Neat? Yes. High tech. Yes? But so completely different what everyone is used to using that no one cares. Or at least no one expects it to be a replacement for the status quo.
outside of college radio stations, there's nothing left worth listening to, and this tells you why.
Nonsense. You might mean "only college stations play the kind of music I like," which certainly doesn't mean that other stations suck. Or you might mean that many commercial stations have short, safe playlists. But then there are stations that don't fit that mold.
This is just like the overgeneralization that commercial music sucks, when you'll find instead that all of the music played on college stations is, in fact, commercial. The myth among anti-media geeks is that CDs from Britney Spears and Mariah Carey are put out by Evil Money Grubbing Corporations, while music from Chemical Brothers and Radiohead is put out by Independent Freedom Loving Hippies. When, in fact, there's no difference.
Simple. Next time you put together a computer, buy a chipset for DDR-II, but only put pc2100 memory in. Then, six months later, buy screaming fast DDR-II memory. Sure it'll cost you more in the long run, but you'll have upgraded your RAM successfully. Or you could do like everybody else and buy more RAM rather than faster to make your upgrade.
And then some new memory system will be announced that needs a new motherboard anyway.
It's time the myth of the upgradable PC was put to rest.
I remember how big robotics was supposed to become, and how they would replace all our industrial workers...
And so they did to a great extent. Have you ever seen the assembly line at any auto manufacturerer? Just because a robot doesn't walk on two legs and push a vaccuum doesn't mean it isn't a sophisticated robot.
No amount of P3 opts will speed up gcc though, what we need are string functions in the CPU, we have had enough matrix/mmx/3d shit added to the cpu, how about some real optimized memory type funcs()s
You mean like the string functions that were in the original 8088 and 8086? Heh. They're still there, just generally slower than emulating them with simpler instructions. movsd is still lightning fast, though. What more do you want?
Look, this is simple. Bandwidth is expensive, or at least it's not the free resource everyone likes to think that it is. You ever look at the prices for T1 lines? They're expensive for a reason. Some of that is gouging, sure, the bottom line is that *somebody* is paying for crazy-high bandwidth. Cable ISPs started out with cheap prices to attract customers, then the realization hit that they couldn't keep it up forever. This is not a surprise to anyone except college students who are used to having "free" high bandwidth connections in their dorm rooms.
I gather that the Itanium philosophy is to transfer the complexity to the compiler. The question is, how good are the compilers now? At the moment, it looks like a real bastard of a job putting together a decent one for any Itanium series. That VLIW stuff looks like it needs to be spot on every time to get the performance (don't do 3 fp ops in a row).
Solid information content: 0 Repetition of things heard elsewhere: 10
Hopefully as price drops and more people purchase the pIV chip the power of the chip will become more and more applicable. At first look the pIV may look like a bomb, a dud, a slow chip. But, the chip has great potential which is yet to be realized. As more and more applications are made available which are optimized for the pIV we'll really start to see this chip shine.
I'm sure you have a heart full of hope when you say that, but don't hold your breath. Speaking as a developer, you get much bigger increases from across the board optimizations than twiddling around with chip specific tweaks. It just doesn't pay off. "When the code is optimized for processor XXX" has been a standard line since the Pentium II days, and it just hasn't been true in practice. Heck, nobody is optimizing for the Pentium III yet!
This is ridiculous. One Ultra Huge Heavily Marketed Movie is beating another Ultra Huge Heavily Marketed Movie and you're trying to read some sort of deep changing of the guard theme into it? Is this even worth disucssing? Both movies are making more money than 50 Slasdotters combined will make in their entire lifetimes. How can this be reasonably talked about?
When you sign up for their service, you pay for a certain speed for a certain ammount of $/month. Whether or not you use that is your business - you paid for it, its yours to use. If comcast is running out of bandwidth, its their fault - they oversold without proper planning.
That's not how it works, sorry. If Comcast--or any ISP--assumed the worst, that each user would be transferring some massive amount of data per month--then they just couldn't handle it. And no ISP in existence could either. There isn't enough bandwidth for that.
Phone companies have done the same thing for years. You *assume* that when you pick up the phone you will have a free line, but if everyone picked up the phone at the same time then many--even the majority--would not get lines. Phone companies plan for phone calls of certain lengths, and they have to worry about exceptions like radio call-in contests and Mother's Day (the day with the most phone traffic).
What about Linux, for example? Come on. This can't be serious.
Linux is simply a version of UNIX, and UNIX was created by a large corporation: Bell Labs. It could easily be argued that UNIX would never have been written in the first place, had some brilliant people not been able to work on it full-time. When you have the funding to make something your day job, you can get a lot more done than working late nights and weekends.
As far as I can tell, these people have, respectively "invented" Linux, Perl and Vim, which are respectively marginal improvements (in certain senses) of UNIX, AWK, and ed/sed.
I'd argue that Perl is a much greater leap than the other two. Linux basically is just an Open Source version of UNIX (though I know it pains many young 'uns to admit this), and vim is vi with some extra features. But Perl was fundamentally new in many ways, unless you want to get into one of those "all books only have seven plots" discussions.
Of course while Perl may have initially been created by Larry Wall, dozens and dozens of people have had a hand in it since then.
id rather see the local band at the bar who has never been signed, now ever will be! if you were good, you wouldnt need to make your money off of radio promotion, youd promote your self nofx/grateful dead/phish... and make money by winning your fans at tours, by being a good show.
That's naive, and you're extrapolating a couple of exceptions to the rule (i.e. Phish) into the general case. In any little town, you'll find half a dozen really good bands that may be better than what you hear on the radio, and there are fifty thousand such towns. But it is really, really hard to turn that into a full-time living. You play some bars for a pittance, you sell a couple of CDs per show, and that's hardly enough money to buy equipment, go on tour, and record your next album. It isn't just a matter of being good. It's a matter of getting some backing and marketing help so you can get a wider audience. I know that's not how it works in your idealistic world, but that's how things work in this world.
This is going to majorly affect my life as a geek! Now I can convert all my friends to Linux, because they all love Sherwin-Williams!
Seriously, I don't know how any of this matters to anyone. UNIX has always been a behind-the-scenes OS, and Linux is certainly not the underground geeks-only OS that many geeks so badly want it to be, so why does this matter at all?
Labels are totally unnecessary in this equation; at least one quarter of the bands I listen to are self-produced and unsigned anyway.
Which means that 3/4 of them are not. Selling music by yourself is a tough gig. If a band can get financial support from a label, then that lets them devote time to touring and recording. It's much better than having to do it on the side while holding down a full-time job. You make very little money selling your own music and playing local venues.
I agree, this is pretty impressive from a technological standpoint. But in many ways it's also starting to look less like a computer game and more like a bad B-movie released straight to your local Blockbuster. It looks like some guy running around his house with a video camera. Impressive? To a programmer, yes. But to someone used to watching movies, it looks hugely cheesy. At least typical 3D games tend to be more like comic books, rather than bad imitations of reality. The characters in Doom 3 now look like smooth, well-lit...GI Joe action figures.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this article is taking the Microsoft Domination angle. Sony is going to take the domination route too, of course. Console makers want tight control over everything (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo can reject games because they don't like the concept), and naturally that includes networks. But this is ignoring the bigger issue.
Console gamers have gotten used to lightning fast games with no slowdown. PC users halfway expect bugs and long load times and frame rate stutter--or even frighteningly bad frame rates--from PC games. And so when they deal with the inherent unreliability of playing networked games, with all the joy of lag and dropped connections, they're used to it. But this isn't going to fly well with console gamers. There's no 100% bulletproof way to make a 60fps game play over the internet. No matter what you do, you're either going to get frame rate stutter (because the clients are in-step with the server) or phantom hits and misses (because the client is extrapolating to make things *seem* smoother). And this is goimg to be a mess. As it is, most PC gamers don't have a clue about what lag really is, and they seem to think that it's the fault of the developer. Heck, now the term "lag" is applied to non-networked situations: "Black & White lags on my Pentium II."
Developers would best steer clear of the whole mess, unless they're going to write low-latency games like The Sims. But that's not what the console market wants or is expecting.
Great. If there's egomaniac bigger than Wolfram, then it's Kurzweil. Actually, Kurzweil is on his own level, constantly inventing goofy terms to expound upon his wacky brain-in-a-jar theories that completely and utterly ignore the fact that both AI researchers and brain theorists aren't making the slightest bit of headway toward his vision of the near future.
It's interesting how most of the questions have a self-serving angle, as if the asker is just trying to get Mr. Cox to agree with him. And moreso, those questions were exactly what you'd expect from zealots without much real-life experience. Someone actually thought that "open source" was the worlds largest grassroots organization? And I love the guy who sees PC has being "open." Open in what sense? Do you have the VHDL for your Athlon or GeForce 2? Is being able to swap one overpriced video card with a bad driver for another really all that empowering?
Kudos to Alan for some level-headed responses, given the loons who asked questions.
Slashdot Mirror
I want an ACTUAL STORYLINE, scripted events,
So you're saying you want a linear game. No thanks.
Not that I dislike their music, but comparing them to Brittney Spears or Mariah is like comparing apples to apples.
:P
And that would be why I said "when, in fact, there's no difference"
This in fact goes right against your argument - what YOU think of as underground music is actually REALLY mainstream...
I don't think that at all. You misread my post.
Neat? Yes. High tech. Yes? But so completely different what everyone is used to using that no one cares. Or at least no one expects it to be a replacement for the status quo.
outside of college radio stations, there's nothing left worth listening to, and this tells you why.
Nonsense. You might mean "only college stations play the kind of music I like," which certainly doesn't mean that other stations suck. Or you might mean that many commercial stations have short, safe playlists. But then there are stations that don't fit that mold.
This is just like the overgeneralization that commercial music sucks, when you'll find instead that all of the music played on college stations is, in fact, commercial. The myth among anti-media geeks is that CDs from Britney Spears and Mariah Carey are put out by Evil Money Grubbing Corporations, while music from Chemical Brothers and Radiohead is put out by Independent Freedom Loving Hippies. When, in fact, there's no difference.
Simple. Next time you put together a computer, buy a chipset for DDR-II, but only put pc2100 memory in. Then, six months later, buy screaming fast DDR-II memory. Sure it'll cost you more in the long run, but you'll have upgraded your RAM successfully. Or you could do like everybody else and buy more RAM rather than faster to make your upgrade.
And then some new memory system will be announced that needs a new motherboard anyway.
It's time the myth of the upgradable PC was put to rest.
I remember how big robotics was supposed to become, and how they would replace all our industrial workers...
And so they did to a great extent. Have you ever seen the assembly line at any auto manufacturerer? Just because a robot doesn't walk on two legs and push a vaccuum doesn't mean it isn't a sophisticated robot.
No amount of P3 opts will speed up gcc though, what we need are string functions in the CPU, we have had enough matrix/mmx/3d shit added to the cpu, how about some real optimized memory type funcs()s
You mean like the string functions that were in the original 8088 and 8086? Heh. They're still there, just generally slower than emulating them with simpler instructions. movsd is still lightning fast, though. What more do you want?
Look, this is simple. Bandwidth is expensive, or at least it's not the free resource everyone likes to think that it is. You ever look at the prices for T1 lines? They're expensive for a reason. Some of that is gouging, sure, the bottom line is that *somebody* is paying for crazy-high bandwidth. Cable ISPs started out with cheap prices to attract customers, then the realization hit that they couldn't keep it up forever. This is not a surprise to anyone except college students who are used to having "free" high bandwidth connections in their dorm rooms.
I gather that the Itanium philosophy is to transfer the complexity to the compiler. The question is, how good are the compilers now? At the moment, it looks like a real bastard of a job putting together a decent one for any Itanium series. That VLIW stuff looks like it needs to be spot on every time to get the performance (don't do 3 fp ops in a row).
Solid information content: 0
Repetition of things heard elsewhere: 10
Hopefully as price drops and more people purchase the pIV chip the power of the chip will become more and more applicable. At first look the pIV may look like a bomb, a dud, a slow chip. But, the chip has great potential which is yet to be realized. As more and more applications are made available which are optimized for the pIV we'll really start to see this chip shine.
I'm sure you have a heart full of hope when you say that, but don't hold your breath. Speaking as a developer, you get much bigger increases from across the board optimizations than twiddling around with chip specific tweaks. It just doesn't pay off. "When the code is optimized for processor XXX" has been a standard line since the Pentium II days, and it just hasn't been true in practice. Heck, nobody is optimizing for the Pentium III yet!
This is ridiculous. One Ultra Huge Heavily Marketed Movie is beating another Ultra Huge Heavily Marketed Movie and you're trying to read some sort of deep changing of the guard theme into it? Is this even worth disucssing? Both movies are making more money than 50 Slasdotters combined will make in their entire lifetimes. How can this be reasonably talked about?
When you sign up for their service, you pay for a certain speed for a certain ammount of $/month. Whether or not you use that is your business - you paid for it, its yours to use. If comcast is running out of bandwidth, its their fault - they oversold without proper planning.
That's not how it works, sorry. If Comcast--or any ISP--assumed the worst, that each user would be transferring some massive amount of data per month--then they just couldn't handle it. And no ISP in existence could either. There isn't enough bandwidth for that.
Phone companies have done the same thing for years. You *assume* that when you pick up the phone you will have a free line, but if everyone picked up the phone at the same time then many--even the majority--would not get lines. Phone companies plan for phone calls of certain lengths, and they have to worry about exceptions like radio call-in contests and Mother's Day (the day with the most phone traffic).
What about Linux, for example? Come on. This can't be serious.
Linux is simply a version of UNIX, and UNIX was created by a large corporation: Bell Labs. It could easily be argued that UNIX would never have been written in the first place, had some brilliant people not been able to work on it full-time. When you have the funding to make something your day job, you can get a lot more done than working late nights and weekends.
As far as I can tell, these people have, respectively "invented" Linux, Perl and Vim, which are respectively marginal improvements (in certain senses) of UNIX, AWK, and ed/sed.
I'd argue that Perl is a much greater leap than the other two. Linux basically is just an Open Source version of UNIX (though I know it pains many young 'uns to admit this), and vim is vi with some extra features. But Perl was fundamentally new in many ways, unless you want to get into one of those "all books only have seven plots" discussions.
Of course while Perl may have initially been created by Larry Wall, dozens and dozens of people have had a hand in it since then.
id rather see the local band at the bar who has never been signed, now ever will be! if you were good, you wouldnt need to make your money off of radio promotion, youd promote your self nofx/grateful dead/phish... and make money by winning your fans at tours, by being a good show.
That's naive, and you're extrapolating a couple of exceptions to the rule (i.e. Phish) into the general case. In any little town, you'll find half a dozen really good bands that may be better than what you hear on the radio, and there are fifty thousand such towns. But it is really, really hard to turn that into a full-time living. You play some bars for a pittance, you sell a couple of CDs per show, and that's hardly enough money to buy equipment, go on tour, and record your next album. It isn't just a matter of being good. It's a matter of getting some backing and marketing help so you can get a wider audience. I know that's not how it works in your idealistic world, but that's how things work in this world.
This is going to majorly affect my life as a geek! Now I can convert all my friends to Linux, because they all love Sherwin-Williams!
Seriously, I don't know how any of this matters to anyone. UNIX has always been a behind-the-scenes OS, and Linux is certainly not the underground geeks-only OS that many geeks so badly want it to be, so why does this matter at all?
Labels are totally unnecessary in this equation; at least one quarter of the bands I listen to are self-produced and unsigned anyway.
Which means that 3/4 of them are not. Selling music by yourself is a tough gig. If a band can get financial support from a label, then that lets them devote time to touring and recording. It's much better than having to do it on the side while holding down a full-time job. You make very little money selling your own music and playing local venues.
Now, if only the artists would break away totally from the record labels, everything would be great.
Great. And then most of the bands you love you would never have even heard of.
I agree, this is pretty impressive from a technological standpoint. But in many ways it's also starting to look less like a computer game and more like a bad B-movie released straight to your local Blockbuster. It looks like some guy running around his house with a video camera. Impressive? To a programmer, yes. But to someone used to watching movies, it looks hugely cheesy. At least typical 3D games tend to be more like comic books, rather than bad imitations of reality. The characters in Doom 3 now look like smooth, well-lit...GI Joe action figures.
We have this 3-5 pound computer sitting in our heads that is so powerful that we can't emulate it with any success.
Yeah, and just try computing factorial 200 with your brain, or solving systems of 5000 equations, or indexing the web.
The brain and computer hardware are two different things, each with its own strengths.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this article is taking the Microsoft Domination angle. Sony is going to take the domination route too, of course. Console makers want tight control over everything (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo can reject games because they don't like the concept), and naturally that includes networks. But this is ignoring the bigger issue.
Console gamers have gotten used to lightning fast games with no slowdown. PC users halfway expect bugs and long load times and frame rate stutter--or even frighteningly bad frame rates--from PC games. And so when they deal with the inherent unreliability of playing networked games, with all the joy of lag and dropped connections, they're used to it. But this isn't going to fly well with console gamers. There's no 100% bulletproof way to make a 60fps game play over the internet. No matter what you do, you're either going to get frame rate stutter (because the clients are in-step with the server) or phantom hits and misses (because the client is extrapolating to make things *seem* smoother). And this is goimg to be a mess. As it is, most PC gamers don't have a clue about what lag really is, and they seem to think that it's the fault of the developer. Heck, now the term "lag" is applied to non-networked situations: "Black & White lags on my Pentium II."
Developers would best steer clear of the whole mess, unless they're going to write low-latency games like The Sims. But that's not what the console market wants or is expecting.
Well thought out review [kurzweilai.net]
Great. If there's egomaniac bigger than Wolfram, then it's Kurzweil. Actually, Kurzweil is on his own level, constantly inventing goofy terms to expound upon his wacky brain-in-a-jar theories that completely and utterly ignore the fact that both AI researchers and brain theorists aren't making the slightest bit of headway toward his vision of the near future.
We have seen many things in the last two years that outperform silicon based transistors.
Brings to mind the IBM research about Gallium Arsenide chips from 15 or so years ago. This is nothing new.
It's interesting how most of the questions have a self-serving angle, as if the asker is just trying to get Mr. Cox to agree with him. And moreso, those questions were exactly what you'd expect from zealots without much real-life experience. Someone actually thought that "open source" was the worlds largest grassroots organization? And I love the guy who sees PC has being "open." Open in what sense? Do you have the VHDL for your Athlon or GeForce 2? Is being able to swap one overpriced video card with a bad driver for another really all that empowering?
Kudos to Alan for some level-headed responses, given the loons who asked questions.