I do not believe for a single instant that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are idiots
Oh, I do. I absolutely do. If they weren't idiots, the war would be going better. You think that wouldn't serve them? The American people would be pleased as hell to let our troops stay in Iraq for years while Halliburton builds huge army bases and all the defense contractors suck up billions of taxpayer $s, if the war were going better. They'd have their non-Saudi middle east military bases, their oil reserves locked up where our troops are close by, and a friendly government right next door to what they wanted to be their next adventure, Iran. Instead, they've botched everything up, more and more Americans are demanding we leave lucrative base-building contracts be damned, and they lost their pet Congress that was allowing them to get away with all this crap. No, no, if they were smart, they could satisfy whatever their desires are without all this blow-back. They have simply fucked up majorly because they never had any idea what they were doing.
I used to think that they were smart but duplicitous. Then mistake after mistake after mistake after predictable mistake. When we found out that the administration had been taking most of their cues on Iraq from an Iranian agent, I knew they were fucking clueless. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear, and they believed it whole heartedly. They ignored any military adviser who told them something they didn't want to hear, such as that Rumsfeld's fast & light military strategy was retarded. They just didn't want to hear it, even though if they heard it and acted on it then their goals would have been better served. That means they're stupid.
Well yes because what damned him was being blind to the fact that Bush is driven by ideology at the expense of facts in a way that few have been. The reasons behind that blindness are not particularly important to me.
Well the navy is developing them for that purpose, so they seem to disagree. And at the energies they are talking about (8MJ in working prototypes, 64MJ planned for the full-size version) the round would be traveling so quickly that wind would have very little effect, so very little in the way of guidance is needed.
Also a rail gun round would be much, much less vulnerable to this kind of laser anti-weapon system. For one, relative to the rail gun round a cruise missile is standing still, a ridiculously easy target. For two, the way in which these lasers destroy the incoming weapon with such a small amount of energy is by causing the warhead to explode. Rail guns are kinetic weapons, so to destroy an incoming round you would have to essentially vaporize a solid slug of tungsten.
The major problem with rail guns that they have yet to solve is that the rails themselves experience a repulsive force equal to the force accelerating the projectile, with the result that the gun must be serviced after every shot.
There will still certainly be uses for cruise missiles. They'll still be an excellent choice for submarines, and smaller destroyers. But if they solve or mitigate the self-destructive tendencies of the rail gun, we could be seeing the resurgence of the battleship as a primary naval weapon.
Please. Plenty of leaders regardless of party say that. Reagen in my opinion was particularly good at recognizing when his ideals didn't mesh with reality on the ground. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, are all way off the charts of believing that whatever they think is right is right regardless of what anyone else says or what actually happens. Nobody has been as completely brazen about ignoring the advice of experts within their own administration telling them that their pet theories are wrong. Has there been a single failure in Iraq that was not predicted in advance by experts, including top generals? Even members of Rumsfeld's office were trying to prepare for the obvious problems, but he forbid them from doing so because he believed it wasn't necessary.
I'm serious, drop the "oh, everyone thinks their party is great and hates the other guy" bullshit. It's crap. If you don't realize that Bush's administration is running on pure ideology and letting not a single fact get in their way, you're just not paying attention. If you care about what party they are in, then you're a partisan stooge. If you don't care, you're just ignorant. I don't care which is the case -- wake up, and stop saying "the other guy is just as bad, so this guy is okay". That's a lame and meaningless excuse. Start looking at the actual person, the actual decisions being made, the disconnection from reality that is by now well documented, the continuous stream of former officials saying they didn't know jack shit. I suppose they all just hate bush because he's a republican too. Or maybe, just maybe, what the evidence seems to say is actually true: The country is being run by idiots who think ideology trumps reality and thus reality can be ignored.
All the enemy needs to do is first fire a barrage of Jiffy Pop popcorn. when the laser hits it, the corn pops and rains down on the target. This should be sufficient in preventing the laser from knocking out the REAL rounds, which are fired second.
So would this be called Jiffy Chaff?
Re:So will this be the demise of their ...
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Truck-Mounted Laser Guns
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Rail guns are what the navy is going to use to replace cruise missiles (which replaced heavy ship artillery). Lots of advantages there -- about the same range and precision and destructive power as a cruise missile, but at a fraction of the cost. Plus has a huge advantage over both cruise missiles and conventional artillery shells in that the ammunition won't explode if the ship gets hit -- though I imagine the gigantic capacitors needed to fire the gun may blow up if charged up and hit, though that'd only be one shot's worth of energy rather than the ships whole payload. Rail guns have a bright future, as long as they can figure out how to keep the gun from destroying itself every shot.
Lasers so far are mostly being considered for defensive roles to shoot missiles and artillery down. This is a good role for lasers, since first hitting the target at the speed of light is good when you're trying to hit a small fast moving target, and second because the energy needed to destroy a warhead isn't that large.
Two awesome future technologies, two roles. It's a good time to be a geek.:)
You're thinking of EPIC, Intel's ISA for the Itanium line. The instruction bundles generated by the compiler had explicit scheduling information in them. The compiler was basically responsible for everything, and as was discovered, that puts an onerous burden on the compiler that it is not easy for it to meet. Plus exposing micro-architecture in the ISA is a bad idea because when you change the underlying architecture suddenly your program's scheduling and such is all messed up. The decisions the compiler makes for one Itanium chip may not be optimal for another, but it's all hard-coded.
The idea behind RISC was to actually enable processors that could make the kind of complicated scheduling decisions you're talking about. Out-of-order superscalar processors were considered too hard to do with a CISC ISA. There's still a lot the compiler can do, and compilers started to adapt to the RISC way of doing things. But at any given cycle, it's the processor itself that knows best what resources are available on the processor and what operations can be executed in parallel. RISC is not about exposing the microarchitecture to the compiler.
x86 processors do the same thing now, breaking the CISC ops into RISC-like micro ops. Also, x86 compilers have generally started to use a RISC-like subset of x86, using the complicated instructions at a bare minimum and mostly using the load/store/op model of RISC. Only with some x86 sugar, like combining a memory operation and an arithmetic operation into one instruction.
You're right, in that it's the decode latency that is the big x86 penalty. It ends up not being that much, like I said, a percent or two on average.
The P4 trace cache was actually a quite successful way to reduce the decode latency and decouple decode from the critical path. The reason it didn't really help branch mispredict latency is because getting rid of 3-4 cycles isn't that big a deal when there's at least 15 more cycles after that.:P
*"Choose Your Own Adventure #178: The Pirate Ghosts of Bigley Manor." Not a real CYOA book, but with a lot of concepts taken from them. Again, I didn't say it was "good" art, but could you really call a show with pirate ghosts *bad*?
The only way to call it "bad" would be in reference to the lost opportunity to also include pirate moneys, pirate ninjas, ninja ghosts, and ninja monkey robot ghosts.
But seriously, sounds awesome. I didn't really think that my idea of a choose-your-own-play was original or anything, but really cool to hear someone did it and it worked.
I don't need it to sell or give away your product either, thanks to the doctrine of first sale (Title 17, Section 109 for US Copyright law). I need it to make and distribute copies.
You did notice that "convey" is defined to be a subset of "propagation", which is defined just above as that which would be copyright infringement, specifically making and distributing copies. "Convey" is a form of "propagation", and your reading it to mean the transference of a single instance of software without creating new copies a-la reselling your software is incorrect. Just like when copyright law itself talks about distributing a copy, they don't mean transferring a single legally acquired instance to someone else, they mean creating a copy, keeping the original, and shipping the copy off to someone else.
Of course, Pamela never replied to that.
Well she never said GPLv3 was the only free license, or that we had to do whatever the FSF said unquestioningly. And she had already explained why she felt v3 was superior to v2 on many occasions. So what would have been the point of replying? To brush off the flamebait then repeat herself?
Linus likes to be pragmatic, not political, which is well and good. Linus' problem is that he thinks the two are mutually exclusive. The license that applies to your software has a huge effect on the practical uses for said software and on the practical development paths for that software. Linus is ignoring the flaws of the GPLv2 in an effort to be pragmatic, but that isn't pragmatic because that doesn't make the flaws go away and doesn't keep people from exploiting those flaws.
A good example is his comments on the anti-tivo clause. We shouldn't use legal means to stop a use of technology, he argues, in particular because if you make it illegal then only the "good guys" are really prevented from using it and it's the good guys we want on the forefront of technology. Sound advice, except... If they are putting a modified Linux kernel into a hardware device and not releasing the source, thus violating the spirit if not the letter of the GPL, they aren't the good guys! So then Linus argues that these bad guys trying to keep the source secret aren't going to respect the law, right? Well we aren't talking about outlaws and gangsters, we're talking about software vendors who, presumeably, would like to be able to legally operate in this and other countries. Which is why the GPLv2 has been so effective, because yes we can actually stop people from violating it through legal means. Not having that leverage -- meaning what the "bad guys" are doing is perfectly legal according to the license -- is to have no recourse at all. How is that practical? It isn't. This is how Linus fails pragmatism.
His and your admonition to not make this an "us versus them thing" after your initial post just reminds me of two arguing groups of Church officials both rushing to pull out the "What would Jesus do?" bit first.
Heh, I remember watching a show that was basically about stupid modern art, and I remember being increasingly incensed with what people were willing to shell out loads of money for. The most egregious one in my mind was the little old lady who paid ten thousand dollars for a pile of red, blue, and silver foil-wrapped Hershey's Kisses. That's all it was, a big pile of kisses dumped in a corner. Ten large. Wow.
But the thing that turned it around for me was when they showed the young modern artist who had successfully sold a shoe polish tin filled to the brim with his own feces for several grand. And after thinking about that little old lady trying to justify the deep meaning behind the pile of hershey's kisses and how she had to spend $10k on it instead of going to CostCo and spending $20 on her own kisses to pile in the corner... it clicked.
A shoe polish tin filled with shit is not art. The act of getting someone to pay you thousands of dollars for your shit in a tin is a stinging criticism of the modern art world, the sycophants who desperately pretend to understand it in order to seem cultured, and is a magnificent piece of "high" art.
I'm just here to point out that there's a big difference between fps in a movie/tv show and a video game. Video games create still images that are perfectly sharp based on where every object is at the instant in time that the image represents. For a video game, 30fps is a bare minimum for what we would call "playable" today, though the human eye can easily distinguish frame rates above 100 (probably higher than your monitor refresh rate). Movies and TV, by virtue of being filmed, are blurred due to the motion of whatever is being filmed over the period in which that frame is exposed. This inherent blur means that you can get away with a much lower frame rate and still fool the human brain, and is why a normal movie filmed at 24 fps provides a much more convincing impression of continuous motion than a video game at 70fps.
Of course an ad agency is going to get a study that says their ads work, even if they had to pay for a dozen first that said they don't.
All I really care about is the pervasiveness of ads in games, and from that standpoint the veracity of these numbers is much less important than what the people putting them in games think. And I'm not convinced that even if a dozen studies came out saying in-game ads don't work that they'd actually stop. There's a lot of vested interest in putting ads in games, and while they will surely embrace this study, they'd probably be highly skeptical of a study that said the opposite. How many studies have shown that people tend to completely ignore web-based ads, not even registering their existence a lot of the time? And are there less web-based ads? No, because the reality is that they probably do work overall, and certainly the people putting ads on websites aren't going to take the risk of stopping.
Which I guess makes my only point "more ads are coming regardless of what studies say".
So would a play which involved audience participation, and which was scripted such that according to said audience participation could result in one of several outcomes, then become a sport? I don't know if such a thing would offend the High Poobahs of theatre, but it sounds like a cool work of art to me.
I've never seen a video game that was -that- malleable. They only ever allow what the game authors put into the game that you could do. It was like when I was describing computer RPGs to my roomate, who is familiar with pen and paper RPGs but not CRPGs, and I was describing the bit in the NWN expansion where you get turned to stone by a surprise encounter with a medusa.
"How do they make sure you get to that point instead of running off somewhere else?" he asked, thinking like a game master whose players can ruin their plans.
"Uh, by making that the only thing in the area that you can interact with in any way" was the answer. If they don't give you the option to do something else, then you can't do anything else but stand there and not do what they want.
The fact is that games only offer the illusion of malleability to varying degrees. The ways in which the game designer both gives you choices and constrains the outcomes seems to me to be the very place where "art" can be created in a way unique to video games.
But in terms of human civilization and culture, which have both been around for a lot less time than humans themselves and move much more rapidly than our species itself, literature is very old and does have a very well established tradition on which to base your notion of "purity". Recorded music is just a way of experiencing music, and music is even more ancient than writing, and again has established traditions and parameters and a codified way of talking about it. Painting is ancient. And while neither of these things are static and unchanging, any new development can be discussed in terms of the history.
Movies? Relative newcomer. Movies are still in their infancy as an art form -- compared to other human artforms, not just geologic time as it seems you were doing. Movies are starting to have a significant history that would inform anyone calling themselves a "purist", though I've never heard someone doing so.
Video games? Not even three decades of existence, and founded on technology known for doubling its operational parameters in only two years. This isn't even comparable to the other art forms as far as having an established history, a canon to which one can wish to remain true as a "purist". In the grand scheme of things we're at the "discovering that banging a stick on a hollow tree stump in a regular beat makes a pleasing noise" phase. Acting like their is an established way for banging ones stick against a hollow tree stump against which new stump-stick-beaters should be judged is foolish, because there is an ongoing explosion of people trying various beaters and various objects upon which to beat and nobody has found a "good" way to do it.
Call me in 50 years, when we can look back on this period of infancy in video games, assuming we are not yet even in it, and we can discuss what "purity" means. In the meantime, there's no point because there simply isn't enough history, and yes that's different than other art forms.
The obvious Wii upgrade would have to be a software jump: specifically, multimedia. I'm on record from last November as saying that DVD playing doesn't matter to me, because everyone has a DVD player already. I've cooled on that. The Wii is on, it's connected right the hell now, I can't be bothered messing with switches, the damn thing's got a remote control, I want to play a DVD in it.
Making an assumption on the context behind your original argument, can I reword it this way so you aren't technically flip-flopping^W^W changing your mind?
"The presence or absence of DVD playing isn't going to drive Wii sales because everyone already has a DVD player, but once you've got a Wii it sure would be nice if it did play DVDs.":)
Weird, sounds to me like you have a bias on the GPLv3 issue yourself that colors your opinion of Pamela's opinion as "bias". After all, the part where you "lost all respect for her" was due to her saying something that is factually true -- GPLv2 would allow MS' strategy of inserting patent-encumbered code into GPL software then suing users of said software. The only thing that could make that an "accusation", as if Linus was deliberately trying to help Microsoft, is your own bias.
She wasn't accusing Linus of helping MS put patent landmines in the Linux Kernel. She was asking if Linus' concerns regarding the GPLv3 were worth leaving Linux (legally) exposed to the possibility of patent landmines by sticking with GPLv2. Which is a perfectly reasonable question.
The area hit of x86 is not really that severe. It certainly would not allow significantly larger caches, especially since there's diminishing returns on cache size and the L2s on Intel parts are fairly large, anything less than a 50% increase would be irrelevent. Similarly, the area of an on-chip northbridge would be larger than what you could save by removing the x86 decoders. And in either case, it isn't die size that is stopping Intel from putting the northbridge on-chip (AMD already has, and they are much more constrained by die size than Intel who has fab capacity to spare), it's their investment in their current system topology. They'll make the switch eventually (2009 I hear), and it won't have anything to do with making room on the die.
You can bet that if they could change the instruction set at a whim they would have done a long time ago, and the processor would perform much better.
No. No it wouldn't. It might perform marginally better, as in maybe 1-2%, if you could get rid of all x86 cruft. That number is mostly a WAG, but I've done performance modelling studies to back it up (or more specifically, I've modelled x86 cores without x86 cruft because it's easier, and adding in the cruft for accuracy costs a percent or two on average).
People thought instruction set was the key to performance back in the early RISC days. x86 was too complex, it could never keep up with the new out-of-order processors RISC ISAs allowed. But then those clever folks at Intel came up with decoding x86 instructions into "micro-ops" that look just like RISC instructions and ever since then x86 has been competitive with RISC. That RISC never took over the market because there was no compelling reason for it to do so when all your apps were already written for x86 architectures that were just as fast.
So x86 is here to stay. Am I sad because a crufty ugly ISA is what we're going to be stuck supporting forever? You bet. Am I sad because we're dropping some hypothetical performance on the ground by keeping x86? No, not a bit.
The only way in which you get extra performance out of changing the instruction set is by exposing hardware features not otherwise available. For example, vector processing units, which were added nicely to x86 by the SSE extensions to x86. Or like EPIC tried to do, exposing basically everything from the basic scheduler bundles to the branch predictor, which I think is an example of how trying to put to much emphasis on the ISA can hurt you not help. A lot of computer architecture is done to make a computer run the code that compilers generate quickly, and then the compiler can try to optimize their code for that architecture, forming a feedback loop. Requiring the compiler to generate the code that will make your architecture run fast as a one-way optimization is a bad idea.
But that's not why Intel came up with EPIC. It isn't why they'd drop x86 like a flaming badger if they could. They came up with EPIC because AMD does not have a cross-licensing deal with Intel for anything non-x86. Whatever ISA they come up with is immaterial next to them being the only game in town producing that ISA. That was the point of EPIC -- locking out all competitors -- but it failed. They are probably not eager to try again soon, especially since most of the Itanium people have been run out of town.
I don't care who they are and I especially don't care what political party they are affiliated with, whoever broke the law here should be shit-canned, as should the Diebold voting machines. Didn't the state of California already bar them from elections for breaking election rules? I know they got caught applying an uncertified update just before at election.
This is simply unacceptable, and screw anyone who only gives a shit if a certain group of politicians is involved, or if you don't approve of the result. Unverifiable voting machines are breaking the foundation of Democracy.
I don't know. I don't like Gore, at least in 2000 the only thing I liked about him was his environmental policy, I still hated his corporatism. Maybe he'd be better, maybe he'd be worse.
The only thing I know for sure would be different had Gore become President is that we would not be in Iraq.
That's enough for me to wish things had been different.
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I do not believe for a single instant that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are idiots
Oh, I do. I absolutely do. If they weren't idiots, the war would be going better. You think that wouldn't serve them? The American people would be pleased as hell to let our troops stay in Iraq for years while Halliburton builds huge army bases and all the defense contractors suck up billions of taxpayer $s, if the war were going better. They'd have their non-Saudi middle east military bases, their oil reserves locked up where our troops are close by, and a friendly government right next door to what they wanted to be their next adventure, Iran. Instead, they've botched everything up, more and more Americans are demanding we leave lucrative base-building contracts be damned, and they lost their pet Congress that was allowing them to get away with all this crap. No, no, if they were smart, they could satisfy whatever their desires are without all this blow-back. They have simply fucked up majorly because they never had any idea what they were doing.
I used to think that they were smart but duplicitous. Then mistake after mistake after mistake after predictable mistake. When we found out that the administration had been taking most of their cues on Iraq from an Iranian agent, I knew they were fucking clueless. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear, and they believed it whole heartedly. They ignored any military adviser who told them something they didn't want to hear, such as that Rumsfeld's fast & light military strategy was retarded. They just didn't want to hear it, even though if they heard it and acted on it then their goals would have been better served. That means they're stupid.
Well yes because what damned him was being blind to the fact that Bush is driven by ideology at the expense of facts in a way that few have been. The reasons behind that blindness are not particularly important to me.
Well the navy is developing them for that purpose, so they seem to disagree. And at the energies they are talking about (8MJ in working prototypes, 64MJ planned for the full-size version) the round would be traveling so quickly that wind would have very little effect, so very little in the way of guidance is needed.
Also a rail gun round would be much, much less vulnerable to this kind of laser anti-weapon system. For one, relative to the rail gun round a cruise missile is standing still, a ridiculously easy target. For two, the way in which these lasers destroy the incoming weapon with such a small amount of energy is by causing the warhead to explode. Rail guns are kinetic weapons, so to destroy an incoming round you would have to essentially vaporize a solid slug of tungsten.
The major problem with rail guns that they have yet to solve is that the rails themselves experience a repulsive force equal to the force accelerating the projectile, with the result that the gun must be serviced after every shot.
There will still certainly be uses for cruise missiles. They'll still be an excellent choice for submarines, and smaller destroyers. But if they solve or mitigate the self-destructive tendencies of the rail gun, we could be seeing the resurgence of the battleship as a primary naval weapon.
Please. Plenty of leaders regardless of party say that. Reagen in my opinion was particularly good at recognizing when his ideals didn't mesh with reality on the ground. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, are all way off the charts of believing that whatever they think is right is right regardless of what anyone else says or what actually happens. Nobody has been as completely brazen about ignoring the advice of experts within their own administration telling them that their pet theories are wrong. Has there been a single failure in Iraq that was not predicted in advance by experts, including top generals? Even members of Rumsfeld's office were trying to prepare for the obvious problems, but he forbid them from doing so because he believed it wasn't necessary.
I'm serious, drop the "oh, everyone thinks their party is great and hates the other guy" bullshit. It's crap. If you don't realize that Bush's administration is running on pure ideology and letting not a single fact get in their way, you're just not paying attention. If you care about what party they are in, then you're a partisan stooge. If you don't care, you're just ignorant. I don't care which is the case -- wake up, and stop saying "the other guy is just as bad, so this guy is okay". That's a lame and meaningless excuse. Start looking at the actual person, the actual decisions being made, the disconnection from reality that is by now well documented, the continuous stream of former officials saying they didn't know jack shit. I suppose they all just hate bush because he's a republican too. Or maybe, just maybe, what the evidence seems to say is actually true: The country is being run by idiots who think ideology trumps reality and thus reality can be ignored.
All the enemy needs to do is first fire a barrage of Jiffy Pop popcorn. when the laser hits it, the corn pops and rains down on the target. This should be sufficient in preventing the laser from knocking out the REAL rounds, which are fired second.
So would this be called Jiffy Chaff?
Rail guns are what the navy is going to use to replace cruise missiles (which replaced heavy ship artillery). Lots of advantages there -- about the same range and precision and destructive power as a cruise missile, but at a fraction of the cost. Plus has a huge advantage over both cruise missiles and conventional artillery shells in that the ammunition won't explode if the ship gets hit -- though I imagine the gigantic capacitors needed to fire the gun may blow up if charged up and hit, though that'd only be one shot's worth of energy rather than the ships whole payload. Rail guns have a bright future, as long as they can figure out how to keep the gun from destroying itself every shot.
:)
Lasers so far are mostly being considered for defensive roles to shoot missiles and artillery down. This is a good role for lasers, since first hitting the target at the speed of light is good when you're trying to hit a small fast moving target, and second because the energy needed to destroy a warhead isn't that large.
Two awesome future technologies, two roles. It's a good time to be a geek.
The kid in me is disappointed that the truck doesn't transform into a humanoid robot with the laser held in its hand like a gun.
Yah see, he's sayin' it's a bureaucracy that is competent, so it's broken like it is goin' against the definition of what it is.
Ah say, that's a joke, son.
Heh cool. Was there a "Shakespeare ending" where everyone died? :)
You're thinking of EPIC, Intel's ISA for the Itanium line. The instruction bundles generated by the compiler had explicit scheduling information in them. The compiler was basically responsible for everything, and as was discovered, that puts an onerous burden on the compiler that it is not easy for it to meet. Plus exposing micro-architecture in the ISA is a bad idea because when you change the underlying architecture suddenly your program's scheduling and such is all messed up. The decisions the compiler makes for one Itanium chip may not be optimal for another, but it's all hard-coded.
The idea behind RISC was to actually enable processors that could make the kind of complicated scheduling decisions you're talking about. Out-of-order superscalar processors were considered too hard to do with a CISC ISA. There's still a lot the compiler can do, and compilers started to adapt to the RISC way of doing things. But at any given cycle, it's the processor itself that knows best what resources are available on the processor and what operations can be executed in parallel. RISC is not about exposing the microarchitecture to the compiler.
x86 processors do the same thing now, breaking the CISC ops into RISC-like micro ops. Also, x86 compilers have generally started to use a RISC-like subset of x86, using the complicated instructions at a bare minimum and mostly using the load/store/op model of RISC. Only with some x86 sugar, like combining a memory operation and an arithmetic operation into one instruction.
You're right, in that it's the decode latency that is the big x86 penalty. It ends up not being that much, like I said, a percent or two on average.
:P
The P4 trace cache was actually a quite successful way to reduce the decode latency and decouple decode from the critical path. The reason it didn't really help branch mispredict latency is because getting rid of 3-4 cycles isn't that big a deal when there's at least 15 more cycles after that.
*"Choose Your Own Adventure #178: The Pirate Ghosts of Bigley Manor." Not a real CYOA book, but with a lot of concepts taken from them. Again, I didn't say it was "good" art, but could you really call a show with pirate ghosts *bad*?
The only way to call it "bad" would be in reference to the lost opportunity to also include pirate moneys, pirate ninjas, ninja ghosts, and ninja monkey robot ghosts.
But seriously, sounds awesome. I didn't really think that my idea of a choose-your-own-play was original or anything, but really cool to hear someone did it and it worked.
I don't need it to sell or give away your product either, thanks to the doctrine of first sale (Title 17, Section 109 for US Copyright law). I need it to make and distribute copies.
You did notice that "convey" is defined to be a subset of "propagation", which is defined just above as that which would be copyright infringement, specifically making and distributing copies. "Convey" is a form of "propagation", and your reading it to mean the transference of a single instance of software without creating new copies a-la reselling your software is incorrect. Just like when copyright law itself talks about distributing a copy, they don't mean transferring a single legally acquired instance to someone else, they mean creating a copy, keeping the original, and shipping the copy off to someone else.
Of course, Pamela never replied to that.
Well she never said GPLv3 was the only free license, or that we had to do whatever the FSF said unquestioningly. And she had already explained why she felt v3 was superior to v2 on many occasions. So what would have been the point of replying? To brush off the flamebait then repeat herself?
Linus likes to be pragmatic, not political, which is well and good. Linus' problem is that he thinks the two are mutually exclusive. The license that applies to your software has a huge effect on the practical uses for said software and on the practical development paths for that software. Linus is ignoring the flaws of the GPLv2 in an effort to be pragmatic, but that isn't pragmatic because that doesn't make the flaws go away and doesn't keep people from exploiting those flaws.
A good example is his comments on the anti-tivo clause. We shouldn't use legal means to stop a use of technology, he argues, in particular because if you make it illegal then only the "good guys" are really prevented from using it and it's the good guys we want on the forefront of technology. Sound advice, except... If they are putting a modified Linux kernel into a hardware device and not releasing the source, thus violating the spirit if not the letter of the GPL, they aren't the good guys! So then Linus argues that these bad guys trying to keep the source secret aren't going to respect the law, right? Well we aren't talking about outlaws and gangsters, we're talking about software vendors who, presumeably, would like to be able to legally operate in this and other countries. Which is why the GPLv2 has been so effective, because yes we can actually stop people from violating it through legal means. Not having that leverage -- meaning what the "bad guys" are doing is perfectly legal according to the license -- is to have no recourse at all. How is that practical? It isn't. This is how Linus fails pragmatism.
His and your admonition to not make this an "us versus them thing" after your initial post just reminds me of two arguing groups of Church officials both rushing to pull out the "What would Jesus do?" bit first.
Heh, I remember watching a show that was basically about stupid modern art, and I remember being increasingly incensed with what people were willing to shell out loads of money for. The most egregious one in my mind was the little old lady who paid ten thousand dollars for a pile of red, blue, and silver foil-wrapped Hershey's Kisses. That's all it was, a big pile of kisses dumped in a corner. Ten large. Wow.
But the thing that turned it around for me was when they showed the young modern artist who had successfully sold a shoe polish tin filled to the brim with his own feces for several grand. And after thinking about that little old lady trying to justify the deep meaning behind the pile of hershey's kisses and how she had to spend $10k on it instead of going to CostCo and spending $20 on her own kisses to pile in the corner... it clicked.
A shoe polish tin filled with shit is not art. The act of getting someone to pay you thousands of dollars for your shit in a tin is a stinging criticism of the modern art world, the sycophants who desperately pretend to understand it in order to seem cultured, and is a magnificent piece of "high" art.
I'm just here to point out that there's a big difference between fps in a movie/tv show and a video game. Video games create still images that are perfectly sharp based on where every object is at the instant in time that the image represents. For a video game, 30fps is a bare minimum for what we would call "playable" today, though the human eye can easily distinguish frame rates above 100 (probably higher than your monitor refresh rate). Movies and TV, by virtue of being filmed, are blurred due to the motion of whatever is being filmed over the period in which that frame is exposed. This inherent blur means that you can get away with a much lower frame rate and still fool the human brain, and is why a normal movie filmed at 24 fps provides a much more convincing impression of continuous motion than a video game at 70fps.
Of course an ad agency is going to get a study that says their ads work, even if they had to pay for a dozen first that said they don't.
All I really care about is the pervasiveness of ads in games, and from that standpoint the veracity of these numbers is much less important than what the people putting them in games think. And I'm not convinced that even if a dozen studies came out saying in-game ads don't work that they'd actually stop. There's a lot of vested interest in putting ads in games, and while they will surely embrace this study, they'd probably be highly skeptical of a study that said the opposite. How many studies have shown that people tend to completely ignore web-based ads, not even registering their existence a lot of the time? And are there less web-based ads? No, because the reality is that they probably do work overall, and certainly the people putting ads on websites aren't going to take the risk of stopping.
Which I guess makes my only point "more ads are coming regardless of what studies say".
So would a play which involved audience participation, and which was scripted such that according to said audience participation could result in one of several outcomes, then become a sport? I don't know if such a thing would offend the High Poobahs of theatre, but it sounds like a cool work of art to me.
I've never seen a video game that was -that- malleable. They only ever allow what the game authors put into the game that you could do. It was like when I was describing computer RPGs to my roomate, who is familiar with pen and paper RPGs but not CRPGs, and I was describing the bit in the NWN expansion where you get turned to stone by a surprise encounter with a medusa.
"How do they make sure you get to that point instead of running off somewhere else?" he asked, thinking like a game master whose players can ruin their plans.
"Uh, by making that the only thing in the area that you can interact with in any way" was the answer. If they don't give you the option to do something else, then you can't do anything else but stand there and not do what they want.
The fact is that games only offer the illusion of malleability to varying degrees. The ways in which the game designer both gives you choices and constrains the outcomes seems to me to be the very place where "art" can be created in a way unique to video games.
But in terms of human civilization and culture, which have both been around for a lot less time than humans themselves and move much more rapidly than our species itself, literature is very old and does have a very well established tradition on which to base your notion of "purity". Recorded music is just a way of experiencing music, and music is even more ancient than writing, and again has established traditions and parameters and a codified way of talking about it. Painting is ancient. And while neither of these things are static and unchanging, any new development can be discussed in terms of the history.
Movies? Relative newcomer. Movies are still in their infancy as an art form -- compared to other human artforms, not just geologic time as it seems you were doing. Movies are starting to have a significant history that would inform anyone calling themselves a "purist", though I've never heard someone doing so.
Video games? Not even three decades of existence, and founded on technology known for doubling its operational parameters in only two years. This isn't even comparable to the other art forms as far as having an established history, a canon to which one can wish to remain true as a "purist". In the grand scheme of things we're at the "discovering that banging a stick on a hollow tree stump in a regular beat makes a pleasing noise" phase. Acting like their is an established way for banging ones stick against a hollow tree stump against which new stump-stick-beaters should be judged is foolish, because there is an ongoing explosion of people trying various beaters and various objects upon which to beat and nobody has found a "good" way to do it.
Call me in 50 years, when we can look back on this period of infancy in video games, assuming we are not yet even in it, and we can discuss what "purity" means. In the meantime, there's no point because there simply isn't enough history, and yes that's different than other art forms.
The obvious Wii upgrade would have to be a software jump: specifically, multimedia. I'm on record from last November as saying that DVD playing doesn't matter to me, because everyone has a DVD player already. I've cooled on that. The Wii is on, it's connected right the hell now, I can't be bothered messing with switches, the damn thing's got a remote control, I want to play a DVD in it.
:)
Making an assumption on the context behind your original argument, can I reword it this way so you aren't technically flip-flopping^W^W changing your mind?
"The presence or absence of DVD playing isn't going to drive Wii sales because everyone already has a DVD player, but once you've got a Wii it sure would be nice if it did play DVDs."
Weird, sounds to me like you have a bias on the GPLv3 issue yourself that colors your opinion of Pamela's opinion as "bias". After all, the part where you "lost all respect for her" was due to her saying something that is factually true -- GPLv2 would allow MS' strategy of inserting patent-encumbered code into GPL software then suing users of said software. The only thing that could make that an "accusation", as if Linus was deliberately trying to help Microsoft, is your own bias.
She wasn't accusing Linus of helping MS put patent landmines in the Linux Kernel. She was asking if Linus' concerns regarding the GPLv3 were worth leaving Linux (legally) exposed to the possibility of patent landmines by sticking with GPLv2. Which is a perfectly reasonable question.
Well yeah, which means that the ultimate historical answer to the question of "Who won: RISC or CISC?" is "Both!" :)
The area hit of x86 is not really that severe. It certainly would not allow significantly larger caches, especially since there's diminishing returns on cache size and the L2s on Intel parts are fairly large, anything less than a 50% increase would be irrelevent. Similarly, the area of an on-chip northbridge would be larger than what you could save by removing the x86 decoders. And in either case, it isn't die size that is stopping Intel from putting the northbridge on-chip (AMD already has, and they are much more constrained by die size than Intel who has fab capacity to spare), it's their investment in their current system topology. They'll make the switch eventually (2009 I hear), and it won't have anything to do with making room on the die.
You can bet that if they could change the instruction set at a whim they would have done a long time ago, and the processor would perform much better.
No. No it wouldn't. It might perform marginally better, as in maybe 1-2%, if you could get rid of all x86 cruft. That number is mostly a WAG, but I've done performance modelling studies to back it up (or more specifically, I've modelled x86 cores without x86 cruft because it's easier, and adding in the cruft for accuracy costs a percent or two on average).
People thought instruction set was the key to performance back in the early RISC days. x86 was too complex, it could never keep up with the new out-of-order processors RISC ISAs allowed. But then those clever folks at Intel came up with decoding x86 instructions into "micro-ops" that look just like RISC instructions and ever since then x86 has been competitive with RISC. That RISC never took over the market because there was no compelling reason for it to do so when all your apps were already written for x86 architectures that were just as fast.
So x86 is here to stay. Am I sad because a crufty ugly ISA is what we're going to be stuck supporting forever? You bet. Am I sad because we're dropping some hypothetical performance on the ground by keeping x86? No, not a bit.
The only way in which you get extra performance out of changing the instruction set is by exposing hardware features not otherwise available. For example, vector processing units, which were added nicely to x86 by the SSE extensions to x86. Or like EPIC tried to do, exposing basically everything from the basic scheduler bundles to the branch predictor, which I think is an example of how trying to put to much emphasis on the ISA can hurt you not help. A lot of computer architecture is done to make a computer run the code that compilers generate quickly, and then the compiler can try to optimize their code for that architecture, forming a feedback loop. Requiring the compiler to generate the code that will make your architecture run fast as a one-way optimization is a bad idea.
But that's not why Intel came up with EPIC. It isn't why they'd drop x86 like a flaming badger if they could. They came up with EPIC because AMD does not have a cross-licensing deal with Intel for anything non-x86. Whatever ISA they come up with is immaterial next to them being the only game in town producing that ISA. That was the point of EPIC -- locking out all competitors -- but it failed. They are probably not eager to try again soon, especially since most of the Itanium people have been run out of town.
I don't care who they are and I especially don't care what political party they are affiliated with, whoever broke the law here should be shit-canned, as should the Diebold voting machines. Didn't the state of California already bar them from elections for breaking election rules? I know they got caught applying an uncertified update just before at election.
This is simply unacceptable, and screw anyone who only gives a shit if a certain group of politicians is involved, or if you don't approve of the result. Unverifiable voting machines are breaking the foundation of Democracy.
I don't know. I don't like Gore, at least in 2000 the only thing I liked about him was his environmental policy, I still hated his corporatism. Maybe he'd be better, maybe he'd be worse.
The only thing I know for sure would be different had Gore become President is that we would not be in Iraq.
That's enough for me to wish things had been different.