Personally the way I refer to these sorts of games is "ethical F2P", and that includes titles such as League of Legends and Path of Exile. Anything that you can reasonably play without dropping a cent into. Interestingly these sorts of games tend to do really well (LoL is the biggest earning game, DotA2 is the biggest on Steam, and other games following this model are also doing very well). Turns out that people don't like it when games are obvious cash-grabs.
BS. Lack of security is a fairytale the media has dreamed up to drive ratings. Really, the chance of getting killed or harmed in a terrorist attack is basically zero. People are scared because they see 1-in-a-million events on TV all the time, since that is an easy sell for the news networks, so you are left with a bunch of idiots with a poor understanding of statistics fearing for their life. Western countries are safer now than they have been at any point in history and there is zero reason to trash liberty for more security.
I agree that I think that Trump doesn't care much about social issues, but that is a problem, because Mike Pence (and the Republican congress) do care, and I worry that they will destroy a lot of the progress that's been made and Trump won't lift a finger to stop it. For example I doubt Trump would go out of his way to repeal gay marriage but would he veto a bill prohibiting gay marriage if it is handed to him by congress?
The thing is, unskilled workers don't matter (economically) in the modern world. They can either find service jobs or we need to provide something like UBI to take care of their needs. Automation is reality and will continue to get better and cheaper. Holding it up is only introducing artificial inefficiency in the system. Even China, where labour is still far cheaper than in the West, is increasingly moving towards automation in its factories. The world is in for a massive tidal shift in how it operates economically, and this will likely be accompanied with a massive political shift as well.
No it won't because warming is great for the biosphere. Eventually the additional biomass will sequester enough carbon to reduce the CO2 levels to lower levels but that's a process that will likely take millions of years. People really don't seem to understand that global warming isn't a threat to life on Earth, it's not even a threat to human life (we are pretty adaptable). That doesn't mean that the eventual flooding of coastal cities and disruption to the food supply wouldn't be major catastrophe that we should aim to avoid.
The manufacturing jobs are never coming back. If companies decide to build factories in America it will be modern and almost entirely automated factories with very few workers (like Tesla's gigafactory). The age of American manufacturing is over for good. The world has changed and we need to move on. Nostalgia won't solve a damn thing.
Given that human beings have on several occasions beamed out "Hello" signals to points in the galaxy that we think might harbour life, it doesn't seem far fetched that a highly advanced alien civilisation would do the same...
Not sure I'd blame the coach here (though that's probably part of the issue). But as the summary says and several other posters have pointed out: the equipment is owned by the NFL and handed to the coaches at the games. That means little time for the coach to practice using the equipment and no control over it. I also suspect that the software is probably implemented as some abortion of a webapp that runs somewhere in the cloud so that the NFL can keep 100% control over it (and any data that it uses). So some corporate weenie somewhere probably made a decision to guard the precious IP that then hamstrings the final product (would certainly explain inconsistent performance, if network connectivity issues caused operations to take far longer than they should).
That's just speculation on my part of course, but the Surface (Pro) tablets are certainly fast enough that any non-complete-turd software should run plenty fast on them.
A lot of the problems are pretty similar to when gaming started to take off on mobile too. Initially we had mostly shitty ports/clones from other platforms and control schemes that largely sucked (virtual joystick anyone?). Over time quality has improved and control schemes have been figured out that work well with the touch screen interface to the point that mobile is a pretty good gaming platform (not for everyone but it certainly makes a lot of money).
VR will take some time to really find its footing but I wouldn't bet against it right now. Almost all the devs that I've talked to or watched interviews with are giddy with excitement over working with VR so I think the content will come, and once quality content arrives that will drive the adoption of VR gear by gamers too.
Far, far more research dollars are already being poured into the machine intelligence side of things. IBM, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are doing huge amounts of work on that front right now. Having a few small labs doing work on the robotics side is fine. Eventually we will want a human-like interface to human-like machine intelligence (no not for everything but there are many use cases where it makes sense) and having some work done to get us there is good. Even if all it does is just remind us that we can't make it across the uncanny valley yet.
And nobody claims that global warming is a threat to life on Earth. For the biosphere in general it's probably great. Hell, it's not even a threat to human life on the planet, we are an adaptable species and global warming won't be enough to drive us to extinction. The danger of global warming is to human civilisation as it exists right now - it will cause coastal metropolises to flood and will mess with agriculture in many places. Nobody (who has an actual clue anyway) is worried about the end of the world here but that doesn't mean the consequences cannot be truly catastrophic.
I'm not sure how insane micro would be cheating, it is simply the computer being better at micro than humans. Knowing the DeepMind team they will be using the same inputs/outputs as the human players so the AI will not be able to actually cheat in any way. And as far as strategy is concerned, do you really think Starcraft strategy is much more advanced than Go strategy? Personally I doubt it (in fact given the frantic nature of Starcraft matches I would rather think that the strategic component would be relatively less developed compared to the centuries of refined Go play). Given then that the DeepMind team recently trounced one of the best human Go players and given the additional advantages in terms of speed and reaction that an AI possesses, I see them succeeding in this challenge rather easily.
Then what would be an "advancement in AI"? AlphaGo learns the game by playing it, that is the basis of intelligence (it's not completely general yet but that is mostly a matter of scope). Humans don't do anything else special either, we learn from inputs and apply that learning to the world, that is what we call intelligence. It isn't magic, it isn't special.
No, he's living his life in a different way. We could all do with a bit less judgement, though I know it is hard. There are many perfectly valid ways of living your life and the most important thing is that you are happy with the way that you live it, because we are all dust in the end.
Not all shaders are created with WYSIWYG interfaces (in fact Unity doesn't even ship with a graphical material editor, though there are 3rd party assets that add this feature). Still, for very complex effects sometimes there is no other way than to go in and code it in HLSL/CG/GLSL or whatever. Whether that is creating art or programming is a whole different question, people specialized in the field are usually referred to as "technical artists" as it is a bit of both. You simply aren't going to create a compute shader to simulate fluid dynamics using some node-based visual editor for instance.
Well apparently the DeepMind team are already working on having the AI play games with imperfect information. I wouldn't be surprised if they announced similar show matches against top poker players in a few months or so. After all this is nothing like DeepBlue, which was created from ground up to play chess and do nothing else. This is more or less the same system that they trained to play a bunch of Atari 2600 games a while back. With some tweaks they can sit it down to train on a few hundred thousand rounds of poker from online sites, then have it play a few thousand tournaments against itself and then they have an AI that will probably play (online) poker incredibly well.
Some vegetarians don't eat meat because they don't like it but for many that isn't the reason. They like the way meat tastes but they refuse to eat it for a variety of other reasons. It might be moral (they don't like animals being slaughtered for food), due to health concerns (meat is often said to be bad for you, although this is generally not true if you eat it in moderation), or because meat production is horrendously inefficient (usually out of some concern for the those starving in poor countries, even though in reality this is a distribution problem and not a production problem at all).
If I suddenly came into that kind of money I would use it to realize all of my creative dreams. I would start a computer game company, hire people to create one or more TV shows that I have ideas for, and more. I have millions of ideas for things that I would like to create that would just need some capital to get going. Sure some might turn out to be awful but it wouldn't matter with that much money to back me up. Once those are up and running I would set up my own set of charity organizations targeting what I think are the worlds biggest problems. I would also invest in nuclear R&D and push for more nuclear development and a move to electric cars to finally tackle the CO2 problem.
That would be for a start. I'm sure I could come with a million other things to spend the money on too. What I wouldn't do is buy a mansion and a bunch of sports cars, that's just stupid. A nice house and a good electric car sure, but nothing ostentatious. I've never understood the whole "conspicuous consumption" thing.
Agreed. The faster we move to all telecommunications being treated as raw data the better. Of course the old telecom giants hate this idea and are fighting it tooth and nail but it's inevitable. Give it a few years and there will be no more phone lines, no more "talk minutes", no more SMS. Just plain old data, and everything else will exist on top of that. Developing countries like Cuba have a chance to get ahead of the game without the inertia of decades of shitty business practices by the telcos.
To be fair it is still somewhat simpler to get networking going in C# than in C++ with something like Boost. I ported a simple TCP/IP server from C++ to C# not long ago and it certainly was easier to get working in C#. It's not a massive challenge but for someone not terribly familiar with C++ it might take a while to figure things out.
Personally, by the sounds of this project, I would probably code it in C# (or Java if that's your thing) and then bind in anything that those languages can't do using the native interface and a small C library (probably easiest to stick with straight C when doing native interop, though you can go C++ if you feel you really need it). For small projects I feel like going full native is rarely going to be worth it.
Which in turn keeps them from getting in trouble in other ways - for example access to porn has shown to decrease the rate at which rapes occur. Keeping people fed and entertained helps to keep society stable for everyone, even the Romans knew that (bread and circuses).
Intentions matter more so than just raw numbers. If you kill 10 people by accident, even negligence, that is generally considered as not being as bad as killing one person on purpose. The vast majority of deaths attributed to communist regimes come from incompetence and mismanagement resulting in mass famines.
Furthermore, the reason the Nazis are so hated is not because they killed a lot of people but because they targeted people based on racism and prejudice. Communists killed people they saw as threats (real or perceived) to their ideology and power, and not because of their race, religion or because they were disabled. Again, this makes a difference. Historically we don't have much of a problem with the state killing enemies of the state (how many people shed a tear when Osama Bin-Laden was executed by the Navy Seals?). Obviously the scale on which the communists executed people was far greater, and there's no way that those millions killed by Stalin were all legitimate enemies of the state but there is an emotional difference that exists here.
It should also be pointed out that comparing Nazi Germany to communism in general isn't really a genuine comparison. Communism in Stalinist Russia was very different from the later years of the Soviet Union after Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation. It was still a brutal, repressive, and totalitarian regime, but nothing like it was under Stalin, or what Germany was under Hitler. A more fair comparison would be communism to fascism in general, and so including Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain. Both of these regimes are considered bad in comparison to capitalist democracies by most, but neither is seen as the same sort of evil as Nazi Germany. That's because it isn't about being a brutal oppressive regime or how many people you have killed (do you count the 465,000–2,500,000 civilian dead during the Vietnam War against the USA?). No, the reason the Nazi's have a special dark place in history is because they engaged in genocide and because they invented a whole, gruesome, machinery of death to accomplish that goal.
No matter what Nvidia themselves say this isn't a gamer targeted card. It simply doesn't make sense for a gamer to buy, they are far better off with GTX980's in SLI (which outperforms the Titan X in gaming benchmarks significantly).
Lacking in DP performance does make it less attractive to most GPGPU researchers, but some cases do just fine using SP and most graphics related research certainly does. So let me reiterate: if you are working on research for next generation games and you are working with massive assets that may or may not be compressed down in the future this card is interesting. If you are doing other graphics research in raytracing or voxel cone tracing or the like then this card is interesting.
Of course some of these cards will simply end up in the hands of gamers with more money than sense, but I imagine the majority will find their way into universities in the hands of researchers who need large amounts of onboard memory and high amounts of single-precision performance. Not a big market for sure but I doubt that any of the Titan line of cards are really profitable on their own anyway, they exist primarily as PR for Nvidia (which is why they are always surrounded by big PR events).
In case people are confused it is important to point out that the Titan cards aren't aimed at gamers. They are partly a PR stunt for Nvidia (look, we make the biggest, baddest GPU out there), and partly of interest to developers working in graphics research (either developing tech for next gen games, GPGPU research, fluid simulations, and other projects). When you are raycasting massive voxel scenes for example, the 12GB can look rather attractive.
At the end of the day it is very much a niche product, and calling it a "consumer card" is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. If all you are looking to do is to consume content (i.e. play games) this isn't the card for you, just SLI as many GTX980's as you can afford together and be done with it.
While historically language has changed a lot over time and it may well do so in the future I wouldn't necessarily bet on it. Never before in human history has there been this level of global communication or this level of permanent record of communications (including audiovisual records). While small changes are a given (new words and expressions enter common parlance all the time), a wholesale shift in language may (or may not) be prevented by future generations continuing to read, watch, and listen to media produced over the last century.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally the way I refer to these sorts of games is "ethical F2P", and that includes titles such as League of Legends and Path of Exile. Anything that you can reasonably play without dropping a cent into. Interestingly these sorts of games tend to do really well (LoL is the biggest earning game, DotA2 is the biggest on Steam, and other games following this model are also doing very well). Turns out that people don't like it when games are obvious cash-grabs.
BS. Lack of security is a fairytale the media has dreamed up to drive ratings. Really, the chance of getting killed or harmed in a terrorist attack is basically zero. People are scared because they see 1-in-a-million events on TV all the time, since that is an easy sell for the news networks, so you are left with a bunch of idiots with a poor understanding of statistics fearing for their life. Western countries are safer now than they have been at any point in history and there is zero reason to trash liberty for more security.
I agree that I think that Trump doesn't care much about social issues, but that is a problem, because Mike Pence (and the Republican congress) do care, and I worry that they will destroy a lot of the progress that's been made and Trump won't lift a finger to stop it. For example I doubt Trump would go out of his way to repeal gay marriage but would he veto a bill prohibiting gay marriage if it is handed to him by congress?
The thing is, unskilled workers don't matter (economically) in the modern world. They can either find service jobs or we need to provide something like UBI to take care of their needs. Automation is reality and will continue to get better and cheaper. Holding it up is only introducing artificial inefficiency in the system. Even China, where labour is still far cheaper than in the West, is increasingly moving towards automation in its factories. The world is in for a massive tidal shift in how it operates economically, and this will likely be accompanied with a massive political shift as well.
No it won't because warming is great for the biosphere. Eventually the additional biomass will sequester enough carbon to reduce the CO2 levels to lower levels but that's a process that will likely take millions of years. People really don't seem to understand that global warming isn't a threat to life on Earth, it's not even a threat to human life (we are pretty adaptable). That doesn't mean that the eventual flooding of coastal cities and disruption to the food supply wouldn't be major catastrophe that we should aim to avoid.
The manufacturing jobs are never coming back. If companies decide to build factories in America it will be modern and almost entirely automated factories with very few workers (like Tesla's gigafactory). The age of American manufacturing is over for good. The world has changed and we need to move on. Nostalgia won't solve a damn thing.
Given that human beings have on several occasions beamed out "Hello" signals to points in the galaxy that we think might harbour life, it doesn't seem far fetched that a highly advanced alien civilisation would do the same...
Not sure I'd blame the coach here (though that's probably part of the issue). But as the summary says and several other posters have pointed out: the equipment is owned by the NFL and handed to the coaches at the games. That means little time for the coach to practice using the equipment and no control over it. I also suspect that the software is probably implemented as some abortion of a webapp that runs somewhere in the cloud so that the NFL can keep 100% control over it (and any data that it uses). So some corporate weenie somewhere probably made a decision to guard the precious IP that then hamstrings the final product (would certainly explain inconsistent performance, if network connectivity issues caused operations to take far longer than they should).
That's just speculation on my part of course, but the Surface (Pro) tablets are certainly fast enough that any non-complete-turd software should run plenty fast on them.
A lot of the problems are pretty similar to when gaming started to take off on mobile too. Initially we had mostly shitty ports/clones from other platforms and control schemes that largely sucked (virtual joystick anyone?). Over time quality has improved and control schemes have been figured out that work well with the touch screen interface to the point that mobile is a pretty good gaming platform (not for everyone but it certainly makes a lot of money).
VR will take some time to really find its footing but I wouldn't bet against it right now. Almost all the devs that I've talked to or watched interviews with are giddy with excitement over working with VR so I think the content will come, and once quality content arrives that will drive the adoption of VR gear by gamers too.
Far, far more research dollars are already being poured into the machine intelligence side of things. IBM, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others are doing huge amounts of work on that front right now. Having a few small labs doing work on the robotics side is fine. Eventually we will want a human-like interface to human-like machine intelligence (no not for everything but there are many use cases where it makes sense) and having some work done to get us there is good. Even if all it does is just remind us that we can't make it across the uncanny valley yet.
And nobody claims that global warming is a threat to life on Earth. For the biosphere in general it's probably great. Hell, it's not even a threat to human life on the planet, we are an adaptable species and global warming won't be enough to drive us to extinction. The danger of global warming is to human civilisation as it exists right now - it will cause coastal metropolises to flood and will mess with agriculture in many places. Nobody (who has an actual clue anyway) is worried about the end of the world here but that doesn't mean the consequences cannot be truly catastrophic.
I'm not sure how insane micro would be cheating, it is simply the computer being better at micro than humans. Knowing the DeepMind team they will be using the same inputs/outputs as the human players so the AI will not be able to actually cheat in any way. And as far as strategy is concerned, do you really think Starcraft strategy is much more advanced than Go strategy? Personally I doubt it (in fact given the frantic nature of Starcraft matches I would rather think that the strategic component would be relatively less developed compared to the centuries of refined Go play). Given then that the DeepMind team recently trounced one of the best human Go players and given the additional advantages in terms of speed and reaction that an AI possesses, I see them succeeding in this challenge rather easily.
Then what would be an "advancement in AI"? AlphaGo learns the game by playing it, that is the basis of intelligence (it's not completely general yet but that is mostly a matter of scope). Humans don't do anything else special either, we learn from inputs and apply that learning to the world, that is what we call intelligence. It isn't magic, it isn't special.
No, he's living his life in a different way. We could all do with a bit less judgement, though I know it is hard. There are many perfectly valid ways of living your life and the most important thing is that you are happy with the way that you live it, because we are all dust in the end.
Not all shaders are created with WYSIWYG interfaces (in fact Unity doesn't even ship with a graphical material editor, though there are 3rd party assets that add this feature). Still, for very complex effects sometimes there is no other way than to go in and code it in HLSL/CG/GLSL or whatever. Whether that is creating art or programming is a whole different question, people specialized in the field are usually referred to as "technical artists" as it is a bit of both. You simply aren't going to create a compute shader to simulate fluid dynamics using some node-based visual editor for instance.
Well apparently the DeepMind team are already working on having the AI play games with imperfect information. I wouldn't be surprised if they announced similar show matches against top poker players in a few months or so. After all this is nothing like DeepBlue, which was created from ground up to play chess and do nothing else. This is more or less the same system that they trained to play a bunch of Atari 2600 games a while back. With some tweaks they can sit it down to train on a few hundred thousand rounds of poker from online sites, then have it play a few thousand tournaments against itself and then they have an AI that will probably play (online) poker incredibly well.
Some vegetarians don't eat meat because they don't like it but for many that isn't the reason. They like the way meat tastes but they refuse to eat it for a variety of other reasons. It might be moral (they don't like animals being slaughtered for food), due to health concerns (meat is often said to be bad for you, although this is generally not true if you eat it in moderation), or because meat production is horrendously inefficient (usually out of some concern for the those starving in poor countries, even though in reality this is a distribution problem and not a production problem at all).
If I suddenly came into that kind of money I would use it to realize all of my creative dreams. I would start a computer game company, hire people to create one or more TV shows that I have ideas for, and more. I have millions of ideas for things that I would like to create that would just need some capital to get going. Sure some might turn out to be awful but it wouldn't matter with that much money to back me up. Once those are up and running I would set up my own set of charity organizations targeting what I think are the worlds biggest problems. I would also invest in nuclear R&D and push for more nuclear development and a move to electric cars to finally tackle the CO2 problem.
That would be for a start. I'm sure I could come with a million other things to spend the money on too. What I wouldn't do is buy a mansion and a bunch of sports cars, that's just stupid. A nice house and a good electric car sure, but nothing ostentatious. I've never understood the whole "conspicuous consumption" thing.
Agreed. The faster we move to all telecommunications being treated as raw data the better. Of course the old telecom giants hate this idea and are fighting it tooth and nail but it's inevitable. Give it a few years and there will be no more phone lines, no more "talk minutes", no more SMS. Just plain old data, and everything else will exist on top of that. Developing countries like Cuba have a chance to get ahead of the game without the inertia of decades of shitty business practices by the telcos.
To be fair it is still somewhat simpler to get networking going in C# than in C++ with something like Boost. I ported a simple TCP/IP server from C++ to C# not long ago and it certainly was easier to get working in C#. It's not a massive challenge but for someone not terribly familiar with C++ it might take a while to figure things out.
Personally, by the sounds of this project, I would probably code it in C# (or Java if that's your thing) and then bind in anything that those languages can't do using the native interface and a small C library (probably easiest to stick with straight C when doing native interop, though you can go C++ if you feel you really need it). For small projects I feel like going full native is rarely going to be worth it.
Which in turn keeps them from getting in trouble in other ways - for example access to porn has shown to decrease the rate at which rapes occur. Keeping people fed and entertained helps to keep society stable for everyone, even the Romans knew that (bread and circuses).
Intentions matter more so than just raw numbers. If you kill 10 people by accident, even negligence, that is generally considered as not being as bad as killing one person on purpose. The vast majority of deaths attributed to communist regimes come from incompetence and mismanagement resulting in mass famines.
Furthermore, the reason the Nazis are so hated is not because they killed a lot of people but because they targeted people based on racism and prejudice. Communists killed people they saw as threats (real or perceived) to their ideology and power, and not because of their race, religion or because they were disabled. Again, this makes a difference. Historically we don't have much of a problem with the state killing enemies of the state (how many people shed a tear when Osama Bin-Laden was executed by the Navy Seals?). Obviously the scale on which the communists executed people was far greater, and there's no way that those millions killed by Stalin were all legitimate enemies of the state but there is an emotional difference that exists here.
It should also be pointed out that comparing Nazi Germany to communism in general isn't really a genuine comparison. Communism in Stalinist Russia was very different from the later years of the Soviet Union after Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation. It was still a brutal, repressive, and totalitarian regime, but nothing like it was under Stalin, or what Germany was under Hitler. A more fair comparison would be communism to fascism in general, and so including Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain. Both of these regimes are considered bad in comparison to capitalist democracies by most, but neither is seen as the same sort of evil as Nazi Germany. That's because it isn't about being a brutal oppressive regime or how many people you have killed (do you count the 465,000–2,500,000 civilian dead during the Vietnam War against the USA?). No, the reason the Nazi's have a special dark place in history is because they engaged in genocide and because they invented a whole, gruesome, machinery of death to accomplish that goal.
No matter what Nvidia themselves say this isn't a gamer targeted card. It simply doesn't make sense for a gamer to buy, they are far better off with GTX980's in SLI (which outperforms the Titan X in gaming benchmarks significantly).
Lacking in DP performance does make it less attractive to most GPGPU researchers, but some cases do just fine using SP and most graphics related research certainly does. So let me reiterate: if you are working on research for next generation games and you are working with massive assets that may or may not be compressed down in the future this card is interesting. If you are doing other graphics research in raytracing or voxel cone tracing or the like then this card is interesting.
Of course some of these cards will simply end up in the hands of gamers with more money than sense, but I imagine the majority will find their way into universities in the hands of researchers who need large amounts of onboard memory and high amounts of single-precision performance. Not a big market for sure but I doubt that any of the Titan line of cards are really profitable on their own anyway, they exist primarily as PR for Nvidia (which is why they are always surrounded by big PR events).
In case people are confused it is important to point out that the Titan cards aren't aimed at gamers. They are partly a PR stunt for Nvidia (look, we make the biggest, baddest GPU out there), and partly of interest to developers working in graphics research (either developing tech for next gen games, GPGPU research, fluid simulations, and other projects). When you are raycasting massive voxel scenes for example, the 12GB can look rather attractive.
At the end of the day it is very much a niche product, and calling it a "consumer card" is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. If all you are looking to do is to consume content (i.e. play games) this isn't the card for you, just SLI as many GTX980's as you can afford together and be done with it.
While historically language has changed a lot over time and it may well do so in the future I wouldn't necessarily bet on it. Never before in human history has there been this level of global communication or this level of permanent record of communications (including audiovisual records). While small changes are a given (new words and expressions enter common parlance all the time), a wholesale shift in language may (or may not) be prevented by future generations continuing to read, watch, and listen to media produced over the last century.