I don't think a pure Flash layout would really be that much bigger than a pure HTML/image layout. It's just that people insist on putting sound, animation, and complex interaction in the flash version. Some of it is excusable since you need to roll your own UI code in Flash, and it can't handle very large amounts of text, but all-flash sites are quite feasible.
Remember that lamers can also be banned by XBL account, which is independent of IP and MAC. And they probably won't figure out how to spoof THAT anytime soon.
If you are using MS's hardware (the XBL pipes and servers) against MS's wishes and possibly at the expense of one of MS's paying customers, they have every right to try to keep you off. It's call the right to refuse service.
You've actually got something there... Maybe the next big thing is media that contains its own playback mechanism. Maybe your next album will be 64MB of ROM on a sealed MP3 player, like the "preview discmans" people bring up occasionally.
An equally likely explanation is that the DVD playback is implemented with hardware-level color keying (which is how DVD players have worked for YEARS) and Apple has no reason to implement the nontrivial process of letting the Quartz-level screengrab tool access it.
No. Apple supports the idea of not stealing or infringing copyright. However, unlike everyone else, they are not willing to pursue this goal at the expense of existing functionality and their customer's rights.
He's not making an analogy, he's making a counterexample. And he's right: Both products are priced at what the market will bear, except that the present or absence of competition is included in "market conditions", along with a TON of other factors.
For example, Coke has a contract with my old university (UIUC) that only Coke products may be sold in vending machines around the campus. It's still $1 for a bottle and $.60 for a can, even though there's nothing to stop them from gouging us to hell.
You really should have read the article. They are not claiming that radio waves can be used to support the structure forever. They are using the radio waves to move the raw materials into position and hold them there while they are fixed in place with something more permanent.
To some people, the choice of computer or operating system is not a political or moral question. It is instead a question of (somewhat) personal preference and (mostly) using the right tool for the job. I'm not going to fall into the usual trap of making absurd analogies involving Microsoft and historic villains or Linux and hippies, but the Slashdot community in general has a huge tendency to make a mountain out of this particular molehill. It's not that important what name is on your OS directory, as long as the computer does what you ask it to.
EVERYBODY does this, especially Apple. How many times has the "They're supported by hardware sales" argument been invoked against x86 OS X here? How much do you think Apple is losing on the iApps or movie trailer hosting? How many other companies are shelling out for research that won't bear fruit for another few years? This is perfectly normal corporate gambling, except that MS is doing it in the market instead of the lab.
Hey, I'm thanking my lucky stars I have only 512MB of RAM:P
(One side effect of Macs making less progress than PCs is that it's feasible to collect and continue using every video card you've bought over the last 4 years...)
What Doom 3 really requires is what 3D cards give it: Very, very fast basic operations like matrix multiply and floating-point table interpolation, memory fast enough to move the textures and various color, Z, stencil, etc buffers around, the relatively simple shader execution engine, and a bit of general-purpose CPU for running the game logic and GL control code.
ASCI White is good at none of those things. It is a massively parallel computer designed for tasks that require very large amounts of general-purpose CPU. Running a single program thread on a single node is not very impressive; running a few thousand threads on all of its nodes at once makes it the fastest computer in the world.
I suppose that if someone bothered to make a version of Doom 3 that replicated itself across all of White's processors, rendered 3072 16x16 tiles at once, and recombined them into a 1024x768 frame, it would run pretty fast. But there still probably wouldn't be enough memory bandwidth between the nodes to run much faster than a decent desktop CPU connected to a Radeon 9700 over AGP 8x.
Has anyone noticed that the links in this article are ILLEGAL? And not just controversial, civil-disobedience, megacoprs-bought-the-law-to-oppress-us "illegal", but violation-of-NDA and warez-illegal? I thought at least the Slashdot editors were smarter and more ethical than this.
I heard this once but never confirmed it: Is it true that Air Force One's broadcast system uses the same frequency as, and occasionally interferes with, garage door openers?
As far as I can tell this is fixed in Omniweb 4.1.1b1 under Jaguar (the ability to drag complete files into the Finder was not part of cocoa until Jaguar; IE is a carbon app).
One possible way to do real "learning" AI could be to have it learn from the developers or beta testers for a few months, then archive the learned state and ship it with the final game.
Slashdot Mirror
...none of the target audience of these documents will ever believe them for a second.
I don't think a pure Flash layout would really be that much bigger than a pure HTML/image layout. It's just that people insist on putting sound, animation, and complex interaction in the flash version. Some of it is excusable since you need to roll your own UI code in Flash, and it can't handle very large amounts of text, but all-flash sites are quite feasible.
If you are using MS's hardware (the XBL pipes and servers) against MS's wishes and possibly at the expense of one of MS's paying customers, they have every right to try to keep you off. It's call the right to refuse service.
You've actually got something there... Maybe the next big thing is media that contains its own playback mechanism. Maybe your next album will be 64MB of ROM on a sealed MP3 player, like the "preview discmans" people bring up occasionally.
An equally likely explanation is that the DVD playback is implemented with hardware-level color keying (which is how DVD players have worked for YEARS) and Apple has no reason to implement the nontrivial process of letting the Quartz-level screengrab tool access it.
No. Apple supports the idea of not stealing or infringing copyright. However, unlike everyone else, they are not willing to pursue this goal at the expense of existing functionality and their customer's rights.
He's not making an analogy, he's making a counterexample. And he's right: Both products are priced at what the market will bear, except that the present or absence of competition is included in "market conditions", along with a TON of other factors.
For example, Coke has a contract with my old university (UIUC) that only Coke products may be sold in vending machines around the campus. It's still $1 for a bottle and $.60 for a can, even though there's nothing to stop them from gouging us to hell.
Dialup is unusably slow for modern network gaming. I'm not being a bandwidth chauvanist, I know this because I'm using dialup right now :P
1) Read the article. They use the radio waves to temporarily hold the raw materials while they lock them down with more permanent measures.
You really should have read the article. They are not claiming that radio waves can be used to support the structure forever. They are using the radio waves to move the raw materials into position and hold them there while they are fixed in place with something more permanent.
To some people, the choice of computer or operating system is not a political or moral question. It is instead a question of (somewhat) personal preference and (mostly) using the right tool for the job. I'm not going to fall into the usual trap of making absurd analogies involving Microsoft and historic villains or Linux and hippies, but the Slashdot community in general has a huge tendency to make a mountain out of this particular molehill. It's not that important what name is on your OS directory, as long as the computer does what you ask it to.
EVERYBODY does this, especially Apple. How many times has the "They're supported by hardware sales" argument been invoked against x86 OS X here? How much do you think Apple is losing on the iApps or movie trailer hosting? How many other companies are shelling out for research that won't bear fruit for another few years? This is perfectly normal corporate gambling, except that MS is doing it in the market instead of the lab.
You've got a long way to go to guru status if you haven't memorized those pages yet, n00b :P
Hey, I'm thanking my lucky stars I have only 512MB of RAM :P
(One side effect of Macs making less progress than PCs is that it's feasible to collect and continue using every video card you've bought over the last 4 years...)
Show me the part where it says that installing the CLI will prevent me from running native Mac programs.
See parent's point #2.
Or at least "CHA".
What Doom 3 really requires is what 3D cards give it: Very, very fast basic operations like matrix multiply and floating-point table interpolation, memory fast enough to move the textures and various color, Z, stencil, etc buffers around, the relatively simple shader execution engine, and a bit of general-purpose CPU for running the game logic and GL control code.
ASCI White is good at none of those things. It is a massively parallel computer designed for tasks that require very large amounts of general-purpose CPU. Running a single program thread on a single node is not very impressive; running a few thousand threads on all of its nodes at once makes it the fastest computer in the world.
I suppose that if someone bothered to make a version of Doom 3 that replicated itself across all of White's processors, rendered 3072 16x16 tiles at once, and recombined them into a 1024x768 frame, it would run pretty fast. But there still probably wouldn't be enough memory bandwidth between the nodes to run much faster than a decent desktop CPU connected to a Radeon 9700 over AGP 8x.
Has anyone noticed that the links in this article are ILLEGAL? And not just controversial, civil-disobedience, megacoprs-bought-the-law-to-oppress-us "illegal", but violation-of-NDA and warez-illegal? I thought at least the Slashdot editors were smarter and more ethical than this.
I heard this once but never confirmed it: Is it true that Air Force One's broadcast system uses the same frequency as, and occasionally interferes with, garage door openers?
As far as I can tell this is fixed in Omniweb 4.1.1b1 under Jaguar (the ability to drag complete files into the Finder was not part of cocoa until Jaguar; IE is a carbon app).
One possible way to do real "learning" AI could be to have it learn from the developers or beta testers for a few months, then archive the learned state and ship it with the final game.
Whether he is or not, I'm sure Batman could beat him.