I don't think hardware has reached a "good enough" point so much as we don't see new machines that stomp our old machines eighteen months after we buy them. My three year old Macbook Pro benchmarks around 80% as fast as the current model (or similarly high-end PCs). No big incentive to replace it.
Plenty of people bashed on IRIX. It was an industry joke (back when a GB was a LOT of memory it was famed for leaking 512MB of RAM per day with nothing on but a screensaver).
Oh, you're assuming $10/month for SMS too. But then you're saying 3G - EDGE is worth nothing, and iPhone 2.0's ability to run push messaging (so you can use AIM etc. instead of SMS) is also worth nothing.
This reminds me of when Apple went from referring to monitor sizes by usable screen area to physical size (their 13" monitor became what everyone else called a 14" monitor, etc.) and everyone berated them for doing what everyone else had been doing and no-one had given them credit for.
If everyone complained about the iPhone's price before because Apple didn't conceal it behind plan lockin BS, let's castigate them again for using the same plan lockin BS their rivals were ALREADY using.
Very nice post, but I would like to point out that all kinds of information follow from IP (e.g. where you live) which helps search for things like restaurants.
Google actually uses IP data to localize information in searches intelligently, including suggesting search terms via typeahead. So their desire to store IP address is actually somewhat valid.
Um what? Sounds like you've drunk someone else's kool-aid.
I use Macs with third-party hard disks, monitors, keyboards, mice, RAM, printers, scanners, still and video cameras... The list goes on. Most stuff "just works" without even needing to install special drivers. (It is hard to get third party video cards for Mac Pros.) My iPod is full of music ripped from CDs. Pretty much the only computer hardware I buy from Apple is minimally configured boxes (and keyboards -- from time to time Apple has produced first-rate keyboards), and this has been the case since I bought my Quadra 700 in 1991 with nothing in it except a floppy drive and 4MB of RAM.
There have been times when Apple has sold sealed stuff (e.g. the original Mac) but there's generally a good reason for it. You can't exactly swap random components into a Dell laptop, a Thinkpad, or a Zune either.
Everybody who buys music from iTMS is worse off than they would be if the store didn't exist.
A bizarre claim. People are paying to be made worse off. Wow, we must be idiots.
I buy stuff from iTMS because it saves me waiting for a CD via mail, then ripping it. And if I need a CD I can burn one myself (legally). How am I worse off in any way? Arguably by the difference in price (if any), audio quality (if perceptible). Meanwhile, we just saved the world a bunch of packaging and plastic.
I think his response was pretty reasonable and balanced, actually.
1) Ray-tracing isn't going to solve all problems (it doesn't for movie rendering, why would it for real-time?)
2) Existing software still needs to run.
3) A hybrid approach will end up making the most sense (since it has for everything else).
He's not just talking "party line"... he's talking common sense. Ray-tracing everything is just an inefficient way to get the job done. It produces great mirror-finished objects but ugly shadows and mediocre lighting. (Guess which demos are full of mirror-finish objects?)
Window vs. aisle is not the issue anyway. It's (a) idiots standing in the aisles messing with their baggage (or whatever) holding up everyone else, and (b) boarding the folks at the front of the plane first.
I don't think you understand what the post you're replying to means by "creating wealth".
Making software creates wealth. Making source code creates wealth. Selling it is just redistribution of wealth.
If a bunch of people get together and produce a word-processor, an open source word-processor will always be around for people to improve, debug, learn from, while a closed source word processor will only be around while the company survives and sells it.
In both cases the "wealth" of a useful product is produced, but in one, the product and its useful constituents (source code, etc.) eventually disappear.
The reason we have copyright and patent law is to give people an incentive to produce public goods which, once produced, are best given away. One of the intrinsic problems with closed source software is that a big part of the thing which IP law is intended to generate and eventually give away for free is instead kept secret and lost.
Why would impaling weapons do less damage? They reach deeper into the body, are better able to damage vital organs and have less chance of being blocked by bones.
First of all, I didn't write the explanation of what the GURPS rule is SUPPOSED to do. The GURPS rules say they do and intend to do one thing and then do the exact opposite.
Also take a look at what happened in the middle ages when knights started wearing heavy plate armour: they didn't start using more arrows, swords and spears, they dropped those weapons and migrated to maces, flails, heavier swords (slasing instead of thrusting), and polearms with funky, often hammer-shaped heads.
No, they switched from slashing weapons to both bludgeoning and impaling weapons (swords with points and no edges appeared in response to metal armor), and in the case of the bludgeoning weapons, they usually had spikes. At Agincourt arrows annihilated massed plate-armored cavalry. The Mongols had no problems with plate armored opposition.
Go take a look at some actual weapons from the period (reading D&D does not constitute research).
As one writer on the subject put it -- the reason you see so many flails and maces on castle walls in England (and relatively few swords) is that the swords got used.
I think GURPS has it right. Weight helps more than a thin sharp point against solid armour.
Ideally, you want both. But I leave you with this: at what point have professional soldiers preferred maces and hammers to swords and lances? Try to find one such moment in history.
GURPS achieves outstanding backwards compatibility by never fixing major bugs. E.g. impaling weapons are supposed to do less damage but be better at penetrating armor, but the rules have the exact opposite effect, and this has been the case from GURPS 1 to GURPS 4, despite numerous complaints and the fact that this could be fixed without breaking anything else.
I also think that we're unlikely to equal human intelligence except as a curiosity long after we've obtained the necessary technology. Instead, we'll produce AIs with wildly different abilities from humans (far better in some things, such as arithmetic, or remembering large slabs of data, and probably worse in others). Calibrating an AI to be "equal" to a human will be a completely separate and not especially useful endeavor, and it will be something tinkerers do later.
And I suspect that the necessary insights to produce human-like intelligence aren't going to be around for some time. We still have only a foggy idea of how a lot of human intelligence works in the existing hardware.
There are several things going on out in space that would possibly lead to a detectable odor:
1) hard UV and even higher frequency EMR (stuff that gets filtered out by the atmosphere) 2) vacuum (lower air pressure may volatize some substances that don't volatize in relatively normal pressures).
The only real test to show the benefit of Skulltrail was the 3D rendering section where the Skulltrail machines really did post decent results. Even for video encoding you reach a point where the problem becomes IO-bound (and you can't compress video frame n independently of video frame n+1 because of interframe compression). Of course, the next question is whether a Skulltrail machine is cost effective against slightly cheaper machines used in parallel for 3D rendering.
If you set up your Mac or Linux box to use IPv6, you wouldn't be able to access facebook.
Chances are your Mac is set up to use IPv6 "automatically" and doesn't have this problem (because it falls back to IPv4 as required).
Three years ago I found an obscure feature that I happen to like, but since it's obscure my linux distro didn't implement it *exactly* the same way that Microsoft implements it. Mac's don't implement it that way either, but no matter, this is somehow proof of linux's suckiness.
Yes, but most Linux distros pretend to be Windows (generally an older version of Windows). And Linux-o-philes tend to provide helpful replies like "type man find".
Seems to me that based on Ars Technica's torture test, the original iPod Nano would win. That said, mine stopped working after it went through the washer for the third time.
And, frankly, the iPod worked a hell of a lot better when it was working than my GameBoy did.
Easily 30% of what the federal government does could be cut back and then you can immediately pay off the deficit and then lower taxes.
Only if that 30% came from the Defense Budget, which is 60% of taxes. Or do you think we can easily cut back 75% of everything the Federal government does that isn't defense-related?
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I don't think hardware has reached a "good enough" point so much as we don't see new machines that stomp our old machines eighteen months after we buy them. My three year old Macbook Pro benchmarks around 80% as fast as the current model (or similarly high-end PCs). No big incentive to replace it.
I've rebooted XP64 about four times in the last week ... all security patches.
If you have equal skill in optimization, but not necessarily equal time to spend optimizing.
Surely the effort required to optimize a program should factor in. Here, C may not fare so well.
Plenty of people bashed on IRIX. It was an industry joke (back when a GB was a LOT of memory it was famed for leaking 512MB of RAM per day with nothing on but a screensaver).
I love the miniature tablet bolted to the right wristrest.
It's like a piece of junk made by gluing a bunch of useful pieces into a roughly laptop shaped object.
Gimme a MacBook Pro with a small wacom or cintiq tablet any day. It will be smaller, lighter, have decent battery life, and not run Windows.
It looks like:
1) A mess
2) Three OS X docks
3) Dashboard / Yahoo widgets
But with all the aesthetic sense and usability of an Open Source project.
You should have a pretty well-prepared answer by now.
24*10 - 200 = $40.
Oh, you're assuming $10/month for SMS too. But then you're saying 3G - EDGE is worth nothing, and iPhone 2.0's ability to run push messaging (so you can use AIM etc. instead of SMS) is also worth nothing.
This reminds me of when Apple went from referring to monitor sizes by usable screen area to physical size (their 13" monitor became what everyone else called a 14" monitor, etc.) and everyone berated them for doing what everyone else had been doing and no-one had given them credit for.
If everyone complained about the iPhone's price before because Apple didn't conceal it behind plan lockin BS, let's castigate them again for using the same plan lockin BS their rivals were ALREADY using.
I'm thinking certain subsets of "last".
Very nice post, but I would like to point out that all kinds of information follow from IP (e.g. where you live) which helps search for things like restaurants.
Google actually uses IP data to localize information in searches intelligently, including suggesting search terms via typeahead. So their desire to store IP address is actually somewhat valid.
Um what? Sounds like you've drunk someone else's kool-aid.
I use Macs with third-party hard disks, monitors, keyboards, mice, RAM, printers, scanners, still and video cameras... The list goes on. Most stuff "just works" without even needing to install special drivers. (It is hard to get third party video cards for Mac Pros.) My iPod is full of music ripped from CDs. Pretty much the only computer hardware I buy from Apple is minimally configured boxes (and keyboards -- from time to time Apple has produced first-rate keyboards), and this has been the case since I bought my Quadra 700 in 1991 with nothing in it except a floppy drive and 4MB of RAM.
There have been times when Apple has sold sealed stuff (e.g. the original Mac) but there's generally a good reason for it. You can't exactly swap random components into a Dell laptop, a Thinkpad, or a Zune either.
Agreed.
My favorite bit from skimming it: "even WIRED got it wrong" (referring to telling Apple to get out of the hardware business).
This from the magazine whose cover story was "The Long Boom" the month that the internet bubble burst.
Wired hardly ever gets anything right (not entirely its fault, since it makes lots of predictions), but still.
Everybody who buys music from iTMS is worse off than they would be if the store didn't exist.
A bizarre claim. People are paying to be made worse off. Wow, we must be idiots.
I buy stuff from iTMS because it saves me waiting for a CD via mail, then ripping it. And if I need a CD I can burn one myself (legally). How am I worse off in any way? Arguably by the difference in price (if any), audio quality (if perceptible). Meanwhile, we just saved the world a bunch of packaging and plastic.
I'm guessing the porn industry can provide a ton of prior art. They were selling porn online in 1999, no? (Video is a superset of audio...)
I think his response was pretty reasonable and balanced, actually.
... he's talking common sense. Ray-tracing everything is just an inefficient way to get the job done. It produces great mirror-finished objects but ugly shadows and mediocre lighting. (Guess which demos are full of mirror-finish objects?)
1) Ray-tracing isn't going to solve all problems (it doesn't for movie rendering, why would it for real-time?)
2) Existing software still needs to run.
3) A hybrid approach will end up making the most sense (since it has for everything else).
He's not just talking "party line"
Window vs. aisle is not the issue anyway. It's (a) idiots standing in the aisles messing with their baggage (or whatever) holding up everyone else, and (b) boarding the folks at the front of the plane first.
I don't think you understand what the post you're replying to means by "creating wealth".
Making software creates wealth. Making source code creates wealth. Selling it is just redistribution of wealth.
If a bunch of people get together and produce a word-processor, an open source word-processor will always be around for people to improve, debug, learn from, while a closed source word processor will only be around while the company survives and sells it.
In both cases the "wealth" of a useful product is produced, but in one, the product and its useful constituents (source code, etc.) eventually disappear.
The reason we have copyright and patent law is to give people an incentive to produce public goods which, once produced, are best given away. One of the intrinsic problems with closed source software is that a big part of the thing which IP law is intended to generate and eventually give away for free is instead kept secret and lost.
Why would impaling weapons do less damage? They reach deeper into the body, are better able to damage vital organs and have less chance of being blocked by bones.
First of all, I didn't write the explanation of what the GURPS rule is SUPPOSED to do. The GURPS rules say they do and intend to do one thing and then do the exact opposite.
Also take a look at what happened in the middle ages when knights started wearing heavy plate armour: they didn't start using more arrows, swords and spears, they dropped those weapons and migrated to maces, flails, heavier swords (slasing instead of thrusting), and polearms with funky, often hammer-shaped heads.
No, they switched from slashing weapons to both bludgeoning and impaling weapons (swords with points and no edges appeared in response to metal armor), and in the case of the bludgeoning weapons, they usually had spikes. At Agincourt arrows annihilated massed plate-armored cavalry. The Mongols had no problems with plate armored opposition.
Go take a look at some actual weapons from the period (reading D&D does not constitute research).
As one writer on the subject put it -- the reason you see so many flails and maces on castle walls in England (and relatively few swords) is that the swords got used.
I think GURPS has it right. Weight helps more than a thin sharp point against solid armour.
Ideally, you want both. But I leave you with this: at what point have professional soldiers preferred maces and hammers to swords and lances? Try to find one such moment in history.
GURPS achieves outstanding backwards compatibility by never fixing major bugs. E.g. impaling weapons are supposed to do less damage but be better at penetrating armor, but the rules have the exact opposite effect, and this has been the case from GURPS 1 to GURPS 4, despite numerous complaints and the fact that this could be fixed without breaking anything else.
I also think that we're unlikely to equal human intelligence except as a curiosity long after we've obtained the necessary technology. Instead, we'll produce AIs with wildly different abilities from humans (far better in some things, such as arithmetic, or remembering large slabs of data, and probably worse in others). Calibrating an AI to be "equal" to a human will be a completely separate and not especially useful endeavor, and it will be something tinkerers do later.
And I suspect that the necessary insights to produce human-like intelligence aren't going to be around for some time. We still have only a foggy idea of how a lot of human intelligence works in the existing hardware.
There are several things going on out in space that would possibly lead to a detectable odor:
1) hard UV and even higher frequency EMR (stuff that gets filtered out by the atmosphere)
2) vacuum (lower air pressure may volatize some substances that don't volatize in relatively normal pressures).
The only real test to show the benefit of Skulltrail was the 3D rendering section where the Skulltrail machines really did post decent results. Even for video encoding you reach a point where the problem becomes IO-bound (and you can't compress video frame n independently of video frame n+1 because of interframe compression). Of course, the next question is whether a Skulltrail machine is cost effective against slightly cheaper machines used in parallel for 3D rendering.
Not that I particularly want to defend TFA, but:
If you set up your Mac or Linux box to use IPv6, you wouldn't be able to access facebook.
Chances are your Mac is set up to use IPv6 "automatically" and doesn't have this problem (because it falls back to IPv4 as required).
Three years ago I found an obscure feature that I happen to like, but since it's obscure my linux distro didn't implement it *exactly* the same way that Microsoft implements it. Mac's don't implement it that way either, but no matter, this is somehow proof of linux's suckiness.
Yes, but most Linux distros pretend to be Windows (generally an older version of Windows). And Linux-o-philes tend to provide helpful replies like "type man find".
Seems to me that based on Ars Technica's torture test, the original iPod Nano would win. That said, mine stopped working after it went through the washer for the third time.
And, frankly, the iPod worked a hell of a lot better when it was working than my GameBoy did.
Easily 30% of what the federal government does could be cut back and then you can immediately pay off the deficit and then lower taxes.
Only if that 30% came from the Defense Budget, which is 60% of taxes. Or do you think we can easily cut back 75% of everything the Federal government does that isn't defense-related?