Assuming you can stream all of the geometry and textures to the end user?
I played Second Life, I know just how shitty of an experience that can be, especially if there isn't some robust system for caching the data (gigs and gigs worth) locally to avoid having to redownload it all every time you turn around. Load times are already a problem on several Facebook games (mostly the Flash ones) and they're only a few MB!
Maybe when they want a simple ls to take less than 5 minutes to complete on directories with even a moderate number of files? Cygwin is horrible. It's slow, buggy, and in constant flux. I much prefer natively compiling with something like MinGW when I can get away with it.
Except of course by the time it is fast enough to handle today's games, the games of the day will be much more complex.
Really, this smells an awful lot like a Facebook game developer going "Why would you do anything else?", unaware of the numerous technical hurdles that keep Facebook games limited today are not going to magically disappear with HTML5. Oh the future of gaming, where everything is Mafia Wars.:P
Yeah, the TFA is completely overheated on this. I can't imagine any manufacturer implementing this without also adding some way to disable the cert checks, preferably with a physical switch.
The problem is getting the wording just right so some spin doctor can't come around and twist it to make it look like you said the opposite thing. This happens a lot in climate science and has made the entire community very careful in what they publish.
Or to put it another way: Do you think Disney would allow Netflix to let people simply get copies of their movies by mail if they had any say at all in the matter?
Nope, that's exactly what they do, thanks to the magic of the first sale doctrine. They're not "broadcasting" anything, so they don't have to pay royalties. Video stores don't either, those high price VHS tapes you remember were from back in the days when studios didn't sell most movies retail and charged outrageous prices to the video stores for every copy.
The studios hate the DVD by mail service with a firey burning passion, but their hands are tied unless they can bribe enough congressmen to sneak a new law through, and that's not as easy as people make it sound.
The worst part is that EVERY legit streaming service has weak selection, Netflix is just a little less weak than the competitors (although if they lose Starz content we'll have to see). The major studios have been pretty hostile to streaming (even the original outrageous $8/movie streaming sites) and really we only have it so good now thanks to some rather fancy footwork by Netflix in the early days before the studios really took notice of them.
The DVD-by-mail service is the only sure thing Netflix has. It costs them more, but they're not beholden to studio assholes with it. They just buy disks retail and stick them in envelopes. The streaming business model puts way too much power in the hands of the studios and lets them dick over any competitors at will.
Seems to me it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to build a mag-lev skateboard, assuming you were willing to limit yourself to just skating on a big magnet. Those big hockey-puck rare earth magnets should be more than strong enough to repel the weight of a person. How one retrieves the board after you accidentally flip it over is an exercise left to the reader.
The problem with stacked chips like this in the past has been cooling the wafers in the middle of the stack. While DIMMs don't run as hot as processors or GPUs, this is still a concern for them. I wonder how they're going to handle this? Or are they only going to target low power low performance parts?
I think there may have been some extenuating circumstances there. And there's no guarantee that it will work at any scale, just that with a small enough community it may be possible for people to effectively police each other as a community to avoid collecting moochers or power grabs.
Everybody in the US is taxed some amount, say $20. That money is put into a giant pot. If someone wants to run for President or for Congress they have to officially declare (and probably get 50k signatures or whatever, to keep the riff raff out). Once they declare, they are instantly given a share of that pot of money (maybe 50 or 100 million bucks for president) and are not allowed to use their own money anymore. They aren't even allowed to fundraise. BAM. Of course this will cause a lot of 519 type nonsense, but it does create a buffer between the candidate and the paychecks.
This has absolutely zero chance of going anywhere in real life because there are way too many vested interests in the current system, all of which are intimately tied with the process and the regulators, but it's a simple system that puts a serious dent in the corruption problem. There is actually a partial version of this system already in place, but it's voluntary, so nobody uses it.
It's probably more accurate to say that it is impossible to set up a communist system, at least on large scales. In very small communities where people can police each other it could work, but Marx's fundamental misunderstandings about human nature doomed the idea from the start. In a classless system, who enforces the rules? If there is nobody with authority to enforce the rules, how do you keep people from breaking them? If someone does have the authority to enforce rules, how do you prevent them from abusing that authority?
Those HID headlamps are "modulated for safety" too, and that doesn't stop them from blinding every oncoming motorist the instant they're knocked even slightly out of alignment or those crazy cases where people drive on roads that aren't perfectly straight and level.
I especially can't wait for the knockoff aftermarket replacement versions that don't even pretend to care about the safety of the other drivers.
Pretty sure people have been living on boats for a long time now. It combines all of the charm of living in a trailer with the joy of not having stable ground under your feet. It's not terrible, but the idea of a region changing en-mass to living in houseboats is absurd. What use is having a floating house if the roads are always flooded out and the utilities don't work?
There are much better solutions to the problem if you live in a flood prone area.
I stayed in an upscale hotel in Europe once where the TVs were disguised as fancy mirrors (with frame and all). When the screen was off it was a perfectly usable mirror and you could only tell the difference if you looked carefully.
To me, this seems about as useful as those "internet on your refrigerator!" things that Bestbuy carries. Who wants to surf the web in the bathroom?
This happens all the time with computers, but especially with drive controllers it seems. The guy who rushes his half baked solution to market first at the lowest price ends up with millions of copies in nearly every computer in the world. Then a couple of years later when people start really using them, they discover that in fact the chip is full of bugs and slow and corrupts your data. It happened with the CMD 640 back when IDE first came out, the SiI 3112 when SATA first came out, and now it's happening against with SATA2. Most early Firewire controllers were total crap too, and the cheap ones still are.
The worst part is that nearly every peripheral card manufacturer is going to use that same chip because it's the cheapest. So even if you try to get around a buggy chip on your motherboard by buying a PCIe card, you'll just end up with a second copy of that broken chip. It's infuriating and I don't expect the situation to change anytime soon. That is why I always wait when a new storage access standard comes out, it's just a solid bet that the first generation chips will be way more trouble than they're worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you can stream all of the geometry and textures to the end user?
I played Second Life, I know just how shitty of an experience that can be, especially if there isn't some robust system for caching the data (gigs and gigs worth) locally to avoid having to redownload it all every time you turn around. Load times are already a problem on several Facebook games (mostly the Flash ones) and they're only a few MB!
Maybe when they want a simple ls to take less than 5 minutes to complete on directories with even a moderate number of files? Cygwin is horrible. It's slow, buggy, and in constant flux. I much prefer natively compiling with something like MinGW when I can get away with it.
Except of course by the time it is fast enough to handle today's games, the games of the day will be much more complex.
:P
Really, this smells an awful lot like a Facebook game developer going "Why would you do anything else?", unaware of the numerous technical hurdles that keep Facebook games limited today are not going to magically disappear with HTML5. Oh the future of gaming, where everything is Mafia Wars.
Yeah, the TFA is completely overheated on this. I can't imagine any manufacturer implementing this without also adding some way to disable the cert checks, preferably with a physical switch.
The problem is getting the wording just right so some spin doctor can't come around and twist it to make it look like you said the opposite thing. This happens a lot in climate science and has made the entire community very careful in what they publish.
Well, the US does have the best (paid) middlemen in the world. That's something right?
Or to put it another way: Do you think Disney would allow Netflix to let people simply get copies of their movies by mail if they had any say at all in the matter?
Nope, that's exactly what they do, thanks to the magic of the first sale doctrine. They're not "broadcasting" anything, so they don't have to pay royalties. Video stores don't either, those high price VHS tapes you remember were from back in the days when studios didn't sell most movies retail and charged outrageous prices to the video stores for every copy.
The studios hate the DVD by mail service with a firey burning passion, but their hands are tied unless they can bribe enough congressmen to sneak a new law through, and that's not as easy as people make it sound.
It's not impossible, but it may have to wait until after the 2012 election, depending on how that goes.
The worst part is that EVERY legit streaming service has weak selection, Netflix is just a little less weak than the competitors (although if they lose Starz content we'll have to see). The major studios have been pretty hostile to streaming (even the original outrageous $8/movie streaming sites) and really we only have it so good now thanks to some rather fancy footwork by Netflix in the early days before the studios really took notice of them.
The DVD-by-mail service is the only sure thing Netflix has. It costs them more, but they're not beholden to studio assholes with it. They just buy disks retail and stick them in envelopes. The streaming business model puts way too much power in the hands of the studios and lets them dick over any competitors at will.
The actual odds for shuttle failure on each launch were calculated to be about 1 in 100, which ended up being pretty close to reality.
Also, chances are 99% of that was spam.
Because a data plan is like $30 or $40 these days and the SMS plan is just included with the voice? That's a $360/year savings!
Seems to me it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to build a mag-lev skateboard, assuming you were willing to limit yourself to just skating on a big magnet. Those big hockey-puck rare earth magnets should be more than strong enough to repel the weight of a person. How one retrieves the board after you accidentally flip it over is an exercise left to the reader.
Ok, so we have the self lacing shoes, but I won't be happy until I can buy my very own hoverboard. Wheels are for lamers.
The problem with stacked chips like this in the past has been cooling the wafers in the middle of the stack. While DIMMs don't run as hot as processors or GPUs, this is still a concern for them. I wonder how they're going to handle this? Or are they only going to target low power low performance parts?
I think there may have been some extenuating circumstances there. And there's no guarantee that it will work at any scale, just that with a small enough community it may be possible for people to effectively police each other as a community to avoid collecting moochers or power grabs.
They could also revoke everyone using the key on a machine with an nVidia graphics card (or Intel).
The solution is as obvious as it is unworkable.
Everybody in the US is taxed some amount, say $20. That money is put into a giant pot. If someone wants to run for President or for Congress they have to officially declare (and probably get 50k signatures or whatever, to keep the riff raff out). Once they declare, they are instantly given a share of that pot of money (maybe 50 or 100 million bucks for president) and are not allowed to use their own money anymore. They aren't even allowed to fundraise. BAM. Of course this will cause a lot of 519 type nonsense, but it does create a buffer between the candidate and the paychecks.
This has absolutely zero chance of going anywhere in real life because there are way too many vested interests in the current system, all of which are intimately tied with the process and the regulators, but it's a simple system that puts a serious dent in the corruption problem. There is actually a partial version of this system already in place, but it's voluntary, so nobody uses it.
It's probably more accurate to say that it is impossible to set up a communist system, at least on large scales. In very small communities where people can police each other it could work, but Marx's fundamental misunderstandings about human nature doomed the idea from the start. In a classless system, who enforces the rules? If there is nobody with authority to enforce the rules, how do you keep people from breaking them? If someone does have the authority to enforce rules, how do you prevent them from abusing that authority?
Those HID headlamps are "modulated for safety" too, and that doesn't stop them from blinding every oncoming motorist the instant they're knocked even slightly out of alignment or those crazy cases where people drive on roads that aren't perfectly straight and level.
I especially can't wait for the knockoff aftermarket replacement versions that don't even pretend to care about the safety of the other drivers.
Pretty sure people have been living on boats for a long time now. It combines all of the charm of living in a trailer with the joy of not having stable ground under your feet. It's not terrible, but the idea of a region changing en-mass to living in houseboats is absurd. What use is having a floating house if the roads are always flooded out and the utilities don't work?
There are much better solutions to the problem if you live in a flood prone area.
I stayed in an upscale hotel in Europe once where the TVs were disguised as fancy mirrors (with frame and all). When the screen was off it was a perfectly usable mirror and you could only tell the difference if you looked carefully.
To me, this seems about as useful as those "internet on your refrigerator!" things that Bestbuy carries. Who wants to surf the web in the bathroom?
This happens all the time with computers, but especially with drive controllers it seems. The guy who rushes his half baked solution to market first at the lowest price ends up with millions of copies in nearly every computer in the world. Then a couple of years later when people start really using them, they discover that in fact the chip is full of bugs and slow and corrupts your data. It happened with the CMD 640 back when IDE first came out, the SiI 3112 when SATA first came out, and now it's happening against with SATA2. Most early Firewire controllers were total crap too, and the cheap ones still are.
The worst part is that nearly every peripheral card manufacturer is going to use that same chip because it's the cheapest. So even if you try to get around a buggy chip on your motherboard by buying a PCIe card, you'll just end up with a second copy of that broken chip. It's infuriating and I don't expect the situation to change anytime soon. That is why I always wait when a new storage access standard comes out, it's just a solid bet that the first generation chips will be way more trouble than they're worth.
Heck Rise of the Triad had stacked levels before even that. Ironically its engine was even more primitive than Doom's despite having that feature.