Yep. With an onboard computer that eats 5-10 percent of your engine power, and is needlessly prone to causing random things to fail in your car. And might, some day, some of the time, stop you from robbing a bank. Maybe.
It's not the DRM that'd piss me off (none of my users are paid to care about audio, period) but the dodginess with Adobe (and presumably others). What nobody seems to have noted yet is that in order for Windows 7 to pick up that you've warezed your CS4, one of two things needs to be occuring:
- Windows 7 ships with a secret blacklist of known warez MD5s/SHA1s. Make it a rolling hash a-la rsync for maximal anti-warezing.
or, worse again
- Microsoft have a secret API (not a huge surprise here) that they've shared with a few 'trusted' software OEMs such as Adobe. CS4 and friends register the MD5s (or whatever) of their more likely warez vectors, and an expanded version of WFP (in a 'protected' process a-la PVP-OPM in vista) makes sure you don't fuck with those files.
If this is even half true, then Microsoft just quit the game. For keeps.
Copyright infringement is theft from the copyright holder, not the consumer. And it IS theft.
No. It isn't.
Copyright, as a concept, was invented to ensure that there was some degree of incentive for creative works to be produced, by allowing the creator (or her assignees) a temporary monopoly in order to make bank off their effort. Copyright infringement, as a concept, exists solely due to the fact that copyright, regardless of its intentions, is a fiction due to the very nature of information propagation.
You want to talk about theft? Fine. Talk about how 99% of western culture has been branded, monetized, and is now owned by some corporation or other. Talk about how Sonny Bono and Cher stole Mickey Mouse off the American people in 1997. Talk about what the various WIPO and Free Trade treaties do to perpetuate this (Australia's high court ruled that the DMCA-style law of the day only applied if you were ALREADY breaking the law, then we signed USAFTA and are now obligated to introduce a NEW DMCA-style law, for instance [1].) Talk about how much money the IFPI have spent bribing officials in the Swedish judicial system. Talk about Fritz Hollings and the SSSSCA/CBDTPA. Talk about what these fuckers have stolen off society at large and YOU in particular.
But don't tell me that I owe the fuckers who sue daycare centres for singing 'happy birthday' a brass razoo. I don't. If you believe otherwise, then you've already lost the game.
Accounting: I'm surprised that there are no real FOSS contenders in this space; at least on the low end, such packages are perfectly suited to a subscription model (hey, those tax tables don't update themselves.) This is a niche, however, where people probably feel better paying for a bit of piece of mind (nobody ever expects an audit...)
Photoshop/Illustrator: GIMP is 90% there for 90% of people. Opens PSD files, so it would seem to fit into most folks' workflow. I'm honestly not sure where Inkscape is at, but it's only going to get better.
Access/etc: If your business depends on Access or something similar, you're almost better off running it on Windows. When you scale it, you can scale it onto a better platform.
SQL Server: I think you'll find that Postgres can 'do the job' significantly better than SQL server under almost all workloads. Mysql is, of course, a running joke amongst anyone who knows what they're talking about. Obviously, if you're going to migrate to a new DBMS, there's going to be pain. SQL 2005 to Postgres is no more or less painful than Oracle 9i to SQL 2005.
Exchange: There are umpteen trillion unix-based (OSS, free beer, AND payware) 'groupware' suites. Most of the better ones have an Outlook plugin if you're still using Office.
Visual Studio: The choice of an IDE is INCREDIBLY subjective. I have/never/ liked Visual Studio, although that's not to say that others aren't more productive using it than using any other IDE. Developers, ultimately, need to be able to choose their own IDE; as long as it integrates with the higher level workflow and speaks the same language dialect as the rest of the team, who really cares? I know some people who swear by Eclipse (which I tried at the start of last year and didn't like much,) and some people who won't code using anything except nvi. For what it's worth, I find that Code::Blocks has a great feature:heft ratio.
You're right about one thing, though: games. At home, the ONLY use I have for windows of any stripe is the (sadly, more than) occasional reboot into XP64 to play Farcry 2 or Fallout 3 or the depressingly bad port of Saints Row 2. This will change, however, and not in the direction that most people are hoping. Consoles are already in the process of murdering PC gaming to the point where all we'll get given to us are bad console ports (Saints Row 2 was the most egregious example, on a 4-way 3.2GHz machine with a GTX260 the framerate fluctuates between 3 and 85fps) loaded up with DRM and other nonsense. Of the three games I mentioned, only Fallout 3 considered the PC to be a first-tier platform, and that's most likely because of Bethesda's history as a PC development shop and the fact that the Fallout 3 engine is a direct descendant of the Morrowind engine.
After the next generation of consoles, I'd expect gaming on Windows and Linux to be roughly at parity, and I'm not expecting anyone to port too many more games to Linux. Wine will run the bad ports well enough, and there will be a thriving third party aftermarket for keyboard/mouse connectivity kits for consoles.
As nice as Free Software is (and as much as I'm working on a free OpenGL/DX video game engine under LGPL), not everyone's as much of a foaming-at-the-mouth dickweed as you are.
It's mouthbreathing fucks like you who give linux users a bad name. Shouldn't you be in school?
However, if you're shooting up guard posts, you're doing it wrong.
To each their own. I actually quite enjoyed Grand Theft Africa (played through it 3 times, so it must have been doing something right as far as my tastes in such things go,) but found that the 'stealth' play style was considerably undercooked compared to the 'rambo' play style. Even on 'insane', by the time you've managed to acquire an automatic sidearm and some form of LMG, shooting the crap out of guardposts is a reasonably trivial endeavour if you use your head (set some grass on fire for area denial, blow up an ammo dump/barrels if they're there, etc etc). By way of comparison, taking a more stealthy approach seemed difficult as hell, if for no other reason than despite how lovely Dunia's grass looks it doesn't occlude the PC when the enemy AI does an eye raycast. This was something that CRYSIS got right ffs.
On the other hand, don't get me started on some of the artificial restrictions put in for the sake of gameplay (spend what's meant to be 5-10 days in the African outback and the only civilians you see are hanging out in an underground railroad? Can't fire guns indoors? WTF NOT!? Oh. It's so we don't need to deal with the potentially game-breaking ramifications of shooting somebody who was going to give you a mission...)
Grand Theft Africa could have been an awful lot better if they'd just taken one or two clues from FO3 (which is a great tactical FPS and a terrible RPG IMO).
No wonder Chrysler is going broke, wasting their money on sponsorships that are rarely noticed.
The Hemi engine might be a bit hard to notice (although it's rammed down your throat every time you repair an assault truck,) but how could you miss the various models of Chrysler Jeep (which are mentioned by name in a few places in the game)?
I'd say this is far from a hard-to-notice sponsorship, although I have to admit that it was a total wtf moment when I realised that Chrysler had paid for it.
There are jobs, and there are jobs. One of the things I heard is that MS are going to sack the entire team that produces Flight Simulator. Now, are you going to tell me that those guys could replace Prasad and Thusita over in Windows?
Last time I checked, dealing with large sets of vectors and rendering a realistic looking terrain had little in common with SMP locking code in a microkernel.
Horses for courses. This idiot senator would do well to realise that.
If a foreign national loses his job and goes back to his country, then his country will take care of him.
Unlike the American government, who have steadfastly refused to implement any sort of welfare safety net and currently have a higher population of homeless veterans than most countries have unemployed citizens (a touch under 500 thousand at last count, if google is to be believed.)
I love how Americans are so convinced that their country is so fantastic that they'd institute BS like this to 'prove a point' to the 'uppity immigrants' trying to 'get in'.
The sooner that America wakes up and realises that nobody outside of confused Mexicans and drunk Moosefuckers are trying to cross their borders, the better. Really, they got nothin'.
Honestly? What are the PAYE (income witholding) tax brackets in the US of A? I live in a country with communist medicine (.au) and pay an aggregate of about 23% of my income as tax (now that i've paid my HECS debt anyhow.)
Are American tax rates really so low? What would an American be paying as PAYE tax on a reasonable (high 5-low 6 figure) income? I ask this as an honest question...
Jokes aside, if I had a list of "best games of 2008" (which I don't because nobody would care), FC2 would be in second or third place, even if you could tell they just tacked the saved game system on at the last minute.
1) If you are making a backup then you are OK, but face it, this crap started because too many people distribute movies on the net so people don't have to shell the money out. In all honesty if they came to your house and you could show them a 1:1 ratio every dvd/cd backup with the original, they would apologize and leave your house. Chances are it would be a ratio of 100:1 pirated:legit.
Of course. Anyone who wants to rip discs to a different format is a warezie. That's logic if ever I saw it. Sir, you could out-debate a horse!
2) Modifying the movie, and the extra's, violates the TOC. Just like any contract, if you do not like it then do not sign for it and do not use the product. If you like the product that much then use it how they asked you to use it.
I'm actually not sure what you think you're trying to say here. Modifying the movie would require a copy on your hard disk, and hard disks don't HAVE a TOC! (In fact, on newer recordable media, ATIP/PMA is arguably the correct term anyhow.) You might, of course, mean Terms of Use, or something, in which case I'd suggest you go fuck yourself, because nobody signs anything when they buy a movie, and it's fascist assumptions such as 'corporations can bind us to whatever we want without our recourse' which get society broadly raped over time. You're a REALLY sharp one, aren't you?
I don't know why these issues are so hard to understand. Don't steal, and don't violate their TOC. If you think the movie sucks and is not wtflol worth the money then don't buy it, don't watch it. Wait for it to come out on TV and you can have it for free (not really since there is advertising) or borrow the movie from a friend. There are plenty of ways to watch a movie/hear a tune which doesn't require you to steal it or modify the DVD.
So, while you're against warez (that much of a consistent position was at least present in your ramblings, remind me to tip your speechwriter!), you have no problem with people borrowing discs off their friends. How, exactly, is this any different? (other than the ENTIRELY LEGAL AND NOT AT ALL PRAGMATIC argument about the number of copies in existence, and the desire for copyright law originally to make non-tangible goods resemble tangible ones).
There are cogent arguments for not infringing peoples' copyrights. You, sir, have made none of them.
Depending, of course, what format the input is in, you may need to change the muxer (not everything will sit in an ASF container. If your clients are also VLC, I'd use mux=ts for anything that's MPEG.)
This is obviously a trivial-as-shit implementation, but it doesn't require multicast. If you wanted to do multicast RTP, you could do that with #sout{access=rtp,dst=239.255.0.1,mux=ts}, for instance. This will probably be considerably more expensive on the local network, however, unless you have switches which handle IGMP prune/graft messages sensibly (i.e. not most cheap switches.) Truth told, if you just want to save T1 bandwidth, reflecting the stream via http is probably a far simpler alternative.
You could also transcode the stream if your clients don't natively support whatever format it's in, by adding the 'transcode' filter to the sout line. Read the VLC docs for how to do this, I don't know offhand.
Do you have even a vague understanding of what 'transform' and 'lighting' actually mean? Allow me to elucidate.
'transform' refers to the act of converting vertex positions in model space (the coordinate system used in the vertex buffers) to clip (camera) space. This is typically one matrix * vector multiplication per vertex; the vertex's position in model space is multiplied by the world-view-projection matrix. On modern hardware, this is generally done in the vertex program (other things may be done to the vertex's position before or after the co-ord transform, mind you, such as multiplication by a set of bone matrices for hardware animation, etc.)
'lighting' refers to the process of deciding the colour of each fragment ('potential pixel'). Before programmable graphics hardware, this was done by taking the dot product of the vertex normal and the light vector (or position, depending on light type), and multiplying it by the light's diffuse colour. The resulting colour intensity was then linearly interpolated across the face between vertices, and used to light the texture in conjunction with the ambient term. With modern programmable hardware, lighting is usually done per-fragment based on a normal map, which is input as a second texture to the fragment program. The light position is converted from object (or world) space into 'tangent' space, which is a coordinate system whose basis vectors are parallel and orthogonal to the plane being lit, and the surface is lit based on the dot product of the light vector in tangent space and the normal from the normal map.
Back in the bad old days, when men with beards owned IRIX boxes and everybody else had a TNT2 or worse, transform and lighting were done in software for most folks, by a client of the rendering system, before the primitives were submitted as draw calls to the rendering system. Post-about-2001, cards with hardware T&L, such as Geforce 256, showed up in the PC space. These cards were the first consumer 3D hardware to perform fixed-function transform and lighting (roughly as I've described it above) in silicon. The API didn't change much, although there was a DirectX version bump (6 to 7). OpenGL programmers didn't really notice; the library itself, obviously, had to know if it was talking to a fixed-function card or a dumb card, but most OpenGLs were provided by hardware vendors in any event, so this wasn't a factor.
Fast forward to today, everybody's using hardware which allows parts (most, these days) of the rendering pipeline to be replaced entirely with programs written by the engine developer (or even the artist, in some cases.) Transforming vertices can be done in conjunction with all manner of other crap, and lighting can be done using whatever model the programmer/artist desire. Regardless, however, it's all done in the same pipeline on the GPU. If the SPUs, as you suggest, were pre-transforming and pre-lighting vertices before writing them to 3d hardware's vertex buffers, then all you'd get is some really confused 3d hardware. RSX (the 3D chip loosely based on nvidia's G70 architecture) has 8 vertex pipelines and 24 fragment pipelines, all programmable. This is more than enough power to do significantly more with each vertex than simple transformation, and enough power to perform even complex effects such as steep parallax-mapped lighting in the fragment pipeline.
In conclusion, while Xenos (360's GPU) may or may not be better than RSX, RSX is CERTAINLY more than powerful enough to handle its own T&L. Cell's SPEs are, at least on some level, a compromise between the massively data-parallel yet somewhat braindead pipelines of a GPU and the more-or-less serial yet significantly intelligent threads of a modern CPU. They'd be great for accelerating physics (Bullet, i believe, has a Cell backend) or AI, but really add fuck all to the 3D rendering side of the console.
So does the D10U arch (GTX260/GTX280). Unless you need the ability to say 'Nvidia says it should have worked' when it doesn't work, you're wasting your money buying a Tesla card with a D10U chip on it when you can get the exact same thing (exactness may not include domain validation and/or burn-in) for half the price on a consumer-level VGA card.
however populating that last slot will sacrifice triple channel with single channel performance.
No, it won't. For some time now, Intel's RAM controllers have had some way of interleaving that buys you most of the performance of the 'correct' X-way setup, even with mismatched bank sizes.
That said, Intel have lost the plot if they think that encouraging this sort of thing is a/good idea/.
They should be, because circumventing the filter (in a blanket fashion, as is likely to be done by most who attempt to circumvent it at all, rather than simply enabling it for sites which are known to be filtered) is going to require a connection to a host outside of Australia. For local content, a second connection back IN to the country will also be required.
This is problematic because Australia's connections overseas are nowhere near equipped to deal with this sort of traffic increase, either from an ISP cost-recovery point-of-view (expect Internet plan costs to go up if too many people decide to circumvent the filter) or from a sheer bits-in-the-pipe point-of-view.
Essentially, the Australian government is forcing citizens to act contrary to the way the Internet was DESIGNED if they want to get an optimal experience. When everything catches fire and melts, you can bet your arse this'll be of concern to Conroy.
Phase 2 of the filter will be blocking anything EXCEPT approved web/mail/etc access (assuming they don't throw it out completely after it melts our international pipes), but by this point it will be too late. It'll be the black box flight recorder debacle all over again.
Additionally, it would seem as though at least some of these submissions are quite well thought out given the scope of the exercise.
The submission concerning online DRM circumvention (for music and warez and such) seeks to establish an exception for anybody to bypass such DRM after the operator goes broke, but (and here's the good bit) for a developer to do so at any time before that happens. They then go on to qualify the fact that a lot of DRM circumvention is performed by amateurs and suggest that no formal qualification bar be set for such development. This gives anyone who wants it rights to the source code by default.
The submission by the EFF, whilst loquacious, hits the nail on the head with the DVD circumvention thing, too. By defining an arbitrary class who are (by definition) non-infringing (DVD mashup authors are hardly unique in this regard, it could have just as easily been school teachers with Final Cut Pro or any other arbitrary fair use,) the software all of a sudden becomes legal to distribute, and possess, simply not to use in any way other than (in this example) ripping a DVD for the purposes of creating a fair-use collage. By the time the bits are ripped, the DMCA has become irrelevant and you still have the ripper.
It would appear that the motivations behind both of these submissions are to work within an incredibly narrow framework and ease the chilling effect the DMCA has on upon their respective sets of circumstances. If you gotta do something, you'd do something like this.
The Australian Government are a bag of dickheads for playing along with Conroy's filtering BS to save face (yes, the main reason Kevin747 hasn't axed the filtering scheme yet is because Conroy said it would work. They know it doesn't.) Their actions, whilst fucked up and inexcusable, are not even vaguely comparable to the RIAA's in either style or function.
Now, ARIA, on the other hand, I believe has been waging their own 'digital rights' campaign for some time now, but that's another issue. I'm not sure if they're suing people or not.
It won't be 600MB/sec. It won't even be a theoretical 600MB/sec. Assuming that USB3 uses the same 10B/8B coding scheme as earlier incarnations, your peak throughput will be 480MB/sec. In reality, you'll be lucky to hit 300-400, assuming that USB3 scales roughly the same as USB2 does.
Of course, crappy cables inducing retransmissions and such are likely to be a far greater problem at a 4800Mbit/sec line rate than they are at 480Mbit/sec, so even that number is only likely to be semi-reachable in the real world.
The ZFS developers specifically wanted the open sourced code to be under a GPL incompatible license, hence it has been released under CDDL
No. The ZFS developers' management wanted the code to be under a license which served their purposes. The fact that CDDL is GPL-incompatible is, largely, GPL's fault. Don't blame the Sun guys for releasing free code simply because everything must be GPL in your world.
Depends. Strikes me that at least one of the core XBMC devs is going out of his way to deliberately trash the reputation of the Plex developer, up to and including deliberately misspelling the guy's name.
His fork may be better or worse technologically (that's something you can measure objectively,) but there's no need for name calling.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. With an onboard computer that eats 5-10 percent of your engine power, and is needlessly prone to causing random things to fail in your car. And might, some day, some of the time, stop you from robbing a bank. Maybe.
If Ford did this, they'd be run out of town.
It's not the DRM that'd piss me off (none of my users are paid to care about audio, period) but the dodginess with Adobe (and presumably others). What nobody seems to have noted yet is that in order for Windows 7 to pick up that you've warezed your CS4, one of two things needs to be occuring:
- Windows 7 ships with a secret blacklist of known warez MD5s/SHA1s. Make it a rolling hash a-la rsync for maximal anti-warezing.
or, worse again
- Microsoft have a secret API (not a huge surprise here) that they've shared with a few 'trusted' software OEMs such as Adobe. CS4 and friends register the MD5s (or whatever) of their more likely warez vectors, and an expanded version of WFP (in a 'protected' process a-la PVP-OPM in vista) makes sure you don't fuck with those files.
If this is even half true, then Microsoft just quit the game. For keeps.
Copyright infringement is theft from the copyright holder, not the consumer. And it IS theft.
No. It isn't.
Copyright, as a concept, was invented to ensure that there was some degree of incentive for creative works to be produced, by allowing the creator (or her assignees) a temporary monopoly in order to make bank off their effort. Copyright infringement, as a concept, exists solely due to the fact that copyright, regardless of its intentions, is a fiction due to the very nature of information propagation.
You want to talk about theft? Fine. Talk about how 99% of western culture has been branded, monetized, and is now owned by some corporation or other. Talk about how Sonny Bono and Cher stole Mickey Mouse off the American people in 1997. Talk about what the various WIPO and Free Trade treaties do to perpetuate this (Australia's high court ruled that the DMCA-style law of the day only applied if you were ALREADY breaking the law, then we signed USAFTA and are now obligated to introduce a NEW DMCA-style law, for instance [1].) Talk about how much money the IFPI have spent bribing officials in the Swedish judicial system. Talk about Fritz Hollings and the SSSSCA/CBDTPA. Talk about what these fuckers have stolen off society at large and YOU in particular.
But don't tell me that I owe the fuckers who sue daycare centres for singing 'happy birthday' a brass razoo. I don't. If you believe otherwise, then you've already lost the game.
[1] Sony v. Stevens, http://www.out-law.com/page-6200
Accounting: I'm surprised that there are no real FOSS contenders in this space; at least on the low end, such packages are perfectly suited to a subscription model (hey, those tax tables don't update themselves.) This is a niche, however, where people probably feel better paying for a bit of piece of mind (nobody ever expects an audit...)
Photoshop/Illustrator: GIMP is 90% there for 90% of people. Opens PSD files, so it would seem to fit into most folks' workflow. I'm honestly not sure where Inkscape is at, but it's only going to get better.
Access/etc: If your business depends on Access or something similar, you're almost better off running it on Windows. When you scale it, you can scale it onto a better platform.
SQL Server: I think you'll find that Postgres can 'do the job' significantly better than SQL server under almost all workloads. Mysql is, of course, a running joke amongst anyone who knows what they're talking about. Obviously, if you're going to migrate to a new DBMS, there's going to be pain. SQL 2005 to Postgres is no more or less painful than Oracle 9i to SQL 2005.
Exchange: There are umpteen trillion unix-based (OSS, free beer, AND payware) 'groupware' suites. Most of the better ones have an Outlook plugin if you're still using Office.
Visual Studio: The choice of an IDE is INCREDIBLY subjective. I have /never/ liked Visual Studio, although that's not to say that others aren't more productive using it than using any other IDE. Developers, ultimately, need to be able to choose their own IDE; as long as it integrates with the higher level workflow and speaks the same language dialect as the rest of the team, who really cares? I know some people who swear by Eclipse (which I tried at the start of last year and didn't like much,) and some people who won't code using anything except nvi. For what it's worth, I find that Code::Blocks has a great feature:heft ratio.
You're right about one thing, though: games. At home, the ONLY use I have for windows of any stripe is the (sadly, more than) occasional reboot into XP64 to play Farcry 2 or Fallout 3 or the depressingly bad port of Saints Row 2. This will change, however, and not in the direction that most people are hoping. Consoles are already in the process of murdering PC gaming to the point where all we'll get given to us are bad console ports (Saints Row 2 was the most egregious example, on a 4-way 3.2GHz machine with a GTX260 the framerate fluctuates between 3 and 85fps) loaded up with DRM and other nonsense. Of the three games I mentioned, only Fallout 3 considered the PC to be a first-tier platform, and that's most likely because of Bethesda's history as a PC development shop and the fact that the Fallout 3 engine is a direct descendant of the Morrowind engine.
After the next generation of consoles, I'd expect gaming on Windows and Linux to be roughly at parity, and I'm not expecting anyone to port too many more games to Linux. Wine will run the bad ports well enough, and there will be a thriving third party aftermarket for keyboard/mouse connectivity kits for consoles.
You are not 'we the linux users'.
As nice as Free Software is (and as much as I'm working on a free OpenGL/DX video game engine under LGPL), not everyone's as much of a foaming-at-the-mouth dickweed as you are.
It's mouthbreathing fucks like you who give linux users a bad name. Shouldn't you be in school?
However, if you're shooting up guard posts, you're doing it wrong.
To each their own. I actually quite enjoyed Grand Theft Africa (played through it 3 times, so it must have been doing something right as far as my tastes in such things go,) but found that the 'stealth' play style was considerably undercooked compared to the 'rambo' play style. Even on 'insane', by the time you've managed to acquire an automatic sidearm and some form of LMG, shooting the crap out of guardposts is a reasonably trivial endeavour if you use your head (set some grass on fire for area denial, blow up an ammo dump/barrels if they're there, etc etc). By way of comparison, taking a more stealthy approach seemed difficult as hell, if for no other reason than despite how lovely Dunia's grass looks it doesn't occlude the PC when the enemy AI does an eye raycast. This was something that CRYSIS got right ffs.
On the other hand, don't get me started on some of the artificial restrictions put in for the sake of gameplay (spend what's meant to be 5-10 days in the African outback and the only civilians you see are hanging out in an underground railroad? Can't fire guns indoors? WTF NOT!? Oh. It's so we don't need to deal with the potentially game-breaking ramifications of shooting somebody who was going to give you a mission...)
Grand Theft Africa could have been an awful lot better if they'd just taken one or two clues from FO3 (which is a great tactical FPS and a terrible RPG IMO).
No wonder Chrysler is going broke, wasting their money on sponsorships that are rarely noticed.
The Hemi engine might be a bit hard to notice (although it's rammed down your throat every time you repair an assault truck,) but how could you miss the various models of Chrysler Jeep (which are mentioned by name in a few places in the game)?
I'd say this is far from a hard-to-notice sponsorship, although I have to admit that it was a total wtf moment when I realised that Chrysler had paid for it.
There are jobs, and there are jobs. One of the things I heard is that MS are going to sack the entire team that produces Flight Simulator. Now, are you going to tell me that those guys could replace Prasad and Thusita over in Windows?
Last time I checked, dealing with large sets of vectors and rendering a realistic looking terrain had little in common with SMP locking code in a microkernel.
Horses for courses. This idiot senator would do well to realise that.
If a foreign national loses his job and goes back to his country, then his country will take care of him.
Unlike the American government, who have steadfastly refused to implement any sort of welfare safety net and currently have a higher population of homeless veterans than most countries have unemployed citizens (a touch under 500 thousand at last count, if google is to be believed.)
I love how Americans are so convinced that their country is so fantastic that they'd institute BS like this to 'prove a point' to the 'uppity immigrants' trying to 'get in'.
The sooner that America wakes up and realises that nobody outside of confused Mexicans and drunk Moosefuckers are trying to cross their borders, the better. Really, they got nothin'.
Honestly? What are the PAYE (income witholding) tax brackets in the US of A? I live in a country with communist medicine (.au) and pay an aggregate of about 23% of my income as tax (now that i've paid my HECS debt anyhow.)
Are American tax rates really so low? What would an American be paying as PAYE tax on a reasonable (high 5-low 6 figure) income? I ask this as an honest question...
Grand Theft Africa
Jokes aside, if I had a list of "best games of 2008" (which I don't because nobody would care), FC2 would be in second or third place, even if you could tell they just tacked the saved game system on at the last minute.
1) If you are making a backup then you are OK, but face it, this crap started because too many people distribute movies on the net so people don't have to shell the money out. In all honesty if they came to your house and you could show them a 1:1 ratio every dvd/cd backup with the original, they would apologize and leave your house. Chances are it would be a ratio of 100:1 pirated:legit.
Of course. Anyone who wants to rip discs to a different format is a warezie. That's logic if ever I saw it. Sir, you could out-debate a horse!
2) Modifying the movie, and the extra's, violates the TOC. Just like any contract, if you do not like it then do not sign for it and do not use the product. If you like the product that much then use it how they asked you to use it.
I'm actually not sure what you think you're trying to say here. Modifying the movie would require a copy on your hard disk, and hard disks don't HAVE a TOC! (In fact, on newer recordable media, ATIP/PMA is arguably the correct term anyhow.) You might, of course, mean Terms of Use, or something, in which case I'd suggest you go fuck yourself, because nobody signs anything when they buy a movie, and it's fascist assumptions such as 'corporations can bind us to whatever we want without our recourse' which get society broadly raped over time. You're a REALLY sharp one, aren't you?
I don't know why these issues are so hard to understand. Don't steal, and don't violate their TOC. If you think the movie sucks and is not wtflol worth the money then don't buy it, don't watch it. Wait for it to come out on TV and you can have it for free (not really since there is advertising) or borrow the movie from a friend. There are plenty of ways to watch a movie/hear a tune which doesn't require you to steal it or modify the DVD.
So, while you're against warez (that much of a consistent position was at least present in your ramblings, remind me to tip your speechwriter!), you have no problem with people borrowing discs off their friends. How, exactly, is this any different? (other than the ENTIRELY LEGAL AND NOT AT ALL PRAGMATIC argument about the number of copies in existence, and the desire for copyright law originally to make non-tangible goods resemble tangible ones).
There are cogent arguments for not infringing peoples' copyrights. You, sir, have made none of them.
You could do it trivially with a command like
vlc http://path-to/stream --sout '#std{access=http,mux=asf,dst=:8000}'
Depending, of course, what format the input is in, you may need to change the muxer (not everything will sit in an ASF container. If your clients are also VLC, I'd use mux=ts for anything that's MPEG.)
This is obviously a trivial-as-shit implementation, but it doesn't require multicast. If you wanted to do multicast RTP, you could do that with #sout{access=rtp,dst=239.255.0.1,mux=ts}, for instance. This will probably be considerably more expensive on the local network, however, unless you have switches which handle IGMP prune/graft messages sensibly (i.e. not most cheap switches.) Truth told, if you just want to save T1 bandwidth, reflecting the stream via http is probably a far simpler alternative.
You could also transcode the stream if your clients don't natively support whatever format it's in, by adding the 'transcode' filter to the sout line. Read the VLC docs for how to do this, I don't know offhand.
Do you have even a vague understanding of what 'transform' and 'lighting' actually mean? Allow me to elucidate.
'transform' refers to the act of converting vertex positions in model space (the coordinate system used in the vertex buffers) to clip (camera) space. This is typically one matrix * vector multiplication per vertex; the vertex's position in model space is multiplied by the world-view-projection matrix. On modern hardware, this is generally done in the vertex program (other things may be done to the vertex's position before or after the co-ord transform, mind you, such as multiplication by a set of bone matrices for hardware animation, etc.)
'lighting' refers to the process of deciding the colour of each fragment ('potential pixel'). Before programmable graphics hardware, this was done by taking the dot product of the vertex normal and the light vector (or position, depending on light type), and multiplying it by the light's diffuse colour. The resulting colour intensity was then linearly interpolated across the face between vertices, and used to light the texture in conjunction with the ambient term. With modern programmable hardware, lighting is usually done per-fragment based on a normal map, which is input as a second texture to the fragment program. The light position is converted from object (or world) space into 'tangent' space, which is a coordinate system whose basis vectors are parallel and orthogonal to the plane being lit, and the surface is lit based on the dot product of the light vector in tangent space and the normal from the normal map.
Back in the bad old days, when men with beards owned IRIX boxes and everybody else had a TNT2 or worse, transform and lighting were done in software for most folks, by a client of the rendering system, before the primitives were submitted as draw calls to the rendering system. Post-about-2001, cards with hardware T&L, such as Geforce 256, showed up in the PC space. These cards were the first consumer 3D hardware to perform fixed-function transform and lighting (roughly as I've described it above) in silicon. The API didn't change much, although there was a DirectX version bump (6 to 7). OpenGL programmers didn't really notice; the library itself, obviously, had to know if it was talking to a fixed-function card or a dumb card, but most OpenGLs were provided by hardware vendors in any event, so this wasn't a factor.
Fast forward to today, everybody's using hardware which allows parts (most, these days) of the rendering pipeline to be replaced entirely with programs written by the engine developer (or even the artist, in some cases.) Transforming vertices can be done in conjunction with all manner of other crap, and lighting can be done using whatever model the programmer/artist desire. Regardless, however, it's all done in the same pipeline on the GPU. If the SPUs, as you suggest, were pre-transforming and pre-lighting vertices before writing them to 3d hardware's vertex buffers, then all you'd get is some really confused 3d hardware. RSX (the 3D chip loosely based on nvidia's G70 architecture) has 8 vertex pipelines and 24 fragment pipelines, all programmable. This is more than enough power to do significantly more with each vertex than simple transformation, and enough power to perform even complex effects such as steep parallax-mapped lighting in the fragment pipeline.
In conclusion, while Xenos (360's GPU) may or may not be better than RSX, RSX is CERTAINLY more than powerful enough to handle its own T&L. Cell's SPEs are, at least on some level, a compromise between the massively data-parallel yet somewhat braindead pipelines of a GPU and the more-or-less serial yet significantly intelligent threads of a modern CPU. They'd be great for accelerating physics (Bullet, i believe, has a Cell backend) or AI, but really add fuck all to the 3D rendering side of the console.
So does the D10U arch (GTX260/GTX280). Unless you need the ability to say 'Nvidia says it should have worked' when it doesn't work, you're wasting your money buying a Tesla card with a D10U chip on it when you can get the exact same thing (exactness may not include domain validation and/or burn-in) for half the price on a consumer-level VGA card.
however populating that last slot will sacrifice triple channel with single channel performance.
/good idea/.
No, it won't. For some time now, Intel's RAM controllers have had some way of interleaving that buys you most of the performance of the 'correct' X-way setup, even with mismatched bank sizes.
That said, Intel have lost the plot if they think that encouraging this sort of thing is a
They should be, because circumventing the filter (in a blanket fashion, as is likely to be done by most who attempt to circumvent it at all, rather than simply enabling it for sites which are known to be filtered) is going to require a connection to a host outside of Australia. For local content, a second connection back IN to the country will also be required.
This is problematic because Australia's connections overseas are nowhere near equipped to deal with this sort of traffic increase, either from an ISP cost-recovery point-of-view (expect Internet plan costs to go up if too many people decide to circumvent the filter) or from a sheer bits-in-the-pipe point-of-view.
Essentially, the Australian government is forcing citizens to act contrary to the way the Internet was DESIGNED if they want to get an optimal experience. When everything catches fire and melts, you can bet your arse this'll be of concern to Conroy.
Phase 2 of the filter will be blocking anything EXCEPT approved web/mail/etc access (assuming they don't throw it out completely after it melts our international pipes), but by this point it will be too late. It'll be the black box flight recorder debacle all over again.
I think I would have to support any punishment that they get. Especially for option 3.
You, sir, are a dickhead.
Additionally, it would seem as though at least some of these submissions are quite well thought out given the scope of the exercise.
The submission concerning online DRM circumvention (for music and warez and such) seeks to establish an exception for anybody to bypass such DRM after the operator goes broke, but (and here's the good bit) for a developer to do so at any time before that happens. They then go on to qualify the fact that a lot of DRM circumvention is performed by amateurs and suggest that no formal qualification bar be set for such development. This gives anyone who wants it rights to the source code by default.
The submission by the EFF, whilst loquacious, hits the nail on the head with the DVD circumvention thing, too. By defining an arbitrary class who are (by definition) non-infringing (DVD mashup authors are hardly unique in this regard, it could have just as easily been school teachers with Final Cut Pro or any other arbitrary fair use,) the software all of a sudden becomes legal to distribute, and possess, simply not to use in any way other than (in this example) ripping a DVD for the purposes of creating a fair-use collage. By the time the bits are ripped, the DMCA has become irrelevant and you still have the ripper.
It would appear that the motivations behind both of these submissions are to work within an incredibly narrow framework and ease the chilling effect the DMCA has on upon their respective sets of circumstances. If you gotta do something, you'd do something like this.
I approve.
The Australian Government are a bag of dickheads for playing along with Conroy's filtering BS to save face (yes, the main reason Kevin747 hasn't axed the filtering scheme yet is because Conroy said it would work. They know it doesn't.) Their actions, whilst fucked up and inexcusable, are not even vaguely comparable to the RIAA's in either style or function. Now, ARIA, on the other hand, I believe has been waging their own 'digital rights' campaign for some time now, but that's another issue. I'm not sure if they're suing people or not.
It won't be 600MB/sec. It won't even be a theoretical 600MB/sec. Assuming that USB3 uses the same 10B/8B coding scheme as earlier incarnations, your peak throughput will be 480MB/sec. In reality, you'll be lucky to hit 300-400, assuming that USB3 scales roughly the same as USB2 does. Of course, crappy cables inducing retransmissions and such are likely to be a far greater problem at a 4800Mbit/sec line rate than they are at 480Mbit/sec, so even that number is only likely to be semi-reachable in the real world.
The ZFS developers specifically wanted the open sourced code to be under a GPL incompatible license, hence it has been released under CDDL
No. The ZFS developers' management wanted the code to be under a license which served their purposes. The fact that CDDL is GPL-incompatible is, largely, GPL's fault. Don't blame the Sun guys for releasing free code simply because everything must be GPL in your world.
Hypocrite.
Depends. Strikes me that at least one of the core XBMC devs is going out of his way to deliberately trash the reputation of the Plex developer, up to and including deliberately misspelling the guy's name.
His fork may be better or worse technologically (that's something you can measure objectively,) but there's no need for name calling.
I'd be likely to take you more seriously if you could spell Elan Feingold's name correctly.