Actually you make a point, console manufacturers and game companies screw their customers over the accesories and games so much that in the end nowadays a PC is cheaper, it even is cheaper if you count in that in many cases you just have to upgrade the graphics hardware and at every second console generation the pc upgrade itself is mandatory. Over its lifetime I have dumped more money onto my wii than I have done for my aging PC which simply got a new life by adding a decent graphics card. The price difference of the games makes up for it.
That is the main issue, you cannot really move away from x86 to the better alternatives because one thing Intel nowadays does right, they deliver speed. There was a time until the mid 90s when all Intel processors even speedwise were absolute crap, but that has changed, there arent too many processors faster than what x86 has to offer nowadays.
The only way I see that you can get away from x86 will be once a processor can hit the scene which can do x86 emulation as fast or faster than native x86 can. Microsoft probably would love to unknot the tie they have with Intel to gain more independence but they cannot. Intel pretty much is aware of that, and that is probably one of the reasons why they invest so much into linux as well, if things break apart they at least have another offering.
Besides the merits of UO I cannot forgive that it was one of the reasons why Ultima as a series died, I know there were many others, but without Garriot abandoning the U9 project halfway for Ultima online and then finishing it in a lousy state because EA finally after years demanded a product the series probably still would be alive. It still is sad for me that the series died such a death, it still surpasses the modern RPGs in many aspects. Bring in another RPG game like U7 with total freedom and still yet with such a density in story and character and trying to recreate a modern world without trying to force the player on rails. The only game having partially succeeded in this aspect is Arx Fatalis, and Gothic 2 and both of them were a hommage to UUW. I still miss this kind of RPG style lost nowadays in either japanese RPGs which play like Ultima 2 on rails or american RPGs which try to recreate the world but forget about a decent story or deliver good characters and story but push the player on rails.
U7 was sort of the pinnacle of a genre which was Monkey Island to the adventure games.
Really, we should be able again to start to focus on technical solutions and working standards, instead of having to deal with laywers and scammers all the time (often both being one person or company at the same time) Really the goldrush triggered by the 80s and 90s attracted the usual bunch of crooks which made the live of the people working in this area absolutely miserable. If this all is not shiny anymore I am all for it. I do not want to get rich, I just want to produce working solutions and make a living out of it that is all.
Actually you are wrong in your assumption, prototypes are just are the exposed method table compilers usually hide, which adds flexibility because you can extend a lot of things that way but it has pitfalls.
But that was not my issue, my issue was that everyone is enforced to add inheritance on top of prototypes and because there is no standardized way some do it wrong and some implementations collide and some are outright buggy.
Sorry to say that but saying that prototypes are there is no justification to leave the high level construct out. That is like if you would say you dont need inheritance in C++ because you can gain access to the virtual method table of the compiler anyway or you can simulate it by using function pointers and your own arrays and can add it on top of it.
From most cases I have seen inheritance was added on top of it in almost any big library, which means there is something missing, and to the worse every library did it differently and even worse the implementations can collide because if one library tries to inherit from an object which has inheritance done by another you are bound to open a real mess!
Other example, I dont need high level languages because I can roll my own in assembler, is pretty much the same mentality. Sorry to be harsh about it, but the insistence that prototype is all you need is outright wrong for the real world use and pretty much every big library for javascript in existence prooves it. They usually add following things: A shorter notation for
document.getElementById inheritance mixins and standardized namespaces within the scope of their domain with helper constructs which hide the implicit map hack. (well the last one is not done by prototype which just hijacks the entire javascript base)
All of this ins indication enough that something is wrong in the approach of providing prototype constructs alone!
And the funny thing other languages dont have a problem to expose constructs like the prototype and also have a real inheritance on top of it (check out groovy or ruby, or I think even smalltalk), it is always the javascript keep the language clear proponents who want to have it the only way while others like Adobe already have moved on in ActionScript!
Yepp we again then can expect another standard which probably every browser vendor will integrate except microsoft which once it is standardized will roll its own web d3d... Been there done that, read up about SVG, CSS 2.0, transparent PNGs, Flash/Silverlight, Corba, OpenGL etc...
Dont get me wrong I do most of my work with javascript, and I know the inner depths of the language. And as far as I can see the language itself is as powerful as every other dynamic language like ruby or groovy for instance. But the designers missed a few things, which then have to be simulated and sometimes due to having a simulation of those language constructs can cause cross implementation collisions. Those would be easy to fix, introduce real classes and inheritance or simply make a standard on how to do those things.
Introduce real namespaces instead of having to hack them via map/objects, and I think most people would be happy! The inheritance issue is probably the most pressing because that is one of the 2 key areas which constantly causes cross library collisions the other one being the overriding of base objects and extending them and hijacking of something like $
But I agree the language itself has been somehow misjudged in the past, because it is so easy to hack a quick script, real javascript if you write big systems with it is almost as hard to handle as C++ and as flexible as Lisp or Smalltalk!
Actually it already is there to some degree what do you think is the dom node and images etc... they all have hooks somewhere into the hardware. The way I see it javascript will only be used for scripting on the 3d scenegraph and 3d elements themselves. There is no more hardware connectivity than what already is given with the javascript/dom connectivity.
You obviously never have seen a sony reader do you? The thing can be loaded via usb just like a normal harddrive, you can use drmed ebooks but open epub books and pdfs work quite fine and there is no way that sony can pull a book from you unless you confirm it first in the uploading pc software to sync it away. For all bad things sony has done in this area, they hit it right on the head with the ebook readers they simply are a good mixture between being almost entirely open and still supporting drm unlike amazon who pulls stupid tricks with the mobipocket format and their users. I never got it why amazon got all the sales, the sony ebook reader is more open and has a way better build quality. I guess amazon did the hype machine right, while Sonys always was somehow off radar.
The sony one actually is pretty non predatory, which is unusal for sony. And the build quality is excellent with its aluminium case and fortified glass display.
Online news has been stuck in a prisoner's dilemma situation (from their POV). If everyone charged for news, then they'd be OK. When only some people charge for news, those that charge lose their audience. That drives the system to the equilibrium of noone charging for news. From the consumer's POV this is a good thing.
Because Murdoch owns so much of the news, he might be able to break out of the current poor (for newspaper publishers) equilibrium.
I rather doubt it since he does not have a complete monopoly, but given the state of Murdochs news outlets the world definitely would be a better place if all of them would go bankrupt at once. Sorry for the people working there but you really sold out to the devils little nephew!
Compiling OpenCL code as x86 is potentially interesting. There are two ways that make sense. One is as a front-end to your existing compiler toolchain (e.g. GCC or LLVM) so that you can write parts of your code in OpenCL and have them compiled to SSE (or whatever) code and inlined in the calling code on platforms without a programmable GPU. With this approach, you'd include both the OpenCL bytecode (which is JIT-compiled to the GPU's native instruction set by the driver) and the native binary and load the CPU-based version if OpenCL is not available. The other is in the driver stack, where something like Gallium (which has an OpenCL state tracker under development) will fall back to compiling to native CPU code if the GPU can't support the OpenCL program directly.
Having a separate compiler that doesn't integrate cleanly with the rest of your toolchain (i.e. uses a different intermediate representation preventing cross-module optimisations between C code and OpenCL) and doesn't integrate with the driver stack is very boring.
Oh, and the press release appears to be a lie:
AMD is the first to deliver a beta release of an OpenCL software development platform for x86-based CPUs
Somewhat surprising, given that OS X 10.6 betas have included an OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs for several months prior to the date of the press release. Possibly they meant public beta.
I assume so OpenCL for ATI cards is heavens sent, since ATI seems to get nowhere with their custom shader language solutions, unlike NVidia which made heavy inroads with CUDA on the video codec front. I am rather sick of having a powerhorse which rivals the best nvidia cards and yet all the codecs use CUDA for video coding acceleration!
That is mostly a problem of the american news media less a problem of not having news. I was several times in the US and I really was amazed about the non existing quality of the so called local news and generally news outlets on television (I dont even talk about newspapers)
Haha yes, good comparison. If Jesus lived today Fox news probably constantly would make up stories how bad he is and this evil communist must be brought down by the CIA etc... And after the cruzification they probably would make a special report day how the world got better once after the death of this communist hippie.
Anyway given the current state of society Jesus probably would have ended in a similar fate. Probably brought down by exactly the same type of people.
Throw the books into the next garbage bin... There is all to it, only a minority of marriages/relationships work in that scheme, the rest has been posted by others alreasy. One thing I cannot figure out is why all those books are written in those stereotype ways while most relationships do not work that way anyway.
Jepp that is exactly the agenda she tries to follow.. the main problem is that both big german parties have such people Leyen being SPD and Zypris and SchÃuble being CDU and the german voting behavior is too rigid to change the situation. But at least it is highly questionable that von Leyen will be in the next cabinet with the SPD definitely getting a severe smack on the head.
She has been recently discovering the internet, before she was living happily in Barbieland playing with her Disney ponies. The wakeup call was simply too hard for her.
Seriously, if you read interviews with her, that woman is the german equivalent to Sarah Palin. Stupid dangerous outrigt arrogant and does not even listen one second to anyone!
Sorry I mixed up the years, in 1409 Pleton was in Mistra he was expelled from Constantinople in 1393 and started to settle there, the famous council was in 1438-39, so how could the catholic church hamper the lectures which happend around 30 years later? Pleton was not even in Florence in 1409 but was sitting in Mistra studying Plato. Forget about my last posting regarding this I mixed up years a quick googling about the facts set me right.
Interesting, but seems unlikely can you give me references, i have yet to see one of this fact. All references I found were that pleton came to florence in conjunction with the emperor, and had time on his hands and started teaching and after he left his scholars tought, but not a single reference on the net is speaking about being expelled, it seems more likely he left after the council was over.
Also unlikely because Pleton visited Florcence in conjunction with the byzantine emperor around 1407 and was therefore under the protection of his emperor, besides that he has been living in Mistra since 1393.
Truth however is he was a neo pagan and hence hat lots of enemies but he constantly was under protection of the byzantine emperor hence was sort of untouchable in Mistra.
Actually in case of a catastrophy on a worlwide scale, it is more likely that Linux would survive in case of computer technology can be safed than Windows, due to windows inherent closed source nature!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you make a point, console manufacturers and game companies screw their customers over the accesories and games so much that in the end nowadays a PC is cheaper, it even is cheaper if you count in that in many cases you just have to upgrade the graphics hardware and at every second console generation the pc upgrade itself is mandatory.
Over its lifetime I have dumped more money onto my wii than I have done for my aging PC which simply got a new life by adding a decent graphics card.
The price difference of the games makes up for it.
That is the main issue, you cannot really move away from x86 to the better alternatives because one thing Intel nowadays does right, they deliver speed. There was a time until the mid 90s when all Intel processors even speedwise were absolute crap, but that has changed, there arent too many processors faster than what x86 has to offer nowadays.
The only way I see that you can get away from x86 will be once a processor can hit the scene which can do x86 emulation as fast or faster than native x86 can.
Microsoft probably would love to unknot the tie they have with Intel to gain more independence but they cannot.
Intel pretty much is aware of that, and that is probably one of the reasons why they invest so much into linux as well, if things break apart they at least have another offering.
Besides the merits of UO I cannot forgive that it was one of the reasons why Ultima as a series died, I know there were many others, but without Garriot abandoning the U9 project halfway for Ultima online and then finishing it in a lousy state because EA finally after years demanded a product the series probably still would be alive.
It still is sad for me that the series died such a death, it still surpasses the modern RPGs in many aspects. Bring in another RPG game like U7 with total freedom and still yet with such a density in story and character and trying to recreate a modern world without trying to force the player on rails. The only game having partially succeeded in this aspect is Arx Fatalis, and Gothic 2 and both of them were a hommage to UUW.
I still miss this kind of RPG style lost nowadays in either japanese RPGs which play like Ultima 2 on rails or american RPGs which try to recreate the world but forget about a decent story or deliver good characters and story but push the player on rails.
U7 was sort of the pinnacle of a genre which was Monkey Island to the adventure games.
Well the plugin situation worked excellently for svg, didnÂt it?
Really, we should be able again to start to focus on technical solutions and working standards, instead of having to deal with laywers and scammers all the time (often both being one person or company at the same time)
Really the goldrush triggered by the 80s and 90s attracted the usual bunch of crooks which made the live of the people working in this area absolutely miserable. If this all is not shiny anymore I am all for it. I do not want to get rich, I just want to produce working solutions and make a living out of it that is all.
Actually you are wrong in your assumption, prototypes
are just are the exposed method table compilers usually hide, which adds flexibility because you can extend a lot of things that way but it has pitfalls.
But that was not my issue, my issue was that everyone is enforced to add inheritance on top of prototypes and because there is no standardized way some do it wrong and some implementations collide and some are outright buggy.
Sorry to say that but saying that prototypes are there is no justification to leave the high level construct out. That is like if you would say you dont need inheritance in C++ because you can gain access to the virtual method table of the compiler anyway or you can simulate it by using function pointers and your own arrays and can add it on top of it.
From most cases I have seen inheritance was added on top of it in almost any big library, which means there is something missing, and to the worse every library did it differently and even worse the implementations can collide because if one library tries to inherit from an object which has inheritance done by another you are bound to open a real mess!
Other example, I dont need high level languages because I can roll my own in assembler, is pretty much the same mentality.
Sorry to be harsh about it, but the insistence that prototype is all you need is outright wrong for the real world use and pretty much every big library for javascript in existence prooves it.
They usually add following things:
A shorter notation for
document.getElementById
inheritance
mixins
and standardized namespaces within the scope of their domain with helper constructs which hide the implicit map hack. (well the last one is not done by prototype which just hijacks the entire javascript base)
All of this ins indication enough that something is wrong in the approach of providing prototype constructs alone!
And the funny thing other languages dont have a problem to expose constructs like the prototype and also have a real inheritance on top of it (check out groovy or ruby, or I think even smalltalk), it is always the javascript keep the language clear proponents who want to have it the only way while others like Adobe already have moved on in ActionScript!
Yea sure send them H1N1 in a vial...
Yepp we again then can expect another standard which probably every browser vendor will integrate except microsoft which once it is standardized will roll its own web d3d...
Been there done that, read up about SVG, CSS 2.0, transparent PNGs, Flash/Silverlight, Corba, OpenGL etc...
Dont get me wrong I do most of my work with javascript, and I know the inner depths of the language. And as far as I can see the language itself is as powerful as every other dynamic language like ruby or groovy for instance. But the designers missed a few things, which then have to be simulated and sometimes due to having a simulation of those language constructs can cause cross implementation collisions. Those would be easy to fix, introduce real classes and inheritance or simply make a standard on how to do those things.
Introduce real namespaces instead of having to hack them via map/objects, and I think most people would be happy!
The inheritance issue is probably the most pressing because that is one of the 2 key areas which constantly causes cross library collisions the other one being the overriding of base objects and extending them and hijacking of something like $
But I agree the language itself has been somehow misjudged in the past, because it is so easy to hack a quick script, real javascript if you write big systems with it is almost as hard to handle as C++ and as flexible as Lisp or Smalltalk!
Actually it already is there to some degree what do you think is the dom node and images etc... they all have hooks somewhere into the hardware.
The way I see it javascript will only be used for scripting on the 3d scenegraph and 3d elements themselves. There is no more hardware connectivity than what already is given with the javascript/dom connectivity.
You obviously never have seen a sony reader do you?
The thing can be loaded via usb just like a normal harddrive, you can use drmed ebooks but open epub books and
pdfs work quite fine and there is no way that sony can pull a book from you unless you confirm it first in the uploading pc software
to sync it away.
For all bad things sony has done in this area, they hit it right on the head with the ebook readers they simply
are a good mixture between being almost entirely open and still supporting drm unlike amazon who pulls stupid tricks
with the mobipocket format and their users.
I never got it why amazon got all the sales, the sony ebook reader is more open and has a way better build quality.
I guess amazon did the hype machine right, while Sonys always was somehow off radar.
The sony one actually is pretty non predatory, which is unusal for sony.
And the build quality is excellent with its aluminium case and fortified glass display.
Murchdoch speaking of quality journalism... excellent joke
Online news has been stuck in a prisoner's dilemma situation (from their POV). If everyone charged for news, then they'd be OK. When only some people charge for news, those that charge lose their audience. That drives the system to the equilibrium of noone charging for news. From the consumer's POV this is a good thing.
Because Murdoch owns so much of the news, he might be able to break out of the current poor (for newspaper publishers) equilibrium.
I rather doubt it since he does not have a complete monopoly, but given the state of Murdochs news outlets the world definitely would be a better place if all of them would go bankrupt at once. Sorry for the people working there but you really sold out to the devils little nephew!
Compiling OpenCL code as x86 is potentially interesting. There are two ways that make sense. One is as a front-end to your existing compiler toolchain (e.g. GCC or LLVM) so that you can write parts of your code in OpenCL and have them compiled to SSE (or whatever) code and inlined in the calling code on platforms without a programmable GPU. With this approach, you'd include both the OpenCL bytecode (which is JIT-compiled to the GPU's native instruction set by the driver) and the native binary and load the CPU-based version if OpenCL is not available. The other is in the driver stack, where something like Gallium (which has an OpenCL state tracker under development) will fall back to compiling to native CPU code if the GPU can't support the OpenCL program directly.
Having a separate compiler that doesn't integrate cleanly with the rest of your toolchain (i.e. uses a different intermediate representation preventing cross-module optimisations between C code and OpenCL) and doesn't integrate with the driver stack is very boring.
Oh, and the press release appears to be a lie:
AMD is the first to deliver a beta release of an OpenCL software development platform for x86-based CPUs
Somewhat surprising, given that OS X 10.6 betas have included an OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs for several months prior to the date of the press release. Possibly they meant public beta.
I assume so OpenCL for ATI cards is heavens sent, since ATI seems to get nowhere with their custom shader language solutions, unlike NVidia which made heavy inroads with CUDA on the video codec front.
I am rather sick of having a powerhorse which rivals the best nvidia cards and yet all the codecs use CUDA for video coding acceleration!
That is mostly a problem of the american news media less a problem of not having news.
I was several times in the US and I really was amazed about the non existing quality
of the so called local news and generally news outlets on television (I dont even talk about newspapers)
Haha yes, good comparison. If Jesus lived today Fox news probably constantly would make up stories how bad he is and this evil communist must be brought down by the CIA etc...
And after the cruzification they probably would make a special report day how the world got better once after the death of this communist hippie.
Anyway given the current state of society Jesus probably would have ended in a similar fate. Probably brought down by exactly the same type of people.
Throw the books into the next garbage bin...
There is all to it, only a minority of marriages/relationships work in that scheme, the rest has been
posted by others alreasy.
One thing I cannot figure out is why all those books are written in those stereotype ways while
most relationships do not work that way anyway.
Sorry my fault I am not german and dont even live there.
Jepp that is exactly the agenda she tries to follow.. the main problem is that both big german parties have such people Leyen being SPD and Zypris and SchÃuble being CDU and the german voting behavior is too rigid to change the situation.
But at least it is highly questionable that von Leyen will be in the next cabinet with the SPD definitely getting a severe smack on the head.
She has been recently discovering the internet, before she was living happily in Barbieland playing with her Disney ponies.
The wakeup call was simply too hard for her.
Seriously, if you read interviews with her, that woman is the german equivalent to Sarah Palin. Stupid dangerous outrigt arrogant and does not even listen one second to anyone!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism
Sorry I mixed up the years, in 1409 Pleton was in Mistra he was expelled from Constantinople in 1393 and started to settle there, the famous council was in 1438-39, so how could the catholic church hamper the lectures which happend around 30 years later? Pleton was not even in Florence in 1409 but was sitting in Mistra studying Plato. Forget about my last posting regarding this I mixed up years a quick googling about the facts set me right.
Interesting, but seems unlikely can you give me references, i have yet to see one of this fact.
All references I found were that pleton came to florence in conjunction with the emperor, and had time on his hands and started teaching and after he left his scholars tought, but not a single reference on the net is speaking about being expelled, it seems more likely he left after the council was over.
Also unlikely because Pleton visited Florcence in conjunction with the byzantine emperor around 1407 and was therefore under the protection of his emperor, besides that he has been living in Mistra since 1393.
Truth however is he was a neo pagan and hence hat lots of enemies but he constantly was under protection of the byzantine emperor hence was sort of untouchable in Mistra.
Actually in case of a catastrophy on a worlwide scale, it is more likely that Linux would survive in case of computer technology can be safed than Windows, due to windows inherent closed source nature!