Heh, I have a lot of Ikea furniture I would sell as antiques, then.
You're misunderstanding my point. I wouldn't value the original antiques over the copies. I wouldn't shell out millions or even thousands for your copy of some 18th century chair. No, I would be willing to pay maybe $100 for your copy, and maybe $10 for the original due to it being too old to actually sit on.
So what's the big deal with it being original? There's no actual original anyway, since each painting is an imperfect execution of what the artist had in mind in the first place.
Furthermore, where is the value of a painting? Is it in that say, Louis Wain might have sneezed on it and embedded a bit of his bodily fluids and bacteria into the picture? Or is it that the picture is actually nice to look at?
If the value of a picture is in the image, then we should reproduce it as widely as possible, not get obsessed about the "original".
The way I see it, the value of an "original" is like the value of things like some famous singer's underwear, tulips, and diamonds: irrational, and way above the actual value they would have if evaluated based on the actual usefulness.
As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing. Maybe even better if it's in a better shape.
The only exception I can see is for the people actually interested in doing chemical analysis of the painting. But that shouldn't really be a concern for people looking for something to hang in their room/mansion/compound.
1. It runs on 4 x quad core. Which is about just 4X the CPU power a normal user could have right now. A 4X speed improvement isn't probably that far away. They may be hoping to reach a point where a dedicated video card is no longer needed. With the required performance level being so near, adding some extra support to the CPU may be enough.
2. Raytracing scales differently than methods currently used in games. With raytracing, increasing resolution is what adds the processing time, while adding detail is very cheap. Which I'm guessing means that as soon as you get raytracing going in real time at a decent resolution, adding extra quality is cheap. This would radically change the current situation, and possibly drastically bump the quality level.
3. Raytracing implements effects like shadows and transparency in a straightforward manner, which should make it easier to code. Game developers should like that. Also, in my understanding, raytracing also doesn't need to decompose things like spheres into lots of triangles, so the engine can test a ray's collision with a sphere directly. If you can specify parts of a scene as objects like spheres, toruses and such, it'd result in much finer detail.
What I think Intel is trying to do here to ATI/AMD and nVidia is the same thing fast CPUs did to soundcards. There's no longer a real need to have specialized hardware to play MIDI or add effects to sounds, since the CPU is quite capable of doing it itself. In fact, IIRC, Creative had to *blackmail* John Carmack into supporting EAX, because he could implement the same effects faster using the CPU.
It's not the unfamiliarity, it's that a gun may be "just a tool", but it's a dangerous sort of tool.
There are many "just a tool" devices that inspire an amount of fear and caution in most sane people. Unless something is wrong with your head, you don't behave in sudden or threatening ways near somebody carrying a potentially dangerous tool like a chainsaw or a drill. The same way, most people would avoid walking in a nailgun's line of fire. Certain kinds of tools SHOULD instill an amount of caution and respect.
I find it completely unsurprising that when confronted by a strange man carrying a gun, on his own property people decide he's best avoided. After all they can't know whether he's harmless or psychotic, the gun's very capable of causing harm at a distance, and with him being on his own property he's in an advantage should he choose to fire it. Even a slight risk of getting shot vastly outweights the need to have a geeky meeting.
Right, so you were trying to enforce family unity, then. It's still not something that can be enforced. You can drag a horse to water, but still can't make it drink. If your family is actually averse to sitting together even once a week, it's not going to suddenly become a model family because you force them to sit together.
It's the same reason why mandatory school is such crap: Even if you force children who don't want to study to be there, there's nothing you can do to force them to actually learn. I was really amazed by the incredible change in atmosphere there is once you move on to education that's optional.
Fix whatever relationship problem there is, then once people stop having a reason to avoid each other they won't need to be forced to dinner together.
You can't force "family time" when the family doesn't want it. It's only going to annoy everybody else.
With teenagers, it's been a while, but IIRC the issue is this:
Teenagers are starting to have lives of their own which you don't participate in much, or often at all. That means you have no common ground except for what you can get from their presence at home. This in turn will restrict your subjects for conversation to ones that are mostly annoying.
My own parents' attitude was often something like "Yes, yes, that's interesting, but how is studying for the exam going?". For most people in school there's nothing less exciting to talk about than school work. Which means that virtually any conversation at the table becomes unpleasant, and it's preferrable to go eat alone to avoid having one in the first place. In the worst case you'll manage to make "Let's eat together like a family" translate to "Come here so can I grill you again for not studying enough/getting bad grades".
This isn't really comparable to your wife asking you how did work go, because your job is taken by choice or at least out of necessity, while for most teenagers school is something externally imposed and which they'd get rid of if they could.
This IMO is related to the subject of this story. Notice the many annoyed people saying how you can't enforce fun? Well, you can't enforce family time either. For both things everybody involved has to consent to it, otherwise all you end up with is a group of people that are in a worse mood than they were before.
What exactly is "32 bit software reworked to run on x64"? That would imply there's some good reason to write specifically for x64.
Writing for x64 is for the most part exactly the same as for 32 bit. Hello world is exactly the same. So is 99% of software. The only time there is any difference is when there's a 64/32 bit specific optimization. Some of that can be done portably (types like int32_fast_t that indicate "This needs to be at least a 32 bit integer, but use whatever is fastest for the arch" that can be 64 bit if that's faster).
The source is the same for a 32 bit and 64 bit application, unless fixing of stupid assumptions (like sizeof(void*) == sizeof(int)) is needed.
You can optimize for x64, but most applications will never be specifically written for it. Maybe a CPU specific algorithm for something like encryption, but it's not something that requires a rewrite.
That doesn't mean there's no advantage to 64 bit apps as compared to 32 bit ones on a 64 bit OS. Compiling for 64 bit gives you advantages. There are more registers, and the compiler knows that some features are absolutely guaranteed to exist, so it can use things like SSE, when a 32 bit CPU isn't guaranteed to have them. Then of course you pay a penalty for larger pointers.
I tried Freenet back when it was new. It was an incredible pain to use.
I still say that their biggest mistake was to use Java to write it.
It uses really incredible amounts of resources. Back when it appeared, a computer with 128-256MB RAM was decent. Problem is that Freenet brought this hardware to its knees. My server had load averages of 20, it was unbearable. Even if I could have dedicated this box to Freenet exclusively, a loadavg of 20 means it's not getting nearly all the time it wants, which adds to the latency of the network. And Freenet's latency is horrible as could be expected.
I believe that this is one of the major reasons it didn't catch on. Freenet should have been something light, easy to install, and as unobtrusive to the owner of the machine as possible to maximize its spread. Instead it was a hog, hard to install on any OS, and required lots of fiddling to keep it from griding your box to a halt.
It simply doesn't make sense that something with a relatively simple function can consume much more resources than an Apache server.
Freenet also had many bugs. Some of which were due to its massive use of threads IIRC. It also had horrible, scary bugs. For example a bug in the implementation of the encryption algorithm meant that half of every 256 bit block was encrypted, and the other half wasn't. The attitude on the mailing list was basically "oops", and "it's still in development, we didn't guarantee security, so sucks for whoever was bitten by this" from the main developer.
IMO, Freenet shows how "release early, release often" needs a small addition: "after making sure it's not a huge pain in the ass to use". Because when the user's impression is "This is pretty raw, but it's neat already" you're going well, but when it's "I spent an hour figuring out how to set it up, and now the darn thing killed my server" they're not likely to hang around for very long.
Note that in the article, the author doesn't propose a new reasonable length of copyright, he's proposing drastically cutting it as a *punishment* for misbehavior. From that POV a too short term makes perfect sense.
On a magnetic hard disk, once you get a failure you can expect the thing to die completely soon, because failures tend to be mechanical. Once there's scraped magnetic material bouncing around on the inside it's only going to get worse, possibly very fast.
On a SSD what should happen is that sectors die in a predictable fasion, and they die due to writes, so you can still read and recover your data.
The analogy to oil is not valid, since you can't make nuclear weapons out of oil.
You can't make nuclear bombs with anything besides the right material, which oil isn't, obviously enough. Oil isn't completely harmless though. You could make a napalm bomb with it.
The deal seems perfectly reasonable to me. Iran gets what it (ostensibly) wants, which is civilian nuclear power;
Ok. Why would somebody want nuclear power? I imagine that as a country it's unfavourable to depend on somebody else for your electricity, they could say, get into a war, or decide to cut your supply off. It's like water, you really want to have your own.
The whole point of having your own reactor is making your own power. That's kinda pointless if you're going to let somebody else control your fuel supply.
Any child learned long ago than having everything owned by their parents really sucks, because they can take it away at any time. That's a good part of why I bought everything that was important to me once I started earning money.
By criticizing the deal, you are implying that Iran (and, indeed, every other nation) has the right to enrich as much uranium as they please, which is not significantly different from saying that every nation has the right to acquire nuclear weapons.
You troll far too obviously. "You're with us, or against us", in other words?
But let's play this game. What is exactly that makes the US, a country that actually made nuclear bombs and used them more entitled to being able to use the technology than another country?
All I said is that I'm completely unsurprised that Iran didn't like that deal. Would you sign up for a deal that forbid you to build refineries in exchange for a promise to sell you oil?
Iran only has to build expensive reactors, and buy the fuel from the US (or whoever provides it) which will of course be sold at a profit (so it's not exactly a huge concession on the provider's part)
That'd work right until the provider decides it doesn't like something going on and says "No more fuel for you!".
Then what happens is that Iran gets rolling blackouts, and gets stuck with lots of expensive hardware they can't use, because if they had enough power without the reactors they wouldn't be building them in the first place.
Yes, I don't understand why anybody wouldn't sign up for a great deal like that.
The energy content of a gallon of gasoline isn't nearly the same thing as the useful amount of energy a car motor can extract from it. IIRC, they're mostly 50% efficient.
Electric cars use energy far more efficiently. Electric motors can be more than 95% efficient, and if you put the motor in the wheel you remove the whole overhead of the transmission. Then there's regenerative braking.
Well, at least the one mentioned in the article reproduced already.
Maybe this is what geeks should do. Pretend to be normal people for a few months, get married, have children, and THEN fill the house with strange hardware.
Like I went into the Sears and Circuit City "stores" in the IBM island and they were deserted, not very useful, and lacking in content, but it made me wonder if I was looking at an early Web 3D basically.
I hear IBM is quite happy actually, it seems they own quite large amounts of land there and use it for meetings or something like that. Personally I almost never visit corporate areas, so I don't really know.
One thing though: It's normal for a shop in SL to be deserted. That doesn't mean it's failing. SL is real-world-like, but free from many of its constraints. You don't need to wander around a shop for a long time like a supermarket. There are search facilities available, and unlike RL shops everything is always in stock. You can teleport in, find the thing you want, buy it, and vanish in 2 minutes.
The thing about SL, is that you really have to get it. Some companies really don't. For instance, some months ago I heard AMD was giving a talk about some multi-threading tech. So I showed up. The AMD place was pretty, well built. There were a few people in the area, and the AMD guy. Then the surprise: There's absolutely nothing going on in SL, the actual talk is done with *Skype*. Which I didn't have installed.
The SL part was completely silent. There were no pictures, no graphs, no material besides AMD logos, and nobody was doing anything in SL at all. It was a very odd thing, several people are there just sitting in SL, which is not bringing any benefit at all because it's not being used.
Intel did it right some time later. The actual talk was in SL, graphs, answering questions from the SL audience in SL, etc. I hope AMD took a hint from that.
It's a "virtual world". I think they're trying to make it something similar to the web. As in, the web is not a game, but you can implement games in it. Same way, SL is not a game, but you can implement games inside.
I'd say it parallels the web quite nicely in that SL is really a medium for doing things. Some people play. Some use it as a 3D chat. Some as a base for programming/building projects. Some role play. For some it allows simulating their dreams: If you want to be an anthropomorphic cat, or to live in a steampunk styled world, there's that as well.
If you want games, they can be implemented inside SL, though of course there are limits to how well it works. Things like chess are easy enough to implement in SL, though implementing a chess AI is probably nearly impossible in LSL. FPS style deathmatch can be had very easily, though since the guns are all user made there's nobody ensuring it's balanced.
Of course not everybody gets SL, just not like everybody gets the web. If you asked my parents they wouldn't have a clue why there are so many people posting here, for them it's not "real" and completely pointless.
Once mail arrives, the "read/unread" status is entirely a flag on your own computer. Nobody else ever finds out whether it's been read. Your client could report that of course, but each client needs to report it then, and there's still an awful lot of *Windows 98* boxes out there.
That still ignores the fact that botnets won't care, and that enforcing payment on email won't work as it'd be a project of titanic proportions, and many people disagree.
People understand "Vista capable" as "this computer can run Vista, but it could run XP or Linux as well". "Vista capable" would mean it fulfills Vista's minimum RAM, etc requirements, and not that necessarily it must run Vista.
This is presumably applied to computers with hardware without drivers for other OSes.
I said we have to be careful. By spending a little effort in designing security for the tracks now rather than later, we not only make it harder for the terrorists but also keep people from wandering in front of the train and getting smeared.
I don't think you know much about what happened, or even been near a modern rail system.
First of all, the bombs were in backpacks, left inside the trains. The rails had absolutely nothing to do with it. They were activated by cell phone. There's really very little you can do to prevent somebody leaving a backpack in a train. There are now stickers announcing that there are cameras inside the train, but it's not like it's going to stop a bomb from exploding.
Second, nobody "wanders" in front of a train and gets smeared. We don't live inside a Roadrunner cartoon, tracks are very obvious and at least in populated places have barriers around them. You don't exactly end up on one by accident.
You'd still have to worry about security though. At least a plane at altitude is very hard to shoot down. So unless you manage to plant a terrorist or bomb on the plane it's safe until landing approach.
With the train you could place a bomb of sufficient size anywhere along the tracks set to detonate at the right time to take out the train. Not saying this can't be solved, but we do have to be careful.
Can we drop this terrorism bullshit already? It's very tiring.
I say this as somebody who daily used the train that got blown up in Madrid (though wasn't on it at that time), had a classmate die there, and a friend who was in it, but wasn't hurt. I don't give a damn about the terrorists. I still use that same train.
It can't noticeably improve ping times since the only thing it can ever affect is its own latency. A ping from one server to another here comes out to 0.3ms, this includes a path through the software stack and NIC on both computers. Assuming it magically eliminated all latency it just wouldn't change anything noticeable anyway.
Now reduced CPU usage I can believe, but that is also very weird. An ancient P100 can quite easily deal with 10Mbps of traffic, which is WAY higher than any normal game uses. I'd be very interested in raw networking benchmarks.
The only way I can see it affecting ping time is by reducing CPU load. If the game works in a while(1) { render(); do_network(); } loop, then obviously freeing up CPU time reduces the latency of the network handling code.
Assuming that is how it works, and that reducing latency is the desirable thing, SLI would have a much greater effect for the same price.
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You're misunderstanding my point. I wouldn't value the original antiques over the copies. I wouldn't shell out millions or even thousands for your copy of some 18th century chair. No, I would be willing to pay maybe $100 for your copy, and maybe $10 for the original due to it being too old to actually sit on.
So what's the big deal with it being original? There's no actual original anyway, since each painting is an imperfect execution of what the artist had in mind in the first place.
Furthermore, where is the value of a painting? Is it in that say, Louis Wain might have sneezed on it and embedded a bit of his bodily fluids and bacteria into the picture? Or is it that the picture is actually nice to look at?
If the value of a picture is in the image, then we should reproduce it as widely as possible, not get obsessed about the "original".
The way I see it, the value of an "original" is like the value of things like some famous singer's underwear, tulips, and diamonds: irrational, and way above the actual value they would have if evaluated based on the actual usefulness.
As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing. Maybe even better if it's in a better shape.
The only exception I can see is for the people actually interested in doing chemical analysis of the painting. But that shouldn't really be a concern for people looking for something to hang in their room/mansion/compound.
I see two things here:
1. It runs on 4 x quad core. Which is about just 4X the CPU power a normal user could have right now. A 4X speed improvement isn't probably that far away. They may be hoping to reach a point where a dedicated video card is no longer needed. With the required performance level being so near, adding some extra support to the CPU may be enough.
2. Raytracing scales differently than methods currently used in games. With raytracing, increasing resolution is what adds the processing time, while adding detail is very cheap. Which I'm guessing means that as soon as you get raytracing going in real time at a decent resolution, adding extra quality is cheap. This would radically change the current situation, and possibly drastically bump the quality level.
3. Raytracing implements effects like shadows and transparency in a straightforward manner, which should make it easier to code. Game developers should like that. Also, in my understanding, raytracing also doesn't need to decompose things like spheres into lots of triangles, so the engine can test a ray's collision with a sphere directly. If you can specify parts of a scene as objects like spheres, toruses and such, it'd result in much finer detail.
What I think Intel is trying to do here to ATI/AMD and nVidia is the same thing fast CPUs did to soundcards. There's no longer a real need to have specialized hardware to play MIDI or add effects to sounds, since the CPU is quite capable of doing it itself. In fact, IIRC, Creative had to *blackmail* John Carmack into supporting EAX, because he could implement the same effects faster using the CPU.
It's not the unfamiliarity, it's that a gun may be "just a tool", but it's a dangerous sort of tool.
There are many "just a tool" devices that inspire an amount of fear and caution in most sane people. Unless something is wrong with your head, you don't behave in sudden or threatening ways near somebody carrying a potentially dangerous tool like a chainsaw or a drill. The same way, most people would avoid walking in a nailgun's line of fire. Certain kinds of tools SHOULD instill an amount of caution and respect.
I find it completely unsurprising that when confronted by a strange man carrying a gun, on his own property people decide he's best avoided. After all they can't know whether he's harmless or psychotic, the gun's very capable of causing harm at a distance, and with him being on his own property he's in an advantage should he choose to fire it. Even a slight risk of getting shot vastly outweights the need to have a geeky meeting.
Right, so you were trying to enforce family unity, then. It's still not something that can be enforced. You can drag a horse to water, but still can't make it drink. If your family is actually averse to sitting together even once a week, it's not going to suddenly become a model family because you force them to sit together.
It's the same reason why mandatory school is such crap: Even if you force children who don't want to study to be there, there's nothing you can do to force them to actually learn. I was really amazed by the incredible change in atmosphere there is once you move on to education that's optional.
Fix whatever relationship problem there is, then once people stop having a reason to avoid each other they won't need to be forced to dinner together.
You can't force "family time" when the family doesn't want it. It's only going to annoy everybody else.
With teenagers, it's been a while, but IIRC the issue is this:
Teenagers are starting to have lives of their own which you don't participate in much, or often at all. That means you have no common ground except for what you can get from their presence at home. This in turn will restrict your subjects for conversation to ones that are mostly annoying.
My own parents' attitude was often something like "Yes, yes, that's interesting, but how is studying for the exam going?". For most people in school there's nothing less exciting to talk about than school work. Which means that virtually any conversation at the table becomes unpleasant, and it's preferrable to go eat alone to avoid having one in the first place. In the worst case you'll manage to make "Let's eat together like a family" translate to "Come here so can I grill you again for not studying enough/getting bad grades".
This isn't really comparable to your wife asking you how did work go, because your job is taken by choice or at least out of necessity, while for most teenagers school is something externally imposed and which they'd get rid of if they could.
This IMO is related to the subject of this story. Notice the many annoyed people saying how you can't enforce fun? Well, you can't enforce family time either. For both things everybody involved has to consent to it, otherwise all you end up with is a group of people that are in a worse mood than they were before.
What exactly is "32 bit software reworked to run on x64"? That would imply there's some good reason to write specifically for x64.
Writing for x64 is for the most part exactly the same as for 32 bit. Hello world is exactly the same. So is 99% of software. The only time there is any difference is when there's a 64/32 bit specific optimization. Some of that can be done portably (types like int32_fast_t that indicate "This needs to be at least a 32 bit integer, but use whatever is fastest for the arch" that can be 64 bit if that's faster).
The source is the same for a 32 bit and 64 bit application, unless fixing of stupid assumptions (like sizeof(void*) == sizeof(int)) is needed.
You can optimize for x64, but most applications will never be specifically written for it. Maybe a CPU specific algorithm for something like encryption, but it's not something that requires a rewrite.
That doesn't mean there's no advantage to 64 bit apps as compared to 32 bit ones on a 64 bit OS. Compiling for 64 bit gives you advantages. There are more registers, and the compiler knows that some features are absolutely guaranteed to exist, so it can use things like SSE, when a 32 bit CPU isn't guaranteed to have them. Then of course you pay a penalty for larger pointers.
I tried Freenet back when it was new. It was an incredible pain to use.
I still say that their biggest mistake was to use Java to write it.
It uses really incredible amounts of resources. Back when it appeared, a computer with 128-256MB RAM was decent. Problem is that Freenet brought this hardware to its knees. My server had load averages of 20, it was unbearable. Even if I could have dedicated this box to Freenet exclusively, a loadavg of 20 means it's not getting nearly all the time it wants, which adds to the latency of the network. And Freenet's latency is horrible as could be expected.
I believe that this is one of the major reasons it didn't catch on. Freenet should have been something light, easy to install, and as unobtrusive to the owner of the machine as possible to maximize its spread. Instead it was a hog, hard to install on any OS, and required lots of fiddling to keep it from griding your box to a halt.
It simply doesn't make sense that something with a relatively simple function can consume much more resources than an Apache server.
Freenet also had many bugs. Some of which were due to its massive use of threads IIRC. It also had horrible, scary bugs. For example a bug in the implementation of the encryption algorithm meant that half of every 256 bit block was encrypted, and the other half wasn't. The attitude on the mailing list was basically "oops", and "it's still in development, we didn't guarantee security, so sucks for whoever was bitten by this" from the main developer.
IMO, Freenet shows how "release early, release often" needs a small addition: "after making sure it's not a huge pain in the ass to use". Because when the user's impression is "This is pretty raw, but it's neat already" you're going well, but when it's "I spent an hour figuring out how to set it up, and now the darn thing killed my server" they're not likely to hang around for very long.
Note that in the article, the author doesn't propose a new reasonable length of copyright, he's proposing drastically cutting it as a *punishment* for misbehavior. From that POV a too short term makes perfect sense.
It's still not the same failure mode though.
On a magnetic hard disk, once you get a failure you can expect the thing to die completely soon, because failures tend to be mechanical. Once there's scraped magnetic material bouncing around on the inside it's only going to get worse, possibly very fast.
On a SSD what should happen is that sectors die in a predictable fasion, and they die due to writes, so you can still read and recover your data.
You can't make nuclear bombs with anything besides the right material, which oil isn't, obviously enough. Oil isn't completely harmless though. You could make a napalm bomb with it.
Ok. Why would somebody want nuclear power? I imagine that as a country it's unfavourable to depend on somebody else for your electricity, they could say, get into a war, or decide to cut your supply off. It's like water, you really want to have your own.
The whole point of having your own reactor is making your own power. That's kinda pointless if you're going to let somebody else control your fuel supply.
Any child learned long ago than having everything owned by their parents really sucks, because they can take it away at any time. That's a good part of why I bought everything that was important to me once I started earning money.
You troll far too obviously. "You're with us, or against us", in other words?
But let's play this game. What is exactly that makes the US, a country that actually made nuclear bombs and used them more entitled to being able to use the technology than another country?
Stop trolling, I said nothing of the sort.
All I said is that I'm completely unsurprised that Iran didn't like that deal. Would you sign up for a deal that forbid you to build refineries in exchange for a promise to sell you oil?
Wonderful deal, isn't it?
Iran only has to build expensive reactors, and buy the fuel from the US (or whoever provides it) which will of course be sold at a profit (so it's not exactly a huge concession on the provider's part)
That'd work right until the provider decides it doesn't like something going on and says "No more fuel for you!".
Then what happens is that Iran gets rolling blackouts, and gets stuck with lots of expensive hardware they can't use, because if they had enough power without the reactors they wouldn't be building them in the first place.
Yes, I don't understand why anybody wouldn't sign up for a great deal like that.
Even better actually.
The energy content of a gallon of gasoline isn't nearly the same thing as the useful amount of energy a car motor can extract from it. IIRC, they're mostly 50% efficient.
Electric cars use energy far more efficiently. Electric motors can be more than 95% efficient, and if you put the motor in the wheel you remove the whole overhead of the transmission. Then there's regenerative braking.
Well, at least the one mentioned in the article reproduced already.
Maybe this is what geeks should do. Pretend to be normal people for a few months, get married, have children, and THEN fill the house with strange hardware.
I hear IBM is quite happy actually, it seems they own quite large amounts of land there and use it for meetings or something like that. Personally I almost never visit corporate areas, so I don't really know.
One thing though: It's normal for a shop in SL to be deserted. That doesn't mean it's failing. SL is real-world-like, but free from many of its constraints. You don't need to wander around a shop for a long time like a supermarket. There are search facilities available, and unlike RL shops everything is always in stock. You can teleport in, find the thing you want, buy it, and vanish in 2 minutes.
The thing about SL, is that you really have to get it. Some companies really don't. For instance, some months ago I heard AMD was giving a talk about some multi-threading tech. So I showed up. The AMD place was pretty, well built. There were a few people in the area, and the AMD guy. Then the surprise: There's absolutely nothing going on in SL, the actual talk is done with *Skype*. Which I didn't have installed.
The SL part was completely silent. There were no pictures, no graphs, no material besides AMD logos, and nobody was doing anything in SL at all. It was a very odd thing, several people are there just sitting in SL, which is not bringing any benefit at all because it's not being used.
Intel did it right some time later. The actual talk was in SL, graphs, answering questions from the SL audience in SL, etc. I hope AMD took a hint from that.
It's a "virtual world". I think they're trying to make it something similar to the web. As in, the web is not a game, but you can implement games in it. Same way, SL is not a game, but you can implement games inside.
I'd say it parallels the web quite nicely in that SL is really a medium for doing things. Some people play. Some use it as a 3D chat. Some as a base for programming/building projects. Some role play. For some it allows simulating their dreams: If you want to be an anthropomorphic cat, or to live in a steampunk styled world, there's that as well.
If you want games, they can be implemented inside SL, though of course there are limits to how well it works. Things like chess are easy enough to implement in SL, though implementing a chess AI is probably nearly impossible in LSL. FPS style deathmatch can be had very easily, though since the guns are all user made there's nobody ensuring it's balanced.
Of course not everybody gets SL, just not like everybody gets the web. If you asked my parents they wouldn't have a clue why there are so many people posting here, for them it's not "real" and completely pointless.
Err, do you even understand how email works?
Once mail arrives, the "read/unread" status is entirely a flag on your own computer. Nobody else ever finds out whether it's been read. Your client could report that of course, but each client needs to report it then, and there's still an awful lot of *Windows 98* boxes out there.
That still ignores the fact that botnets won't care, and that enforcing payment on email won't work as it'd be a project of titanic proportions, and many people disagree.
The way I understand it:
People understand "Vista capable" as "this computer can run Vista, but it could run XP or Linux as well". "Vista capable" would mean it fulfills Vista's minimum RAM, etc requirements, and not that necessarily it must run Vista.
This is presumably applied to computers with hardware without drivers for other OSes.
How about this? It looks pretty cool with the glasses.
I don't think you know much about what happened, or even been near a modern rail system.
First of all, the bombs were in backpacks, left inside the trains. The rails had absolutely nothing to do with it. They were activated by cell phone. There's really very little you can do to prevent somebody leaving a backpack in a train. There are now stickers announcing that there are cameras inside the train, but it's not like it's going to stop a bomb from exploding.
Second, nobody "wanders" in front of a train and gets smeared. We don't live inside a Roadrunner cartoon, tracks are very obvious and at least in populated places have barriers around them. You don't exactly end up on one by accident.
Can we drop this terrorism bullshit already? It's very tiring.
I say this as somebody who daily used the train that got blown up in Madrid (though wasn't on it at that time), had a classmate die there, and a friend who was in it, but wasn't hurt. I don't give a damn about the terrorists. I still use that same train.
I find the whole thing quite suspicious.
It can't noticeably improve ping times since the only thing it can ever affect is its own latency. A ping from one server to another here comes out to 0.3ms, this includes a path through the software stack and NIC on both computers. Assuming it magically eliminated all latency it just wouldn't change anything noticeable anyway.
Now reduced CPU usage I can believe, but that is also very weird. An ancient P100 can quite easily deal with 10Mbps of traffic, which is WAY higher than any normal game uses. I'd be very interested in raw networking benchmarks.
The only way I can see it affecting ping time is by reducing CPU load. If the game works in a while(1) { render(); do_network(); } loop, then obviously freeing up CPU time reduces the latency of the network handling code.
Assuming that is how it works, and that reducing latency is the desirable thing, SLI would have a much greater effect for the same price.
A co-worker recently brought his new laptop, it had Firefox preinstalled.