With the help of a bunch of libraries, sure. Otherwise, you not only have a multiprocessor debugging situation but you have a heterogenous multiprocessor debugging situation.
GCC will not automagically take your program and break it into parts that will run on the PPC core and the SPEs in parallel. I don't know of any that do a great job on a homogenous multiprocessor system but there are some that try to do some parallelization (OpenMP enabled compilers for example). I don't know of any that will on any architecture that the Cell copied (the various DSPs from TI and other companies, for example).
Many programmers have never had to debug an application that is multithreaded, much less an application where it is multithreaded and the threads run on heterogenous cores simultaneously. (I have done so, incidentally.)
When you are talking about one thread of code on an individual Cell unit, sure. There haven't been very good auto-parallelizing compilers yet (to run code on multiple SPEs, for example) for homogenous multi-core architectures, much less heterogenous multi-core architectures.
Why resent DRM being put into Linux? If you don't like it, I'm sure there will be DRM-less distributions that you'll be able to use. For those who want the DRM in Linux, why do you want to force your opinion on them? If F/OSS is about choice, why are you wanting to limit the choices available?
I think 18 year olds are just as mature as those who are 35 or even 45 years old. Moreso in most cases.
I used to think that, too... when I was 18. I was on my own at 17 and making my own way through life and at the time, I thought I was mature. 20 years later, I can see how immature I still was back then, even though I was more mature than pretty much anyone else I knew in that age group.
While a pilot's brain is one of the most valuable things in a combat aircraft, the pilot's body is one of the weakest links in the system. Fighters have long been designed (and limited in some cases) to perform within tolerances of what a human can withstand (9G limits and such). Also, various systems such as ejection seats and armor have to be included to protect the pilot. With a UAV, those issues go away. We can design UAVs which have performance envelopes that no human would survive. I agree with the problems about transmission of control signals and the like, but if you can guarantee communications, a UAV should be able to take out an aircraft with a pilot inside it in a dogfight relatively easy just because of maneuverability, not that dogfights would happen that often.
I agree with others in that the most versitile combat UAVs will just be a loitering platform for firing missiles and dropping LGBs. You can have some armed with a bunch of AAMs to protect the ones with the air-to-ground ordnance, as well as have some with both types of ordnance.
That depends on if the contact with the light skin of the blimp is enough to detonate a contact-triggered RPG. Otherwise, it's just a bigger diameter peashooter. Something that can be triggered "at the right time" to explode would be more effective.
Plus, the internal structure is probably cellular (adds weight but a leak in one cell won't leak out the helium in the other cells) which could also make it more difficult to take down.
Nice post, but you say: They've been conditioned to believe that they need new machines every couple of years. That'show bad it is in the computer industry right now. and, while this may be true to some degree, I know many people who don't do so.
A quick digression, what you say, in a nutshell is Moore's Law: it's the rate at which people will upgrade (based on economics and the like). The industry can move forward with process shrinks and the like at that rate and make money. Slower than that and they'll lose the market because others will supply the performance, faster than that and people will skip a generation.
Back to the subject, there are a number of people in my family still running PentiumII and PentiumIII machines. I think my uncle still runs a Pentium(that's it, just Pentium). Those are folks who do fairly light stuff on their machines. Those who tend to upgrade every two years are enthusiasts (who will always want the latest/greatests) and those who want the tasks they do to be done faster. Take the professional content creator who makes very heavy use of Photoshop and the like. This person will want to upgrade, fairly often, to fairly good hardware. The reason is that it will hopefully cut the time to do certain tasks. This has many obvious advantages. A serious Photoshop professional would be using a fairly high end P4 or Athlon64 these days, not a PentiumIII or much less something from 10 years ago because a new system would easily cut the time down on certain tasks by at least a factor of 10.
Still... that doesn't help people who don't want to have to get used to something. It's a sad truth simply because they could better themselves if they put the effort in, but most people simply don't want to.
A couple of things here. First, given someone like a Photoshop professional, learning the new thing takes time, not only for the application itself but possibly the platform as well - as the OA says, it's about the plugins and stuff, too. So, spend a few weeks ironing out The Gimp (potentially lots of frustration in this task) or spend a few weeks actually doing work and getting paid? For many, that's a very easy choice. The other bit about "bettering themselves" is specious, at best. Quantify "bettering themselves". Most people don't care about the OS as long as they can get their stuff done (it works AND it is familiar). Most people don't care about where the application comes from (OSS or closed). They just want to do their thing. Saying that using OSS is "bettering" oneself implies there is something morally (or religiously) better about it than the alternatives and that would be something very hard to prove (and no, "because it's not M$" is not a valid argument).
Me, I use Linux for a lot of things that it does well (and the applications on it do well). Likewise, I use Windows for the things it (and its applications) do well. I have no religious ties to either as they are tools which happen to be suited for similar jobs, just some better than others.
Something that I like having another screen for is to be able to flip over and bring up Google to search for something (like hints or maps to some area where I am). Unfortunately, some games lock the mouse when you're in full screen mode so you have to play them windowed (WoW, for instance).
Also, it's nice to have another monitor so you can just do other stuff while playing a game, like burning a DVD or ripping CDs or something (I have an Athlon64 X2) and being able to watch the progress of that and/or start a new one whenever you want without flipping out of the game to do it.
That may be true but VMWare is useful for many, many other things like virtualizing servers (web, mail, etc.) and doing cross platform software development (like I do - run a client VM and a server VM in whatever OSs I want) where we don't care what the MAC is as long as it is unique.
How about the rights of the content creator? If the content creator ("right" or "wrong", it doesn't matter) wants money from anyone who plays copies of his music, for example, are you saying that he doesn't have that right?
I'd agree 100% with anyone who says that copyrights need to evolve (mostly be a lot shorter in our new digital world) but I don't agree that our digital world should remove the rights of content creators to want to be compensated for their content (for a short time anyway). To me, the best thing to be arguing about is how long that the copyrights should be. I think it should be more than one year but less than five, personally, but I'm not sure where in between.
Just to keep it on base... remember that the GPL (all versions) use copyright law to prevent just anyone from taking the GPLd code and using it however they want (including in closed source products which they then sell). Getting rid of copyrights completely removes any power that the GPL may have and all OSS code is then effectively BSD licensed or it has to become closed source. The same copyright laws that deal with music and copying mp3s is what OSS uses to define GPL. You can't have one and not the other. Which would you rather lose?
The most unique part of the game was the "Bug of the Week" feature combined with the "God class of the Week" feature. The bug of the week feature made gaming lively... what would be the exploit this week? I can die everything (even game things like lamp posts and even other players against their will) my favorite color. Every week something would be introduced to the game that made another/different combination of skills god-like so you would rework all your skills to match that (or just let the bot macros do it for you). Basically these features added together made the game more like Quake where everyone avoids everyone else at all costs for fear of PK or being subjected to the latest bug (get died from head to toe in bright lime green just for standing next to another player for 1 second and it cost you in-game money to redie all your equipment back to the colors you had) instead of an MMORPG type like the EQ series or WoW where you sought out other players to help you accomplish things.
I played a bunch of the single-player Ultima games. I've never been so disappointed in a game in my life than in Ultima Online.
There have been many people talking about persistent changes in the game world for a long time. For examples: trees grow, if you chop one down, everyone sees a stump there. A large field in this one area has a lot of travel across it, a path forms if enough players take the same path across it over time - note that different servers may have different paths across the field as their server's travel patterns may differ. etc.
Some games have even had persistent changes (one time event for each server). EQ had Waking the Sleeper and WoW has this Slithus opening thing.
However, there are two major issues with having one-time content on a large scale. The first is technical... bandwidth. To broadcast all the persistent changes in a world (remember, these happen almost constantly) requires a lot of bandwidth. Game communication still has to cater to modem speeds because a significant portion of gamers still use dial-up - enough so that you don't want to eliminate them from your potential market. Some compromises can be made, however. "Canned" changes, like those mentioned above, are possible because they require just a server-side setting and only maybe a small change be sent out over the network once to tell the client which graphics file(s) to load (of course, you have to send all the sets of graphics out in patches ahead of time). The downside of this is that the changes have the feel of being canned. They are either one change or they are a small set of changes that get cycled as world events dictate. Those type, the small set, lose the illusion after a while. This will change over time as more of the world gets connected via broadband (and faster in the future - fiber to the home:))so this will sort itselve out eventually. In any case, bandwidth ultimately takes backseat to the biggest issue which is just the massive amount of content that has to be created.
The *biggest* problem to overcome doesn't deal with graphics like "put a stump here" or "put a path here" but just the consumable content. Some games may make this an illusion by having different quests to the same instance flagging certain characteristics - the first quest you go in and beat the prince so the second quest reflects that the prince is dead in the instance. This is pretty flexible but it isn't "world" in that you can still see other people wanting help to go kill the prince that you've already killed. It's usually a nice compromise but it still isn't world persistent. For world persistent events, the one-time nature of it presents a HUGE burden on the game content developers. It may take months for the developers to design an encounter around a king in some distant castle only to have that king killed the first night it is put onto a server. First, this type of content means that only a very tiny subset of the players will ever see it so it is a lot of work for just 40 people to do in one night. Second, most game players want to experience "everything" in the game and the vast majority of content will not be seen by the vast majority of players in this type system. So, it becomes a massive amount of work to provide that type content to a few hundred players (out of several millions, for example in WoW). The logical alternative is to fall back to canned encounters that randomly spawn every so often but with minor changes... the boss has different colored robes, maybe a different class (for rpgs), and the like. However, this illusion is quickly seen through and isn't much different (if at all) from the instancing quests and the like.
So, basically people want to have the single-person game experience where all their actions have an effect on the world but they also want to play the game with 100s (1000s, 10000s, millions) of players. There's no easy solution that doesn't feel canned (which removes much of the excitement and entertainment of it).
There are many other issues as well... for example you mention the two outcome scenarios... that's, in effect, creating two games and a
Yes, but leaving out subsystems (or partially implementing them - just take a look at the patch required to get SubSpace Continuum running... functionality, although minor, was left out and this was required for SubSpace to run properly) may cause incorrect program behaviour. Without those systems, WINE won't be compatible with Windows (and it'd be real easy to write stuff so that WINE won't work... just throw in some security subsystem code).
Probably not far off from the truth. I can easily see how it will impact other distributions (distracting from them, for example, especially from the 'user' perspective). From the 'common user' standpoint, Google is a very recognizable brand name. While geeks (like me) may choose a distribution based on other criteria, the unwashed masses will most likely make a beeline for a Google branded distribution if there were ever a reason for them to finally commit to switching over from Windows. This is both good and bad. It is good in that a strong brand recognition is associated with Linux, but it is also potentially bad in (at least it can be frightening to think ) that Google will become a power in the Linux world (maybe even *the* power) based on the number of users it might get and how much influence it decides to wield.
Yeah, your point isn't new by decades (in releation to video games) but my point was that you have the option of not looking at the character at all (no character on the screen) so there is no "angle" at which to see the toon on the screen be it male or female. I play in first person mode all the time (wow, eq, etc.) for example. I have a number of reasons of doing that but none are in relation to what sex of the toon is that I'm playing, though (honestly, I rarely care about the bunch of pixels on the screen that are supposed to be my in-game representation).
Actually, the wildly faster areas are sure signs that something probably needs to be done as well. How? you say. Well... a function that does nothing but "return" is a lot faster than a function that actually does some work. There are numbers of places where WINE simply does nothing when it should be doing something. Just a guess, but I'd bet that the Windows security model isn't implemented, for example, so no checking/validating (even to whatever level Windows attempts to do it) isn't done.
Fortunately, most games have settings so that you don't have to stare at your character's ass at all while you play. In fact, I (personally) haven't played a single game in over 10 years that didn't allow me to change camera options. So, this "ass looking" argument really holds no water.
It's pretty sad how most Americans seem to think that your "rights" are actually "allowed" by the government.
Actually, they are allowed, specified, and provisioned by founders the government and included in the document(s) that define our government and we are supposed to make sure our government doesn't deny them to us. I can give you plenty of examples of governments in the world that do not "allow" various things we've outlined in our Bill of Rights, for example.
Gates' fortune is every bit as obscene as the author claims Jobs' fortune is, and probably much more suspect in how Gates acquired it.
I dunno... having a cult of personality and practically brainwashing his cult^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople out of their money like Jobs does is pretty nasty, IMO.
As soon as (new) games can find a way (the popular games... when it is released, not a decade later) on Linux with good performance, I'll not need Windows anymore.
Yes, since matrices form the basis for a lot of the computation for the types of problems parallel computing wants to solve, parallel matrix solution algorithms are all over the place. There are a number of algorithms even based on properties of the matrix, even.... dense vs. sparse. There are algorithms based on the amount of communication required, as well. Some algorithms work better with fast interconnects, some tollerate slower speed interconnects. The same with latency. Some Google-Fu can turn up a bunch of stuff.
Ummm... Ice doesn't cool the oceans.... ice exists because in those areas, not enough sunlight (and other factors) don't add enough heat to the environment to keep water in liquid state. With global warming, heat is being added to those environments.
I'm with you on this. I distruct Richard Stallman for the same reasons. I personally think he's gone off on a side road of his original mission. Originally, it was to provide a bunch of software that was open to all and protected by copyright. Now, it seems his mission is to attempt to destroy anything that isn't open to all and protected in the ways he wants to define it. The first is setting up a safe haven for intellectual ideas and the like. The second is waging a war. I don't want a war and have no time for it. I prefer to live and let live and have no problem with OSS and proprietary software coexisting. Stallman no longer wants to coexist so I've not supported his views for some time.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't tell Mercury that!
With the help of a bunch of libraries, sure. Otherwise, you not only have a multiprocessor debugging situation but you have a heterogenous multiprocessor debugging situation.
GCC will not automagically take your program and break it into parts that will run on the PPC core and the SPEs in parallel. I don't know of any that do a great job on a homogenous multiprocessor system but there are some that try to do some parallelization (OpenMP enabled compilers for example). I don't know of any that will on any architecture that the Cell copied (the various DSPs from TI and other companies, for example).
Many programmers have never had to debug an application that is multithreaded, much less an application where it is multithreaded and the threads run on heterogenous cores simultaneously. (I have done so, incidentally.)
When you are talking about one thread of code on an individual Cell unit, sure. There haven't been very good auto-parallelizing compilers yet (to run code on multiple SPEs, for example) for homogenous multi-core architectures, much less heterogenous multi-core architectures.
Why resent DRM being put into Linux? If you don't like it, I'm sure there will be DRM-less distributions that you'll be able to use. For those who want the DRM in Linux, why do you want to force your opinion on them? If F/OSS is about choice, why are you wanting to limit the choices available?
I think 18 year olds are just as mature as those who are 35 or even 45 years old. Moreso in most cases.
I used to think that, too... when I was 18. I was on my own at 17 and making my own way through life and at the time, I thought I was mature. 20 years later, I can see how immature I still was back then, even though I was more mature than pretty much anyone else I knew in that age group.
While a pilot's brain is one of the most valuable things in a combat aircraft, the pilot's body is one of the weakest links in the system. Fighters have long been designed (and limited in some cases) to perform within tolerances of what a human can withstand (9G limits and such). Also, various systems such as ejection seats and armor have to be included to protect the pilot. With a UAV, those issues go away. We can design UAVs which have performance envelopes that no human would survive. I agree with the problems about transmission of control signals and the like, but if you can guarantee communications, a UAV should be able to take out an aircraft with a pilot inside it in a dogfight relatively easy just because of maneuverability, not that dogfights would happen that often.
I agree with others in that the most versitile combat UAVs will just be a loitering platform for firing missiles and dropping LGBs. You can have some armed with a bunch of AAMs to protect the ones with the air-to-ground ordnance, as well as have some with both types of ordnance.
That depends on if the contact with the light skin of the blimp is enough to detonate a contact-triggered RPG. Otherwise, it's just a bigger diameter peashooter. Something that can be triggered "at the right time" to explode would be more effective.
Plus, the internal structure is probably cellular (adds weight but a leak in one cell won't leak out the helium in the other cells) which could also make it more difficult to take down.
So did Linux, if all those recent patches for PNG and a few other libraries I installed were to be considered.
Nice post, but you say: They've been conditioned to believe that they need new machines every couple of years. That'show bad it is in the computer industry right now. and, while this may be true to some degree, I know many people who don't do so.
A quick digression, what you say, in a nutshell is Moore's Law: it's the rate at which people will upgrade (based on economics and the like). The industry can move forward with process shrinks and the like at that rate and make money. Slower than that and they'll lose the market because others will supply the performance, faster than that and people will skip a generation.
Back to the subject, there are a number of people in my family still running PentiumII and PentiumIII machines. I think my uncle still runs a Pentium(that's it, just Pentium). Those are folks who do fairly light stuff on their machines. Those who tend to upgrade every two years are enthusiasts (who will always want the latest/greatests) and those who want the tasks they do to be done faster. Take the professional content creator who makes very heavy use of Photoshop and the like. This person will want to upgrade, fairly often, to fairly good hardware. The reason is that it will hopefully cut the time to do certain tasks. This has many obvious advantages. A serious Photoshop professional would be using a fairly high end P4 or Athlon64 these days, not a PentiumIII or much less something from 10 years ago because a new system would easily cut the time down on certain tasks by at least a factor of 10.
Still... that doesn't help people who don't want to have to get used to something. It's a sad truth simply because they could better themselves if they put the effort in, but most people simply don't want to.
A couple of things here. First, given someone like a Photoshop professional, learning the new thing takes time, not only for the application itself but possibly the platform as well - as the OA says, it's about the plugins and stuff, too. So, spend a few weeks ironing out The Gimp (potentially lots of frustration in this task) or spend a few weeks actually doing work and getting paid? For many, that's a very easy choice. The other bit about "bettering themselves" is specious, at best. Quantify "bettering themselves". Most people don't care about the OS as long as they can get their stuff done (it works AND it is familiar). Most people don't care about where the application comes from (OSS or closed). They just want to do their thing. Saying that using OSS is "bettering" oneself implies there is something morally (or religiously) better about it than the alternatives and that would be something very hard to prove (and no, "because it's not M$" is not a valid argument).
Me, I use Linux for a lot of things that it does well (and the applications on it do well). Likewise, I use Windows for the things it (and its applications) do well. I have no religious ties to either as they are tools which happen to be suited for similar jobs, just some better than others.
Something that I like having another screen for is to be able to flip over and bring up Google to search for something (like hints or maps to some area where I am). Unfortunately, some games lock the mouse when you're in full screen mode so you have to play them windowed (WoW, for instance).
Also, it's nice to have another monitor so you can just do other stuff while playing a game, like burning a DVD or ripping CDs or something (I have an Athlon64 X2) and being able to watch the progress of that and/or start a new one whenever you want without flipping out of the game to do it.
That may be true but VMWare is useful for many, many other things like virtualizing servers (web, mail, etc.) and doing cross platform software development (like I do - run a client VM and a server VM in whatever OSs I want) where we don't care what the MAC is as long as it is unique.
How about the rights of the content creator? If the content creator ("right" or "wrong", it doesn't matter) wants money from anyone who plays copies of his music, for example, are you saying that he doesn't have that right?
I'd agree 100% with anyone who says that copyrights need to evolve (mostly be a lot shorter in our new digital world) but I don't agree that our digital world should remove the rights of content creators to want to be compensated for their content (for a short time anyway). To me, the best thing to be arguing about is how long that the copyrights should be. I think it should be more than one year but less than five, personally, but I'm not sure where in between.
Just to keep it on base... remember that the GPL (all versions) use copyright law to prevent just anyone from taking the GPLd code and using it however they want (including in closed source products which they then sell). Getting rid of copyrights completely removes any power that the GPL may have and all OSS code is then effectively BSD licensed or it has to become closed source. The same copyright laws that deal with music and copying mp3s is what OSS uses to define GPL. You can't have one and not the other. Which would you rather lose?
The most unique part of the game was the "Bug of the Week" feature combined with the "God class of the Week" feature. The bug of the week feature made gaming lively... what would be the exploit this week? I can die everything (even game things like lamp posts and even other players against their will) my favorite color. Every week something would be introduced to the game that made another/different combination of skills god-like so you would rework all your skills to match that (or just let the bot macros do it for you). Basically these features added together made the game more like Quake where everyone avoids everyone else at all costs for fear of PK or being subjected to the latest bug (get died from head to toe in bright lime green just for standing next to another player for 1 second and it cost you in-game money to redie all your equipment back to the colors you had) instead of an MMORPG type like the EQ series or WoW where you sought out other players to help you accomplish things.
I played a bunch of the single-player Ultima games. I've never been so disappointed in a game in my life than in Ultima Online.
There have been many people talking about persistent changes in the game world for a long time. For examples: trees grow, if you chop one down, everyone sees a stump there. A large field in this one area has a lot of travel across it, a path forms if enough players take the same path across it over time - note that different servers may have different paths across the field as their server's travel patterns may differ. etc.
:))so this will sort itselve out eventually. In any case, bandwidth ultimately takes backseat to the biggest issue which is just the massive amount of content that has to be created.
Some games have even had persistent changes (one time event for each server). EQ had Waking the Sleeper and WoW has this Slithus opening thing.
However, there are two major issues with having one-time content on a large scale. The first is technical... bandwidth. To broadcast all the persistent changes in a world (remember, these happen almost constantly) requires a lot of bandwidth. Game communication still has to cater to modem speeds because a significant portion of gamers still use dial-up - enough so that you don't want to eliminate them from your potential market. Some compromises can be made, however. "Canned" changes, like those mentioned above, are possible because they require just a server-side setting and only maybe a small change be sent out over the network once to tell the client which graphics file(s) to load (of course, you have to send all the sets of graphics out in patches ahead of time). The downside of this is that the changes have the feel of being canned. They are either one change or they are a small set of changes that get cycled as world events dictate. Those type, the small set, lose the illusion after a while. This will change over time as more of the world gets connected via broadband (and faster in the future - fiber to the home
The *biggest* problem to overcome doesn't deal with graphics like "put a stump here" or "put a path here" but just the consumable content. Some games may make this an illusion by having different quests to the same instance flagging certain characteristics - the first quest you go in and beat the prince so the second quest reflects that the prince is dead in the instance. This is pretty flexible but it isn't "world" in that you can still see other people wanting help to go kill the prince that you've already killed. It's usually a nice compromise but it still isn't world persistent. For world persistent events, the one-time nature of it presents a HUGE burden on the game content developers. It may take months for the developers to design an encounter around a king in some distant castle only to have that king killed the first night it is put onto a server. First, this type of content means that only a very tiny subset of the players will ever see it so it is a lot of work for just 40 people to do in one night. Second, most game players want to experience "everything" in the game and the vast majority of content will not be seen by the vast majority of players in this type system. So, it becomes a massive amount of work to provide that type content to a few hundred players (out of several millions, for example in WoW). The logical alternative is to fall back to canned encounters that randomly spawn every so often but with minor changes... the boss has different colored robes, maybe a different class (for rpgs), and the like. However, this illusion is quickly seen through and isn't much different (if at all) from the instancing quests and the like.
So, basically people want to have the single-person game experience where all their actions have an effect on the world but they also want to play the game with 100s (1000s, 10000s, millions) of players. There's no easy solution that doesn't feel canned (which removes much of the excitement and entertainment of it).
There are many other issues as well... for example you mention the two outcome scenarios... that's, in effect, creating two games and a
Yes, but leaving out subsystems (or partially implementing them - just take a look at the patch required to get SubSpace Continuum running... functionality, although minor, was left out and this was required for SubSpace to run properly) may cause incorrect program behaviour. Without those systems, WINE won't be compatible with Windows (and it'd be real easy to write stuff so that WINE won't work... just throw in some security subsystem code).
this will rule.
Probably not far off from the truth. I can easily see how it will impact other distributions (distracting from them, for example, especially from the 'user' perspective). From the 'common user' standpoint, Google is a very recognizable brand name. While geeks (like me) may choose a distribution based on other criteria, the unwashed masses will most likely make a beeline for a Google branded distribution if there were ever a reason for them to finally commit to switching over from Windows. This is both good and bad. It is good in that a strong brand recognition is associated with Linux, but it is also potentially bad in (at least it can be frightening to think ) that Google will become a power in the Linux world (maybe even *the* power) based on the number of users it might get and how much influence it decides to wield.
Yeah, your point isn't new by decades (in releation to video games) but my point was that you have the option of not looking at the character at all (no character on the screen) so there is no "angle" at which to see the toon on the screen be it male or female. I play in first person mode all the time (wow, eq, etc.) for example. I have a number of reasons of doing that but none are in relation to what sex of the toon is that I'm playing, though (honestly, I rarely care about the bunch of pixels on the screen that are supposed to be my in-game representation).
Actually, the wildly faster areas are sure signs that something probably needs to be done as well. How? you say. Well... a function that does nothing but "return" is a lot faster than a function that actually does some work. There are numbers of places where WINE simply does nothing when it should be doing something. Just a guess, but I'd bet that the Windows security model isn't implemented, for example, so no checking/validating (even to whatever level Windows attempts to do it) isn't done.
Fortunately, most games have settings so that you don't have to stare at your character's ass at all while you play. In fact, I (personally) haven't played a single game in over 10 years that didn't allow me to change camera options. So, this "ass looking" argument really holds no water.
It's pretty sad how most Americans seem to think that your "rights" are actually "allowed" by the government.
Actually, they are allowed, specified, and provisioned by founders the government and included in the document(s) that define our government and we are supposed to make sure our government doesn't deny them to us. I can give you plenty of examples of governments in the world that do not "allow" various things we've outlined in our Bill of Rights, for example.
Gates' fortune is every bit as obscene as the author claims Jobs' fortune is, and probably much more suspect in how Gates acquired it.
I dunno... having a cult of personality and practically brainwashing his cult^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople out of their money like Jobs does is pretty nasty, IMO.
As soon as (new) games can find a way (the popular games... when it is released, not a decade later) on Linux with good performance, I'll not need Windows anymore.
Yes, since matrices form the basis for a lot of the computation for the types of problems parallel computing wants to solve, parallel matrix solution algorithms are all over the place. There are a number of algorithms even based on properties of the matrix, even.... dense vs. sparse. There are algorithms based on the amount of communication required, as well. Some algorithms work better with fast interconnects, some tollerate slower speed interconnects. The same with latency. Some Google-Fu can turn up a bunch of stuff.
Ummm... Ice doesn't cool the oceans.... ice exists because in those areas, not enough sunlight (and other factors) don't add enough heat to the environment to keep water in liquid state. With global warming, heat is being added to those environments.
I'm with you on this. I distruct Richard Stallman for the same reasons. I personally think he's gone off on a side road of his original mission. Originally, it was to provide a bunch of software that was open to all and protected by copyright. Now, it seems his mission is to attempt to destroy anything that isn't open to all and protected in the ways he wants to define it. The first is setting up a safe haven for intellectual ideas and the like. The second is waging a war. I don't want a war and have no time for it. I prefer to live and let live and have no problem with OSS and proprietary software coexisting. Stallman no longer wants to coexist so I've not supported his views for some time.