A game that didn't hold your hand to the point that you almost can't get lost, or fail, or lose anything ever, unless you actually try. EQ was famous for brutally punishing players for mistakes, and often even just arbitrarily (spawning a cyclops 2 feet from you that can kill you in 1 second), but as annoying as that was, it was actually preferable to the risk free 'you can run away from anything mechanics' that dominate later games.
A game where death was something that actually hurt, as opposed to the 15 second inconvenience it is in most games now. In early EQ dying sucked. If you survived a difficult fight, or an unwanted add, or whatever, it was truly elating. If someone saved your ass you were grateful, they'd just saved you 20 minutes of travel and 2 hours worth of monster killing not to mention a possibly difficult corpse recovery...
So let me get this straight. The game is difficult, you can't run away from a fight that is too much for you, a single random spawn while you're fighting other mobs could result in you being overwhelmed, and if you die from such a cheap occurance you not only have to waste half an hour getting to your corpse, you then have to repeat 2 hours of mindless grinding just to regain your lost progress? Two and a half hours of boredom is my punishment for daring to try to kill one more mob at once than I should, or being around when a mob spawns?
FUCK THAT.
I'm sorry, forget whether or not death has "meaning". My time has meaning. We're talking about a genre that is already defined by taking the least amount of content and turning it into the maximum amount of time spent by the player by requiring lengthy "grinds". At least when I grind in WoW I'm making forward progress. Two hours is a full night's session -- if I logged on one night, ground away for two hours, then the next night had to repeat the exact same process because I'd gotten unlucky and died, I'd cancel my subscription. It's already sketchy enough deliberately wasting my time so as to acrue more monthly fees, but to actually set me backwards as "punishment" for the game being cheap would be the final straw.
I can't imagine how groups would form in EQ, unless you already knew everyone involved. At least, I'd never join a PuG, because I'm never going to want to risk losing 2 hours of actual progress because of someone else's screwup. In a WoW PuG I'm only risking the actual time I spend with the PuG (plus some gold), they can't actually undo the progress I've made before.
If I want an RPG where death has meaning, I'll play nethack. At least in nethack the game knows how to be both hard and give you plenty of ways to escape or otherwise survive deadly situations.
They didn't say it was wrong (meaning that there was more than one gunmen), they said the analysis was not correct.
I guess you could say it was misleading, but it's not the way I took it. I took it to mean the analysis was wrong, as in not correct.
If any step in a proof is wrong, then the entire proof is wrong, even if the conclusion is actually a true statement.
Of course it's all the other problems with the official story that naturally push my mind in the direction of there being multiple shooters upon finding out that the proof of the single shooter was incorrect. But I still didn't take the summary as implying that this was now proven.
You think the hardware vendors are waiting around? They are already dreaming of 128-bit CPU's.
Well I see what you're getting at (hardware vendors wanting to sell upgrades), but no, they aren't dreaming of 128-bit cpus. Because 64 bits is really going to be enough for a long time. 2^64 is huge.
Previous jumps made a lot more sense. 4 to 8 to 16 was automatic, as soon as transistor budgets was high enough it made sense to do it. 16 bits wasn't ever sufficient, either -- 64k isn't even a very long text file, and PCs had ten times that much ram already that needed to be addressed through segments. 32 bits gives you 4GB of address space, which is starting to get pretty reasonable, and was more than sufficient for quite a while, but also not ridiculously huge. Servers bumped up against it first, but when AMD released the Opteron even my not-too-expensive home desktop had 2GB of RAM. Intel may have been right that desktops didn't exactly need 64-bit, but overal the time was ripe to change.
The thing is, though, that while Moore's Law is exponential, increasing bits is super-exponential, as in 2^2^N. So every time we double the number of address bits, we double the number of generations it takes for memory densities to catch up. 32-bit can address 64,000 times more than a 16 bit machine. 64-bit machines can address 4 billion times more memory than 32-bit.
So it's going to be a while -- at least twenty years even if the exponential growth in memory capacity continues unabated -- before there's any point to even considering 128-bit addressing. Yes, hardware vendors may like to promote upgrades, but it's easy enough to do so just by offering more performance/lower power/whatever other features. Adding bits means adding cost in datapaths, in pins, and in having to convince software vendors to re-write so there's any point in having those extra bits and datapaths in the first place, and if none of the software people want those bits they won't buy in and then it's just wasted.
Oh, and if/when we do ever switch to 128-bit addressing, which I'm predicting won't be for another 2 decades at least, then we will never switch to 256-bit addressing, at least not until we leave the Milky Way and are no longer satisfied by being able to address every particle in a single galaxy uniquely.
However, there's a reason why x86 is still the dominant platform extant. Underneath all the hacks and kludges and other cruft, the basic platform is stable, completely documented, and TIME TESTED.
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Sorry, I'm not trying to make fun, that was an excellent post so stumbling across that small clause thrown in there made me Laugh Out Loud.
Sadly, there is a lot in x86 that isn't documented. Especially if you're looking for all that documentation in one place, but even without you're never going to find every piece of undocumented behavior. The worst part is that a lot of it you would never think could matter but ends up mattering a lot. Some of it has been discovered and documented on the net, others is "documented" only in the heads of the engineers who made the chips. This is ultimately in my opinion one of the only relevent digs against x86. It makes it extremely difficult to make fully compatible x86 chips, which is part of why there are so few people making them.
Still, as long as all the AMD and Intel engineers aren't wiped out simultaneously, we should be okay. Transmeta and Via still know how to make x86 chips too. But pretty much any other ISA is better documented than x86.
Originally, yes. At some point it was increased to 2^48, matching the virtual address space. I'm not sure why since I doubt anyone even server customers were reaching the limit. Let's see: 8 sockets times 2 dram channels times 4 dimm slots times 2 GB dimms = 128 GB, and I'm not even sure you can populate 4 dimms per channel in a server setup. Still, that's 2^37, only a few doublings from 2^40. So they probably wanted to make sure they didn't ever have a problem by increasing the address space now.
I believe the virtual memory goes to 2^48. Not sure the logic on that one, but it was probably to cut down on the size of page tables.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was a major motivation too.
I'm sure it's also one of those things that when the time comes, they'll add a setting in newer chips to enable more bits.
They planned this from the get-go, which is why the spec requires that every address be in "canonical" form, which basically means the address is sign-extended from the highest supported bit. This keeps some too-clever-for-their-own-good programmer from realizing that they have a 64-bit address, but really the hardware only uses 48 of them, so that's 16 bits in which to stick some other piece of data. If that was allowed, then when the size of the virtual address space was increased that application would break.
It really is spooky to look over your shoulder and see an attack helicopter floating a couple hundred yards away when you had to idea it was even there.
Especially when you aren't anywhere near a war zone or military base, and it happens repeatedly as you're leaving work or headed to the movies. What do you want from me, Mysterious Apache Pilot?!
will hardware vendors stop releasing 32-bit chips?
As far as AMD and Intel are concerned, 32-bit-only processors are nearly gone already.
Will companies upgrade hardware in orer to get the latest version of Windows?
Maybe, but it's more likely just to upgrade the system specs like they're having to do with Vista rather than to support 64-bit. The upgrade needed to run Vista probably entails purchasing a 64-bit processor, even if they don't use a 64-bit OS.
Will this help provide more incentive for a Linux desktop?
Nope.
Will this increase the amount of lead going into our landfills?
I do not believe that Microsoft is dropping support for 32-bit applications from future operating systems; that would be foolish. The whole reason AMD64 took off as opposed to IA-64 is that it's backward compatible and supports running 32-bit applications within a 64-bit OS with no speed penalty. Compared to other things an OS does, supporting 32-bit apps within a 64-bit OS is easy.
What they mean is that the OS itself will only run on a 64-bit capable processor. You will have to have a processor with the x86-64 extensions. That's all. Not a big deal, either, since it won't be long until all non-embedded processors sold by AMD and Intel are 64-bit capable. By the time the successor to Vista comes out certainly.
Not related to your post, but the summary mentions how AMD should be "delighted". No, not really. AMD would have been ecstatic if a fully functional non-beta 64-bit Windows had been out 3-4 years ago when they had x86-64 and Intel did not. Instead they relied on Linux to help them sell based on 64-bit. Now, when both are selling 64-bit mainstream processors, it doesn't matter much. AMD/Intel processors will still have to support 32-bit operating systems into eternity, so they don't get anything out of MS dropping support.
I can't understand how value-added content is such a bad thing when you're already shelling out $60 for a game.
Because in the mentality of Microsoft execs (and of course many others), not charging $10 for a map is like losing $10. Even if they don't need to because they already made significant profit off your original purchase. It's not just about making money, it's about making maximal money, and a the lack of a hypothetical gain equals a loss.
So, in your imagination of what real life is like, there is no computer in the world attached to something important that can't simply be "done manually" if it fails, eh? Wow, you realy are ignorant. At what point does tremendous ignorance become knowledge? Does it rapid around, when you know so little that it's like knowing everything? I guess not knowing anything does free you to make up anything you want, and you won't know that it's BS.
Most people think Y2K was BS, but that's because they don't know what went on behind the scenes. You don't know either, and given the chance to learn, eschew it. That's deliberate ignorance. That's the kind of thing that, in real life, gets you ostracized and/or punched depending on the setting.
Oh, and you have got quite a mouth on you, you should really wrap those lips around some place, where they wouldn't do too much damage to the owner.
Now why would I want to cut in on your business, seeing as you are so poorly equipped for any other job? That just seems cruel.
Not interested in talking to a fallacy generator online, in rl would have been different.
Yes, in real life you would have shut the fuck up with your ignorant comments about Y2K as soon as you realized somebody who did know what the fuck they were talking about was present.
you are in no way an educated person when it comes to my reactions to stimula, but whatever.
I based it off your reaction to Y2K -- civilization didn't end, therefore it was never a problem to begin with. I guessed that your reaction to civilization surviving global warming by fixing it would be the same. That isn't a very big leap. If your reaction would be different, you've done nothing to show it, rather the opposite.
irrelevant, any mistakes that are presented by automated processes can at the end be fixed manually and then the automated processes that really require fixes would have been fixed.
Uh huh. For one, many automated processes have no "manual" back up that you can re-do. For two, when the issue is an industrial control system you can't just "undo" a failure of a safety system that could lead to damage to material or injury to workers. You can't "undo" a failure of an air traffic control system.
I guess we'll just "undo" global warming if it turns out to actually be a problem, and go back in time to fix the things that needed to be fixed.
House fires have killed people. Has Global Warming killed people? Has Y2K killed people? (in any significant numbers anyway, most things can kill, few things are worth mentioning because they don't kill in enough numbers.)
Prehistoric You, standing outside Humanity's First Burning House: "Gee guys, maybe we should just see how this plays out. Nobody has ever died in a house fire before, right? Maybe it will be all right!"
Oh, and if the fire department does come and put out the fire, and nobody is injured, that means it was never a problem in the first place and the fire department didn't need to be called.
that's what I call hysteria and you are dancing to its tune. You are assuming quite a few links here, from CO2 to mass flooding. Nice theories, but not in any way more scary to me than the Y2K predictions.
Right, I'm not trying to elucidate the entire body of climate research and the possible outcomes of climate change here. Though the CO2 -> warming link is very strong, and while this won't necessarily result in the melting of ice caps, it is a distinct possibility, and the connection between the ice caps melting and mass flooding is pretty much 100%. Basically the only assumption I am making here is that global climate change is reality, and take your pick from the multitudinous effects of such, pretty much none of which are good. You don't agree anthropogenic climate change is reality, fine, but your stance presented here is more "if it exists i still don't think we need to do anything" which is utterly foolish.
Also, I repeat that the only reason none of those scary Y2K predictions came true is because where it mattered people worked to fix it! How you can parlay that into not needing to fix global warming because it's the same kind of hysteria I don't know, but it makes no sense.
and if you decide to do something, the absense of the end of civilization will be taken by people like you to mean that you have done enough to prevent an imminent catastrophe. How do you know that? You do not know that, you will just act on a hysteria that is feeding this movement (religion really.)
Well, see, if something is really done, it will also be commensurate with study of the indicators of what the effects are. So while your assumption that there was never a problem would be baseless exactly like your belief that y2k wasn't a problem, the belief that the steps taken to prevent global warming were effective would be based on science. Sort of like how the ozone hole "hysteria" that resulted in the CFC ban was followed by studying atmospheric CFC levels and the ozone hole and found that the ban worked and reduced the hole in accordance with predictions. But because the predictions of what would happen if nothing was done never came true (because something was done), then I guess it was all hysteria and religion!
you are making assumptions about my reactions, but that's ok.
More "educated guesses", but whatever.
Oh, and I worked at the Y2K times on some of the fixes of other people's code. So what would have happened if it wasn't fixed? Some accounting system would have had screwed up orders and some manual corrections would have been required.
So, you worked on it, but not on any of the industrial control systems and banking systems that were of actual import. Cool, thanks for your contribution, but there were other more important ones. When did you work on it?
Not a big deal, not the end of the civilization.
So, "not the end of the civilization" == "not a big deal". It takes a lot to impress you, I see. Your house is on fire, but civilization will go on, so let's not send the fire department. They'd just be capitalizing on your hysteria, anyway.
BTW, Y2K could not have ended civilization simply because we don't require computers to live. If you are going to extrapolate that and say that rapid climate change couldn't end civilization, you're nuts. And since I don't subscribe to the line of thought that if it doesn't end civilization it's no big deal, I'm worried enough about the idea of sea waters rising enough to force the majority of the world's populations to have to pick up and move. I'm sure that couldn't cause any major problems, though!
You assume that a shit loads of money is being spent to 'fix the GW problem'. I assume that shit loads of money is being spent and that very little of it actually ends up doing something useful.
Not at all, as so far I don't see much being done at all to "fix the GW problem". There is certainly no concerted effort. There's a few half-assed measures and protocols, ones that don't even require major polluters to do anything at all, or ones that are basically "Clear Skies Act" doubletalk which don't actually help the environment but end up being big handouts to business.
I'm saying if we decide to take global warming seriously and do something about, the absence of the end of civilization will be taken by people like you to mean that nothing had to be done in the first place.
It is, after all, Christmass.
The funny thing is that "Christmas" for the Y2K bug was only in the few years just prior, when everyone who had sat on their ass not doing anything suddenly panicked. The only "Christmas" in regards to stopping global warming will similarly be when people with attitudes like yours have done nothing, suddenly realize that they have to do something, and the only methods that will succeed are extremely expensive ones.
Right now the only Christmas is for the big industry status quo, the oil companies, and everyone else who has every reason in the world to downplay global warming. They're making money hand over fist, and for a pittance of their PR budget that can stop anyone from making them pay the true cost of their pollution.
Um, yeah. The only reason you think Y2K wasn't a big deal is because people busted their ass ensuring that it wouldn't be. You have no idea what would have happened if nothing had been done about Y2K, but that's okay, because the people for whom it truly mattered had their shit together and never even considered not doing anything about it.
Now it's Global Warming, and if we are kept safe it will again be because of people busting their ass and spending shitloads. I'm sure that you'll say it was never that big a deal in the first place. Whereas if the opposite tack was taken, to do nothing under the assumption that global warming "will not do much", and everything goes to hell, you'll be asking why more wasn't done. Just like you'd be asking why more wasn't done to stop Y2K if nothing had been done. Good thing it was.
There is no such thing as a defensive patent; that just does not make any sense at all.
No, it does make sense. Even though by nature a patent is designed as an offensive weapon, it is perfectly possible to use them strategically as a form of defense and nothing more, and for some companies this is the most desireable way of using them.
Say, just to pick a random example from nowhere, that you make microprocessors. You come up with a bunch of clever ideas designing such a microprocessor, but those ideas are simply means to an end. The individual widgets inside the chip aren't that important, from an IP point of view. First, most of the original ideas for these widgets come from academia in the first place. Second, a whole new slew of ideas will have to be made for the next chip, and the widgets in the current chip may not be appropriate. Third, but similarly, it isn't easy for a competitor to see a widget in your chip and copy it because it may not even work in their design which is in addition to the years it takes to design a new chip. Fourth, using a patent to prevent others from making that widget doesn't provide any significant barrier to entry for competitors since it is trivial to not use the patented widgets and instead come up with others. There are already sufficient barriers to entry in microprocessors such that only a few companies left still doing it.
So the patents don't particularly help in the traditional sense of locking up an invention so competitors can't use it. However, they still try to get as many as possible, and that's for the primary reason of not being the victim of someone else's patents. Because so many things are patented it is essentially a given that some part of the chip will be violating someone else's patent. No, they don't know which one, and deliberately refrain from finding out since knowingly infringing a patent is treble damages. Yet when the day comes and a patent infringement claim is brought, they want to be able to turn around, look through their own massive patent portfolio and the plaintif's products and claim that they too are infringing. Then the negotiation begins, and the company with the biggest and most impressive pile of patents gets the most favorable terms in the resulting cross-licensing agreement.
Not that it usually even goes that far. Usually the two companies realise that they are probably violating each other's patents, and decide to work out cross-licensing before it really becomes an issue. When you are using patents defensively, you don't want to go on the offensive, as the whole thing is a sort of MAD.
None of which means that patents aren't crippling innovation. Patents have turned technology development into a war zone with minefields strewn randomly and brigand armies roaming the countryside and scorched barren no-mans-lands. It's just that in this war zone there are groups whose fortifications are purely defensive in nature, whose guns are only to be fired at those who fire upon them. The fact that they feel the need to build those fortifications for no other reason than self-defense is actually an indicator of the big mess this has become.
Yes, keep living in your cozy climate-controlled cave until someone else finds the "irrefutable proof" creates the "cure-all solution" and drops them both in your lap. Of course "irrefutable" really means "inarguable" and people can always find a reason to argue. And if their "cure-all" solution is merely a "cure-most" solution, you can just go right back into your cave and ignore it, because the absence of a perfect solution means there is no problem.
No, it's still a myth, and TFA says that the trend of the total population -- the rising of which being the myth -- is unknown. A sub-population rising does not mean the overall population is rising. Especially when other populations are dropping, and there's a ready explanation for why the one that is rising is doing so.
I can appreciate the sentiment. It was while reading about this, in particular a detail not covered well in that specific article, which is that Ashcroft had said he wouldn't sign off on the legality of the NSA wiretap program, that I almost found myself saying "I miss John Ashcroft".
For a second I was very scared, as though the universe was about to implode.
Hey, if I can get you to run my shell script as root, then I can add my own sources to your sources.list and use apt to install my rootkit!
That's the thing the article doesn't make clear: Does this exploit require that the trojan be executed with admin privileges, or can it get the necessary privileges from a standard user account?
If the former, then clearly this isn't MS' fault at all. Got Root? Got Pwned. If the latter, then it's a local privilege escalation bug that is MS' fault. It may still require the user to download and execute a trojan, which would mean they are already compromised, but the hypothetical escalation bug would increase the damage the trojan could do. Or if there is a remote exploit that allows execution of arbitrary code in user-space, then it could then use the local exploit to get root, and now it's a real worm.
That's why even the most minor of security issues needs to be fixed. Because a bug in your code that is difficult to exploit, combined with a bug in software that you didn't write and would never know was even going to be on the system, and the result could be a simple way to own your machine.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that if this does take advantage of a local root exploit, then MS can spin all they want but they better fix it pronto, simply because you can probably assume that your average windows user will at some point download and execute a trojan. If it ain't, well, not much they can do, other than remind people not to run as admin?
About soft AI, sure. All kinds of great things about tree pruning and state evaluation and stuff like that.
No hard AI stuff, but that's because in order to have a hard AI chess machine, you'd have to make the AI then teach it chess. Much more practical to go for the direct approach.
Driving long stretches on the highway there is no braking involved and air resistance is high. You are limited by the power of the gas engine (because you'd drain your battery if you tried to use it continually), so most of the time the weight of the electric portion is a disadvantage.
While in some ways a car is more than the sum of its parts, when it comes to the car's mass it is exactly the sum of its parts.
The presence of the electric engine, which has optimal torque at zero rpm and handles the tasks of starting from a stop or accelerating up a hill, allows for a smaller and more efficient ICE. Because of the way the transmission splits power between the ICE and electric motor, the ICE is able to run at near-ideal RPMs all the time, and the ideal RPM range of the engine can be optimized for crusing.
I hoped numbers would be simple to track down, but it doesn't look like the Prius is significantly heavier than other cars in its class, the net result of the smaller ICE + electric is a small increase in mass. Combined with the other advantages the hybrid system brings, and they are still very efficient on the highway. They just aren't sick-efficient like they are in stop-and-go traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
A game that didn't hold your hand to the point that you almost can't get lost, or fail, or lose anything ever, unless you actually try. EQ was famous for brutally punishing players for mistakes, and often even just arbitrarily (spawning a cyclops 2 feet from you that can kill you in 1 second), but as annoying as that was, it was actually preferable to the risk free 'you can run away from anything mechanics' that dominate later games.
A game where death was something that actually hurt, as opposed to the 15 second inconvenience it is in most games now. In early EQ dying sucked. If you survived a difficult fight, or an unwanted add, or whatever, it was truly elating. If someone saved your ass you were grateful, they'd just saved you 20 minutes of travel and 2 hours worth of monster killing not to mention a possibly difficult corpse recovery...
So let me get this straight. The game is difficult, you can't run away from a fight that is too much for you, a single random spawn while you're fighting other mobs could result in you being overwhelmed, and if you die from such a cheap occurance you not only have to waste half an hour getting to your corpse, you then have to repeat 2 hours of mindless grinding just to regain your lost progress? Two and a half hours of boredom is my punishment for daring to try to kill one more mob at once than I should, or being around when a mob spawns?
FUCK THAT.
I'm sorry, forget whether or not death has "meaning". My time has meaning. We're talking about a genre that is already defined by taking the least amount of content and turning it into the maximum amount of time spent by the player by requiring lengthy "grinds". At least when I grind in WoW I'm making forward progress. Two hours is a full night's session -- if I logged on one night, ground away for two hours, then the next night had to repeat the exact same process because I'd gotten unlucky and died, I'd cancel my subscription. It's already sketchy enough deliberately wasting my time so as to acrue more monthly fees, but to actually set me backwards as "punishment" for the game being cheap would be the final straw.
I can't imagine how groups would form in EQ, unless you already knew everyone involved. At least, I'd never join a PuG, because I'm never going to want to risk losing 2 hours of actual progress because of someone else's screwup. In a WoW PuG I'm only risking the actual time I spend with the PuG (plus some gold), they can't actually undo the progress I've made before.
If I want an RPG where death has meaning, I'll play nethack. At least in nethack the game knows how to be both hard and give you plenty of ways to escape or otherwise survive deadly situations.
So that people like you will be tricked into thinking there's no way they could be competent enough to pull off a conspiracy theory!
Oooh, they're clever bastards!
Freeman is mute, and Master Chief suffers from terrible acne, you insensitive clod!
Wait, but you want them to retain their dignity by not being forced to reveal their problems -- I'm an insensitive clod!
They didn't say it was wrong (meaning that there was more than one gunmen), they said the analysis was not correct.
I guess you could say it was misleading, but it's not the way I took it. I took it to mean the analysis was wrong, as in not correct.
If any step in a proof is wrong, then the entire proof is wrong, even if the conclusion is actually a true statement.
Of course it's all the other problems with the official story that naturally push my mind in the direction of there being multiple shooters upon finding out that the proof of the single shooter was incorrect. But I still didn't take the summary as implying that this was now proven.
You think the hardware vendors are waiting around? They are already dreaming of 128-bit CPU's.
Well I see what you're getting at (hardware vendors wanting to sell upgrades), but no, they aren't dreaming of 128-bit cpus. Because 64 bits is really going to be enough for a long time. 2^64 is huge.
Previous jumps made a lot more sense. 4 to 8 to 16 was automatic, as soon as transistor budgets was high enough it made sense to do it. 16 bits wasn't ever sufficient, either -- 64k isn't even a very long text file, and PCs had ten times that much ram already that needed to be addressed through segments. 32 bits gives you 4GB of address space, which is starting to get pretty reasonable, and was more than sufficient for quite a while, but also not ridiculously huge. Servers bumped up against it first, but when AMD released the Opteron even my not-too-expensive home desktop had 2GB of RAM. Intel may have been right that desktops didn't exactly need 64-bit, but overal the time was ripe to change.
The thing is, though, that while Moore's Law is exponential, increasing bits is super-exponential, as in 2^2^N. So every time we double the number of address bits, we double the number of generations it takes for memory densities to catch up. 32-bit can address 64,000 times more than a 16 bit machine. 64-bit machines can address 4 billion times more memory than 32-bit.
So it's going to be a while -- at least twenty years even if the exponential growth in memory capacity continues unabated -- before there's any point to even considering 128-bit addressing. Yes, hardware vendors may like to promote upgrades, but it's easy enough to do so just by offering more performance/lower power/whatever other features. Adding bits means adding cost in datapaths, in pins, and in having to convince software vendors to re-write so there's any point in having those extra bits and datapaths in the first place, and if none of the software people want those bits they won't buy in and then it's just wasted.
Oh, and if/when we do ever switch to 128-bit addressing, which I'm predicting won't be for another 2 decades at least, then we will never switch to 256-bit addressing, at least not until we leave the Milky Way and are no longer satisfied by being able to address every particle in a single galaxy uniquely.
Yeah, and at least the most well known chip, x-scale, isn't even x86. I'm only talking about non-embedded markets here.
However, there's a reason why x86 is still the dominant platform extant. Underneath all the hacks and kludges and other cruft, the basic platform is stable, completely documented, and TIME TESTED.
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Sorry, I'm not trying to make fun, that was an excellent post so stumbling across that small clause thrown in there made me Laugh Out Loud.
Sadly, there is a lot in x86 that isn't documented. Especially if you're looking for all that documentation in one place, but even without you're never going to find every piece of undocumented behavior. The worst part is that a lot of it you would never think could matter but ends up mattering a lot. Some of it has been discovered and documented on the net, others is "documented" only in the heads of the engineers who made the chips. This is ultimately in my opinion one of the only relevent digs against x86. It makes it extremely difficult to make fully compatible x86 chips, which is part of why there are so few people making them.
Still, as long as all the AMD and Intel engineers aren't wiped out simultaneously, we should be okay. Transmeta and Via still know how to make x86 chips too. But pretty much any other ISA is better documented than x86.
2^40 is the physical RAM limit.
Originally, yes. At some point it was increased to 2^48, matching the virtual address space. I'm not sure why since I doubt anyone even server customers were reaching the limit. Let's see: 8 sockets times 2 dram channels times 4 dimm slots times 2 GB dimms = 128 GB, and I'm not even sure you can populate 4 dimms per channel in a server setup. Still, that's 2^37, only a few doublings from 2^40. So they probably wanted to make sure they didn't ever have a problem by increasing the address space now.
I believe the virtual memory goes to 2^48. Not sure the logic on that one, but it was probably to cut down on the size of page tables.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was a major motivation too.
I'm sure it's also one of those things that when the time comes, they'll add a setting in newer chips to enable more bits.
They planned this from the get-go, which is why the spec requires that every address be in "canonical" form, which basically means the address is sign-extended from the highest supported bit. This keeps some too-clever-for-their-own-good programmer from realizing that they have a 64-bit address, but really the hardware only uses 48 of them, so that's 16 bits in which to stick some other piece of data. If that was allowed, then when the size of the virtual address space was increased that application would break.
Of course not. Real Americans don't believe in evolution.
:)
Which is why unfortunately the GP was wrong, and the world is evolving around America.
It really is spooky to look over your shoulder and see an attack helicopter floating a couple hundred yards away when you had to idea it was even there.
Especially when you aren't anywhere near a war zone or military base, and it happens repeatedly as you're leaving work or headed to the movies. What do you want from me, Mysterious Apache Pilot?!
will hardware vendors stop releasing 32-bit chips?
As far as AMD and Intel are concerned, 32-bit-only processors are nearly gone already.
Will companies upgrade hardware in orer to get the latest version of Windows?
Maybe, but it's more likely just to upgrade the system specs like they're having to do with Vista rather than to support 64-bit. The upgrade needed to run Vista probably entails purchasing a 64-bit processor, even if they don't use a 64-bit OS.
Will this help provide more incentive for a Linux desktop?
Nope.
Will this increase the amount of lead going into our landfills?
Can't see how, but I don't know.
I do not believe that Microsoft is dropping support for 32-bit applications from future operating systems; that would be foolish. The whole reason AMD64 took off as opposed to IA-64 is that it's backward compatible and supports running 32-bit applications within a 64-bit OS with no speed penalty. Compared to other things an OS does, supporting 32-bit apps within a 64-bit OS is easy.
What they mean is that the OS itself will only run on a 64-bit capable processor. You will have to have a processor with the x86-64 extensions. That's all. Not a big deal, either, since it won't be long until all non-embedded processors sold by AMD and Intel are 64-bit capable. By the time the successor to Vista comes out certainly.
Not related to your post, but the summary mentions how AMD should be "delighted". No, not really. AMD would have been ecstatic if a fully functional non-beta 64-bit Windows had been out 3-4 years ago when they had x86-64 and Intel did not. Instead they relied on Linux to help them sell based on 64-bit. Now, when both are selling 64-bit mainstream processors, it doesn't matter much. AMD/Intel processors will still have to support 32-bit operating systems into eternity, so they don't get anything out of MS dropping support.
I can't understand how value-added content is such a bad thing when you're already shelling out $60 for a game.
Because in the mentality of Microsoft execs (and of course many others), not charging $10 for a map is like losing $10. Even if they don't need to because they already made significant profit off your original purchase. It's not just about making money, it's about making maximal money, and a the lack of a hypothetical gain equals a loss.
So, in your imagination of what real life is like, there is no computer in the world attached to something important that can't simply be "done manually" if it fails, eh? Wow, you realy are ignorant. At what point does tremendous ignorance become knowledge? Does it rapid around, when you know so little that it's like knowing everything? I guess not knowing anything does free you to make up anything you want, and you won't know that it's BS.
Most people think Y2K was BS, but that's because they don't know what went on behind the scenes. You don't know either, and given the chance to learn, eschew it. That's deliberate ignorance. That's the kind of thing that, in real life, gets you ostracized and/or punched depending on the setting.
Oh, and you have got quite a mouth on you, you should really wrap those lips around some place, where they wouldn't do too much damage to the owner.
Now why would I want to cut in on your business, seeing as you are so poorly equipped for any other job? That just seems cruel.
Not interested in talking to a fallacy generator online, in rl would have been different.
Yes, in real life you would have shut the fuck up with your ignorant comments about Y2K as soon as you realized somebody who did know what the fuck they were talking about was present.
you are in no way an educated person when it comes to my reactions to stimula, but whatever.
I based it off your reaction to Y2K -- civilization didn't end, therefore it was never a problem to begin with. I guessed that your reaction to civilization surviving global warming by fixing it would be the same. That isn't a very big leap. If your reaction would be different, you've done nothing to show it, rather the opposite.
irrelevant, any mistakes that are presented by automated processes can at the end be fixed manually and then the automated processes that really require fixes would have been fixed.
Uh huh. For one, many automated processes have no "manual" back up that you can re-do. For two, when the issue is an industrial control system you can't just "undo" a failure of a safety system that could lead to damage to material or injury to workers. You can't "undo" a failure of an air traffic control system.
I guess we'll just "undo" global warming if it turns out to actually be a problem, and go back in time to fix the things that needed to be fixed.
House fires have killed people. Has Global Warming killed people? Has Y2K killed people? (in any significant numbers anyway, most things can kill, few things are worth mentioning because they don't kill in enough numbers.)
Prehistoric You, standing outside Humanity's First Burning House: "Gee guys, maybe we should just see how this plays out. Nobody has ever died in a house fire before, right? Maybe it will be all right!"
Oh, and if the fire department does come and put out the fire, and nobody is injured, that means it was never a problem in the first place and the fire department didn't need to be called.
that's what I call hysteria and you are dancing to its tune. You are assuming quite a few links here, from CO2 to mass flooding. Nice theories, but not in any way more scary to me than the Y2K predictions.
Right, I'm not trying to elucidate the entire body of climate research and the possible outcomes of climate change here. Though the CO2 -> warming link is very strong, and while this won't necessarily result in the melting of ice caps, it is a distinct possibility, and the connection between the ice caps melting and mass flooding is pretty much 100%. Basically the only assumption I am making here is that global climate change is reality, and take your pick from the multitudinous effects of such, pretty much none of which are good. You don't agree anthropogenic climate change is reality, fine, but your stance presented here is more "if it exists i still don't think we need to do anything" which is utterly foolish.
Also, I repeat that the only reason none of those scary Y2K predictions came true is because where it mattered people worked to fix it! How you can parlay that into not needing to fix global warming because it's the same kind of hysteria I don't know, but it makes no sense.
and if you decide to do something, the absense of the end of civilization will be taken by people like you to mean that you have done enough to prevent an imminent catastrophe. How do you know that? You do not know that, you will just act on a hysteria that is feeding this movement (religion really.)
Well, see, if something is really done, it will also be commensurate with study of the indicators of what the effects are. So while your assumption that there was never a problem would be baseless exactly like your belief that y2k wasn't a problem, the belief that the steps taken to prevent global warming were effective would be based on science. Sort of like how the ozone hole "hysteria" that resulted in the CFC ban was followed by studying atmospheric CFC levels and the ozone hole and found that the ban worked and reduced the hole in accordance with predictions. But because the predictions of what would happen if nothing was done never came true (because something was done), then I guess it was all hysteria and religion!
But that's the problem
you are making assumptions about my reactions, but that's ok.
More "educated guesses", but whatever.
Oh, and I worked at the Y2K times on some of the fixes of other people's code. So what would have happened if it wasn't fixed? Some accounting system would have had screwed up orders and some manual corrections would have been required.
So, you worked on it, but not on any of the industrial control systems and banking systems that were of actual import. Cool, thanks for your contribution, but there were other more important ones. When did you work on it?
Not a big deal, not the end of the civilization.
So, "not the end of the civilization" == "not a big deal". It takes a lot to impress you, I see. Your house is on fire, but civilization will go on, so let's not send the fire department. They'd just be capitalizing on your hysteria, anyway.
BTW, Y2K could not have ended civilization simply because we don't require computers to live. If you are going to extrapolate that and say that rapid climate change couldn't end civilization, you're nuts. And since I don't subscribe to the line of thought that if it doesn't end civilization it's no big deal, I'm worried enough about the idea of sea waters rising enough to force the majority of the world's populations to have to pick up and move. I'm sure that couldn't cause any major problems, though!
You assume that a shit loads of money is being spent to 'fix the GW problem'. I assume that shit loads of money is being spent and that very little of it actually ends up doing something useful.
Not at all, as so far I don't see much being done at all to "fix the GW problem". There is certainly no concerted effort. There's a few half-assed measures and protocols, ones that don't even require major polluters to do anything at all, or ones that are basically "Clear Skies Act" doubletalk which don't actually help the environment but end up being big handouts to business.
I'm saying if we decide to take global warming seriously and do something about, the absence of the end of civilization will be taken by people like you to mean that nothing had to be done in the first place.
It is, after all, Christmass.
The funny thing is that "Christmas" for the Y2K bug was only in the few years just prior, when everyone who had sat on their ass not doing anything suddenly panicked. The only "Christmas" in regards to stopping global warming will similarly be when people with attitudes like yours have done nothing, suddenly realize that they have to do something, and the only methods that will succeed are extremely expensive ones.
Right now the only Christmas is for the big industry status quo, the oil companies, and everyone else who has every reason in the world to downplay global warming. They're making money hand over fist, and for a pittance of their PR budget that can stop anyone from making them pay the true cost of their pollution.
Um, yeah. The only reason you think Y2K wasn't a big deal is because people busted their ass ensuring that it wouldn't be. You have no idea what would have happened if nothing had been done about Y2K, but that's okay, because the people for whom it truly mattered had their shit together and never even considered not doing anything about it.
Now it's Global Warming, and if we are kept safe it will again be because of people busting their ass and spending shitloads. I'm sure that you'll say it was never that big a deal in the first place. Whereas if the opposite tack was taken, to do nothing under the assumption that global warming "will not do much", and everything goes to hell, you'll be asking why more wasn't done. Just like you'd be asking why more wasn't done to stop Y2K if nothing had been done. Good thing it was.
There is no such thing as a defensive patent; that just does not make any sense at all.
No, it does make sense. Even though by nature a patent is designed as an offensive weapon, it is perfectly possible to use them strategically as a form of defense and nothing more, and for some companies this is the most desireable way of using them.
Say, just to pick a random example from nowhere, that you make microprocessors. You come up with a bunch of clever ideas designing such a microprocessor, but those ideas are simply means to an end. The individual widgets inside the chip aren't that important, from an IP point of view. First, most of the original ideas for these widgets come from academia in the first place. Second, a whole new slew of ideas will have to be made for the next chip, and the widgets in the current chip may not be appropriate. Third, but similarly, it isn't easy for a competitor to see a widget in your chip and copy it because it may not even work in their design which is in addition to the years it takes to design a new chip. Fourth, using a patent to prevent others from making that widget doesn't provide any significant barrier to entry for competitors since it is trivial to not use the patented widgets and instead come up with others. There are already sufficient barriers to entry in microprocessors such that only a few companies left still doing it.
So the patents don't particularly help in the traditional sense of locking up an invention so competitors can't use it. However, they still try to get as many as possible, and that's for the primary reason of not being the victim of someone else's patents. Because so many things are patented it is essentially a given that some part of the chip will be violating someone else's patent. No, they don't know which one, and deliberately refrain from finding out since knowingly infringing a patent is treble damages. Yet when the day comes and a patent infringement claim is brought, they want to be able to turn around, look through their own massive patent portfolio and the plaintif's products and claim that they too are infringing. Then the negotiation begins, and the company with the biggest and most impressive pile of patents gets the most favorable terms in the resulting cross-licensing agreement.
Not that it usually even goes that far. Usually the two companies realise that they are probably violating each other's patents, and decide to work out cross-licensing before it really becomes an issue. When you are using patents defensively, you don't want to go on the offensive, as the whole thing is a sort of MAD.
None of which means that patents aren't crippling innovation. Patents have turned technology development into a war zone with minefields strewn randomly and brigand armies roaming the countryside and scorched barren no-mans-lands. It's just that in this war zone there are groups whose fortifications are purely defensive in nature, whose guns are only to be fired at those who fire upon them. The fact that they feel the need to build those fortifications for no other reason than self-defense is actually an indicator of the big mess this has become.
Yes, keep living in your cozy climate-controlled cave until someone else finds the "irrefutable proof" creates the "cure-all solution" and drops them both in your lap. Of course "irrefutable" really means "inarguable" and people can always find a reason to argue. And if their "cure-all" solution is merely a "cure-most" solution, you can just go right back into your cave and ignore it, because the absence of a perfect solution means there is no problem.
No, it's still a myth, and TFA says that the trend of the total population -- the rising of which being the myth -- is unknown. A sub-population rising does not mean the overall population is rising. Especially when other populations are dropping, and there's a ready explanation for why the one that is rising is doing so.
I can appreciate the sentiment. It was while reading about this, in particular a detail not covered well in that specific article, which is that Ashcroft had said he wouldn't sign off on the legality of the NSA wiretap program, that I almost found myself saying "I miss John Ashcroft".
For a second I was very scared, as though the universe was about to implode.
Hey, if I can get you to run my shell script as root, then I can add my own sources to your sources.list and use apt to install my rootkit!
That's the thing the article doesn't make clear: Does this exploit require that the trojan be executed with admin privileges, or can it get the necessary privileges from a standard user account?
If the former, then clearly this isn't MS' fault at all. Got Root? Got Pwned. If the latter, then it's a local privilege escalation bug that is MS' fault. It may still require the user to download and execute a trojan, which would mean they are already compromised, but the hypothetical escalation bug would increase the damage the trojan could do. Or if there is a remote exploit that allows execution of arbitrary code in user-space, then it could then use the local exploit to get root, and now it's a real worm.
That's why even the most minor of security issues needs to be fixed. Because a bug in your code that is difficult to exploit, combined with a bug in software that you didn't write and would never know was even going to be on the system, and the result could be a simple way to own your machine.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that if this does take advantage of a local root exploit, then MS can spin all they want but they better fix it pronto, simply because you can probably assume that your average windows user will at some point download and execute a trojan. If it ain't, well, not much they can do, other than remind people not to run as admin?
About soft AI, sure. All kinds of great things about tree pruning and state evaluation and stuff like that.
No hard AI stuff, but that's because in order to have a hard AI chess machine, you'd have to make the AI then teach it chess. Much more practical to go for the direct approach.
Driving long stretches on the highway there is no braking involved and air resistance is high. You are limited by the power of the gas engine (because you'd drain your battery if you tried to use it continually), so most of the time the weight of the electric portion is a disadvantage.
While in some ways a car is more than the sum of its parts, when it comes to the car's mass it is exactly the sum of its parts.
The presence of the electric engine, which has optimal torque at zero rpm and handles the tasks of starting from a stop or accelerating up a hill, allows for a smaller and more efficient ICE. Because of the way the transmission splits power between the ICE and electric motor, the ICE is able to run at near-ideal RPMs all the time, and the ideal RPM range of the engine can be optimized for crusing.
I hoped numbers would be simple to track down, but it doesn't look like the Prius is significantly heavier than other cars in its class, the net result of the smaller ICE + electric is a small increase in mass. Combined with the other advantages the hybrid system brings, and they are still very efficient on the highway. They just aren't sick-efficient like they are in stop-and-go traffic.