As for the ego, it's there. But it's not contempt for consumers, as most detractors would have you believe. It's confidence. They're saying, "we're number 1". Sony needs to be seen as confident in this console outing. You want them to say "Yeah it sucks, get an Xbox?"
Obviously, but there's a point where confidence does become contempt. Or at least where it is seen as arrogance and presumption, and the customer is offended. As for me, that line was crossed by Sony's gaming division when they said that they thought people would get another job if they had to in order to get a PS3. It was the presumption that their shit was so hot that we would fall all over ourselves to get it, no matter what. That's not an appropriate form of confidence. It's the difference between "we will defeat our competitiors!" and Romero-esque "Ya'll are my bitches!"
It's kinda like the dating scene. You need to be confident, right? Well there's a difference between going up to a beautiful woman in a way that suggests you are not intimidated by her, and walking up and saying "Hey babe, I'm the man of your dreams, you'll be sucking my dick by the end of the night, even after I do THIS!" and then slapping her.
That might work sometimes (run screaming if it does), but it is hardly a good way to achieve broad market penetration, if you catch my drift.
And your proof is a link to your own post which makes the same unsupported accusation? Sweet, I'm convinced.
Anyway, we're not talking about marketing about which uses less power in a common day's usage and will cost you less on your electric bill. We're talking about how their chips are rated for power consumption. This is the TDP, Total Design Power, the number that computer makers will need to use to design their cooling solutions. You can't market your way around TDP; if you try then the cooling solution will be inadequate and the computer will overheat.
The difference in TDP between Intel and AMD is that AMD gives MAX power, which isn't actually achievable in real software, while Intel gives TYPICAL power, which is a number that is around a standard deviation or so away from the average in the bell curve of power consumption for various programs. They use clock throttling to guarantee that no app will ever use more power than that. Both are equally valid as measures of TDP, since in either case it is simply a promise to the HSF designer that the chip will not use more than the stated power. The catch is that Intel's number comes with a caveat that some software may not run at maximum speed because clock throttling is required to keep the power down. This was noticeable with Pentium 4; I haven't heard of Core 2 having this problem, which makes sense because it is in general less power hungry than P4 and probably has a much nicer looking power curve.
AMD still does well for applications which are sensitive to memory bandwidth, for instance - part of the original technological jump of the K8.
Latency, actually. The on-die memory controller puts RAM closer to the chip and is thus faster to access. K8 does do well in the bandwidth category in multi-socket situations, since the on-die controller means the amount of bandwidth scales with the number of sockets (memory controllers).
Just a nit to pick for those who are interested.:)
Lets say some research is based on using more expensive materials to make a performance exponentially faster.
Taking 'exponentially' non-literally, do you mean something like a brand-new fabrication plant with state-of-the-art technology for a smaller silicon node, which costs billions of dollars that cannot be recouped until well after the plant is finished and producing production parts? Developing and re-tooling for silicon on insulator or strained silicon?
I don't think you realize just how competitive these companies are, and just what kind of technological realm they are competing in. Throwing billions of dollars into R&D for advanced tech is run-of-the-mill for them, because if they ever stopped doing so they would fall behind on the Moore's Law curve very quickly and then the incoming cash would stop and they'd be out of business. At least the CPU business.
If any of these companies saw a way to increase performance -- by a lot less than "exponentially" -- they would immediately jump on it.
Now the company needs to be more cost competitive the R&D is changed from making Faster Chips to more affordable ones. So more effort will be towards making chips that run at the same speeds but are cheaper to produce.
It doesn't really work that way. Remember that multi-billion-dollar fab I was talking about these companies building as a matter of course? Well, not only does it allow them to make faster circuits, to simplify things they are faster because they are smaller. Smaller means cheaper -- most of the cost is per-silicon-wafer, so more chips per-wafer means less cost per-chip. So to get your chips that run at the same speeds but are cheaper to produce, you take your same chip from before in the new smaller tech and (glossing over the technical issues) you're done -- smaller cheaper chip, same performance. But they can also use this new tech to make a chip that was the same size as ones before, but has more transistors (hopefully translating to more performance). Even a technology that didn't reduce the size directly but increased performance would also have the same effect -- you can either use the same tech to get a faster version of the same chip, or get an equal-speed version of the chip that is simpler and hopefully thus smaller and cheaper.
This all feeds back into why in their quest for low prices they will not give up R&D for fast tech. Because if one company stops researching tech to make chips go fast and focuses on cheap, and the other focuses on tech for speed, then the one that focused on speed will soon not only have chips that out-perform anything the competition has, they will also have chips that are the same or greater speed than competitors but also cheaper. At that point it is no longer a price war but a slaughter.
Actually, your example only shows that they use the words "citizen" and "person" interchangeably.
No. Read it. Read the whole Constitution. Citizen is not used interchangeably with person; they use person when they mean person, and citizen when and only when they mean citizen. Unless you think "Person held to Service or Labour" (i.e. slaves) is supposed to be interchangeable with "Citizen held to Service or Labour".
As I pointed out to another person on here already, the people who wrote these documents had no problem owning slaves, and treating women as second hand citizens.
Actually, some of them did have a problem owning slaves, and the Constitution was written in such a way as to accomodate them while acknowledging the legal status of slavery at the time. The whole issue of slavery was a ticking time bomb that threatened to destroy the Union before it was even formed, and they weaved their way through it carefully. Congress had a moratorium on even discussing the issue until a decade into the 19th century, and the Union nearly dissolved at several points when that rule was broken and abolitionist legislation was brought to the floor. This contained pressure culminated in the Civil War, which Southerners will accurately describe as a State's Rights issue, but the right they wished to exercise was the right to own slaves. This was not an issue that spontaneously sprang up in the 1840s, it pre-dated the Revolution. What does that have to do with the usage of the word citizen in the Constitution anyway? Right, nothing.
You just need to stop looking at it through the veil of modern political correctness.
But that's what you are doing! You're arguing that nobody who owned slaves and disenfranchised women could have intended for an expansive definition of the freedoms in the Constitution that applies to non-citizens. Clearly such a person today would be considered a huge hypocrite, and accurately so. At the time the Constitution was written, it was not considered hypocritical at all to think of African slaves as sub-human, women as unfit for making judgements of leadership, while simultaneously believing that a fine upstanding Frenchman visiting America should be afforded every protection of his rights that a native receives. Remember, not only did many of the founders frequently visit European countries, the nation itself was still largely comprised of first or second generation immigrants.
Your modern PC sensibility groups racism, sexism, and xenophobia together, and doesn't take into account how each of these things evolved over time. Your argument would spontaneously combust on your monitor if you tried to apply it to the period between the ratification of the 13th Ammendment (abolishing slavery) and the 19th (women's suffrage), because clearly nobody who could treat women as second class citizens could have intended for the rights protected by the Constitution to be applied to slaves!
The 19th Ammendment wasn't ratified until the 1930s. Just because you, today, view mainstreamed racism and sexism as both equally archaic mentalities of the past does not mean that at all points in history they were either both accepted or both rejected. That's silly, and blatantly a-historical. Similarly, views of immigrants have changed, and not for the better as more and more people can't even recall their first non-native ancestor. "Can the government deny non-citizens their due-process rights?" is a new argument, which is why we have had recent laws passed that explicitly allow the denial of these rights and court cases both completed and pending regarding those laws and their application.
Your argument could equally well be changed to "Clearly nobody who would deny non-citizens their rights could also have supported granting rights to women and former African slaves!", and for the same reason: Your PC views are preventing you from forming an accurate picture of non-PC things as they existed over time,
Nowhere in there does it say anything about the constitution being intended to secure the rights of foreigners.
And nowhere in there does it say anything about those rights not being secured for foreigners.
For starters, that's because most of the Constitution is about what the government can do. While obviously our government doesn't have jurisdiction over some foreigner in another country, nevertheless our government is prohibited from abrogating that foreigner's rights to free speech by act of law, according to the First Ammendment. It says "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech". No qualifier for non-citizens. Neither does the Fourth Ammendment make any exceptions for foreigners. When the Constitution means "citizen", it says citizen -- and it does so primarily with regard to the right to vote, something only citizens can do, and also for eligibility for running for office.
Here's a key example from the 14th Ammendment showing the difference: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." You see that? There are privileges that only citizens have, but Equal Protection is for everyone.
The idea that Constitutional rights are in general only protected for citizens is pure 100% made up fantasy.
Not to mention advocating censorship. The First Amendment goes both ways, you know./i>
How the flying fuck is saying Slashdot shouldn't volunteer themselves as a way to spread Forbes' article around censorship? It's still printed in Forbes, a magazine with wider readership than/., for fuck's sake.
I swear, people get the craziest ideas of what censorship and free speech are about. Hint: It has nothing to do with offering to use your own resources to spread someone else's message.
What kind of "groupthink" is it that tells you they don't know whether it will be 1.4 or 5.8 degrees C of increase, tells you the probability that they're wrong about human causation, and argues in public about why Greenland is melting faster than they had predicted?
Absofuckinlutely. People who think that climatologists' have one unique opinion, that there is no dissent, that there is no discussion, that they have a pre-conceived idea of what reality is and do not debate it amongst themselves based on their research and data, simply have no clue. The debate is going on, the science is going on.
And the fact is that in science there are always people trying to disprove whatever is the commonly held theory. Turning the state of scientific knowledge on its ear is a way to get yourself in the history books. If you can back it up. The idea that no one would dare do science that might lead to questioning of the "groupthink" is insane; in fact even people who believe in their theories do experiments to try to disprove them, as this is what scientific rigor demands. Yet the scientific community continues to gather evidence that climate change is happening and that it's happening because of the industrial revolution. Is the fact that nobody has come out with rigorous science that shows this not to be true a sign of the secret cabal stifling research? Or is it a sign that maybe the climate change science was actually of a much higher quality than skeptics would allow, which is why it is difficult to tear down?
cause then there will be a story on here going on about how Microsoft stole from Unix, then we get 800 comments about how microsoft is evil for doing it, yet no one will mention that Apple did the same thing cause they aren't the evil microsoft.
Whatever. For starters, Apple didn't just steal from Unix, they build their OS on top of Unix. And you can't read any article on OSX around here without a dozen posts pointing that out, so the "no one will mention" part is just crap. Of course Apple never hid the fact that they were "stealing" Unix by building their OS on top of BSD. The whole point being to start with a solid OS with all these great Unixy concepts built in and add their Apply interface on top. Whereas when Microsoft steals these features after another five years, they'll act like they were struck by inspiration out of the blue and done something that nobody's done before, like they have with every other idea they've stolen. So the "did the same thing" part is crap too.
It may be fun and easy to take a poke at the "/. doublestandard", but it only reveals that you don't understand that it isn't a double standard at all. Microsoft has a bad rep for a reason among those who have been paying attention, and hey, maybe you don't know or understand why but don't think Apple would get a pass if they truly did the same things Microsoft does.
Next up: Why viewing Halliburton in a harsher light than Bob's General Contracting is also not an unfair double standard.
I wouldn't be quite so optimistic. The difference is that at least some of the people involved in crafting TPM know something about security, as opposed to the people doing DRM and touch-screen voting machines.
I'd be optimistic. radtea had the theoretical reasons why it will never work down. Like I learned in school, cryptography is about Alice sending Bob a message that Charlie isn't supposed to read. Except with DRM, Bob and Charlie are the same person, which pretty much breaks the entire basis. So you have to go through all this trickery with the hardware to let Bob view the message, but then treat him like Charlie and do so without giving him the key to view the message on his own terms.
And yes, there are very smart security people working on TPM. I happen to know a couple such people working on the hardware side of things, and they also agree with the fundamental premise in my first paragraph, which is that TPM can never truly do what it sets out to do. All they can do is what every other DRM scheme has done -- try to make it annoyingly difficult for casual non-tech piracy. There will come along a person or group of persons with the means, and the will, and who will see "annoyingly difficult" as "interestingly challenging" and then that's all she wrote.
Yea, I would say there is a generation gap between those of us who nearly crapped their pants when seeing Wolfenstein 3D at the state fair for the first time in 92, and those who saw Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RtCW) and merely yawned a decade later.
What about those of us who did both?
Games have developed since Wolf 3D. Expectations of gamers have changed in more than a decade of development. It's not just kids growing up with a playstation, it's adults who are judging things by the standards of the day. RtCW was yawn-worthy imo, as opposed to genra-defining like Wolf 3D, and I see their attempt to cash in on my nostalgia for the original as a bad thing, not a positive.
Similarly, I would hate the idea of a new Wing Commander without evidence that it was actually a good, modern, innovative game like the original Wing Commander series, not a crass attempt at a cheap cash-in on a formerly strong name. But they already tried that with the movie, so I wouldn't hold my breath either way.
It's all about managing your expectations. There's nothing worse than feeling jipped because what you got was merely good, not omg-ponies great. It's bad when you convince yourself that your life is going to change because of something, and then your hopes are dashed when you merely experience quality entertainment.
From what I've seen of the creature editor, it looks like an enjoyable mini-game all to itself (kinda like CoH). I expect that to be really good, and I think there's a good chance it will meet or even exceed my expectations. From what I've seen of the gameplay modes, it looks like fairly standard run-around-and-kill followed by basic RTS. I'm expecting that to be fairly blase, with most of the fun coming from taking my custom-build creature out for a romp more than the joy of the gameplay mode itself. In this case, if it does end up having original elements or fun well-designed gameplay, that's just a bonus.
The deal with the Segway, or as it was known then "IT", was that nobody knew what the hell it was. The company hyped it to holy hell, and certainly the media played along creating all the buzz they could ever want for "IT", which was going to "revolutionize transportation", though exactly how was unknown. There's only so much the media can do in that situation, but believe me they tried. If "Spore" was a codename for a game by the amazing Will Wright that was going to "revolutionize sitting on your ass in front of your computer" but otherwise nothing was known about it, there would probably still be lots of media hype, but it would be tough for us on the receiving end of that hype to get our hopes up. On the other hand, there certainly can still be those who are convincing themselves that Spore will be like a personal jetpack, but what is actually delivered is a high-tech scooter.
I always thought of her as Asian, but it is ambiguous as all the characters are rendered iconically. I don't think it's intended to really be ambiguous, since some other characters have well defined races (like the Spanish computer), just more like superflous back story that is neither denied nor explicitly fleshed out. Given that her uncle is a pig and half her orphans are other animal-people, I don't think it's supposed to be important, but it probably is all designed to make the characters easier to relate to.
What is important though is that Jade is a strong female minority lead character. Even more rare she is a bad-ass, but neither a sex-bombshell nor a raging murderous psychopath like most "strong" female leads. She's compassionate, thoughtful, basically peace-loving, but also carries around a can o' whoop-ass that she will open when needed. Really, more characters like her is not a bad thing.
Anyway, there is some but not as much insight in the article as they wanted. Nevertheless I just want to talk more about Jade, one of my favority protagonists in video games this century, from one of my favorite games this century. Beyond Good and Evil was released in the same year as Wind Waker, and as much as I liked that installment BGE was a better Zelda in almost every way. The cell shading was done better (and ditched for the water, where more realistic graphics were used thank god). The dungeons were just as spralling and intricate, but also felt more like a single structure rather than a series of disconnected rooms. The mechanics from stealth to fighting to puzzle solving were more fun. The story was more interesting, as were the characters. Jade in particular was very memorable. The game was unfortunately short, but they just let it be short but satisfying instead of padding the game out with annoyance. Loved that game.
Within limits, a corporation shares a large subset of the rights and responsibilities of a person, the name itself being derived from the Latin term for body, definitively meaning that a corporation is to be treated as somebody.
"definitively meaning" that a corporation is to be treated as a human being?! Because the root word in Latin means "body"? So I guess we should grant the collection of legislators and politicians itself person status because we sometimes refer to the "body politic". Little did I know that my car was an engine, a steel frame, and a plastic body, ergo a "somebody" riding around on the frame. Oh, and my C code is full of individuals who should be granted full rights, because each of my functions has a body! Body has many meanings, many things which have a 'body' are inanimate, and especially things which are derived from another language should not be assumed to have literally the same meaning.
Nobody thought a corporation 'is to be treated as somebody' in the old days. It wasn't until a Judge decided that the word "person" in the non-Constitutional term "corporate person" was the same as the term "person" in the 14th Ammendment. The actual term was created well before that, and the "definitive meaning" didn't involve Constitutional rights.
In other words, we handed human rights to a non-human entity because of a pun.
The only difference is that players who take fewer breaks are more competitive, but I have a hard time believing eg twenty minutes per day is going to put you behind.
You're looking at it backwards. Competitive people are less likely to take breaks, regardless of what actual advantage this gives them. WoW addicts in general are likely to ignore the needs of their biological bodies, so this is Bliz's method of forcing downtime on players such that they have little to do or think about other than their soon-to-explode bladder. Basically a method of trying to prevent a repeat of the guy in S. Korea who died in his chair playing Ragnarok Online.
Mostly tongue in cheek here. I think another reply to my post was closer, in that it's a balance thing to prevent truly massive farming.
Dude, flight paths are the game's built-in bathroom breaks. Hop on the flight path, relieve your bladder, make yourself a sandwich, and pour another beer. I figure these are just Blizzard's way of helping to make sure their players don't die in their chairs. This was improved a hundred-fold when they made it so you could chain flight paths together automatically.
The thing I hate are the zepplins/ships/trams. Those are freaking irritating. You have to be there both when they come to pick you up, and when you arrive at the destination, and they are just long enough in coming that it is really annoying to miss them. I want to be able to just stand on the platform, have it pick me up when the zep arrives, and drop me off when it reaches my destination. Forcing me to sit there and do nothing is what is really obnoxious. When nothing happens, but it happens automatically, that's fine by me.
I don't know, I really like GTA, but I hate the fucking story. It's insipid. The missions are occasionaly fun because they let you do something you normally don't (like shoot from the back of a motorcycle while someone else drives), but in general the only reason I ever do the missions is to unlock new areas. If you could access the whole map at the start of the game, I never would have done a single story mission in GTA:SA.
Now what do I do as far as goals? Well, I have basically two favorites that have given the game a lot of longetivity for me. First is "See how badly I can piss off the cops and live to tell the tale". That's a fun one, and since I can go wherever I want it's never the same twice. Similar is the Vigilante missions, basically "See how many criminals I can kill in the time limit, while simultaneously avoiding the cops, and live to tell the tale".
Too bad that we have yet to invent an encryption algorithm that can be applied iteratively in one order, and un-applied in a different order. You can put two locks on something such that they don't interact and can thus be removed individually. Not so with encryption.
Or maybe we have, and I don't know it. I do know that this conceptual problem -- thinking of encryption as a 'lock' -- is why I had a hard time solving the boat problem the first time I heard it.
P.S. The real solution to the boat problem is to always have a high-powered sniper rifle pointed at the boatman, with a laser sight so he can see the little red dot on his chest that says "Don't steal the diamond". Think outside the box, people!
The optimization argument is true but applies mostly to late-era games. It takes time to learn all the tricks that allow you to get significant boosts from specific consoles, especially when you're "tuning" to get around limitations like limited main memory. Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader was a good showcase of next-gen visuals early in the GC's life, but compared to games released later on the GC (like RE4) it doesn't look so hot anymore. However by the time the ability to tune for the specific hardware is providing dividends for console developers, baseline PC hardware has already advanced by a generation and is twice as powerful running the same un-optimized code as before. In other words, optimization for a specific platform helps consoles keep up and have longer life spans, but it does not put them in front of PC hardware.
I'm not going to call OS overhead a massive advantage. If you reboot your machine and refrain from running any services it shouldn't make that big a difference; it's not as though the console has no OS. This is an advantage, to be sure, but not one that is going to make up for the gap between PC and console hardware.
Resolution is a red herring here. It's why consoles have been able to get away with having weaker hardware, not an example of why they are better. Consoles are just now starting to support resolutions that were standard in PC games five years ago. This is not evidence that they are equally powerful. It means they were doing less to begin with.
By the way, I don't know about a Pentium 4, but the Athlon XP 1.66GHz and GeForce Ti 350 I bought in 2001 at the same time I bought my GC, was later able to run UT2K4 and Doom 3, both at resolutions and with effects that look better than what the GC could do. Could it have handled Rogue Leader? Yes. Absolutely it could have, and at a higher resolution too. Could the GC handle Doome 3? Eh... considering that the biggest problem I had with my hardware was the limited video ram, I'm going to say the GC would have choked and died.
Of course the GC was cheaper, easier to set up, and doesn't crash (not that my Linux box crashes ever since NVidia and X.org got their act together so crashing game != crashing box, but crashing game isn't something you expect either on a console). Consoles have advantages. Performance has never been one of them.
But because of the Macrovision encoding on most DVDs, an output chain that used a VCR as an RF modulator would often cause the picture to fade in and out.
That's a good point, I do remember seeing that before. Fortunately TVs with composite inputs had been around and common for a long time before DVD macrovision hit the scene, if you bought your TV only a few years before your DVD player you were probably fine, but the situation is analagous to HDMI today. Today it's going to be very onerous for the consumer, and hence for the sellers, because we've got incompatabilities with what were very high end TVs only a few years ago.
A DVD owner had to buy not one but four licensed DVD players
You didn't have to, only if you wanted to import movies, and I personally don't know anyone who does so I'm going to group those people in with the ones who want more out of their player than put in disc -> watch disc. Maybe that's U.S. centric, since we don't get screwed on the price of films in our region. But if you wanted to import movies, it was easy to do a little research before hand and get a player that would play from any region.
Of course the real bitch is that the only practical thing that CSS ever did was enforce those stupid region encodings. It never stopped a single pirate.
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It's because he isn't black.
Seriously, I'm actually for the death penalty, but Texas' justice system is horribly racist, at least at that level.
As for the ego, it's there. But it's not contempt for consumers, as most detractors would have you believe. It's confidence. They're saying, "we're number 1". Sony needs to be seen as confident in this console outing. You want them to say "Yeah it sucks, get an Xbox?"
Obviously, but there's a point where confidence does become contempt. Or at least where it is seen as arrogance and presumption, and the customer is offended. As for me, that line was crossed by Sony's gaming division when they said that they thought people would get another job if they had to in order to get a PS3. It was the presumption that their shit was so hot that we would fall all over ourselves to get it, no matter what. That's not an appropriate form of confidence. It's the difference between "we will defeat our competitiors!" and Romero-esque "Ya'll are my bitches!"
It's kinda like the dating scene. You need to be confident, right? Well there's a difference between going up to a beautiful woman in a way that suggests you are not intimidated by her, and walking up and saying "Hey babe, I'm the man of your dreams, you'll be sucking my dick by the end of the night, even after I do THIS!" and then slapping her.
That might work sometimes (run screaming if it does), but it is hardly a good way to achieve broad market penetration, if you catch my drift.
And your proof is a link to your own post which makes the same unsupported accusation? Sweet, I'm convinced.
Anyway, we're not talking about marketing about which uses less power in a common day's usage and will cost you less on your electric bill. We're talking about how their chips are rated for power consumption. This is the TDP, Total Design Power, the number that computer makers will need to use to design their cooling solutions. You can't market your way around TDP; if you try then the cooling solution will be inadequate and the computer will overheat.
The difference in TDP between Intel and AMD is that AMD gives MAX power, which isn't actually achievable in real software, while Intel gives TYPICAL power, which is a number that is around a standard deviation or so away from the average in the bell curve of power consumption for various programs. They use clock throttling to guarantee that no app will ever use more power than that. Both are equally valid as measures of TDP, since in either case it is simply a promise to the HSF designer that the chip will not use more than the stated power. The catch is that Intel's number comes with a caveat that some software may not run at maximum speed because clock throttling is required to keep the power down. This was noticeable with Pentium 4; I haven't heard of Core 2 having this problem, which makes sense because it is in general less power hungry than P4 and probably has a much nicer looking power curve.
AMD still does well for applications which are sensitive to memory bandwidth, for instance - part of the original technological jump of the K8.
:)
Latency, actually. The on-die memory controller puts RAM closer to the chip and is thus faster to access. K8 does do well in the bandwidth category in multi-socket situations, since the on-die controller means the amount of bandwidth scales with the number of sockets (memory controllers).
Just a nit to pick for those who are interested.
Lets say some research is based on using more expensive materials to make a performance exponentially faster.
Taking 'exponentially' non-literally, do you mean something like a brand-new fabrication plant with state-of-the-art technology for a smaller silicon node, which costs billions of dollars that cannot be recouped until well after the plant is finished and producing production parts? Developing and re-tooling for silicon on insulator or strained silicon?
I don't think you realize just how competitive these companies are, and just what kind of technological realm they are competing in. Throwing billions of dollars into R&D for advanced tech is run-of-the-mill for them, because if they ever stopped doing so they would fall behind on the Moore's Law curve very quickly and then the incoming cash would stop and they'd be out of business. At least the CPU business.
If any of these companies saw a way to increase performance -- by a lot less than "exponentially" -- they would immediately jump on it.
Now the company needs to be more cost competitive the R&D is changed from making Faster Chips to more affordable ones. So more effort will be towards making chips that run at the same speeds but are cheaper to produce.
It doesn't really work that way. Remember that multi-billion-dollar fab I was talking about these companies building as a matter of course? Well, not only does it allow them to make faster circuits, to simplify things they are faster because they are smaller. Smaller means cheaper -- most of the cost is per-silicon-wafer, so more chips per-wafer means less cost per-chip. So to get your chips that run at the same speeds but are cheaper to produce, you take your same chip from before in the new smaller tech and (glossing over the technical issues) you're done -- smaller cheaper chip, same performance. But they can also use this new tech to make a chip that was the same size as ones before, but has more transistors (hopefully translating to more performance). Even a technology that didn't reduce the size directly but increased performance would also have the same effect -- you can either use the same tech to get a faster version of the same chip, or get an equal-speed version of the chip that is simpler and hopefully thus smaller and cheaper.
This all feeds back into why in their quest for low prices they will not give up R&D for fast tech. Because if one company stops researching tech to make chips go fast and focuses on cheap, and the other focuses on tech for speed, then the one that focused on speed will soon not only have chips that out-perform anything the competition has, they will also have chips that are the same or greater speed than competitors but also cheaper. At that point it is no longer a price war but a slaughter.
Well, sure, just like dishwashing detergent kills HIV.
YES! Finally the answer to my prayers!
It just also happens to kill the host if you take it intravenously.
Shit! I need to read faster! Call 911 for me...
Actually, your example only shows that they use the words "citizen" and "person" interchangeably.
No. Read it. Read the whole Constitution. Citizen is not used interchangeably with person; they use person when they mean person, and citizen when and only when they mean citizen. Unless you think "Person held to Service or Labour" (i.e. slaves) is supposed to be interchangeable with "Citizen held to Service or Labour".
As I pointed out to another person on here already, the people who wrote these documents had no problem owning slaves, and treating women as second hand citizens.
Actually, some of them did have a problem owning slaves, and the Constitution was written in such a way as to accomodate them while acknowledging the legal status of slavery at the time. The whole issue of slavery was a ticking time bomb that threatened to destroy the Union before it was even formed, and they weaved their way through it carefully. Congress had a moratorium on even discussing the issue until a decade into the 19th century, and the Union nearly dissolved at several points when that rule was broken and abolitionist legislation was brought to the floor. This contained pressure culminated in the Civil War, which Southerners will accurately describe as a State's Rights issue, but the right they wished to exercise was the right to own slaves. This was not an issue that spontaneously sprang up in the 1840s, it pre-dated the Revolution. What does that have to do with the usage of the word citizen in the Constitution anyway? Right, nothing.
You just need to stop looking at it through the veil of modern political correctness.
But that's what you are doing! You're arguing that nobody who owned slaves and disenfranchised women could have intended for an expansive definition of the freedoms in the Constitution that applies to non-citizens. Clearly such a person today would be considered a huge hypocrite, and accurately so. At the time the Constitution was written, it was not considered hypocritical at all to think of African slaves as sub-human, women as unfit for making judgements of leadership, while simultaneously believing that a fine upstanding Frenchman visiting America should be afforded every protection of his rights that a native receives. Remember, not only did many of the founders frequently visit European countries, the nation itself was still largely comprised of first or second generation immigrants.
Your modern PC sensibility groups racism, sexism, and xenophobia together, and doesn't take into account how each of these things evolved over time. Your argument would spontaneously combust on your monitor if you tried to apply it to the period between the ratification of the 13th Ammendment (abolishing slavery) and the 19th (women's suffrage), because clearly nobody who could treat women as second class citizens could have intended for the rights protected by the Constitution to be applied to slaves!
The 19th Ammendment wasn't ratified until the 1930s. Just because you, today, view mainstreamed racism and sexism as both equally archaic mentalities of the past does not mean that at all points in history they were either both accepted or both rejected. That's silly, and blatantly a-historical. Similarly, views of immigrants have changed, and not for the better as more and more people can't even recall their first non-native ancestor. "Can the government deny non-citizens their due-process rights?" is a new argument, which is why we have had recent laws passed that explicitly allow the denial of these rights and court cases both completed and pending regarding those laws and their application.
Your argument could equally well be changed to "Clearly nobody who would deny non-citizens their rights could also have supported granting rights to women and former African slaves!", and for the same reason: Your PC views are preventing you from forming an accurate picture of non-PC things as they existed over time,
Nowhere in there does it say anything about the constitution being intended to secure the rights of foreigners.
... abridging the freedom of speech". No qualifier for non-citizens. Neither does the Fourth Ammendment make any exceptions for foreigners. When the Constitution means "citizen", it says citizen -- and it does so primarily with regard to the right to vote, something only citizens can do, and also for eligibility for running for office.
And nowhere in there does it say anything about those rights not being secured for foreigners.
For starters, that's because most of the Constitution is about what the government can do. While obviously our government doesn't have jurisdiction over some foreigner in another country, nevertheless our government is prohibited from abrogating that foreigner's rights to free speech by act of law, according to the First Ammendment. It says "Congress shall make no law
Here's a key example from the 14th Ammendment showing the difference: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." You see that? There are privileges that only citizens have, but Equal Protection is for everyone.
The idea that Constitutional rights are in general only protected for citizens is pure 100% made up fantasy.
Handy link so you can check for yourself: http://usconstitution.net/const.html
If you keep making shit up, most people will believe you.
Pot, meet kettle. You should get along famously.
Not to mention advocating censorship. The First Amendment goes both ways, you know./i>
/., for fuck's sake.
How the flying fuck is saying Slashdot shouldn't volunteer themselves as a way to spread Forbes' article around censorship? It's still printed in Forbes, a magazine with wider readership than
I swear, people get the craziest ideas of what censorship and free speech are about. Hint: It has nothing to do with offering to use your own resources to spread someone else's message.
What kind of "groupthink" is it that tells you they don't know whether it will be 1.4 or 5.8 degrees C of increase, tells you the probability that they're wrong about human causation, and argues in public about why Greenland is melting faster than they had predicted?
Absofuckinlutely. People who think that climatologists' have one unique opinion, that there is no dissent, that there is no discussion, that they have a pre-conceived idea of what reality is and do not debate it amongst themselves based on their research and data, simply have no clue. The debate is going on, the science is going on.
And the fact is that in science there are always people trying to disprove whatever is the commonly held theory. Turning the state of scientific knowledge on its ear is a way to get yourself in the history books. If you can back it up. The idea that no one would dare do science that might lead to questioning of the "groupthink" is insane; in fact even people who believe in their theories do experiments to try to disprove them, as this is what scientific rigor demands. Yet the scientific community continues to gather evidence that climate change is happening and that it's happening because of the industrial revolution. Is the fact that nobody has come out with rigorous science that shows this not to be true a sign of the secret cabal stifling research? Or is it a sign that maybe the climate change science was actually of a much higher quality than skeptics would allow, which is why it is difficult to tear down?
cause then there will be a story on here going on about how Microsoft stole from Unix, then we get 800 comments about how microsoft is evil for doing it, yet no one will mention that Apple did the same thing cause they aren't the evil microsoft.
Whatever. For starters, Apple didn't just steal from Unix, they build their OS on top of Unix. And you can't read any article on OSX around here without a dozen posts pointing that out, so the "no one will mention" part is just crap. Of course Apple never hid the fact that they were "stealing" Unix by building their OS on top of BSD. The whole point being to start with a solid OS with all these great Unixy concepts built in and add their Apply interface on top. Whereas when Microsoft steals these features after another five years, they'll act like they were struck by inspiration out of the blue and done something that nobody's done before, like they have with every other idea they've stolen. So the "did the same thing" part is crap too.
It may be fun and easy to take a poke at the "/. doublestandard", but it only reveals that you don't understand that it isn't a double standard at all. Microsoft has a bad rep for a reason among those who have been paying attention, and hey, maybe you don't know or understand why but don't think Apple would get a pass if they truly did the same things Microsoft does.
Next up: Why viewing Halliburton in a harsher light than Bob's General Contracting is also not an unfair double standard.
Videogame player gets laid... BAM! Burn Karma burn...
With good reason, cus you're lying.
I wouldn't be quite so optimistic. The difference is that at least some of the people involved in crafting TPM know something about security, as opposed to the people doing DRM and touch-screen voting machines.
I'd be optimistic. radtea had the theoretical reasons why it will never work down. Like I learned in school, cryptography is about Alice sending Bob a message that Charlie isn't supposed to read. Except with DRM, Bob and Charlie are the same person, which pretty much breaks the entire basis. So you have to go through all this trickery with the hardware to let Bob view the message, but then treat him like Charlie and do so without giving him the key to view the message on his own terms.
And yes, there are very smart security people working on TPM. I happen to know a couple such people working on the hardware side of things, and they also agree with the fundamental premise in my first paragraph, which is that TPM can never truly do what it sets out to do. All they can do is what every other DRM scheme has done -- try to make it annoyingly difficult for casual non-tech piracy. There will come along a person or group of persons with the means, and the will, and who will see "annoyingly difficult" as "interestingly challenging" and then that's all she wrote.
Yea, I would say there is a generation gap between those of us who nearly crapped their pants when seeing Wolfenstein 3D at the state fair for the first time in 92, and those who saw Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RtCW) and merely yawned a decade later.
What about those of us who did both?
Games have developed since Wolf 3D. Expectations of gamers have changed in more than a decade of development. It's not just kids growing up with a playstation, it's adults who are judging things by the standards of the day. RtCW was yawn-worthy imo, as opposed to genra-defining like Wolf 3D, and I see their attempt to cash in on my nostalgia for the original as a bad thing, not a positive.
Similarly, I would hate the idea of a new Wing Commander without evidence that it was actually a good, modern, innovative game like the original Wing Commander series, not a crass attempt at a cheap cash-in on a formerly strong name. But they already tried that with the movie, so I wouldn't hold my breath either way.
It's all about managing your expectations. There's nothing worse than feeling jipped because what you got was merely good, not omg-ponies great. It's bad when you convince yourself that your life is going to change because of something, and then your hopes are dashed when you merely experience quality entertainment.
From what I've seen of the creature editor, it looks like an enjoyable mini-game all to itself (kinda like CoH). I expect that to be really good, and I think there's a good chance it will meet or even exceed my expectations. From what I've seen of the gameplay modes, it looks like fairly standard run-around-and-kill followed by basic RTS. I'm expecting that to be fairly blase, with most of the fun coming from taking my custom-build creature out for a romp more than the joy of the gameplay mode itself. In this case, if it does end up having original elements or fun well-designed gameplay, that's just a bonus.
The deal with the Segway, or as it was known then "IT", was that nobody knew what the hell it was. The company hyped it to holy hell, and certainly the media played along creating all the buzz they could ever want for "IT", which was going to "revolutionize transportation", though exactly how was unknown. There's only so much the media can do in that situation, but believe me they tried. If "Spore" was a codename for a game by the amazing Will Wright that was going to "revolutionize sitting on your ass in front of your computer" but otherwise nothing was known about it, there would probably still be lots of media hype, but it would be tough for us on the receiving end of that hype to get our hopes up. On the other hand, there certainly can still be those who are convincing themselves that Spore will be like a personal jetpack, but what is actually delivered is a high-tech scooter.
I think you have insanely puritanical standards if a belly shirt with a jacket and long pants is your definition of 'sex bombshell'.
You can see her wrists, too, the whore!
And yes, compared to other games' ideas of what passes for appropriate female dress, she is puritanical.
I always thought of her as Asian, but it is ambiguous as all the characters are rendered iconically. I don't think it's intended to really be ambiguous, since some other characters have well defined races (like the Spanish computer), just more like superflous back story that is neither denied nor explicitly fleshed out. Given that her uncle is a pig and half her orphans are other animal-people, I don't think it's supposed to be important, but it probably is all designed to make the characters easier to relate to.
What is important though is that Jade is a strong female minority lead character. Even more rare she is a bad-ass, but neither a sex-bombshell nor a raging murderous psychopath like most "strong" female leads. She's compassionate, thoughtful, basically peace-loving, but also carries around a can o' whoop-ass that she will open when needed. Really, more characters like her is not a bad thing.
Anyway, there is some but not as much insight in the article as they wanted. Nevertheless I just want to talk more about Jade, one of my favority protagonists in video games this century, from one of my favorite games this century. Beyond Good and Evil was released in the same year as Wind Waker, and as much as I liked that installment BGE was a better Zelda in almost every way. The cell shading was done better (and ditched for the water, where more realistic graphics were used thank god). The dungeons were just as spralling and intricate, but also felt more like a single structure rather than a series of disconnected rooms. The mechanics from stealth to fighting to puzzle solving were more fun. The story was more interesting, as were the characters. Jade in particular was very memorable. The game was unfortunately short, but they just let it be short but satisfying instead of padding the game out with annoyance. Loved that game.
Within limits, a corporation shares a large subset of the rights and responsibilities of a person, the name itself being derived from the Latin term for body, definitively meaning that a corporation is to be treated as somebody.
"definitively meaning" that a corporation is to be treated as a human being?! Because the root word in Latin means "body"? So I guess we should grant the collection of legislators and politicians itself person status because we sometimes refer to the "body politic". Little did I know that my car was an engine, a steel frame, and a plastic body, ergo a "somebody" riding around on the frame. Oh, and my C code is full of individuals who should be granted full rights, because each of my functions has a body! Body has many meanings, many things which have a 'body' are inanimate, and especially things which are derived from another language should not be assumed to have literally the same meaning.
Nobody thought a corporation 'is to be treated as somebody' in the old days. It wasn't until a Judge decided that the word "person" in the non-Constitutional term "corporate person" was the same as the term "person" in the 14th Ammendment. The actual term was created well before that, and the "definitive meaning" didn't involve Constitutional rights.
In other words, we handed human rights to a non-human entity because of a pun.
The only difference is that players who take fewer breaks are more competitive, but I have a hard time believing eg twenty minutes per day is going to put you behind.
You're looking at it backwards. Competitive people are less likely to take breaks, regardless of what actual advantage this gives them. WoW addicts in general are likely to ignore the needs of their biological bodies, so this is Bliz's method of forcing downtime on players such that they have little to do or think about other than their soon-to-explode bladder. Basically a method of trying to prevent a repeat of the guy in S. Korea who died in his chair playing Ragnarok Online.
Mostly tongue in cheek here. I think another reply to my post was closer, in that it's a balance thing to prevent truly massive farming.
Dude, flight paths are the game's built-in bathroom breaks. Hop on the flight path, relieve your bladder, make yourself a sandwich, and pour another beer. I figure these are just Blizzard's way of helping to make sure their players don't die in their chairs. This was improved a hundred-fold when they made it so you could chain flight paths together automatically.
The thing I hate are the zepplins/ships/trams. Those are freaking irritating. You have to be there both when they come to pick you up, and when you arrive at the destination, and they are just long enough in coming that it is really annoying to miss them. I want to be able to just stand on the platform, have it pick me up when the zep arrives, and drop me off when it reaches my destination. Forcing me to sit there and do nothing is what is really obnoxious. When nothing happens, but it happens automatically, that's fine by me.
I don't know, I really like GTA, but I hate the fucking story. It's insipid. The missions are occasionaly fun because they let you do something you normally don't (like shoot from the back of a motorcycle while someone else drives), but in general the only reason I ever do the missions is to unlock new areas. If you could access the whole map at the start of the game, I never would have done a single story mission in GTA:SA.
Now what do I do as far as goals? Well, I have basically two favorites that have given the game a lot of longetivity for me. First is "See how badly I can piss off the cops and live to tell the tale". That's a fun one, and since I can go wherever I want it's never the same twice. Similar is the Vigilante missions, basically "See how many criminals I can kill in the time limit, while simultaneously avoiding the cops, and live to tell the tale".
It works for me.
Oh, well, I'm aware of Diffie-Hellman. Sorry, I didn't specify private key encryption algorithm.
Too bad that we have yet to invent an encryption algorithm that can be applied iteratively in one order, and un-applied in a different order. You can put two locks on something such that they don't interact and can thus be removed individually. Not so with encryption.
Or maybe we have, and I don't know it. I do know that this conceptual problem -- thinking of encryption as a 'lock' -- is why I had a hard time solving the boat problem the first time I heard it.
P.S. The real solution to the boat problem is to always have a high-powered sniper rifle pointed at the boatman, with a laser sight so he can see the little red dot on his chest that says "Don't steal the diamond". Think outside the box, people!
The optimization argument is true but applies mostly to late-era games. It takes time to learn all the tricks that allow you to get significant boosts from specific consoles, especially when you're "tuning" to get around limitations like limited main memory. Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader was a good showcase of next-gen visuals early in the GC's life, but compared to games released later on the GC (like RE4) it doesn't look so hot anymore. However by the time the ability to tune for the specific hardware is providing dividends for console developers, baseline PC hardware has already advanced by a generation and is twice as powerful running the same un-optimized code as before. In other words, optimization for a specific platform helps consoles keep up and have longer life spans, but it does not put them in front of PC hardware.
I'm not going to call OS overhead a massive advantage. If you reboot your machine and refrain from running any services it shouldn't make that big a difference; it's not as though the console has no OS. This is an advantage, to be sure, but not one that is going to make up for the gap between PC and console hardware.
Resolution is a red herring here. It's why consoles have been able to get away with having weaker hardware, not an example of why they are better. Consoles are just now starting to support resolutions that were standard in PC games five years ago. This is not evidence that they are equally powerful. It means they were doing less to begin with.
By the way, I don't know about a Pentium 4, but the Athlon XP 1.66GHz and GeForce Ti 350 I bought in 2001 at the same time I bought my GC, was later able to run UT2K4 and Doom 3, both at resolutions and with effects that look better than what the GC could do. Could it have handled Rogue Leader? Yes. Absolutely it could have, and at a higher resolution too. Could the GC handle Doome 3? Eh... considering that the biggest problem I had with my hardware was the limited video ram, I'm going to say the GC would have choked and died.
Of course the GC was cheaper, easier to set up, and doesn't crash (not that my Linux box crashes ever since NVidia and X.org got their act together so crashing game != crashing box, but crashing game isn't something you expect either on a console). Consoles have advantages. Performance has never been one of them.
But because of the Macrovision encoding on most DVDs, an output chain that used a VCR as an RF modulator would often cause the picture to fade in and out.
That's a good point, I do remember seeing that before. Fortunately TVs with composite inputs had been around and common for a long time before DVD macrovision hit the scene, if you bought your TV only a few years before your DVD player you were probably fine, but the situation is analagous to HDMI today. Today it's going to be very onerous for the consumer, and hence for the sellers, because we've got incompatabilities with what were very high end TVs only a few years ago.
A DVD owner had to buy not one but four licensed DVD players
You didn't have to, only if you wanted to import movies, and I personally don't know anyone who does so I'm going to group those people in with the ones who want more out of their player than put in disc -> watch disc. Maybe that's U.S. centric, since we don't get screwed on the price of films in our region. But if you wanted to import movies, it was easy to do a little research before hand and get a player that would play from any region.
Of course the real bitch is that the only practical thing that CSS ever did was enforce those stupid region encodings. It never stopped a single pirate.