ATI, suddenly finding themselves in a corner, made a very smart decision under pressure.
Point is, they can come out of this wearing the white hat, because they were the first to be such good guys about the issue.
The fact is, even with all Nvidia optimizations in-place, their high-end card will just barely edge out a 9800 Pro without optimizations. Add ot this the fact that ATI, 3dmark and the community will hound them and discount Nvidia's optimizations until they are removed, and you've got an all-out win for ATI.
Remember folks: everyone cheats. Fools take things too far and get caught. ATI has played the fool before, Nvidia plays it now; that is the game.
But certainly note that Intel's 740 drivers were also blatantly cheating. Everyone cheats. IF you get caught, deal with it, and don't get caught again. Hopefully, ATI got this concept right the 3rd time. I must say I'm shocked at the miniscule amount of easily detectable cheats ATI is using, they're almost playing the game straight-up!
Probably because they're just as guilty, and certainly have been in the past.
If it's a case of the pot calling the kettle black, you want to hold your tounge. I wouldn't be surprised at all if ATI seeded this 'discovery', but on the other hand it's not all that amazing a discovery.
If I were a beta-tester, presented with real-world hardware and drivers, the first thing I would do is vary the benchmark to verify the sturdyness of the drivers and hardware. If it can handle moving around freely in a fully-3D rendered envronment without significant visual anomalies, it has passed the most important test.
That said, I'm really surprised somebody didn't notice this sooner, like the day of release. It's not at all unherad of for people to run non-standard tests, even though the results are usually not published as part of the 'review'.
One major reason 3dfx died was their introduction of SLI to the consumer marketplace.
Prior to this, only Obsidian had been using SLI for their Voodoo Graphics based boards and arcade setups.
SLI unfortunately promised the world to consumers, and they got it. But it killed any profits for their upgrade cycle, because EVERYONE already could see what the upgrade cycle was and how well it performed. Voodoo 2 SLI was so much better than a single Voodoo 2 that most people considered it an upgrade, rather than an option at purchase.
Most people bought a single Voodoo 2 board, and added on the second 6 months to a year later at cut-rate prices. 3DFX never placed a premium or restriction on SLI, any regular board could do it, so people were more likely to wait for the prices to fall on regular boards.
Furthermore, consumers feel hurt when you take away a fancy doo-dad from them. Consumers were fairly irate when they heard that the Voodoo3 series would not feature an SLI upgrade path of any kind. They were even more pissed off to learn that only the Voodoo3 3000 outperformed a set of Voodoo 2 12MB boards in SLI.
SLI softened the market for the Voodoo3. If 3dfx had simply released a single-board Voodoo 2, it still would have been faster than anything else out there for 6 months, and would have reached parity with the TNT. Then, they could have simultaneously released the Voodoo 3 ( twice as fast as a single Voodoo 2 ), and offer a 'special' Voodoo 2 upgrade board for SLI ( priced fairly high, of course ).
VSA-100 = Voodoo3 with 32-bit color and dedicated Anti-aliasing hardware. I would consider this an advancement, but at the time some people were looking for things like T&L, hardware DOT3 or Environmental Bump Mapping. What we got was T-buffer, which was just a software trick.
So, did 3dfx/3DFX release one or two unique chipsets? Depends on who you ask.
Vodooo3 = Banshee with an extra TexelFX2.
Banshee = PixelFX2 + TexelFX2 + custom 2D core on a single chip.
Voodoo 2 chipset = PixelFX2 + TexelFX2 + TexelFX2 * Keep in mind this capability to scale was already built into the Voodoo Graphics, and was hardly unique.
The IRS, as well as my state ( Maryland ) make EDITABLE electronic forms available over the web. I know that Pennsylvania does the same, and likey many more states.
Download the forms, and fill them out on the computer. Make a mistake? No need to start over.
When you're done, print it out. All your numbers are in a nice, clean font. The only messy part is your signature.
My only problem with this system is they don't let you save the edited version of the form, so if you make a mistake then want to fix it later you have to fill it all out again. But it's much better than doing it all on paper.
Ummmm. You can't be that dense. You really, really, really, really, really cannot be that dense, please.
You know, some people actually recognize when a play on words reference requires no explanation.
Like Better Than Ezra.
Which received a +5 Funny rating.
Which would be nearly impossible if people didn't know there was a band called "Better Than Ezra"
And now, for your pleasure, some of my favorite lyrics ( Return of the Postmoderns )
Feeding line caught tuna to a neutered Bodhisattva, Writhing peaches for the president out on the whitehouse lawn, Beating Herbert Hoover with a leather-tipped pinata, Thorn and KAty drink the milk tinted Amerasian Green
"StepAhead Advanced Branch Prediction - Looks ahead and gathers the data needed to optimally run applications"
Finally! A WinChip that doesn't insist on doing things the old-fashioned way.
Three years go when VIA merged the Cyrix product name with the Winchip line, they touted the WinChip's lack of Out-Of-Order-Execution and use of Static Branch Prediciton as "features".
This was puported to save power and make the die smaller. Funny to see them do a complete 360 only 3 years later, after their castrated chip has failed to attract a single Tier 1 vendor.
The Cyrix MII sold better than the WinChip / VIA C3; at least Compaq and Emachines were selling systems based on it back in the day. It sold where the WinChip couldn't, because it actually delivered on being both reasonably powerful and dirt-cheap. The WinChip could claim to be dirt-cheap, but reasonably powerful...welll...
So, after so long a wait, do we finally have a winner? A low power chip that can actually play a Divx movie? Perhaps they could get rid of that hardware DVD decoder too, a feature other systems havn't needed since the Celeron 400 / K6-2 450.
In the US we have nationwide companies that have to deal with state-level taxes.
How can you advertise a price with sales tax ( your VAT ) to the whole nation, when the sales tax varies in all 50 states plus The District of Columbia? There are some states that don't even have a sales tax ( like Delaware ).
That's too damn expensive to create 50 different versions of your commercial, your campaign signs, etc. And honestly, you need NUMBERS to hook consumers, so you just can't say "it's on sale at a very low price!"
Is this admissable as evidence?
on
DVRs for Cop Cars
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That would be my biggest question, since the digital format is an order of magnitude easier to seamlessly edit than analog media.
You are not a user. You are a superuser. Do not pretend to be a user.
Repeat after me: "I read Slashdot. I am %99.997 likely not to be a user"
"I read Slashdot. I am %99.997 likely not to be a user"
Users want something that works as well as a television, but you can add stuff to it seamlessly. It doesnt work like that in the real world.
That said, most users buy fully preinstalled and preconfigured PCs. They will also tend to buy software packages and even upgrades and accessories direct from the OEM to avoid the hassle self-install.
They like the idea of a recovery disc over swimming through patches or taking it to a technician because, even though its dead-simple and quite drastic, AT LEAST it leaves the user in charge.
If YOU fuck up YOUR system, you know how to roll back, re-ghost from an image, rebuild your kernel or some other ghastly arrchaic thing that requires the command prompt.
Users are content with the fact that they can pop a recovery CD in and get XP back in mint condition, no matter how much they mucked the system up. After they get bitten once, they'll realize why every brand-name PC comes with a CD-burner these days, and create monthly backups.
I know it's not how superusers like to live. But for the user, it is the ONLY way to come to terms with such an endlessly flexible system.
Agreed. Culling / hidden surface removal is based on the camera's current POV. That said, if the camera angle changes, the game engine or the video card's own culling engine should supply the card with new data based on the new camera POV.
What this test attempts to show is that Nvidia's card selectively clips based on a SINGLE, DEFINED POV.
THIS IS NOT A BUG. Your camera changes, your visible surfaces should change. If it doesnt, this is a sound indicator that you are anticipating the clipping plane.
What astounds me is that people like Kyle Bennett & Co., who have no concept of how 3D rendeing works, would pass this off so readily as a retaliatory strike.
It delivered. With 3D Winbench. All other benchmarks were the same or worse, unfortunately.
But please note that ATI was hardly the only culprit even inj that particular lineup. Witness the i740 having the ability to perform as well as a Voodoo 2 in Winbench 3D, yet perform so poorly even in DirectX 5 single-textured games like Incoming and Forsaken.
Fact is people have been and will continue to fudge benchmark results.
Bond is replaceable because Bond is not the man. Bond is the style. We see the face all the time, and yet all we remember are the well-tailored grey suits, sporty cars and Walther PPK. All you need is a suave man to wear that suit, drive that car and fire that weapon.
Batman is not replaceable because Batman ( as portrayed in the 80s/90s ) is the man behind the mask. This is why it was so important to have someone who could actually act, and why people really missed Michael Keaton in III and IV. He was fairly good at the role, and people became attached to his personal emotional stigma.
You'll find the same thing has happened with Spiderman. The geek-out-of-water persona really gave Peter Parker as a person a lot more depth than people were expecting. But that depth is forever attached to Tobey, it will be lost if you switch actors.
"Good vs. Evil is an element of plot, as it is simply a classification of conflict. I can't believe they even separated this out."
Depends entirely on the movie. There are lots of movies where the conflict is not cut-and-dried, and often gets tangled up in itself.
A small part of the population actually enjoys mind games like this, but most want a simple thing
Green Goblin bad, Spider Man good. Mordor bad, rest of Middle-Earth good. Magneto bad, Xavier good. Senator Palpatine bad, Yoda good.
See, without simple conflits like these that are obvious to all early on in the film, the movie will tend to meander and lose the audience.
Books can get away with this, and are usually better without it, because they don't have such stringent time requirements. But screenplays need gripping conflicts, all though the movie.
The processor architectures themselves aren't 5 orders of magnitude different.
IPC of the 8088: ~1/12 ( somewhere around 300-400k IPS for the 4.7MHz version )
Typically agreed upon IPC for the Pentium IV: 6
Today's architectures, despite pipelining, multiple ALUs, fast caching and all the other tricks, are not even 100 times faster than their origins. For reference, we didn't even top 1.0 IPC until the 486.
It's the combination of speed-tuned architectures plus the small processes that create todays super fast processors. You could not easily clock out an 8088 at multiple GHz, and probably couldn't even enter the hundreds of MHz range without some heavy modification.
Every aspect of life is childish. We just pretend that things have changed by keeping things inside.
When you were a kid, you hung out with the people you cared about, you talked shit about the people the rest of your group hated, and you sat down and watched mindless TV on saturday mornings.
Now that you're grown up, you come home every night and hang out wit the people you care about, you talk shit about that guy in the office that nobody else likes, and you turn on the tube and watch mindless sitcoms.
Don't think you're "grown up" just because you get bills every moth and file your own 1040. Any robot can write a check, that's not what determines your self. Your self has not changed.
The only thing adults do that innocent kids don't is lie to themselves.
So, quit lying to yourself and being embarrassed. Sit down with your kids and share the moment.
Let me tell you a very important thing about the world.
There are two pure extremes out there: the Pacifist, and the Belligerent. Neither one is right, because neither one promotes survival of the species.
Before you understand what I'm trying to say, you have to understand that the two words have been corrupted by popular culture.
PACIFISTS NEVER FIGHT. If you would fight to defend your home and your belongings, actively protect your family and friends, save your daughter from a rapist, you are not a Pacifist. A Pacifist lacks any trace of humanity because he or she would never intervene violence with violence for another human being's sake.
But then again, if you are willing to make calculated war with another country, you aren't a true Belligerent. There are times when fighting now is better than fighting later, or vice-versa, and this is a concept neither a true Belligerent not true Pacifist can understand. Even Hitler, crazy as he was, led his expansion in an cool, calculated manner.
If you concede the fact that the real world is neither of these two extremes, then you also must concede that, as people set on survival, we can never fully lower our gaurd. We lower it as much as we can for the sake of everyone's sanity, but it can never be removed.
When you bitch about budgets the size of Texas, I really wonder if you've lost sight of the human factor and slipped into full pacifism. You forget that an effective army, whether it's used for defense or offense, is a necessity, and that human lives are above-all most important.
Perhaps you'd like to step back to the Vietnam era? Our completely non-stealth B-52s and F4 Phantoms were getting swatted down like flies by Soviet SAM sites. Our platoons went in to die by the thousands just to hit critical enemy installations.
Yet, you're getting upset that we're now replacing a portion of that fleet of B-52s with something that has a radar cross-section ten-thousand times smaller than a B-52? A bomber built to survive, so we have less PEOPLE as well as bombers to replace?
You're getting upset over a cruise missle that saves hundreds, possibly thousands of soldiers' lives by hitting key enemy targets, especially the well-defended ones?
War exists. Take this as truth, for all eternity. Don't get caught up in the numbers, just worry about the people.
handwriting recognition is predictive (ie: it differentiates between a captial I, lowercase L, and numerial 1 by the characters that came before or after). In random sequences (read: good passwords), this fails miserably.
What did you expect? This is the same thing the human brain does to an extent, that is why can look at the following:
Oklahoma City
Okahoma Ciyy
Your mind makes out the difference, and knows the intent. You probably know Oklahoma City exists. Your mind spells out the first word phonetically, even with the missing letter it still sounds like "Oak ah home ah", so you make the connection. Plus, your mind immediately looks for other options for the second word's prefix, like 'Cit', 'Cin', or 'Cig', because it is very unlikely to be 'Ciy'.
Same thing happens if you are presented with a messy writing style, your brain uses the associated content and fleshes out any words, syllables or letters you cannot read.
If the human brain depends on phonetics, sentence structure AND cultural literacy to fill in the blanks, how the hell do you expect the mind, let alone a computer, to deal with non-phonetic, non-structured entries?
What you need there is a simpler password system, where you enter the letters not as flowing speech, but one letter at a time like graffiti. Still, it will never be easy...without the tactile feedback of pressing a key, you can never know what you really input.
Oh, but that's my whole point. TODAY's privatization movement is almost entirely greed-driven, with more and more push by the open market for governments to butt out every day.
Unless Capitalism itself comes tumbling down, you're not likely to see anything remotely representing the gargantuan efforts of old.
Ma Bell, NASA, ARPA, they're all dying out. Replaced by the new free market, which can do EVERYTHING faster, better cheaper. AND WILL HARDLY EVER SPEND MONEY ON PROFITLESS VENTURES.
Satellites can make money...if they don't try to do things any differently. The fact that you single out Iridium only proves my point: this was the BIGGEST, and the LAST attempt to seriously change how we use Low Earth Orbit connunications in the last decade. No money, no sale.
GPS...is over 2 decades old, a last remnant from the same space heyday that hatched the Space Shuttle.
Development contnues on building better rockets...so long as they're specifically designed for launching satellites at even lower cost.
Where's the innovation?
Where's the expedition to Mars? The base on the moon? Just to say "HEY, -WE- DID IT!". It's just possible we could open the doors for huge profits in the process.
You're not going to see any of that from today's space companies, because it's an unheard of risk. Why should software companies even bother with pushing the bounds of software if there's no money in it? No patents whatsoever means no protections, no possible chance to recoup your investment.
If Christopher Colombus had asked Microsoft to support him in getting to the New World, they would have made him jump through thousands of hoops and upper management to get approval, feasability studies, etc. And after all the effort of finding the new world, putting in insane efforts, they would fire him because his Q1 profits were below target. JESUS CHRIST, the world is RUN by beancounters folks, not a dreamer among them.
And don't even talk about intangible benefits, this means nothing to corporations. A corporation wouldn't care that Spain gained tons of notoriety worldwide by developing and sapping the New World. In the long term, the Spanish lost their empire and now play second-fiddle to the rest of the developed world. THAT is all that ANY beancounter corporation cares about.
So, I suppose that makes all open-source software developers socialist? NO.
It means all open-source developers don't really know what they want. They want all the benefits of a govenrment-sactioned, tax-driven monopolist melting pot without any of the restrictions.
Make up your minds folks. You want real innovation, take a look back and SEE what has truely driven innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
ATI, suddenly finding themselves in a corner, made a very smart decision under pressure.
Point is, they can come out of this wearing the white hat, because they were the first to be such good guys about the issue.
The fact is, even with all Nvidia optimizations in-place, their high-end card will just barely edge out a 9800 Pro without optimizations. Add ot this the fact that ATI, 3dmark and the community will hound them and discount Nvidia's optimizations until they are removed, and you've got an all-out win for ATI.
Remember folks: everyone cheats. Fools take things too far and get caught. ATI has played the fool before, Nvidia plays it now; that is the game.
ATI released these drivers promising a free %40 improvement in performance. Well, you got it, if all you like to play is 3D Winbench 98.
Tom's Hardware uncovered the discrepancy
But certainly note that Intel's 740 drivers were also blatantly cheating. Everyone cheats. IF you get caught, deal with it, and don't get caught again. Hopefully, ATI got this concept right the 3rd time. I must say I'm shocked at the miniscule amount of easily detectable cheats ATI is using, they're almost playing the game straight-up!
Probably because they're just as guilty, and certainly have been in the past.
If it's a case of the pot calling the kettle black, you want to hold your tounge. I wouldn't be surprised at all if ATI seeded this 'discovery', but on the other hand it's not all that amazing a discovery.
If I were a beta-tester, presented with real-world hardware and drivers, the first thing I would do is vary the benchmark to verify the sturdyness of the drivers and hardware. If it can handle moving around freely in a fully-3D rendered envronment without significant visual anomalies, it has passed the most important test.
That said, I'm really surprised somebody didn't notice this sooner, like the day of release. It's not at all unherad of for people to run non-standard tests, even though the results are usually not published as part of the 'review'.
One major reason 3dfx died was their introduction of SLI to the consumer marketplace.
Prior to this, only Obsidian had been using SLI for their Voodoo Graphics based boards and arcade setups.
SLI unfortunately promised the world to consumers, and they got it. But it killed any profits for their upgrade cycle, because EVERYONE already could see what the upgrade cycle was and how well it performed. Voodoo 2 SLI was so much better than a single Voodoo 2 that most people considered it an upgrade, rather than an option at purchase.
Most people bought a single Voodoo 2 board, and added on the second 6 months to a year later at cut-rate prices. 3DFX never placed a premium or restriction on SLI, any regular board could do it, so people were more likely to wait for the prices to fall on regular boards.
Furthermore, consumers feel hurt when you take away a fancy doo-dad from them. Consumers were fairly irate when they heard that the Voodoo3 series would not feature an SLI upgrade path of any kind. They were even more pissed off to learn that only the Voodoo3 3000 outperformed a set of Voodoo 2 12MB boards in SLI.
SLI softened the market for the Voodoo3. If 3dfx had simply released a single-board Voodoo 2, it still would have been faster than anything else out there for 6 months, and would have reached parity with the TNT. Then, they could have simultaneously released the Voodoo 3 ( twice as fast as a single Voodoo 2 ), and offer a 'special' Voodoo 2 upgrade board for SLI ( priced fairly high, of course ).
Yes, but I believe the author's observation is:
VSA-100 = Voodoo3 with 32-bit color and dedicated Anti-aliasing hardware. I would consider this an advancement, but at the time some people were looking for things like T&L, hardware DOT3 or Environmental Bump Mapping. What we got was T-buffer, which was just a software trick.
So, did 3dfx/3DFX release one or two unique chipsets? Depends on who you ask.
Vodooo3 = Banshee with an extra TexelFX2.
Banshee = PixelFX2 + TexelFX2 + custom 2D core on a single chip.
Voodoo 2 chipset = PixelFX2 + TexelFX2 + TexelFX2
* Keep in mind this capability to scale was already built into the Voodoo Graphics, and was hardly unique.
Voodoo Rush chipset = PixelFX + TexelFX + Alliance AT25
Voodoo Graphics chipset = PixelFX + TexelFX
As a resident of Baltimore, I can most certainly assure you that this article meets The Sun's highest standards for excellence.
That said, I read The Washington Post.
Why yes,
I DO like to put on women's cloting, and hang around in bars.
But don't tell CmdTaco. He's obviously smitten with my feminine side.
Congratulations, Shinji!
You've hit the nail on the head. Neon Genesis is an experience, not a universe.
What he mean to say is, YOU ARE WRONG SIR.
Current is generated from a time-changing magnetic flux. Your static magnetic field will generate no current.
And Faraday is turning in his grave.
Even better! Use fill-in PDFs!
The IRS, as well as my state ( Maryland ) make EDITABLE electronic forms available over the web. I know that Pennsylvania does the same, and likey many more states.
Download the forms, and fill them out on the computer. Make a mistake? No need to start over.
When you're done, print it out. All your numbers are in a nice, clean font. The only messy part is your signature.
My only problem with this system is they don't let you save the edited version of the form, so if you make a mistake then want to fix it later you have to fill it all out again. But it's much better than doing it all on paper.
Ummmm. You can't be that dense. You really, really, really, really, really cannot be that dense, please.
You know, some people actually recognize when a play on words reference requires no explanation.
Like Better Than Ezra.
Which received a +5 Funny rating.
Which would be nearly impossible if people didn't know there was a band called "Better Than Ezra"
And now, for your pleasure, some of my favorite lyrics ( Return of the Postmoderns )
Feeding line caught tuna to a neutered Bodhisattva,
Writhing peaches for the president out on the whitehouse lawn,
Beating Herbert Hoover with a leather-tipped pinata,
Thorn and KAty drink the milk tinted Amerasian Green
"StepAhead Advanced Branch Prediction - Looks ahead and gathers the data needed to optimally run applications"
Finally! A WinChip that doesn't insist on doing things the old-fashioned way.
Three years go when VIA merged the Cyrix product name with the Winchip line, they touted the WinChip's lack of Out-Of-Order-Execution and use of Static Branch Prediciton as "features".
This was puported to save power and make the die smaller. Funny to see them do a complete 360 only 3 years later, after their castrated chip has failed to attract a single Tier 1 vendor.
The Cyrix MII sold better than the WinChip / VIA C3; at least Compaq and Emachines were selling systems based on it back in the day. It sold where the WinChip couldn't, because it actually delivered on being both reasonably powerful and dirt-cheap. The WinChip could claim to be dirt-cheap, but reasonably powerful...welll...
So, after so long a wait, do we finally have a winner? A low power chip that can actually play a Divx movie? Perhaps they could get rid of that hardware DVD decoder too, a feature other systems havn't needed since the Celeron 400 / K6-2 450.
In the US we have nationwide companies that have to deal with state-level taxes.
How can you advertise a price with sales tax ( your VAT ) to the whole nation, when the sales tax varies in all 50 states plus The District of Columbia? There are some states that don't even have a sales tax ( like Delaware ).
That's too damn expensive to create 50 different versions of your commercial, your campaign signs, etc. And honestly, you need NUMBERS to hook consumers, so you just can't say "it's on sale at a very low price!"
That would be my biggest question, since the digital format is an order of magnitude easier to seamlessly edit than analog media.
"This is not the way it's supposed to be."
Actually, it is the way it's supposed to be.
You are not a user. You are a superuser. Do not pretend to be a user.
Repeat after me:
"I read Slashdot. I am %99.997 likely not to be a user"
"I read Slashdot. I am %99.997 likely not to be a user"
Users want something that works as well as a television, but you can add stuff to it seamlessly. It doesnt work like that in the real world.
That said, most users buy fully preinstalled and preconfigured PCs. They will also tend to buy software packages and even upgrades and accessories direct from the OEM to avoid the hassle self-install.
They like the idea of a recovery disc over swimming through patches or taking it to a technician because, even though its dead-simple and quite drastic, AT LEAST it leaves the user in charge.
If YOU fuck up YOUR system, you know how to roll back, re-ghost from an image, rebuild your kernel or some other ghastly arrchaic thing that requires the command prompt.
Users are content with the fact that they can pop a recovery CD in and get XP back in mint condition, no matter how much they mucked the system up. After they get bitten once, they'll realize why every brand-name PC comes with a CD-burner these days, and create monthly backups.
I know it's not how superusers like to live. But for the user, it is the ONLY way to come to terms with such an endlessly flexible system.
Agreed. Culling / hidden surface removal is based on the camera's current POV. That said, if the camera angle changes, the game engine or the video card's own culling engine should supply the card with new data based on the new camera POV.
What this test attempts to show is that Nvidia's card selectively clips based on a SINGLE, DEFINED POV.
THIS IS NOT A BUG. Your camera changes, your visible surfaces should change. If it doesnt, this is a sound indicator that you are anticipating the clipping plane.
What astounds me is that people like Kyle Bennett & Co., who have no concept of how 3D rendeing works, would pass this off so readily as a retaliatory strike.
The hack in question was with 3D Winbench. ATI released a "Turbo" driver that promised a %40 increase in performance.
Tom's take on the issue
It delivered. With 3D Winbench. All other benchmarks were the same or worse, unfortunately.
But please note that ATI was hardly the only culprit even inj that particular lineup. Witness the i740 having the ability to perform as well as a Voodoo 2 in Winbench 3D, yet perform so poorly even in DirectX 5 single-textured games like Incoming and Forsaken.
Fact is people have been and will continue to fudge benchmark results.
Bond is replaceable because Bond is not the man. Bond is the style. We see the face all the time, and yet all we remember are the well-tailored grey suits, sporty cars and Walther PPK. All you need is a suave man to wear that suit, drive that car and fire that weapon.
Batman is not replaceable because Batman ( as portrayed in the 80s/90s ) is the man behind the mask. This is why it was so important to have someone who could actually act, and why people really missed Michael Keaton in III and IV. He was fairly good at the role, and people became attached to his personal emotional stigma.
You'll find the same thing has happened with Spiderman. The geek-out-of-water persona really gave Peter Parker as a person a lot more depth than people were expecting. But that depth is forever attached to Tobey, it will be lost if you switch actors.
We don't always do presidents.
Hamilton adorns the $10 bill. Was he president? Nope.
Just the first Secretary of the Treasury under the new United States Government.
"Good vs. Evil is an element of plot, as it is simply a classification of conflict. I can't believe they even separated this out."
Depends entirely on the movie. There are lots of movies where the conflict is not cut-and-dried, and often gets tangled up in itself.
A small part of the population actually enjoys mind games like this, but most want a simple thing
Green Goblin bad, Spider Man good.
Mordor bad, rest of Middle-Earth good.
Magneto bad, Xavier good.
Senator Palpatine bad, Yoda good.
See, without simple conflits like these that are obvious to all early on in the film, the movie will tend to meander and lose the audience.
Books can get away with this, and are usually better without it, because they don't have such stringent time requirements. But screenplays need gripping conflicts, all though the movie.
The processor architectures themselves aren't 5 orders of magnitude different.
IPC of the 8088: ~1/12 ( somewhere around 300-400k IPS for the 4.7MHz version )
Typically agreed upon IPC for the Pentium IV: 6
Today's architectures, despite pipelining, multiple ALUs, fast caching and all the other tricks, are not even 100 times faster than their origins. For reference, we didn't even top 1.0 IPC until the 486.
It's the combination of speed-tuned architectures plus the small processes that create todays super fast processors. You could not easily clock out an 8088 at multiple GHz, and probably couldn't even enter the hundreds of MHz range without some heavy modification.
Every aspect of life is childish. We just pretend that things have changed by keeping things inside.
When you were a kid, you hung out with the people you cared about, you talked shit about the people the rest of your group hated, and you sat down and watched mindless TV on saturday mornings.
Now that you're grown up, you come home every night and hang out wit the people you care about, you talk shit about that guy in the office that nobody else likes, and you turn on the tube and watch mindless sitcoms.
Don't think you're "grown up" just because you get bills every moth and file your own 1040. Any robot can write a check, that's not what determines your self. Your self has not changed.
The only thing adults do that innocent kids don't is lie to themselves.
So, quit lying to yourself and being embarrassed. Sit down with your kids and share the moment.
Let me tell you a very important thing about the world.
There are two pure extremes out there: the Pacifist, and the Belligerent. Neither one is right, because neither one promotes survival of the species.
Before you understand what I'm trying to say, you have to understand that the two words have been corrupted by popular culture.
PACIFISTS NEVER FIGHT. If you would fight to defend your home and your belongings, actively protect your family and friends, save your daughter from a rapist, you are not a Pacifist. A Pacifist lacks any trace of humanity because he or she would never intervene violence with violence for another human being's sake.
But then again, if you are willing to make calculated war with another country, you aren't a true Belligerent. There are times when fighting now is better than fighting later, or vice-versa, and this is a concept neither a true Belligerent not true Pacifist can understand. Even Hitler, crazy as he was, led his expansion in an cool, calculated manner.
If you concede the fact that the real world is neither of these two extremes, then you also must concede that, as people set on survival, we can never fully lower our gaurd. We lower it as much as we can for the sake of everyone's sanity, but it can never be removed.
When you bitch about budgets the size of Texas, I really wonder if you've lost sight of the human factor and slipped into full pacifism. You forget that an effective army, whether it's used for defense or offense, is a necessity, and that human lives are above-all most important.
Perhaps you'd like to step back to the Vietnam era? Our completely non-stealth B-52s and F4 Phantoms were getting swatted down like flies by Soviet SAM sites. Our platoons went in to die by the thousands just to hit critical enemy installations.
Yet, you're getting upset that we're now replacing a portion of that fleet of B-52s with something that has a radar cross-section ten-thousand times smaller than a B-52? A bomber built to survive, so we have less PEOPLE as well as bombers to replace?
You're getting upset over a cruise missle that saves hundreds, possibly thousands of soldiers' lives by hitting key enemy targets, especially the well-defended ones?
War exists. Take this as truth, for all eternity. Don't get caught up in the numbers, just worry about the people.
handwriting recognition is predictive (ie: it differentiates between a captial I, lowercase L, and numerial 1 by the characters that came before or after). In random sequences (read: good passwords), this fails miserably.
What did you expect? This is the same thing the human brain does to an extent, that is why can look at the following:
Oklahoma City
Okahoma Ciyy
Your mind makes out the difference, and knows the intent. You probably know Oklahoma City exists. Your mind spells out the first word phonetically, even with the missing letter it still sounds like "Oak ah home ah", so you make the connection. Plus, your mind immediately looks for other options for the second word's prefix, like 'Cit', 'Cin', or 'Cig', because it is very unlikely to be 'Ciy'.
Same thing happens if you are presented with a messy writing style, your brain uses the associated content and fleshes out any words, syllables or letters you cannot read.
If the human brain depends on phonetics, sentence structure AND cultural literacy to fill in the blanks, how the hell do you expect the mind, let alone a computer, to deal with non-phonetic, non-structured entries?
What you need there is a simpler password system, where you enter the letters not as flowing speech, but one letter at a time like graffiti. Still, it will never be easy...without the tactile feedback of pressing a key, you can never know what you really input.
Oh, but that's my whole point. TODAY's privatization movement is almost entirely greed-driven, with more and more push by the open market for governments to butt out every day.
Unless Capitalism itself comes tumbling down, you're not likely to see anything remotely representing the gargantuan efforts of old.
Ma Bell, NASA, ARPA, they're all dying out. Replaced by the new free market, which can do EVERYTHING faster, better cheaper. AND WILL HARDLY EVER SPEND MONEY ON PROFITLESS VENTURES.
Satellites can make money...if they don't try to do things any differently. The fact that you single out Iridium only proves my point: this was the BIGGEST, and the LAST attempt to seriously change how we use Low Earth Orbit connunications in the last decade. No money, no sale.
GPS...is over 2 decades old, a last remnant from the same space heyday that hatched the Space Shuttle.
Development contnues on building better rockets...so long as they're specifically designed for launching satellites at even lower cost.
Where's the innovation?
Where's the expedition to Mars? The base on the moon? Just to say "HEY, -WE- DID IT!". It's just possible we could open the doors for huge profits in the process.
You're not going to see any of that from today's space companies, because it's an unheard of risk. Why should software companies even bother with pushing the bounds of software if there's no money in it? No patents whatsoever means no protections, no possible chance to recoup your investment.
If Christopher Colombus had asked Microsoft to support him in getting to the New World, they would have made him jump through thousands of hoops and upper management to get approval, feasability studies, etc. And after all the effort of finding the new world, putting in insane efforts, they would fire him because his Q1 profits were below target. JESUS CHRIST, the world is RUN by beancounters folks, not a dreamer among them.
And don't even talk about intangible benefits, this means nothing to corporations. A corporation wouldn't care that Spain gained tons of notoriety worldwide by developing and sapping the New World. In the long term, the Spanish lost their empire and now play second-fiddle to the rest of the developed world. THAT is all that ANY beancounter corporation cares about.
So, I suppose that makes all open-source software developers socialist? NO.
It means all open-source developers don't really know what they want. They want all the benefits of a govenrment-sactioned, tax-driven monopolist melting pot without any of the restrictions.
Make up your minds folks. You want real innovation, take a look back and SEE what has truely driven innovation.
Not Open Source.
Open-Endedness.