As for upcoming MMORPG's, none of them will command the attention that WoW has. If Lord of the Rings Online couldn't make a dent in WoW, especially given the long, great history of the Tolkien Universe, what chance does any other MMORPG have?
I don't think it will take a lot of "study" to see that game success has nothing to do with weight of established lore behind it. Just look at the history of Star Trek games. If anything, having a license to an existing "Universe" is a millstone around a game's neck.
LotR is almost as good an example as Trek. Due to the way magic in the books worked (almost no one had much, except a very few massively powerful wizards), they felt they had to make the magic system in LotRO impoverished compared to most other such games.
We could just go with logic here. Who's going to spend months or years of their free time playing a game, regardless of the game's own qualities, just because they really enjoyed the 5 to 10 hours it took them to read the books its lore comes from?
So I think pointing to a licensed product as somehow the "best hope" to unseat WoW just because of the strength of the source material is a bit wrong-headed.
What I want to know is what is a "MAC address request". I've never seen one. I've seen DHCP requests, ARP requests, even AARP requests- but not a MAC address request.
An ARP request is a request for the MAC address associated with the given IP address. Presumably that's what he meant.
Yes, its true that if some machine (for some bizzare reason) were to be requesting a MAC address, that's probably how you would phrase it. However, if you don't start with the assumption that he's a clueless, its fairly obvious what he's talking about.
Imagine if copyright lasts only for 14 years, Microsoft could use all GPL'ed code written before 1993.
...and we could use all Microsoft code written before 1993.
If anything, 14 years is probably way too short for software. Frigging "Lifetime Warranty"s for computer equipment only last 5 years. Arguably, software goes obsolete quicker than hardware. A large amount of software is obsolete on release (if they bother to release it at all).
That doesn't even get into the damage done to society when you have an industry where our entire societal infrastructure is now built on its products, copying is free, recreating from scratch is immensely expensive and time consuming, and industry can't find enough skilled people to build all that is needed.
AT&T also said an open-access network would deprive taxpayers of billions of dollars, and inhibit the growth of wireless broadband in the country."
English translation: We taxpayers would loose billions in revenue from sales of the operating frequencies to companies, who would have paid for it by charging us trillions in wireless fees.
I'm sure glad AT&T is fighting for my interes...wait a minute...
Remote KVM style solutions would have to send new video data over the wire before it would be available at the remote end
I can see what you are getting at from a throughput issue. From that standpoint (as well noise, etc), I can see advantages to doing this.
However, the OP was talking about "render lag", which I'm presuming is different from throughput. I don't see how lag is improved this way. If anything, it could get worse, as any synchronization between the CPU and the GPU now has to hop over the PCI bus, through the interface card, over the FO cable, into the remote unit, and then back, rather than just going over the PCI(-X?) bus.
I see from their datasheet that the IF cards are available in PCI-X 16, so it could be worse, but still there's all that extra hardware it has to hop through. That has to be increasing end to end lag.
Another interesting bit is that the actual graphics processor is in the Extio, not in the PC. This way rendering lag is minimized.
I'm not sure I understand this comment. The information is still going to have to travel (up to) 250 meters from CPU to display. What does it matter for lag where in that 250 meters the GPU sits? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "rendering lag"?
I work on commercial flight simulators. Lag as measured from control movement to video response is something the FAA has standards for, and thus we have to measure and optimize for.
I watched it live, and I must say it was full of marketing drivel. Not one moment did I feel wonder at what was displayed, only felt like I was being sold something but a really slimy salesman.... All we got in this display was I bunch of dick waving.
You wandered into the wrong trade show. You wanted the Electronic Entertainment Expo, not the Erotic Entertainment Expo. Read the marquee more closely next time.
george orwell is bullshit. the future of cameras everywhere is that they can be used AGAINST big government
More likely, it just means anyone can use them to invade anyone's privacy. Just imagine what batshit-crazy stalkers will start doing once they get access to universal surveilence cameras. (Hint: if you aren't batshit crazy yourself, you probably can only imagine the meerest surface of the evil they can cause).
Yeah, unrestricted use of goto's is generally considered a Bad Thing. However, there are two known situations where they actually can improve readability of a program:
Implementing state machines.
State machines have more or less entirely unstructured control to start with. The goto is a natural expression of this. You can avoid the dreaded "goto" in this situation by using a switch statement in a loop, with the cases representing each state. However, this is slower than the goto, and really no easier to read. For an example of this use of goto, see the code generated by lex.
Simulating exceptions in languages that don't support them directly.
Handling exceptional conditions inline can get quite ugly, and distracts the reader from the code representing the normal execution flow. It can also case a lot of duplicated code when there are several "exceptions" that need to be handled the same way. Instead, goto's can be used to redirect control to a separate "exception handler". The kernel code you linked appears to be an example of this kind of goto.
Little known fact: God experimented with MS Office for the Ten Commandments, (found in Exodus 20:2-17). Unfortunately, he left revision tracking on. Some clever Jewish hacker figured out the edits and posted the original version in Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Now we are stuck with two different versions.
Well, remember back when CD's came out...there really was no way to rip them...hell, not many people had a harddrive big enough to hold all a CD's data. At that time, a CD was a safe, one use medium...you could record off it to cassette, but, that was lossy and they didn't care that much about it.
In fact, the RIAA considered it a great advance. At the time everyone routinely made analog copies of their albums to cassette. A lot of people even bought cassettes (cheaper) and made copies of those. Most portable stereos came with two cassette drives for dubbing. Mine did it at quadruple speed, so it didn't take so long.
CD's were like an IP godsend to the RIAA. Suddenly there was a high-quality digital playback media, but there was no consumer digital recording media to match. When Sony tried to come out with digital cassettes a few years later, which would have gotten things back to where they were before, the RIAA screamed like a stuck pig.
The "consumers can only buy and playback" regime that the RIAA is trying so hard to maintain now is only a recent (20-year-old) system. There's absolutely no reason why they should expect this situation to last forever, and no reason why anyone should feel they have a right to it.
I have been bullied in various ways over the years, none all that particularly scarring. I have even been "cyberbullied" to use that hip term, and I agree with the above posts about it regarding anonymity. . . . Just unplug.
OK. As a former victim, I'll bite.
Suppose I unplug. How does that help me when Mr. Crazy is contacting my boss and lodging complaints, contacting my company's customers and lodging complaints, contacting relevant federal regulatory authorities dealing with my company and lodging complaints, setting up websites full of really nasty slander with my phone number and address (work and home) on them, is using test newsgroups to emailbomb my company's mail server. All of this has happened to me, and could happen to you too if you if you manage to tweak Mr. Crazy in some random way only he knows.
How about those disturbed individuals who go that extra mile to pose as you and post your address and info on your wife and / or children on deviant sex sites as someone who is interested in their kind of perverted action? Heck, they can even pose as your wife or kids and set up meetings with pervs at your house (while you are away). All this stuff *has* happened.
The temptation is to blame the victim, I know. I was that way too till it happened to me. You think nobody would go through all that trouble unless there was really something to their accusations, right? Surely nobody is disturbed enough to get *that* nasty for no reason, right? There are some limits to what another person will unfairly do to you for no good reason, right? No, no, and no. A certain percentage of the general public is just totally batshit crazy. Given the amount of people on the internet, the fact is that they are out there, like human land-mines. A real cyberbully is limited in the sick stuff he can do to you only by his twisted imagination.
Yes, you should be strong enough to laugh off idiot flamewars. But true cyberbullying is of a different scale entirely, and nobody should have to "just put up" with it.
Let me tell you, you have not lived until you've had some nutjob with nothing but time on his hands and an internet connection devote himself to making your life miserable. It truly amazing what someone with no life, shame, or scruples is capable of doing to you.
How or what does a district really do? Perhaps I'm naive but isn't a vote a vote? What matters what district you're in? If 100 people vote, 51 for x and 49 for y. It shouldn't matter who voted where.
Well, say you are someone with a stake in the balance of power between the Reps and the Dems in the House of Representatives. For example, lets pretend you are... I don't know... the leader of one of the parties in the House. Let's further say that the House is closely divided. To you a couple of changed seats either way can mean the difference between being (arguably) the most powerful person in the US, and meerly being the lead whiner.
Now lets suppose this state happens to have a lot of close districts, 50/50 rep and dem. If you can get yourself access to the newest census data mining software, you can figure out where reps and dems are down to a really low resolution. So what you can do is take 5 or so 50/50 districts. Pick one, and split all its reps you can find into the other districts. Move something like %15 of the other 4 districts' dems into the first district. Now instead of 5 50/50 districts, you have 4 safely rep districts and 1 very safe dem district. Do this a couple of more times, and you can pick up a lot of seats.
Of course there's a price to pay for this. That new safe dem in the house is probably going to be very liberal now, where she perhaps couldn't get away with that before. However, the other 4 reps are going to be a bit more conservative, since they can now get away with that. The one liberal is in the minority, and can be labeled a kook and ignored. Another drawback is that you just made the House way more partisan. But what do you care? You're now the most powerful person in the US! Time to go have a talk with those rich lobbyists...
The first interstellar humans will arrive at the next star in the form of embryos (or their virtual equivalents) to a pre-built space colony constructed by machines.
That'd be a great way to colonize the galaxy with alligators, but wouldn't work so well with humans. We are helpless when we are born, and are totally dependent on other (older) humans for out physical, mental, and emotional sustenance and development. If you can build machines that can do all that well enough, they'd have to be so close to human that you might as well just send them and leave the biologicals out of it entirely.
There was a good article not too long ago in Fast Company about the shuttle coding team.
Ah. ThankyouThankyouThankyou. I'd been looking for this article. Calling 1996 "Not too long ago" might be a bit of a stretch, at least for Slashdot, but its a great article for the layman on NASA manned software methodoligies. Anyone still confused by all this, please read the article, and then decide for yourself how likely it is that something important in there is running Windows.:-)
But claiming that it is "mathematically proved" that a program is bug free (or at least works as intended under all conditions) was going a bit too far
Perhaps. However, that's not quite what I said. I just said they run mathematical proofs on their software. If you know anything about formal methods (no shame in not knowing. Few CS graduates even know a lot about it), then you'd know that proofs should only be a part of a verification (testing) regimen. There can still be bugs in an implementation (or its compiler!), even after its algorithm has been "proven".
Could these computers have MicroSoft's Windows as the OS?
No.
On NASA's manned space equipment you will find no software that is not controlled by NASA. These folks don't just run a few tests. They spend thousands of dollars per SLOC in testing. They actually mathematically prove their software's correctness. Perhaps the Russian agency's quality isn't quite as high, but I still doubt their (or anyone else's) systems onboard the ISS have any OS at all. Most likely they are all custom embedded systems.
I'd council against jumping to conclusions about the cause of this solely based on the Russian origin of these systems. I remember a lot of people did that with the early Ariane crash based on it being written in Ada, and ended up looking pretty silly when the problem turned out to be some ported code that wasn't rewritten properly for the new platform.
It looks like you want to create a business with a business model that relies on you controlling access to your source code. If you really want to do that, you shouldn't build your software on top of a Free Software infrastructure. A lot of effort has been put into Free Software licenses to ensure that the software remains free, and trying to work around that is just going to cause you headaches. Use closed-source software instead. That world understands your needs and desires much better and, as a side benefit, won't make any annoying moral judgements against you. Sure, it costs money, but so will your product.
If instead you really want to build a build a business on top of Free Software, you should look at using a business model that is compatible with Free Software. That means no secret source code, but there are lots of other options for making money. Contrary to popular belief, there are quite a few companies out there legitimately making money from Free Software. Look at what they do.
I hope they don't take the politically correct move by depicting the Europeans as the sole aggressors. I'd like to see some historical accuracy.
This is the Crusades we are talking about, right? Europeans organized and carried them out.
The only historical quibble I might have is if they depict non-Christians as the sole victims. Generally the Crusading armies had no compunction about attacking their co-religionists on the way there, and at least one of the Crusades never accomplished anything more than gutting the Byzantine Empire (Greek Orthodox Christian) to pay off the bankers.
I can't get at the link, but they could be quite historically accurate if they stick to a specific crusade, and perhaps depict the player as a member of the Iranian (not Arab) tribe of Assassins of Almut. However, they were the original fundamentalist muslim terrorists, so I can see where a lot of gamers (myself included) might be a bit uncomfortable playing from their viewpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it will take a lot of "study" to see that game success has nothing to do with weight of established lore behind it. Just look at the history of Star Trek games. If anything, having a license to an existing "Universe" is a millstone around a game's neck.
LotR is almost as good an example as Trek. Due to the way magic in the books worked (almost no one had much, except a very few massively powerful wizards), they felt they had to make the magic system in LotRO impoverished compared to most other such games.
We could just go with logic here. Who's going to spend months or years of their free time playing a game, regardless of the game's own qualities, just because they really enjoyed the 5 to 10 hours it took them to read the books its lore comes from?
So I think pointing to a licensed product as somehow the "best hope" to unseat WoW just because of the strength of the source material is a bit wrong-headed.
An ARP request is a request for the MAC address associated with the given IP address. Presumably that's what he meant.
Yes, its true that if some machine (for some bizzare reason) were to be requesting a MAC address, that's probably how you would phrase it. However, if you don't start with the assumption that he's a clueless, its fairly obvious what he's talking about.
If anything, 14 years is probably way too short for software. Frigging "Lifetime Warranty"s for computer equipment only last 5 years. Arguably, software goes obsolete quicker than hardware. A large amount of software is obsolete on release (if they bother to release it at all).
That doesn't even get into the damage done to society when you have an industry where our entire societal infrastructure is now built on its products, copying is free, recreating from scratch is immensely expensive and time consuming, and industry can't find enough skilled people to build all that is needed.
English translation:
We taxpayers would loose billions in revenue from sales of the operating frequencies to companies, who would have paid for it by charging us trillions in wireless fees.
I'm sure glad AT&T is fighting for my interes...wait a minute...
I can see what you are getting at from a throughput issue. From that standpoint (as well noise, etc), I can see advantages to doing this.
However, the OP was talking about "render lag", which I'm presuming is different from throughput. I don't see how lag is improved this way. If anything, it could get worse, as any synchronization between the CPU and the GPU now has to hop over the PCI bus, through the interface card, over the FO cable, into the remote unit, and then back, rather than just going over the PCI(-X?) bus.
I see from their datasheet that the IF cards are available in PCI-X 16, so it could be worse, but still there's all that extra hardware it has to hop through. That has to be increasing end to end lag.
I'm not sure I understand this comment. The information is still going to have to travel (up to) 250 meters from CPU to display. What does it matter for lag where in that 250 meters the GPU sits? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "rendering lag"?
I work on commercial flight simulators. Lag as measured from control movement to video response is something the FAA has standards for, and thus we have to measure and optimize for.
You wandered into the wrong trade show. You wanted the Electronic Entertainment Expo, not the Erotic Entertainment Expo. Read the marquee more closely next time.
More likely, it just means anyone can use them to invade anyone's privacy. Just imagine what batshit-crazy stalkers will start doing once they get access to universal surveilence cameras. (Hint: if you aren't batshit crazy yourself, you probably can only imagine the meerest surface of the evil they can cause).
State machines have more or less entirely unstructured control to start with. The goto is a natural expression of this. You can avoid the dreaded "goto" in this situation by using a switch statement in a loop, with the cases representing each state. However, this is slower than the goto, and really no easier to read. For an example of this use of goto, see the code generated by lex.
Handling exceptional conditions inline can get quite ugly, and distracts the reader from the code representing the normal execution flow. It can also case a lot of duplicated code when there are several "exceptions" that need to be handled the same way. Instead, goto's can be used to redirect control to a separate "exception handler". The kernel code you linked appears to be an example of this kind of goto.
Hooo, that was a good one. Best laugh I've had all week!
Little known fact: God experimented with MS Office for the Ten Commandments, (found in Exodus 20:2-17). Unfortunately, he left revision tracking on. Some clever Jewish hacker figured out the edits and posted the original version in Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Now we are stuck with two different versions.
OK. Tell me who right now is at work, and who is home napping?
That depends on the family...
In fact, the RIAA considered it a great advance. At the time everyone routinely made analog copies of their albums to cassette. A lot of people even bought cassettes (cheaper) and made copies of those. Most portable stereos came with two cassette drives for dubbing. Mine did it at quadruple speed, so it didn't take so long.
CD's were like an IP godsend to the RIAA. Suddenly there was a high-quality digital playback media, but there was no consumer digital recording media to match. When Sony tried to come out with digital cassettes a few years later, which would have gotten things back to where they were before, the RIAA screamed like a stuck pig.
The "consumers can only buy and playback" regime that the RIAA is trying so hard to maintain now is only a recent (20-year-old) system. There's absolutely no reason why they should expect this situation to last forever, and no reason why anyone should feel they have a right to it.
OK. As a former victim, I'll bite.
Suppose I unplug. How does that help me when Mr. Crazy is contacting my boss and lodging complaints, contacting my company's customers and lodging complaints, contacting relevant federal regulatory authorities dealing with my company and lodging complaints, setting up websites full of really nasty slander with my phone number and address (work and home) on them, is using test newsgroups to emailbomb my company's mail server. All of this has happened to me, and could happen to you too if you if you manage to tweak Mr. Crazy in some random way only he knows.
How about those disturbed individuals who go that extra mile to pose as you and post your address and info on your wife and / or children on deviant sex sites as someone who is interested in their kind of perverted action? Heck, they can even pose as your wife or kids and set up meetings with pervs at your house (while you are away). All this stuff *has* happened.
The temptation is to blame the victim, I know. I was that way too till it happened to me. You think nobody would go through all that trouble unless there was really something to their accusations, right? Surely nobody is disturbed enough to get *that* nasty for no reason, right? There are some limits to what another person will unfairly do to you for no good reason, right? No, no, and no. A certain percentage of the general public is just totally batshit crazy. Given the amount of people on the internet, the fact is that they are out there, like human land-mines. A real cyberbully is limited in the sick stuff he can do to you only by his twisted imagination.
Yes, you should be strong enough to laugh off idiot flamewars. But true cyberbullying is of a different scale entirely, and nobody should have to "just put up" with it.
Clearly someone's never had it happen to them.
Let me tell you, you have not lived until you've had some nutjob with nothing but time on his hands and an internet connection devote himself to making your life miserable. It truly amazing what someone with no life, shame, or scruples is capable of doing to you.
Well, say you are someone with a stake in the balance of power between the Reps and the Dems in the House of Representatives. For example, lets pretend you are
Now lets say you somehow, by hook or by crook, manage to get yourself in control of redistricting a nice big state
Now lets suppose this state happens to have a lot of close districts, 50/50 rep and dem. If you can get yourself access to the newest census data mining software, you can figure out where reps and dems are down to a really low resolution. So what you can do is take 5 or so 50/50 districts. Pick one, and split all its reps you can find into the other districts. Move something like %15 of the other 4 districts' dems into the first district. Now instead of 5 50/50 districts, you have 4 safely rep districts and 1 very safe dem district. Do this a couple of more times, and you can pick up a lot of seats.
Of course there's a price to pay for this. That new safe dem in the house is probably going to be very liberal now, where she perhaps couldn't get away with that before. However, the other 4 reps are going to be a bit more conservative, since they can now get away with that. The one liberal is in the minority, and can be labeled a kook and ignored. Another drawback is that you just made the House way more partisan. But what do you care? You're now the most powerful person in the US! Time to go have a talk with those rich lobbyists...
That'd be a great way to colonize the galaxy with alligators, but wouldn't work so well with humans. We are helpless when we are born, and are totally dependent on other (older) humans for out physical, mental, and emotional sustenance and development. If you can build machines that can do all that well enough, they'd have to be so close to human that you might as well just send them and leave the biologicals out of it entirely.
Well, duh. Finding a rusted out old junker in OKC would hardly be newsworthy.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist)
Ah. ThankyouThankyouThankyou. I'd been looking for this article. Calling 1996 "Not too long ago" might be a bit of a stretch, at least for Slashdot, but its a great article for the layman on NASA manned software methodoligies. Anyone still confused by all this, please read the article, and then decide for yourself how likely it is that something important in there is running Windows.
Perhaps. However, that's not quite what I said. I just said they run mathematical proofs on their software. If you know anything about formal methods (no shame in not knowing. Few CS graduates even know a lot about it), then you'd know that proofs should only be a part of a verification (testing) regimen. There can still be bugs in an implementation (or its compiler!), even after its algorithm has been "proven".
No.
On NASA's manned space equipment you will find no software that is not controlled by NASA. These folks don't just run a few tests. They spend thousands of dollars per SLOC in testing. They actually mathematically prove their software's correctness. Perhaps the Russian agency's quality isn't quite as high, but I still doubt their (or anyone else's) systems onboard the ISS have any OS at all. Most likely they are all custom embedded systems.
I'd council against jumping to conclusions about the cause of this solely based on the Russian origin of these systems. I remember a lot of people did that with the early Ariane crash based on it being written in Ada, and ended up looking pretty silly when the problem turned out to be some ported code that wasn't rewritten properly for the new platform.
It looks like you want to create a business with a business model that relies on you controlling access to your source code. If you really want to do that, you shouldn't build your software on top of a Free Software infrastructure. A lot of effort has been put into Free Software licenses to ensure that the software remains free, and trying to work around that is just going to cause you headaches. Use closed-source software instead. That world understands your needs and desires much better and, as a side benefit, won't make any annoying moral judgements against you. Sure, it costs money, but so will your product.
If instead you really want to build a build a business on top of Free Software, you should look at using a business model that is compatible with Free Software. That means no secret source code, but there are lots of other options for making money. Contrary to popular belief, there are quite a few companies out there legitimately making money from Free Software. Look at what they do.
A non-exhaustive list would include making your money off of support, hired development of new features, branding and packaging, access to non-infectious licensed libraries, early access to fixes, or sales of your hardware. The last option sounds promising for you, but this is something you should look into.
This is the Crusades we are talking about, right? Europeans organized and carried them out.
The only historical quibble I might have is if they depict non-Christians as the sole victims. Generally the Crusading armies had no compunction about attacking their co-religionists on the way there, and at least one of the Crusades never accomplished anything more than gutting the Byzantine Empire (Greek Orthodox Christian) to pay off the bankers.
I can't get at the link, but they could be quite historically accurate if they stick to a specific crusade, and perhaps depict the player as a member of the Iranian (not Arab) tribe of Assassins of Almut. However, they were the original fundamentalist muslim terrorists, so I can see where a lot of gamers (myself included) might be a bit uncomfortable playing from their viewpoint.
Marion Barry reads Slashdot? Who knew?