Looking at all the asshole replies to this parent's parent, I think we have just demonstrated what "silent majority" means
Here's to hoping I'll always have money to live a life, and hoping SupahVee will soon be able to buy a new house in a neighbourhood where his kid will grow up to be proud of him.
Amount of money to be made per employee / GDP of a nation divided by its inhabitants / average income per worker / choose whatever is your preferred definition; its not that important for the point I was trying to make.
You act as if creating software isn't something it takes an "employee" to do..
I think this summarizes what you're saying. You're right that, if one software engineer writes something for free, it doesn't take another paid software engineer to write the same thing for money. In that sense, we're shit-out-of-luck.
However, the money it cost to pay that engineer came from businesses that can now spend that money elsewhere. The "cost-of-operating-a-business" just went down which means the business just became more profitable, which would allow it to expand and thus hire employees. One might imagine a medium sized business hiring specialist software engineers who have the ability to customize and extend said opensource software with industry specific expansions that will guarantee the competitive advantage of that business.
All in all, it's a move away from generic commoditized "just had my degree and want some practice" programming toward industry specific, highly specialized, highly paid programming.
What the f***? How is that supposed to help reverse falling unemployment?
I have no clue why one would want to reverse falling unemployment. Sounds most desirable.
Joking aside: the point I think the author made is that opensource technologies allow funds to be used for other purposes, i.e. that of employment, thus improving productivity for business by hiring more workers instead of renting/buying more software.
The bigger difference in opinion, and one you see often these days, is wether or not a rise in productivity is good or bad.
I'm personally convinced it is good, I believe that it is the reason we enjoy modern prosperity versus two centuries ago. However, to believe it is good, you must also accept that the resulting job redundancies from increases in productivity are a temporary, and economically speaking, healthy, phenomenon that redistributes resources (including human capital) across a society to prepare it for further future growth.
We both agree that job redundancies are unpleasant. What we disagree on is what it is a symptom of.
I believe, and so does the author it appears, that speeding up opensource development would ramp up productivity which would turn speed the process of economic renewal the western (US & Europe) world is going through.
Wether the job redunancies are a temporary (5-10 yrs) or a permanent phenomenon is what we disagree on.
Slashdot - if you're going to post links to economics related subjects, can you please make sure it is written by someone with a clue about economics?
Further, the use of H1B holders is stupid for two unrelated reasons: you're shipping money to overseas economies, and you're training a workforce to compete against you once it returns home (which most do).
Silly me, and here I was thinking economy was not about holding on to money but about circulating money. The higher the pace of circulation, the better the economy.
Should the world follow your advice then not only world trade would slowly grind to a halt but your cost of living would sky-rocket, eventually setting you back to the middle ages.
Using H1B workers is an interim solution to a longer term problem. The longer term problem is that of off-shore competition.
India's body-shopping business right now is negligable compared to what might happen if they start building and selling meaningful software themselves, instead of being hired to do so.
In your zero H1B visa world, the US will cease to develop software as it does now.
For this to happen, the pace of innovation in computer science needs to slow and the quality of computer science education of India needs to level with the western world.
I believe this is happening.
But good luck with your isolationist agenda there.
That, mr. Anderson, is the sound of inevitability
Keen revolutionary scroller aspects (techy)
on
Masters of Doom
·
· Score: 1
Iirc, Commander Keen was one of the first to actual use VGA registers directly; this meant bypassing the BIOS (apart from mode 13h I guess) and accessing three functionalities that were provided by the standard VGA hardware but never exposed, being :
Memory address of top left corner of screen.
Scanline where the screen resets to address 0 on the card (screen split).
The benefit of these two were that you could scroll the screen downwards and sideways "for free" by messing with the address while only having to draw tiles in your border zone (twice the tiles for vertical scrolling -- think about it for a while and it'll come to you).
The vertical split could then be used to paint a scoreboard.
I would call the first time programmers look beyond the tools everyone else uses revolutionary, yes.
In the Amiga era, a similair problem existed, and unless someone corrects me, I believe it was Team17 who uses something quite similair to the above to implement full framerate scrolling using the Amiga's Copper Chip. Now there is a second thing at play here which is that on the Amiga I can reset vertically to Any address, not just 0. This benefits scrolling considerably and was used in their SuperFrog title (if anyone has an Action Replay, hit the button and do a screendump -- you'll see the copper split).
This eventually ended up in an interesting little white lie in an interview about Team17's first AGA scroller, which, according to one of T17's artists (iirc) "did not need more than 128 colors" so they didn't move it up to 256 colors.
That, I believe, to have been a lie. The problem instead is that, for 256 colors, there were a full *8* 32bit bitplane registers that needed to be set in the horizontal blank (the time when the last pixel is drawn on the right and the next pixel on the next scanline starts on the left). However! here wasn't enough time to do this! Through some hand testing at the time with manual copperlists I managed to do 7, but you couldn't fit any more without cropping the screen (making it look rediculous).
Anyway, I think that roughly was why id Software (and Team-17) deserve the credit they get for Commander Keen (and SuperFrog if that was the first one).
Not only can Bruce answer this given his many conversations with non-technology (politics) types, but even better, many slashdotters can learn and apply his answer in their own evangalical spread of Open Source.
Here's me hoping the question will be asked for the benefit of everyone!
Imagine..... hundreds of thousands of slashdotting nerds preaching the Gospel of Opensource like "the Bruce"
and increase the GDP of the nations they are moving operations to. That means increased buying power for that nation, and in turn, everybody benefits from selling to that nation......
That's a beautiful thought but the sad side of it is that there is nothing structurally competitive about India that would allow it to sustainably charge higher wages. India itself also needs to compete with countries like China.
I don't think India itself woke up to this fact and recall seeing spreadsheets in which they expect wages to go up 10% every year. Amusingly naive.
Was about to mod you down but thought the sportsmanship of a response would be better.
The shoes are obviously an example, and given that it is a very brand oriented product, possibly not a good one for the arguments you give.
That however does not change the whole point - if I see two qualitatively identical products, you can bet your ass that I'm going with the cheaper of the two.
Eg. in software if I'm buying a project planner, one is MS-Project the other is Joe Potatoe's Project, then you can BET your ASS I'm not going to buy MS-Project if Joe Potato project does the exact same thing including file formats -- I'm gonna buy what's at least $100USD cheaper than the other one.
That's the point that was made from the consumer perspective and its a proven one.
Recent discussions in the US about protecting homeland jobs and all that crud will only serve to damage not only US capitalism, but firmly push the US into a deflationary spiral due to an inability to compete with foreign products thus demanding lower salaries to be able to lower prices.
The notion that this can be influenced by a single nation's policies toward its corporations is amusing at best but more likely downright damaging to that nation's citizens.
I'm not sure I buy the agent-of-Microsoft theory, but I do think they're basically using the throw-whatever-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks routine.
Not until we see firm proof, you're right. This lawsuit is however Microsoft's wet dream come true, and they could never do this themselves for marketing reasons.
That, and their recent generosity makes it sufficient for consideration.
I'm concerned this is getting personal (well, moreso). It casts doubt on Linus' competency and/or ethics, thus casting doubts on Linux, and I think may be a veiled threat towards Torvalds and suggest that in the future they may, as has been hinted, take action against him individually.
Could be that this is why Linus is temporarily shifting jobs to ODSL? IBM can possibly better protect him there than at financially weak Transmeta?
The only way I can sum this up is "If you use Linux, the terrorists have already won." This addition is rather odd, as if they are so worried, why wasn't this in the original suit? It smacks of exploiting the fear of terrorism and rogue nations for their own ends, and to me hints that their next strategy could be to focus on the idea that "Linx is unethical."
I think this shows a change in SCO's goals. After realizing their chances of getting money from IBM are slim, they may now have shifted their goals to maximizing damage to both Linux and IBM, which would be in the interest of Microsoft, which has already made a generous financial donation and might make more.
If you really think slashdotters are into business related technology stories, then you need to report on the big stories, not the ones that make your "competition" look bad. This is fundamental editorial ethics.
Man what are you smoking! Since when is slashdot competition to Microsoft? And "fundamental editorial ethics" are doing pretty good given that slashdot is a pro-Linux site.
Jesus man, bugger off to MSN and eat what Microsoft serves you but don't complain here.
Humble opinion: In Open source it is more important to have something to start with so others can follow someone's lead, than have something to finish with, so no one else has anything to add.
Besides, they do mention "Beta", beta == feature completeness with only minor problems. Should be okay.
Yes, its a working force-field, unfortunately it uses a 15,000 degree plasma in the process. If you tried this in say a jail cell, you would fairly quickly cook the occupant.
just build a heat-shielding wall between said force-field and said prisoner.
Kill or be killed. Always has been and always will be.
This is overly simplistic and simply untrue. The problem India has is that their value proposition is cost based "do same for less", or "do a little-bit less for a lot less".
There is nothing inherently competitive about their business model, their infrastructure nor their location, that would make them more or less suitable to run your IT business at.
It is this why they may very well loose out from where they are now.
However this doesn't mean it has always to be this way. Might I remind you of Japan for example (though other examples exist), Japan rebuilt itself from scratch. It used to be that, "Made in Japan" was a trademark for "crappy cheapo products", but Japan Improved - infact, Japan improved itself soo much, it was mimicked all over the world by the "expensive" countries (quality circles and Kaizen, anyone?)! By improving its quality, the value it offered increased, by extension, the productivity of its workers increased and therefore the wages and economy strongly improved. The disruptive nature whereby you take the market by storm from the bottom and move up is well documented in The Innovator's Dillemma, and applies here (Innovation != Technology only).
The big question, moving forward, for India is if they can create a sustainable competitive advantage -- one that is not soo easy to replicate? Perhaps local expertise, perhaps Indian development tools, perhaps elevate their education & know-how to and beyond Western-world levels (have an Indian institute be the frame of reference for top-notch technology, instead of today the MIT).
Right now I'm reading The Competitive Advantage of Nations, the original reason for reading it was so I could understand how the high-cost countries could still doodle in technology while countries like India undercut us so much, but it'd appear India may soon be needing the same type of thinking.
If, from the parent's parent post Capitalism != (innovation|democracy|freedom)
then if Capitalism is True (i.e. exists) it means (innovation|democracy|freedom) *HAS* to be false, and therefore, in Capitalism, there cannot be innovation, nor democracy, nor freedom.
Therefore, gentlemen, you have just concluded Capitalism == Communism.
This opens up the oppertunity for investors to sue SCO for misinformation.
Had investors known that SCO did not infact own the IP, they might have chosen to invest differently. We need to wait for the stockprice to crater (it will - this increases risk), and the lawsuits can start. The emails to Novell asking to transfer copyright clearly proves that senior management at SCO was intentionally misinforming the public.
Outcome : executives at SCO forever tainted, market cap reduced to zero, VC's burned, and less likely to pursue an "attack opensource IP" strategy again, final outcome : GPL stronger than before.
If SCO owns the contracts but not the code, I find the following statement on their website a tad strange:
SCO is the owner of the UNIX Operating System Intellectual Property that dates all the way back 1969, when the UNIX System was created at Bell Laboratories. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, SCO has acquired ownership of the patents, copyrights and core technology associated with the UNIX System
I.e. they're fucked.
Many kudo's to Bruce Perens for his obvious behind the scenes lobbying and to Novell for trying to pamper the community (hope they succeed, they're a cute, insignificant little friendly, furry, huggable company and deserve a profitable niche in todays market).
A huge pile of cash is only indicative of the past - during the heyday of the internet bubble there were dozens of companies with huge piles of cash - a year ago United Airlines had billions of dollars in the bank too - they've barely managed to emerge from bankruptcy, and there's still much work ahead.
For nVidia, its pile of cash is definitely only indicative of the past. However, in the internet bubble-days, a lot of companies had cash not because of earnings, but because of overhyped equity. Most of us know how to quickly spend a lot of money, nVidia has proven, in a most competitor-bloodspilling manner, that it can make it.
In addition, take a look at all those engineers from Silicon Graphics - when Silicon Graphics made its ill move towards "normal" servers and away from its graphics niche, all those engineers abandoned ship and signed up with nVidia.
Compare that with 3DFX, shortly before they went bankrupt they had purchased the tiny GigaPixel firm for (iirc) 1Billion USD in hopes of grabbing the Microsoft XBox contract which was at that time assigned to Gigapixel, before then, they wasted money on buying STB (don't even remember for how much there).
I cannot comment too much on Airlines since I don't track them too much (fully commoditized, too heavily regulated, no serious money to be had in any of its niche markets).
... and one of them is more likely than the other to have correctly gauged the future buying needs of their customers.
A friend of mine showed me a "handy-cam demo" of Half-Life 2, and its engine. In that demo we see the most sophisticated shaders (refraction, translucency, reflection) around, physics engine, you name it -- aside from wondering about how that much content (a _lot_ of detail in that game) could still be profitable for a gameshop, the other conclusion was that I'll probably be needing a new graphics card soon to get a decent frame rate. That kind of engine puts a heavy demand on both GPU (shaders, graphics) and CPU (physics), and I personally strongly believe that this type of engine will drive future demand for graphics cards.
Imho, The future for graphics is only in its infancy; after the z-buffer paradigm, we still have raytracing to explore. The possibilities are truly endless.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like saying ASCII is binary because it's encoded in bits.
The "XML fits all" argument made is justified, the protocol is XML based.
Here's to hoping I'll always have money to live a life, and hoping SupahVee will soon be able to buy a new house in a neighbourhood where his kid will grow up to be proud of him.
Amount of money to be made per employee / GDP of a nation divided by its inhabitants / average income per worker / choose whatever is your preferred definition; its not that important for the point I was trying to make.
You act as if creating software isn't something it takes an "employee" to do..
I think this summarizes what you're saying. You're right that, if one software engineer writes something for free, it doesn't take another paid software engineer to write the same thing for money. In that sense, we're shit-out-of-luck.
However, the money it cost to pay that engineer came from businesses that can now spend that money elsewhere. The "cost-of-operating-a-business" just went down which means the business just became more profitable, which would allow it to expand and thus hire employees. One might imagine a medium sized business hiring specialist software engineers who have the ability to customize and extend said opensource software with industry specific expansions that will guarantee the competitive advantage of that business.
All in all, it's a move away from generic commoditized "just had my degree and want some practice" programming toward industry specific, highly specialized, highly paid programming.
Maybe not a bad thing in the long run.
What the f***? How is that supposed to help reverse falling unemployment?
I have no clue why one would want to reverse falling unemployment. Sounds most desirable.
Joking aside: the point I think the author made is that opensource technologies allow funds to be used for other purposes, i.e. that of employment, thus improving productivity for business by hiring more workers instead of renting/buying more software.
The bigger difference in opinion, and one you see often these days, is wether or not a rise in productivity is good or bad.
I'm personally convinced it is good, I believe that it is the reason we enjoy modern prosperity versus two centuries ago. However, to believe it is good, you must also accept that the resulting job redundancies from increases in productivity are a temporary, and economically speaking, healthy, phenomenon that redistributes resources (including human capital) across a society to prepare it for further future growth.
We both agree that job redundancies are unpleasant. What we disagree on is what it is a symptom of.
I believe, and so does the author it appears, that speeding up opensource development would ramp up productivity which would turn speed the process of economic renewal the western (US & Europe) world is going through.
Wether the job redunancies are a temporary (5-10 yrs) or a permanent phenomenon is what we disagree on.
Slashdot - if you're going to post links to economics related subjects, can you please make sure it is written by someone with a clue about economics?
Is Michael Porter economical enough for you?
Silly me, and here I was thinking economy was not about holding on to money but about circulating money. The higher the pace of circulation, the better the economy.
Should the world follow your advice then not only world trade would slowly grind to a halt but your cost of living would sky-rocket, eventually setting you back to the middle ages.
Using H1B workers is an interim solution to a longer term problem. The longer term problem is that of off-shore competition.
India's body-shopping business right now is negligable compared to what might happen if they start building and selling meaningful software themselves, instead of being hired to do so.
In your zero H1B visa world, the US will cease to develop software as it does now.
For this to happen, the pace of innovation in computer science needs to slow and the quality of computer science education of India needs to level with the western world.
I believe this is happening.
But good luck with your isolationist agenda there.
That, mr. Anderson, is the sound of inevitability
Memory address of top left corner of screen.
Scanline where the screen resets to address 0 on the card (screen split).
The benefit of these two were that you could scroll the screen downwards and sideways "for free" by messing with the address while only having to draw tiles in your border zone (twice the tiles for vertical scrolling -- think about it for a while and it'll come to you).
The vertical split could then be used to paint a scoreboard.
I would call the first time programmers look beyond the tools everyone else uses revolutionary, yes.
In the Amiga era, a similair problem existed, and unless someone corrects me, I believe it was Team17 who uses something quite similair to the above to implement full framerate scrolling using the Amiga's Copper Chip. Now there is a second thing at play here which is that on the Amiga I can reset vertically to Any address, not just 0. This benefits scrolling considerably and was used in their SuperFrog title (if anyone has an Action Replay, hit the button and do a screendump -- you'll see the copper split).
This eventually ended up in an interesting little white lie in an interview about Team17's first AGA scroller, which, according to one of T17's artists (iirc) "did not need more than 128 colors" so they didn't move it up to 256 colors.
That, I believe, to have been a lie. The problem instead is that, for 256 colors, there were a full *8* 32bit bitplane registers that needed to be set in the horizontal blank (the time when the last pixel is drawn on the right and the next pixel on the next scanline starts on the left). However! here wasn't enough time to do this! Through some hand testing at the time with manual copperlists I managed to do 7, but you couldn't fit any more without cropping the screen (making it look rediculous).
Anyway, I think that roughly was why id Software (and Team-17) deserve the credit they get for Commander Keen (and SuperFrog if that was the first one).
Here's me hoping the question will be asked for the benefit of everyone!
Imagine..... hundreds of thousands of slashdotting nerds preaching the Gospel of Opensource like "the Bruce"
That's a beautiful thought but the sad side of it is that there is nothing structurally competitive about India that would allow it to sustainably charge higher wages. India itself also needs to compete with countries like China.
I don't think India itself woke up to this fact and recall seeing spreadsheets in which they expect wages to go up 10% every year. Amusingly naive.
The shoes are obviously an example, and given that it is a very brand oriented product, possibly not a good one for the arguments you give.
That however does not change the whole point - if I see two qualitatively identical products, you can bet your ass that I'm going with the cheaper of the two.
Eg. in software if I'm buying a project planner, one is MS-Project the other is Joe Potatoe's Project, then you can BET your ASS I'm not going to buy MS-Project if Joe Potato project does the exact same thing including file formats -- I'm gonna buy what's at least $100USD cheaper than the other one.
That's the point that was made from the consumer perspective and its a proven one.
Recent discussions in the US about protecting homeland jobs and all that crud will only serve to damage not only US capitalism, but firmly push the US into a deflationary spiral due to an inability to compete with foreign products thus demanding lower salaries to be able to lower prices.
The notion that this can be influenced by a single nation's policies toward its corporations is amusing at best but more likely downright damaging to that nation's citizens.
Bullshit friend; read up on marketing, decisions are emotional and only later justified by reason.
(because of some other required conditions, lab-based stress tests had never revealed it)
"Sure!" Oh c'mon man, you're among nerds now, admit you didn't do any!
Other than that, cool anecdote.
Not until we see firm proof, you're right. This lawsuit is however Microsoft's wet dream come true, and they could never do this themselves for marketing reasons.
That, and their recent generosity makes it sufficient for consideration.
Could be that this is why Linus is temporarily shifting jobs to ODSL? IBM can possibly better protect him there than at financially weak Transmeta?
The only way I can sum this up is "If you use Linux, the terrorists have already won." This addition is rather odd, as if they are so worried, why wasn't this in the original suit? It smacks of exploiting the fear of terrorism and rogue nations for their own ends, and to me hints that their next strategy could be to focus on the idea that "Linx is unethical."
I think this shows a change in SCO's goals. After realizing their chances of getting money from IBM are slim, they may now have shifted their goals to maximizing damage to both Linux and IBM, which would be in the interest of Microsoft, which has already made a generous financial donation and might make more.
Just some good old geek paranoia ofcourse.
Man what are you smoking! Since when is slashdot competition to Microsoft? And "fundamental editorial ethics" are doing pretty good given that slashdot is a pro-Linux site.
Jesus man, bugger off to MSN and eat what Microsoft serves you but don't complain here.
Humble opinion: In Open source it is more important to have something to start with so others can follow someone's lead, than have something to finish with, so no one else has anything to add.
Besides, they do mention "Beta", beta == feature completeness with only minor problems. Should be okay.
So how do multi-layer CD's (DVD's) work? Different frequencies of light?
Not sure if they tested for this but if they didn't I think this particular rocket might not go too far.
just build a heat-shielding wall between said force-field and said prisoner.
(oh, right...)
This is overly simplistic and simply untrue. The problem India has is that their value proposition is cost based "do same for less", or "do a little-bit less for a lot less".
There is nothing inherently competitive about their business model, their infrastructure nor their location, that would make them more or less suitable to run your IT business at.
It is this why they may very well loose out from where they are now.
However this doesn't mean it has always to be this way. Might I remind you of Japan for example (though other examples exist), Japan rebuilt itself from scratch. It used to be that, "Made in Japan" was a trademark for "crappy cheapo products", but Japan Improved - infact, Japan improved itself soo much, it was mimicked all over the world by the "expensive" countries (quality circles and Kaizen, anyone?)! By improving its quality, the value it offered increased, by extension, the productivity of its workers increased and therefore the wages and economy strongly improved. The disruptive nature whereby you take the market by storm from the bottom and move up is well documented in The Innovator's Dillemma, and applies here (Innovation != Technology only).
The big question, moving forward, for India is if they can create a sustainable competitive advantage -- one that is not soo easy to replicate? Perhaps local expertise, perhaps Indian development tools, perhaps elevate their education & know-how to and beyond Western-world levels (have an Indian institute be the frame of reference for top-notch technology, instead of today the MIT).
Right now I'm reading The Competitive Advantage of Nations, the original reason for reading it was so I could understand how the high-cost countries could still doodle in technology while countries like India undercut us so much, but it'd appear India may soon be needing the same type of thinking.
Exciting times ahead for observing bystanders.
Communism = (~innovation)&&(~democracy)&&(~freedom )
If, from the parent's parent post Capitalism != (innovation|democracy|freedom)
then if Capitalism is True (i.e. exists) it means (innovation|democracy|freedom) *HAS* to be false, and therefore, in Capitalism, there cannot be innovation, nor democracy, nor freedom.
Therefore, gentlemen, you have just concluded Capitalism == Communism.
One of us must be wrong.
Had investors known that SCO did not infact own the IP, they might have chosen to invest differently. We need to wait for the stockprice to crater (it will - this increases risk), and the lawsuits can start. The emails to Novell asking to transfer copyright clearly proves that senior management at SCO was intentionally misinforming the public.
Outcome : executives at SCO forever tainted, market cap reduced to zero, VC's burned, and less likely to pursue an "attack opensource IP" strategy again, final outcome : GPL stronger than before.
SCO is the owner of the UNIX Operating System Intellectual Property that dates all the way back 1969, when the UNIX System was created at Bell Laboratories. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, SCO has acquired ownership of the patents, copyrights and core technology associated with the UNIX System
I.e. they're fucked.
Many kudo's to Bruce Perens for his obvious behind the scenes lobbying and to Novell for trying to pamper the community (hope they succeed, they're a cute, insignificant little friendly, furry, huggable company and deserve a profitable niche in todays market).
(Things like Nimda are a lot more hairy due to HLL use than when compared to Code Red).
who is Tom?
For nVidia, its pile of cash is definitely only indicative of the past. However, in the internet bubble-days, a lot of companies had cash not because of earnings, but because of overhyped equity. Most of us know how to quickly spend a lot of money, nVidia has proven, in a most competitor-bloodspilling manner, that it can make it.
In addition, take a look at all those engineers from Silicon Graphics - when Silicon Graphics made its ill move towards "normal" servers and away from its graphics niche, all those engineers abandoned ship and signed up with nVidia.
Compare that with 3DFX, shortly before they went bankrupt they had purchased the tiny GigaPixel firm for (iirc) 1Billion USD in hopes of grabbing the Microsoft XBox contract which was at that time assigned to Gigapixel, before then, they wasted money on buying STB (don't even remember for how much there).
I cannot comment too much on Airlines since I don't track them too much (fully commoditized, too heavily regulated, no serious money to be had in any of its niche markets).
A friend of mine showed me a "handy-cam demo" of Half-Life 2, and its engine. In that demo we see the most sophisticated shaders (refraction, translucency, reflection) around, physics engine, you name it -- aside from wondering about how that much content (a _lot_ of detail in that game) could still be profitable for a gameshop, the other conclusion was that I'll probably be needing a new graphics card soon to get a decent frame rate. That kind of engine puts a heavy demand on both GPU (shaders, graphics) and CPU (physics), and I personally strongly believe that this type of engine will drive future demand for graphics cards.
Imho, The future for graphics is only in its infancy; after the z-buffer paradigm, we still have raytracing to explore. The possibilities are truly endless.