Until you can seperate the two, you're stuck with patents. Perhaps you can wrangle with the balance, but you cannot rid yourself of patents.
Without patents, innovation will stagnate until it loses it's critical mass, and then it will fail altogether.
People aren't magically born wanting to advance the human race. They latch on to the self-fueled excitement of the innovation machine as they grow. Somebody figures out how to make a super processor, it's pasted all over the news, discussed in classrooms. Somebody finds a cure for some disease, it's discussed on every corner of the earth for months and referenced for years as "the greatest scientific discovery this decade".
People feed on the innovation hype, it's really the only reason anyone cares to innovate. It spurs people to ask why, and then, ask why not?
But how many people do you think would go on working on this innovation if the monetary backing to fulfil their dreams isn't there? Not many people are willing to go into debt for free software. So you end up with a significantly smaller group of people dedicating even less time from their lives.
This is where the problem comes in. This cut-down group of people is not enough critical mass to maintain the hype required to drive innovation. The advancements come more slowly, and the excitement and magnetism of the software career drains away.
Look at the Space Program. How many of you wanted to be an Astronaut when you were kids? Probably every one of you, since we had just done cool things like going to the moon and launching the Space Shuttle. We were going to build that Space Station International and beat the Russians! You were not born wanting to be an Astronaut, but it was ingrained on you because it was HOT and continually advancing.
How many kids today want to be an Astronaut? The Space Shuttle is boring, reduced to a few missions a year as space janitors. The International Space Station is worthless, and took forever to build due to red tape. NASA's funding seems to get smaller and smaller every year. All we have now are occasional blips on the radar like the Pathfinder and the still unclaimed X-Prize; this is what we are left with.
What happened? The Space Shuttle proved that we cannot gain anything on the cost of unmanned rockets for satellites. The Apollo missions proved we have nothing to gain from colonizing and mining the moon.
THERE IS NO MONEY IN SPACE. INNOVATION STAGNATED.
Do you expect anything less when there's no money to be made in software? Find a better solution, or find a new planet to live on.
"Yes, things will come into balance eventually, but that will take decades."
Take a look at NAFTA. In the early 90s, companies soared into Mexico and set up shop. They made everything, clothing, cars, etc. But then the quality of life began to increase, educational levels rose, and thus demands for pay raises came about.
By 2000, all these companies were hightailing it for the next great low-cost destination, China. Believe it or not, MEXICO was now TOO DAMNED EXPENSIVE to operate out of. Left behind were these halfway-developed dying manufacturing towns with standards of living no better than when they started.
The same thing will happen to the US. The effects are not so immediate because the US has some wealth that is hard to get cheaper or from alternate sources ( agriculural capacity, mining ), and the US economy is diversified. But in the last two decades we have seen entire domestic industries die ( textiles, steel to name a couple ), and we have chosen to ignore this and try to replace it with the budding electronics / software industry.
But our electronics and software will soon be made everywhere but the US as well. The rising trade deficit for the last decade has been an alarming warning sign. It's not going to balance out until the US is milked completely of it's buying power, because the huge multinational companies aren't going to stop producing cheap goods unless nobody wants to buy them.
And then, when the US market dies, somebody else will become the buyer of these trinkets, and the system will continue. The US as a nation is of no importance, they're just the current best customer.
And when the Chinese workers start to rise above 3rd-world status, the companies will all move to the next big low-priced contender. Who knows, after they're done fully milking the US and dragging us down, we'll be RIPE for the manufacturing explotation! Imagine, the US supplying cheap goods to a China with cash to blow!
Welcome to global capitalisim, folks. Profits rule, not nations. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it, pawn. Now, SMILE, and stop looking so depressed:)
"yes, it's tax deductable. to what extent i don't know. can i give 100% of my money to god and then not pay taxes?"
Nope. Uncle Sam says "Show me tha money"
Limit for deductible charitable donations ( without looking too deeply into your recipients ): %20 of adjusted gross income.
For an accredited charity, the deduction is limited to 50% of adjusted gross income. Any higher and the deduction carries over, so you get hit for the other %50.
Basically, if you're already paying taxes ( you're not the poverty-line, EIC type ), then there's no way to avoid paying taxes through charitable deductions.
* Just want to make one note about something you passed over. Farming subsidies are one of the hardest concepts to understand in this country. I'm not going to say that they're good or bad, the key to them is they bring consistency. You know for a fact that you can walk into a supermarket and buy food for a reasonable price. It will be there every day, and the prices remain mostly flat, especially for staples like meat, milk, breads and vegetables. This is the kind of situation you need when you're trying to provide essential goods to 300 million people every day.
Can the free market do better? Hard to say, but the fact of the matter is I don't want to wake up one morning and find out the the North American food market has turned into some DRAM-like dumping ground. You know the story, the market gets oversupplied, and all but a select few get killed off in massive price-dumping wars.
International commodity markets can produce this sort of effect, where people ramp up as soon as prices start rising, and dump instead of holding stock when prices tank. Prices can fluctuate ludicrous amounts in a month. Add agriculture's suceptibility to the environment, and do you have to wonder anymore why these subsidies exist?
No thanks, I'll sit down and enjoy my price-controled food while I try to think of a better way.
Except you set it up once and can use it anywhere.
ANYWHERE.
Desktop, mobile, PDA, Cell phone, you name it. You're customized and ready to go, your OS and programs follow you ( The simpler ones run on the Xscale processor, the wireless link is just for shared data and I0 / screen updates, the more complex platforms get streamed boot data then program data, like your desktop )
We've been bitching at Intel for years for not making things portable enough, instead concentrating on bigger, hotter power hungry desktop chips.
Now Intel looks to be making a move to make everyone's standard data server run on a capable but not overkill Xscale.
Sure, there are some specialized things it can't process. Want to play a game? Mosey over to the desktop, your Xscale will stream the game files over in a few seconds, and while you play, fully configured with your key. Want to crunch a new movie into Divx or your favorite video codec? Your desktop will encode it and download it to the server in real time. Your desktop probably won't even have a hard disk, everything including the OS should be streamed from your handheld server.
* The key point here is this can be used as a seamless virtual session device ( ala Citrix ) plus fileserver plus desktop companion. Remote GUI sessions have always had problems catching on because the software is expensive and they require solid bandwidth. This has neither problem, and does more, so it's not dedicated hardware you're plunking down for. The battery life could be better, true, but for first generation >4 hours is impressive.
"There's more to the epia-systems than the low-power CPU. Most notable is the ITX form factor"
So?
ITX is amall, but its only a few centimeters to a side smaller than MicroATX. Hardly enough to get upset over, either one could fit into a low-profile hifi style case.
Face it, VIA is simply forced to create a non-existent market for their processors, because they stupidly bought the two worst processors on the market, and even had to shelve the Cyrix line due to performance scaling issues.
Their earliest MicroATX boards were Socket 370, and purposefully didn't have Tualatin support at a time when Tualiatins were still popular, all so they could get some press on the otherwise unimpressive Ezra core C3.
Their biggest sellers today? Pentium 4 MicroATX boards, which cannot possibly accept their crappy C3.
So now, once again, VIA is out to sell us the very same chipset as the older MicroATX DDR266 Socket 370 boards with the same crappy chip, only in a smaller format with no upgradability. Gotta sell those underclocked Winchips...errr, I mean, EPIAs.
Once again, VIA is trying to convince us that we all need to replace our DVD players with Media PCs that can't quite play DVDs, that we all need to replace our Tivos with Media PCs that can't quite do real-time TV encoding.
Convergence is the wave of the future. RIGHT NOW, it doesn't work without giving something up. I'll keep my DVD deck, thank you.
Want CPU power at low wattage? Get creative folks
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Remember this little thing called the Tualatin? The 800MHz version topped out at 12w, and could run circles around even a 1GHz C3, not to mention the sickly EPIA.
Go and buy a Tualatin Celeron ( they're up in the 1.3 or 1.4 GHz range, be sure you get one with 133MHz bus ) and clock it down to 66MHz bus. You'll stil have a machine capable of decoding DVD in software ( a Celeron 400 could do this without breaking a sweat ), and it can be fanless.
What is the world coming to that some company can pass off a crappy CPU with no OOOE and a half-speed FPU as "efficient"? Christ, if you pumped up the speed of the C3 such that the power it used was the same as a Pentium IV, it would still get it's ass handed to it performancewise.
IT IS JUST A WINCHIP FOLKS. Don't be fooled by the smoke and mirrors.
Right. The key to understanding the economics of gasoline is not depending on population density alone.
Traffic Density should be considered, with two aspects:
1. How many cars go by a location each day?
2. How many cars consider this a starting point / destination?
People are more likely to fuel up on the way, and are even more likely to fuel up closer to the start or end of their trip rather than the middle.
The problem with questions like this is, in order to answer them with anything but boring math, they require a decent amount of insight into culture and common practices. What exactly does this have to do with your job, unless you are selling something?
Yup, I have the same thing going on, I hunt and peck with my two index fingers, and hit the shift keys with the ring fingers, occasionally hit spacebar with my thumb.
You should hear it, compared to the other touch-typists, I make a racket even on these quiet membrane keyboards. But what amazes people even more than the loud typing is the rate at which I can pump the words out. 50-60 WPM is none too shabby.
I've tried to teach myself touch typing, but I've come to realize that it would be bad for me on two levels:
1. My hands and arms would move much less, making them more vulnerable to RSI.
2. My eyes would get tired from staring at the screen. I'm not your typical Hunt 'n Peck ( once my hands get centered, I can type without hunting ), but my eyes do regular fast checks on the keyboard to verify that my hands are lined up ( much like an experienced driver knows generally how fast they're going, but will check the speedometer occasionally to calibrate ).
People who touch-type do nothing but stare at the screen for hours on-end. I don't know how your eyes stand the strain.
I think the point these folks are attempting to make is:
We've been doing the desktop dance for the last few years, IPCs fluctuating, but performance and power usage always rising.
Yet, a decade ago, Intel was strictly against this kind of practice. Intel chips for years were packaged in a big ceramic heat spreader, and could be run without a sink. There were no multipliers, memory ran at processor click speed, so there was little performance skew. Performance increased linearly with CPU clock speed. Even with the 486, Intel never released a chip with more than 2x multiplier, and purposefully never released a chip that required an active fan cooling the heatsink. It was only after the Pentium was released that they gave in to competition and pushed clock speeds, power disappation and multipliers.
What ever happened to the concept of the efficient computer? Sure, we've tackled the multiplier issues using multiple layers of efficient cache, paired with features like prefetch.
But what about power consumption?
RIGHT THIS MOMENT, we have laptop computers using the Centrino chip, AND THEY SPANK the P4 clock-for-clock.
RIGHT THIS MOMENT, we have laptops ion development using the extremely low power ATI Mobile DirectX 9 solution.
Both these chipsets are designed to maximize performance for power, and have the capability to shut down unused parts of the chip for maximum power efficiency.
AND NEITHER OF THEM ARE AVAILABLE FOR DESKTOP. NOR will they ever be. Nobody cares that desktop power consumption has quadrupled since the 486, and the processor's power consumption alone has increased by almost 10x.
We don't have to have windtunnel systems. We don't have to settle for VIA Epia boards with the horsepower of a 386. The sad fact is the perfect balance already exists, but you'll never see it except in an overpriced notebook.
Hey, what's wrong with a geek getting to do everything that geeks never get to do?
You know like,
1. have a hottie for a wife. Bang hottie nightly.
2. With only a handful of friends, write a piece of software that will revolutionize communications. And of course assume that somebody else will gladly provide the satellites to make it all work.
These devices are going to be more than a few meters away from the transmitter. They will need a very powerful signal if you use the traditional RF tag setup, since the brodcast is omni-directional ( multiple sensor locations ).
Perhaps you could do it with a tight-beam antenna. Have it cycle through all sensors, angling the antenna toward it. But thats a helluva complex setup for something as simple as monitoring.
If the sensors can power themselves, you don't even have to transmit to them. Just have them dumbfire information to the central receiver. Much less power consumed, much simpler receiver. Worred about collisions caused by dumb transmitters timing it wrong? Use CDMA or similar concepts to allow multiple simultaneous transmissions.
"The goal of the redistribution of wealth is not to have total equality, as you seem to think, but to give everyone in a country a decent living. Working toward that goal will never be unproductive."
It's always unproductive. Every change you make to "the system" results in a return to balance.
The Free Market system dictates that the market must react to supply and demand.
For example, what do you think was the reaction to the huge increase in college graduates starting in the 50/60s? Better salaries for everyone? Hell no, it just means that more jobs now required a college education.
The market didn't spread the wealth, employers simply felt justified to expect their employees to be better trained before being hired than they were in the past.
The balance of education shifted, so the balance of job requirements shifted. Businesses become more productive due to less training overhead, but the workers see almost nothing. Nothing except the "college degree required" for anything having to to with technical concepts or management.
You think it's amazing that you can make 50k+ a year with that fancy degree of yours? Bah, what the hell can you buy with it? Ask your grandfather how he paid a mortgage and supported an entire household with his high school degree on a single income in the 1950s without having to live in a shack. NOW THAT's BUYING POWER.
As said above, the income equality has never been better than 1950, and that was only because of the economic overdrive impetus we got from our incredibly fast mobilization into WWII, and the rash of families built in its wake. Income gaps grew and money inflated, the rest is history.
"The biggest problem with OpenGL isn't that it isn't suitable for 2D - it works very well for 2D - but that it isn't specified to a pixel level and that it doesn't have decent font rendering support."
But you see, it's not really a problem...
glOrtho2D mode means you're basically manipulating at the pixel level, so draw your layout verticies and render. If you want a pretty picture, there's always texture mapping.
Glut mouse events return pixels, so you're basically working pixels to pixels.
Considering that even the crummy integrated graphics on today's motherboards are twice as fast a TNT2s, I don't really think rendering speed will be a problem.
Agreed on the drop-in multiplayer, every game released since has built on it.
I have never liked RTS online because of all the logistics involved. Unless you and all the players know what you're doing, it can take 20 minutes to get a game started. Then, if anyone drops, it feels like you just wasted your time.
Also, a note on hardware acceleration:
VQuake was the world's first 3D-accelerated version of Quake. Carmack decided to work with Rendition because, at the time, their hardware was much more affordable than 3DFX and better performing than PowerVR.
VQuake had all the features of GLQuake, plus hardware edge anti-aliasing. The port was a pain in the ass, and soured Carmack to hardware-specific game ports. So, when he wrote an OpenGL implementation for his Intergraph workstation, the light bulb clicked on.
I just wish the industry could have all agreed on a way to implement hardware edge anti-aliasing ( aside from Matrox's Stencil Buffer hack ), FSAA looks so blurry. It's sad that cards today can't even do a technique my crappy Rendition card could do with ease in native ports.
FOR YEARS, not a single solitary fax machine I encountered in the workplace had clearly labeled on it WHETHER TO PUT THE PAPER IN TEXT-SIDE UP OR DOWN. Most of us only use these machines infrequently, so it's easy to forget.
Most of said fax machines I've encountered had signs added by users as to which of the two to use. The ones that didn't were a trip, because you didn't get ANY scan feedback until you got the TX confirmation page. It wasn't your fault that you just fired off 10 pages of blank sheets, but you felt stupid just the same.
It is amazing the assumptions designers will make.
Anyway, these days fax makers clearly mark such matters.
As for copiers, they're even smarter. Auto-feed, copy? No problem, load the auto-feed, press copy.
Not sure if you should position the paper horizontally or vertically on the scanner glass? Again, no problem: most modern copiers scan the page size and position automatically. Just press the copy button.
Agreed. I don't understand why people get so giddy over VIA's line of minature boards with crappy processors.
The C3 is a WinChip.
That means it has:
- No Branch Prediction - No OOOE - 1/2 speed FPU
It's no wonder these chips use 10w, they're so simple. A Pentium III 500 could run circles around them.
Just imagine how powerful and cool your system would be if you took an 800MHz Tualatin P3 designed for Blade servers, and dropped the bus speed from 133 down to 100. There you go, a powerful Pentium III 600 with 10w power usage.
In other words, there is nothing amazing about what VIA is doing. You could do the same ( with better results ) using an Intel processor, provided you want to go through the trouble of procuring the parts.
Fight Club's theater showing was crap because of poor marketing.
The movie was marketed as if it was a hyper-violent Lock-Stock type movie without the plot. It was played off as a buch of guys who started fights and beat people up. I remember seeing MULTIPLE previews on TV and in the theater, and ALL of them had this theme.
Fact is, that is only one small scene in the movie, and is insignificant to the storyline. Man, how easily you can ruin a perfect picture with crappy advertising. I almost refused to watch the DVD, I had decided it was going to be stupid, so I was glad friends insisted I sit down and watch it.
Agreed. The concept, when you actually think about it, is mindbendingly stupid.
Who cares if human beings are an efficient way to convert food ( simple hydrocarbons and protiens ) into energy, with a complex enzyme catalyst system for maximum efficiency.
Where the hell do you get food, with the sky scorched? Without the sun, the input energy supply dwindles to nothing. And without Photosynthesis to add to the energy supply, you're just living by Aerobic or Anerobic respiration until the supply runs dry.
Actually, you're forgetting some of the most important aspects that Windows 95 brought to the world.
Plug 'n Play - Nod to OS/2 for having the same feature, but Win95 is responsible for bringing it to the masses. There were, as expected, a few bugs, but in most cases the hardware was properly detected and configured without the user lifting a finger. Think of Win95 as the working, but basic PnP, whereas Windows 2k / XP with ACPI are the best it ever needs to be.
Built-in easy networking (IPX/TCP/Etc.) - Come on folks. Linux was a pain in the ass for years to configure to talk to anything, unless you already knew how. In Windows, it was as simple as opening an applet, and selecting the protocol / service. Better still, most Dialup / Network adapters AUTOMATICALLY installed the protocols and services you needed, so no user interaction necessary.
No, it wasn't perfect. But time doesn't stand still, and in terms of features Win95 was an excellent starting point for things to come. Both features mentioned above ( simple networking, PnP ) have been nearly perfected in 2k/XP.
Except, after some quick research, I don't think this is really possible unless you can significantly distance yourself from FASA and ALL the previous work under the Battletech name.
Seems I was wrong when I said Earthseige was made without a license. AFAIK, Dynamix bid the rights from FASA to make the original Mechwarrior, but there was a split between Dynamix and Sierra. This resulted in Dynamix releasing Earthseige, and Sierra releasing Mechwarrior II: The Clans. AFAIK, because of the split, they were both licensed to do so.
Activision's Heavy Gear series was also released with FASA's license, despite the fact that the gameplay was drastically different.
Can anyone name a game that was comprised almost entirely of Mech-style combat that wasn't released under the Battletech license?
Don't get me wrong, I love the Battletech universe, even have a 3rd Edition set in my closet. But with so much "prior art" from so many releases, it would be hard not to step on SOMEBODY's toes.
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Greed drives innovation.
Until you can seperate the two, you're stuck with patents. Perhaps you can wrangle with the balance, but you cannot rid yourself of patents.
Without patents, innovation will stagnate until it loses it's critical mass, and then it will fail altogether.
People aren't magically born wanting to advance the human race. They latch on to the self-fueled excitement of the innovation machine as they grow. Somebody figures out how to make a super processor, it's pasted all over the news, discussed in classrooms. Somebody finds a cure for some disease, it's discussed on every corner of the earth for months and referenced for years as "the greatest scientific discovery this decade".
People feed on the innovation hype, it's really the only reason anyone cares to innovate. It spurs people to ask why, and then, ask why not?
But how many people do you think would go on working on this innovation if the monetary backing to fulfil their dreams isn't there? Not many people are willing to go into debt for free software. So you end up with a significantly smaller group of people dedicating even less time from their lives.
This is where the problem comes in. This cut-down group of people is not enough critical mass to maintain the hype required to drive innovation. The advancements come more slowly, and the excitement and magnetism of the software career drains away.
Look at the Space Program. How many of you wanted to be an Astronaut when you were kids? Probably every one of you, since we had just done cool things like going to the moon and launching the Space Shuttle. We were going to build that Space Station International and beat the Russians! You were not born wanting to be an Astronaut, but it was ingrained on you because it was HOT and continually advancing.
How many kids today want to be an Astronaut? The Space Shuttle is boring, reduced to a few missions a year as space janitors. The International Space Station is worthless, and took forever to build due to red tape. NASA's funding seems to get smaller and smaller every year. All we have now are occasional blips on the radar like the Pathfinder and the still unclaimed X-Prize; this is what we are left with.
What happened? The Space Shuttle proved that we cannot gain anything on the cost of unmanned rockets for satellites. The Apollo missions proved we have nothing to gain from colonizing and mining the moon.
THERE IS NO MONEY IN SPACE. INNOVATION STAGNATED.
Do you expect anything less when there's no money to be made in software? Find a better solution, or find a new planet to live on.
"Yes, things will come into balance eventually, but that will take decades."
:)
Take a look at NAFTA. In the early 90s, companies soared into Mexico and set up shop. They made everything, clothing, cars, etc. But then the quality of life began to increase, educational levels rose, and thus demands for pay raises came about.
By 2000, all these companies were hightailing it for the next great low-cost destination, China. Believe it or not, MEXICO was now TOO DAMNED EXPENSIVE to operate out of. Left behind were these halfway-developed dying manufacturing towns with standards of living no better than when they started.
The same thing will happen to the US. The effects are not so immediate because the US has some wealth that is hard to get cheaper or from alternate sources ( agriculural capacity, mining ), and the US economy is diversified. But in the last two decades we have seen entire domestic industries die ( textiles, steel to name a couple ), and we have chosen to ignore this and try to replace it with the budding electronics / software industry.
But our electronics and software will soon be made everywhere but the US as well. The rising trade deficit for the last decade has been an alarming warning sign. It's not going to balance out until the US is milked completely of it's buying power, because the huge multinational companies aren't going to stop producing cheap goods unless nobody wants to buy them.
And then, when the US market dies, somebody else will become the buyer of these trinkets, and the system will continue. The US as a nation is of no importance, they're just the current best customer.
And when the Chinese workers start to rise above 3rd-world status, the companies will all move to the next big low-priced contender. Who knows, after they're done fully milking the US and dragging us down, we'll be RIPE for the manufacturing explotation! Imagine, the US supplying cheap goods to a China with cash to blow!
Welcome to global capitalisim, folks. Profits rule, not nations. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it, pawn. Now, SMILE, and stop looking so depressed
"yes, it's tax deductable. to what extent i don't know. can i give 100% of my money to god and then not pay taxes?"
Nope. Uncle Sam says "Show me tha money"
Limit for deductible charitable donations ( without looking too deeply into your recipients ): %20 of adjusted gross income.
For an accredited charity, the deduction is limited to 50% of adjusted gross income. Any higher and the deduction carries over, so you get hit for the other %50.
Basically, if you're already paying taxes ( you're not the poverty-line, EIC type ), then there's no way to avoid paying taxes through charitable deductions.
* Just want to make one note about something you passed over. Farming subsidies are one of the hardest concepts to understand in this country. I'm not going to say that they're good or bad, the key to them is they bring consistency. You know for a fact that you can walk into a supermarket and buy food for a reasonable price. It will be there every day, and the prices remain mostly flat, especially for staples like meat, milk, breads and vegetables. This is the kind of situation you need when you're trying to provide essential goods to 300 million people every day.
Can the free market do better? Hard to say, but the fact of the matter is I don't want to wake up one morning and find out the the North American food market has turned into some DRAM-like dumping ground. You know the story, the market gets oversupplied, and all but a select few get killed off in massive price-dumping wars.
International commodity markets can produce this sort of effect, where people ramp up as soon as prices start rising, and dump instead of holding stock when prices tank. Prices can fluctuate ludicrous amounts in a month. Add agriculture's suceptibility to the environment, and do you have to wonder anymore why these subsidies exist?
No thanks, I'll sit down and enjoy my price-controled food while I try to think of a better way.
Except you set it up once and can use it anywhere.
ANYWHERE.
Desktop, mobile, PDA, Cell phone, you name it. You're customized and ready to go, your OS and programs follow you ( The simpler ones run on the Xscale processor, the wireless link is just for shared data and I0 / screen updates, the more complex platforms get streamed boot data then program data, like your desktop )
We've been bitching at Intel for years for not making things portable enough, instead concentrating on bigger, hotter power hungry desktop chips.
Now Intel looks to be making a move to make everyone's standard data server run on a capable but not overkill Xscale.
Sure, there are some specialized things it can't process. Want to play a game? Mosey over to the desktop, your Xscale will stream the game files over in a few seconds, and while you play, fully configured with your key. Want to crunch a new movie into Divx or your favorite video codec? Your desktop will encode it and download it to the server in real time. Your desktop probably won't even have a hard disk, everything including the OS should be streamed from your handheld server.
* The key point here is this can be used as a seamless virtual session device ( ala Citrix ) plus fileserver plus desktop companion. Remote GUI sessions have always had problems catching on because the software is expensive and they require solid bandwidth. This has neither problem, and does more, so it's not dedicated hardware you're plunking down for. The battery life could be better, true, but for first generation >4 hours is impressive.
"There's more to the epia-systems than the low-power CPU. Most notable is the ITX form factor"
So?
ITX is amall, but its only a few centimeters to a side smaller than MicroATX. Hardly enough to get upset over, either one could fit into a low-profile hifi style case.
Face it, VIA is simply forced to create a non-existent market for their processors, because they stupidly bought the two worst processors on the market, and even had to shelve the Cyrix line due to performance scaling issues.
Their earliest MicroATX boards were Socket 370, and purposefully didn't have Tualatin support at a time when Tualiatins were still popular, all so they could get some press on the otherwise unimpressive Ezra core C3.
Their biggest sellers today? Pentium 4 MicroATX boards, which cannot possibly accept their crappy C3.
So now, once again, VIA is out to sell us the very same chipset as the older MicroATX DDR266 Socket 370 boards with the same crappy chip, only in a smaller format with no upgradability. Gotta sell those underclocked Winchips...errr, I mean, EPIAs.
Once again, VIA is trying to convince us that we all need to replace our DVD players with Media PCs that can't quite play DVDs, that we all need to replace our Tivos with Media PCs that can't quite do real-time TV encoding.
Convergence is the wave of the future. RIGHT NOW, it doesn't work without giving something up. I'll keep my DVD deck, thank you.
Remember this little thing called the Tualatin? The 800MHz version topped out at 12w, and could run circles around even a 1GHz C3, not to mention the sickly EPIA.
Go and buy a Tualatin Celeron ( they're up in the 1.3 or 1.4 GHz range, be sure you get one with 133MHz bus ) and clock it down to 66MHz bus. You'll stil have a machine capable of decoding DVD in software ( a Celeron 400 could do this without breaking a sweat ), and it can be fanless.
What is the world coming to that some company can pass off a crappy CPU with no OOOE and a half-speed FPU as "efficient"? Christ, if you pumped up the speed of the C3 such that the power it used was the same as a Pentium IV, it would still get it's ass handed to it performancewise.
IT IS JUST A WINCHIP FOLKS. Don't be fooled by the smoke and mirrors.
Right. The key to understanding the economics of gasoline is not depending on population density alone.
Traffic Density should be considered, with two aspects:
1. How many cars go by a location each day?
2. How many cars consider this a starting point / destination?
People are more likely to fuel up on the way, and are even more likely to fuel up closer to the start or end of their trip rather than the middle.
The problem with questions like this is, in order to answer them with anything but boring math, they require a decent amount of insight into culture and common practices. What exactly does this have to do with your job, unless you are selling something?
Yup, I have the same thing going on, I hunt and peck with my two index fingers, and hit the shift keys with the ring fingers, occasionally hit spacebar with my thumb.
You should hear it, compared to the other touch-typists, I make a racket even on these quiet membrane keyboards. But what amazes people even more than the loud typing is the rate at which I can pump the words out. 50-60 WPM is none too shabby.
I've tried to teach myself touch typing, but I've come to realize that it would be bad for me on two levels:
1. My hands and arms would move much less, making them more vulnerable to RSI.
2. My eyes would get tired from staring at the screen. I'm not your typical Hunt 'n Peck ( once my hands get centered, I can type without hunting ), but my eyes do regular fast checks on the keyboard to verify that my hands are lined up ( much like an experienced driver knows generally how fast they're going, but will check the speedometer occasionally to calibrate ).
People who touch-type do nothing but stare at the screen for hours on-end. I don't know how your eyes stand the strain.
The instructions SPECIFICALLY SAID......."DO NOT PLAY WITH HAPPY FUN BALL"!!!!!!!!!
Ahh, but the commercial states:
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
However, you can play with it all you like! Only 14.95!
I think the point these folks are attempting to make is:
We've been doing the desktop dance for the last few years, IPCs fluctuating, but performance and power usage always rising.
Yet, a decade ago, Intel was strictly against this kind of practice. Intel chips for years were packaged in a big ceramic heat spreader, and could be run without a sink. There were no multipliers, memory ran at processor click speed, so there was little performance skew. Performance increased linearly with CPU clock speed. Even with the 486, Intel never released a chip with more than 2x multiplier, and purposefully never released a chip that required an active fan cooling the heatsink. It was only after the Pentium was released that they gave in to competition and pushed clock speeds, power disappation and multipliers.
What ever happened to the concept of the efficient computer? Sure, we've tackled the multiplier issues using multiple layers of efficient cache, paired with features like prefetch.
But what about power consumption?
RIGHT THIS MOMENT, we have laptop computers using the Centrino chip, AND THEY SPANK the P4 clock-for-clock.
RIGHT THIS MOMENT, we have laptops ion development using the extremely low power ATI Mobile DirectX 9 solution.
Both these chipsets are designed to maximize performance for power, and have the capability to shut down unused parts of the chip for maximum power efficiency.
AND NEITHER OF THEM ARE AVAILABLE FOR DESKTOP. NOR will they ever be. Nobody cares that desktop power consumption has quadrupled since the 486, and the processor's power consumption alone has increased by almost 10x.
We don't have to have windtunnel systems. We don't have to settle for VIA Epia boards with the horsepower of a 386. The sad fact is the perfect balance already exists, but you'll never see it except in an overpriced notebook.
Hey, what's wrong with a geek getting to do everything that geeks never get to do?
You know like,
1. have a hottie for a wife. Bang hottie nightly.
2. With only a handful of friends, write a piece of software that will revolutionize communications. And of course assume that somebody else will gladly provide the satellites to make it all work.
3. Smite Bill Gates in-person.
HEY, IT COULD HAPPEN!
inverse square law.
These devices are going to be more than a few meters away from the transmitter. They will need a very powerful signal if you use the traditional RF tag setup, since the brodcast is omni-directional ( multiple sensor locations ).
Perhaps you could do it with a tight-beam antenna. Have it cycle through all sensors, angling the antenna toward it. But thats a helluva complex setup for something as simple as monitoring.
If the sensors can power themselves, you don't even have to transmit to them. Just have them dumbfire information to the central receiver. Much less power consumed, much simpler receiver. Worred about collisions caused by dumb transmitters timing it wrong? Use CDMA or similar concepts to allow multiple simultaneous transmissions.
"The goal of the redistribution of wealth is not to have total equality, as you seem to think, but to give everyone in a country a decent living. Working toward that goal will never be unproductive."
It's always unproductive. Every change you make to "the system" results in a return to balance.
The Free Market system dictates that the market must react to supply and demand.
For example, what do you think was the reaction to the huge increase in college graduates starting in the 50/60s? Better salaries for everyone? Hell no, it just means that more jobs now required a college education.
The market didn't spread the wealth, employers simply felt justified to expect their employees to be better trained before being hired than they were in the past.
The balance of education shifted, so the balance of job requirements shifted. Businesses become more productive due to less training overhead, but the workers see almost nothing. Nothing except the "college degree required" for anything having to to with technical concepts or management.
You think it's amazing that you can make 50k+ a year with that fancy degree of yours? Bah, what the hell can you buy with it? Ask your grandfather how he paid a mortgage and supported an entire household with his high school degree on a single income in the 1950s without having to live in a shack. NOW THAT's BUYING POWER.
As said above, the income equality has never been better than 1950, and that was only because of the economic overdrive impetus we got from our incredibly fast mobilization into WWII, and the rash of families built in its wake. Income gaps grew and money inflated, the rest is history.
Hey, how do you use the three seashells?
"The biggest problem with OpenGL isn't that it isn't suitable for 2D - it works very well for 2D - but that it isn't specified to a pixel level and that it doesn't have decent font rendering support."
But you see, it's not really a problem...
glOrtho2D mode means you're basically manipulating at the pixel level, so draw your layout verticies and render. If you want a pretty picture, there's always texture mapping.
Glut mouse events return pixels, so you're basically working pixels to pixels.
Considering that even the crummy integrated graphics on today's motherboards are twice as fast a TNT2s, I don't really think rendering speed will be a problem.
You can't Patent it, but you can Trademark it.
:)
Just ask Michael Buffer. He gets paid every time any ring announcer opens a fight with "Ladies and gentlemen. Let's get ready to rumble!"
Honestly, trademarks are worse then patents, because they last longer
Agreed on the drop-in multiplayer, every game released since has built on it.
I have never liked RTS online because of all the logistics involved. Unless you and all the players know what you're doing, it can take 20 minutes to get a game started. Then, if anyone drops, it feels like you just wasted your time.
Also, a note on hardware acceleration:
VQuake was the world's first 3D-accelerated version of Quake. Carmack decided to work with Rendition because, at the time, their hardware was much more affordable than 3DFX and better performing than PowerVR.
VQuake had all the features of GLQuake, plus hardware edge anti-aliasing. The port was a pain in the ass, and soured Carmack to hardware-specific game ports. So, when he wrote an OpenGL implementation for his Intergraph workstation, the light bulb clicked on.
I just wish the industry could have all agreed on a way to implement hardware edge anti-aliasing ( aside from Matrox's Stencil Buffer hack ), FSAA looks so blurry. It's sad that cards today can't even do a technique my crappy Rendition card could do with ease in native ports.
I have no problem with copiers...
It's fax machines that faze me.
FOR YEARS, not a single solitary fax machine I encountered in the workplace had clearly labeled on it WHETHER TO PUT THE PAPER IN TEXT-SIDE UP OR DOWN. Most of us only use these machines infrequently, so it's easy to forget.
Most of said fax machines I've encountered had signs added by users as to which of the two to use. The ones that didn't were a trip, because you didn't get ANY scan feedback until you got the TX confirmation page. It wasn't your fault that you just fired off 10 pages of blank sheets, but you felt stupid just the same.
It is amazing the assumptions designers will make.
Anyway, these days fax makers clearly mark such matters.
As for copiers, they're even smarter. Auto-feed, copy? No problem, load the auto-feed, press copy.
Not sure if you should position the paper horizontally or vertically on the scanner glass? Again, no problem: most modern copiers scan the page size and position automatically. Just press the copy button.
What I'd really like the code to is the old 2D id, Apogee, and Epic games. Command Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit!
Star Control II for 3DO was made open-source by Toys For Bob. It has been ported to PC.
The game is nearly identical, save a simpler control system and some fancy real-time transitions.
The source to the PC version is owned by some other party, and will not be released in the forseeable future.
Or should we pay heed to Mr. Lucas, and make all the good lasers red, and the bad lasers green?
IM SO CONFUSED!!!!!!
Agreed. I don't understand why people get so giddy over VIA's line of minature boards with crappy processors.
The C3 is a WinChip.
That means it has:
- No Branch Prediction
- No OOOE
- 1/2 speed FPU
It's no wonder these chips use 10w, they're so simple. A Pentium III 500 could run circles around them.
Just imagine how powerful and cool your system would be if you took an 800MHz Tualatin P3 designed for Blade servers, and dropped the bus speed from 133 down to 100. There you go, a powerful Pentium III 600 with 10w power usage.
In other words, there is nothing amazing about what VIA is doing. You could do the same ( with better results ) using an Intel processor, provided you want to go through the trouble of procuring the parts.
Fight Club's theater showing was crap because of poor marketing.
The movie was marketed as if it was a hyper-violent Lock-Stock type movie without the plot. It was played off as a buch of guys who started fights and beat people up. I remember seeing MULTIPLE previews on TV and in the theater, and ALL of them had this theme.
Fact is, that is only one small scene in the movie, and is insignificant to the storyline. Man, how easily you can ruin a perfect picture with crappy advertising. I almost refused to watch the DVD, I had decided it was going to be stupid, so I was glad friends insisted I sit down and watch it.
Agreed. The concept, when you actually think about it, is mindbendingly stupid.
Who cares if human beings are an efficient way to convert food ( simple hydrocarbons and protiens ) into energy, with a complex enzyme catalyst system for maximum efficiency.
Where the hell do you get food, with the sky scorched? Without the sun, the input energy supply dwindles to nothing. And without Photosynthesis to add to the energy supply, you're just living by Aerobic or Anerobic respiration until the supply runs dry.
Actually, you're forgetting some of the most important aspects that Windows 95 brought to the world.
Plug 'n Play - Nod to OS/2 for having the same feature, but Win95 is responsible for bringing it to the masses. There were, as expected, a few bugs, but in most cases the hardware was properly detected and configured without the user lifting a finger. Think of Win95 as the working, but basic PnP, whereas Windows 2k / XP with ACPI are the best it ever needs to be.
Built-in easy networking (IPX/TCP/Etc.) -
Come on folks. Linux was a pain in the ass for years to configure to talk to anything, unless you already knew how. In Windows, it was as simple as opening an applet, and selecting the protocol / service. Better still, most Dialup / Network adapters AUTOMATICALLY installed the protocols and services you needed, so no user interaction necessary.
No, it wasn't perfect. But time doesn't stand still, and in terms of features Win95 was an excellent starting point for things to come. Both features mentioned above ( simple networking, PnP ) have been nearly perfected in 2k/XP.
Except, after some quick research, I don't think this is really possible unless you can significantly distance yourself from FASA and ALL the previous work under the Battletech name.
Seems I was wrong when I said Earthseige was made without a license. AFAIK, Dynamix bid the rights from FASA to make the original Mechwarrior, but there was a split between Dynamix and Sierra. This resulted in Dynamix releasing Earthseige, and Sierra releasing Mechwarrior II: The Clans. AFAIK, because of the split, they were both licensed to do so.
Activision's Heavy Gear series was also released with FASA's license, despite the fact that the gameplay was drastically different.
Can anyone name a game that was comprised almost entirely of Mech-style combat that wasn't released under the Battletech license?
Don't get me wrong, I love the Battletech universe, even have a 3rd Edition set in my closet. But with so much "prior art" from so many releases, it would be hard not to step on SOMEBODY's toes.