What amazes me about 2nd amendments fanatics is that thought they will go on and on about their individual freedoms and the wording of the amendment itself, what they fail to recognize is that Uncle Sam and Co. (the States) have EVERY RIGHT to regulate the purchase of firearms.
Switch to the 1st amendment, which is regulated ALL THE TIME. Just because you have a belief you want to express, doesn't mean you can't commit libel. Doesn't mean you can use it as an excuse to not serve African Americans or make a gay couple's cake (lower courts have decided this issue already and I suspect in June so will the SCOTUS).
So strictly speaking, the Gov't and/or States absolutely have every right to tell you that you don't get to buy missiles or nuclear weapons. End of story.
Rights are indeed regulated. Get over it.
Coming full circle, what many "lefttist morons" such as myself would like to see is not taking away anyone's guns, but rather regulating them sanely: Get rid of the gun show loop hole, better background checks, restrictions on magazine capacities to mitigate damage, and of course better healthcare for our mentally ill. And do at a national level since we need consistency and cooperation among the States so bad actors can't exploit borders.
Piracy has been around forever. Where there is any distributable media whether that is software, music, movies, what have you, there will be pirates. Grrr...
But that's not the problem...
Fundamentally, the Internet coupled with digital media has eliminated the need for the overhead costs incurred by conventional brick-and-mortar distribution models.
The way media is distributed directly effects the revenue model:
If I have to create a plastic case and a small metallic like circle and ship it across the country to stores in order to share poka classics that is going to cost more than just offering it as a digital download.
Newspapers are dying for this exact same reason, distributing just news is not enough to bring in readership that attracts advertising revenue (its all online).
I will reiterate: The Internet has changed the way distribution of media occurs thereby directly effecting the revenue models of all the major industries. Get with the program.
Mr Wayne should not be fighting piracy, he should be working with his publisher to discover new ways to get his books in distribution chains that make sense in this new economy.
In classical Slashdot fashion, "I for one welcome our new Kindle overlords."
I totally agree, I have one and even signed up for the developer kit. It was an interesting architecture to say the least, they had a LifeOS platform that run a C-like scripting language under a VM called Pawn. The architects I believe stated that Pawn provided a very fast execution environment but made *programming* simple enough for hobbyist and even non-geek types.
My issues were mainly they didn't release anything after the Pleo itself. I mean they were some holiday behavioral editions but that's about it. I really wanted them to release a PDK so I could come up with my own behaviors to really make my Pleo my own. I think its a fantastic idea, albeit with most fantastic ideas, the barrier to entry is typically high.
One thing though, they should open source LifeOS and/or the PDK if they can't sell it. I think a community run RTOS focused on behavioral modeling and extending the model via a simple expressive language and user generated content is fantastic. I even suggested to them in a long survey I filled out as an owner of the first adopter that they should allow folks to exchange behaviors via the web and create a virtual Facebook for rotobotic toys and their owners.
Its a winner and way ahead of its time...but yet again the business model around it needed to be ironed out.
Its a far simpler system, "better" is up for debate...
if you don't need a pagefile. There was a time when all OSs worked this way, and some still do. Programs are "relocated" at load, using a relocation table to correct any hard-coded addresses. This still happens for Windows DLLs, and on a modern system it's a trivial processing cost.
You are talking more about PIC than virtual memory vs non virtualized address spaces. All modern binary containers like ELF provide ways to relocate text and more importantly data. Remember, architectures like Intel are almost by definition position independent since address are offset based.
But even today, your application specifies hard-coded addresses, you will break something and its obviously not portable across systems.
The payoff for not using virtual addressing is that (a) you can't have a pagefault, which just simplifies kernel code all around,
In the other *better* world you spoke you may have it worst where you have to relocate text and data because processes are competing for the same hard-coded physical address space.
and (b) generally when you pass a pointer to a kernel routine (e.g, I/O operations), the kernel has to translate the memory address form virtual to physical, which gets messy sometimes.
Messy? I have never seen translation as the messy part. In fact that's the easiest part. Its managing virtual address space that is messy.
You must be confused about virtual vs. physical memory. In modern processors, there is no penalty for using virtual memory, all translation from virtual to physical address space is done internal to the processor and you won't notice the difference.
Well I would say the penalty for virtual to physical translation is mitigated by the translation units on the processor. Remember, when x86-64 came out they did away with segmentation since most operating systems (other than NT) didn't make use of it at all (pretty much all mainstream UNIX kernels map segments to cover the whole physical address space). There is certainly a penalty for lookup.
To further the above, remember with a direct memory mapped environment there has to be a way to prevent processes from stepping over each other. As many people have noted, virtual memory allows processes to *think* they have access to the entire address space (albeit virtual one) when only a limited amount of physical memory is installed. This feature also enables a cleaner run-time and linking environment. Imagine if every program had to be linked with hard addresses, how would you manage them...
What's interesting is that the concept of virtual memory and its benefits have now spread on a much more wider scale with complete virtualization where the entire hardware is abstracted.
So the 8 folks living in Montana may have trouble...ok...great...
Statesman's thoughts are just really way off. Just like real estate is about location, location, location, media is about content, content, content.
The fact is the proliferation of many technologies from streaming audio to that AUX IN line in your car have allowed listeners to get the same content XM/Sirius provides for FREE.
Its not about iPhones vs satellite radio. Satellite radio has always had this stigma around it:
I'm going to pay $13/month because some satellite radio DJ creates better iPOD playlists than me? Seriously.
If they can get more exclusive content like Howard Stern (whether you like him or not is not the issue) then I can see paying for a subscription.
But as it stands, I'll stick with my mp3 player, burned CDs, and NPR if I want to listen to something while driving.
This is nothing new and there is nothing *fishy* going on. As a side, my MSI notebook also has some non-compliant tables which causes FreeBSD's ACPICA (which was written by Intel) to not recognize the battery status light.
The issue is that Microsoft OSes are not ACPI compliant period. They are semi-ACPI compliant and always have been. Most motherboard manufacturers use the Hardware SDK in order to get the WHQL certification. The SDK provides tools to automatically generate ACPI tables (and in fact if he looks at the DSDT he can see how the tables were generated, typically they are stamped by the SDK).
You hit it on the head. But to expand on your point further, I think the driving force of the whole move was it was the people of Chica....Gotham...that were the heros. This theme was directly foreshadowed in the movie when Gordon states something to the effect that he leaves the Batsignal on as a reminder that he's out there, i.e. Batman becomes more than a man but a true ideological force that inspires the people of Gotham to rise up and fight the corruption and injustice that pervades the city (this was Bruce's goal in the first movie).
It was Joker who believed that in the midst of chaos, when life doesn't go according to "plan," good people devolve into Joker-esque creatures, i.e Joker in his insanity believes he is the true nature of Gotham. His influence of Harvey Dent/Two-Face was again a way to drive home the fact that even an appointed hero can devolve into madness given the right "push." Conversely, it is Batman who believes Gotham is in fact full of good people who are struggling to survive because the level of corruption/injustice has risen to a point that has poisoned the system itself.
It was the boat scene that ultimately proved the Joker wrong.
Take Lego Mindstorms, as far as I remember, the NXT stuff (ARM7TDM based I think) primarily uses LabView. If I wanted to write a custom application to execute on the firmware itself thats a much higher barrier to entry. Furthermore, if I wanted the discrete components to talk to one another and recognize when a component has been added or deleted (hot-plug), I need to write that too. I'm out of the loop on what the hobbyist's are doing with NXT - I mean I remember when folks were talking about porting uCos to it and running their own application. But even that is at a much higher order of complexity than writing Java where most of the devices functionality has been abstracted for you (for better or worse, you can argue either way depending on your requirements and level of sophistication).
And no, I mean web services. The OSGi framework they are using (Concierge) consists of a small HTTP servlet engine to accept web-based services. Moreover, the BugBase's I believe come with 802.11 built-in standard so literally you could export your device's functionality as a bunch of RESTful style web services. I'm not saying this is necessary or even useful in a lot of applications...but they are taking a more SOA based approach to consumer based electronic development and that's pretty cool in my book.
Some background: I've been to the BUG+NYC meetings, they bought me some drinks, I talked to the developers, and I've played around with the SDK, downloaded the high-level source....
As the article explains, its the concept of "hardware based mash-ups" thats really interesting. The initial modules themselves are pretty much standard across most high-even portable devices (e.g. my iPhone). However, instead of a more typical hobbyist approach of developing some hardware and letting low-level programmers fuss around with the firmware and driver code to create a new devices, BugLabs have created a standards based approach to export hardware as web services thereby making it easier to build higher level functionality (the "Lego" part).
If you wanted to build a custom device that had feature x, y and z you would have to integrate different device types in a non-standard or proprietary way, potentially write low-level driver and system code, and then build applications around it. BugLabs has created an environment where you can jump immediately to building YOUR application after picking x, y, and z components. That's pretty neat - hot-plug, start up, stop, the general runtime has been completely written for you. All you need to do is write the application piece.
Its also an open platform which allows you to rewrite everything if you really wanted to (and yes the hardware module design and snap-in mechanism is also open from what I understand).
The application piece of the BugLabs stack is based on the OSGi framework (in Java) with I believe some JNI libraries underneath talking to a Linux based OS. At the very least its a FANTASTIC prototyping platform and a pretty complete open-source middleware platform for consumer based devices.
1) I played and ran second edition about 10 years ago with a bunch of high school friends. I started to play third edition but school took over and I gradually loss interest. My friends however did not. They started to become more involved with the D&D community via live-action, joining several official player organizations, playing in sanctioned games, cross-country adventures to the mecca that is GENCON, as well as buying a plethora of 3rd edition material. Given the complexities (depth) of 3rd edition (as noted by several posts), I feel a little overwhelmed and that I don't have the "background" to really engage with them when 4th edition comes out. I was wondering how will you make 4th edition more accessible to casual and/or new gamers? Will I be able to pick up just the core books and generate a player-character that is on the level with experienced 3rd edition players? Will I need to go back and read 3rd edition supplements to better understand the world of 4th edition?
2) I was wondering if the D&D Tools leverage social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace (OpenSocial)? I have always thought that the real popularity behind D&D (maybe all classical RPGs) is that a game session becomes a loosely structured social event for friends to communicate, share ideas, and just well, catch up (with a wee bit of hacking and slashing). More to the point, the number of online gamers and D&D fans probably constitutes a gigantic social network in itself. Do you guys intend to create some of the social networking dynamics of online sites like Facebook or something entirely different?
Slashdot Mirror
...before you have to rent it
That's not even remotely true.
What amazes me about 2nd amendments fanatics is that thought they will go on and on about their individual freedoms and the wording of the amendment itself, what they fail to recognize is that Uncle Sam and Co. (the States) have EVERY RIGHT to regulate the purchase of firearms.
Switch to the 1st amendment, which is regulated ALL THE TIME. Just because you have a belief you want to express, doesn't mean you can't commit libel. Doesn't mean you can use it as an excuse to not serve African Americans or make a gay couple's cake (lower courts have decided this issue already and I suspect in June so will the SCOTUS).
So strictly speaking, the Gov't and/or States absolutely have every right to tell you that you don't get to buy missiles or nuclear weapons. End of story.
Rights are indeed regulated. Get over it.
Coming full circle, what many "lefttist morons" such as myself would like to see is not taking away anyone's guns, but rather regulating them sanely: Get rid of the gun show loop hole, better background checks, restrictions on magazine capacities to mitigate damage, and of course better healthcare for our mentally ill. And do at a national level since we need consistency and cooperation among the States so bad actors can't exploit borders.
Piracy has been around forever. Where there is any distributable media whether that is software, music, movies, what have you, there will be pirates. Grrr...
But that's not the problem...
Fundamentally, the Internet coupled with digital media has eliminated the need for the overhead costs incurred by conventional brick-and-mortar distribution models.
The way media is distributed directly effects the revenue model:
If I have to create a plastic case and a small metallic like circle and ship it across the country to stores in order to share poka classics that is going to cost more than just offering it as a digital download.
Newspapers are dying for this exact same reason, distributing just news is not enough to bring in readership that attracts advertising revenue (its all online).
I will reiterate: The Internet has changed the way distribution of media occurs thereby directly effecting the revenue models of all the major industries. Get with the program.
Mr Wayne should not be fighting piracy, he should be working with his publisher to discover new ways to get his books in distribution chains that make sense in this new economy.
In classical Slashdot fashion, "I for one welcome our new Kindle overlords."
I totally agree, I have one and even signed up for the developer kit. It was an interesting architecture to say the least, they had a LifeOS platform that run a C-like scripting language under a VM called Pawn. The architects I believe stated that Pawn provided a very fast execution environment but made *programming* simple enough for hobbyist and even non-geek types.
My issues were mainly they didn't release anything after the Pleo itself. I mean they were some holiday behavioral editions but that's about it. I really wanted them to release a PDK so I could come up with my own behaviors to really make my Pleo my own. I think its a fantastic idea, albeit with most fantastic ideas, the barrier to entry is typically high.
One thing though, they should open source LifeOS and/or the PDK if they can't sell it. I think a community run RTOS focused on behavioral modeling and extending the model via a simple expressive language and user generated content is fantastic. I even suggested to them in a long survey I filled out as an owner of the first adopter that they should allow folks to exchange behaviors via the web and create a virtual Facebook for rotobotic toys and their owners.
Its a winner and way ahead of its time...but yet again the business model around it needed to be ironed out.
This is a far better system,
Its a far simpler system, "better" is up for debate...
if you don't need a pagefile. There was a time when all OSs worked this way, and some still do. Programs are "relocated" at load, using a relocation table to correct any hard-coded addresses. This still happens for Windows DLLs, and on a modern system it's a trivial processing cost.
You are talking more about PIC than virtual memory vs non virtualized address spaces. All modern binary containers like ELF provide ways to relocate text and more importantly data. Remember, architectures like Intel are almost by definition position independent since address are offset based.
But even today, your application specifies hard-coded addresses, you will break something and its obviously not portable across systems.
The payoff for not using virtual addressing is that (a) you can't have a pagefault, which just simplifies kernel code all around,
In the other *better* world you spoke you may have it worst where you have to relocate text and data because processes are competing for the same hard-coded physical address space.
and (b) generally when you pass a pointer to a kernel routine (e.g, I/O operations), the kernel has to translate the memory address form virtual to physical, which gets messy sometimes.
Messy? I have never seen translation as the messy part. In fact that's the easiest part. Its managing virtual address space that is messy.
You must be confused about virtual vs. physical memory. In modern processors, there is no penalty for using virtual memory, all translation from virtual to physical address space is done internal to the processor and you won't notice the difference.
Well I would say the penalty for virtual to physical translation is mitigated by the translation units on the processor. Remember, when x86-64 came out they did away with segmentation since most operating systems (other than NT) didn't make use of it at all (pretty much all mainstream UNIX kernels map segments to cover the whole physical address space). There is certainly a penalty for lookup.
To further the above, remember with a direct memory mapped environment there has to be a way to prevent processes from stepping over each other. As many people have noted, virtual memory allows processes to *think* they have access to the entire address space (albeit virtual one) when only a limited amount of physical memory is installed. This feature also enables a cleaner run-time and linking environment. Imagine if every program had to be linked with hard addresses, how would you manage them...
What's interesting is that the concept of virtual memory and its benefits have now spread on a much more wider scale with complete virtualization where the entire hardware is abstracted.
So the 8 folks living in Montana may have trouble...ok...great...
Statesman's thoughts are just really way off. Just like real estate is about location, location, location, media is about content, content, content.
The fact is the proliferation of many technologies from streaming audio to that AUX IN line in your car have allowed listeners to get the same content XM/Sirius provides for FREE.
Its not about iPhones vs satellite radio. Satellite radio has always had this stigma around it:
I'm going to pay $13/month because some satellite radio DJ creates better iPOD playlists than me? Seriously.
If they can get more exclusive content like Howard Stern (whether you like him or not is not the issue) then I can see paying for a subscription.
But as it stands, I'll stick with my mp3 player, burned CDs, and NPR if I want to listen to something while driving.
This is nothing new and there is nothing *fishy* going on. As a side, my MSI notebook also has some non-compliant tables which causes FreeBSD's ACPICA (which was written by Intel) to not recognize the battery status light.
The issue is that Microsoft OSes are not ACPI compliant period. They are semi-ACPI compliant and always have been. Most motherboard manufacturers use the Hardware SDK in order to get the WHQL certification. The SDK provides tools to automatically generate ACPI tables (and in fact if he looks at the DSDT he can see how the tables were generated, typically they are stamped by the SDK).
Nothing to see here...move along.....
You hit it on the head. But to expand on your point further, I think the driving force of the whole move was it was the people of Chica....Gotham...that were the heros. This theme was directly foreshadowed in the movie when Gordon states something to the effect that he leaves the Batsignal on as a reminder that he's out there, i.e. Batman becomes more than a man but a true ideological force that inspires the people of Gotham to rise up and fight the corruption and injustice that pervades the city (this was Bruce's goal in the first movie).
It was Joker who believed that in the midst of chaos, when life doesn't go according to "plan," good people devolve into Joker-esque creatures, i.e Joker in his insanity believes he is the true nature of Gotham. His influence of Harvey Dent/Two-Face was again a way to drive home the fact that even an appointed hero can devolve into madness given the right "push."
Conversely, it is Batman who believes Gotham is in fact full of good people who are struggling to survive because the level of corruption/injustice has risen to a point that has poisoned the system itself.
It was the boat scene that ultimately proved the Joker wrong.
The examples you gave are not the same...
Take Lego Mindstorms, as far as I remember, the NXT stuff (ARM7TDM based I think) primarily uses LabView. If I wanted to write a custom application to execute on the firmware itself thats a much higher barrier to entry. Furthermore, if I wanted the discrete components to talk to one another and recognize when a component has been added or deleted (hot-plug), I need to write that too. I'm out of the loop on what the hobbyist's are doing with NXT - I mean I remember when folks were talking about porting uCos to it and running their own application. But even that is at a much higher order of complexity than writing Java where most of the devices functionality has been abstracted for you (for better or worse, you can argue either way depending on your requirements and level of sophistication).
And no, I mean web services. The OSGi framework they are using (Concierge) consists of a small HTTP servlet engine to accept web-based services. Moreover, the BugBase's I believe come with 802.11 built-in standard so literally you could export your device's functionality as a bunch of RESTful style web services. I'm not saying this is necessary or even useful in a lot of applications...but they are taking a more SOA based approach to consumer based electronic development and that's pretty cool in my book.
Some background: I've been to the BUG+NYC meetings, they bought me some drinks, I talked to the developers, and I've played around with the SDK, downloaded the high-level source....
As the article explains, its the concept of "hardware based mash-ups" thats really interesting. The initial modules themselves are pretty much standard across most high-even portable devices (e.g. my iPhone). However, instead of a more typical hobbyist approach of developing some hardware and letting low-level programmers fuss around with the firmware and driver code to create a new devices, BugLabs have created a standards based approach to export hardware as web services thereby making it easier to build higher level functionality (the "Lego" part).
If you wanted to build a custom device that had feature x, y and z you would have to integrate different device types in a non-standard or proprietary way, potentially write low-level driver and system code, and then build applications around it. BugLabs has created an environment where you can jump immediately to building YOUR application after picking x, y, and z components. That's pretty neat - hot-plug, start up, stop, the general runtime has been completely written for you. All you need to do is write the application piece.
Its also an open platform which allows you to rewrite everything if you really wanted to (and yes the hardware module design and snap-in mechanism is also open from what I understand).
The application piece of the BugLabs stack is based on the OSGi framework (in Java) with I believe some JNI libraries underneath talking to a Linux based OS. At the very least its a FANTASTIC prototyping platform and a pretty complete open-source middleware platform for consumer based devices.
I have two questions:
1) I played and ran second edition about 10 years ago with a bunch of high school friends. I started to play third edition but school took over and I gradually loss interest. My friends however did not. They started to become more involved with the D&D community via live-action, joining several official player organizations, playing in sanctioned games, cross-country adventures to the mecca that is GENCON, as well as buying a plethora of 3rd edition material. Given the complexities (depth) of 3rd edition (as noted by several posts), I feel a little overwhelmed and that I don't have the "background" to really engage with them when 4th edition comes out. I was wondering how will you make 4th edition more accessible to casual and/or new gamers? Will I be able to pick up just the core books and generate a player-character that is on the level with experienced 3rd edition players? Will I need to go back and read 3rd edition supplements to better understand the world of 4th edition?
2) I was wondering if the D&D Tools leverage social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace (OpenSocial)? I have always thought that the real popularity behind D&D (maybe all classical RPGs) is that a game session becomes a loosely structured social event for friends to communicate, share ideas, and just well, catch up (with a wee bit of hacking and slashing). More to the point, the number of online gamers and D&D fans probably constitutes a gigantic social network in itself. Do you guys intend to create some of the social networking dynamics of online sites like Facebook or something entirely different?