The Spammers are complete bullshit. The article is mearly repeating what the spammer said, in a similar way to when an article mearly repeats what Linus or Alan or RMS says. If you don't like the spammers, call them bullshit. The article does not say they are right or wrong, it only passes what they said along. It's called "reporting".
I'd bet that the author of the article had to promise not to demonize the spammers just to get permission to interview them.
Don't shoot the messenger just becuase you don't like the message.
Is it too much to ask that a journalist check facts before extensively quoting a criminal?
What facts? The journalist is mearly repeating what the subject said, in quotes. The only FACT being presented BY THE JOURNALIST is that the people referenced said the statements in quotes. All else is the conjecture of the spammers themselves.
The journalist doesn't have the right to change what the subject said. If the subject lied, then the subject lied. The journalist does have the right to comment on the accuracy of what the subject said. That is not an obligation. As far as I can tell, the journalist did not comment either positivley or negatively on what the subject said.
Also, It is questionable at best whether these people are criminals. They are certainly obnixious, abusive, all kinds of other things. But "Criminal" has a specific meaning, related to law, courts, conviction, judges, juries. Do you know that these people have been charged with and convicicted of a crime related to junk e-mail?
I can certainly understand that you do not like the spammers. I don't either. I can see that you want as much press to demonize them as possible. That does not mean that any press that does not demonize them is automatically bad journalism.
it takes the words of the spammers completely at face value.
Weeeeelll..., not quite.
It does, as you noticed, quote exactly what the spammers say and claim. It does not explicitly call them liers. It does not extensively detail the position of the anti-spammers. All that lends itself to an article that primarily informs the reader of the position of the spammer.
But, it does not actually say that what the spammer is doing is right, legal, moral or anything else. It simply passes along their views.
That is what unbiased reporting is about. If I read an article that outright calls spammers scum and claims they should DIE DIE DIE, I'd read that as a biased article.
There are plenty of articles around that detail how spammers annoy people, how they should be stopped, how they cost money, and on and on. most of these articles do not provide voice for the other side (the spammers). Would you call them bad reporting because of that?
Bias is not about supporting your position. Bias is about supporting any one position over another. Just because it doesn't support your bias does not mean it has the opposite bias. The middle ground usually looks hostile from either end, sort of the "If you're not for us, then you're against us" mentality.
if I saw one of these things comming at me, I'd run for the hills!
The Hills? NONONONONO! That's where they are most effective. You need to run to the flat wide open spaces. That way you could out run and out manouver it on your trusty tricycle.
If you were deceived by that, then you should pay a little better attention to what you are reading. You call youself an engineer, so you should be used to the idea of "attention to detail". Pay attention to the details you read in the same way that you pay attention to the code you read and write. Read what it actually says, not what you want it to say or what you ASSUME it should say.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that rendered images in the context of a new piece of graphics hardware were actually produced using that new graphics hardware.
images supposedly produced on the NV30
...except that they did not ever claim that they produced them. You infered that from their placement on the page. You assumed that if a picture is on the page, it must be from their hardware. "Not doing so leaves me with no choice other than to assume". Your mistake, not theirs. You do have the choice, you just need to use it. You can blindly expect the world to play by your rules, or you can learn how it works and understand how to play by its rules.
It sounds like the difference is between what YOU expect from a disclaimer and what a lawyer or court would consider a sufficient disclaimer. You seem to want some glairing statement like "Our hardware can draw pictures like this one, but we did not actually draw these exact pictures. These came from another fancy rendering program".
A lawyer might simply say "Our hardware can draw pictures like this one." "Like" is a sufficient disclaimer.
Of course it is meant as a deception. Unfortunately, deception is part of sales. If you really can't tell what it means, if you really can't see through the language, then you're gonna have a hard time out in the real world. You can complain all you want as to whether it's fair or right or whatever. The only rules that sales plays by are advertising laws (and sometimes not even those). The only way to call them on it is to take them to court. I don't thing there's a case here.
If deception is the problem, then accuse them of deception. Forgery has a more clear definition, and if these pictures have enough disclaimer, then they are not forgeries.
The coffie cup, the knight, and the girl all have adiquate disclaimers. The motorcycle and tabletop both have language in them implying that they were rendered with Cg. Make your case there.
Last time I used sarcasm tags, I got a compalint that I didn't really need them. It was "obvious". I guess you can't please everyone. Style is a personal choice...
It would be easier to tell if you ACTUALLY READ the caption rather than just look at the pictures.
This image montage should be instantly recognizable, and is from the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie. The NV3x architecture's CineFX engine is capable of rendering scenes of similar accuracy, as those found in computer generated films such as Final Fantasy.
It says capable of rendering , see. That means the chip has the same rendering capability in its vertex shader as the high powered rendering engine that rendered these original pictures. It does not say they actually rendered this picture on this chip.
Each processor has it's own memory controller so there is no shared memory bottleneck for multiprocessing. 2 processors should be exactly twice as fast using multithreaded applications
As you said, each processor has its own memory. If a processor needs data in another processors memory space, it has to request it over the Hyperchannel bus, not quite a local request (NUMA).
Multithreaded programs share a lot of data between threads.
Sooo. what you really mean is that two independant processes will each run as if on a dedicated processor (which they will). But multithreading will still have some memory and bus contention.
The 4 Gig limit is for addressing space with 32 bits. This has not limited either physical or virtual memory space in modern processors for a long time.
Physical memory was extended to 36 bits by the PII (or was it PPro?).
For greater than 4Gb virtual, you can still use segmentation. A process can have (what, 12 bits of local segments, 12 bits of global segemnts) 8192 segments, each with 4 Gig memory. Hardly a hard limit. It just means data has to be broken up. All you old 286 programmers know how to do that don't you.
Note: AMDs X86-64 will supposedly discontinue support for segmentation in 64-bit mode.
Those decrepit baby boomers owe it to us later generations.
Yeah, everyone OWES US something.
Do you think you could elaborate a little more on what WE owe THEM? I never see anyone talk about that. Or maybe you think you (we) don't owe anyone else anything.
The confusion seems to be in the definition of "Good". To those of us who watch, "Good" has to do with the story, acting, production quality and some other things.
To a movie company, "Good" is a movie that makes lots of money. By their definition, a 100M$ movie is good no matter who liked it or not. The finest acting and story that only make 20M$ is not a "Good" movie to them.
I can see it now. So many more people will now be hawking their wares on E-Bay in a desperate attempt to qualify for health insurance. The volume goes up. the quality goes down...
It says that "everyone does it, so why should we hold these people to a higher standard?"
CRAP.
They told us to hold them to a higher standard by electing them. They said they would make the country a better place, or at lease a safer one. They claimed superiority to their competitors. They claimed to want to help the people. Go listen to all of their campaign speeches.
I expect there are a lot of people in the world who lie and cheat and steal. And I try very carefully to see through the lies, avoid the cheats, and not get ripped off by th thieves.
So then the liers, cheaters, and thieves are making the laws, I do what I can to remove them. THAT is in ALL OF OUR best interests.
There are also good congress-critters. It's always a good time to get rid of the trash and support the good. I guess the only think to add is that not all of congress is bad, just the handfull of bad apples. Let's clean them up, not excuse them.
How much fragmentation can the Open Source community take?
Well, lets see. Hundreds of thousands of available programmers, Thousands of projects. that roughly divides ito hundreds of programmers per project (if they were so lucky).
Most of the time when we hear complaining about fragmentation, what it usually comes from is the speakers desire to have the programmers that are working on projects he doesn't care about to switch to projects he does care about.
Fragmentation is just another word for variety. There are multiple projects covering almost any area of software you can mention. If it were somehow determined that only one project in each area would survive and the rest would go away, then we are setting ourselves up for monopolies. We'll be trying to make one program be all things to all people. That's what we are trying to get away from.
Hurd is different from the Linux Kernel. Some things are worse (stability, speed) and some things are better (configurability, dynamic services). People will choose based on what they need, and different people need different things. you've decided what you want. Now be kind enough to allow the rest of us to choose for ourselves.
I'd bet that if the DOD really didn't like the idea of a moon base, they'd use easier cheeper methods to compete: like sabotage here on earth, or a handfull of long range missels that could take out a moon base without a human leaving the Earth. Military responses only.
The economic/scientific bebefits of a moonbase would be of more advantage to China in a time of Peace. It wouldn't survive a war.
The only real advantage of ATA133 is to support drives >120GB.
Yes, that is the real advantage, and probably the reason that ATA133 will eventually become the standard for all drives/controllers. through the years, increasing capacity has always been a driving force behind changing standards. Increaced speed only matters if it is measurable.
Of course, the funny thing is that the only 160GB drive available right now is a mere 5400 RPM (with a lovely 35.9 MB/s at outer diameter).
Just because the only available drive is no good doesn't mean the standard is worthless. If you need the capacity, then ATA133 is worth it at any. Large drives are on the way, and the first step is the interface. If we weren't willing to change standards for larger drives, then we'd all have farms of hundreds of 120MB drives right now. It's worth it to change the standard to allow capacity even if there is not an immediate benefit of speed.
Apparantly it's working though, since some people actually think it matters.
So you all see right through this, do you? you think it was sooo obvious what he was doing that you can't understand how anyone could be taken in?
If I was going to try to pull a scam like this, and I wanted to take in as many of you as possible, I'd do it this way:
"I've just found the most advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithm ever. It is smarter than an average human in a wide variety of roles and can operate independantly on new untezted situations."
"I am a PHD in mathematics and game theory with deep experience in AI design. My new algorithm is actually a nested set of several common AI and gaming algorithms, most of which have been published in other places. However, I have stacked them together in a format that makes it highly adaptive with a N-Net framework that uses a variety of specialty algorithms to handle specific problems and an adaptive gaming algorithm to handle unknown situations. It's performance actually surprised me when I first used it. It was a happy adaptation that brought unexpected cohesion to the process. It works by initially guessing about unknown factors in a new situations and attempting to use a known algorithm to handle it. It it fails, the N-Net adapts and a new method is selected until one works. Complex situations are recognized as sets of specific events that can usually be recognized and treated separately."
"I'm sorry I don't have a full fledge gaming experience to show you, (I'm not a video game programmer, no graphics), but I have a simplistic interface that you can use to give it a basic Turing Test"
(demos typing interface, question and answer, it responds very intelligently. Other people are allowed to suggest questions, it responds very well.)
"So you see, all I need is a solid application framework to install it in, and you have the most intellegent application ever."
"So who's interested?"
That is how a scam works.
(Oh, by the way, that demo was a real person on the other end of a hidden communication channel)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd bet that the author of the article had to promise not to demonize the spammers just to get permission to interview them.
Don't shoot the messenger just becuase you don't like the message.
What facts? The journalist is mearly repeating what the subject said, in quotes. The only FACT being presented BY THE JOURNALIST is that the people referenced said the statements in quotes. All else is the conjecture of the spammers themselves.
The journalist doesn't have the right to change what the subject said. If the subject lied, then the subject lied. The journalist does have the right to comment on the accuracy of what the subject said. That is not an obligation. As far as I can tell, the journalist did not comment either positivley or negatively on what the subject said.
Also, It is questionable at best whether these people are criminals. They are certainly obnixious, abusive, all kinds of other things. But "Criminal" has a specific meaning, related to law, courts, conviction, judges, juries. Do you know that these people have been charged with and convicicted of a crime related to junk e-mail?
I can certainly understand that you do not like the spammers. I don't either. I can see that you want as much press to demonize them as possible. That does not mean that any press that does not demonize them is automatically bad journalism.
Weeeeelll..., not quite.
It does, as you noticed, quote exactly what the spammers say and claim. It does not explicitly call them liers. It does not extensively detail the position of the anti-spammers. All that lends itself to an article that primarily informs the reader of the position of the spammer.
But, it does not actually say that what the spammer is doing is right, legal, moral or anything else. It simply passes along their views. That is what unbiased reporting is about. If I read an article that outright calls spammers scum and claims they should DIE DIE DIE, I'd read that as a biased article.
There are plenty of articles around that detail how spammers annoy people, how they should be stopped, how they cost money, and on and on. most of these articles do not provide voice for the other side (the spammers). Would you call them bad reporting because of that?
Bias is not about supporting your position. Bias is about supporting any one position over another. Just because it doesn't support your bias does not mean it has the opposite bias. The middle ground usually looks hostile from either end, sort of the "If you're not for us, then you're against us" mentality.
The Hills? NONONONONO! That's where they are most effective. You need to run to the flat wide open spaces. That way you could out run and out manouver it on your trusty tricycle.
___
/ | \
|/ \|
\___/
( Peace )
If you were deceived by that, then you should pay a little better attention to what you are reading. You call youself an engineer, so you should be used to the idea of "attention to detail". Pay attention to the details you read in the same way that you pay attention to the code you read and write. Read what it actually says, not what you want it to say or what you ASSUME it should say.
images supposedly produced on the NV30
It sounds like the difference is between what YOU expect from a disclaimer and what a lawyer or court would consider a sufficient disclaimer.
You seem to want some glairing statement like "Our hardware can draw pictures like this one, but we did not actually draw these exact pictures. These came from another fancy rendering program".
A lawyer might simply say "Our hardware can draw pictures like this one." "Like" is a sufficient disclaimer.
Of course it is meant as a deception. Unfortunately, deception is part of sales. If you really can't tell what it means, if you really can't see through the language, then you're gonna have a hard time out in the real world. You can complain all you want as to whether it's fair or right or whatever. The only rules that sales plays by are advertising laws (and sometimes not even those). The only way to call them on it is to take them to court. I don't thing there's a case here.
The coffie cup, the knight, and the girl all have adiquate disclaimers. The motorcycle and tabletop both have language in them implying that they were rendered with Cg. Make your case there.
Last time I used sarcasm tags, I got a compalint that I didn't really need them. It was "obvious". I guess you can't please everyone. Style is a personal choice...
It says capable of rendering , see. That means the chip has the same rendering capability in its vertex shader as the high powered rendering engine that rendered these original pictures. It does not say they actually rendered this picture on this chip.
Get it now....?
I want 5 MEGAWATTS by mid may!
As you said, each processor has its own memory. If a processor needs data in another processors memory space, it has to request it over the Hyperchannel bus, not quite a local request (NUMA).
Multithreaded programs share a lot of data between threads.
Sooo. what you really mean is that two independant processes will each run as if on a dedicated processor (which they will). But multithreading will still have some memory and bus contention.
Physical memory was extended to 36 bits by the PII (or was it PPro?).
For greater than 4Gb virtual, you can still use segmentation. A process can have (what, 12 bits of local segments, 12 bits of global segemnts) 8192 segments, each with 4 Gig memory. Hardly a hard limit. It just means data has to be broken up. All you old 286 programmers know how to do that don't you.
Note: AMDs X86-64 will supposedly discontinue support for segmentation in 64-bit mode.
Yeah, everyone OWES US something.
Do you think you could elaborate a little more on what WE owe THEM? I never see anyone talk about that. Or maybe you think you (we) don't owe anyone else anything.
To a movie company, "Good" is a movie that makes lots of money. By their definition, a 100M$ movie is good no matter who liked it or not. The finest acting and story that only make 20M$ is not a "Good" movie to them.
I guess bums don't qualify as people.
I can see it now. So many more people will now be hawking their wares on E-Bay in a desperate attempt to qualify for health insurance. The volume goes up. the quality goes down...
Oh wait, That's already happened.
So the Baby Bells should know about and fear anti-trust consequinces better than most other companies. It is where they were born.
CRAP.
They told us to hold them to a higher standard by electing them. They said they would make the country a better place, or at lease a safer one. They claimed superiority to their competitors. They claimed to want to help the people. Go listen to all of their campaign speeches.
I expect there are a lot of people in the world who lie and cheat and steal. And I try very carefully to see through the lies, avoid the cheats, and not get ripped off by th thieves.
So then the liers, cheaters, and thieves are making the laws, I do what I can to remove them. THAT is in ALL OF OUR best interests.
There are also good congress-critters. It's always a good time to get rid of the trash and support the good. I guess the only think to add is that not all of congress is bad, just the handfull of bad apples. Let's clean them up, not excuse them.
Well, lets see. Hundreds of thousands of available programmers, Thousands of projects. that roughly divides ito hundreds of programmers per project (if they were so lucky).
Most of the time when we hear complaining about fragmentation, what it usually comes from is the speakers desire to have the programmers that are working on projects he doesn't care about to switch to projects he does care about.
Fragmentation is just another word for variety. There are multiple projects covering almost any area of software you can mention. If it were somehow determined that only one project in each area would survive and the rest would go away, then we are setting ourselves up for monopolies. We'll be trying to make one program be all things to all people. That's what we are trying to get away from.
Hurd is different from the Linux Kernel. Some things are worse (stability, speed) and some things are better (configurability, dynamic services). People will choose based on what they need, and different people need different things. you've decided what you want. Now be kind enough to allow the rest of us to choose for ourselves.
1066 is the only one that has fallen into the public domain. All the rest are still under copyright.
Wasn't there something called "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" in there somewhere?
The economic/scientific bebefits of a moonbase would be of more advantage to China in a time of Peace. It wouldn't survive a war.
Yes, that is the real advantage, and probably the reason that ATA133 will eventually become the standard for all drives/controllers. through the years, increasing capacity has always been a driving force behind changing standards. Increaced speed only matters if it is measurable.
Of course, the funny thing is that the only 160GB drive available right now is a mere 5400 RPM (with a lovely 35.9 MB/s at outer diameter).
Just because the only available drive is no good doesn't mean the standard is worthless. If you need the capacity, then ATA133 is worth it at any. Large drives are on the way, and the first step is the interface. If we weren't willing to change standards for larger drives, then we'd all have farms of hundreds of 120MB drives right now. It's worth it to change the standard to allow capacity even if there is not an immediate benefit of speed.
Apparantly it's working though, since some people actually think it matters.
Yes, we do.
Put a down payment on the US national debt.
If I was going to try to pull a scam like this, and I wanted to take in as many of you as possible, I'd do it this way:
That is how a scam works.
(Oh, by the way, that demo was a real person on the other end of a hidden communication channel)