Read again: he said "People would pay with a money order with no return address and no note of what it was", which would kind of make it hard to associate it with the name and return address.
I must have missed out on the complimentary 'behave like an asshole' chip installation that's supposed to come with your first ISP account since it wouldn't occur to me to leave negative feedback without EMailing them first.
Also, I look for negative comments in a sellers rating because I want to know if the guy might rip me off, not to discover that he can't read minds.
If we don't have someone like the W3C putting this stuff in writing somewhere, how else are we going to have a hope in hell of browsers talking to each other?
Should everyone just copy whatever Microsoft comes up with, because lets face it, they have the largest userbase? Somehow I don't see people here appreciating that.
I mean sure, you can say "wah wah, Microsoft didn't follow the standards, wah wah, Opera doesn't do this yet, this standards system is flawed!" but if there is no reference point for any of these things, how could you possibly expect things to improve?
One thing that's obvious is that these technologies are needed, not just silly ideas implemented by bored programmers, so if they're going to exist, then better an appropriate committee come up with workable drafts than a lone company goes ahead and does what they feel like. (heck that's one of the main reasons MS came up with so much funky spec breaking stuff - call it embrace and extend if you want, but they wanted to do things before the standards were there, which is why we have this mess)
Or are you really demanding we all take a nice big step backwards and remove the capacity for client side scripting because you're a caveman and can't understand what it's used for?
Do you think javascript == popup windows? The open window call is abused, and I'd like to see the spec implement some kind of suggested behaviour along the lines of disregarding popups that aren't user activated (Mozillia already does a great job of this, but making it part of the spec would be superior) but to lose client based scripting would be a blow to the usability of the Internet and the palette of web designers trying to make intelligent sites.
Client side form validation, adapting pages, and heck, even silly stuff like graphical rollovers which you can't do in CSS yet, are all things the Internet benefits from. Only an idiot would fail to anticipate how their page would work to users who don't have Javascript turned on, but it can make the experience run that much nicer and efficiently.
Not to mention that nuking Javascript, an open, standards based, accessible language, will simply promote the use of obnoxious propriety technology like Flash.
There are other people making these points, it's not up to every site and every person to try and shoulder the entire argument, the list was simply pointing out some absurd ramifications.
Average guy on the street might not understand what you're trying to say about amendment violations, 'a threat to Americas freedom' might be difficult for some people to grasp, but pointing out that this bill to 'stop those nasty pirates' is worded so broad that it will apply to baby monitors and answering machines, has a fair bit of impact.
It's just another way to point out the utter lunacy of it all. It all helps.
I think there's a fundamental flaw with generalising from what is essentially the second hand market into a commercial enterprise.
Sure, you can buy a book, rip pages out write things in it and sell it to someone who knows and understands what you've done. But what if you made a business out of it? You bought the books in bulk, had automated page ripper outers and printers that put your comments in, then wanted to resell them? Do you see anything wrong with that?
What if there was a book and you ripped out the pages to make sections of it appear completely out of context, and then resold it to the masses? That's what it gets down with, you're screwing with someone's creative vision, you're messing with their fundamental right to have their work expressed in the way they want to it be expressed.
What if there was a movie that was trying to deal with a sensitive and delicate subject, and you decide to omit some key lines? How about just dubbing over some parts? Is subtracting elements any different from adding? Could someone make a business where they splice some copyright free porn into a Disney film and sell them? Can anyone see why Disney would be legitimately concerned by this?
What right does a commercial venture have to modify someone else's work and re-release it? They want to build a business model on maiming films.
I know most of you guys here are probably more familiar with coding, which is a lot more practical, functional, and so resists analogies to 'artistic integrity', but movies, books or artwork aren't a loose collection of discreet objects, the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts, and the thought of some company butchering films to appease the morally righteous, is disturbing.
I consider there to be an important difference between someone's right to choose how they experience a product, and someone's right to make a business out of altering someone else's copyrighted material and reselling it. If they want to sell altered films, get the film makers authorisation. Otherwise they should be telling their customers to go watch something G rated in the first place.
Don't forget all the agro posters arguing why the electric car that charges itself up as it goes along isn't a perpetual motion machine because they didn't state it explicitly in the article.
I think it's more a case that people are being realistic about the real science, but the pseudo science "I have no qualifications but I broke the Laws of Thermodynamics in my bath tub" articles brings out all the crystal waving kooks.
"Overall, Cg is not a generic language for graphics programming; it is a language for NVIDIA's current generation of graphics card."
Well, what does anyone expect! Cg is a tool to help developers take advantage of pixel and vertex shaders *today*. And which pixel and vertex shaders do they know best? NVidia stated in their original press announcement that it would work across DirectX and OpenGL, as well as with other pixel and vertex shaders that comply with the specifications and even mentioned that other chip makers would be able to optimise the compiler for their particular hardware.
The games industry moves along at a rocket pace, it's all about performance and getting the most out of the hardware right now. I applaud NVidia for actually doing something for today, rather than just talking about how great things are going to be tomorrow, and fail to see why leaving features unimplemented is a cardinal sin when they're not available in their current generation of chips.
Reading their press release, I don't know what the hell Codeplay want. Some attention maybe.
I found the stuff at the start about physics in general interesting, but the movie reviews themselves left a bit of a sour taste.
I think you're right, he's basically picking at what he feels like rather than taking an honest look at the physics in films. And his criticisms of the time travel in Terminator 2? What was that about, we don't have time travel, we don't even have a leading theory for how time travel might work, they didn't try to techno babble us, so what's the problem?
In my opinion, nitpicking and criticisms should be reserved for the times when films get it wrong when they didn't need to - a bit of research, a consultant or two could have patched their movie without any problems. That's the stuff I find most unforgivable, blasting people for speculating about future physics seems a bit mean.
If people don't apply patches, fixes, updates and security recommendations, then Microsoft could have released a fix in 2 seconds, and it still won't do any good.
Linux and other open source software aren't impervious to bugs being discovered either, they just respond faster - so the lesson here is simply "if you're an idiot, you can get '0wn3d' on any OS".
Yeah it sucks that Microsoft take two months to fix an exploit, but if it only affects a service that would have been switched off already if you followed instructions, then it's not *that* big of a deal.
But benchmarks and user experience also tend back up AMD's claims.
Yeah, "benchmarks != real world performance" or whatever, but it's more honest for AMD to try and provide the consumer numbers that reflect what they're meant to be equivalent to than simply list their MHz.
What do you expect them to do, sit there and take a PR hit for no good reason just because they don't have the clockspeed? MHz is a silly performance indicator, and AMD's XP naming series is a hack, but it's not like there's any other catchy bite size indicators waiting in the wings anyway.
So? In hindsight it's easy to pick the stuff that turned out to be bogus, like if I went on about people thinking an atomic weapon would ignite the atmosphere.
Does the fact that some people were wrong about not being able to travel faster than 20mph mean that some other people's cries about the danger of radiation should be ignored? It makes no sense, and speaking for myself, "well people often get funny ideas that don't pan out" won't sound very consoling if I or someone I care for comes down with mobile phone caused brain cancer because at the time they "just didn't know", and more importantly, dismissed anyone who queried the impact as a crackpot.
What should we learn from this? That those mercury skin treatments are great! And asbestos is a great material to use everywhere! And that we'll control those pesky bugs by introducing their natural predator, the canetoad!
Yeah, GIF got blown away, it's now scrapped and we use JP(E)G for everything.
... unless you need a graphic to be transparent.
... or want it to animate
... or if you're building template/navigation elements that you don't want marred by artifacts
... or if you're displaying cartoons, technical drawings or anything else that doesn't have many colours but needs to be sharp
This "JPEG is better than GIF so it replaced it" stuff is crazy, you might as well claim "forks are better than knives" or "spanners are better than hammers".
They're complimentary formats, unlike ARJ vs ZIP or MP3 vs Ogg Vorbis. JPEG vs GIF is more like MP3 vs MIDI. (actually that's a reasonable analogy)
I think the distinction is that a lot of people were 'exposed' to the spoiler without any warning, and from an unexpected source. I don't think anyone's ever equated freedom of information with freedom for information to jump out and force itself on you.
If you went hunting for X Files information, fair enough that it's your fault if you see something you didn't want to read. But Slashdot reporting significant tv show plot twists before the episode even aired in some parts of America? It's a screwup, plain and simple.
"Oh, it's just a TV show, how trivial, get over it!" - if it's so trivial, what's it doing being reported on Slashdot? The only reason why it was posted was because it was important to a reasonable segment of Slashdot's userbase!
Slashdot Mirror
Read again: he said "People would pay with a money order with no return address and no note of what it was", which would kind of make it hard to associate it with the name and return address.
I must have missed out on the complimentary 'behave like an asshole' chip installation that's supposed to come with your first ISP account since it wouldn't occur to me to leave negative feedback without EMailing them first.
Also, I look for negative comments in a sellers rating because I want to know if the guy might rip me off, not to discover that he can't read minds.
If we don't have someone like the W3C putting this stuff in writing somewhere, how else are we going to have a hope in hell of browsers talking to each other?
Should everyone just copy whatever Microsoft comes up with, because lets face it, they have the largest userbase? Somehow I don't see people here appreciating that.
I mean sure, you can say "wah wah, Microsoft didn't follow the standards, wah wah, Opera doesn't do this yet, this standards system is flawed!" but if there is no reference point for any of these things, how could you possibly expect things to improve?
One thing that's obvious is that these technologies are needed, not just silly ideas implemented by bored programmers, so if they're going to exist, then better an appropriate committee come up with workable drafts than a lone company goes ahead and does what they feel like. (heck that's one of the main reasons MS came up with so much funky spec breaking stuff - call it embrace and extend if you want, but they wanted to do things before the standards were there, which is why we have this mess)
Or are you really demanding we all take a nice big step backwards and remove the capacity for client side scripting because you're a caveman and can't understand what it's used for?
Do you think javascript == popup windows? The open window call is abused, and I'd like to see the spec implement some kind of suggested behaviour along the lines of disregarding popups that aren't user activated (Mozillia already does a great job of this, but making it part of the spec would be superior) but to lose client based scripting would be a blow to the usability of the Internet and the palette of web designers trying to make intelligent sites.
Client side form validation, adapting pages, and heck, even silly stuff like graphical rollovers which you can't do in CSS yet, are all things the Internet benefits from. Only an idiot would fail to anticipate how their page would work to users who don't have Javascript turned on, but it can make the experience run that much nicer and efficiently.
Not to mention that nuking Javascript, an open, standards based, accessible language, will simply promote the use of obnoxious propriety technology like Flash.
There are other people making these points, it's not up to every site and every person to try and shoulder the entire argument, the list was simply pointing out some absurd ramifications.
Average guy on the street might not understand what you're trying to say about amendment violations, 'a threat to Americas freedom' might be difficult for some people to grasp, but pointing out that this bill to 'stop those nasty pirates' is worded so broad that it will apply to baby monitors and answering machines, has a fair bit of impact.
It's just another way to point out the utter lunacy of it all. It all helps.
I think there's a fundamental flaw with generalising from what is essentially the second hand market into a commercial enterprise.
Sure, you can buy a book, rip pages out write things in it and sell it to someone who knows and understands what you've done. But what if you made a business out of it? You bought the books in bulk, had automated page ripper outers and printers that put your comments in, then wanted to resell them? Do you see anything wrong with that?
What if there was a book and you ripped out the pages to make sections of it appear completely out of context, and then resold it to the masses? That's what it gets down with, you're screwing with someone's creative vision, you're messing with their fundamental right to have their work expressed in the way they want to it be expressed.
What if there was a movie that was trying to deal with a sensitive and delicate subject, and you decide to omit some key lines? How about just dubbing over some parts? Is subtracting elements any different from adding? Could someone make a business where they splice some copyright free porn into a Disney film and sell them? Can anyone see why Disney would be legitimately concerned by this?
What right does a commercial venture have to modify someone else's work and re-release it? They want to build a business model on maiming films.
I know most of you guys here are probably more familiar with coding, which is a lot more practical, functional, and so resists analogies to 'artistic integrity', but movies, books or artwork aren't a loose collection of discreet objects, the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts, and the thought of some company butchering films to appease the morally righteous, is disturbing.
I consider there to be an important difference between someone's right to choose how they experience a product, and someone's right to make a business out of altering someone else's copyrighted material and reselling it. If they want to sell altered films, get the film makers authorisation. Otherwise they should be telling their customers to go watch something G rated in the first place.
Ingo Molnar is credited in the summary (try the top of the page) as being the major contributor to the project.
It's nice you got half of the reference, anyway.
Don't forget all the agro posters arguing why the electric car that charges itself up as it goes along isn't a perpetual motion machine because they didn't state it explicitly in the article.
I think it's more a case that people are being realistic about the real science, but the pseudo science "I have no qualifications but I broke the Laws of Thermodynamics in my bath tub" articles brings out all the crystal waving kooks.
Quote from the article :
"Overall, Cg is not a generic language for graphics programming; it is a language for NVIDIA's current generation of graphics card."
Well, what does anyone expect! Cg is a tool to help developers take advantage of pixel and vertex shaders *today*. And which pixel and vertex shaders do they know best? NVidia stated in their original press announcement that it would work across DirectX and OpenGL, as well as with other pixel and vertex shaders that comply with the specifications and even mentioned that other chip makers would be able to optimise the compiler for their particular hardware.
The games industry moves along at a rocket pace, it's all about performance and getting the most out of the hardware right now. I applaud NVidia for actually doing something for today, rather than just talking about how great things are going to be tomorrow, and fail to see why leaving features unimplemented is a cardinal sin when they're not available in their current generation of chips.
Reading their press release, I don't know what the hell Codeplay want. Some attention maybe.
I found the stuff at the start about physics in general interesting, but the movie reviews themselves left a bit of a sour taste.
I think you're right, he's basically picking at what he feels like rather than taking an honest look at the physics in films. And his criticisms of the time travel in Terminator 2? What was that about, we don't have time travel, we don't even have a leading theory for how time travel might work, they didn't try to techno babble us, so what's the problem?
In my opinion, nitpicking and criticisms should be reserved for the times when films get it wrong when they didn't need to - a bit of research, a consultant or two could have patched their movie without any problems. That's the stuff I find most unforgivable, blasting people for speculating about future physics seems a bit mean.
Well, I know it's pretty minor, but there *was* that part where Jango Fett said they were 'seismic charges'.
Maybe he lied to trick us.
If people don't apply patches, fixes, updates and security recommendations, then Microsoft could have released a fix in 2 seconds, and it still won't do any good.
Linux and other open source software aren't impervious to bugs being discovered either, they just respond faster - so the lesson here is simply "if you're an idiot, you can get '0wn3d' on any OS".
Yeah it sucks that Microsoft take two months to fix an exploit, but if it only affects a service that would have been switched off already if you followed instructions, then it's not *that* big of a deal.
Last time I checked no one was forcing you to click the thumbnails. ;)
But benchmarks and user experience also tend back up AMD's claims.
Yeah, "benchmarks != real world performance" or whatever, but it's more honest for AMD to try and provide the consumer numbers that reflect what they're meant to be equivalent to than simply list their MHz.
What do you expect them to do, sit there and take a PR hit for no good reason just because they don't have the clockspeed? MHz is a silly performance indicator, and AMD's XP naming series is a hack, but it's not like there's any other catchy bite size indicators waiting in the wings anyway.
So? In hindsight it's easy to pick the stuff that turned out to be bogus, like if I went on about people thinking an atomic weapon would ignite the atmosphere.
Does the fact that some people were wrong about not being able to travel faster than 20mph mean that some other people's cries about the danger of radiation should be ignored? It makes no sense, and speaking for myself, "well people often get funny ideas that don't pan out" won't sound very consoling if I or someone I care for comes down with mobile phone caused brain cancer because at the time they "just didn't know", and more importantly, dismissed anyone who queried the impact as a crackpot.
What should we learn from this? That those mercury skin treatments are great! And asbestos is a great material to use everywhere! And that we'll control those pesky bugs by introducing their natural predator, the canetoad!
Yeah, GIF got blown away, it's now scrapped and we use JP(E)G for everything.
... unless you need a graphic to be transparent.
... or want it to animate
... or if you're building template/navigation elements that you don't want marred by artifacts
... or if you're displaying cartoons, technical drawings or anything else that doesn't have many colours but needs to be sharp
This "JPEG is better than GIF so it replaced it" stuff is crazy, you might as well claim "forks are better than knives" or "spanners are better than hammers".
They're complimentary formats, unlike ARJ vs ZIP or MP3 vs Ogg Vorbis. JPEG vs GIF is more like MP3 vs MIDI. (actually that's a reasonable analogy)
I think the distinction is that a lot of people were 'exposed' to the spoiler without any warning, and from an unexpected source. I don't think anyone's ever equated freedom of information with freedom for information to jump out and force itself on you.
If you went hunting for X Files information, fair enough that it's your fault if you see something you didn't want to read. But Slashdot reporting significant tv show plot twists before the episode even aired in some parts of America? It's a screwup, plain and simple.
"Oh, it's just a TV show, how trivial, get over it!" - if it's so trivial, what's it doing being reported on Slashdot? The only reason why it was posted was because it was important to a reasonable segment of Slashdot's userbase!
Yeah, that's a pretty stupid, unhelpful image for what's supposed to be a serious topic.
But I found a diagram that explains it much better. (bottom left frame)