The clueless corporate purchasing minions are the same everywhere, in all walks of commerce. Just like in music, they only buy the crap they bought before, to strict formula. After all, their jobs could be on the line for a bad decision.
So don't expect any of the larger publishers to buy a truly original game. They're not staffed by gaming *FANS*, but by 9-to-5'ers who have no personal love for the genre. It's a job.
In any event, forget publishers. It's 2005, self-market online. If you need help, use marketting minions, don't sell your soul to marketting overloards in a megamachine.
You could, but someone can relicense it as GPL on Saturdays and MIT on Tuesdays, since GPL and MIT by themselves don't have restrictions.
Not so. What license would grant them the right to do that? Certainly not the GPL, since once something is GPL, it's always GPL -- that's its strongest point, its ultimate protection. Not even the author can change the license of the version he has released under GPL. (He can license future versions differently of course, but note that he alone has this freedom as copyright holder, nobody else can).
And when the author personally offers the additional freedom that plugins to his code are not considered derived works of his code, then that doesn't allow anyone to alter the licensing either. So, they can't do so by any legal means.
Note also that nobody is in a position to chase infringements other than the copyright holder, so the FSF certainly would not be able to do so even if they didn't like additional freedoms being granted alongside the GPL.
I don't think he was a Gentoo bum, as he didn't point out the things that Gentoo users usually do.
But I am, and I also spent many years with SuSE (I can see 6 packs of SuSE Professional up on the shelf for starters), so I can comment on both.
Gentoo may have the most dreadfully appalling install system of all distros (actually, it's more correct to say that it doesn't have an install system at all), but that's overcome trivially by using 3rd-party derivatives like Vidalinux (uses the Anaconda installer).
And once installed, Gentoo's Portage system is infinitely superior to any YaST crap... and I seriously mean crap in comparison. And I've used plenty of other distros to slightly lesser degree, and I can tell you that the same applies to them all, simply because of the amazing Portage.
Portage is better constructed, better maintained, vastly more flexible, securely designed, trivially configured, and here's the surprising kicker... enormously more user-friendly than YaST and its brethren.
For Windoze dweebs who have a total aversion to the commandline and don't recognize real user friendliness when it stares them in the face, I have nothing but sympathy, but for the Unix-meme community in general, a distro based on Gentoo but offering a real installer is the way to go for both ease and ultimate empowerment.
(Ideally Gentoo should provide a real installer of its own of course, but there's religion there unfortunately, and they won't.)
There's no way around it....you simply have to take the good with the bad.
Not really, there are some VERY good things that could come from this, if the world actually moved in the direction of anonymity (sadly I don't think it will)...
"This will make it incredibly difficult for you to track down the source of the attacks."
If you can't track them down, then there is no point complaining about attacks against you and bringing the law into it, so you would have to employ self-protection instead. Think of it as your $30 cable router's firewall on steroids, plus a bit more intelligence at ISPs.:-) In general, real defence is far more effective than looking to political solutions in a global space, where the law is largely powerless.
And as a side benefit, defence doesn't add to the already mountainous volume of law, nor lines the pockets of lawyers, not drains your wallet of legal expenses. But of course, you pay for your technological defenses instead.
It's not just Microsoft though. Pretty much the whole corporate sphere works to that kind of moral code, always laying the blame for their questionable actions at the door of "protecting shareholders' profits".
Microsoft just happens to get caught at it a lot.:)
A new scheme for this is actually pointless, because it just reinvents an existing wheel and does so far less effectively than before.
That previously invented wheel is PGP keys.
They were created for a different purpose, but they already contain a string that can be used as a legible identifier (which commonly contains a URL or email address), and they are trivially checked, and they are vastly more proven and secure as a means of trusted identification, and they already operate through a distributed system of public keyservers, and there is already a huge web of trust built around them, and of course OpenPGP and GnuPG are already fully free and open systems.
So why reinvent a wheel, and badly? Use PGP keys for login recognition, and any security concerns just evaporate.
Patents hobble revision. If an idea is truly novel, then it will not be hindered by the patent system.
But all science and technology is incremental -- even the most radically "novel" idea rides entirely on the previously built foundation of scientific work, a pyramid without which that allegedly novel concept would not exist and in fact would not even be intelligible. So to claim unique ownership of the idea is totally disingenuous at best, and in actuality quite fraudulent as well as utterly unfair to those who went before and upon whose work it inevitably stands.
The real problem with patents is that they have become synonymous with idea ownership, when in reality they were intended purely as a short-term boost to assist manufacturing. A patent should become void if, after 5 years of protection, the holder has not actually started building something that uses it, verifiably.
Those people raising objections entirely fail to realize the role of technology in the evolution of Mankind. Perhaps they should try reading Ray Kurzweil's insightful book "The Age of Spiritual Machines", or hang around on some of the power-thinking future engineering forums for a bit, to see where things are heading.
I can paraphrase it all for them very simply but rather bluntly: we are ALL disabled, because protein is a really crap technology.
It's not only that we will be able to do better than nature has done in due course. No, it's much more dramatic than that. We will ***HAVE*** to progress beyond what nature has given us, and become one with our post-protein technologies, because if we don't do that then in time we will no longer be the dominent intelligence on the planet --- our machines will be that instead, and we will be no more than very dumb pets.
This isn't the Matrix scenario at all --- this is the hopeful positive scenario where the machines are on our side, but with IQs in the thousands or millions.
Well, maybe a section of humanity will want to stay dumb and looked after by their benevolent machine masters in a comfortable zoo of their own making, but the signs are clear that they will be a very small minority, because each new generation is more comfortable with technology than the last, and pretty much nobody is happy with the concept of no longer being the dominant species here. Yet everyone wants more and more technology, the trend is irreversible.
Blind nature did what it did over millions of years very admirably, but its goals and mechanisms for the proliferation of species started to lose their relevance to Man quite a long time ago, and now natural evolution is simply out of its depth in a world where machines are becoming dramatically more powerful by the decade.
You don't need to extrapolate for very long to come to a future where the effective intelligence of machines (by simple brute force, not clever AI software) matches ours and then exceeds it by many orders of magnitude. And when that happens, there will be only two choices for Mankind: to either continue to be the masters by integrating with the technology, or to get left behind as lower-grade natural primates.
Perhaps the species will split into two at that point, who knows. All I can do is speak for myself --- I'm not interested in regressing back into the metaphorical treetops, and I'm perfectly happy with and even eager for machine converge. And I know I'm not alone.
There are tons of solutions to the problem, but they all miss the boat because they're done at the wrong level, and hence they're not transparent. The last thing we need are more sound demons. (I use NAS and it works fine, but it's the wrong solution too.)
All sound drivers without exception should work like they do currently on FIRST OPEN, but on second and subsequent opens they should automatically hook in a mixer and mix all inputs together.
The code to do it already exists, but it's just not being structured sensibly as above. It's no surprise that newbies find the one-at-a-time behaviour unhelpful, because it is. This is a multi-user O/S fer crissakes, single-open in sound drivers is just dumb!
What they've done is to formalize a mechanism for exclusions similar to the one that we're used to in the Linux kernel, which also provides licensing exclusions to allow closed binary applications to run under it and closed binary drivers to run within it, despite the kernel itself being GPL'd.
Linux overcomes this issue because the GPL's explanatory notes describe a general exemption for closed applications that link to standard operating system programs and interfaces, without needing to reveal the application source code. It's rather imprecise though, hinging on the meaning of words like standard and distribution. Try defining standard for Gentoo, hehe.:-)
RedHat have improved on that by formalizing the exemption mechanism, ie. explicitly stating where you can link to without strings attached and mandating that linking anywhere else will place you under GPL rules. Clarification benefits everyone, lawyers excepted of course.
Type "SOL PLEASE" to include us in sim
on
Simulated Universe
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10 billion particles, 20M galaxies... so that's just 500 particles per galaxy.
Since our little G2 sun isn't among our galaxy's top 500 stars on mass or luminosity, I guess it's not represented by even one particle in the simulation... how sad.:-(
Of course, that's where the "SOL PLEASE" cheat code comes in...;-)
Simulation is part of checking the model
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Simulated Universe
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I thought that they really hadn't even figured out how the universe worked.
Of course they haven't figured out how the universe works. Science isn't about that.
It's about creating mathematically precise models of reality that predict the same behaviour that the real world actually exhibits through testing and observation. The two things are entirely different. The real, hidden structure of reality may be utterly different from the models, but as long as she behaves in exactly the way that they predict, the proposed models earn their tick of acceptance just fine. That's how Science works.
The simulation work comes into this by helping both to generate and to check predictions.
It's not too surprising that the general public gets confused about this, since scientists don't go around prefixing every sentence with "It's just a model" disclaimers. But you can't really blame them for the lack of insightful science in most school curricula.
You've split the subject into two parts (which is good) --- first, "thinking out of the box" by re-examining peripheral areas instead of treating them as axiomatic, and second, coming up with original ideas within one's narrow specialist area.
In neither of these does your contention stand up.
When you re-examine peripheral subjects instead of treating them as axiomatic, you are once again specializing on one or two of them and never on dozens and hundreds of subjects, so once again the extent of coverage is not overwhelming. Almost nobody is a total generalist and polymath able to research all the relevant peripheral areas, and it has always been so. There is nothing new here.
And on the issue of coming up with something original within a narrowly focussed area, your contention that it is harder now is unjustified. Every subject area in science can be drilled down deeper and deeper without any bottom in sight. This stems from the fact that science doesn't actually look at reality directly, but only creates models and then checks to see whether reality behaves like the models predict. As a result, there is no end to the models and theories that can be proposed and tested, subject only to the hard reality check provided by the scientific method.
In many ways, research students have never had it so easy to find fertile ground for new work as today, with the whole universe of ideas at their googling fingertips, triggering new concepts and possibilities in one's mind with every page that pops up. The mind is an excellent engine for generating entirely unprecedented associations between almost unrelated concepts and reasoning.
It's a good time for original, highly creative research. The article has it entirely wrong.
Typically, it takes many years of trial and error (mostly error) before a young turk realizes this and starts to be able to narrow down the approaches that might actually work.
No, creative research doesn't work that way, at least not in academia, from my experience on both sides of the student/staff fence.
PhD students are no older today than in earlier times, and in their final year, each of the competent ones are the world's peak thinkers in their particular disciplines. It has always been so, and it must be so, because originality of work is a requirement for a PhD to be granted.
The reason why it doesn't take students any longer than before to reach PhD thinking level is simply that research is not ever done from first principles in all areas of a scientific discipline. Instead, the latest stable theories are taken as axiomatic in peripheral areas, and only the specific and narrow area targetted for original research is dissected fully for detailed examination.
This approach can continue indefinitely, regardless of the ever increasing size of the past body of knowledge. You won't find researchers getting any older because of it.
I think you're wrong, but for a reason that I haven't heard expressed by anyone else. I think that photorealism is going to be skipped.
You see, the problem is that reality is not pretty. From gardens to fashion models, people are always striving for something "better than reality", even though it's rare to hear anyone say that this is because reality is ugly. It's the truth though.
Machine-generated graphics will be capable of vastly higher quality than real-world imaging within your 10-year deadline. This would allow total photorealism, if it were desired. But it won't be desired, believe me.:-)
how many people will make a comment about communism and linux
Communism makes some people see red (:-), so leave it out.
More relevant here is that Linux and open source in general is about cooperation and collaboration without an enemy, whereas sociopolitical systems usually have an enemy within and always have an enemy without. Our collaborative community has no real similarity to any of that, despite the political FUD occasionally dished out by the vested interests that we're treading on.
So yeah, we'll get some negative political mud thrown at us, but who cares. It's just the death throes of the old cathedral dinosaurs on their way out.
if I wanted a big, loud games machine I'd use a PC
I agree with you, ie. small and quiet is essential in the target environment, but I feel very strongly that there is also another issue that is being completely ignored so far: standard hifi form factors.
If the console manufacturers actually believed their own words about entertainment convergence, they'd be making consoles that fit sensibly into hifi racks, sandwiched tidily between A/V amps, tuners, DVD players, etc.
And since hifi systems come in full-width, midi, and micro sizes, the consoles should offer different enclosure styles too (hey, it's just plastic, the cheapest part of the whole unit), as well as a more portable version for taking along to your friends'. There hasn't been a console yet that hasn't looked like an ugly carbuncle hanging off the side of an otherwise decently styled entertainment system.
Sadly the console manufacturers seem to think that it's their divine right to make whacky and sexily styled enclosures at the expense of the commonsense and practicality needed for physical integration with other entertainment equipment. I doubt that this will change any time soon, as none of the Big Three are noted for listening to customer requirements.
Maybe we need some console rehousing specialists to help the annoyed hifi enthusiasts among us!:-)
So far these have been the least intelligent responses to scientific matter I believe I have ever see on slashdot.
Yeah, kind of dire.:-) But then, it's Slashdot, and it does have its moments.
Here's a slightly scientific thought for you though (but only slightly). What's the extinction radius of a 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watt event like this one?
Because if the extinction radius is at all large, and if this happens at all frequently on a cosmological timescale, then it ought to be factored into Drake's equation.
It could be the reason why the galaxy doesn't appear to be crammed full of high-tech intelligent life --- maybe random sectors of the galaxy everywhere get sterilized back to lifelessness by magnetar events often enough to keep the average density of life in the galaxy near zero, because life simply can't persist very long?
SomethingAwful was a good example to quote here in the context of forums. Interestingly, there are other examples along the same lines but in a slightly different area, that of 3D virtual worlds, which in many ways are like forums but in more modern clothing.
For example, in Second Life (a 3D world in which you live, build, and interact with others, but not a MMOG) you contribute to discussion events in much the same way as you would contribute to a forum thread. In addition, you contribute content in the form of objects like clothes and other things that you create (objects can contain scripts, so they can be quite sophisticated), and of course you build unique mansions and places for people to visit and play in, and everything that you create is yours unless you sell it. You are adding the world content, as you do on forums.
Yet, Second Life charges you a one-off lifetime fee of $10 for membership to this world (and regular rent too if you want to own land), so in effect you're paying them for adding your own content, even if it's just your own presence to fill the world, which is quite analoguous to paying for your right to comment on forums.
In principle, it's quite reasonable to pay the host for providing the environment in which you exist. Whether it is reasonable or not in practice depends on the details of each case, especially the amount which you are being asked to pay. After all, it is the actual participants who actually give life to the world or to the forum, not the hosts, so a significant fee can never be justified.
You really shouldn't comment on things you don't know anything about.
Here is some info on the transputer family, and links to data sheets on devices in each of the four main families. The T212, T414, and T805 became the most popular. And yes, they're all microprocessors, ie. a little integrated circuit CPU which you plug into a motherboard just like you do a Pentium, and with all the normal features of a normal microprocessor plus a few others of their own, like the 4 on-chip comms links. I've got a couple of T414's upstairs sitting on the shelf.
These Inmos microprocessors were right down the middle of where Kutaragi wants to take the Cell, with lots of interdevice communications being handled directly by the hardware. Inmos even made graphics output chips which were often driven by multiple transputers in parallel, so graphics demos were really common on the transputer scene.
Interestingly, after being passed around between various European parties once Inmos ran out of money, the rights to the transputer were eventually sold off to some Japanese megacorp, iirc.
I found it an interesting interview on several fronts, but it was slightly curious to me that he didn't mention the Inmos Transputer in his short review of the evolution of computing.
Of course, in such a brief summary you can't expect much detail, but the point about the Transputer was that it's the only relevant precursor to the Cell that has made it to market in a substantial way (there was a whole Transputer industry very active for most of a decade). Arbitrary-sized networks of small communicating hardware elements like Kutaragi envisages are nothing new to Transputer fans, and I'm sure that he knows it.
My guess is that he would prefer to leave the Transputer forgotten, because it introduced a paradigm that was way ahead of its time and it didn't catch on. (The fact that it was invented by Inmos in the UK instead of Intel in the US didn't help of course.)
The PR side of Kutaragi probably doesn't want to taint the Cell with any mention of past "revolutions" that fizzled out despite their supreme technical merits. I wish him great success though --- I'll certainly be buying a Cell-based PS3 the instant it comes out.:-)
I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design:-)
Tannenbaum was merely ahead of his time. We're already almost in an age where the operating system overhead is pretty minimal, and the latest advances in microkernels put message passing almost on a par with direct context switching anyway.
What this means is that, at some point in the not too distant future, the monolithic kernel will be seen as a really bad idea on all counts, and with no performance benefit at all. And we all know that loading graphic binary drivers into our kernel images is compromising our uptimes, so the realities of "a bad idea" are with us already.
It was just his 1991 time frame that didn't match up to reality all that well. The substance was good.
Just because the messenger is suspect doesn't meant that the message isn't true.
In this case the raw facts are pretty accurate, despite the message being sensationalized unnecessarily. Once photorealism and realistic movement are achieved, what then? The current driving forces for new purchases will then disappear, so ability to innovate not technically but in game themes and in storytelling and in player interation will become the new frontier.
Yet, there is no sign that the current game blockbuster industry has the necessary creativity in those areas at all --- the change and progress in those elements of gaming has been very minimal indeed, with only a few exceptions.
What he says is valid. I'm currently on the existing games treadmill and I love it a lot, yet I do see his point perfectly.
What other digital camera manufacturers have documented their RAW file format?
That entirely misses the point.
Undocumented RAW formats are one thing, and can in most cases be reverse-engineering quite trivially just by using commonsense.
But what Nikon did was to *ENCRYPT* the values contained in one particular set of fields, those holding the white balance information.
This is totally unrelated to the structure of their RAW files being undocumented. It requires a decryption key to release that data (which is the photographer's data anyway, not theirs), and commonsense cannot possibly reveal it.
Slashdot Mirror
The clueless corporate purchasing minions are the same everywhere, in all walks of commerce. Just like in music, they only buy the crap they bought before, to strict formula. After all, their jobs could be on the line for a bad decision.
So don't expect any of the larger publishers to buy a truly original game. They're not staffed by gaming *FANS*, but by 9-to-5'ers who have no personal love for the genre. It's a job.
In any event, forget publishers. It's 2005, self-market online. If you need help, use marketting minions, don't sell your soul to marketting overloards in a megamachine.
You could, but someone can relicense it as GPL on Saturdays and MIT on Tuesdays, since GPL and MIT by themselves don't have restrictions.
Not so. What license would grant them the right to do that? Certainly not the GPL, since once something is GPL, it's always GPL -- that's its strongest point, its ultimate protection. Not even the author can change the license of the version he has released under GPL. (He can license future versions differently of course, but note that he alone has this freedom as copyright holder, nobody else can).
And when the author personally offers the additional freedom that plugins to his code are not considered derived works of his code, then that doesn't allow anyone to alter the licensing either. So, they can't do so by any legal means.
Note also that nobody is in a position to chase infringements other than the copyright holder, so the FSF certainly would not be able to do so even if they didn't like additional freedoms being granted alongside the GPL.
So that's another MMOG you can subscribe to only to cancel immediately. :-)
The problem isn't actually the advertising, it's that Sony are submitting people to it without decreasing the subscription cost.
In AO, only free accounts have to suffer enforced advertising by Massive through in-game billboards. Everyone else has the choice of turning it off.
I Smell the blood of a Gentoo bum.
... and I seriously mean crap in comparison. And I've used plenty of other distros to slightly lesser degree, and I can tell you that the same applies to them all, simply because of the amazing Portage.
... enormously more user-friendly than YaST and its brethren.
I don't think he was a Gentoo bum, as he didn't point out the things that Gentoo users usually do.
But I am, and I also spent many years with SuSE (I can see 6 packs of SuSE Professional up on the shelf for starters), so I can comment on both.
Gentoo may have the most dreadfully appalling install system of all distros (actually, it's more correct to say that it doesn't have an install system at all), but that's overcome trivially by using 3rd-party derivatives like Vidalinux (uses the Anaconda installer).
And once installed, Gentoo's Portage system is infinitely superior to any YaST crap
Portage is better constructed, better maintained, vastly more flexible, securely designed, trivially configured, and here's the surprising kicker
For Windoze dweebs who have a total aversion to the commandline and don't recognize real user friendliness when it stares them in the face, I have nothing but sympathy, but for the Unix-meme community in general, a distro based on Gentoo but offering a real installer is the way to go for both ease and ultimate empowerment.
(Ideally Gentoo should provide a real installer of its own of course, but there's religion there unfortunately, and they won't.)
There's no way around it....you simply have to take the good with the bad.
...
:-) In general, real defence is far more effective than looking to political solutions in a global space, where the law is largely powerless.
Not really, there are some VERY good things that could come from this, if the world actually moved in the direction of anonymity (sadly I don't think it will)
"This will make it incredibly difficult for you to track down the source of the attacks."
If you can't track them down, then there is no point complaining about attacks against you and bringing the law into it, so you would have to employ self-protection instead. Think of it as your $30 cable router's firewall on steroids, plus a bit more intelligence at ISPs.
And as a side benefit, defence doesn't add to the already mountainous volume of law, nor lines the pockets of lawyers, not drains your wallet of legal expenses. But of course, you pay for your technological defenses instead.
It's not just Microsoft though. Pretty much the whole corporate sphere works to that kind of moral code, always laying the blame for their questionable actions at the door of "protecting shareholders' profits".
:)
Microsoft just happens to get caught at it a lot.
Shabby, very shabby.
A new scheme for this is actually pointless, because it just reinvents an existing wheel and does so far less effectively than before.
That previously invented wheel is PGP keys.
They were created for a different purpose, but they already contain a string that can be used as a legible identifier (which commonly contains a URL or email address), and they are trivially checked, and they are vastly more proven and secure as a means of trusted identification, and they already operate through a distributed system of public keyservers, and there is already a huge web of trust built around them, and of course OpenPGP and GnuPG are already fully free and open systems.
So why reinvent a wheel, and badly? Use PGP keys for login recognition, and any security concerns just evaporate.
Patents hobble revision. If an idea is truly novel, then it will not be hindered by the patent system.
But all science and technology is incremental -- even the most radically "novel" idea rides entirely on the previously built foundation of scientific work, a pyramid without which that allegedly novel concept would not exist and in fact would not even be intelligible. So to claim unique ownership of the idea is totally disingenuous at best, and in actuality quite fraudulent as well as utterly unfair to those who went before and upon whose work it inevitably stands.
The real problem with patents is that they have become synonymous with idea ownership, when in reality they were intended purely as a short-term boost to assist manufacturing. A patent should become void if, after 5 years of protection, the holder has not actually started building something that uses it, verifiably.
Those people raising objections entirely fail to realize the role of technology in the evolution of Mankind. Perhaps they should try reading Ray Kurzweil's insightful book "The Age of Spiritual Machines", or hang around on some of the power-thinking future engineering forums for a bit, to see where things are heading.
I can paraphrase it all for them very simply but rather bluntly: we are ALL disabled, because protein is a really crap technology.
It's not only that we will be able to do better than nature has done in due course. No, it's much more dramatic than that. We will ***HAVE*** to progress beyond what nature has given us, and become one with our post-protein technologies, because if we don't do that then in time we will no longer be the dominent intelligence on the planet --- our machines will be that instead, and we will be no more than very dumb pets.
This isn't the Matrix scenario at all --- this is the hopeful positive scenario where the machines are on our side, but with IQs in the thousands or millions.
Well, maybe a section of humanity will want to stay dumb and looked after by their benevolent machine masters in a comfortable zoo of their own making, but the signs are clear that they will be a very small minority, because each new generation is more comfortable with technology than the last, and pretty much nobody is happy with the concept of no longer being the dominant species here. Yet everyone wants more and more technology, the trend is irreversible.
Blind nature did what it did over millions of years very admirably, but its goals and mechanisms for the proliferation of species started to lose their relevance to Man quite a long time ago, and now natural evolution is simply out of its depth in a world where machines are becoming dramatically more powerful by the decade.
You don't need to extrapolate for very long to come to a future where the effective intelligence of machines (by simple brute force, not clever AI software) matches ours and then exceeds it by many orders of magnitude. And when that happens, there will be only two choices for Mankind: to either continue to be the masters by integrating with the technology, or to get left behind as lower-grade natural primates.
Perhaps the species will split into two at that point, who knows. All I can do is speak for myself --- I'm not interested in regressing back into the metaphorical treetops, and I'm perfectly happy with and even eager for machine converge. And I know I'm not alone.
There are tons of solutions to the problem, but they all miss the boat because they're done at the wrong level, and hence they're not transparent. The last thing we need are more sound demons. (I use NAS and it works fine, but it's the wrong solution too.)
All sound drivers without exception should work like they do currently on FIRST OPEN, but on second and subsequent opens they should automatically hook in a mixer and mix all inputs together.
The code to do it already exists, but it's just not being structured sensibly as above. It's no surprise that newbies find the one-at-a-time behaviour unhelpful, because it is. This is a multi-user O/S fer crissakes, single-open in sound drivers is just dumb!
It's actually very clever wording by RedHat.
:-)
What they've done is to formalize a mechanism for exclusions similar to the one that we're used to in the Linux kernel, which also provides licensing exclusions to allow closed binary applications to run under it and closed binary drivers to run within it, despite the kernel itself being GPL'd.
Linux overcomes this issue because the GPL's explanatory notes describe a general exemption for closed applications that link to standard operating system programs and interfaces, without needing to reveal the application source code. It's rather imprecise though, hinging on the meaning of words like standard and distribution. Try defining standard for Gentoo, hehe.
RedHat have improved on that by formalizing the exemption mechanism, ie. explicitly stating where you can link to without strings attached and mandating that linking anywhere else will place you under GPL rules. Clarification benefits everyone, lawyers excepted of course.
10 billion particles, 20M galaxies ... so that's just 500 particles per galaxy.
... how sad. :-(
... ;-)
Since our little G2 sun isn't among our galaxy's top 500 stars on mass or luminosity, I guess it's not represented by even one particle in the simulation
Of course, that's where the "SOL PLEASE" cheat code comes in
I thought that they really hadn't even figured out how the universe worked.
Of course they haven't figured out how the universe works. Science isn't about that.
It's about creating mathematically precise models of reality that predict the same behaviour that the real world actually exhibits through testing and observation. The two things are entirely different. The real, hidden structure of reality may be utterly different from the models, but as long as she behaves in exactly the way that they predict, the proposed models earn their tick of acceptance just fine. That's how Science works.
The simulation work comes into this by helping both to generate and to check predictions.
It's not too surprising that the general public gets confused about this, since scientists don't go around prefixing every sentence with "It's just a model" disclaimers. But you can't really blame them for the lack of insightful science in most school curricula.
You've split the subject into two parts (which is good) --- first, "thinking out of the box" by re-examining peripheral areas instead of treating them as axiomatic, and second, coming up with original ideas within one's narrow specialist area.
In neither of these does your contention stand up.
When you re-examine peripheral subjects instead of treating them as axiomatic, you are once again specializing on one or two of them and never on dozens and hundreds of subjects, so once again the extent of coverage is not overwhelming. Almost nobody is a total generalist and polymath able to research all the relevant peripheral areas, and it has always been so. There is nothing new here.
And on the issue of coming up with something original within a narrowly focussed area, your contention that it is harder now is unjustified. Every subject area in science can be drilled down deeper and deeper without any bottom in sight. This stems from the fact that science doesn't actually look at reality directly, but only creates models and then checks to see whether reality behaves like the models predict. As a result, there is no end to the models and theories that can be proposed and tested, subject only to the hard reality check provided by the scientific method.
In many ways, research students have never had it so easy to find fertile ground for new work as today, with the whole universe of ideas at their googling fingertips, triggering new concepts and possibilities in one's mind with every page that pops up. The mind is an excellent engine for generating entirely unprecedented associations between almost unrelated concepts and reasoning.
It's a good time for original, highly creative research. The article has it entirely wrong.
Typically, it takes many years of trial and error (mostly error) before a young turk realizes this and starts to be able to narrow down the approaches that might actually work.
No, creative research doesn't work that way, at least not in academia, from my experience on both sides of the student/staff fence.
PhD students are no older today than in earlier times, and in their final year, each of the competent ones are the world's peak thinkers in their particular disciplines. It has always been so, and it must be so, because originality of work is a requirement for a PhD to be granted.
The reason why it doesn't take students any longer than before to reach PhD thinking level is simply that research is not ever done from first principles in all areas of a scientific discipline. Instead, the latest stable theories are taken as axiomatic in peripheral areas, and only the specific and narrow area targetted for original research is dissected fully for detailed examination.
This approach can continue indefinitely, regardless of the ever increasing size of the past body of knowledge. You won't find researchers getting any older because of it.
Photorealism is a decade away at the very least.
:-)
I think you're wrong, but for a reason that I haven't heard expressed by anyone else. I think that photorealism is going to be skipped.
You see, the problem is that reality is not pretty. From gardens to fashion models, people are always striving for something "better than reality", even though it's rare to hear anyone say that this is because reality is ugly. It's the truth though.
Machine-generated graphics will be capable of vastly higher quality than real-world imaging within your 10-year deadline. This would allow total photorealism, if it were desired. But it won't be desired, believe me.
how many people will make a comment about communism and linux
Communism makes some people see red (:-), so leave it out.
More relevant here is that Linux and open source in general is about cooperation and collaboration without an enemy, whereas sociopolitical systems usually have an enemy within and always have an enemy without. Our collaborative community has no real similarity to any of that, despite the political FUD occasionally dished out by the vested interests that we're treading on.
So yeah, we'll get some negative political mud thrown at us, but who cares. It's just the death throes of the old cathedral dinosaurs on their way out.
if I wanted a big, loud games machine I'd use a PC
:-)
I agree with you, ie. small and quiet is essential in the target environment, but I feel very strongly that there is also another issue that is being completely ignored so far: standard hifi form factors.
If the console manufacturers actually believed their own words about entertainment convergence, they'd be making consoles that fit sensibly into hifi racks, sandwiched tidily between A/V amps, tuners, DVD players, etc.
And since hifi systems come in full-width, midi, and micro sizes, the consoles should offer different enclosure styles too (hey, it's just plastic, the cheapest part of the whole unit), as well as a more portable version for taking along to your friends'. There hasn't been a console yet that hasn't looked like an ugly carbuncle hanging off the side of an otherwise decently styled entertainment system.
Sadly the console manufacturers seem to think that it's their divine right to make whacky and sexily styled enclosures at the expense of the commonsense and practicality needed for physical integration with other entertainment equipment. I doubt that this will change any time soon, as none of the Big Three are noted for listening to customer requirements.
Maybe we need some console rehousing specialists to help the annoyed hifi enthusiasts among us!
So far these have been the least intelligent responses to scientific matter I believe I have ever see on slashdot.
:-) But then, it's Slashdot, and it does have its moments.
Yeah, kind of dire.
Here's a slightly scientific thought for you though (but only slightly). What's the extinction radius of a 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watt event like this one?
Because if the extinction radius is at all large, and if this happens at all frequently on a cosmological timescale, then it ought to be factored into Drake's equation.
It could be the reason why the galaxy doesn't appear to be crammed full of high-tech intelligent life --- maybe random sectors of the galaxy everywhere get sterilized back to lifelessness by magnetar events often enough to keep the average density of life in the galaxy near zero, because life simply can't persist very long?
SomethingAwful was a good example to quote here in the context of forums. Interestingly, there are other examples along the same lines but in a slightly different area, that of 3D virtual worlds, which in many ways are like forums but in more modern clothing.
For example, in Second Life (a 3D world in which you live, build, and interact with others, but not a MMOG) you contribute to discussion events in much the same way as you would contribute to a forum thread. In addition, you contribute content in the form of objects like clothes and other things that you create (objects can contain scripts, so they can be quite sophisticated), and of course you build unique mansions and places for people to visit and play in, and everything that you create is yours unless you sell it. You are adding the world content, as you do on forums.
Yet, Second Life charges you a one-off lifetime fee of $10 for membership to this world (and regular rent too if you want to own land), so in effect you're paying them for adding your own content, even if it's just your own presence to fill the world, which is quite analoguous to paying for your right to comment on forums.
In principle, it's quite reasonable to pay the host for providing the environment in which you exist. Whether it is reasonable or not in practice depends on the details of each case, especially the amount which you are being asked to pay. After all, it is the actual participants who actually give life to the world or to the forum, not the hosts, so a significant fee can never be justified.
You write: Transputer != microprocessor
m s_transputers.htm -- An intro to transputers
n /inmos/2186.pdf - 16-bit IMS T225 transputer (T200 famiily)
m s_t414.htm - 32-bit IMS T414 transputer (T400 family)
n /inmos/4260.pdf 32-bit IMS T9000 virtual-channel transputer
You really shouldn't comment on things you don't know anything about.
Here is some info on the transputer family, and links to data sheets on devices in each of the four main families. The T212, T414, and T805 became the most popular. And yes, they're all microprocessors, ie. a little integrated circuit CPU which you plug into a motherboard just like you do a Pentium, and with all the normal features of a normal microprocessor plus a few others of their own, like the 4 on-chip comms links. I've got a couple of T414's upstairs sitting on the shelf.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kryten_droid/inmos/i
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/documentatio
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kryten_droid/inmos/i
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/t805.htm - 32-bit IMS T805 f/p transputer (T800 family)
http://www.classiccmp.org/transputer/documentatio
These Inmos microprocessors were right down the middle of where Kutaragi wants to take the Cell, with lots of interdevice communications being handled directly by the hardware. Inmos even made graphics output chips which were often driven by multiple transputers in parallel, so graphics demos were really common on the transputer scene.
Interestingly, after being passed around between various European parties once Inmos ran out of money, the rights to the transputer were eventually sold off to some Japanese megacorp, iirc.
I found it an interesting interview on several fronts, but it was slightly curious to me that he didn't mention the Inmos Transputer in his short review of the evolution of computing.
:-)
Of course, in such a brief summary you can't expect much detail, but the point about the Transputer was that it's the only relevant precursor to the Cell that has made it to market in a substantial way (there was a whole Transputer industry very active for most of a decade). Arbitrary-sized networks of small communicating hardware elements like Kutaragi envisages are nothing new to Transputer fans, and I'm sure that he knows it.
My guess is that he would prefer to leave the Transputer forgotten, because it introduced a paradigm that was way ahead of its time and it didn't catch on. (The fact that it was invented by Inmos in the UK instead of Intel in the US didn't help of course.)
The PR side of Kutaragi probably doesn't want to taint the Cell with any mention of past "revolutions" that fizzled out despite their supreme technical merits. I wish him great success though --- I'll certainly be buying a Cell-based PS3 the instant it comes out.
I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)
Tannenbaum was merely ahead of his time. We're already almost in an age where the operating system overhead is pretty minimal, and the latest advances in microkernels put message passing almost on a par with direct context switching anyway.
What this means is that, at some point in the not too distant future, the monolithic kernel will be seen as a really bad idea on all counts, and with no performance benefit at all. And we all know that loading graphic binary drivers into our kernel images is compromising our uptimes, so the realities of "a bad idea" are with us already.
It was just his 1991 time frame that didn't match up to reality all that well. The substance was good.
Just because the messenger is suspect doesn't meant that the message isn't true.
In this case the raw facts are pretty accurate, despite the message being sensationalized unnecessarily. Once photorealism and realistic movement are achieved, what then? The current driving forces for new purchases will then disappear, so ability to innovate not technically but in game themes and in storytelling and in player interation will become the new frontier.
Yet, there is no sign that the current game blockbuster industry has the necessary creativity in those areas at all --- the change and progress in those elements of gaming has been very minimal indeed, with only a few exceptions.
What he says is valid. I'm currently on the existing games treadmill and I love it a lot, yet I do see his point perfectly.
What other digital camera manufacturers have documented their RAW file format?
That entirely misses the point.
Undocumented RAW formats are one thing, and can in most cases be reverse-engineering quite trivially just by using commonsense.
But what Nikon did was to *ENCRYPT* the values contained in one particular set of fields, those holding the white balance information.
This is totally unrelated to the structure of their RAW files being undocumented. It requires a decryption key to release that data (which is the photographer's data anyway, not theirs), and commonsense cannot possibly reveal it.