There's an apple.slashdot.org and not a lenovo.slashdot.org mainly because there isn't an Amiga laptop (or much of an Amiga anything anymore,) so people with that personality now have to buy Apple.
Eh? I used the Amiga for years, and now I'm using Windows. Not sure how operating system usage is tied to "personality"
Perhaps some Amiga users have moved onto OS X (modern Macs have just as much common with the Amiga as they do with classic Macs - all it needs is the Amiga sticker rather than a Mac sticker). But that doesn't really answer it - 10-20 years ago, the mainstream press still didn't seem to care much about the Amiga, but were again bending over backwards to promote Apple, so I think this is more of an Apple thing, than Amiga users supposedly moving to Apple products.
The gist of the second half of your post seems to be that the main problem with the Air is that it doesn't fix every single problem and complaint that people of today has with laptops. It doesn't have to. There is a market for different laptops with different tradeoffs.
But why then do we only hear about the Air? Loads of Slashdot articles, all the way up to mainstream news coverage like the BBC. Yet nothing on these other laptops - I didn't even know there were other thin ones until someone pointed them out to me.
Given the coverage it gets as if it's something new and revolutionary, I'm expecting it to fix pretty much near every single problem. If it's actually just yet another laptop, then I don't expect to keep hearing about it.
Does this mean that people making their emo blogs on livejournal or something are going to demand compensation for the traffic they generate?
Er, no. Just like the people posting on Slashdot from their mum's basement aren't going to demand compensation for the traffic they generate, either.
"Writers" can mean anything from someone who writes a script for the latest film, to someone writing about their day, or something on Slashdot - but if I see an article talking about the latest TV series being held up because of writers going on strike, it's pretty obvious from the context that the hold up isn't due to trolls on Slashdot...
Similarly with "Bloggers". The bloggers presumably aren't writing journals, just as not everyone on LiveJournal or Slashdot isn't talking about starting up a union.
How can you unionize a very loosely connected group of people?... Blogging is about freedom.
Perhaps in this loosely connected group, there are some who don't share this belief?
I found it odd when I heard there was a writers guild, that had now gone on strike seemingly bringing the nation's TV industry to a halt - it sounds as odd as having a "programmers guild" or a "geeks guild". If we went on strike, we could bring a nation to its knees;)
But given these things exist, I don't see a bloggers guild is any odder.
In the context of TFA, I think "column" is more appropriate. Blogs that appear on large websites, particularly news websites, are those that would usually be referred to as "columns" in newspapers or print in general, and those that write them "columnists".
"Blog" does have the advantage in that it is specific to the Internet - although it is also more general, referring also, as you say, to things like journals.
Unless someone is paying you to blog, blogging isn't a job.
Some of them do, and presumably he is in that article. But yes, the article is odd in that he seems to primarily be talking about people who don't get paid at all. The point of unions is to ensure rights for employees. There is some argument for capitalising on what you do - getting people to pay you - but that's not what I would call a union in the "worker's union" sense.
But then again, later on he does talk about primarily a union for people blogging for money, those that are "professional", so I think what he says isn't unreasonable.
Older PCs don't have a CD drive. Older TVs don't have a HDMI socket. Older Macs don't ship with a two-button mouse.
The difference is there weren't thousands of PC fanbois claiming that the lack of a CD drive meant they were somehow superior to computers with CD drives.
Funny how that when Macs do come with two-button mice, it's finally acknowledged as a useful thing.
And we can look forward to several Slashdot articles and mainstream news articles telling us of the unique and innovative iScrew...
(Why do we not hear about all the other light and thin laptops? I was misled to believe that the Air was something uniquely new, due to all the coverage it was getting.)
Yeah, but typical users want to play typical games, not ego shooters that make a 8800 sweat.
I said 8600, not 8800. And even the low end graphics cards way outperform the Intel GMA 950. Typical users may not care about ego shooters, but they may still care about non-old games that will struggle on this chipset.
Uhr? make -j 2 or some higher value depending on what you've got under the hood. Runs your gccs in parallel.
CPUs are there for running a job very fast - GPUs are there for running tasks that are easily parallelised very fast. The latter are not just for games, it's just that 3D graphics is one of the few common tasks that is embarrassingly parallel.
I'm not sure how ray tracing becoming standard is good for GCC compiling - since ray tracing is also embarrassingly parallel, if it becomes standard, we might see that offloaded onto a future GPU anyway.
I haven't tried compiling with multithreading, but if it really does scale well, then there's no reason you couldn't do that job on a GPU either. Though I suspect what actually happens is that different threads are each compiled in a separate thread - in which case, it's better to have a smaller number of faster cores (a CPU) than a larger number of slower cores (a GPU). And which also means, suddenly having a 1,000 core CPU (as people are claiming will be utilised for ray tracing) won't make your compiling go 500 times faster than a dual core, unless you have 1,000 source files.
Plenty of people have laptops that they use around the house - they don't need it ultra small, but they also don't want a massive bulky PC either (e.g., they might want something to use in the living room / garden / bed, plus there are other advantages such as taking it round a friend's house, or taking it to be repaired - laptops aren't just for people using computers whilst travelling).
Of course the point is choice. If people want 13", they choose it, if they want 14" or 17", they get that model instead. Oh wait, with Apple they can't.
I've been moving my family, friends, and gf to Macs for a while now, and they're much happier than they've ever been. Between $1100 and $600 you get a heck of a lot more performance (not always relevant to them), but the peace of mind of not being subject to malware, trojans
Please, not this myth again. Yes, they're probably happier because they think they'd be plagued by malware and trojans, and they think this extra performance is useful (even though as you admit, it's usually not relevant for most people).
Unless you're into playing the latest games, the lower end of laptops are more than enough - the amount of performance these days is not "budget". *checks Apple site* But now I see that the MacBooks only have the same basic Intel integrated graphics as the low end laptops that are half the price! So what is this extra performance you speak of that is so relevant for average users?
People I thought I was mad for allowing my parents get a Windows laptop for their first PC - apparentely I should have insisted they spend hundreds more and get a Mac. Yet it's one year on, and not a problem.
I think the problem here is, the typical user would consider the mini a "reasonably specced system". The mini is a "regular computer".
Even typical users like to play games, and I see that the Mac Mini has the rather basic Intel GMA 950 processor.
Disclaimer: yes, I do have the Intel GMA 950 in my laptop, so I do know what it's like - but it's just a laptop. I'd much rather something like the far more powerful but still cheap 8600GT I can shove in my desktop. A desktop PC, that is.
Apple is there to advertise and sell MacOS X. People buying Macs are for the moost part buying it for MacOS X. If some people want Windows presinstalled on the system, then they could always pay extra and have a shop do the work for them.
I disagree - Apple is there to sell Macs. They're a hardware company. That's why they're happy to include boot camp - and also why they don't see OS X for standard PCs. They're not an OS company - they ditched MacOS and jumped to building an OS from NeXT quite happily, because it suited their platform better.
You are right though that their intent is to market "not a generic PC" - they differentiate themselves on the platform as a whole, not specifically OS X.
I read the article as talking about how traits are passed on - whether they are selected randomly or not. Yes, changes introduced by mutation would be random, but that's a different issue.
You are correct in describing facts and theories, but "evolution" can refer to both. This article explains it well I think - Evolution is a Fact and a Theory.
I'm afraid there's much misinformation in your post.
* I could say that using shaders gives "free per-pixel lighting". I'm not sure if you mean free as in coding effort or performance - it's true for the former, as for the latter, on modern cards the difference between per-vertex and per-pixel doesn't seem to be significant (plus, it seems silly to criticise rasterising for its per-pixel performance anyway - it's still way faster than ray tracing!)
* Shaders do not require "some funky assembly language", they are programmed in high level languages (which, I should point out, contain standard features that make graphics programming easier than standard C or C++). Assembly language was only used in the early days.
* For that matter, shadows and reflections don't require shaders anyway.
* The mathematics required to implement shadows or reflections is no harder than 3D programming in general, or what you'd need for doing ray tracing.
* I'm not sure what you mean by "psychological tricks"? The algorithm for stencil shadow volumes for example mimics what you would expect - a pixel receives light from any light that isn't blocked (i.e., casting a shadow on it). The downside is that it can only handle direct hits from a light source, and it's harder to do light reflections from other surfaces.
I don't want an example - I asked for a measurable definition.
All you've done there is given your opinion of an example of what constitutes "potentially dangerous ground" - I'm asking for a definition of "potentially dangerous ground", i.e., how do we measure in terms of harm caused or whatever?
It would be like me saying you are a "potentially dangerous person", and then asked what I mean by that, me describing your appearance as what I mean by a "potentially dangerous person"...
And I'm confused - I thought above you said that Doom was "potentially dangerous ground", now you list features that aren't in Doom? Or do you mean there was a mod that enabled these things?
It says that a quad core processor gets 16.9 frames at 256x256 resolution.
Wow.
(Like most ray tracing advocates, he points out that ray tracing is "perfect for parallelization", but this ignores that so is standard 3D rendering - graphics cards have been taking advantage of this parallisation for years.)
Keep in mind recent parallelization advances. According to TFA, raytracing performance scales almost linearly with the number of processors
Yes, and standard rasterisation methods are embarrassingly parallel, too. As the other reply points out, we already have parallel processors in the form of GPUs. So I don't see that either multicore CPUs, or that raytracing is easily parallised, is going to make raytracing suddenly catch up.
What we might see perhaps is that one day processors are so fast enough that people are willing to take the performance hit to get better effects from ray tracing (though even then, I hear that even non-real-time realistic 3D rendering often doesn't use ray tracing these days?)
There were and are mods for Doom based on schools and other real-world settings. You could - however crudely - caricature real people. This is potentially dangerous ground and I think the gamer-geek should admit that much.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say - that Doom did cause Columbine? Or if not, let's have a measurable definition of "potentially dangerous ground" before we admit to anything.
All those 2D space alien shooters ever since Space Invaders didn't have a "story or narrative that "framed" the action in anything but the most minimal sense" and they had the same goal "to shoot everything that moves". Nor did they have "concepts like rules of engagement, collateral damage".
Which great atrocities shall we blame on Space Invaders?
Slashdot Mirror
There's an apple.slashdot.org and not a lenovo.slashdot.org mainly because there isn't an Amiga laptop (or much of an Amiga anything anymore,) so people with that personality now have to buy Apple.
Eh? I used the Amiga for years, and now I'm using Windows. Not sure how operating system usage is tied to "personality"
Perhaps some Amiga users have moved onto OS X (modern Macs have just as much common with the Amiga as they do with classic Macs - all it needs is the Amiga sticker rather than a Mac sticker). But that doesn't really answer it - 10-20 years ago, the mainstream press still didn't seem to care much about the Amiga, but were again bending over backwards to promote Apple, so I think this is more of an Apple thing, than Amiga users supposedly moving to Apple products.
The gist of the second half of your post seems to be that the main problem with the Air is that it doesn't fix every single problem and complaint that people of today has with laptops. It doesn't have to. There is a market for different laptops with different tradeoffs.
But why then do we only hear about the Air? Loads of Slashdot articles, all the way up to mainstream news coverage like the BBC. Yet nothing on these other laptops - I didn't even know there were other thin ones until someone pointed them out to me.
Given the coverage it gets as if it's something new and revolutionary, I'm expecting it to fix pretty much near every single problem. If it's actually just yet another laptop, then I don't expect to keep hearing about it.
Does this mean that people making their emo blogs on livejournal or something are going to demand compensation for the traffic they generate?
Er, no. Just like the people posting on Slashdot from their mum's basement aren't going to demand compensation for the traffic they generate, either.
"Writers" can mean anything from someone who writes a script for the latest film, to someone writing about their day, or something on Slashdot - but if I see an article talking about the latest TV series being held up because of writers going on strike, it's pretty obvious from the context that the hold up isn't due to trolls on Slashdot...
Similarly with "Bloggers". The bloggers presumably aren't writing journals, just as not everyone on LiveJournal or Slashdot isn't talking about starting up a union.
How can you unionize a very loosely connected group of people? ... Blogging is about freedom.
;)
Perhaps in this loosely connected group, there are some who don't share this belief?
I found it odd when I heard there was a writers guild, that had now gone on strike seemingly bringing the nation's TV industry to a halt - it sounds as odd as having a "programmers guild" or a "geeks guild". If we went on strike, we could bring a nation to its knees
But given these things exist, I don't see a bloggers guild is any odder.
In the context of TFA, I think "column" is more appropriate. Blogs that appear on large websites, particularly news websites, are those that would usually be referred to as "columns" in newspapers or print in general, and those that write them "columnists".
"Blog" does have the advantage in that it is specific to the Internet - although it is also more general, referring also, as you say, to things like journals.
Unless someone is paying you to blog, blogging isn't a job.
Some of them do, and presumably he is in that article. But yes, the article is odd in that he seems to primarily be talking about people who don't get paid at all. The point of unions is to ensure rights for employees. There is some argument for capitalising on what you do - getting people to pay you - but that's not what I would call a union in the "worker's union" sense.
But then again, later on he does talk about primarily a union for people blogging for money, those that are "professional", so I think what he says isn't unreasonable.
It is Britain's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun
And it was the first to sell 1 million copies a day.
Well then...seems that this 'evil right wing, middle class' paper outsells your liberal stuff.
So..to you, the wingnut, makes it evil.
The fact that it is popular does not change what the OP says - that just makes it sadder.
Or, according to you, is The Sun the best paper ever?
And I'm not sure what his "liberal stuff" is - he never mentioned he reads a paper. Neither do I.
Older PCs don't have a CD drive. Older TVs don't have a HDMI socket. Older Macs don't ship with a two-button mouse.
The difference is there weren't thousands of PC fanbois claiming that the lack of a CD drive meant they were somehow superior to computers with CD drives.
Funny how that when Macs do come with two-button mice, it's finally acknowledged as a useful thing.
And we can look forward to several Slashdot articles and mainstream news articles telling us of the unique and innovative iScrew...
(Why do we not hear about all the other light and thin laptops? I was misled to believe that the Air was something uniquely new, due to all the coverage it was getting.)
Yeah, but typical users want to play typical games, not ego shooters that make a 8800 sweat.
I said 8600, not 8800. And even the low end graphics cards way outperform the Intel GMA 950. Typical users may not care about ego shooters, but they may still care about non-old games that will struggle on this chipset.
Dell and HP are a poor comparison to a Macbook.
Okay I'll bite - why are they a poor comparison?
Uhr? make -j 2 or some higher value depending on what you've got under the hood. Runs your gccs in parallel.
CPUs are there for running a job very fast - GPUs are there for running tasks that are easily parallelised very fast. The latter are not just for games, it's just that 3D graphics is one of the few common tasks that is embarrassingly parallel.
I'm not sure how ray tracing becoming standard is good for GCC compiling - since ray tracing is also embarrassingly parallel, if it becomes standard, we might see that offloaded onto a future GPU anyway.
I haven't tried compiling with multithreading, but if it really does scale well, then there's no reason you couldn't do that job on a GPU either. Though I suspect what actually happens is that different threads are each compiled in a separate thread - in which case, it's better to have a smaller number of faster cores (a CPU) than a larger number of slower cores (a GPU). And which also means, suddenly having a 1,000 core CPU (as people are claiming will be utilised for ray tracing) won't make your compiling go 500 times faster than a dual core, unless you have 1,000 source files.
Plenty of people have laptops that they use around the house - they don't need it ultra small, but they also don't want a massive bulky PC either (e.g., they might want something to use in the living room / garden / bed, plus there are other advantages such as taking it round a friend's house, or taking it to be repaired - laptops aren't just for people using computers whilst travelling).
Of course the point is choice. If people want 13", they choose it, if they want 14" or 17", they get that model instead. Oh wait, with Apple they can't.
I've been moving my family, friends, and gf to Macs for a while now, and they're much happier than they've ever been. Between $1100 and $600 you get a heck of a lot more performance (not always relevant to them), but the peace of mind of not being subject to malware, trojans
Please, not this myth again. Yes, they're probably happier because they think they'd be plagued by malware and trojans, and they think this extra performance is useful (even though as you admit, it's usually not relevant for most people).
Unless you're into playing the latest games, the lower end of laptops are more than enough - the amount of performance these days is not "budget". *checks Apple site* But now I see that the MacBooks only have the same basic Intel integrated graphics as the low end laptops that are half the price! So what is this extra performance you speak of that is so relevant for average users?
People I thought I was mad for allowing my parents get a Windows laptop for their first PC - apparentely I should have insisted they spend hundreds more and get a Mac. Yet it's one year on, and not a problem.
I think the problem here is, the typical user would consider the mini a "reasonably specced system". The mini is a "regular computer".
Even typical users like to play games, and I see that the Mac Mini has the rather basic Intel GMA 950 processor.
Disclaimer: yes, I do have the Intel GMA 950 in my laptop, so I do know what it's like - but it's just a laptop. I'd much rather something like the far more powerful but still cheap 8600GT I can shove in my desktop. A desktop PC, that is.
Apple is there to advertise and sell MacOS X. People buying Macs are for the moost part buying it for MacOS X. If some people want Windows presinstalled on the system, then they could always pay extra and have a shop do the work for them.
I disagree - Apple is there to sell Macs. They're a hardware company. That's why they're happy to include boot camp - and also why they don't see OS X for standard PCs. They're not an OS company - they ditched MacOS and jumped to building an OS from NeXT quite happily, because it suited their platform better.
You are right though that their intent is to market "not a generic PC" - they differentiate themselves on the platform as a whole, not specifically OS X.
I read the article as talking about how traits are passed on - whether they are selected randomly or not. Yes, changes introduced by mutation would be random, but that's a different issue.
You are correct in describing facts and theories, but "evolution" can refer to both. This article explains it well I think - Evolution is a Fact and a Theory.
I'm afraid there's much misinformation in your post.
* I could say that using shaders gives "free per-pixel lighting". I'm not sure if you mean free as in coding effort or performance - it's true for the former, as for the latter, on modern cards the difference between per-vertex and per-pixel doesn't seem to be significant (plus, it seems silly to criticise rasterising for its per-pixel performance anyway - it's still way faster than ray tracing!)
* Shaders do not require "some funky assembly language", they are programmed in high level languages (which, I should point out, contain standard features that make graphics programming easier than standard C or C++). Assembly language was only used in the early days.
* For that matter, shadows and reflections don't require shaders anyway.
* The mathematics required to implement shadows or reflections is no harder than 3D programming in general, or what you'd need for doing ray tracing.
* I'm not sure what you mean by "psychological tricks"? The algorithm for stencil shadow volumes for example mimics what you would expect - a pixel receives light from any light that isn't blocked (i.e., casting a shadow on it). The downside is that it can only handle direct hits from a light source, and it's harder to do light reflections from other surfaces.
GPUs are neat when you happen to be playing a game, but they don't help a "make" command finish sooner.
Well, a multicore CPU won't help you there either.
If 100-cores CPU existed, it would be easy to utilize all those cores to render a Ray Traced scene 100 times faster then 1 core is able to do.
And if a 100-core processor existed, we could use those to render rasterised graphics 100 times faster. Will 128 do?
(I don't disagree with the rest of your post, but there is no special advantage with multicore processors and ray tracing.)
let me suggest an example:
I don't want an example - I asked for a measurable definition.
All you've done there is given your opinion of an example of what constitutes "potentially dangerous ground" - I'm asking for a definition of "potentially dangerous ground", i.e., how do we measure in terms of harm caused or whatever?
It would be like me saying you are a "potentially dangerous person", and then asked what I mean by that, me describing your appearance as what I mean by a "potentially dangerous person"...
And I'm confused - I thought above you said that Doom was "potentially dangerous ground", now you list features that aren't in Doom? Or do you mean there was a mod that enabled these things?
It says that a quad core processor gets 16.9 frames at 256x256 resolution.
Wow.
(Like most ray tracing advocates, he points out that ray tracing is "perfect for parallelization", but this ignores that so is standard 3D rendering - graphics cards have been taking advantage of this parallisation for years.)
Keep in mind recent parallelization advances. According to TFA, raytracing performance scales almost linearly with the number of processors
Yes, and standard rasterisation methods are embarrassingly parallel, too. As the other reply points out, we already have parallel processors in the form of GPUs. So I don't see that either multicore CPUs, or that raytracing is easily parallised, is going to make raytracing suddenly catch up.
What we might see perhaps is that one day processors are so fast enough that people are willing to take the performance hit to get better effects from ray tracing (though even then, I hear that even non-real-time realistic 3D rendering often doesn't use ray tracing these days?)
Doom defined the first person shooter. ...
There were and are mods for Doom based on schools and other real-world settings. You could - however crudely - caricature real people. This is potentially dangerous ground and I think the gamer-geek should admit that much.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say - that Doom did cause Columbine? Or if not, let's have a measurable definition of "potentially dangerous ground" before we admit to anything.
All those 2D space alien shooters ever since Space Invaders didn't have a "story or narrative that "framed" the action in anything but the most minimal sense" and they had the same goal "to shoot everything that moves". Nor did they have "concepts like rules of engagement, collateral damage".
Which great atrocities shall we blame on Space Invaders?