Whatever. I actually own a G4, and it's quite fast enough for me when you're on a good network connection. It renders Slashdot in less than a second on Netscape 4.75, so what's your problem? Not happy with being able to blink between hitting return at the URL bar and getting a page, or is it just IE envy?
I think you're just spewing nonsense and hatred, free from the burden of facts.
Actually, I forgot to cover that in my reply. The wife/girlfriend/love interest who is dedicated to keeping their life as a couple normal at all costs is another archtype which I'm used to seeing -- at least in anime. I could list a number of sources, but the ones you'd probably find the easiest would be on Toonami, so there's Chi-chi -- Gokuu's wife on Dragonball Z -- and Catherine -- Trowa's girl on Gundam Wing. They're not really villanous. They just want to lead a normal life, and the strange abilities and/or willingness to go off to battle of the man they are in love with threatens all of that.
I've having a hard time thinking of a good example of this from American sources. Many Batman stories have involved a woman who wants him to settle down, but it's not a regular occurance. I'm sure there's got to be more, it just doesn't come to mind immediately.
I remember them. You could supposedly drop one off the roof of a building in the middle of a read/write operation and not loose any data or damage the media from the impact.
The Stillsuits looked very lame - once again - done better by Lynch.
At least they had caps and masks this time. It was really silly to see Fremen running around with their heads (particularly their noses and mouths) uncovered to let all that moisture evaporate.
It doesn't seem like any of the talent in this series outside of William Hurt is ready for even network TV.
I dunno. Feyd looks like he could be interesting once the plot starts to involve him more. He looks a little more cunning and menacing than Sting's version.
I despise the introduction of Irulan as a potential love interest. This makes his later action of virtually enslaving her in a marriage without love by which she will bear him no children for the purpose of securing his claim to the throne somewhat dulled and nonsensical. We'll see what they do with that.
Guild Navigators
Guild navigators are very well described in the second book, Dune Messiah, were one is involved in a conspiracy to kill Emperor Atreides. They are humanoid in form, but are taller and more elongated looking with bluish-silver skin, eyes that are so blue that they are almost black, and gills that they use to breathe the spice-laden air they must live in. They have extra fingers and toes, which are very elongated and are webbed. Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials has the most accurate picture I've ever seen. This fleshy Abyss-style manta/Communion alien this is better than the mutant aborted fetus of the movie, but it's FAR from accurate. I was very disappointed to see them not fully correct this detail.
Paul
Paul really does come off as Luke Skywalker. The little whiny bitchy Luke of the first movie. ("...but we could buy our own star ship with thaa-at!) The rebellous attitude is in stark contrast with the almost unnatural maturity Paul possesses. He's supposed to be trained as a Mentat. Where did all that go? I already don't like his character, but I'm hoping he'll grow up some once the Fremen get ahold of him.
Other than all that and the floating Baron Harkonnen, I'm pretty happy with the faithfulness of the mini-series adaptation.
Paul displays incredible maturity, discipline, and self-control even from the very beginning in the book. I'm disappointed that they didn't stress his Mentat training more. "A Mentat Duke would be most formidable."
The ornithopter thing makes sense since we have no real working function designs that could operate at anywhere near the speeds, cargo carrying capacity, and cost efficiency of the machines from the books, so why bother showing one? You can wave away anti-gravity and star drives, but a purely mechanical propulsion system can't really be BS'ed unless it's flat-out fantasy and magic is involved.
But he's not the villain because he does those things for good reasons...
You really need to read more comic books, read more fiction, and watch more movies in general.
In real life, no one hardly ever thinks that they're the bad guy. The Unabomber thought he was doing what was right (stopping the evils of modern society). The guy who shot all those abortion doctors thought he was doing what was right (bring justice to baby assassins). People who embed nails in trees which result in fatal or crippling logging accidents think they're doing what is right (saving the forest from greedy rapists of the earth). Heck, that guy last week who was working with his mom to try to sell off his nephew on the Russian black market to be broken down into organs said he was "pursuing his dream."
I'm getting side tracked though. In fiction there are three major kinds of villians:
1) Those who are evil for the sake of being evil.
2) Those who are merely selfish and ruthless.
3) Those who are willing to commit evil for the greater good.
The first one is simply lame. "Ooo, I am darkness incarnate. Fear me!" The only time it even remotely works is when supernatural forces of Evil are involved. Even then, it has become cliche. The best villians all fall into the latter categories. Even the insane and evil Hannibal Lecter is a case of the second category. He's not doing it to be evil, he's just willing to go to any extreme to satisfy his darker desires. However, this is still not a villian doing things for the greater good.
In the realm of superheroes and comic books, the best example of a villian doing something for the greater good is Magneto. Magneto has seen what happens when a minority is oppressed in the extreme when growing up in WWII Germany. He is fighting back so that mutants will come out on top. In his eyes, he is completely justified for anything he does. He is trying to be a savior to his people. So, don't discount Mr. Glass as a villian just because he thinks he's justified. The justified villian is a fictional archetype reaching back as far as literature has been being written. It's very much a cornerstone of the pulp genre which led to the development of modern comics.
Viable theory, or have I overlooked something in the screenplay?
You also might want to consider that every superhero has more than one villian. Mr. Glass would just be the first that David Dunn faces.
You know, wanting to keep parts of their system closed has nothing to do with the choice of BSD over Linux. Everything that Linux would've done (the BSD layer) is already open source. Everything else in the OS is just a user-space app. You can drop in a new copy of the Darwin kernel and not disturb a single thing in the system. The GPL in no way bars closed apps from being run on an open system.
The real reason Apple went with BSD is because Mac OS X is basically an updated version of NeXT's OPENSTEP OS that can run Carbon apps, has a new graphics sub-system, Java, and includes a few new apps like the emulation environment that runs Classic Mac OS programs. NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were based on BSD/Mach. All Apple did was update the Mach kernel and update the BSD 4.3 code to BSD 4.4 from some Free distributions.
Using Linux would've involved ripping out the UNIX underpinnings and replacing them for negligible gain. It was a smarter move to stay with what had been proven to work for NeXT. (Though I really, really wish that they'd adopt GNU syntax in the command-line utilities. It's so much better.)
I don't buy that argument.. the same could be said for Sun, but they make an X86 Solaris. Why? At least partly because they know if people use it on x86 and get experience with it, they might then buy Sun computers knowing how much better it will/could be on it. There are other reasons too (so that admins who work on Sparcs can use Solaris at home too without the high cost of sparc machines), but that's one of the primary ones IMO.
Well, that works for Sun. Sun's advantage is it's highly scalable server software. This isn't the same as the desktop market. The kind of person who would buy a high end Sun server wouldn't be able to find the same performance in any current x86-based server. It's not just more, faster chips. There are a number of other reasons too.
However, Apple is in the desktop market. The speed advantage of Apple hardware is a slight thing at best nowdays, while the price is still at a premium. I don't regret my purchase of a PowerMac G4 at the time I made it. It was far better than any x86 machine on the market at the time. Times have changed, but the prices have not. The price ratio is no longer worth paying on the merit of higher performance alone, and recent trends over the past few years should show anyone knowledgeable in computers that the public cares far more about low price than high performance. Witness the explosion of sub-$1000, then sub-$800, then sub-$500 markets.
What are the two reasons to buy from Apple, then? If you're new to computers, fashion is probably a factor. If you're not, then the Mac OS is the more important reason. You make the Mac OS available on cheaper albiet slower and less reliable hardware and most people won't care. They wouldn't pay the premium for Apple hardware, unless they liked the looks. Remember, I'm talking about normal, uninformed people -- not computer geeks like us.
That guts Apple's hardware sales. We saw the exact same thing when Apple allowed clone makers. Questionably superior or inferior hardware, offered for much less than Apple's offerings. Basically, it ate Apple alive. So, what does Apple have left? While dropping hardware would cut their costs, the vast majority of their profits come from their hardware. There are only a few OS-only companies. They usually either:
1) Try to sell their OS at a premium, with limited success (NeXT)
2) Lead some particular profitable niche market (QNX)
3) Supplant their OS research with other products (Apple, Microsoft)
4) Offer support for arcane, user-unfriendly OSes (*cough* Linux distros *cough*)
5) Flounder until they can do one or more of 1-4 or die (Be)
Apple has next to no other real compelling software to sell, like MS, and they no longer dominate any markets that Windows or other can't really compete in. The whole goal of the Mac OS is to make living off of support nigh-impossible, so their choices are to jack up prices -- which will chafe most cheap consumers (who are probably already paying for Windows anyway on x86 hardware) -- or they can take the nosedive to death. It really is that limited.
It's bad enough to see people post within a thread without having read the full story, but it's far worse to see whole stories posted by editors who didn't bother to do any research.
Just look at it. He didn't even follow the link to notice the fact that it's Dulux, not Delux. Oh, and the 700 SMS games are obviously pirated, not that he probably saw them. There's no way Sega would license 700 games for a reasonably small portion of the $249 price tag. Oh, and orders are placed through PayPal? I smell something here.
It's obviously either a complete scam or a legitimately illegal piece of hardware. Plus, any player that deliberately touted region and Macrovision bypassing would be in clear violation of the DVD-CCA's contracts to license CSS and other technologies necessary to play DVDs. As much as I hate the MPAA, it might be fun to report these jokers -- well, before or after reporting them to the Better Business Bureau.
Had Sony bothered to write a set of high-level libraries, an emu might have been able to intercept calls to it and translate them a port of Sony's library.
You could probably shift the bulk of such a library's work onto the NV20's T&L processor, leaving the x86 to deal with the application's physics code and the like. Of course, Sony hasn't yet released such a library so this is pure speculation.
Of course, then, you wouldn't have compatibility for the best-performing games on the machine, and no one would want half-done compatibility. Those games are always the ones that go straight to the metal, like some of Square's latest games. While it's a stumbling block not to have libraries for developers getting used to the system, those that do will be writing much more powerful games. The article covers a couple of possible uses of the different units in the Emotion Engine architecture for different kinds of games.
There's also a few other problems that I'm not sure the X-box could handle. The main CPU core is capable of doing two 64-bit integer operations at once. I'm not even sure if the x86 family supports 64-bit integer ops. I'm positive it doesn't support doing them in an explicitly parallel fashion, though you could try to rely on the processor to schedule them at once in a superscalar fashion. At the very least, it won't do 64-bit integer math at optimum speeds. Then, there's always the precise timing based on knowledge of the hardware that emulators sometimes have trouble with.
Add to that the requirement for more memory than the PS2 has total (so that the games and the emulator can all be in memory at once) and the usual 50% or more slow-down that even the best emulators seem to have compared to native chip speeds due to emulator overhead... Well, it seems to be at least nigh-impossible.
Anyway, its just a rumour for now, what ya think could a useable PS2 emulator be developed for an xbox spec machine ?
Two words: Hell, no.
Just trying to emulate VU0 & VU1 on the PS2 would be far more than an x86 chip could handle. If you've read the article, you'll remember that that's up to 10 simultaneous floating point calculations that the Emotion Engine platform can chew on at once (1 for the main FPU, 4 for VU0, and 5 for VU1). Intel's SSE can barely choke on 4 at a time, if I recall correctly, coupled with -- maybe -- up to two simultaneously issued instructions to the FPUs on a Celeron. I'll almost guarantee that it gets better FPU performance too. FP and SIMD have not been x86 strong-points compared to other architectures.
Then you've got to consider emulating the interaction between various components of the system, such as how VU0 & VU1 may do math in serial or in parallel to render a scene. Then there's the insane bandwidth between the system and the Graphics Synthesizer -- 2560 bits at 150 MHz. The PS2 is meant to be constantly transferring data over its busses and to make relatively little use of cache. Oh, and then there's the little inconsequential IO processor that's basically a PSX on a chip.
Time will tell whether the X-box will be a better gaming platform or not. However, I don't care how good it is, you won't see something capable of emulating a PS2 for years, unless someone else takes the radical architectural approaches that they did. It's just too different from a regular PC-like architecture, and let's face it -- that's all the X-box is is a suped-up PC in a console box.
If the human brain can adapt to 4-color sight, then I wonder how much longer before someone tries to engineer extra infra-red cones. Infrared-sensitive eyes have long been a part of the cyberpunk genre of fiction, but the idea of growing up with "natural" infrared vision in addition to normal color vision would be wonderful.
If we ever moved that way, though, would we have to come up with new color words -- words that most of the population couldn't understand?
1) Speed is already one of the most emphasized design goals of the Linux kernel. If you have never read the Linux kernel source, then you're probably not aware of the numerous gcc-specific tricks and tangled code that is used to speed optimizations. Trust me. The kernel is as fast as it's going to get.
2) It is standardized between every incremental revision, as much as any driver model can be standardized. The major changes only come between minor and major revisions, such as 2.2 -> 2.3/2.4.
3) Whatever.
4) Nonsense. The kernel uses the user-level helper tasks for efficiency's sake. If you haven't studied the kernel module loading system, then you shouldn't really be talking about it. Standardization of config files is also impossible in many cases do to the differences between said devices.
5) Might be nice.
6) Okay, now this just shows total ignorance of how Linux and software/system interaction in general works. The kernel's treatment of threads is that they are equal to processes that share the same memory mapping structures. The Linux scheduler handles thread-switching quite admirably, and you will be hard-pressed to find any desktop OS scheduler that performs as well as Linux's. The major misconception here is in assuming that "pervasive multi-threading" is all the kernel's responsibility. That is all the responsibility of the user-level library and application code. The kernel schedules and relegates threads. It's the user-level code that responsible for taking advantage of the threading facilities available.
You seem to be bound up in the desktop world of "GUI == part of OS." In Linux, the GUI is a user-level application, as well it should be in the case of what they have available. God forbid anyone attempt to weld the Unseelie monstrosity that is X11 into the kernel. That would introduce bloat and instability into the entire system. This is why there aren't kernel-level SAMBA implementations, BTW. The responsiveness of the desktop interface is not the Linux kernel's fault. The fact is that QNX and BeOS both have very well written GUI layers. However, to claim that they are in general more responsive is a little bit of marketing/evangelism propoganda. The responsiveness of the Linux kernel is very, very nice on a process/thread level.
Yeah, an orbital elevator. Duh. It's been thought of in science fiction for decades. The problem is that there is massive strain on the cable from the centrifugal force that requires the cable to be made from material with incredible tensile strength, approximately 62 GPa. Many sci-fi authors have come up with things like "woven diamond." Modern research has indicated that carbon nanotubles might be the answer -- once we find a way of manufacturing them.
In fact, there was a slashdot article on this in September. It's an old idea.
It has little to do with the problem of funding for the satellite. It's just that they can't fund the researchers to watch it. It'll probably stay safely in orbit on its own, but if no one's able to watch it, it would be safer for future shuttle missions to just deorbit it in a controlled fashion.
I'm really disappointed in the way Bush didn't answer the question about tax cuts countering the efforts of Alan Greenspan to keep inflation in check. However, I'm made even more cynical by his non-response that claimed Greenspan actually supported his move and demonized the Gore campaign by saying that he won't spend the money on new programs like Gore. Hello? Didn't he also say:
I have a plan that includes $2.767 billion in new initiatives to help parents, teachers, and faith-based leaders influence children to steer clear of the evils of the drug culture.
Then, didn't he immediately follow it up with promises to spend the majority of the $5 trillon surplus on new programs and not on debt reduction before giving $1 trillion back in a tax cut?
Got that right. That's reason numbero uno that I'm buying a PlayStation2 -- Final Fantasy X. I will buy whatever console that Square targets its games for. Heck, I'm even going to buy a color WonderSwan if Square sells their updated ports of the old Nintendo Final Fantasy I, IIj, & IIIj in America. I bought my Playstation for Final Fantasy VII, and I'll buy my Playstation2 for Final Fantasy X when it comes out.
I'll follow Square anywhere -- other than X-box that is.
I have a DVD player. Moreover, I have a GOOD DVD player that's better than the PS2 one and so Sony putting a DVD player into the PS2 is completely and utterly useless to me, and in fact incurs the additional cost of paying for shit I don't want or need.
Actually, you need to look at it from the flipside. The PS2 supports MPEG-2 decoding and the 4.7 GB+ DVD disc format for enhanced game play. The fact that it can play DVDs is a neat bonus. If you play console RPGs, like Final Fantasy VII & VIII, then you can see what the ability to mix MPEG-2 video into the gameplay and no longer having to use 4 discs for one game will buy you.
QDR SRAM is not meant as a replacement for main memory. Like most SRAM, it's meant for high speed buffers, such as on a network router, hard drive, or (maybe) processor L2 cache (though it only runs at 200 MHz). SRAM is much more expensive and consumes much more power than DRAM, including DDR SDRAM and RDRAM.
DDD SRAM != DDR SDRAM. Read Ars Technica's RAM guide for a good description of the underlying differences in design between SRAM and SDRAM.
Also, you'll note that QDR SRAM does not violate the most contentious of Rambus Inc.'s patents because it's older SRAM technology, not SDRAM. They aren't really doing anything that new. All QDR SRAM is is double-ported DDR SRAM. All the information is there on the website you linked to.
I think that one of the key things we have to come to realize at this dawn of a new century is the extreme danger of a growing and increasingly politicized use of science.
Personally, I find it more dangerous that our society looks at the empirical evidence of science and calls it political when it threatens the cushy life that we've built for ourselves. In this case, the scientific evidence clashes with the orthodox forces of the industrial establishment. This is not dissimilar from the attitude of Big Tobacco with dueling studies over the cancer-causing effects of tobacco smoke.
Facts:
The ozone hole is getting larger. Satellite photos show this.
The ozone layer protects us from the larger amounts of UV radiation outside the atomsphere.
UV radiation contributes to cancer. FYI, UV radiation is sufficiently energetic to break carbon bonds -- the chemical backbone of all biological structures.
Certain chemicals we emit into the environment react with ozone, disrupting the ozone-oxygen/free radical cycle that blocks UV rays.
While there may be a natural component to this happening, deep cores taken from Antarctic ice indicate that this is the worst the planet has probably seen.
Only dedicated and intelligent scientists, devoted to their field of inquiry [while in competition with each other] are qualified to make any determinations of provable risk, and if there is any at all.
They are making predictions of risk, and they are starting to come true, but people are ignoring them, calling their research "political."
Actually, while much of his statement was a lot of overreacting, the so-called "terminator" seeds are real. They're the creation of Monsanto, a biotech company on the same level of consumer disdaining evil as Microsoft. Monsanto is also the inventor of PCBs & Agent Orange and a big promoter of rBGH. They also have a pretty hideous record of being fined for pollution.
My favorite quote from them is from Phil Angel, their director of corporate communications: "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."
Here's a great paranoid website tracking the antics of this company and their money-over-lives attitude. Granted, it is off an organic foods website, but the articles they link to are all for real.
Of course, that won't protect us against a gamma-ray burst unless we get out of this whole galaxy, and it won't protect us against the collapse of the vacuum if that's even possible.
Exactly. Actually, from what I've heard, Bush's tax cuts, etc are for giving back/making things more proportional. i.e., if you are of the 10% rich, then you get more back, because you have paid more. Conversely, if you paid little, you get little back. Why in hell people have problems with this I'll never understand. You pay more, you get more back. There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
Except that the rich are already getting more out of society than the poor. Plus, the money which is taxed from them is money that would go to luxury uses as compared to the basic necessities that the poor and middle class have to spend their money on.
As for Brin's "rant", it just seems to be more liberalist crap. He's just perpetuating the liberal notion that it's the government's money, not yours, and even if it was yours, the government knows best how to handle it. Never mind that for inheritance taxes, they are taxing income and goods that have already been taxed. Never mind that the government should be in no way whatsoever entitled to get up to 50% of someone's equity and goods and such just because they died and wanted to pass it on to their offspring.
What did their offspring do to earn it? What will losing a few million more matter to the top 1% of the nation? Compare that to what $1000 more would matter to the bottom 10%. Yes, the government does know best how to use some of that money. The military, environmental protection, farm relief, federal law enforcement, and other domains are areas in which an individual rich person could do little to help out even if they were so inclined. This redistribution of wealth to protect the entirety of the nations from others and from itself is the reason we have the "diamond" that he describes. It's not a square block, like in a pure socialist society, but it serves the majority of the people far better than the old "pyramid" system. Isn't that what democracy is all about, serving the needs of the majority?
This makes the flat tax idea seem a great one.
Oh, except that it has the exact same effect that he describes of eliminating the motivation for rich people to give to charity that our current progressive system uses while simultaneously penalizing the lowest income brackets. No wonder the Republicans are so much in favor of this. It's the rich that will most benefit.
Giving the government less of our money to work with might be the single most effective way at reducing government.
Not that anyone's given a good reason for wanting this other than it means more money in their pockets -- in the short term, anyway. What exactly is wrong with large government, and how do you think reducing their income in taxes will reduce the government instead of just racking up more debt.?
Added to this, it's a microkernel system. Big Iron doesn't need microkernels. They're a little bit slower by nature, but you get the advance of a small, configurable "mostly user-space" kernel. That's pretty cool for palmtops and everyday PC's but not Big Iron, I'd say. That's why QNX doesn't run on mainframes.
Actually, a microkernel would be excellent for a huge massively parallel mainframe. The more elements of the system you spin off into seperate userland processes, the more you can run at once. Most of what a good microkernel does is pass messages between processes and processors and schedule things. This minimal overhead means less kernel blocking and more ability to spawn off tasks on seperate processors. There is less "critical code" to worry about. The overhead in a microkernel that everyone speaks about is mainly an issue for desktop, not mainframe systems.
Oh, and QNX can run on SMP systems. Read about it here. It only seems to go up to 8 procs currently (wheee...), but it sounds as if it could potentially do more.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever. I actually own a G4, and it's quite fast enough for me when you're on a good network connection. It renders Slashdot in less than a second on Netscape 4.75, so what's your problem? Not happy with being able to blink between hitting return at the URL bar and getting a page, or is it just IE envy?
I think you're just spewing nonsense and hatred, free from the burden of facts.
Actually, I forgot to cover that in my reply. The wife/girlfriend/love interest who is dedicated to keeping their life as a couple normal at all costs is another archtype which I'm used to seeing -- at least in anime. I could list a number of sources, but the ones you'd probably find the easiest would be on Toonami, so there's Chi-chi -- Gokuu's wife on Dragonball Z -- and Catherine -- Trowa's girl on Gundam Wing. They're not really villanous. They just want to lead a normal life, and the strange abilities and/or willingness to go off to battle of the man they are in love with threatens all of that.
I've having a hard time thinking of a good example of this from American sources. Many Batman stories have involved a woman who wants him to settle down, but it's not a regular occurance. I'm sure there's got to be more, it just doesn't come to mind immediately.
I remember them. You could supposedly drop one off the roof of a building in the middle of a read/write operation and not loose any data or damage the media from the impact.
The Stillsuits looked very lame - once again - done better by Lynch.
At least they had caps and masks this time. It was really silly to see Fremen running around with their heads (particularly their noses and mouths) uncovered to let all that moisture evaporate.
It doesn't seem like any of the talent in this series outside of William Hurt is ready for even network TV.
I dunno. Feyd looks like he could be interesting once the plot starts to involve him more. He looks a little more cunning and menacing than Sting's version.
Irulan
I despise the introduction of Irulan as a potential love interest. This makes his later action of virtually enslaving her in a marriage without love by which she will bear him no children for the purpose of securing his claim to the throne somewhat dulled and nonsensical. We'll see what they do with that.
Guild Navigators
Guild navigators are very well described in the second book, Dune Messiah, were one is involved in a conspiracy to kill Emperor Atreides. They are humanoid in form, but are taller and more elongated looking with bluish-silver skin, eyes that are so blue that they are almost black, and gills that they use to breathe the spice-laden air they must live in. They have extra fingers and toes, which are very elongated and are webbed. Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials has the most accurate picture I've ever seen. This fleshy Abyss-style manta/Communion alien this is better than the mutant aborted fetus of the movie, but it's FAR from accurate. I was very disappointed to see them not fully correct this detail.
Paul
Paul really does come off as Luke Skywalker. The little whiny bitchy Luke of the first movie. ("...but we could buy our own star ship with thaa-at!) The rebellous attitude is in stark contrast with the almost unnatural maturity Paul possesses. He's supposed to be trained as a Mentat. Where did all that go? I already don't like his character, but I'm hoping he'll grow up some once the Fremen get ahold of him.
Other than all that and the floating Baron Harkonnen, I'm pretty happy with the faithfulness of the mini-series adaptation.
Paul displays incredible maturity, discipline, and self-control even from the very beginning in the book. I'm disappointed that they didn't stress his Mentat training more. "A Mentat Duke would be most formidable."
The ornithopter thing makes sense since we have no real working function designs that could operate at anywhere near the speeds, cargo carrying capacity, and cost efficiency of the machines from the books, so why bother showing one? You can wave away anti-gravity and star drives, but a purely mechanical propulsion system can't really be BS'ed unless it's flat-out fantasy and magic is involved.
But he's not the villain because he does those things for good reasons...
You really need to read more comic books, read more fiction, and watch more movies in general.
In real life, no one hardly ever thinks that they're the bad guy. The Unabomber thought he was doing what was right (stopping the evils of modern society). The guy who shot all those abortion doctors thought he was doing what was right (bring justice to baby assassins). People who embed nails in trees which result in fatal or crippling logging accidents think they're doing what is right (saving the forest from greedy rapists of the earth). Heck, that guy last week who was working with his mom to try to sell off his nephew on the Russian black market to be broken down into organs said he was "pursuing his dream."
I'm getting side tracked though. In fiction there are three major kinds of villians:
1) Those who are evil for the sake of being evil.
2) Those who are merely selfish and ruthless.
3) Those who are willing to commit evil for the greater good.
The first one is simply lame. "Ooo, I am darkness incarnate. Fear me!" The only time it even remotely works is when supernatural forces of Evil are involved. Even then, it has become cliche. The best villians all fall into the latter categories. Even the insane and evil Hannibal Lecter is a case of the second category. He's not doing it to be evil, he's just willing to go to any extreme to satisfy his darker desires. However, this is still not a villian doing things for the greater good.
In the realm of superheroes and comic books, the best example of a villian doing something for the greater good is Magneto. Magneto has seen what happens when a minority is oppressed in the extreme when growing up in WWII Germany. He is fighting back so that mutants will come out on top. In his eyes, he is completely justified for anything he does. He is trying to be a savior to his people. So, don't discount Mr. Glass as a villian just because he thinks he's justified. The justified villian is a fictional archetype reaching back as far as literature has been being written. It's very much a cornerstone of the pulp genre which led to the development of modern comics.
Viable theory, or have I overlooked something in the screenplay?
You also might want to consider that every superhero has more than one villian. Mr. Glass would just be the first that David Dunn faces.
You know, wanting to keep parts of their system closed has nothing to do with the choice of BSD over Linux. Everything that Linux would've done (the BSD layer) is already open source. Everything else in the OS is just a user-space app. You can drop in a new copy of the Darwin kernel and not disturb a single thing in the system. The GPL in no way bars closed apps from being run on an open system.
The real reason Apple went with BSD is because Mac OS X is basically an updated version of NeXT's OPENSTEP OS that can run Carbon apps, has a new graphics sub-system, Java, and includes a few new apps like the emulation environment that runs Classic Mac OS programs. NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were based on BSD/Mach. All Apple did was update the Mach kernel and update the BSD 4.3 code to BSD 4.4 from some Free distributions.
Using Linux would've involved ripping out the UNIX underpinnings and replacing them for negligible gain. It was a smarter move to stay with what had been proven to work for NeXT. (Though I really, really wish that they'd adopt GNU syntax in the command-line utilities. It's so much better.)
I don't buy that argument.. the same could be said for Sun, but they make an X86 Solaris. Why? At least partly because they know if people use it on x86 and get experience with it, they might then buy Sun computers knowing how much better it will/could be on it. There are other reasons too (so that admins who work on Sparcs can use Solaris at home too without the high cost of sparc machines), but that's one of the primary ones IMO.
Well, that works for Sun. Sun's advantage is it's highly scalable server software. This isn't the same as the desktop market. The kind of person who would buy a high end Sun server wouldn't be able to find the same performance in any current x86-based server. It's not just more, faster chips. There are a number of other reasons too.
However, Apple is in the desktop market. The speed advantage of Apple hardware is a slight thing at best nowdays, while the price is still at a premium. I don't regret my purchase of a PowerMac G4 at the time I made it. It was far better than any x86 machine on the market at the time. Times have changed, but the prices have not. The price ratio is no longer worth paying on the merit of higher performance alone, and recent trends over the past few years should show anyone knowledgeable in computers that the public cares far more about low price than high performance. Witness the explosion of sub-$1000, then sub-$800, then sub-$500 markets.
What are the two reasons to buy from Apple, then? If you're new to computers, fashion is probably a factor. If you're not, then the Mac OS is the more important reason. You make the Mac OS available on cheaper albiet slower and less reliable hardware and most people won't care. They wouldn't pay the premium for Apple hardware, unless they liked the looks. Remember, I'm talking about normal, uninformed people -- not computer geeks like us.
That guts Apple's hardware sales. We saw the exact same thing when Apple allowed clone makers. Questionably superior or inferior hardware, offered for much less than Apple's offerings. Basically, it ate Apple alive. So, what does Apple have left? While dropping hardware would cut their costs, the vast majority of their profits come from their hardware. There are only a few OS-only companies. They usually either:
1) Try to sell their OS at a premium, with limited success (NeXT)
2) Lead some particular profitable niche market (QNX)
3) Supplant their OS research with other products (Apple, Microsoft)
4) Offer support for arcane, user-unfriendly OSes (*cough* Linux distros *cough*)
5) Flounder until they can do one or more of 1-4 or die (Be)
Apple has next to no other real compelling software to sell, like MS, and they no longer dominate any markets that Windows or other can't really compete in. The whole goal of the Mac OS is to make living off of support nigh-impossible, so their choices are to jack up prices -- which will chafe most cheap consumers (who are probably already paying for Windows anyway on x86 hardware) -- or they can take the nosedive to death. It really is that limited.
It's bad enough to see people post within a thread without having read the full story, but it's far worse to see whole stories posted by editors who didn't bother to do any research. Just look at it. He didn't even follow the link to notice the fact that it's Dulux, not Delux. Oh, and the 700 SMS games are obviously pirated, not that he probably saw them. There's no way Sega would license 700 games for a reasonably small portion of the $249 price tag. Oh, and orders are placed through PayPal? I smell something here. It's obviously either a complete scam or a legitimately illegal piece of hardware. Plus, any player that deliberately touted region and Macrovision bypassing would be in clear violation of the DVD-CCA's contracts to license CSS and other technologies necessary to play DVDs. As much as I hate the MPAA, it might be fun to report these jokers -- well, before or after reporting them to the Better Business Bureau.
Had Sony bothered to write a set of high-level libraries, an emu might have been able to intercept calls to it and translate them a port of Sony's library.
You could probably shift the bulk of such a library's work onto the NV20's T&L processor, leaving the x86 to deal with the application's physics code and the like. Of course, Sony hasn't yet released such a library so this is pure speculation.
Of course, then, you wouldn't have compatibility for the best-performing games on the machine, and no one would want half-done compatibility. Those games are always the ones that go straight to the metal, like some of Square's latest games. While it's a stumbling block not to have libraries for developers getting used to the system, those that do will be writing much more powerful games. The article covers a couple of possible uses of the different units in the Emotion Engine architecture for different kinds of games.
There's also a few other problems that I'm not sure the X-box could handle. The main CPU core is capable of doing two 64-bit integer operations at once. I'm not even sure if the x86 family supports 64-bit integer ops. I'm positive it doesn't support doing them in an explicitly parallel fashion, though you could try to rely on the processor to schedule them at once in a superscalar fashion. At the very least, it won't do 64-bit integer math at optimum speeds. Then, there's always the precise timing based on knowledge of the hardware that emulators sometimes have trouble with.
Add to that the requirement for more memory than the PS2 has total (so that the games and the emulator can all be in memory at once) and the usual 50% or more slow-down that even the best emulators seem to have compared to native chip speeds due to emulator overhead... Well, it seems to be at least nigh-impossible.
Anyway, its just a rumour for now, what ya think could a useable PS2 emulator be developed for an xbox spec machine ?
Two words: Hell, no.
Just trying to emulate VU0 & VU1 on the PS2 would be far more than an x86 chip could handle. If you've read the article, you'll remember that that's up to 10 simultaneous floating point calculations that the Emotion Engine platform can chew on at once (1 for the main FPU, 4 for VU0, and 5 for VU1). Intel's SSE can barely choke on 4 at a time, if I recall correctly, coupled with -- maybe -- up to two simultaneously issued instructions to the FPUs on a Celeron. I'll almost guarantee that it gets better FPU performance too. FP and SIMD have not been x86 strong-points compared to other architectures.
Then you've got to consider emulating the interaction between various components of the system, such as how VU0 & VU1 may do math in serial or in parallel to render a scene. Then there's the insane bandwidth between the system and the Graphics Synthesizer -- 2560 bits at 150 MHz. The PS2 is meant to be constantly transferring data over its busses and to make relatively little use of cache. Oh, and then there's the little inconsequential IO processor that's basically a PSX on a chip.
Time will tell whether the X-box will be a better gaming platform or not. However, I don't care how good it is, you won't see something capable of emulating a PS2 for years, unless someone else takes the radical architectural approaches that they did. It's just too different from a regular PC-like architecture, and let's face it -- that's all the X-box is is a suped-up PC in a console box.
If the human brain can adapt to 4-color sight, then I wonder how much longer before someone tries to engineer extra infra-red cones. Infrared-sensitive eyes have long been a part of the cyberpunk genre of fiction, but the idea of growing up with "natural" infrared vision in addition to normal color vision would be wonderful.
If we ever moved that way, though, would we have to come up with new color words -- words that most of the population couldn't understand?
1) Speed is already one of the most emphasized design goals of the Linux kernel. If you have never read the Linux kernel source, then you're probably not aware of the numerous gcc-specific tricks and tangled code that is used to speed optimizations. Trust me. The kernel is as fast as it's going to get.
2) It is standardized between every incremental revision, as much as any driver model can be standardized. The major changes only come between minor and major revisions, such as 2.2 -> 2.3/2.4.
3) Whatever.
4) Nonsense. The kernel uses the user-level helper tasks for efficiency's sake. If you haven't studied the kernel module loading system, then you shouldn't really be talking about it. Standardization of config files is also impossible in many cases do to the differences between said devices.
5) Might be nice.
6) Okay, now this just shows total ignorance of how Linux and software/system interaction in general works. The kernel's treatment of threads is that they are equal to processes that share the same memory mapping structures. The Linux scheduler handles thread-switching quite admirably, and you will be hard-pressed to find any desktop OS scheduler that performs as well as Linux's. The major misconception here is in assuming that "pervasive multi-threading" is all the kernel's responsibility. That is all the responsibility of the user-level library and application code. The kernel schedules and relegates threads. It's the user-level code that responsible for taking advantage of the threading facilities available.
You seem to be bound up in the desktop world of "GUI == part of OS." In Linux, the GUI is a user-level application, as well it should be in the case of what they have available. God forbid anyone attempt to weld the Unseelie monstrosity that is X11 into the kernel. That would introduce bloat and instability into the entire system. This is why there aren't kernel-level SAMBA implementations, BTW. The responsiveness of the desktop interface is not the Linux kernel's fault. The fact is that QNX and BeOS both have very well written GUI layers. However, to claim that they are in general more responsive is a little bit of marketing/evangelism propoganda. The responsiveness of the Linux kernel is very, very nice on a process/thread level.
Yeah, an orbital elevator. Duh. It's been thought of in science fiction for decades. The problem is that there is massive strain on the cable from the centrifugal force that requires the cable to be made from material with incredible tensile strength, approximately 62 GPa. Many sci-fi authors have come up with things like "woven diamond." Modern research has indicated that carbon nanotubles might be the answer -- once we find a way of manufacturing them.
In fact, there was a slashdot article on this in September. It's an old idea.
It has little to do with the problem of funding for the satellite. It's just that they can't fund the researchers to watch it. It'll probably stay safely in orbit on its own, but if no one's able to watch it, it would be safer for future shuttle missions to just deorbit it in a controlled fashion.
I'm really disappointed in the way Bush didn't answer the question about tax cuts countering the efforts of Alan Greenspan to keep inflation in check. However, I'm made even more cynical by his non-response that claimed Greenspan actually supported his move and demonized the Gore campaign by saying that he won't spend the money on new programs like Gore. Hello? Didn't he also say:
I have a plan that includes $2.767 billion in new initiatives to help parents, teachers, and faith-based leaders influence children to steer clear of the evils of the drug culture.
Then, didn't he immediately follow it up with promises to spend the majority of the $5 trillon surplus on new programs and not on debt reduction before giving $1 trillion back in a tax cut?
And the gamers follow Square left and right.
Got that right. That's reason numbero uno that I'm buying a PlayStation2 -- Final Fantasy X. I will buy whatever console that Square targets its games for. Heck, I'm even going to buy a color WonderSwan if Square sells their updated ports of the old Nintendo Final Fantasy I, IIj, & IIIj in America. I bought my Playstation for Final Fantasy VII, and I'll buy my Playstation2 for Final Fantasy X when it comes out.
I'll follow Square anywhere -- other than X-box that is.
I have a DVD player. Moreover, I have a GOOD DVD player that's better than the PS2 one and so Sony putting a DVD player into the PS2 is completely and utterly useless to me, and in fact incurs the additional cost of paying for shit I don't want or need.
Actually, you need to look at it from the flipside. The PS2 supports MPEG-2 decoding and the 4.7 GB+ DVD disc format for enhanced game play. The fact that it can play DVDs is a neat bonus. If you play console RPGs, like Final Fantasy VII & VIII, then you can see what the ability to mix MPEG-2 video into the gameplay and no longer having to use 4 discs for one game will buy you.
QDR SRAM is not meant as a replacement for main memory. Like most SRAM, it's meant for high speed buffers, such as on a network router, hard drive, or (maybe) processor L2 cache (though it only runs at 200 MHz). SRAM is much more expensive and consumes much more power than DRAM, including DDR SDRAM and RDRAM.
DDD SRAM != DDR SDRAM. Read Ars Technica's RAM guide for a good description of the underlying differences in design between SRAM and SDRAM.
Also, you'll note that QDR SRAM does not violate the most contentious of Rambus Inc.'s patents because it's older SRAM technology, not SDRAM. They aren't really doing anything that new. All QDR SRAM is is double-ported DDR SRAM. All the information is there on the website you linked to.
Personally, I find it more dangerous that our society looks at the empirical evidence of science and calls it political when it threatens the cushy life that we've built for ourselves. In this case, the scientific evidence clashes with the orthodox forces of the industrial establishment. This is not dissimilar from the attitude of Big Tobacco with dueling studies over the cancer-causing effects of tobacco smoke.
Facts:
Only dedicated and intelligent scientists, devoted to their field of inquiry [while in competition with each other] are qualified to make any determinations of provable risk, and if there is any at all.
They are making predictions of risk, and they are starting to come true, but people are ignoring them, calling their research "political."
Actually, while much of his statement was a lot of overreacting, the so-called "terminator" seeds are real. They're the creation of Monsanto, a biotech company on the same level of consumer disdaining evil as Microsoft. Monsanto is also the inventor of PCBs & Agent Orange and a big promoter of rBGH. They also have a pretty hideous record of being fined for pollution.
My favorite quote from them is from Phil Angel, their director of corporate communications: "Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA's job."
Here's a great paranoid website tracking the antics of this company and their money-over-lives attitude. Granted, it is off an organic foods website, but the articles they link to are all for real.
Of course, that won't protect us against a gamma-ray burst unless we get out of this whole galaxy, and it won't protect us against the collapse of the vacuum if that's even possible.
Of course, that assumes that there has been someone infringing on the patent by doing it without first licensing it. Oops.
Exactly. Actually, from what I've heard, Bush's tax cuts, etc are for giving back/making things more proportional. i.e., if you are of the 10% rich, then you get more back, because you have paid more. Conversely, if you paid little, you get little back. Why in hell people have problems with this I'll never understand. You pay more, you get more back. There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever.
Except that the rich are already getting more out of society than the poor. Plus, the money which is taxed from them is money that would go to luxury uses as compared to the basic necessities that the poor and middle class have to spend their money on.
As for Brin's "rant", it just seems to be more liberalist crap. He's just perpetuating the liberal notion that it's the government's money, not yours, and even if it was yours, the government knows best how to handle it. Never mind that for inheritance taxes, they are taxing income and goods that have already been taxed. Never mind that the government should be in no way whatsoever entitled to get up to 50% of someone's equity and goods and such just because they died and wanted to pass it on to their offspring.
What did their offspring do to earn it? What will losing a few million more matter to the top 1% of the nation? Compare that to what $1000 more would matter to the bottom 10%. Yes, the government does know best how to use some of that money. The military, environmental protection, farm relief, federal law enforcement, and other domains are areas in which an individual rich person could do little to help out even if they were so inclined. This redistribution of wealth to protect the entirety of the nations from others and from itself is the reason we have the "diamond" that he describes. It's not a square block, like in a pure socialist society, but it serves the majority of the people far better than the old "pyramid" system. Isn't that what democracy is all about, serving the needs of the majority?
This makes the flat tax idea seem a great one.
Oh, except that it has the exact same effect that he describes of eliminating the motivation for rich people to give to charity that our current progressive system uses while simultaneously penalizing the lowest income brackets. No wonder the Republicans are so much in favor of this. It's the rich that will most benefit.
Giving the government less of our money to work with might be the single most effective way at reducing government.
Not that anyone's given a good reason for wanting this other than it means more money in their pockets -- in the short term, anyway. What exactly is wrong with large government, and how do you think reducing their income in taxes will reduce the government instead of just racking up more debt.?
Added to this, it's a microkernel system. Big Iron doesn't need microkernels. They're a little bit slower by nature, but you get the advance of a small, configurable "mostly user-space" kernel. That's pretty cool for palmtops and everyday PC's but not Big Iron, I'd say. That's why QNX doesn't run on mainframes. Actually, a microkernel would be excellent for a huge massively parallel mainframe. The more elements of the system you spin off into seperate userland processes, the more you can run at once. Most of what a good microkernel does is pass messages between processes and processors and schedule things. This minimal overhead means less kernel blocking and more ability to spawn off tasks on seperate processors. There is less "critical code" to worry about. The overhead in a microkernel that everyone speaks about is mainly an issue for desktop, not mainframe systems. Oh, and QNX can run on SMP systems. Read about it here. It only seems to go up to 8 procs currently (wheee...), but it sounds as if it could potentially do more.