanow, etc) embedded in a TV or BD player, which usually do NOT have a HDD.
Of course you CAN watch TV shows in SD with a very mediocre encoding, but if you want DVD-quality SD with H.264 you'll need around 2Mbps (maybe a bit less) and for HD (which will also be a requirement for Internet video to be mainstream) you'll need at least 3-4Mbps for 720p or even more for 1080p.
I went to one in a hidden valley once! And well, as I'm sure you know, these days ranch != ranching.
But yeah, I'm sure that was a stupid small number, you can go ahead and multiply by a couple orders of magnitude after you drive all them damn sheep herders out. Though I'm pretty sure my point stands, once you get to more than a couple acres per property, your expectations of decent cable and Internet over the mere "rural" towns have gone from the 1 percentile to the 0.001 percentile...
Downloading != streaming. Streaming is renting a movie and watching in real time, which is just godawful at SD resolution at 1Mbps, and completely impossible in HD. And no, mainstream middle America does NOT watch movies using bittorrent (or Netflix) on their laptops.
And as for video stores, yeah, it's that simple. Please do go serve the rural community by opening up a small business on one of the thousand now desolate main streets and try to scrape by, not knowing if you are going to bring in enough money to last until the end of the year.
I have many relatives who do and 1Mbps is insufficient for at least one major reason - movies.
Blockbuster put all of the local video stores out of business, and now that they are circling the drain, they are closing all of their non-profitable stores (which apparently includes most of the ones in rural areas). Because of this, a lot of people in rural areas are starting to rely on streaming for their VOD rentals.
Unfortunately, 1Mbps is pretty much the minimum for watchable SD video, and 4-6Mbps is required for decent HD.
Then again, we are not talking about Bobby Joe who lives out on his 40 acre ranch in Idaho and chases off people who stray onto his proppity. We are talking the millions of people in the US who live in towns of 500-5000 people are often as computer literate as the rest of the country, and just want the same basic utilities. The telcos and cable companies got their franchises promising that, and even if it will not be as profitable to deliver their promises, they should be required to do it.
And you even missed the MOST impressive error in that sentence... if each photon exerted that impulse then the sun would have pretty much instantly obliterated the satellite (and all life on earth). That number should be the TOTAL, not PER PHOTON. All in all, an absolutely horrible article and summary.
Actually (not that this contract has any hope IMO) if Zuckerberg had promised 85% of the company to some random guy and not told the VCs, you can bet they're not just going to say "that's ok Mark, we thought we owned a 60% share of the company but we can all just split what's left!" More like, "ok, his share comes out of YOUR share first, buddy..."
I actually find it ironic that libelf was picked as an example of infringement. I can tell you first hand that the (more standard) UNIX/Solaris libelf is NOT compatible with the Linux/libc libelf. And I can also tell you that after pointing this out to Ulrich Drepper he really didn't give a shit... (I think his approximate words were "It's been like that for a while, too late, I won't change it").
Their only mistake was actually naming it "libelf"... since it is most definitely NOT the same library...
Everyone says (and I agree) that SC2 is one of the best PC games ever made. Unfortunately it was also one of the most pirated PC games ever made, and so the creators never really made much money from it. If any creative works could ever be considered "failures" because of piracy, I'd say 80's-90's computer games would be up there...
Then again, I don't think that means it should be called a "failure" - profitable or not, it's gotta feel nice to have made a game consistently in everyone's top 10 list. But it is one of those times you wish the creators had received a bit more financial recognition for their work.
Bordering on offtopic, but my favorite quote from Paul Reiche III (SC2 designer, hilarious writer, and currently head of Toys For Bob) in a GameSpot interview:
GS: Do you ever intend to revisit the series or do something similar?
PR: Fred and I would love to create another Star Control game, but due to the cruel realities of modern game economics, I suspect both Fred and I will need to become independently wealthy before we can tackle the project full time. Dedicated Star Control fans should not take this as a request by Fred and myself for checks in the mail -- especially large checks from rich fans. Such checks should not be sent to our offices in Novato (directly to me, Paul). Guilt over playing illegally pirated copies of the game should not be a factor in sending exceptionally generous checks.
I don't see what the government could do after the fact, they have no expertise in the field, nor should they.
The thing they could have done was actually properly monitor the industry and prevent an unprepared company from tapping a 30B+ barrel oil field in one of the most environmentally diverse and economically important ocean regions in the world until they have tested and verified containment procedures in place, rather than exchange money, gifts and sex for favorable treatment...
5 attempts, no matter how "massive", that fail miserably is in no way impressive to me. No points for effort here, this isn't Kindergarten.
And becomes even less impressive when the ridiculous estimates of 2000-5000 barrels per day leaking were later updated to 60,000-100,000 bpd (and those were really only changed when the majority of non-partisan scientists examining the data pointed out how ridiculous they were... so believe the new "official" estimate with a grain of salt...)
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[...] meaning speed would generally be limited by the controller bus, which for PCIe x16 is not a factor), can you name a practical, real world application that would benefit from this? (I'm not saying there isn't, I just really can't think of one).
Pretty much anything with high IO requirements and multiple IO streams ?
Again with the generalizations... One real world example? And remember, the point is that it's NECESSARY to spread 1GB over 50 drives, not that it's just some random collection of drives on a SAN. If that were the case, there would of course be tons of other apps sharing the storage, and no reason it needs to cost so absurdly much.
So if they are on a SAN with that one gig spread across 50 drives, there are some applications that need that speed.
1GB spread out over 50 drives?? Besides the fact that I can't imagine it would be any faster with modern hardware (1GB can easily fit entirely in a battery backed up cache on a RAID controller, meaning speed would generally be limited by the controller bus, which for PCIe x16 is not a factor), can you name a practical, real world application that would benefit from this? (I'm not saying there isn't, I just really can't think of one).
Well, Timothy's comment makes no sense (as usual) anyway. A "rolling stop" at a 4 way stop sign with no other cars present? Really not that big a deal.
But these are not "stop sign cameras". These are red LIGHT cameras. How in hell do you "roll" through a red light?!
Hah, and the haters and trolls who work for Rambus (or have stock?) apparently have mod points today...
How do you think they have lasted 10 years beyond any product they have actually manufactured??
Their only business in the last decade has been patent trolling... and business has been good.
Except when his web site gets slashdotted ;)
"First shalt thou take out the Holy ziploc bag, then shalt thou count to three ounces, no more, no less. Three shall be the number of ounces, and the number ounces shall be three. Four ounces shalt thou not bring, neither thou two ziploc bags, excepting that thou then proceed to check one. Five ounces is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then handest thou thy Holy ziploc bag to thy TSA screener, who being arbitrary in My sight, shall confiscate it anyway."
I'm not begging any questions, read the last paragraph of my statement. As I said, people have different priorities.
I'm not judging any of those priorities, just pointing out that the OP's point about "greener pastures" is all relative. "The grass is always greener..."
Last *month*? Thorne has been (in)famous for a lot longer than that...
http://www.amazon.com/Internet-Playground-David-Thorne/dp/0980672929
Won't happen. Why? While exceptions exist (Zero Punctuation!), these are not people who passed up that position at the New York Times for "Game Informer". They took this job because real journalists won't go near it, and someone told them "you get to play games all day and then write what you think!" These days I'm happy if they can string together a coherent sentence, let alone provide consistency or objectiveness in their reviews :)
Well, regarding the cost, I guess it depends on the game. I fine with paying $50 for a game (and more for add-ons) if they provide 30-40 hours or more of entertainment (some still do!) $2 an hour? Sounds good to me. Go see a first run movie and it's at least $6 an hour now.
If you don't want to pay that much, then wait a while and pick it up used for 1/'2 that... just like waiting for a movie to come out on DVD/BD.
Honestly, I might have agreed with you 15 years ago, I guess now that the value of my free time is worth so much more than the cost of the game or movie that consumes it, I just don't care anymore :) Though obviously the majority agrees, otherwise these games and movies wouldn't succeed in the marketplace...
Google may have won "Best Employer" in the US, but they would be considered McDonald's level in Scandinavia and a lot of the western european countries.
Except for the fact that a whole bunch of those "McDonald's" employees are now multi-millionaires. And those that missed the IPO boat are still getting paid WAY more than their equivalent in Sweden. Except for the vacation time (which is a definite lifestyle difference - most engineers I know in the US have 1/2 that much, but never use it all anyway), all of those other perks are more than made up for (ie you can pay for them yourself and still be ahead) by the higher salary.
But hey, people have different priorities. I work with a bunch of engineers originally from a few different Northern/Western European countries with similar working conditions, and they all say they are here because they LIKE the faster pace of the work and the extra disposable income...
Much larger number of programmers are gainfully employed, and there are thousands of openings for software engineers in the SF Bay Area alone. Does anyone really want the ones who can't get hired reviewing mission critical code anyway?
Well, buffering only works if your buffer is large enough to hold any drop below the average bitrate over the length of the content.
Normally this is just needed to deal with spikes in the content bitrate or temporary networking issues. But if, for example, the content averages 1.2Mbps and you have 1Mbps, you need to have buffered at least (200Kbps * seconds of video) before you start playback. This is possible (though painful as you may have to wait a long time) on a computer, but if you are using a networked TV or BD player with no HDD it's probably not practical (you can only buffer to RAM, which won't be enough over a 2 hour movie).
In this discussion people need to think beyond their laptops :) IP/Internet connectivity will some day (and in some cases already is) replace phone service, cable TV, radio broadcasting, etc. But to do that it will have to be sufficient to look and behave approximately the same as those existing services do right now, and that's going to require at least 3-4Mbps for mediocre HD, double that to start looking really good.
>>>Downloading != streaming
Actually, it is correct. Streaming is a subset of downloading with specific constraints due to the content being consumed in real time, requiring a minimum average bitrate over a buffering window.
This is a critical distinction given the fact that the primary way that the average consumer will be watching Internet video is on a television via a player (Netflix, Vudu, Cinemanow, etc) embedded in a TV or BD player, which usually do NOT have a HDD.
Of course you CAN watch TV shows in SD with a very mediocre encoding, but if you want DVD-quality SD with H.264 you'll need around 2Mbps (maybe a bit less) and for HD (which will also be a requirement for Internet video to be mainstream) you'll need at least 3-4Mbps for 720p or even more for 1080p.
I went to one in a hidden valley once! And well, as I'm sure you know, these days ranch != ranching.
But yeah, I'm sure that was a stupid small number, you can go ahead and multiply by a couple orders of magnitude after you drive all them damn sheep herders out. Though I'm pretty sure my point stands, once you get to more than a couple acres per property, your expectations of decent cable and Internet over the mere "rural" towns have gone from the 1 percentile to the 0.001 percentile...
Downloading != streaming. Streaming is renting a movie and watching in real time, which is just godawful at SD resolution at 1Mbps, and completely impossible in HD. And no, mainstream middle America does NOT watch movies using bittorrent (or Netflix) on their laptops.
And as for video stores, yeah, it's that simple. Please do go serve the rural community by opening up a small business on one of the thousand now desolate main streets and try to scrape by, not knowing if you are going to bring in enough money to last until the end of the year.
Please go do that, or shut the fuck up about it.
Do you live in a rural area?
I have many relatives who do and 1Mbps is insufficient for at least one major reason - movies.
Blockbuster put all of the local video stores out of business, and now that they are circling the drain, they are closing all of their non-profitable stores (which apparently includes most of the ones in rural areas). Because of this, a lot of people in rural areas are starting to rely on streaming for their VOD rentals.
Unfortunately, 1Mbps is pretty much the minimum for watchable SD video, and 4-6Mbps is required for decent HD.
Then again, we are not talking about Bobby Joe who lives out on his 40 acre ranch in Idaho and chases off people who stray onto his proppity. We are talking the millions of people in the US who live in towns of 500-5000 people are often as computer literate as the rest of the country, and just want the same basic utilities. The telcos and cable companies got their franchises promising that, and even if it will not be as profitable to deliver their promises, they should be required to do it.
And you even missed the MOST impressive error in that sentence... if each photon exerted that impulse then the sun would have pretty much instantly obliterated the satellite (and all life on earth). That number should be the TOTAL, not PER PHOTON. All in all, an absolutely horrible article and summary.
Actually (not that this contract has any hope IMO) if Zuckerberg had promised 85% of the company to some random guy and not told the VCs, you can bet they're not just going to say "that's ok Mark, we thought we owned a 60% share of the company but we can all just split what's left!" More like, "ok, his share comes out of YOUR share first, buddy..."
I actually find it ironic that libelf was picked as an example of infringement. I can tell you first hand that the (more standard) UNIX/Solaris libelf is NOT compatible with the Linux/libc libelf. And I can also tell you that after pointing this out to Ulrich Drepper he really didn't give a shit... (I think his approximate words were "It's been like that for a while, too late, I won't change it").
Their only mistake was actually naming it "libelf"... since it is most definitely NOT the same library...
Everyone says (and I agree) that SC2 is one of the best PC games ever made. Unfortunately it was also one of the most pirated PC games ever made, and so the creators never really made much money from it. If any creative works could ever be considered "failures" because of piracy, I'd say 80's-90's computer games would be up there...
Then again, I don't think that means it should be called a "failure" - profitable or not, it's gotta feel nice to have made a game consistently in everyone's top 10 list. But it is one of those times you wish the creators had received a bit more financial recognition for their work.
Bordering on offtopic, but my favorite quote from Paul Reiche III (SC2 designer, hilarious writer, and currently head of Toys For Bob) in a GameSpot interview:
Oops, then I found out that it's $5 for unlimited use (otherwise you can use it 5 times a day for free, I think).
Not that I have a problem with paying for it if I use it... (though I don't remember using Shazam more than a few times a day anyway).
I don't see what the government could do after the fact, they have no expertise in the field, nor should they.
The thing they could have done was actually properly monitor the industry and prevent an unprepared company from tapping a 30B+ barrel oil field in one of the most environmentally diverse and economically important ocean regions in the world until they have tested and verified containment procedures in place, rather than exchange money, gifts and sex for favorable treatment...
5 attempts, no matter how "massive", that fail miserably is in no way impressive to me. No points for effort here, this isn't Kindergarten.
And becomes even less impressive when the ridiculous estimates of 2000-5000 barrels per day leaking were later updated to 60,000-100,000 bpd (and those were really only changed when the majority of non-partisan scientists examining the data pointed out how ridiculous they were... so believe the new "official" estimate with a grain of salt...)