Katz, as usual, has well overstated his point with pompous terms and quotations, drawing on sources he doesn't fully understand, to come up with something that sounds really good, but is just false.
Of course Episode II is a more complicated story than Spider-Man: Lucas's fans demand an entire universe - a world immersive and pervasive, not just a story. Seeing it may be reflex to many of us, but those tiny tidbits of truth don't justify Katz's analysis that Lucas has some how "lost" to Spider-Man.
The fact is, Episode II is drowning under the weight of Spider-Man not because Spider-Man is a superior story, or even because of a simpler more myth-driven plot. Spider-Man is a success because it's a great movie. It's a joy to see because no part of it seems forced. It's well acted, well scripted, and well thought out. In a post 9/11 world, it gives its viewer empowerment. In a cinematic market full of forced, predictable love stories, it gives us something different - something more realistic maybe.
But gaze into the future, young jedi. Episode II (like Episode V) is a transition movie; it is meant to set up Episode III. Let's not forget what's in the box: Anakin turns to the dark side, Luke and Leia are born, the Jedi are slaughtered, the Republic collapses, and the rebellion is born. This is cosmic (pun intended) stuff. Spider-Man is a good movie, but there is no where for the spider opera to go now.
Lucas isn't losing at the box office because of the problem of myth; Lucas is losing at the box office because he's an idea man who never quite figured out how to make movies without sour moments. But I think, in the long run, people will rewatch Star Wars more than Spider-Man, just like they do other great comic book movies (like the first Batman.)
ACPI is another example of doing something easy to make something easy and screwing up an important case instead of doing something a little harder for the same benefit that doesn't screw up the side case.
Leaving all your PCI devices sharing a single IRQ doesn't hurt the computer in the sense of physically damaging it, but it does a hell of a job with interrupt latency.
Those of us who deal with latency problems under Windows anyway (like for real-time audio processing) notice that we can often get better than twice the performance of an ACPI Windows install with a Standard PC Windows install. The PCI devices can still share IRQs (that's a driver issue) and to boot - you get to pick the IRQs. Since not all IRQs are created equal, you basically get to put your devices in priority, so that if you have a device (that the aforementioned audio device) that needs its interrupts to be serviced ahead of everybody else, putting it by itself on IRQ 9 is a life saver. On my system I can run 24 24-bit audio channels with effects with 2ms latency most of the time, and 4ms worst case. With an ACPI install (and ACPI turned on in BIOS) I couldn't get under 20ms, and that was under the best of circumstances. Try to use a USB device, and you're easily over 100ms.
This is NOT an improvement!! IRQs were designed with priorities in mind for a reason. New specs shouldn't just allow hardware to share interrupts and then make the software deal with prioritization (which it does badly anyway) but should just do what we always do for addressing lines: add more.
BTW, not being able to turn off your system is FUD. You can enable APM on a non-ACPI install and still shut off your computer.
I wouldn't worry about nuclear stockpiles becoming so small it makes war "thinkable" again. For the most part in our current international situation no country could "win" a game theoretic scenario involving a nuclear exchange unless the exchange was very limited and they were a rogue state anyway. The problem with nuclear weapons (this is coming from memory - any PoliSci grad students out there want to correct?) is that they offer very little in the way of political options. You can wipe major cities, but you can't hit targets of interest - which is why you need so many if you want to try to take out the other guy's nukes. Contrary to popular belief, it's hard to take out important military targets with nuclear weapons.
They can only really be used in open international conflict once. That first use defines the fear and deterrence. After that, they're only really usabe when they aren't used.
Oh yeah, unless you're a terrorist. Which is why the NPT is so important, and always has been. It's not, contrary to thought, to keep countries from getting nukes, but to keep stupid individuals from getting nukes.
This is, of course, assuming you use a consumer soundcard. Professional soundcards (like the M-Audio Audiophile or the Delta 1010) assign their inputs to known reference standards, like -10dBV or +4 dBu. RTFM.
I work for said company writing said programming language. Two examples that will do this exact thing are "1 Channel Simple Scope.vi" and "2 Channel Oscilloscope.vi" which are in the examples/DAQ/benchtop.llb directory.
To use them, you'll need to use NI hardware. NI sells a low cost E-series multifunction I/O board (the PCI-6023E) with 12-bit single-ended analog inputs (16 of them), 8 digital I/O lines, and 2 24-bit counter timers. The price in the U.S. is $395, and you can get them from us at www.ni.com.
The comments here miss the point. ATI didn't fine tune their drivers to run better on Quake III - they internally lower the visual quality of their rendering if the string "uake3" is detected. This allows them to render faster, and since more advanced engines are used in benchmarking for video quality, they get the "best" of both worlds (high quality in one test, high speed in another.)
It is manipulation through misrepresentation, and they should be called on it. They aren't making optimizations in the normal sense of the word - reaching the same (by some definition) output through faster means; they are reaching it through inferior means without telling anybody.
As much as he want to change the vocabulary used in the IP debates, in the end it is a boolean arguement: Either there is or there is not Intellectual Property. True or False.
This is just false. No discussion of intellectual property is absolute. A good example is public libraries: one doesn't think twice about photocopying the information available in a book in a public library because what is contained there is _information_. We have recognized as a culture that access to that kind of information is important to all citizens in order to be capable citizens of a free society, and thus libraries are accessible to everyone for not much money.
So, you can see, there are in fact examples in which our current culture _already_ balances the rights of content producers with the rights of the content consumers. People in the IP discussion of software should make themselves more familiar with the discussion surrounding the creation of libraries. People in the IP discussion about music/movies/etc will not benefit from this analogy, though, since the content produced there is primarily entertainment - not information.
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Katz, as usual, has well overstated his point with pompous terms and quotations, drawing on sources he doesn't fully understand, to come up with something that sounds really good, but is just false.
Of course Episode II is a more complicated story than Spider-Man: Lucas's fans demand an entire universe - a world immersive and pervasive, not just a story. Seeing it may be reflex to many of us, but those tiny tidbits of truth don't justify Katz's analysis that Lucas has some how "lost" to Spider-Man.
The fact is, Episode II is drowning under the weight of Spider-Man not because Spider-Man is a superior story, or even because of a simpler more myth-driven plot. Spider-Man is a success because it's a great movie. It's a joy to see because no part of it seems forced. It's well acted, well scripted, and well thought out. In a post 9/11 world, it gives its viewer empowerment. In a cinematic market full of forced, predictable love stories, it gives us something different - something more realistic maybe.
But gaze into the future, young jedi. Episode II (like Episode V) is a transition movie; it is meant to set up Episode III. Let's not forget what's in the box: Anakin turns to the dark side, Luke and Leia are born, the Jedi are slaughtered, the Republic collapses, and the rebellion is born. This is cosmic (pun intended) stuff. Spider-Man is a good movie, but there is no where for the spider opera to go now.
Lucas isn't losing at the box office because of the problem of myth; Lucas is losing at the box office because he's an idea man who never quite figured out how to make movies without sour moments. But I think, in the long run, people will rewatch Star Wars more than Spider-Man, just like they do other great comic book movies (like the first Batman.)
ACPI is another example of doing something easy to make something easy and screwing up an important case instead of doing something a little harder for the same benefit that doesn't screw up the side case.
Leaving all your PCI devices sharing a single IRQ doesn't hurt the computer in the sense of physically damaging it, but it does a hell of a job with interrupt latency.
Those of us who deal with latency problems under Windows anyway (like for real-time audio processing) notice that we can often get better than twice the performance of an ACPI Windows install with a Standard PC Windows install. The PCI devices can still share IRQs (that's a driver issue) and to boot - you get to pick the IRQs. Since not all IRQs are created equal, you basically get to put your devices in priority, so that if you have a device (that the aforementioned audio device) that needs its interrupts to be serviced ahead of everybody else, putting it by itself on IRQ 9 is a life saver. On my system I can run 24 24-bit audio channels with effects with 2ms latency most of the time, and 4ms worst case. With an ACPI install (and ACPI turned on in BIOS) I couldn't get under 20ms, and that was under the best of circumstances. Try to use a USB device, and you're easily over 100ms.
This is NOT an improvement!! IRQs were designed with priorities in mind for a reason. New specs shouldn't just allow hardware to share interrupts and then make the software deal with prioritization (which it does badly anyway) but should just do what we always do for addressing lines: add more.
BTW, not being able to turn off your system is FUD. You can enable APM on a non-ACPI install and still shut off your computer.
I wouldn't worry about nuclear stockpiles becoming so small it makes war "thinkable" again. For the most part in our current international situation no country could "win" a game theoretic scenario involving a nuclear exchange unless the exchange was very limited and they were a rogue state anyway. The problem with nuclear weapons (this is coming from memory - any PoliSci grad students out there want to correct?) is that they offer very little in the way of political options. You can wipe major cities, but you can't hit targets of interest - which is why you need so many if you want to try to take out the other guy's nukes. Contrary to popular belief, it's hard to take out important military targets with nuclear weapons.
They can only really be used in open international conflict once. That first use defines the fear and deterrence. After that, they're only really usabe when they aren't used.
Oh yeah, unless you're a terrorist. Which is why the NPT is so important, and always has been. It's not, contrary to thought, to keep countries from getting nukes, but to keep stupid individuals from getting nukes.
This is, of course, assuming you use a consumer soundcard. Professional soundcards (like the M-Audio Audiophile or the Delta 1010) assign their inputs to known reference standards, like -10dBV or +4 dBu. RTFM.
I work for said company writing said programming language. Two examples that will do this exact thing are "1 Channel Simple Scope.vi" and "2 Channel Oscilloscope.vi" which are in the examples/DAQ/benchtop.llb directory.
To use them, you'll need to use NI hardware. NI sells a low cost E-series multifunction I/O board (the PCI-6023E) with 12-bit single-ended analog inputs (16 of them), 8 digital I/O lines, and 2 24-bit counter timers. The price in the U.S. is $395, and you can get them from us at www.ni.com.
The comments here miss the point. ATI didn't fine tune their drivers to run better on Quake III - they internally lower the visual quality of their rendering if the string "uake3" is detected. This allows them to render faster, and since more advanced engines are used in benchmarking for video quality, they get the "best" of both worlds (high quality in one test, high speed in another.)
It is manipulation through misrepresentation, and they should be called on it. They aren't making optimizations in the normal sense of the word - reaching the same (by some definition) output through faster means; they are reaching it through inferior means without telling anybody.
Except that they were caught.
So, you can see, there are in fact examples in which our current culture _already_ balances the rights of content producers with the rights of the content consumers. People in the IP discussion of software should make themselves more familiar with the discussion surrounding the creation of libraries. People in the IP discussion about music/movies/etc will not benefit from this analogy, though, since the content produced there is primarily entertainment - not information.