...is that developers shouldn't HAVE to develop for specific hardware. I don't work in the game industry specifically, but I don't see how this is necessarily good for software in general, or graphics software in particular. This doesn't give developers "more choice in the hardware they develop for" It gives them less choice, because they have to decide how to allocate limited resources on a per-platform basis. When you have a common API, you're not forced to choose in the first place. That's why hardware specific features and capabilities ought to be abstracted-out into a common API. What these guys should do is come up with a dozen or so different kinds of high-level magic (e.g. water waves, flame, smoke,bullet-holes, whatever) that they can work with their pixel and vertex shaders, lobby Microsoft to get that magic incorporated into the DirectX spec, and then supply drivers that meet those specs by sending a few pre-packaged routines to the pixel/vertex shaders, rather than have game developers worry about this stuff directly. Or am I missing something?
...is not likely to operate under a profit motive. And therefore they are not likely to be profitable. And therefore they will eventually go bankrupt. And therefore the courts will liquidate their assets. And we know what happens then.
...that they are worried that China may gain access to the CSS encryption technology that the MPAA relies on to protect its profits. They probably figure that piracy will run rampant if China gets a hold of this. To address your point about Acer, I guess the DVD-ROM drives themselves don't do the decryption, otherwise DeCSS wouldn't have any significance whatsoever.
Of course, if they think that no one in China has managed to get his/her hands on DeCSS by now, they're kidding themselves.
No, but apparently you are, because you completely misunderstood what I said. I did not suggest that the compiler should interpret a single syntax in two different ways. I said that a language should not have two different meanings be represented by deceptively similar constructs.
In C++, the preprocessor by itself is a Turing environment
Huh??? The pre-processor has no concept of iteration. I.e., you can't loop. Please provide some proof, or cite some reference, which shows that the C++ preprocessor (just C++? is the C preprocessor substantially deficient relative to C++?) is equivalent to a Turing machine.
Nonsense. BY DEFINITION, the threshold of hearing , which is the faintest sound the average person can hear, is zero dB (decibels). 2.5 bells, or 25 decibells, is a sound pressure 10 ^ 2.5, or 316 times as large as the threshold of hearing.
Who says that a complex problem needs a high number of state changes?
</em>
<p>
Well, we could argue about how complex is "complex", and how high is "high", but that's missing the point.
<p>
The outcome of a travelling salesman problem is not a state change, unless you think you can solve the problem by flipping a bit. Even if you use the physical analogue of creating lengths of strings tied together at the various city nodes and pull the "cities" in question until the strings are tight and selecting the tight path, every atom moving in the process is a state change.
<p>
And even if you prove that P=NP, you still need an algorithm that traverses the data, examines it, compares different links, etc, and every step in the algorithm is AT LEAST a state change.
I think you may have missed my point, though. Moore's law is sort of an "anti-limit". It's exactly unlike the physical "laws" which place limits on things because Moore's law implies that there is no limit (doubling every 1.5 years, yada yada yada).
The physics limitations apply to massively parallel machines as well. Read the article. Multiple CPU's still work by changing state. If you've got a million CPU's, and together they weigh less than a kilogram, they all have a collective maximum number of state changes per second as computed in the article for an arbitrary device of that mass.
> there might be very different approaches
> (regarding computational power) to use the
> physics for building fast computers
Different from what? Like I said, the discussion relied on no particular form of technology. The only assumption is that a computer system must "change state" in order to perform any computation. And a computer is basically a "finite state machine". And if you think a computer can compute something without changing state, then how will you know when it's produced the intended result?
No, the limitations that technology can overcome are engineering limitations. The limitations talked about in the article are basic fundamental physics limitations that don't depend on any particular form of technology. Note that nowhere is it said that the problem is the size of the tracings on the microchip, or heat dissipation, or whatever. It's all a matter of any physical system having a bounded energy having a corresponding bounded rate of state change. Saying that there will be another technological revolution that surpasses this is like saying we'll be able to cool things below absolute zero when we figure out how to build better condensing coils for our refrigerators.
Speeding may be a crime from the government's perspective, but it's a violation of a contract from the company's perspective. You are not at risk, currently in the situation under discussion, of being thrown in jail or charged with a criminal violation because of this technology. You are being charged a fee for using their property beyond specifications.
Incorrectness in the above reply
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 2
The elipses in your quote, "... no onboard ethernet", refer to, in part, the reference board. The article does not state, contrary to what you way, that the reference board has on-board ethernet. The fact that the chipset supports it is another matter. But then you knew this, given the last paragraph in your reply in which you draw the distinction between the number of PCI slots on the ref board and the number supported by the chipset.
Is the Simpsons really worthy of this? If they came out with a reasonably-priced boxed set of the entire Star Trek original series, I'd go out and buy a DVD player. But the Simpsons?
I have never had a pilot deny permission to use a GPS on board, for the last twenty of my flights.
Why are you constantly tracking your position every time you get on an airplane? You already know where you are: You are on an airplane. Leave the airplane's position up to the navigator and watch the damn movie.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you want to have your taxes raised to pay for anti-virus software for everyone?
...then the next Edmund Pope will die of bone cancer in a Russian jail.
...is that developers shouldn't HAVE to develop for specific hardware. I don't work in the game industry specifically, but I don't see how this is necessarily good for software in general, or graphics software in particular. This doesn't give developers "more choice in the hardware they develop for" It gives them less choice, because they have to decide how to allocate limited resources on a per-platform basis. When you have a common API, you're not forced to choose in the first place. That's why hardware specific features and capabilities ought to be abstracted-out into a common API. What these guys should do is come up with a dozen or so different kinds of high-level magic (e.g. water waves, flame, smoke,bullet-holes, whatever) that they can work with their pixel and vertex shaders, lobby Microsoft to get that magic incorporated into the DirectX spec, and then supply drivers that meet those specs by sending a few pre-packaged routines to the pixel/vertex shaders, rather than have game developers worry about this stuff directly. Or am I missing something?
...is not likely to operate under a profit motive. And therefore they are not likely to be profitable. And therefore they will eventually go bankrupt. And therefore the courts will liquidate their assets. And we know what happens then.
...that they are worried that China may gain access to the CSS encryption technology that the MPAA relies on to protect its profits. They probably figure that piracy will run rampant if China gets a hold of this. To address your point about Acer, I guess the DVD-ROM drives themselves don't do the decryption, otherwise DeCSS wouldn't have any significance whatsoever.
Of course, if they think that no one in China has managed to get his/her hands on DeCSS by now, they're kidding themselves.
I think it just means that .NET won't allow you to use more than one speaker.
No, but apparently you are, because you completely misunderstood what I said. I did not suggest that the compiler should interpret a single syntax in two different ways. I said that a language should not have two different meanings be represented by deceptively similar constructs.
Yes, but in a well-designed language, "a=b" and "a==b" wouldn't both be completely legal and yet have completely different meanings.
Huh??? The pre-processor has no concept of iteration. I.e., you can't loop. Please provide some proof, or cite some reference, which shows that the C++ preprocessor (just C++? is the C preprocessor substantially deficient relative to C++?) is equivalent to a Turing machine.
Nonsense. BY DEFINITION, the threshold of hearing , which is the faintest sound the average person can hear, is zero dB (decibels). 2.5 bells, or 25 decibells, is a sound pressure 10 ^ 2.5, or 316 times as large as the threshold of hearing.
Who says that a complex problem needs a high number of state changes?
</em>
<p>
Well, we could argue about how complex is "complex", and how high is "high", but that's missing the point.
<p>
The outcome of a travelling salesman problem is not a state change, unless you think you can solve the problem by flipping a bit. Even if you use the physical analogue of creating lengths of strings tied together at the various city nodes and pull the "cities" in question until the strings are tight and selecting the tight path, every atom moving in the process is a state change.
<p>
And even if you prove that P=NP, you still need an algorithm that traverses the data, examines it, compares different links, etc, and every step in the algorithm is AT LEAST a state change.
I think you may have missed my point, though. Moore's law is sort of an "anti-limit". It's exactly unlike the physical "laws" which place limits on things because Moore's law implies that there is no limit (doubling every 1.5 years, yada yada yada).
The physics limitations apply to massively parallel machines as well. Read the article. Multiple CPU's still work by changing state. If you've got a million CPU's, and together they weigh less than a kilogram, they all have a collective maximum number of state changes per second as computed in the article for an arbitrary device of that mass.
> there might be very different approaches
> (regarding computational power) to use the
> physics for building fast computers
Different from what? Like I said, the discussion relied on no particular form of technology. The only assumption is that a computer system must "change state" in order to perform any computation. And a computer is basically a "finite state machine". And if you think a computer can compute something without changing state, then how will you know when it's produced the intended result?
> There are thermodynamic limits to this (kinda
> like Moore's law).
I think you meant to say, "almost, but not quite, entirely UNlike Moore's Law".
No, the limitations that technology can overcome are engineering limitations. The limitations talked about in the article are basic fundamental physics limitations that don't depend on any particular form of technology. Note that nowhere is it said that the problem is the size of the tracings on the microchip, or heat dissipation, or whatever. It's all a matter of any physical system having a bounded energy having a corresponding bounded rate of state change. Saying that there will be another technological revolution that surpasses this is like saying we'll be able to cool things below absolute zero when we figure out how to build better condensing coils for our refrigerators.
Now that they are no longer "in the red", so to speak, I wonder if they will change their name to "BlackHat", and become a security consulting firm.
No, that's not all there is to it. Context matters:
Context is important, and using someone else's trademark in a domain name is not as cut and dried as you seem to imply.
Not really
Speeding may be a crime from the government's perspective, but it's a violation of a contract from the company's perspective. You are not at risk, currently in the situation under discussion, of being thrown in jail or charged with a criminal violation because of this technology. You are being charged a fee for using their property beyond specifications.
The elipses in your quote, "... no onboard ethernet", refer to, in part, the reference board. The article does not state, contrary to what you way, that the reference board has on-board ethernet. The fact that the chipset supports it is another matter. But then you knew this, given the last paragraph in your reply in which you draw the distinction between the number of PCI slots on the ref board and the number supported by the chipset.
Is the Simpsons really worthy of this? If they came out with a reasonably-priced boxed set of the entire Star Trek original series, I'd go out and buy a DVD player. But the Simpsons?
Just what the heck is a "square foot of compressed anti-matter"? You measure mass in *area*?
Why are you constantly tracking your position every time you get on an airplane? You already know where you are: You are on an airplane. Leave the airplane's position up to the navigator and watch the damn movie.