But you forget that children aren't people so they can't choose anything. They're just some weird cross between pets and property until they turn 18 and then they magically become human beings with the capability of sentient thought and equal rights... unless they're gay. Oh and they can't drink... or get a credit card... or rent a car... and have to pay outrageous insurance rates. But other than that they've got the same rights as everyone else under the constitution once they've passed the arbitrary temporal threshold without regard for physical, mental, or emotional maturity or capability.
Take an array of data with a power of 2 size. Replace each pair of elements with their average sum ((A+B)/2) for the first, and the average difference ((A-B)/2) for the second. Then repeat for pairs of average sums recursively. i.e. every 2, every 4, every 8, etc until you get to the top. Takes about 10 lines of code or so. That's an inplace fast Haar wavelet transform. Sounds spiffy don't it?
Maybe you should try a good hardware site sometime. One that doesn't update quite as much but has more thought in the articles than "Wow it's 4fps faster in quake3!", with a forum full of people who know what they're talking about. If you avoid sites that review every minor cpu and video card speed bump under the sun, you'll probably find more quality content that actually means something to someone who can already figure out that x+y mhz > x mhz for a product that was exactly the same 2 months ago.
I believe it works in 98 and ME, I've used it before but can't recall what OS they were using. I think in 98 you might need to run iexplore.exe with the url after it for it to work right. Ctrl+o works just fine too, but both still are vulnerable to popups, browser hijacks, etc. It's getting out of hand.
Usually I try and go for the adress bar so that these people might have some miniscule chance of learning how to use a web browser correctly, because I know they're not going to be able to associate start->run with browsing sites, they won't remember. Ctrl+o maybe if they write it down, but likely not.
Obviously people who wrote this article advising to type in urls have NO IDEA how bad things are right now. I had a job in phone support for an ISP recently, and it's impossible to get the average user to type a url in the adress bar, because most don't even HAVE an adress bar anymore!
Typical conversation: me: "Ok, now go to the adress bar and type the following..." customer: "Go to the what?" me: "Ok, do you have a web browser open? It's the program you use to view websites." customer: "I thought I had you guys." me: "Yes, now click on whatever you use to view our homepage." customer: "But I just told you I don't have that anymore all I have is this incredifind.com thing." me: "That's ok, I'll fix that in a minute, just click on it and open it up." customer: "Ok, I have the incredifind open. Now how do I get to my internet?" me: "Ok, do have an adress bar at the top?" customer: "Wait, there's popups in the way now, let me close them." (wait 4 minutes to close popups that spawn other popups) customer: "Ok I can see, you said adress? I don't see that." me: "Well we want to type in a web page, so do you see a long white bar at the top?" customer: "Yeah I have 4, let me just type it in this super search one..." me: "Umm ok let's not..." customer: "Ok I'm at ultimatelinks.com, what do I click on now?" me: "Ok let's forget about that for a minute, what do the white bars at the top say next to them" customer: "Umm.. searchnow, supersearch, fastsearch, quickfind..." me: "Do any of them say adress next to them?" customer: "No." me: "Ok do you have the word adress anywhere in the gray area up at the top?" customer: "I have file... edit.."(wait 3 minutes to read entire list) Now, either the adress bar is there and collapsed, and I spend 5 minutes trying to instruct them how to use the mouse to drag it open, or it's not and I try to go through the view menu and turn it on, and spend 5 minutes trying to figure out which options are removed from their menus by spyware hijacks. me: "Ok fine, hit ctrl+o, does a little window pop up?" customer: "Yes, you want me to type it in there?" me: "Yes do that." customer: "Ok, I'm there but there's a big popup and I can't close it because it has no X." me: "Ok can you drag it out of the way?" customer: "How do I do that?" me: "Ok try just hitting control and the F4 key at the top of your keyboard, does it go away?" customer: "Yeah. That's neat, I'll write that down. Wait, another popup came up..."
I'm not kidding, this is in no way an exaggeration or parody. While this is not a real conversation in itself, all these things have occured in similar conversations I had on the phone during support calls. And they seriously expect these people to type in URLs? How about making the browser so malicioius programs can't remove or replace the adress bar first?
Actually I remmember having a conversation with Case on Kali in I believe 1995 or early 1996 where he told me he DID patent or copyright his ladder ruleset because he was licensing it out to some tennis club for use. This was back when the ladder was small and not a company yet, before Red Alert came out I think. He didn't try and get the concept of the ladder, just the specific algorithm he used for rankings, which if I remember right was challenger moves 1/2 the distance between their rank and defeated challengee's rank if they win, if they're adjacent they swap positions, otherwise no change. I'm pretty sure he did tell me he had some kind of legal lock on the system and that's what started the idea of going commercial with the ladder site.
Case actually started the ladder sometime in 1994 I believe, I remember playing C&C on it back when I had a kali serial number in the 11,000 range. I'll have to try and ICQ Case and see if he's heard about this, because I checked and the ladder is still in operation over at igl.net and casesladder.com. However I think his system is copyrighted, not patented. The ladder as a company was incorporated in 1996, and I know it was operating quite awhile before that.
If I find out any more info from Case I'll post a reply here.
Given what it's costing companies to reduce spam, and what they're paying in network bandwidth, wouldn't it be more economical to just hire people to track down the major spamers and then just post 10 million dollar international bounties on each head? I bet it'd cut the spam level alot more effectively for alot less money.
As for spyware, maybe it's just me, but how about say, not letting files download onto your local disk and set up with executable permissions? You'd think that maybe a modern OS would have some kind of setting to disable this kind of thing? Maybe even just lock out c:\program files\ from being able to create new directories? Yeah I didn't think so. I'm sure the new "security focused" development has better things to secure than the filesystem from malicious executables, because we all know this is a new and infrequent problem right?
One of these days I'll run into someone who gives you these "free offers to improve your life" and talks about how beneficial they are. Then I'll give them some nice theraputic blows to the face to increase the supply of oxygen giving blood to the skin. Look, it works! I can see it turning purple with extra blood now. You should thank me for preemptivly solving a case of skin irritation from lack of bloodflow. How about I remove some of those teeth so you're protected from dangerous cavities too?
If we're going by most number of really bad scifi movies and tv episodes, this wins hands down. Yes, once upon a time people believed the future of computing would be an evolutionary progression of stumbling into walls with a 20lb brick on your head.
The problem with putting everything in one box is the weakest link problem. Whenever any one thing breaks or becomes obsolete and you want to upgrade, you usually need to throw out the entire box. PCs get around this with standard parts but the average joe or my mom is not going to go grab a screwdriver and pop open a PC to install a new video card. Think they're going to swap hard drives and tuner cards on a set top PVR so they can reccord HDTV now? No. If this kind of thing was really appealing to consumers, every TV would have a VCR and a DVD player. Do they make these? Yes. Are they popular? Not really. They made TVs with radios back in the day too, do we have them now? A few.
What's really going to kill this is WIRELESS. If all the devices in the house can interoperate over 802.11g, bluetooth, etc, then you HAVE a "virtual uberdevice". It's just a matter of getting the functionality to be seamless, and that'll take some work. Once you can stream your video files from your PVR to any TV in your house, stream your TV's captured input to your PC to edit, stream your ipod's mp3s to your stereo etc, then who needs to put it all in one box? Intel is working on putting RF in silicon so this kind of thing will be pretty cheap to add to any device. Multiple devices will probably be more expensive overall, but easier to upgrade. Will there be all in ones? Yeah, and I'll probably buy one for my mom because she'll never care to upgrade it. But anyone who swaps TVs or DVD players every couple years (gotta have that progressive scan!) or upgrades their PC at least once a year will probably go for seperate networked appliances.
The downfall of this is getting it to work right and interchangeably. I expect Sony or someone to show up with this idea fairly soon but screw it up so that only THEIR brand devices work with each other. Then the market will bemoan this for a year or 2 until someone like Intel or MS comes up with a standard. Apple/Sony/Phillips will then come up with competing standards, and after another 3 years of fighting one of them should either win out or all devices will support all the standards because it's become cheap enough.
So we should see it around 2007-2009. Probably about the time everyone's swapping out their obsolete DVD players for HDVD players and people are buzzing about upcoming Xbox3/PS4.
The article's really long, and somewhat technical. Here's the layman highlights for anyone who just wants to know "Ok what should I care about?"
1. The big change is all memory goes virtual. What this means is that you don't need to load an entire texture to render a subset of it's pixels. This is a VERY good thing considering on most textures you're only using a low level mipmap anyway. Thus, texture memory on the card becomes more like a gigantic L2 or L3 cache that can be efficiently used. Also you can have massive texture spaces without having things go all slow over AGP. 3Dlabs' Wildcat already does this. This was originally mentioned by Carmack in the 3/27/2000.plan update which you can find here: http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&ti me=20000308010919
In addition, geometry is stored virtual as well, as are shaders, which can be loaded into the processor in pages, instead of being limited to a small block of instructions that have to fit entirely into the GPU registers. The registers now work more like an L1 cache, and shader programs can be effectively unlimited size. This means lots of neat special effects will be possible.
2. High ordered surfaces (curves) are getting mandated. No more n-patches vs truform, it's going to use standard curve systems like Beizer splines.
3. Fur rendering and shadow volumes are going into hardware as part of a new "tesselation processor"
4. You can have multiple instances of meshes. This means you can take one model, run a few vertex programs on it, and store each result seperately. Saves alot of time later.
5. Integer instruction set. This is so you don't have to deal with floating point data when you don't need to. There are some times you want simpler data for use in a shader program and having to pretend everything's a floating point texture isn't convenient.
6. Frame buffer current pixel value reads. This has been a developer request for a long time. It's not mandatory in the spec, but it can be used for all sorts of stuff. Basicly the GPU can read the current value in the framebuffer into the pixel pipeline without needing to maintain a second copy. This will both save alot of memory and allow you to do things such as light accumulation more efficiently.
I think it had something to do with the TVs they had lined up outside at the time showing their latest set of steaming turds on constant repeat and the gaggle of morons staring at them slackjawed and drooling all over the sidewalk at the time. I just felt I couldn't walk through that mess and keep my sanity intact.
There's alot more information being generated these days, and we need to make sure we can keep on top of ways to filter, sort, and absorb it. When the web was 100 sites, it was pretty easy to find what you were looking for. Then when it exploded we needed search engines. Then blogs became popular and Google is still working out how to cope.
I think Advertising is getting to be a problem. Adware and Spyware are running rampant, and making computers less useful by confusing users. Spam is crippling email worldwide. And it's not just limited to online effects, commercials are longer, shows are shorter. Movies have almost an hour of advertising sometimes: slides, then commercials, then trailers.
I don't know how it affects most other people, but to me advertising sticks in my brain and keeps gnawing away at the back, making me less likely to buy a product. The more annoying, condescending, or pointless an ad is, the stronger the hate towards the company for wasting my time. For example, I'll NEVER buy a GAP product. Why? Well if GAP had just been a regular clothes store, I might have gone in, wandered around, maybe bought a shirt. But their commercials are so irritating I despise them. I've gone as far as to cross the street to avoid one of their larger stores. Here's another: Capital One talks about their "no hassle" credit cards. I thought this was a good idea and I was thinking of applying for one. Then they ran massive popup spams all over the web, and I changed my mind, permanently. Then there's the modern print advertising in computer industry magazines. You know, the ones that look and read like a 2-4 page product review with a very tiny light gray on white "Advertisement" printed somewhere you're not likely to notice it? That kind of thing pisses me off enough to go and look up the competitors to that company so I can reccomend them instead next time I need that type of product. I really do stuff like this. Am I the only one who's this insane? You tell me. Then there's the outright decietful crap. About 2-3 times a month I get envelopes with my bank's logo on it. Inside is a check for $2.50, and in really light fine print somewhere it'll say "Depositing this indicates you agree to let us take $8/month for 'services' directly from your account." Elsewhere in fine print is a disclaimer saying "We're not really affiliated with your bank even though we're reprinting their logo on your mail." Now I don't fall for this, but I'm betting my grandmother would. And the "valuable services" are basicly more advertising, they send you piles of coupons and ads for stuff. Great, just what I wanted.
I wish companies would focus more on making a better product and highlighting its advantages and features instead of randomly spewing statisticly generated images of unrelated crap, assuming people will digest this and buy it.
Optimium online/cablevision comes to mind here too. They like to monitor your upstream and if you pass a threshold they smack you down from 1mbit up to 150kbit up. The only way to get it off is to call their tech support and they fill out a "you were naughty" form and have someone from their non-sucky and super expensive service, Lightpath, call you back and talk about getting you to sign up for hosting.
The bad part is they don't tell you what the limit is. So, even if you get the throttle removed, there's no way to make sure you don't get put back on it immediately. If you mention this, support says "Oh just use a file transfer app where you can lower the speed." But they can't tell you how low it needs to be to prevent getting smacked again. Is it MB per day? GB per month? MB per hour? Maxed KB/sec for a specific duration? You don't know. Their support doesn't know either, and they wanna keep it this way.
It's really easy to write speeding tickets when you build a highway, go "speeding is illegal" and then refuse to post speed limit signs or tell anyone what the limit is.
Oh and they do this to their "business" customers paying $109/month for the exact same service. No they don't get to know what the upstream limit is either or how it works. They get the same crippling for "possibly running a server" and calls from Lightpath about hosting if they go over and want it removed.
Why is it so impossibly hard to get decent upstream? The prices for anything over 200kbit up 24/7 are nauseating from most ISPs.
Yeah I'm in training to be a phone service rep for a cable ISP. Why? Because "entry level" programming jobs want a degree, 3-5 years experience, and proficiency in 4-7 languages.
How about the belief that a computer science degree is a reasonable requirement for a job involving tech support, network installation, administration, or PC repair?
What's the big deal? Back when I still had a fishtank (probably 1996 or so) I had a genetically engineered catfish. I think it came from some experiment at the university of texas or something. Some grad student crossbred two catfish species (columbian redtail and shovelnose I think) and they looked neat. A petstore here in NY had one in their exotics section. I bought it. It worked just like a regular fish, ate feeder fish, pooped, swam around. Was it evil and they forgot to tell me that part or something?
Some game experiences come to mind. Hmm let's see if I can pick a specific example...
Approx 14-16th level party vs like 26-28th level spellcaster. This was supposed to be a "plot" encounter where the DM smacked us around a bit before having our asses saved by divine providence. Unfortunately it was his broken NPC that needed saving.
After a few minutes of stalemate with the party hiding in an antimagic field set up by my cleric cohort and my paladin and the others figuring out that running outside it, flying up, and whacking with a sword, even a good sword wouldn't work, we changed tactics. Next time I came flying up with an extra-fluffy towel I'd had sitting in my inventory since level 9 or so (about a year and a half of previous gameplay). So, grapple check, got him wrapped in towel. Now what? I throw him in the antimagic field of course. Then the rest of the party proceeds to kick the stuffing out of him.
Unfortunately they always have tricks like hiding their souls and stupid minions always show up to bail them out, otherwise we'd have had him easy.
Shortly after this we started a new campaign to get away from the rampant munchkining that had occured. Our DM found out that even at level 1, giving me things like a crowbar, a net, some paint, or pepper can be a bad idea.
There's absolutely nowhere to go anymore. It's not like Moore's law could just be extended into another dimension or something. 3D processors with the number of layers doubling every 18 months? Nah, who'd go for that.
Yes, Intel caved. Think Phoenix won't? Think maybe they'll change their mind when Dell and Gateway and Compaq and HP go "We're going to write our own BIOSes like IBM now because our customers don't like your inconvenient security."?
Even if the big OEMs don't go for in-house BIOSes I'd bet they'll drive around Taiwan with a dumptruck full of money looking for someone else to write one. Given how long it takes most businesses to fully roll over their entire installed hardware base I can't see something that splits a network like trusted computing being very popular right away, so at best it'll be one of those "It's there for later but we have it off right now." features.
Think MS won't cave on the feature? What's the default on SCSI write caching in Windows 2003. What about the default on the Messenger service?
The key is to make this as unpopular as those past examples. The best way to do this is for people like/. readers who are in the know to explain to their bosses why this will cost money in the long run and cause headaches. What you save in labor costs of fighting viruses you'll spend in trying to get the hardware to talk to your older hardware and software, or reinstalling all new everything to get it to work.
Slashdot Mirror
But you forget that children aren't people so they can't choose anything. They're just some weird cross between pets and property until they turn 18 and then they magically become human beings with the capability of sentient thought and equal rights... unless they're gay. Oh and they can't drink... or get a credit card... or rent a car... and have to pay outrageous insurance rates. But other than that they've got the same rights as everyone else under the constitution once they've passed the arbitrary temporal threshold without regard for physical, mental, or emotional maturity or capability.
(shot of men in riot gear overturning desks, rifling through offices and smashing computers)
Voice in aussie accent: Search engine!
(shot of Fosters can)
Voice in aussie accent: Beer!
Here's an "advanced algorithm" for ya:
Take an array of data with a power of 2 size. Replace each pair of elements with their average sum ((A+B)/2) for the first, and the average difference ((A-B)/2) for the second. Then repeat for pairs of average sums recursively. i.e. every 2, every 4, every 8, etc until you get to the top. Takes about 10 lines of code or so. That's an inplace fast Haar wavelet transform. Sounds spiffy don't it?
Maybe you should try a good hardware site sometime. One that doesn't update quite as much but has more thought in the articles than "Wow it's 4fps faster in quake3!", with a forum full of people who know what they're talking about. If you avoid sites that review every minor cpu and video card speed bump under the sun, you'll probably find more quality content that actually means something to someone who can already figure out that x+y mhz > x mhz for a product that was exactly the same 2 months ago.
Since clicking on links is unsafe until we correct the link clicking bug, please open a dos prompt, run debug.exe and type in the following....
I believe it works in 98 and ME, I've used it before but can't recall what OS they were using. I think in 98 you might need to run iexplore.exe with the url after it for it to work right. Ctrl+o works just fine too, but both still are vulnerable to popups, browser hijacks, etc. It's getting out of hand.
Usually I try and go for the adress bar so that these people might have some miniscule chance of learning how to use a web browser correctly, because I know they're not going to be able to associate start->run with browsing sites, they won't remember. Ctrl+o maybe if they write it down, but likely not.
Obviously people who wrote this article advising to type in urls have NO IDEA how bad things are right now. I had a job in phone support for an ISP recently, and it's impossible to get the average user to type a url in the adress bar, because most don't even HAVE an adress bar anymore!
Typical conversation:
me: "Ok, now go to the adress bar and type the following..."
customer: "Go to the what?"
me: "Ok, do you have a web browser open? It's the program you use to view websites."
customer: "I thought I had you guys."
me: "Yes, now click on whatever you use to view our homepage."
customer: "But I just told you I don't have that anymore all I have is this incredifind.com thing."
me: "That's ok, I'll fix that in a minute, just click on it and open it up."
customer: "Ok, I have the incredifind open. Now how do I get to my internet?"
me: "Ok, do have an adress bar at the top?"
customer: "Wait, there's popups in the way now, let me close them."
(wait 4 minutes to close popups that spawn other popups)
customer: "Ok I can see, you said adress? I don't see that."
me: "Well we want to type in a web page, so do you see a long white bar at the top?"
customer: "Yeah I have 4, let me just type it in this super search one..."
me: "Umm ok let's not..."
customer: "Ok I'm at ultimatelinks.com, what do I click on now?"
me: "Ok let's forget about that for a minute, what do the white bars at the top say next to them"
customer: "Umm.. searchnow, supersearch, fastsearch, quickfind..."
me: "Do any of them say adress next to them?"
customer: "No."
me: "Ok do you have the word adress anywhere in the gray area up at the top?"
customer: "I have file... edit.."(wait 3 minutes to read entire list)
Now, either the adress bar is there and collapsed, and I spend 5 minutes trying to instruct them how to use the mouse to drag it open, or it's not and I try to go through the view menu and turn it on, and spend 5 minutes trying to figure out which options are removed from their menus by spyware hijacks.
me: "Ok fine, hit ctrl+o, does a little window pop up?"
customer: "Yes, you want me to type it in there?"
me: "Yes do that."
customer: "Ok, I'm there but there's a big popup and I can't close it because it has no X."
me: "Ok can you drag it out of the way?"
customer: "How do I do that?"
me: "Ok try just hitting control and the F4 key at the top of your keyboard, does it go away?"
customer: "Yeah. That's neat, I'll write that down. Wait, another popup came up..."
I'm not kidding, this is in no way an exaggeration or parody. While this is not a real conversation in itself, all these things have occured in similar conversations I had on the phone during support calls. And they seriously expect these people to type in URLs? How about making the browser so malicioius programs can't remove or replace the adress bar first?
Actually I remmember having a conversation with Case on Kali in I believe 1995 or early 1996 where he told me he DID patent or copyright his ladder ruleset because he was licensing it out to some tennis club for use. This was back when the ladder was small and not a company yet, before Red Alert came out I think. He didn't try and get the concept of the ladder, just the specific algorithm he used for rankings, which if I remember right was challenger moves 1/2 the distance between their rank and defeated challengee's rank if they win, if they're adjacent they swap positions, otherwise no change. I'm pretty sure he did tell me he had some kind of legal lock on the system and that's what started the idea of going commercial with the ladder site.
Umm... but Case is Jeremy Rusnak, so I don't see why his patent would suddenly be considered one of "the Goldberg Patents", if he even filed one.
Case actually started the ladder sometime in 1994 I believe, I remember playing C&C on it back when I had a kali serial number in the 11,000 range. I'll have to try and ICQ Case and see if he's heard about this, because I checked and the ladder is still in operation over at igl.net and casesladder.com. However I think his system is copyrighted, not patented. The ladder as a company was incorporated in 1996, and I know it was operating quite awhile before that.
If I find out any more info from Case I'll post a reply here.
You get paid for that? And to think I was doing it for free whenever I lost one in there!
Yeah, kinda like how the shameful stigma of buying or watching porn has made it difficult to obtain and rarely advertised in our society.
Given what it's costing companies to reduce spam, and what they're paying in network bandwidth, wouldn't it be more economical to just hire people to track down the major spamers and then just post 10 million dollar international bounties on each head? I bet it'd cut the spam level alot more effectively for alot less money.
As for spyware, maybe it's just me, but how about say, not letting files download onto your local disk and set up with executable permissions? You'd think that maybe a modern OS would have some kind of setting to disable this kind of thing? Maybe even just lock out c:\program files\ from being able to create new directories? Yeah I didn't think so. I'm sure the new "security focused" development has better things to secure than the filesystem from malicious executables, because we all know this is a new and infrequent problem right?
One of these days I'll run into someone who gives you these "free offers to improve your life" and talks about how beneficial they are. Then I'll give them some nice theraputic blows to the face to increase the supply of oxygen giving blood to the skin. Look, it works! I can see it turning purple with extra blood now. You should thank me for preemptivly solving a case of skin irritation from lack of bloodflow. How about I remove some of those teeth so you're protected from dangerous cavities too?
Virtual reality.
If we're going by most number of really bad scifi movies and tv episodes, this wins hands down. Yes, once upon a time people believed the future of computing would be an evolutionary progression of stumbling into walls with a 20lb brick on your head.
The problem with putting everything in one box is the weakest link problem. Whenever any one thing breaks or becomes obsolete and you want to upgrade, you usually need to throw out the entire box. PCs get around this with standard parts but the average joe or my mom is not going to go grab a screwdriver and pop open a PC to install a new video card. Think they're going to swap hard drives and tuner cards on a set top PVR so they can reccord HDTV now? No. If this kind of thing was really appealing to consumers, every TV would have a VCR and a DVD player. Do they make these? Yes. Are they popular? Not really. They made TVs with radios back in the day too, do we have them now? A few.
What's really going to kill this is WIRELESS. If all the devices in the house can interoperate over 802.11g, bluetooth, etc, then you HAVE a "virtual uberdevice". It's just a matter of getting the functionality to be seamless, and that'll take some work. Once you can stream your video files from your PVR to any TV in your house, stream your TV's captured input to your PC to edit, stream your ipod's mp3s to your stereo etc, then who needs to put it all in one box? Intel is working on putting RF in silicon so this kind of thing will be pretty cheap to add to any device. Multiple devices will probably be more expensive overall, but easier to upgrade. Will there be all in ones? Yeah, and I'll probably buy one for my mom because she'll never care to upgrade it. But anyone who swaps TVs or DVD players every couple years (gotta have that progressive scan!) or upgrades their PC at least once a year will probably go for seperate networked appliances.
The downfall of this is getting it to work right and interchangeably. I expect Sony or someone to show up with this idea fairly soon but screw it up so that only THEIR brand devices work with each other. Then the market will bemoan this for a year or 2 until someone like Intel or MS comes up with a standard. Apple/Sony/Phillips will then come up with competing standards, and after another 3 years of fighting one of them should either win out or all devices will support all the standards because it's become cheap enough.
So we should see it around 2007-2009. Probably about the time everyone's swapping out their obsolete DVD players for HDVD players and people are buzzing about upcoming Xbox3/PS4.
The article's really long, and somewhat technical. Here's the layman highlights for anyone who just wants to know "Ok what should I care about?"
.plan update which you can find here: http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=1&ti me=20000308010919
1. The big change is all memory goes virtual. What this means is that you don't need to load an entire texture to render a subset of it's pixels. This is a VERY good thing considering on most textures you're only using a low level mipmap anyway. Thus, texture memory on the card becomes more like a gigantic L2 or L3 cache that can be efficiently used. Also you can have massive texture spaces without having things go all slow over AGP. 3Dlabs' Wildcat already does this. This was originally mentioned by Carmack in the 3/27/2000
In addition, geometry is stored virtual as well, as are shaders, which can be loaded into the processor in pages, instead of being limited to a small block of instructions that have to fit entirely into the GPU registers. The registers now work more like an L1 cache, and shader programs can be effectively unlimited size. This means lots of neat special effects will be possible.
2. High ordered surfaces (curves) are getting mandated. No more n-patches vs truform, it's going to use standard curve systems like Beizer splines.
3. Fur rendering and shadow volumes are going into hardware as part of a new "tesselation processor"
4. You can have multiple instances of meshes. This means you can take one model, run a few vertex programs on it, and store each result seperately. Saves alot of time later.
5. Integer instruction set. This is so you don't have to deal with floating point data when you don't need to. There are some times you want simpler data for use in a shader program and having to pretend everything's a floating point texture isn't convenient.
6. Frame buffer current pixel value reads. This has been a developer request for a long time. It's not mandatory in the spec, but it can be used for all sorts of stuff. Basicly the GPU can read the current value in the framebuffer into the pixel pipeline without needing to maintain a second copy. This will both save alot of memory and allow you to do things such as light accumulation more efficiently.
I think it had something to do with the TVs they had lined up outside at the time showing their latest set of steaming turds on constant repeat and the gaggle of morons staring at them slackjawed and drooling all over the sidewalk at the time. I just felt I couldn't walk through that mess and keep my sanity intact.
There's alot more information being generated these days, and we need to make sure we can keep on top of ways to filter, sort, and absorb it. When the web was 100 sites, it was pretty easy to find what you were looking for. Then when it exploded we needed search engines. Then blogs became popular and Google is still working out how to cope.
I think Advertising is getting to be a problem. Adware and Spyware are running rampant, and making computers less useful by confusing users. Spam is crippling email worldwide. And it's not just limited to online effects, commercials are longer, shows are shorter. Movies have almost an hour of advertising sometimes: slides, then commercials, then trailers.
I don't know how it affects most other people, but to me advertising sticks in my brain and keeps gnawing away at the back, making me less likely to buy a product. The more annoying, condescending, or pointless an ad is, the stronger the hate towards the company for wasting my time. For example, I'll NEVER buy a GAP product. Why? Well if GAP had just been a regular clothes store, I might have gone in, wandered around, maybe bought a shirt. But their commercials are so irritating I despise them. I've gone as far as to cross the street to avoid one of their larger stores. Here's another: Capital One talks about their "no hassle" credit cards. I thought this was a good idea and I was thinking of applying for one. Then they ran massive popup spams all over the web, and I changed my mind, permanently. Then there's the modern print advertising in computer industry magazines. You know, the ones that look and read like a 2-4 page product review with a very tiny light gray on white "Advertisement" printed somewhere you're not likely to notice it? That kind of thing pisses me off enough to go and look up the competitors to that company so I can reccomend them instead next time I need that type of product. I really do stuff like this. Am I the only one who's this insane? You tell me. Then there's the outright decietful crap. About 2-3 times a month I get envelopes with my bank's logo on it. Inside is a check for $2.50, and in really light fine print somewhere it'll say "Depositing this indicates you agree to let us take $8/month for 'services' directly from your account." Elsewhere in fine print is a disclaimer saying "We're not really affiliated with your bank even though we're reprinting their logo on your mail." Now I don't fall for this, but I'm betting my grandmother would. And the "valuable services" are basicly more advertising, they send you piles of coupons and ads for stuff. Great, just what I wanted.
I wish companies would focus more on making a better product and highlighting its advantages and features instead of randomly spewing statisticly generated images of unrelated crap, assuming people will digest this and buy it.
The bad part is they don't tell you what the limit is . So, even if you get the throttle removed, there's no way to make sure you don't get put back on it immediately. If you mention this, support says "Oh just use a file transfer app where you can lower the speed." But they can't tell you how low it needs to be to prevent getting smacked again. Is it MB per day? GB per month? MB per hour? Maxed KB/sec for a specific duration? You don't know. Their support doesn't know either, and they wanna keep it this way.
It's really easy to write speeding tickets when you build a highway, go "speeding is illegal" and then refuse to post speed limit signs or tell anyone what the limit is.
Oh and they do this to their "business" customers paying $109/month for the exact same service. No they don't get to know what the upstream limit is either or how it works. They get the same crippling for "possibly running a server" and calls from Lightpath about hosting if they go over and want it removed.
Why is it so impossibly hard to get decent upstream? The prices for anything over 200kbit up 24/7 are nauseating from most ISPs.
Yeah I'm in training to be a phone service rep for a cable ISP. Why? Because "entry level" programming jobs want a degree, 3-5 years experience, and proficiency in 4-7 languages.
How about the belief that a computer science degree is a reasonable requirement for a job involving tech support, network installation, administration, or PC repair?
What's the big deal? Back when I still had a fishtank (probably 1996 or so) I had a genetically engineered catfish. I think it came from some experiment at the university of texas or something. Some grad student crossbred two catfish species (columbian redtail and shovelnose I think) and they looked neat. A petstore here in NY had one in their exotics section. I bought it. It worked just like a regular fish, ate feeder fish, pooped, swam around. Was it evil and they forgot to tell me that part or something?
Some game experiences come to mind. Hmm let's see if I can pick a specific example...
Approx 14-16th level party vs like 26-28th level spellcaster. This was supposed to be a "plot" encounter where the DM smacked us around a bit before having our asses saved by divine providence. Unfortunately it was his broken NPC that needed saving.
After a few minutes of stalemate with the party hiding in an antimagic field set up by my cleric cohort and my paladin and the others figuring out that running outside it, flying up, and whacking with a sword, even a good sword wouldn't work, we changed tactics. Next time I came flying up with an extra-fluffy towel I'd had sitting in my inventory since level 9 or so (about a year and a half of previous gameplay). So, grapple check, got him wrapped in towel. Now what? I throw him in the antimagic field of course. Then the rest of the party proceeds to kick the stuffing out of him.
Unfortunately they always have tricks like hiding their souls and stupid minions always show up to bail them out, otherwise we'd have had him easy.
Shortly after this we started a new campaign to get away from the rampant munchkining that had occured. Our DM found out that even at level 1, giving me things like a crowbar, a net, some paint, or pepper can be a bad idea.
There's absolutely nowhere to go anymore. It's not like Moore's law could just be extended into another dimension or something. 3D processors with the number of layers doubling every 18 months? Nah, who'd go for that.
Yes, Intel caved. Think Phoenix won't? Think maybe they'll change their mind when Dell and Gateway and Compaq and HP go "We're going to write our own BIOSes like IBM now because our customers don't like your inconvenient security."?
/. readers who are in the know to explain to their bosses why this will cost money in the long run and cause headaches. What you save in labor costs of fighting viruses you'll spend in trying to get the hardware to talk to your older hardware and software, or reinstalling all new everything to get it to work.
Even if the big OEMs don't go for in-house BIOSes I'd bet they'll drive around Taiwan with a dumptruck full of money looking for someone else to write one. Given how long it takes most businesses to fully roll over their entire installed hardware base I can't see something that splits a network like trusted computing being very popular right away, so at best it'll be one of those "It's there for later but we have it off right now." features.
Think MS won't cave on the feature? What's the default on SCSI write caching in Windows 2003. What about the default on the Messenger service?
The key is to make this as unpopular as those past examples. The best way to do this is for people like