Both God and String Theory have the same problems for the scientific method - neither of them is falsifiable - and neither makes predictions about things we don't already know that we can actually go out and test.
So (as a scientist) there is very little point in thinking about either of them for very long because they simply don't get you any further in making workable personal jet packs, or any of the other fun stuff that science is generally so good at.
Falsifiability is a reasonable requirement. It says: "OK Mr. Proponent of God/StringTheory. tell me one experiment I could reasonably consider doing that (if it hypothetically failed) would prove that God/Strings definitely doesn't exist." But there IS no such test for either thing. String theory is just so very flexible that it can accomodate almost any failed experiment by picking another one of the ten-to-the-power-500 possible variations on how space is wrapped up, and experiments that might manage to disprove it appear to require more energy than the entire universe contains in order to perform them. Meanwhile, God is claimed to be utterly omnipotent - so any experiment we think up to prove that he's not there, could merely be written of as him "testing our faith".
Lack of falsifiability doesn't prove or disprove a theory - it just makes the theory worthless for science.
So it's fine to believe in God and be a scientist - so long as you realise that your theory of the universe isn't going to help you make personal jet packs (which you still owe me by the way!).
If somewhere in all the religious texts it said "God can do absolutely anything EXCEPT make purple stars" - then we could all get out our telescopes and go look for purple stars. If we ever found one then the case would be closed. If we never found one - then we still wouldn't know for SURE that there was a God - but ultimate proof isn't something science can ever really provide. But as it is, we are told by the proponents of the God theory that he can do absolutely anything he likes - and we know that if he does exist then he has no compunction in planting REALLY convincing bogus evidence for the big bang just to "test our faith". So we can't make ANY predictions about God whatever and any theory that includes him in any way whatever is useless for our progress. If we employ our belief in God, we can't make a computer that works reliably because God might decide he doesn't like us calculating PI to a bazillion places so the machine would be useless for all practical purposes. We can't find out whether there was life on Mars because he does stuff like burying really convincing solid stone dinosaur bones to try to cheat us into a belief in evolution when he knows full well that it's not true. A world with a God in it is simply not open to doing any kind of useful science - so if we'd like to have personal jet packs (sorry to keep harping on about those - but really, they are a bit overdue), we'd better put God theories to one side while we're designing them. If we used a God-based universe as our model, the only really plausible way to get jet packs is to sit on our backsides and pray for them to materialise out of thin air.
String theory has similar problems - and I could understand why people are beginning to think it's a waste of time for such a large proportion of Physicists to be working on it. The theory is at the point where it certainly COULD be true - but if it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know and there's no way for us to ever disprove it - then it's just not very useful.
No - it's neither the first known geared device - nor the first use of a differential gear nor the first analog computer. The chinese had them beat by close to 2000 years...read and learn:
The south pointing chariot subtracted the number of revolutions of one wheel from the number of revolutions of the other and multiplies by some constant that relates the diameter of the wheels to the distance between them. It had to have used a differential to do that because a 'differential' by definition is any mechanism that computes a difference.
Technically, the South pointing chariot was an analog computer...well, as much as the Antikythera contraption was - albeit on a smaller scale.
I've been hearing about all of these new discoveries about the device over the past week - but I don't see *ANY* new knowledge. We hear that there is finally proof that it's an analog computer - and that finding this word proves it's an astronomical calculator - but I have a book printed 15 years ago that says exactly that. The mechanism that calculates sun and moon positions is completely well understood and has been for years. There are working replicas of the device in several museums that demonstrate how it works.
Check out the Wikipedia article.
So if these guys have really learned something new - they are failing to communicate whatever it ACTUALLY is that they've found.
Isn't is a bit disturbing that the government files patents to prevent us from using stuff that we paid them to invent?
So what happens to all the bits of glass and palladium after it releases its hydrogen load? I guess ideally, it would get saved somewhere for recycling - but presuming that doesn't happ en - is it going to be OK to breath microsopic bits of that stuff?
I am VERY clear about what a 6-DoF controller is - at the SONY E3 presentation, they explained that they'd changed the controller and that the new one "detects all six degrees of freedom". Now, they may have lied - or been imprecise or incorrect - but that is EXACTLY what they said.
Now - it's almost certain to be a detector of relative motion (like a mouse) rather than an absolute motion detector (like a digitizing tablet or the Wii controller) - and that might well make it less suitable than the Wii's controller for some kinds of games - but I'm pretty sure that with good programming, you could still interpret the necessary gestures to play tennis.
Of course SONY may have been mistaken in their use of that technical term - in which case, I apologise for taking them at their word - but I'm quite clear about what 6-DoF means and about what the SONY presentation said.
Dropping processors won't cut the price significantly. Once the chip is designed, the manufacturing cost depends only on volume and yield. Dropping one or more cell processors might help yield somewhat - but not enough to chop more than maybe $10 off the price.
The HUGE cost in PS3 is the BluRay drive. There were estimates out there that they cost SONY $1000 each. The electronics in the PS3 probably costs only a couple of hundred bucks - the rest is in the hard drive and the BluRay drive. These days they can't do without the former - and politically, I don't see how they can drop the latter (although they should).
So even at $600, I'd guess that they're probably selling the console at a $300 net loss. With $60 games (eeek!) they can maybe claw back $20 to $30 from each game sold - so long as the average owner buys maybe 10 to 15 games, they'll eke out a profit.
But I don't know many kids in their demographic who can afford to lay out $60 for a game on a regular basis.
A common rule-of-thumb for parents in the USA is that kids should get an allowance of between 50c and a dollar for every year of their age. So a kid in the 15 year old range at the high end of the demographic will probably be able to spend $15 a week - that's just one $60 game per month - at MOST 12 games per year...but in all likelyhood it'll be much, much less than that because kids are terrible at saving and will tend to buy music or something like that instead.
So kids will get one or maybe two games for birthday and Xmas - it's hard to see how Sony are going to sell more than a dozen games per console owner in the first couple of years. It's a financial disaster for them - and the more consoles they sell, they more money they'll lose.
Are they expecting to sell more to adults with enough disposable income? Maybe - but I suspect adults will be heading to the Xbox.
I think the PS3 is purely and simply a vehicle for getting BluRay players out there against an apathetic public who are (quite frankly) very happy with standard DVD's.
Step 1: BluRay has to become the next DVD standard. 'Big Sony' demands that - so the PS3 has to have BluRay no matter what the game console development team want to do.
Step 2: BluRay is too expensive for Xmas '05 - something over $1000 for a bare drive - since a $1300 game console won't sell, PS3 is delayed a year in the hope that prices will drop. This gives Xbox 360 a chance that it doesn't deserve because (even without BluRay) the PS3 is a better platform.
Step 3: One year later, BluRay is still too expensive - but we already said we'd have it and if we back down now, it'll be horribly humiliating. So we'll make a cheap, cut-down model PS3 and an up-market model.
Step 4: Darn - all of the games makers thought they'd have BluRay capacities and speeds - so we can't downgrade to a regular DVD - even for the low-priced model - so even the low priced model is insanely expensive! (There is a well known marketting phenomena: Most parents will spend about $300 on an Xmas present for their kids - most won't spend $400 - let alone $500)
Step 5: So Sony over-price the console - but they'll still be losing BIG money on every one they sell.
Step 6: Consoles almost always sell at a loss - the gap is filled by charging game developers for the privilage of selling games for this platform. So to fill that large price gap, developers will be paying more $$$ to Sony than they would to Microsoft and Nintendo...so fewer agree to work on that platform. Hence not so many impressive games at E3.
Step 7: The uptake of HighDef TV in 2006 will be far less than predicted in 2004/2005 - so not enough people will buy the high end PS3 model - and since you can't upgrade the low end PS3 into the high end PS3 (as you can with Xbox 360) and NOBODY believes you'll be able to watch "non-DRM'ed BluRay movies" on the low end machine - you just blew the ONLY reason to screw things up back at step #1 above!
Step 8: Nintendo decide to go WAY downmarket and build something utterly Wiierd with not much more performance than a GameCube - so now all the great "serious" games developers have only one platform - and with the PS3 being a year late - they ALL go to Microsoft.
Congratulations Sony - you just gave 100% of the market to Microsoft - don't expect to be in the console business much longer.
What they DESPERATELY need to do is to dump BluRay for PS3 - come out with something cheaper than XBox 360 with just a DVD in it. Most people won't care because most people don't have a TV set that'll support BluRay and there aren't enough BluRay movies out there to make enough people want it *yet*.
The Wii's only advantage (low price and that weird controller thingy) would be dramatically reduced by a cheaper PS3 - which also has a 6 degree of freedom controller and could run games like 'tennis' in the same way. Underpricing the Xbox 360 would be a huge win - and having better performance than anything else out there would seal the deal.
So - Sony has to dump BluRay in the PS3. Heck, they can always come out with a PS4 next year - assuming the drives come down enough in price.
I really don't understand this witch-hunt against file sharing - peer-to-peer. etc. The Internet is all about moving files from A to B - http, ftp, scp, nfs, email, bittorrent...these are all just ways of moving data around.
You can illegally copy copyrighted works using almost any protocol you can imagine - so the existance of a community of people moving data around means NOTHING. Unless the **AA can show WHAT is being moved around - and that it's illegal, there is no reason to single out any one particular protocol as the cause for worry.
Even if you imagine one particular protocol is predominantly used for wrong-doing - you can't reasonably penalise the legal uses of that protocol. If you actually succeeded in shutting down one protocol - another can be invented overnight. This is simply the wrong approach to dealing with copyright violations.
But didn't I read someplace that Microsoft were coming out with their own anti-virus/anti-whatever suite with a monthly service charge?
With that in mind - why would they tell other, competing, anti-virus companies what flaws to protect against?
Come to think of it - why bother fixing flaws at all - just defend against them in the MS Anti-virus gadget instead and encourage people to pay the anti-virus tax. It might even be tempting to add the occasional flaw just to make that work better.
I don't know whether any of these things will actually happen - but you simply can't trust the motives of a company that behaves the way MS consistently does.
I don't understand why Philips would do this. They make TV sets and VCRs and DVDs and such - but they don't own TV stations or cable networks so they don't profit from advertising. All this would do would be to make people not want to buy their equipment...where is the profit motive?
I used to work for Philips Research Labs - they encourage employees to patent stuff - but that doesn't mean that they intend to make products that use the patent. Often they just want a large pile of patents to threaten other companies with - or patents may be defensive in nature. (There is a great story that Philips made a PacMan clone on one of their game consoles years ago - and just like every other company in that business, they got sued by Atari over it. Everyone else caved in and paid up - but Philips dug out an incredibly ancient Magnavox patent that covered the use of TV sets for synthetic video entertainments of all kinds...Atari dropped the law suite - but Philips didn't ever use their broad patent offensively. So defensive patents - when used ethically - are not necessarily a bad thing).
Anyway - it's very dangerous to assign motives to a company due to some random patent.
Personally, I can see a hidden advantage here. If the TV can lock out the controls when there are adverts present - that means that there must be some kind of flag embedded in the advert so the TV can recognise it. This flag would be a wonderful thing because it would mean that someone could use that very same flag to cause a PVR to skip over the advert completely automatically!
Eh? You can easily retask a modern graphics card. You can program the guts of the GPU using either Cg or GLSL (both of which are C-like programming languages with fair generality). You have some restrictions due to the nature of the hardware data flows - but getting at the sources for the drivers wouldn't help you much there.
The trick is in finding the right kind of algorithm to match the hardware architecture - the actual programming is pretty routine stuff.
nVidia's OpenGL drivers are actually very good. I do Linux OpenGL graphics all day long and it's exceedingly rare to find a serious bug. ATI's are not so good - but still - they aren't disasterous.
Even if you had the sources, I'm pretty skeptical that you'd be able to find and fix a bug. You aren't looking at a couple of thousand line USB driver or something. An OpenGL driver is hideously complex.
> Well they have SOME documentation why not release that? Even its crap it's still better then nothing.
To us...I doubt it. Those cards are fiendishly complicated. This isnt' like writing a USB driver or something. A modern 3D graphics card is a monsterous parallel computer - the driver contains a complete compiler and an assembler for the shader processors - it has to generate machine code for these machines on-the-fly to deal with standard (non-shader) OpenGL commands. There is memory management in a situation where a bazillion little shader processors are accessing god-knows-what memory WHILE you are loading stuff and shuffling things around to avoid fragmentation.
This is HARD. These are not like graphics cards of 10 years ago which were basically a big chunk of frame buffer RAM and some timing registers.
So you'd need very complete documentation.
Furthermore - the cards change design (often in very deep ways) about every 6 months - that documentation would have to be kept up to date or it would be useless within a year. Furthermore - we'd need documentation for every card type going back to maybe GeForce-2 - that's about 40 or 50 card designs if you include both nVidia and ATI.
The other issue is that the documentation will reveal things they don't want revealed:
1) Both ATI and nVidia have been known to carefully optimise their drivers to suit particular benchmark tests. They don't want that to be made obvious because it looks bad. 2) They don't want to reveal how their cards work because they are fearful of some clone manufacturer stepping in and making hardware that works with their driver - thereby saving a small fortune in driver development. 3) They don't want to reveal proprietary algorithms. 4) They may be legally prevented from documenting algorithms that they've licensed from other companies. 5) These cards often have bugs in their hardware that the driver has to work around. They don't want those bugs aired out in public because it could make them look bad.
The way these guys work is that the software engineers and the hardware engineers sit next to each other and talk a lot. They can save a lot of time and money by not writing down things that all of them already know.
If they wrote documentation for everything, they'd need several highly qualified engineer-equivelents to do that. Given the small teams that do these designs, that's a huge overhead - and it's one they aren't going to tolerate if it adds even a few days to their product cycle.
I've been through this with the card makers MANY times - the answer is always the same.
This is utterly not going to happen.
Things might be different if there were a dozen companies competing for the business. One company could take a chance - release good documentation and/or good OpenSourced drivers - they would capture close to 100% of the Linux market and that would make a big difference to a tiny company. Other companies would then have to follow suite and everything would turn out right.
But it's not like that. There are now just TWO 3D graphics card manufacturers left on the planet. Matrox, 3DLabs - all of those guys have been out-done and have gotten out of the business - leaving only the two giants. In this situation, neither nVidia nor ATI would notice so much as a blip on their bottom line if they either gained or lost the entire Linux graphics card market. On the other hand, a one week slippage in delivery deadlines close to Xmas can lose them a MASSIVE chunk of the market. If they don't have the single greatest, fastest card 30 days before Xmas, they're screwed for an entire year. They can't afford to blink - let alone waste energy on a teeny-tiny slice of the market.
So - this is absolutely not going to happen. Anyone who even *imagines* otherwise has never talked for long to an nVidia or ATI employee.
If Linux doesn't have proprietary 3D graphics drivers, it doesn't have 3D graphics at all at any usable speed. That means a ton of things like games - and professional applications like Flight Simulation (my job!) would be impossible.
Now - I hear two arguments against my view:
1) If we somehow force all drivers to be OpenSourced then nVidia and ATI will cave in and release the sources to their drivers. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Both companies are very concerned about clone makers stealing their driver work - and about the release of proprietary algorithms. I've spoken to them both at some length about this and you can be very sure they won't cave in. Linux is a microscopic share of their market - we're lucky to have drivers at all.
2) If we force all drivers to be OpenSourced then we'll just have to write our own drivers for these cards. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The details of the 3D hardware's interface isn't documented ANYWHERE - not by nVidia or ATI - these graphics cards are horrifically complex inside - trust me - I used to design 3D hardware. There is no way on earth an OpenSource team without access to the hardware designers would stand a snowballs chance in hell of producing an efficient OpenGL driver. Even if we could - we couldn't come up with new updates on the 6 month product cycle of nVidia and ATI.
So - OpenSourced 3D graphic drivers simply won't happen. Period.
If the religious fanatics manage to license or engineer these drivers out of existance then they are just forcing a TON of loyal Linux users to switch to Windows. Thanks a bunch. Way to go to reward people who took the chance on an OpenSourced OS.
This isn't about religion - this is about end users who want to get real work done in the real world - not in some airy fairy land where dreams come true if you just wish hard enough and believe in yourself.
So Airlines are better than AVERAGE cars - but an SUV is much worse than an average car.
Motorcycles and commuter trains win.
But a FUEL EFFICIENT car is the best option. You can fit an adult, 3 kids and a bunch of kid stuff into a 35mpg MINI Cooper - I do it all the time. Then you're up to 140 passenger miles per gallon - but even when you drive alone, you're still doing a shade better than average. With a typical SUV - even with three kids - you are only just barely making the average - but when you drive it alone (as I'm SURE you do) - you're dragging the average down so far...
Right - but *my* work PC has almost a terabyte of satellite imagery that's already compressed with a proprietary algorithm...plus maybe 2 or 3 gigs of SuSE Linux and a few hundred megs of other stuff. Even if the compression tool was smart enough to compress the SuSE files down to a handful of bytes that say "Insert SuSE Linux v9.7 here", that's only a third of a percent compression of what's on my PC. Compressing JPEG imagery more than a fraction more than it is already (in a lossless manner) is probably close to impossible.
So the best algorithm imaginable is unlikely to get more than maybe a 1.5:1 compression out of my PC. It only takes a few users to have similar issues to render claims of a 25:1 compression rate totally impossible to achieve...even with specialised knowledge of the file contents.
Well, the Slashdot article that I was responding to referenced a ZDNet article - which in turn referenced a paper document that they had scanned and stored here:
It's certainly possible (for some types of data) to perform LOSSY compression down to 25:1 - but this system is a backup system...you don't want lossy compression in a backup system!! So let's assume these guys are talking lossless compression.
The best current compression algorithms for English text come close to 10:1 lossless compression - so there is hope that their system could do that good.
Even simple run-length encoding will manage spectacular compression ratios well over 100:1 on images that are diagrams...but they typically manage zero compression at all for most photographs.
Most notably, if your files have ALREADY been compressed it is unlikely in the extreme that any lossless scheme will encode them further.
There is mathematical PROOF that you can't losslessly compress a generalized stream of random numbers at all.
So examining this claim, we have to deduce that - yes, a well implemented scheme using basic known technology would be able to get into the 25:1 range for SOME files. However, we know for sure that it won't get close to 25:1 for files full of essentially random numbers - notably, files already compressed by some other scheme.
We know then that this cannot be a bold, sweeping claim like "No matter what - you'll get 25:1 compression" - that's simply not possible - and you can prove it using math.. So if that *IS* what they are saying - then we must yell "BULLSHIT".
However, if instead they are claiming "We can compress a typical PC user's file system by 25:1" - then maybe so. In a community of PC users, there will be lots of copies of the same files on lots of PC's - there will be lots of easy-to-compress text files and images of simple diagrams and such. If every PC has a copy of WORD installed on it - then large compression ratios are possible by merely noting this fact. Perhaps that's enough to overcome the likely 1:1 non-compression of that guy's copy of the first billion digits of PI, all of those ZIP and JPG files that are already well compressed. MAYBE we believe their claim for "typical" situations. However, there are no programs out there that can RELIABLY get better lossless compression than 10:1 for text or better than 2:1 for photos. There has to be an awful lot of easy to compress stuff to counteract the effect of a bunch of large photos and ZIP files. One 1MB JPG file has to be accompanied by 50MB of stuff that can be 50:1 compressed in order to average out to 25:1 overall. So their 'magic' compression scheme would have to be able to compress easy-to-compress files by a factor of maybe 100:1 or more in order to allow room for all of those JPG's and ZIP's.
That's a tall order indeed. I think that even for a typical PC's hard drive, this claim is BS.
What's for sure is that they are being a little dishonest by not qualifying their claim in some way.
God knows I hate Microsoft more than most people...but this might be a teensy bit of an overreaction.
The actual source of this information says that:
1) This is a UK-only thing. 2) There are only TWO new MS employees doing this. 3) They discuss this during routine customer meetings. 4) There is no hint of coersion implied here.
So what this actually means is that there are a couple of extra marketeers out there trying to pursuade stores not to sell bare PC's.
* To install their own software. * To transfer software from an old machine. * To install Linux * To take advantage of volume licensing.
The didn't mention "To use a pirated version of windows".
What they ARE saying is that selling a bare system is a missed opportunity for the store. They suggest that if you sell someone a bare machine, you're missing a chance to sell them additional software such as photo processing, music players, etc.
So - yeah Microsoft are most definitely *evil* - but this isn't anything to panic about.
I doubt this will change the minds of many sellers - two guys in one country appealing to store owners who probably made a careful decision to let their customers avoid the MS tax.
You DON'T need to keep re-buying windows over and over again. You DON'T need to buy a copy of Windows only to have it be overwritten with a site-licensed version at work. You DON'T need to buy a copy only to scribble all over it with Linux. You SHOULD be able to save $50 off the cost of your PC if you are in one of those catagories.
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Both God and String Theory have the same problems for the scientific method - neither of them is falsifiable - and neither makes predictions about things we don't already know that we can actually go out and test.
So (as a scientist) there is very little point in thinking about either of them for very long because they simply don't get you any further in making workable personal jet packs, or any of the other fun stuff that science is generally so good at.
Falsifiability is a reasonable requirement. It says: "OK Mr. Proponent of God/StringTheory. tell me one experiment I could reasonably consider doing that (if it hypothetically failed) would prove that God/Strings definitely doesn't exist." But there IS no such test for either thing. String theory is just so very flexible that it can accomodate almost any failed experiment by picking another one of the ten-to-the-power-500 possible variations on how space is wrapped up, and experiments that might manage to disprove it appear to require more energy than the entire universe contains in order to perform them. Meanwhile, God is claimed to be utterly omnipotent - so any experiment we think up to prove that he's not there, could merely be written of as him "testing our faith".
Lack of falsifiability doesn't prove or disprove a theory - it just makes the theory worthless for science.
So it's fine to believe in God and be a scientist - so long as you realise that your theory of the universe isn't going to help you make personal jet packs (which you still owe me by the way!).
If somewhere in all the religious texts it said "God can do absolutely anything EXCEPT make purple stars" - then we could all get out our telescopes and go look for purple stars. If we ever found one then the case would be closed. If we never found one - then we still wouldn't know for SURE that there was a God - but ultimate proof isn't something science can ever really provide. But as it is, we are told by the proponents of the God theory that he can do absolutely anything he likes - and we know that if he does exist then he has no compunction in planting REALLY convincing bogus evidence for the big bang just to "test our faith". So we can't make ANY predictions about God whatever and any theory that includes him in any way whatever is useless for our progress. If we employ our belief in God, we can't make a computer that works reliably because God might decide he doesn't like us calculating PI to a bazillion places so the machine would be useless for all practical purposes. We can't find out whether there was life on Mars because he does stuff like burying really convincing solid stone dinosaur bones to try to cheat us into a belief in evolution when he knows full well that it's not true. A world with a God in it is simply not open to doing any kind of useful science - so if we'd like to have personal jet packs (sorry to keep harping on about those - but really, they are a bit overdue), we'd better put God theories to one side while we're designing them. If we used a God-based universe as our model, the only really plausible way to get jet packs is to sit on our backsides and pray for them to materialise out of thin air.
String theory has similar problems - and I could understand why people are beginning to think it's a waste of time for such a large proportion of Physicists to be working on it. The theory is at the point where it certainly COULD be true - but if it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know and there's no way for us to ever disprove it - then it's just not very useful.
Correction: According to Wikipedia, the South pointing chariot was around in 2643BC - so 2563 years before Antikythera - not 2000.
No - it's neither the first known geared device - nor the first use of a differential gear nor the first analog computer. The chinese had them beat by close to 2000 years...read and learn:
m
o t
80BC Antikythera mechanism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanis
2000BC South pointing chariot - a geared mechanism with a differential.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pointing_Chari
The south pointing chariot subtracted the number of revolutions of one wheel from the number of revolutions of the other and multiplies by some constant that relates the diameter of the wheels to the distance between them. It had to have used a differential to do that because a 'differential' by definition is any mechanism that computes a difference.
Technically, the South pointing chariot was an analog computer...well, as much as the Antikythera contraption was - albeit on a smaller scale.
I've been hearing about all of these new discoveries about the device over the past week - but I don't see *ANY* new knowledge. We hear that there is finally proof that it's an analog computer - and that finding this word proves it's an astronomical calculator - but I have a book printed 15 years ago that says exactly that. The mechanism that calculates sun and moon positions is completely well understood and has been for years. There are working replicas of the device in several museums that demonstrate how it works.
Check out the Wikipedia article.
So if these guys have really learned something new - they are failing to communicate whatever it ACTUALLY is that they've found.
No, no, no.
We were definitely promised jet packs.
*Personal* jet packs.
You scientists can't fob us off with a pair of unpowered plastic wings - even if they are painted black and worn with a cool black suit and helmet.
It's just NOT good enough.
I clearly remember being PROMISED personal jet packs.
Bah.
Isn't is a bit disturbing that the government files patents to prevent us from using stuff that we paid them to invent?
So what happens to all the bits of glass and palladium after it releases its hydrogen load?
I guess ideally, it would get saved somewhere for recycling - but presuming that doesn't happ
en - is it going to be OK to breath microsopic bits of that stuff?
I am VERY clear about what a 6-DoF controller is - at the SONY E3 presentation, they explained that they'd changed the controller and that the new one "detects all six degrees of freedom". Now, they may have lied - or been imprecise or incorrect - but that is EXACTLY what they said.
Now - it's almost certain to be a detector of relative motion (like a mouse) rather than an absolute motion detector (like a digitizing tablet or the Wii controller) - and that might well make it less suitable than the Wii's controller for some kinds of games - but I'm pretty sure that with good programming, you could still interpret the necessary gestures to play tennis.
Of course SONY may have been mistaken in their use of that technical term - in which case, I apologise for taking them at their word - but I'm quite clear about what 6-DoF means and about what the SONY presentation said.
Dropping processors won't cut the price significantly. Once the chip is designed, the manufacturing cost depends only on volume and yield. Dropping one or more cell processors might help yield somewhat - but not enough to chop more than maybe $10 off the price.
The HUGE cost in PS3 is the BluRay drive. There were estimates out there that they cost SONY $1000 each. The electronics in the PS3 probably costs only a couple of hundred bucks - the rest is in the hard drive and the BluRay drive. These days they can't do without the former - and politically, I don't see how they can drop the latter (although they should).
So even at $600, I'd guess that they're probably selling the console at a $300 net loss. With $60 games (eeek!) they can maybe claw back $20 to $30 from each game sold - so long as the average owner buys maybe 10 to 15 games, they'll eke out a profit.
But I don't know many kids in their demographic who can afford to lay out $60 for a game on a regular basis.
A common rule-of-thumb for parents in the USA is that kids should get an allowance of between 50c and a dollar for every year of their age. So a kid in the 15 year old range at the high end of the demographic will probably be able to spend $15 a week - that's just one $60 game per month - at MOST 12 games per year...but in all likelyhood it'll be much, much less than that because kids are terrible at saving and will tend to buy music or something like that instead.
So kids will get one or maybe two games for birthday and Xmas - it's hard to see how Sony are going to sell more than a dozen games per console owner in the first couple of years. It's a financial disaster for them - and the more consoles they sell, they more money they'll lose.
Are they expecting to sell more to adults with enough disposable income? Maybe - but I suspect adults will be heading to the Xbox.
I think the PS3 is purely and simply a vehicle for getting BluRay players out there against an apathetic public who are (quite frankly) very happy with standard DVD's.
Step 1: BluRay has to become the next DVD standard. 'Big Sony' demands that - so the PS3 has to have BluRay no matter what the game console development team want to do.
Step 2: BluRay is too expensive for Xmas '05 - something over $1000 for a bare drive - since a $1300 game console won't sell, PS3 is delayed a year in the hope that prices will drop. This gives Xbox 360 a chance that it doesn't deserve because (even without BluRay) the PS3 is a better platform.
Step 3: One year later, BluRay is still too expensive - but we already said we'd have it and if we back down now, it'll be horribly humiliating. So we'll make a cheap, cut-down model PS3 and an up-market model.
Step 4: Darn - all of the games makers thought they'd have BluRay capacities and speeds - so we can't downgrade to a regular DVD - even for the low-priced model - so even the low priced model is insanely expensive! (There is a well known marketting phenomena: Most parents will spend about $300 on an Xmas present for their kids - most won't spend $400 - let alone $500)
Step 5: So Sony over-price the console - but they'll still be losing BIG money on every one they sell.
Step 6: Consoles almost always sell at a loss - the gap is filled by charging game developers for the privilage of selling games for this platform. So to fill that large price gap, developers will be paying more $$$ to Sony than they would to Microsoft and Nintendo...so fewer agree to work on that platform. Hence not so many impressive games at E3.
Step 7: The uptake of HighDef TV in 2006 will be far less than predicted in 2004/2005 - so not enough people will buy the high end PS3 model - and since you can't upgrade the low end PS3 into the high end PS3 (as you can with Xbox 360) and NOBODY believes you'll be able to watch "non-DRM'ed BluRay movies" on the low end machine - you just blew the ONLY reason to screw things up back at step #1 above!
Step 8: Nintendo decide to go WAY downmarket and build something utterly Wiierd with not much more performance than a GameCube - so now all the great "serious" games developers have only one platform - and with the PS3 being a year late - they ALL go to Microsoft.
Congratulations Sony - you just gave 100% of the market to Microsoft - don't expect to be in the console business much longer.
What they DESPERATELY need to do is to dump BluRay for PS3 - come out with something cheaper than XBox 360 with just a DVD in it. Most people won't care because most people don't have a TV set that'll support BluRay and there aren't enough BluRay movies out there to make enough people want it *yet*.
The Wii's only advantage (low price and that weird controller thingy) would be dramatically reduced by a cheaper PS3 - which also has a 6 degree of freedom controller and could run games like 'tennis' in the same way. Underpricing the Xbox 360 would be a huge win - and having better performance than anything else out there would seal the deal.
So - Sony has to dump BluRay in the PS3. Heck, they can always come out with a PS4 next year - assuming the drives come down enough in price.
The biggest problem with NXT for me is that they skimped on the memory. That thing really cries out for a decent amount of Flash memory.
I really don't understand this witch-hunt against file sharing - peer-to-peer. etc. The Internet is all about moving files from A to B - http, ftp, scp, nfs, email, bittorrent...these are all just ways of moving data around.
You can illegally copy copyrighted works using almost any protocol you can imagine - so the existance of a community of people moving data around means NOTHING. Unless the **AA can show WHAT is being moved around - and that it's illegal, there is no reason to single out any one particular protocol as the cause for worry.
Even if you imagine one particular protocol is predominantly used for wrong-doing - you can't reasonably penalise the legal uses of that protocol. If you actually succeeded in shutting down one protocol - another can be invented overnight. This is simply the wrong approach to dealing with copyright violations.
Argh.
But didn't I read someplace that Microsoft were coming out with their own anti-virus/anti-whatever suite with a monthly service charge?
With that in mind - why would they tell other, competing, anti-virus companies what flaws to protect against?
Come to think of it - why bother fixing flaws at all - just defend against them in the MS Anti-virus gadget instead and encourage people to pay the anti-virus tax. It might even be tempting to add the occasional flaw just to make that work better.
I don't know whether any of these things will actually happen - but you simply can't trust the motives of a company that behaves the way MS consistently does.
Slashdoter? One who dotes on slash? Cool!
No - I said out of *THE* business - meaning the 3D graphics card business.
I don't understand why Philips would do this. They make TV sets and VCRs and DVDs and such - but they don't own TV stations or cable networks so they don't profit from advertising. All this would do would be to make people not want to buy their equipment...where is the profit motive?
I used to work for Philips Research Labs - they encourage employees to patent stuff - but that doesn't mean that they intend to make products that use the patent. Often they just want a large pile of patents to threaten other companies with - or patents may be defensive in nature. (There is a great story that Philips made a PacMan clone on one of their game consoles years ago - and just like every other company in that business, they got sued by Atari over it. Everyone else caved in and paid up - but Philips dug out an incredibly ancient Magnavox patent that covered the use of TV sets for synthetic video entertainments of all kinds...Atari dropped the law suite - but Philips didn't ever use their broad patent offensively. So defensive patents - when used ethically - are not necessarily a bad thing).
Anyway - it's very dangerous to assign motives to a company due to some random patent.
Personally, I can see a hidden advantage here. If the TV can lock out the controls when there are adverts present - that means that there must be some kind of flag embedded in the advert so the TV can recognise it. This flag would be a wonderful thing because it would mean that someone could use that very same flag to cause a PVR to skip over the advert completely automatically!
Eh? You can easily retask a modern graphics card. You can program the guts of the GPU using either Cg or GLSL (both of which are C-like programming languages with fair generality). You have some restrictions due to the nature of the hardware data flows - but getting at the sources for the drivers wouldn't help you much there.
The trick is in finding the right kind of algorithm to match the hardware architecture - the actual programming is pretty routine stuff.
Crack open a GLSL book...you'll be suprised.
nVidia's OpenGL drivers are actually very good. I do Linux OpenGL graphics all day long and it's exceedingly rare to find a serious bug. ATI's are not so good - but still - they aren't disasterous.
Even if you had the sources, I'm pretty skeptical that you'd be able to find and fix a bug. You aren't looking at a couple of thousand line USB driver or something. An OpenGL driver is hideously complex.
> Well they have SOME documentation why not release that? Even its crap it's still better then nothing.
To us...I doubt it. Those cards are fiendishly complicated. This isnt' like writing a USB driver or something. A modern 3D graphics card is a monsterous parallel computer - the driver contains a complete compiler and an assembler for the shader processors - it has to generate machine code for these machines on-the-fly to deal with standard (non-shader) OpenGL commands. There is memory management in a situation where a bazillion little shader processors are accessing god-knows-what memory WHILE you are loading stuff and shuffling things around to avoid fragmentation.
This is HARD. These are not like graphics cards of 10 years ago which were basically a big chunk of frame buffer RAM and some timing registers.
So you'd need very complete documentation.
Furthermore - the cards change design (often in very deep ways) about every 6 months - that documentation would have to be kept up to date or it would be useless within a year. Furthermore - we'd need documentation for every card type going back to maybe GeForce-2 - that's about 40 or 50 card designs if you include both nVidia and ATI.
The other issue is that the documentation will reveal things they don't want revealed:
1) Both ATI and nVidia have been known to carefully optimise their drivers to suit particular benchmark tests. They don't want that to be made obvious because it looks bad.
2) They don't want to reveal how their cards work because they are fearful of some clone manufacturer stepping in and making hardware that works with their driver - thereby saving a small fortune in driver development.
3) They don't want to reveal proprietary algorithms.
4) They may be legally prevented from documenting algorithms that they've licensed from other companies.
5) These cards often have bugs in their hardware that the driver has to work around. They don't want those bugs aired out in public because it could make them look bad.
No - that's not true.
The way these guys work is that the software engineers and the hardware engineers sit next to each other and talk a lot. They can save a lot of time and money by not writing down things that all of them already know.
If they wrote documentation for everything, they'd need several highly qualified engineer-equivelents to do that. Given the small teams that do these designs, that's a huge overhead - and it's one they aren't going to tolerate if it adds even a few days to their product cycle.
I've been through this with the card makers MANY times - the answer is always the same.
This is utterly not going to happen.
Things might be different if there were a dozen companies competing for the business. One company could take a chance - release good documentation and/or good OpenSourced drivers - they would capture close to 100% of the Linux market and that would make a big difference to a tiny company. Other companies would then have to follow suite and everything would turn out right.
But it's not like that. There are now just TWO 3D graphics card manufacturers left on the planet. Matrox, 3DLabs - all of those guys have been out-done and have gotten out of the business - leaving only the two giants. In this situation, neither nVidia nor ATI would notice so much as a blip on their bottom line if they either gained or lost the entire Linux graphics card market. On the other hand, a one week slippage in delivery deadlines close to Xmas can lose them a MASSIVE chunk of the market. If they don't have the single greatest, fastest card 30 days before Xmas, they're screwed for an entire year. They can't afford to blink - let alone waste energy on a teeny-tiny slice of the market.
So - this is absolutely not going to happen. Anyone who even *imagines* otherwise has never talked for long to an nVidia or ATI employee.
I don't see a choice.
If Linux doesn't have proprietary 3D graphics drivers, it doesn't have 3D graphics at all at any usable speed. That means a ton of things like games - and professional applications like Flight Simulation (my job!) would be impossible.
Now - I hear two arguments against my view:
1) If we somehow force all drivers to be OpenSourced then nVidia and ATI will cave in and release the sources to their drivers. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. Both companies are very concerned about clone makers stealing their driver work - and about the release of proprietary algorithms. I've spoken to them both at some length about this and you can be very sure they won't cave in. Linux is a microscopic share of their market - we're lucky to have drivers at all.
2) If we force all drivers to be OpenSourced then we'll just have to write our own drivers for these cards. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The details of the 3D hardware's interface isn't documented ANYWHERE - not by nVidia or ATI - these graphics cards are horrifically complex inside - trust me - I used to design 3D hardware. There is no way on earth an OpenSource team without access to the hardware designers would stand a snowballs chance in hell of producing an efficient OpenGL driver. Even if we could - we couldn't come up with new updates on the 6 month product cycle of nVidia and ATI.
So - OpenSourced 3D graphic drivers simply won't happen. Period.
If the religious fanatics manage to license or engineer these drivers out of existance then they are just forcing a TON of loyal Linux users to switch to Windows. Thanks a bunch. Way to go to reward people who took the chance on an OpenSourced OS.
This isn't about religion - this is about end users who want to get real work done in the real world - not in some airy fairy land where dreams come true if you just wish hard enough and believe in yourself.
According to Wikipedia:
Average passenger-miles per gallon:
Automobiles 34.9
Personal trucks 30.8
Motorcycles 55.0
Transit Buses 30.3
Airlines 33.8
Intercity trains 25.9
Commuter trains 46.1
So Airlines are better than AVERAGE cars - but an SUV is much worse than an average car.
Motorcycles and commuter trains win.
But a FUEL EFFICIENT car is the best option. You can fit an adult, 3 kids and a bunch of kid stuff into a 35mpg MINI Cooper - I do it all the time. Then you're up to 140 passenger miles per gallon - but even when you drive alone, you're still doing a shade better than average. With a typical SUV - even with three kids - you are only just barely making the average - but when you drive it alone (as I'm SURE you do) - you're dragging the average down so far...
Right - but *my* work PC has almost a terabyte of satellite imagery that's already compressed with a proprietary algorithm...plus maybe 2 or 3 gigs of SuSE Linux and a few hundred megs of other stuff. Even if the compression tool was smart enough to compress the SuSE files down to a handful of bytes that say "Insert SuSE Linux v9.7 here", that's only a third of a percent compression of what's on my PC. Compressing JPEG imagery more than a fraction more than it is already (in a lossless manner) is probably close to impossible.
So the best algorithm imaginable is unlikely to get more than maybe a 1.5:1 compression out of my PC. It only takes a few users to have similar issues to render claims of a 25:1 compression rate totally impossible to achieve...even with specialised knowledge of the file contents.
> Stop right there, what source, who said that?
a n.jpg
Well, the Slashdot article that I was responding to referenced a ZDNet article - which in turn referenced a paper document that they had scanned and stored here:
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z/nw/sp/storygraphics/sc
That's my source - and I quoted it.
Microsoft may well have said other things in other places...
It's certainly possible (for some types of data) to perform LOSSY compression down to 25:1 - but this system is a backup system...you don't want lossy compression in a backup system!! So let's assume these guys are talking lossless compression.
The best current compression algorithms for English text come close to 10:1 lossless compression - so there is hope that their system could do that good.
Even simple run-length encoding will manage spectacular compression ratios well over 100:1 on images that are diagrams...but they typically manage zero compression at all for most photographs.
Most notably, if your files have ALREADY been compressed it is unlikely in the extreme that any lossless scheme will encode them further.
There is mathematical PROOF that you can't losslessly compress a generalized stream of random numbers at all.
So examining this claim, we have to deduce that - yes, a well implemented scheme using basic known technology would be able to get into the 25:1 range for SOME files. However, we know for sure that it won't get close to 25:1 for files full of essentially random numbers - notably, files already compressed by some other scheme.
We know then that this cannot be a bold, sweeping claim like "No matter what - you'll get 25:1 compression" - that's simply not possible - and you can prove it using math.. So if that *IS* what they are saying - then we must yell "BULLSHIT".
However, if instead they are claiming "We can compress a typical PC user's file system by 25:1" - then maybe so. In a community of PC users, there will be lots of copies of the same files on lots of PC's - there will be lots of easy-to-compress text files and images of simple diagrams and such. If every PC has a copy of WORD installed on it - then large compression ratios are possible by merely noting this fact. Perhaps that's enough to overcome the likely 1:1 non-compression of that guy's copy of the first billion digits of PI, all of those ZIP and JPG files that are already well compressed. MAYBE we believe their claim for "typical" situations. However, there are no programs out there that can RELIABLY get better lossless compression than 10:1 for text or better than 2:1 for photos. There has to be an awful lot of easy to compress stuff to counteract the effect of a bunch of large photos and ZIP files. One 1MB JPG file has to be accompanied by 50MB of stuff that can be 50:1 compressed in order to average out to 25:1 overall. So their 'magic' compression scheme would have to be able to compress easy-to-compress files by a factor of maybe 100:1 or more in order to allow room for all of those JPG's and ZIP's.
That's a tall order indeed. I think that even for a typical PC's hard drive, this claim is BS.
What's for sure is that they are being a little dishonest by not qualifying their claim in some way.
God knows I hate Microsoft more than most people...but this might be a teensy bit of an overreaction.
a n.jpg says that the top four reasons people buy bare PC's is:
The actual source of this information says that:
1) This is a UK-only thing.
2) There are only TWO new MS employees doing this.
3) They discuss this during routine customer meetings.
4) There is no hint of coersion implied here.
So what this actually means is that there are a couple of extra marketeers out there trying to pursuade stores not to sell bare PC's.
Furthermore, the MS article http://www.zdnet.co.uk/i/z/nw/sp/storygraphics/sc
* To install their own software.
* To transfer software from an old machine.
* To install Linux
* To take advantage of volume licensing.
The didn't mention "To use a pirated version of windows".
What they ARE saying is that selling a bare system is a missed opportunity for the store. They suggest that if you sell someone a bare machine, you're missing a chance to sell them additional software such as photo processing, music players, etc.
So - yeah Microsoft are most definitely *evil* - but this isn't anything to panic about.
I doubt this will change the minds of many sellers - two guys in one country appealing to store owners who probably made a careful decision to let their customers avoid the MS tax.
You DON'T need to keep re-buying windows over and over again. You DON'T need to buy a copy of Windows only to have it be overwritten with a site-licensed version at work. You DON'T need to buy a copy only to scribble all over it with Linux. You SHOULD be able to save $50 off the cost of your PC if you are in one of those catagories.