NVidia focused on engineering. 3DFx lost a lot of their core developers and focused on marketing and/or bets (integrating with board manufacturer, increading marketing expenses, restricting chip sells to their own producers, etc).
I know, because I have an Edge 3D which puts me scene even BEFORE 3Dfx released their first product.
3Dfx had the best product for 3D, and was a small company. They focused more on 3D only. They cut expenses by ditching integration with a 2D core, which meant the procesors could only do full-screen, and even with the arrival of Rush3D, they could only do 3D in ONE window at a time.
They made a lot of mistakes really. Nvidia just kept focusing on engineering at a HUGE LOSS (don't know where that money came from because they REALLY LOST A LOT OF IT, only with TNT2 they managed to get afoot, several years later. All other companies like Rendition, 3DFx, S3, etc didn't survive). Nvidia did survive, money pumped at it by unknown investors (was venture capital at the time).
I am pretty sure that wasn't coincidence. Remember Sega was to use 3Dfx chip. And finally 3Dfx closed, and some years later XBox is born powered by Nvidia.
Yes, what you say is true (tranks for clarifing, that is indeed part of what i meant though i could not name it!!). Nevertheless, I think I mixed two things, the second beign a feeling of unreality in some creatures.
To name two examples: Yoda on AoC (already mentioned) and Golem in LOTR T2T. The skin and light do not look real to me. They certainly look too plasticalike and not real mosnter flesh.
In Jurasic Park I did not experienced these problem. They looked more real, I don't know why. The texture and (textured) body expresions looked so much more convincing.
My feeling could be summarized: hiperrealistic carttons. They look like hyperreal animations, not like filmed creatures.
Only big countries can do that. Small countries can only do that if the manage to get a good deal with the "governing coutries".
Now, I do agree this is a matter of degree. If you have a relatively small country where it's citicens are willing to REALLY push the envelope (study hard, do everything the right way, sacrifice, sense of comunity over selfwelware, etc), they can grow without compling.
It takes a lot of effort, but it is possible. You only need to sacrifice your population for some decades, like Japan's.
Now not many countries are willing to do that. And the mayority rules under democracy. Under democary and an average population, you can't do anything.
This I cannot (of course) probe, but while I know I can do the effort (in my country) I don't see others willing to do it. Not only that, the most clever ones have not much moral (in general), and the ones that DO care, have all the ideas wrong.
It's very very sad. Add to that the educated ones that have all the information wrong even though they are not dumb. Many folks here bought capitalism as "market forces, free trade, goodwill of freedom", and later found that probably is only part to the game. They really can get the entire picture toghether. That is really hard. Not to mention the implementation (for example, you be slightly right about what has to be done, but they way you try to implement it / comuncate it is NO acceptable because nobody can follow you reasoning).
Living in the third world is hard, not only because of a poor/rich distinction but because of the FRUSTRATION factor. It's devastating, unless you don't give a damn and only hope to gather as much money in the least time possible by whatever means. And that's what most of the minds try to do.
Of course, there are some exceptions that give hope!
Well, actually, sometimes if you try to give too much detail, they will look unreal. I can't quote examples right now, except that i had a better experience with Doom II than with Doom III (visually). Doom III has so much better graphics that it looks unreal. I know I am not explaining it very well, but the "washed" pixelated Doom II which wouldn't want to give too much detail, looked more real just for this reason. Doom III gives much more detail, but it's not much more real than what the REAL details would look like.
I feel more photorealism in A New Hoe than in the last iteration. Really. Attack of the clones was kind of cool visually, but just doesn't look real. It does not. Repeat after me, It does not.
Even the ships, the easiest thing to model do not look real. Maybe it's the colors, the texture, etc. The eye can tell the difference between real stuff and wanabe real stuff. The slightest difference from what you would expect in the tiniest detail, and the illusion goes away.
And if it's a real living creature, well... The original Joda looked much more real even though they've done a great job on AotC. A real younger Yoda WOULD look different.
Hey, those are some of the most popular apps. I replied to a poster that though we could live on our own not careing for the outside world (windows for example).
That may be true for some people, but for the mayority I think that it's not.
Fair point. But computers have perfect memory and brutal calculating power. I do not mind the calculating power to be used for "thinking", but i do mind when it's used to ply for the next 30 moves.
I mean, the interesting part of chess is not calculating all posible moves, it's discarding the nodes with the least amount of thought.
Maybe that's why many people do not like computer chess. Because we can have state of art inteligence but a simple computer can kick our ass. Then something must be wrong.
I am not saying a computer is not beautifull in the usual sense, i am saying we think of our inteligence as ART (and mistery, and miracle), while we look at the computers (and it's AI) as only science (after all, we carefully designed this systems).
Anyway, I don't think the mistery will remain closed for many more decades so we'll see what happens (many people think they are very very very special because they are humans. That the universe was created for them blah blah.)
Yeap, inteligence is some kind of art. You see beauty in it. A computer tree and a statistical module for harvesting past GM games has no beauty. Maybe it is because we really really know how a "computer thinks"....this is very deep (if you haven't noticed)...it basically means....
We may be VERY dissapointed, the day we find out HOW WE THINK.:(
I don't really want to know (but am very very curious).
people will start saying: well, go is just a matter of implementing $foo on really good hardware, and that isn't a test of AI.
They will not start saying that, they have ALREADY said that. If you have a computer with 10 ^ 10000000 of the posessing power computers have today, of course you will beat any human.
The thing is having AI, not a calculus zealot trying out all posibilities. Also, to be called Inteligent, it must be "general-porpuse inteligent", that is, it must be able to solve problem by itself. If it relies on a human telling it EXACTLY what to do, then it's not AI. It's a smart guy programing yet another computer for doing specific calculations.
Computer AI would look like this to me:
Me: Computer, learn chess. Here are the rules, here are some games, not play a bit against this computer-player a while (a computer brute force chess program like we have today). Don't use more than 10^100000 of RAM. (10 seconds later) TUX9000: master, i think I learned it. Me: ok, no go beat the SingleComputerAgainstAllHumans tournament held at Moscow. TUX9000: this WILL BE FUN! Thanks master.
they do heuristics based upon other games, cross referencing libraries
Brute force, using HUMAN knoledge (just copy pasting where a human won against a human, with some non-fancy statistics). Ok, this is mostly the opening book (most tricky part) and end-games.
and doing simple depth traversal on position.
Woack, copy pasting what humans have done + pure brute force, that SURELY IS CLEVER, for crist sake. I'd never thought about that myself!
Show me a computer chess program that does not do ply bruteforcing and doesn't do megalohalistic raping of huge databases of GM past games (and of course NO opening and closing books), and we may then start evaluating if we can call that program "baby-AI"...
Go is a two-dimensional game, X + Y, many configurations yes, but depth?
Any game is fun, if played human-human. No human will have perfect memory, we have to use skills. So chess is great, but is more "computable" (ie: computations solve chess really easy). On the other hand, Go is less computable (at least until now).
Also, chess is VERY secuential where as Go is very tricky and parralen: you can NEVER fully evaluate a position until it's too late (assuming players of equal strenth).
With chess, i myself could tell you who is losing. Really, try it for yourself and see. Take Deep Fritz game with K. and try to evaluate it as it goes, then check a GOOD Go game and try to evaluate after move 30 (as an example). Do it several times with different samples (ie: games) for both chess and Go, and you'll see something along the lines of:
Chess good guesses: 99% Go good guesses: 50%
You can only (try to) evaluate Go sucessfully if you really really really play great Go. And that is a problem for a computer, that makes moves based on the evaluation function (ie: 1 pawn x 1 rook = good after 10 moves, I'd do that). In Go that doesn't work:)
The more that is done, the better for us. But Stallman not only said things, he actually did most of them. And so, Lucky Green (though 1/2000 worth what RMS did of course, and intentions NOT clear)
He is quoting what techies that developed palladium asserted at the anti-piracy group. Of course he knows it can be used to that end, but that is NOT what they said. Also, Software Licesing products != Palladium antipiracy.
Anyway, your quote was very to the point and interesting! Those m0therflanders...#%$%! )(anti-piracy is a good thing though, if they start enforcing licenses, they will harvest some revenues, and lower they market share. Bye monopoly (but still leading by huge margin) and some breath to competition. Could be cool for MS and the market).
AI and computer chess DO NOT MIX WELL...really (and computer chess programs don't even help a bit in the AI field as far as i know, chess programs are irrelevant to AI research).
You can produce smart algoriths to add chess knoledge to the chess program, but that does not equal what we'd (at least not me) call AI.
Todd, it could work, people are lazy and non-vigilant. It means they forget easily and try to take the shortest path. Microsoft is trying to clean up image a bit (in the developers minds) and offering a good framework.
Also, offering it for free. It's much better than what they offered before. They really are delivering, but... believe what you want anyway (I am _not_ trying to prove myself right, I only see they are fixing things that where harming them, and that developers WILL turn a bit more MS-friendly)
The problem MS has is they don't yet control other countries. While the USA may be the stronger economy, their expansion line what based on pushing antipiracy and forcing everyone in the world to pay 3x for their products.
If USA was the world, OSS would already be illegal:)
- Mplayer (playing windows media files) - SAMBA (comunicating with Windows machines) - Apache server (serving http documents to 98% of IE users + the rest) - OpenOffice reading and saving MS Word/Excel compatible files - GICU or GAIM: comunicating with Windows IMgrs. - WineX: playing Windows games - Mozilla 1: at last being able to see the web IE users see it.
We may not like it, but the most popular unix applications are the ones that "are suited to fulfilling a set of needs" of which is having on Unix what we had under Windows.
I mean, ok you can do other stuff that does not involve Windows compatibility, but why then are these the most popular applications. Take away those apps, and our Linux dies in a month (my bet).
Is that they want a lot of apps developed for free under the Windows enviroment, with no counterpart in the Unix world.
As a last resort, their "free software" comunity would be based on their products. They will figure out how to profit from it (...as if they haven't figured out already:-)
Today, Windows developers think of selling their product, no matter how crappy it is. Or they have these clones of Word like OpenOffice that do NOT rely on their technology. Well, they want to change that.
If there should be a free Word, it must be based on their patented / owned technology. They "why's" we will find out later on...
Linux is not about innovating just as MS is not about innovating either. Linux is about giving things back to the people that belonged to some small companies that where ripped of by Microsoft.
If you want to innovate you don't NEED Linux, nor Windows, nor MacOS. Innovations are mostly generics and can be ported to any plataform.
Linux = stable secure cheap working OS. OS = lots of free apps (some of them clones of past apps, some new)
I don't get the innovating thing. I understand more the usability + stability + cheapablity of things.
.NET is easy to use. It WILL catch up eventually, and they will give it away for free until they get back the developers comunities that they have lost.
It really really REALLY saves money to use the.NET FW.
What do I mean? Don't underestimate MS. They get it right after iteration nr. 3 (focused). And if people developers use.NET, they will have lots of incentives to use their products.
I mean, i hated ASP, and loved PHP or java. Now I still like PHP, but i really like the.NET (FW). The onl thing keeping me away from.NET is who did it and it's nature.
In short, I believe that developing countries can do to the US exactly what the US did to the developed countries of 100 years ago: ignore their IP protection, and get the exact same response as the US did: annoyance.
Globalisation forbids that. You can't export unless you accept US/EU law. And that laws are writen with US/EU handwriting, not a third world one.
So either you forget about the rest of world or abide to your masters terms. Only really big moster countries sufficient power to challenge this reality.
Slashdot Mirror
NVidia focused on engineering. 3DFx lost a lot of their core developers and focused on marketing and/or bets (integrating with board manufacturer, increading marketing expenses, restricting chip sells to their own producers, etc).
I know, because I have an Edge 3D which puts me scene even BEFORE 3Dfx released their first product.
3Dfx had the best product for 3D, and was a small company. They focused more on 3D only. They cut expenses by ditching integration with a 2D core, which meant the procesors could only do full-screen, and even with the arrival of Rush3D, they could only do 3D in ONE window at a time.
They made a lot of mistakes really. Nvidia just kept focusing on engineering at a HUGE LOSS (don't know where that money came from because they REALLY LOST A LOT OF IT, only with TNT2 they managed to get afoot, several years later. All other companies like Rendition, 3DFx, S3, etc didn't survive). Nvidia did survive, money pumped at it by unknown investors (was venture capital at the time).
I am pretty sure that wasn't coincidence. Remember Sega was to use 3Dfx chip. And finally 3Dfx closed, and some years later XBox is born powered by Nvidia.
Yes, what you say is true (tranks for clarifing, that is indeed part of what i meant though i could not name it!!). Nevertheless, I think I mixed two things, the second beign a feeling of unreality in some creatures.
To name two examples: Yoda on AoC (already mentioned) and Golem in LOTR T2T. The skin and light do not look real to me. They certainly look too plasticalike and not real mosnter flesh.
In Jurasic Park I did not experienced these problem. They looked more real, I don't know why. The texture and (textured) body expresions looked so much more convincing.
My feeling could be summarized: hiperrealistic carttons. They look like hyperreal animations, not like filmed creatures.
Only big countries can do that. Small countries can only do that if the manage to get a good deal with the "governing coutries".
Now, I do agree this is a matter of degree. If you have a relatively small country where it's citicens are willing to REALLY push the envelope (study hard, do everything the right way, sacrifice, sense of comunity over selfwelware, etc), they can grow without compling.
It takes a lot of effort, but it is possible. You only need to sacrifice your population for some decades, like Japan's.
Now not many countries are willing to do that. And the mayority rules under democracy. Under democary and an average population, you can't do anything.
This I cannot (of course) probe, but while I know I can do the effort (in my country) I don't see others willing to do it. Not only that, the most clever ones have not much moral (in general), and the ones that DO care, have all the ideas wrong.
It's very very sad. Add to that the educated ones that have all the information wrong even though they are not dumb. Many folks here bought capitalism as "market forces, free trade, goodwill of freedom", and later found that probably is only part to the game. They really can get the entire picture toghether. That is really hard. Not to mention the implementation (for example, you be slightly right about what has to be done, but they way you try to implement it / comuncate it is NO acceptable because nobody can follow you reasoning).
Living in the third world is hard, not only because of a poor/rich distinction but because of the FRUSTRATION factor. It's devastating, unless you don't give a damn and only hope to gather as much money in the least time possible by whatever means. And that's what most of the minds try to do.
Of course, there are some exceptions that give hope!
Well, actually, sometimes if you try to give too much detail, they will look unreal. I can't quote examples right now, except that i had a better experience with Doom II than with Doom III (visually). Doom III has so much better graphics that it looks unreal. I know I am not explaining it very well, but the "washed" pixelated Doom II which wouldn't want to give too much detail, looked more real just for this reason. Doom III gives much more detail, but it's not much more real than what the REAL details would look like.
It looks more cartoonish maybe...
Two things:
:) (it has happened before).
1) Have you heard of something called a normal distribution? This quote has to work on averages not individual cases...
2) He stated non-crying childs tend to be really smart. He didn't imply crying babies tend to be stupid, as you have read it.
And if you don't agree, well, maybe you where misquoted your IQ
I feel more photorealism in A New Hoe than in the last iteration. Really. Attack of the clones was kind of cool visually, but just doesn't look real. It does not. Repeat after me, It does not.
Even the ships, the easiest thing to model do not look real. Maybe it's the colors, the texture, etc. The eye can tell the difference between real stuff and wanabe real stuff. The slightest difference from what you would expect in the tiniest detail, and the illusion goes away.
And if it's a real living creature, well... The original Joda looked much more real even though they've done a great job on AotC. A real younger Yoda WOULD look different.
Hey, those are some of the most popular apps. I replied to a poster that though we could live on our own not careing for the outside world (windows for example).
That may be true for some people, but for the mayority I think that it's not.
Fair point. But computers have perfect memory and brutal calculating power. I do not mind the calculating power to be used for "thinking", but i do mind when it's used to ply for the next 30 moves.
I mean, the interesting part of chess is not calculating all posible moves, it's discarding the nodes with the least amount of thought.
Maybe that's why many people do not like computer chess. Because we can have state of art inteligence but a simple computer can kick our ass. Then something must be wrong.
I am not saying a computer is not beautifull in the usual sense, i am saying we think of our inteligence as ART (and mistery, and miracle), while we look at the computers (and it's AI) as only science (after all, we carefully designed this systems).
Anyway, I don't think the mistery will remain closed for many more decades so we'll see what happens (many people think they are very very very special because they are humans. That the universe was created for them blah blah.)
Yeap, inteligence is some kind of art. You see beauty in it. A computer tree and a statistical module for harvesting past GM games has no beauty. Maybe it is because we really really know how a "computer thinks"....this is very deep (if you haven't noticed)...it basically means....
:(
We may be VERY dissapointed, the day we find out HOW WE THINK.
I don't really want to know (but am very very curious).
people will start saying: well, go is just a matter of implementing $foo on really good hardware, and that isn't a test of AI.
They will not start saying that, they have ALREADY said that. If you have a computer with 10 ^ 10000000 of the posessing power computers have today, of course you will beat any human.
The thing is having AI, not a calculus zealot trying out all posibilities. Also, to be called Inteligent, it must be "general-porpuse inteligent", that is, it must be able to solve problem by itself. If it relies on a human telling it EXACTLY what to do, then it's not AI. It's a smart guy programing yet another computer for doing specific calculations.
Computer AI would look like this to me:
Me: Computer, learn chess. Here are the rules, here are some games, not play a bit against this computer-player a while (a computer brute force chess program like we have today). Don't use more than 10^100000 of RAM.
(10 seconds later)
TUX9000: master, i think I learned it.
Me: ok, no go beat the SingleComputerAgainstAllHumans tournament held at Moscow.
TUX9000: this WILL BE FUN! Thanks master.
they do heuristics based upon other games, cross referencing libraries
:)
Brute force, using HUMAN knoledge (just copy pasting where a human won against a human, with some non-fancy statistics). Ok, this is mostly the opening book (most tricky part) and end-games.
and doing simple depth traversal on position.
Woack, copy pasting what humans have done + pure brute force, that SURELY IS CLEVER, for crist sake. I'd never thought about that myself!
Show me a computer chess program that does not do ply bruteforcing and doesn't do megalohalistic raping of huge databases of GM past games (and of course NO opening and closing books), and we may then start evaluating if we can call that program "baby-AI"...
Go is a two-dimensional game, X + Y, many configurations yes, but depth?
Any game is fun, if played human-human. No human will have perfect memory, we have to use skills. So chess is great, but is more "computable" (ie: computations solve chess really easy). On the other hand, Go is less computable (at least until now).
Also, chess is VERY secuential where as Go is very tricky and parralen: you can NEVER fully evaluate a position until it's too late (assuming players of equal strenth).
With chess, i myself could tell you who is losing. Really, try it for yourself and see. Take Deep Fritz game with K. and try to evaluate it as it goes, then check a GOOD Go game and try to evaluate after move 30 (as an example). Do it several times with different samples (ie: games) for both chess and Go, and you'll see something along the lines of:
Chess good guesses: 99%
Go good guesses: 50%
You can only (try to) evaluate Go sucessfully if you really really really play great Go. And that is a problem for a computer, that makes moves based on the evaluation function (ie: 1 pawn x 1 rook = good after 10 moves, I'd do that). In Go that doesn't work
That's why I NEVER chalenged the sun: he'd quit at midplay :(
Saying != Doing...
The more that is done, the better for us. But Stallman not only said things, he actually did most of them. And so, Lucky Green (though 1/2000 worth what RMS did of course, and intentions NOT clear)
He is quoting what techies that developed palladium asserted at the anti-piracy group. Of course he knows it can be used to that end, but that is NOT what they said. Also, Software Licesing products != Palladium antipiracy.
...#%$%! )(anti-piracy is a good thing though, if they start enforcing licenses, they will harvest some revenues, and lower they market share. Bye monopoly (but still leading by huge margin) and some breath to competition. Could be cool for MS and the market).
Anyway, your quote was very to the point and interesting! Those m0therflanders
AI and computer chess DO NOT MIX WELL...really (and computer chess programs don't even help a bit in the AI field as far as i know, chess programs are irrelevant to AI research).
You can produce smart algoriths to add chess knoledge to the chess program, but that does not equal what we'd (at least not me) call AI.
Todd, it could work, people are lazy and non-vigilant. It means they forget easily and try to take the shortest path. Microsoft is trying to clean up image a bit (in the developers minds) and offering a good framework.
... believe what you want anyway (I am _not_ trying to prove myself right, I only see they are fixing things that where harming them, and that developers WILL turn a bit more MS-friendly)
Also, offering it for free. It's much better than what they offered before. They really are delivering, but
The problem MS has is they don't yet control other countries. While the USA may be the stronger economy, their expansion line what based on pushing antipiracy and forcing everyone in the world to pay 3x for their products.
:)
If USA was the world, OSS would already be illegal
Most popular unix apps:
- Mplayer (playing windows media files)
- SAMBA (comunicating with Windows machines)
- Apache server (serving http documents to 98% of IE users + the rest)
- OpenOffice reading and saving MS Word/Excel compatible files
- GICU or GAIM: comunicating with Windows IMgrs.
- WineX: playing Windows games
- Mozilla 1: at last being able to see the web IE users see it.
We may not like it, but the most popular unix applications are the ones that "are suited to fulfilling a set of needs" of which is having on Unix what we had under Windows.
I mean, ok you can do other stuff that does not involve Windows compatibility, but why then are these the most popular applications. Take away those apps, and our Linux dies in a month (my bet).
Is that they want a lot of apps developed for free under the Windows enviroment, with no counterpart in the Unix world.
:-)
As a last resort, their "free software" comunity would be based on their products. They will figure out how to profit from it (...as if they haven't figured out already
Today, Windows developers think of selling their product, no matter how crappy it is. Or they have these clones of Word like OpenOffice that do NOT rely on their technology. Well, they want to change that.
If there should be a free Word, it must be based on their patented / owned technology. They "why's" we will find out later on...
Linux is not about innovating just as MS is not about innovating either. Linux is about giving things back to the people that belonged to some small companies that where ripped of by Microsoft.
If you want to innovate you don't NEED Linux, nor Windows, nor MacOS. Innovations are mostly generics and can be ported to any plataform.
Linux = stable secure cheap working OS.
OS = lots of free apps (some of them clones of past apps, some new)
I don't get the innovating thing. I understand more the usability + stability + cheapablity of things.
.NET is easy to use. It WILL catch up eventually, and they will give it away for free until they get back the developers comunities that they have lost.
.NET FW.
.NET, they will have lots of incentives to use their products.
.NET (FW). The onl thing keeping me away from .NET is who did it and it's nature.
It really really REALLY saves money to use the
What do I mean? Don't underestimate MS. They get it right after iteration nr. 3 (focused). And if people developers use
I mean, i hated ASP, and loved PHP or java. Now I still like PHP, but i really like the
They can chose to protect selected industries. After all, they can't compete in all fields at the same time.
Also, copying makes you learn a lot.
Yeah, but who controls the On/Off switch and why?
In short, I believe that developing countries can do to the US exactly what the US did to the developed countries of 100 years ago: ignore their IP protection, and get the exact same response as the US did: annoyance.
Globalisation forbids that. You can't export unless you accept US/EU law. And that laws are writen with US/EU handwriting, not a third world one.
So either you forget about the rest of world or abide to your masters terms. Only really big moster countries sufficient power to challenge this reality.