"BOO! TERRORISTS! Ahhhh, booga booga booga! The terrorist are coming and they'll eat your babies! Ahhhh! Terrorists! Won't sombody think of the children! "
I mean, seriously, this is one of the most insiteful, interesting and underrated statements that I've heard in a long time.
02/27/2003 "When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity, they'd turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the "themed" areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! We'll all have videophones and be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute--compelling and inspirational, even--but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad hocs were repeating the sins of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia." -- Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
What to make of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the first novel by Cory Doctorow, dot-com survivor, inveterate blogger, and now, outreach coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Part organizational-intrigue novel, part post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and part Swiftian satire of the tech mentality, revolutionary impulses, and Disney itself, the book has acquired quite a bit of notice, at least in part for its bold use of the Net.
Published in hard cover by Tor Books and released on the Net under a Creative Commons license (the details: free distribution, attribution required, commerical uses prohibited), Down and Out is also available from Doctorow's web site, not only in ASCII and PDF formats, but also, thanks to an enthusiastic community of Down-and-Outers, formats for Palm, Mobibook, Psion, Rocket eBook, Franklin eBookMan, and Hiebook. It's a testament to what programmers will do for free when you hand them some copyright-friendly content to play with.
Doctorow's reasoning, as an outspoken advocate of open source software and the virtues of peer-to-peer, is that your odds of success go way up if you can put something in people's hands and then figure out how to get paid for it. As he says in his note for the electronic version, "First-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don't have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word of mouth... and telling people about stuff I like is way, way easier if I can just send it to 'em. Way easier."
Thus, he'd rather have you email your friend a copy of this book than send a link to Amazon, or better yet, put it on a peer-to-peer Net. If this happens a lot, that's success. And maybe, some percentage of folks will choose to own the book. Or maybe not. In any case, some percentage of folks will choose to port it to another text-reading device. And maybe someone will choose to translate it to languages the publisher doesn't plan on.
In the world of Down and Out, there is no material scarcity, and people don't die, because they're just backed up to a hard disk and their personalities are poured into a young, sprightly clone. In a world without scarcity, the intangible things that are scarce become all the more valuable. In the world of the "Bitchun' Society," what's scarce is esteem, called Whuffie. For content, we should already be living in the world of the Bitchun Society--any digital file can be copied endlessly without degradation.
Only it can't, because we have accepted the notion of intellectual property and adopted laws that punish people for the wholesale copying of stuff. Doctorow's Net move is an opening to the Bitchun' world, and it poses plenty of questions. Why will anyone buy the book if they can get it online for free? On the other hand, things that are popular are far more likely to generate income streams than things that are not popular; so won't some number of people buy the book just because they've heard about it? In any case, books don't just get published online, they get criticized and raved about. They get people devoting themselves to them, porting them, creating alternative, animated storylines set in the original universe. Think that happens only for a paperback book?
Tor did a print run of 8,500 copies for Down and Out. In all likelihood, that's the total amount of bound books that will ever be created. There have been 75,000 downloads of the book directly from Doctorow's site, and no one knows how many other copies have been emailed between friends or downloaded from KaZaa. So, point proven: for those of us who believe in the Net to spread information and knowledge, Doctorow gets lots of Whuffie.
Richard Koman: So you have this sort of post-apocalyptic book in which these ad hoc committees have taken over Disney World; it's essentially a corporate intrigue story...
Cory Doctorow: Except there's no corporation.
Koman: A post-corporate intrigue story, then. But for anyone who's been around the computer industry awhile, it's hard not to see glimmers of a very familiar world.
Doctorow: I had someone write me today and ask me if it was a subtle commentary on rapid application development, and in fact it is. One of my reference materials was the Microsoft Press Rapid Application Development book, as I was exploring the multifarious ways that organizations get into giant fights over how they should be organized, as opposed to what they should be doing.
Koman: So, talk about some of the references and experiences that formed this book.
Doctorow: It was the confluence of a bunch of technical and social ideas from a bunch of technical and social eras. Walt Disney himself was a technological innovator and very skilled, and an organizational innovator as well. The legend of Disneyland is that he was going to build this theme park, and he went to his brother Roy, who ran the money in the shop, and said "I'd like $17 million to build a theme park," and Roy said, "You can't have it and what's a theme park?" So he went out and raised private capital and hired some engineers to help him build his theme park, and of course, the engineers had never heard of theme parks and they spent a lot of time telling Walt he couldn't do this or that, so he wound up firing them all and going back to the studio and poaching all of the best animators. The animators at Disney studios had spent the 25 years previous, since the creation of the studio, inventing lots of little interesting engineering. So Walt recruited them to come build the park and he called them Imagineers, for lots of reasons: he liked the sound of it and he was always one for coinages, but it was illegal to call them engineers if they weren't really engineers.
The other slice of inspiration was the big technology/Internet boom and the clash of engineering cultures you had there, where there were a lot of people advocating something much like a favor economy, which eventually got formalized into stuff like free software, where you had major, multifarioius, multiuse applications built out of enlightened self-interest.
Koman: Tell us about the lives of the people in the Magic Kingdom in terms of collaborative filtering, being always online, having a data-rich existence. It all sounds a lot like peer-to-peer.
Doctorow: So there's this world I've written about called the Bitchun Society. And in the Bitchun Society there's no more scarcity, there's a kind of Clarke's Law technology that allows them to reproduce anything at zero incremental cost. And what's more, they don't die. You regularly check yourself into a clinic or terminal and make a copy of your brain and if you die they make a new you and pour that back into it. Lucky for me it's science fiction and not science so I don't have to explain the workings of this stuff.
Cory Doctorow will participate in the panel discussion, DRM in Practice: Rights, Restrictions, and Reality at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. The panel will draw on the experiences of current developers, reviewers, and users of multimedia technology to explore the practical effect of digital rights management on technological innovation.
I also don't have to explain the working of the neural interface, which in addition to allowing them to do this suck-your-brains-out-and-drop-it-onto-a-hard-drive thing, also is capable of figuring out how you feel about any given thing anywhere in the world that you have any opinion about--without asking you. And as a consequence of this, you can first of all make some guesses about how you're going to feel about something. You don't have to remember whether you've been to this restaurant because the system remembers and tells you what other good restaurants are nearby. But the second-order effect is it will figure out who you hold in high esteem, who has an opinion about some restaurant you've never been to. And this opinion, and this esteem is called Whuffie.
Koman: And there's left-handed Whuffie and right-handed Whuffie.
Doctorow: That's right, well, it's idiosyncratic. Unlike things like Google PageRank, it's not a beauty contest; it doesn't tell you what the average person thinks is right, or beautiful, or worthy of esteem, it tells you what people like you--people who bought this book also bought clean underwear--think about this resource. And because it's not domain-specific, because it spans all these domains, it's got this incredibly rich dataset, so it's like people who are like you on lots of different axes telling you what to think.
Now, everyone sort of runs their lives as a consequence of this because those few resources that are scarce--like esteem itself, attention, locations--are themselves regulated or apportioned according to Whuffie. The way that happens is that someone asserts that they are in a position to control the distribution of that resource. A group of people--an ad hoc--comes along and says this is our restaurant. And if people behave as if it's their restaurant, if people sit at the tables when they're told to sit, if they order food when they're told to order, if they eat the food when it comes on a plate, then in fact, those people are running the restaurant. But they're only running the restaurant for as long as someone else doesn't come in and successfully assert that they are now running the restaurant. And so there's this built-in incentive to always behave in a way that always makes everyone feel good.
Koman: So this is not unlike deciding who's going to run Venezuela.
Doctorow: Or Argentina, for that matter. One of the things I explore in this book is that it's not all sweetness and light, because there's a lot of sweetness and light. I mean, you end up with people who act in a way that winds up being fundamentally saccharine and conflict-avoiding, because no one wants to get in trouble with anyone, and you wind up with power-law distributions, where people who are popular wind up with the most opportunity to do things that make them popular, which makes them more popular, which gives them more opportunties to be more popular, and even though it's not supposed to be a beauty contest, when you get yourself into a good niche, when you end up running Disney World, that opportunity itself creates more opportunities.
Koman: How does this map to our reality?
Doctorow: I think cash is a rough approximation of Whuffie. Cash is supposed to reflect how much esteem you're held in. Although in a Whuffie society, there's no such thing as a rich a--hole, because "rich" and "a--hole" are the opposite of each other. But I think that in our real world we are plagued with positive returns to scale and power-law distributions. We see this in cash societies, where the rich get richer and have more opportunities to get rich. Certainly that was a characterstic of the technology bubble, where the people who had opportunities to buy in before IPO were the people who didn't need it, essentially. It's a characteristic in publishing, where the authors who get the publicity budget are the authors who are already famous. And it's certainly the case in Google, where being found when you're searched for increases the probability that someone will make a link to you, which increases the probability that you'll be found when you're searched for. That problem, although probably not intractable, is found in both cash and reputation societies. There needs to be some kind of antitrust law or garbage collector that periodically comes along and randomizes Whuffie if you're going to get anything like a merit-based distribution.
Koman: There's a scene in the book, where they ask the Imagineers, "How long to build?" And the guy says, "Five years." And they say, "No, without reviews, and approvals, and sign-offs." And the answer is eight weeks. You've had this experience of pulling together some entrepreneurial programmers but being completely stymied in being able to release your code...
Doctorow: Well, both points of view are correct. One of the things that happens is they say, "Oh, by all means, go do whatever you want, just deliver in eight weeks, and what they find is that without all this planning and oversight, the engineers just wind up ratholing. They take these tiny little parts of the project that are interesting and they don't wind up delivering the actual project. On the other hand, command and control systems are prone to creating these enormous delays where you get sign-off and sign-off and sign-off, and then the CEO says, "Does it have to be gray, can't it be blue?" There's a happy medium somewhere in there.
I think that the thing about venture capital is that despite its risk-taking, it's inherently conservative. One of the best pieces of advice an entrepreneur can get is "retain control of your company." You want to be sure that the oversight from the VCs is board-level oversight, not operational oversight. You want the VCs to sit down and say, "Given that you're spending our money we want to make sure you're doing x." Not, "Why does that guy have two monitors, couldn't he just use one?"
One of the things that has happened in the Bitchun Society is that something that is inherently entrepreneurial has calcified into something quite bureaucratic, hide-bound, slow to change, run by committee, very risk-averse. That's a characteristic of revolutions, too. There's a speech by Abraham Lincoln that's reproduced in the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln exhibit at Disneyland: "... if destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author and its finisher. It cannot come from abroad; it will spring up from among us." Basically, the only thing that will destroy America is America. The only thing that will destroy the Bitchun Society is the Bitchun Society. And the only thing that will destroy an entrepreneurial company is to stop being entrepreneurial.
Koman: What's the backstory of the book? What happened to the Disney Corporation? How did the ad hoc groups come to rule?
Doctorow: That's never really made explicit, because I want the book to be fundamentally optimistic. But one of the things about the revolution is that you have to break some eggs to make the omelet. I have little bits and pieces of it... there's the nonviolent revolution, where you have TAs ousting their professors and offering courses that are credited in different ways. But the violent parts would be the complete collapse of the stock market, and massive poverty and economic and political destabilization, and public corporations just withering way, and thousands of people turning out on the streets and looting and arson. Because this is a massively disruptive technological change that they undergo. It is what happened to the recording industry happening to all of us. And the recording industry certainly went berserk when it happened to them, and behaved in a way that was completely nonlinear, not in their best interests, ungovernable, and so on. I have no reason to believe the general public would behave in a way that's anymore laudable. So I think what happened to the Disney Corporation is that money became massively deflationary, and it died, the same way that even worthy Argentinian corporations died when the Argentinian currency went wildly inflationary.
Koman: You speak of the recording industry as though it's already dead, or at least it will never get back to the way it was.
Doctorow: Well, sure, even the recording industry understands it will never get back to the way it was. I don't think it's dead. I think it is fundamentally changed and I think they're slowly coming to grips with that, although not as fast as we would like them to. But the recording industry has a story of, "We do two really important roles. One is to make music available and the other is to compensate artists." But one of the things we know is that 80 percent of all of the music ever released isn't for sale anywhere in the world. And another thing we know is that 97 percent of the artists signed to a recording contract earn less than $600 per year off of it. So Napster doesn't have a better track record at compensating artists, but it sure as shit had a better track record of making music available.
Napster filled a niche that the music industry was actually incapable of filling for legal and organizational reasons. I've had very earnest conversations with recording industry executives who told me it took forever to get the clearances to put 100 tracks online. Napster put 100 tracks online in the first eight seconds of its existence. So whatever happens, I can't believe that the hundreds of millions of people around the world currently enjoying filesharing--not just filesharers, but the people who get CDs from filesharers--those people aren't going to willingly say, "Yes, let's take the lion's share of our shared musical heritage and throw it away again, put it back in the vault for another 30 years until we can figure out how to make it available--minus whatever disappears between now and then because all known copies of it are destroyed." That isn't a possible outcome to the current struggle. There are lots of other possible outcomes, like serious damage to the rights to build general-purpose tools and so on, which I'm very concerned about. But I'm not concerned that the solution to this will involve throwing that music back in the vault.
Koman: Which goes to the question the Supreme Court wrestled with in Eldred, or the question they should have wrestled with anyway, which is, "What is the best way to ensure the dissemination of creative work?"
Doctorow: Or even more broadly, what is the best way to ensure continuity of our cultural heritage; what is the best way to ensure that things don't vanish? It really is an important question and it was in our side's brief, and unfortunately, it seems to me the Court didn't really address it at all. They said, "Well, Disney's stewardship of Mickey Mouse is above reproach, and therefore Disney deserves to continue holding the rights to the Mickey Mouse cartoons, which would enter the public domain if it weren't for the Sonny Bono act. And why do we want Mickey Mouse back in the public domain? It's not as if there's any absence of creative work being created with his likeness on it." And what they missed is that this has nothing to do with Mickey Mouse. The problem is that in order to keep Mickey Mouse in Disney's hands we are keeping everything that was made contemporaneous with Mickey Mouse out of the public's hands, and in many cases, those works are abandoned, very few copies survive, no one knows who the rights holders are, and before they go into the public domain, if indeed they ever do, all known copies will have vanished forever.
Koman: There's this ideal: univeral access to all human knowledge. The Internet is supposed to be the medium for that. It seems that Napster was doing that for music; peer-to-peer systems in general could enable the dissemination of all public domain stuff on the Net. And yet, probably no one has the chutzpah to suggest that anymore because they're likely to be prosecuted...
Doctorow: Our common cultural heritage is basically distributed across attics across the world. The one thing that a centralized system could never do--I mean, eBay has shown this--is catalogue the contents of everyone's attics. What eBay demonstrated is that the only way to get the contents of everyone's attic catalogued is to ask everyone to catalogue their own attic. This is also true of cultural information. All the information that has ever been digitized is on someone's hard drive somewhere and the solution to making this all available isn't putting it all in one place; with apologies to Brewster, the solution is in keeping it in situ and finding ways for us to exchange it, and ensuring that whenever we exchange it, we increase its availablility, so we have nonrivalrous use of the information.
Koman: So what is your emotional relationship with Disney? You seem to have quite a warm spot in your heart for Walt...
Doctorow: Yeah, everyone loves that crazy old Nazi corpsicle.
Koman: And yet in your day job, you see Disney as doing a lot of harm to the culture.
Doctorow: Well, it's possible to love the sin and hate the sinner. Yeah, I'm a tremendous fan of both Walt Disney and the Disney Corporation in a lot of spheres, not universally, but in a lot of valances. It's the only (publicly traded) company I've ever owned stock in. I grew up going to Disney parks in Florida. It really was one of the formative experiences of my childhood, these annual trips to Disney World to see this kind of techno-utopic autonomous zone. The Florida property especially exists in this kind of extralegal framework where it's not subject to state law--it can do things like build its own nuclear reactor without getting permission from the state government, it doesn't have to pay taxes... Walt pulled off this amazing coup when he got this special economic zone incorporated, straddling two counties but not a part of either, and built Disney World in the middle of it. That kind of techno-utopic thing is very influential in the way I grew up.
The Disney Corporation, when it's not being terrible, is wonderful. It's one of the most enlightened employers in terms of equal rights and gay rights. It's the largest gay employer in the Southland. It has amazing benefits packages, it's a great company to work for if you have kids.
In addition to this, I think that their art and technology kicks ass. But one thing you discover in the technology world, especially in free software, is that being a good programmer and being a good person are not necessarily correlated, or at least being a good programmer and being a person with whom other people want to spend a lot of time, who has good hygiene and good social skills, are not correlated.
Koman: Agree with you on hygiene, but what do you mean by being a "good person?"
Doctorow: There are people who have written great code who are d--ks.
Koman: Is that a greater number of d--ks than the random distribution of d--ks in the larger population?
Doctorow: Maybe not, but I'm not arguing that they're correlated. I'm arguing that eschewing someone's code because the person who wrote it is a d--k is a losing strategy. So there's a corollary in Disney in that they have built undeniably fantastic technology; they have built really interesting and innovative organizations around that technology; they continue to innovate all the time, as art and as science; it's good stuff. And the company does some stuff I'm really angry about in employment law, and in pollution, and in trade practices abroad, and in copyright law, and in technology. There's a lot of things about this company I'm very upset about as a shareholder and as a citizen of the world.
Richard Koman is a freelance writer and editor. He has written for Salon, New Architect, Internet World, and the O'Reilly Network.
I can't believe that the parent has been modded to +4 informative. It's not even about the goddamned post! Take your retoric elsewhere.
Mod me down, I don't care. But at least mod the idiot down who can't keep on-topic. It's about science and batteries, not fucking French oil interests.
The article states: Though this was hard to explain, and did not sit comfortably with the religious ideology of the time, he published his conclusions.
How did identifying it as a battery conflict with religious ideology of the time? I'm truly curious. Any suggestions?
I mean, it couldn't have been because there's no passage saying "And then God invented the battery and said it was good".
Did it confict with the European idea that they were the center of science and religion?
The girl in HS who kept visiting you and you couldn't figure out why...she wanted to fuck you.
The girls who were making out and you chose to just fuck one of them...you should have done them at the same time and made them do some crazy lesbian shit.
The girl who you considered your best friend...she wanted to fuck you, but you were too much of an idiot
The girl in German class with the tongue piercing and huge boobs...should have slipper her the sausage. What were you thinking???
You're going to marry a wonderful woman when you're 27, but for god's sake, fuck those chicks!!!!
Be aware that the New Scientist is not a peer reviewed journal.
The two guys who claimed that they produced cold fusion in a laboratory also didn't publish in a peer reviewed journal. It turns out they were full of crap. Just 'cause it's written doesn't make it so. Once it's in a peer reviewed journal, I'll seriously be interested (chemistry news on/., is that usual?).
Anyway, the New Scientist is well known for its overhyping of science.
Prof. Frink(past): Sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch it, but I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe can own one.
Apu: Could it be used for dating?
Prof. Frink: Well theoretically yes, but, the matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest.
See, he doesn't say anything about bacteria making the computers!!!
Why do I need this protocol when I already bought a Pentium 4 processor to make the internet go faster?:)
First attempt at Karma whoring -- be nice
on
Carmack on NV30 vs R300
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· Score: -1, Redundant
Name: John Carmack Email: Description: Programmer Project:
Jan 29, 2003
NV30 vs R300, current developments, etc
At the moment, the NV30 is slightly faster on most scenes in Doom than the R300, but I can still find some scenes where the R300 pulls a little bit ahead. The issue is complicated because of the different ways the cards can choose to run the game.
The R300 can run Doom in three different modes: ARB (minimum extensions, no specular highlights, no vertex programs), R200 (full featured, almost always single pass interaction rendering), ARB2 (floating point fragment shaders, minor quality improvements, always single pass).
The NV30 can run DOOM in five different modes: ARB, NV10 (full featured, five rendering passes, no vertex programs), NV20 (full featured, two or three rendering passes), NV30 ( full featured, single pass), and ARB2.
The R200 path has a slight speed advantage over the ARB2 path on the R300, but only by a small margin, so it defaults to using the ARB2 path for the quality improvements. The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path. Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.
The reason for this is that ATI does everything at high precision all the time, while Nvidia internally supports three different precisions with different performances. To make it even more complicated, the exact precision that ATI uses is in between the floating point precisions offered by Nvidia, so when Nvidia runs fragment programs, they are at a higher precision than ATI's, which is some justification for the slower speed. Nvidia assures me that there is a lot of room for improving the fragment program performance with improved driver compiler technology.
The current NV30 cards do have some other disadvantages: They take up two slots, and when the cooling fan fires up they are VERY LOUD. I'm not usually one to care about fan noise, but the NV30 does annoy me.
I am using an NV30 in my primary work system now, largely so I can test more of the rendering paths on one system, and because I feel Nvidia still has somewhat better driver quality (ATI continues to improve, though). For a typical consumer, I don't think the decision is at all clear cut at the moment.
For developers doing forward looking work, there is a different tradeoff -- the NV30 runs fragment programs much slower, but it has a huge maximum instruction count. I have bumped into program limits on the R300 already.
As always, better cards are coming soon.
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Doom has dropped support for vendor-specific vertex programs (NV_vertex_program and EXT_vertex_shader), in favor of using ARB_vertex_program for all rendering paths. This has been a pleasant thing to do, and both ATI and Nvidia supported the move. The standardization process for ARB_vertex_program was pretty drawn out and arduous, but in the end, it is a just-plain-better API than either of the vendor specific ones that it replaced. I fretted for a while over whether I should leave in support for the older APIs for broader driver compatibility, but the final decision was that we are going to require a modern driver for the game to run in the advanced modes. Older drivers can still fall back to either the ARB or NV10 paths.
The newly-ratified ARB_vertex_buffer_object extension will probably let me do the same thing for NV_vertex_array_range and ATI_vertex_array_object.
Reasonable arguments can be made for and against the OpenGL or Direct-X style of API evolution. With vendor extensions, you get immediate access to new functionality, but then there is often a period of squabbling about exact feature support from different vendors before an industry standard settles down. With central planning, you can have "phasing problems" between hardware and software releases, and there is a real danger of bad decisions hampering the entire industry, but enforced commonality does make life easier for developers. Trying to keep boneheaded-ideas-that-will-haunt-us-for-years out of Direct-X is the primary reason I have been attending the Windows Graphics Summit for the past three years, even though I still code for OpenGL.
The most significant functionality in the new crop of cards is the truly flexible fragment programming, as exposed with ARB_fragment_program. Moving from the "switches and dials" style of discrete functional graphics programming to generally flexible programming with indirection and high precision is what is going to enable the next major step in graphics engines.
It is going to require fairly deep, non-backwards-compatible modifications to an engine to take real advantage of the new features, but working with ARB_fragment_program is really a lot of fun, so I have added a few little tweaks to the current codebase on the ARB2 path:
High dynamic color ranges are supported internally, rather than with post-blending. This gives a few more bits of color precision in the final image, but it isn't something that you really notice.
Per-pixel environment mapping, rather than per-vertex. This fixes a pet-peeve of mine, which is large panes of environment mapped glass that aren't tessellated enough, giving that awful warping-around-the-triangulation effect as you move past them.
Light and view vectors normalized with math, rather than a cube map. On future hardware this will likely be a performance improvement due to the decrease in bandwidth, but current hardware has the computation and bandwidth balanced such that it is pretty much a wash. What it does (in conjunction with floating point math) give you is a perfectly smooth specular highlight, instead of the pixelish blob that we get on older generations of cards.
There are some more things I am playing around with, that will probably remain in the engine as novelties, but not supported features:
Per-pixel reflection vector calculations for specular, instead of an interpolated half-angle. The only remaining effect that has any visual dependency on the underlying geometry is the shape of the specular highlight. Ideally, you want the same final image for a surface regardless of if it is two giant triangles, or a mesh of 1024 triangles. This will not be true if any calculation done at a vertex involves anything other than linear math operations. The specular half-angle calculation involves normalizations, so the interpolation across triangles on a surface will be dependent on exactly where the vertexes are located. The most visible end result of this is that on large, flat, shiny surfaces where you expect a clean highlight circle moving across it, you wind up with a highlight that distorts into an L shape around the triangulation line.
The extra instructions to implement this did have a noticeable performance hit, and I was a little surprised to see that the highlights not only stabilized in shape, but also sharpened up quite a bit, changing the scene more than I expected. This probably isn't a good tradeoff today for a gamer, but it is nice for any kind of high-fidelity rendering.
Renormalization of surface normal map samples makes significant quality improvements in magnified textures, turning tight, blurred corners into shiny, smooth pockets, but it introduces a huge amount of aliasing on minimized textures. Blending between the cases is possible with fragment programs, but the performance overhead does start piling up, and it may require stashing some information in the normal map alpha channel that varies with mip level. Doing good filtering of a specularly lit normal map texture is a fairly interesting problem, with lots of subtle issues.
Bump mapped ambient lighting will give much better looking outdoor and well-lit scenes. This only became possible with dependent texture reads, and it requires new designer and tool-chain support to implement well, so it isn't easy to test globally with the current Doom datasets, but isolated demos are promising.
The future is in floating point framebuffers. One of the most noticeable thing this will get you without fundamental algorithm changes is the ability to use a correct display gamma ramp without destroying the dark color precision. Unfortunately, using a floating point framebuffer on the current generation of cards is pretty difficult, because no blending operations are supported, and the primary thing we need to do is add light contributions together in the framebuffer. The workaround is to copy the part of the framebuffer you are going to reference to a texture, and have your fragment program explicitly add that texture, instead of having the separate blend unit do it. This is intrusive enough that I probably won't hack up the current codebase, instead playing around on a forked version.
Floating point framebuffers and complex fragment shaders will also allow much better volumetric effects, like volumetric illumination of fogged areas with shadows and additive/subtractive eddy currents.
Opening day is the day to for this type of movie (AOTC, FOTR, TPM, etc...).
Do you know why? The the people there are the ones that are genuinely excited about the movie. It's not a bunch of ho-hum families going to see 'cause they have nothing better to do on Christmas day. These are the people who know the story and cheer at the opening credits.
The excited crowd enhances the movie, as far as I'm concerned.
Put down your chainsaw and listen to me
It's time for us to join in the fight
It's time to let your babies grow up to be cowboys
It's time to let the bedbugs bite
You better put all your eggs in one basket
You better count your chickens before they hatch
You better sell some wine before it's/its time
You better find yourself an itch to scratch
You better squeeze all the Charmin you can while Mr. Wimpole's not around
Stick your head in the microwave and get yourself a tan
Talk with your mouth full; Bite the hand that feeds you
Bite on more than you chew; What can you do
Dare to be stupid
Take some wooden nickles; Look for Mr. Goodbar
Get your mojo working now; I'll show you how
You can dare to be stupid
You can turn the other cheek; You can just give up the ship
You can eat a bunch of sushi and forget to leave a tip
Dare to be stupid
Come on and dare to be stupid
It's so easy to do
Dare to be stupid
We're all waiting for you
Let's go
It's time to make a mountain out of a molehill
So can I have a volunteer
There's no more time for crying over spilled milk
Now it's time for crying in your beer
Settle down, raise a family, join the PTA
Buy some sensible shoes and a Chevyrolet
And party 'till you're broke and they drive you away
It's OK, you can dare to be stupid
It's like spitting on a fish
It's like barking up a tree
It's like I said you gotta buy one if you wanna get one free
Dare to be stupid (yes)
Why don't you dare to be stupid
It's so easy to do
Dare to be stupid
We're all waiting for you
Dare to be stupid
Burn your candle at both ends
Look a gift horse in the mouth
Mashed potatoes can be your friends
You can be a coffee achiever
You can sit around the house and watch Leave It To Beaver
The future's up to you
So what you gonna do
I have been addicted. It/I ruined my life for years. When I tried to stop, all I'd think about was the addiction. Then I'd just let myself have a taste. Just a taste, that's all I need. A taste and then I can get back to what I need to do. Then a taste would turn into a gorge. The process would begin again.
To me it came down to this. It's an addiction when it's easier to get high than to just deal with everyday life.
How many potheads to you know that will have a hard day and insist on getting high "rather than having to think about it"? That's an addiction. They'll come right back and say "Hey, it's just pot. It's not physically addictive. What they don't want you to know is that it's also mentally addictive. You get to the point where you can't live without it. Where it's easier to get high than to deal with the hardships of life. That's the mental addiction.
I believe that video games can be addictive as well. Hell, one of the guys in my lab group is addicted to Ultima Online. If you suggest to him that he might be addicted, he'll blow up at you and insist you don't know shit. If you ask him why he's only gotten 4 hours of sleep per night for the past few months, he'll tell you that work is too hard. If you ask him why he doesn't spend time with his wife anymore, he'll say she just doesn't understand his gameplaying and she's been getting pretty bitchy lately. It's getting easier for this dude to get online an play with some "friends" (non of which he actually knows locally) than to deal with a normal life.
So what's the point of my post. I'm kinda lost myself. Addiction is real and it doesn't matter what form it takes. It's really something that can ruin lives and relationships.
I really can't wait to see the the air car come out!
Now that's going to be exciting. I highly recommend reading the site. Also if I read the FAQ correctly it says that the vehicles will cost between $8000 and $10,000.
An interesting fact is that the air that comes out of the Air Car is cleaner that when it entered the car. Not only is it zero pollution, but it cleans the air!
When I was looking for a new car, I test drove the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insite. Both cars were awesomely silent when you got up to cruising mode. It was actually kinda eerie!
Anyway, I ended up going with a VW Golf TDi (another high efficiency vehicle).
Long story short, hybrid vehicles are really great and they're a good intermediate step between petroleum based fuels and electric cars.
Slashdot Mirror
How else are they going to buy more laws? I mean, come on, buying laws isn't cheap.
That kind of money could buy a lot of laws.
Brilliant!!!
" BOO! TERRORISTS! Ahhhh, booga booga booga! The terrorist are coming and they'll eat your babies! Ahhhh! Terrorists!
Won't sombody think of the children! "
I mean, seriously, this is one of the most insiteful, interesting and underrated statements that I've heard in a long time.
So we, at slashdot, all know that it's a bunch of BS. The general public, however, doesn't and seems to live for "The next great thing".
So I think it's possible for the standard to be both a Myth and a Moneymaker.
Seriously! The uninformed masses just love buying into marketing hype.
02/27/2003
... and telling people about stuff I like is way, way easier if I can just send it to 'em. Way easier."
...
e thing, also is capable of figuring out how you feel about any given thing anywhere in the world that you have any opinion about--without asking you. And as a consequence of this, you can first of all make some guesses about how you're going to feel about something. You don't have to remember whether you've been to this restaurant because the system remembers and tells you what other good restaurants are nearby. But the second-order effect is it will figure out who you hold in high esteem, who has an opinion about some restaurant you've never been to. And this opinion, and this esteem is called Whuffie.
...
... there's the nonviolent revolution, where you have TAs ousting their professors and offering courses that are credited in different ways. But the violent parts would be the complete collapse of the stock market, and massive poverty and economic and political destabilization, and public corporations just withering way, and thousands of people turning out on the streets and looting and arson. Because this is a massively disruptive technological change that they undergo. It is what happened to the recording industry happening to all of us. And the recording industry certainly went berserk when it happened to them, and behaved in a way that was completely nonlinear, not in their best interests, ungovernable, and so on. I have no reason to believe the general public would behave in a way that's anymore laudable. So I think what happened to the Disney Corporation is that money became massively deflationary, and it died, the same way that even worthy Argentinian corporations died when the Argentinian currency went wildly inflationary.
...
...
... Walt pulled off this amazing coup when he got this special economic zone incorporated, straddling two counties but not a part of either, and built Disney World in the middle of it. That kind of techno-utopic thing is very influential in the way I grew up.
"When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity, they'd turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the "themed" areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! We'll all have videophones and be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute--compelling and inspirational, even--but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad hocs were repeating the sins of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia."
-- Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
What to make of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the first novel by Cory Doctorow, dot-com survivor, inveterate blogger, and now, outreach coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Part organizational-intrigue novel, part post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and part Swiftian satire of the tech mentality, revolutionary impulses, and Disney itself, the book has acquired quite a bit of notice, at least in part for its bold use of the Net.
Published in hard cover by Tor Books and released on the Net under a Creative Commons license (the details: free distribution, attribution required, commerical uses prohibited), Down and Out is also available from Doctorow's web site, not only in ASCII and PDF formats, but also, thanks to an enthusiastic community of Down-and-Outers, formats for Palm, Mobibook, Psion, Rocket eBook, Franklin eBookMan, and Hiebook. It's a testament to what programmers will do for free when you hand them some copyright-friendly content to play with.
Doctorow's reasoning, as an outspoken advocate of open source software and the virtues of peer-to-peer, is that your odds of success go way up if you can put something in people's hands and then figure out how to get paid for it. As he says in his note for the electronic version, "First-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don't have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word of mouth
Thus, he'd rather have you email your friend a copy of this book than send a link to Amazon, or better yet, put it on a peer-to-peer Net. If this happens a lot, that's success. And maybe, some percentage of folks will choose to own the book. Or maybe not. In any case, some percentage of folks will choose to port it to another text-reading device. And maybe someone will choose to translate it to languages the publisher doesn't plan on.
In the world of Down and Out, there is no material scarcity, and people don't die, because they're just backed up to a hard disk and their personalities are poured into a young, sprightly clone. In a world without scarcity, the intangible things that are scarce become all the more valuable. In the world of the "Bitchun' Society," what's scarce is esteem, called Whuffie. For content, we should already be living in the world of the Bitchun Society--any digital file can be copied endlessly without degradation.
Only it can't, because we have accepted the notion of intellectual property and adopted laws that punish people for the wholesale copying of stuff. Doctorow's Net move is an opening to the Bitchun' world, and it poses plenty of questions. Why will anyone buy the book if they can get it online for free? On the other hand, things that are popular are far more likely to generate income streams than things that are not popular; so won't some number of people buy the book just because they've heard about it? In any case, books don't just get published online, they get criticized and raved about. They get people devoting themselves to them, porting them, creating alternative, animated storylines set in the original universe. Think that happens only for a paperback book?
Tor did a print run of 8,500 copies for Down and Out. In all likelihood, that's the total amount of bound books that will ever be created. There have been 75,000 downloads of the book directly from Doctorow's site, and no one knows how many other copies have been emailed between friends or downloaded from KaZaa. So, point proven: for those of us who believe in the Net to spread information and knowledge, Doctorow gets lots of Whuffie.
Richard Koman: So you have this sort of post-apocalyptic book in which these ad hoc committees have taken over Disney World; it's essentially a corporate intrigue story
Cory Doctorow: Except there's no corporation.
Koman: A post-corporate intrigue story, then. But for anyone who's been around the computer industry awhile, it's hard not to see glimmers of a very familiar world.
Doctorow: I had someone write me today and ask me if it was a subtle commentary on rapid application development, and in fact it is. One of my reference materials was the Microsoft Press Rapid Application Development book, as I was exploring the multifarious ways that organizations get into giant fights over how they should be organized, as opposed to what they should be doing.
Koman: So, talk about some of the references and experiences that formed this book.
Doctorow: It was the confluence of a bunch of technical and social ideas from a bunch of technical and social eras. Walt Disney himself was a technological innovator and very skilled, and an organizational innovator as well. The legend of Disneyland is that he was going to build this theme park, and he went to his brother Roy, who ran the money in the shop, and said "I'd like $17 million to build a theme park," and Roy said, "You can't have it and what's a theme park?" So he went out and raised private capital and hired some engineers to help him build his theme park, and of course, the engineers had never heard of theme parks and they spent a lot of time telling Walt he couldn't do this or that, so he wound up firing them all and going back to the studio and poaching all of the best animators. The animators at Disney studios had spent the 25 years previous, since the creation of the studio, inventing lots of little interesting engineering. So Walt recruited them to come build the park and he called them Imagineers, for lots of reasons: he liked the sound of it and he was always one for coinages, but it was illegal to call them engineers if they weren't really engineers.
The other slice of inspiration was the big technology/Internet boom and the clash of engineering cultures you had there, where there were a lot of people advocating something much like a favor economy, which eventually got formalized into stuff like free software, where you had major, multifarioius, multiuse applications built out of enlightened self-interest.
Koman: Tell us about the lives of the people in the Magic Kingdom in terms of collaborative filtering, being always online, having a data-rich existence. It all sounds a lot like peer-to-peer.
Doctorow: So there's this world I've written about called the Bitchun Society. And in the Bitchun Society there's no more scarcity, there's a kind of Clarke's Law technology that allows them to reproduce anything at zero incremental cost. And what's more, they don't die. You regularly check yourself into a clinic or terminal and make a copy of your brain and if you die they make a new you and pour that back into it. Lucky for me it's science fiction and not science so I don't have to explain the workings of this stuff.
Cory Doctorow will participate in the panel discussion, DRM in Practice: Rights, Restrictions, and Reality at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. The panel will draw on the experiences of current developers, reviewers, and users of multimedia technology to explore the practical effect of digital rights management on technological innovation.
I also don't have to explain the working of the neural interface, which in addition to allowing them to do this suck-your-brains-out-and-drop-it-onto-a-hard-driv
Koman: And there's left-handed Whuffie and right-handed Whuffie.
Doctorow: That's right, well, it's idiosyncratic. Unlike things like Google PageRank, it's not a beauty contest; it doesn't tell you what the average person thinks is right, or beautiful, or worthy of esteem, it tells you what people like you--people who bought this book also bought clean underwear--think about this resource. And because it's not domain-specific, because it spans all these domains, it's got this incredibly rich dataset, so it's like people who are like you on lots of different axes telling you what to think.
Now, everyone sort of runs their lives as a consequence of this because those few resources that are scarce--like esteem itself, attention, locations--are themselves regulated or apportioned according to Whuffie. The way that happens is that someone asserts that they are in a position to control the distribution of that resource. A group of people--an ad hoc--comes along and says this is our restaurant. And if people behave as if it's their restaurant, if people sit at the tables when they're told to sit, if they order food when they're told to order, if they eat the food when it comes on a plate, then in fact, those people are running the restaurant. But they're only running the restaurant for as long as someone else doesn't come in and successfully assert that they are now running the restaurant. And so there's this built-in incentive to always behave in a way that always makes everyone feel good.
Koman: So this is not unlike deciding who's going to run Venezuela.
Doctorow: Or Argentina, for that matter. One of the things I explore in this book is that it's not all sweetness and light, because there's a lot of sweetness and light. I mean, you end up with people who act in a way that winds up being fundamentally saccharine and conflict-avoiding, because no one wants to get in trouble with anyone, and you wind up with power-law distributions, where people who are popular wind up with the most opportunity to do things that make them popular, which makes them more popular, which gives them more opportunties to be more popular, and even though it's not supposed to be a beauty contest, when you get yourself into a good niche, when you end up running Disney World, that opportunity itself creates more opportunities.
Koman: How does this map to our reality?
Doctorow: I think cash is a rough approximation of Whuffie. Cash is supposed to reflect how much esteem you're held in. Although in a Whuffie society, there's no such thing as a rich a--hole, because "rich" and "a--hole" are the opposite of each other. But I think that in our real world we are plagued with positive returns to scale and power-law distributions. We see this in cash societies, where the rich get richer and have more opportunities to get rich. Certainly that was a characterstic of the technology bubble, where the people who had opportunities to buy in before IPO were the people who didn't need it, essentially. It's a characteristic in publishing, where the authors who get the publicity budget are the authors who are already famous. And it's certainly the case in Google, where being found when you're searched for increases the probability that someone will make a link to you, which increases the probability that you'll be found when you're searched for. That problem, although probably not intractable, is found in both cash and reputation societies. There needs to be some kind of antitrust law or garbage collector that periodically comes along and randomizes Whuffie if you're going to get anything like a merit-based distribution.
Koman: There's a scene in the book, where they ask the Imagineers, "How long to build?" And the guy says, "Five years." And they say, "No, without reviews, and approvals, and sign-offs." And the answer is eight weeks. You've had this experience of pulling together some entrepreneurial programmers but being completely stymied in being able to release your code
Doctorow: Well, both points of view are correct. One of the things that happens is they say, "Oh, by all means, go do whatever you want, just deliver in eight weeks, and what they find is that without all this planning and oversight, the engineers just wind up ratholing. They take these tiny little parts of the project that are interesting and they don't wind up delivering the actual project. On the other hand, command and control systems are prone to creating these enormous delays where you get sign-off and sign-off and sign-off, and then the CEO says, "Does it have to be gray, can't it be blue?" There's a happy medium somewhere in there.
I think that the thing about venture capital is that despite its risk-taking, it's inherently conservative. One of the best pieces of advice an entrepreneur can get is "retain control of your company." You want to be sure that the oversight from the VCs is board-level oversight, not operational oversight. You want the VCs to sit down and say, "Given that you're spending our money we want to make sure you're doing x." Not, "Why does that guy have two monitors, couldn't he just use one?"
One of the things that has happened in the Bitchun Society is that something that is inherently entrepreneurial has calcified into something quite bureaucratic, hide-bound, slow to change, run by committee, very risk-averse. That's a characteristic of revolutions, too. There's a speech by Abraham Lincoln that's reproduced in the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln exhibit at Disneyland: "... if destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author and its finisher. It cannot come from abroad; it will spring up from among us." Basically, the only thing that will destroy America is America. The only thing that will destroy the Bitchun Society is the Bitchun Society. And the only thing that will destroy an entrepreneurial company is to stop being entrepreneurial.
Koman: What's the backstory of the book? What happened to the Disney Corporation? How did the ad hoc groups come to rule?
Doctorow: That's never really made explicit, because I want the book to be fundamentally optimistic. But one of the things about the revolution is that you have to break some eggs to make the omelet. I have little bits and pieces of it
Koman: You speak of the recording industry as though it's already dead, or at least it will never get back to the way it was.
Doctorow: Well, sure, even the recording industry understands it will never get back to the way it was. I don't think it's dead. I think it is fundamentally changed and I think they're slowly coming to grips with that, although not as fast as we would like them to. But the recording industry has a story of, "We do two really important roles. One is to make music available and the other is to compensate artists." But one of the things we know is that 80 percent of all of the music ever released isn't for sale anywhere in the world. And another thing we know is that 97 percent of the artists signed to a recording contract earn less than $600 per year off of it. So Napster doesn't have a better track record at compensating artists, but it sure as shit had a better track record of making music available.
Napster filled a niche that the music industry was actually incapable of filling for legal and organizational reasons. I've had very earnest conversations with recording industry executives who told me it took forever to get the clearances to put 100 tracks online. Napster put 100 tracks online in the first eight seconds of its existence. So whatever happens, I can't believe that the hundreds of millions of people around the world currently enjoying filesharing--not just filesharers, but the people who get CDs from filesharers--those people aren't going to willingly say, "Yes, let's take the lion's share of our shared musical heritage and throw it away again, put it back in the vault for another 30 years until we can figure out how to make it available--minus whatever disappears between now and then because all known copies of it are destroyed." That isn't a possible outcome to the current struggle. There are lots of other possible outcomes, like serious damage to the rights to build general-purpose tools and so on, which I'm very concerned about. But I'm not concerned that the solution to this will involve throwing that music back in the vault.
Koman: Which goes to the question the Supreme Court wrestled with in Eldred, or the question they should have wrestled with anyway, which is, "What is the best way to ensure the dissemination of creative work?"
Doctorow: Or even more broadly, what is the best way to ensure continuity of our cultural heritage; what is the best way to ensure that things don't vanish? It really is an important question and it was in our side's brief, and unfortunately, it seems to me the Court didn't really address it at all. They said, "Well, Disney's stewardship of Mickey Mouse is above reproach, and therefore Disney deserves to continue holding the rights to the Mickey Mouse cartoons, which would enter the public domain if it weren't for the Sonny Bono act. And why do we want Mickey Mouse back in the public domain? It's not as if there's any absence of creative work being created with his likeness on it." And what they missed is that this has nothing to do with Mickey Mouse. The problem is that in order to keep Mickey Mouse in Disney's hands we are keeping everything that was made contemporaneous with Mickey Mouse out of the public's hands, and in many cases, those works are abandoned, very few copies survive, no one knows who the rights holders are, and before they go into the public domain, if indeed they ever do, all known copies will have vanished forever.
Koman: There's this ideal: univeral access to all human knowledge. The Internet is supposed to be the medium for that. It seems that Napster was doing that for music; peer-to-peer systems in general could enable the dissemination of all public domain stuff on the Net. And yet, probably no one has the chutzpah to suggest that anymore because they're likely to be prosecuted
Doctorow: Our common cultural heritage is basically distributed across attics across the world. The one thing that a centralized system could never do--I mean, eBay has shown this--is catalogue the contents of everyone's attics. What eBay demonstrated is that the only way to get the contents of everyone's attic catalogued is to ask everyone to catalogue their own attic. This is also true of cultural information. All the information that has ever been digitized is on someone's hard drive somewhere and the solution to making this all available isn't putting it all in one place; with apologies to Brewster, the solution is in keeping it in situ and finding ways for us to exchange it, and ensuring that whenever we exchange it, we increase its availablility, so we have nonrivalrous use of the information.
Koman: So what is your emotional relationship with Disney? You seem to have quite a warm spot in your heart for Walt
Doctorow: Yeah, everyone loves that crazy old Nazi corpsicle.
Koman: And yet in your day job, you see Disney as doing a lot of harm to the culture.
Doctorow: Well, it's possible to love the sin and hate the sinner. Yeah, I'm a tremendous fan of both Walt Disney and the Disney Corporation in a lot of spheres, not universally, but in a lot of valances. It's the only (publicly traded) company I've ever owned stock in. I grew up going to Disney parks in Florida. It really was one of the formative experiences of my childhood, these annual trips to Disney World to see this kind of techno-utopic autonomous zone. The Florida property especially exists in this kind of extralegal framework where it's not subject to state law--it can do things like build its own nuclear reactor without getting permission from the state government, it doesn't have to pay taxes
The Disney Corporation, when it's not being terrible, is wonderful. It's one of the most enlightened employers in terms of equal rights and gay rights. It's the largest gay employer in the Southland. It has amazing benefits packages, it's a great company to work for if you have kids.
In addition to this, I think that their art and technology kicks ass. But one thing you discover in the technology world, especially in free software, is that being a good programmer and being a good person are not necessarily correlated, or at least being a good programmer and being a person with whom other people want to spend a lot of time, who has good hygiene and good social skills, are not correlated.
Koman: Agree with you on hygiene, but what do you mean by being a "good person?"
Doctorow: There are people who have written great code who are d--ks.
Koman: Is that a greater number of d--ks than the random distribution of d--ks in the larger population?
Doctorow: Maybe not, but I'm not arguing that they're correlated. I'm arguing that eschewing someone's code because the person who wrote it is a d--k is a losing strategy. So there's a corollary in Disney in that they have built undeniably fantastic technology; they have built really interesting and innovative organizations around that technology; they continue to innovate all the time, as art and as science; it's good stuff. And the company does some stuff I'm really angry about in employment law, and in pollution, and in trade practices abroad, and in copyright law, and in technology. There's a lot of things about this company I'm very upset about as a shareholder and as a citizen of the world.
Richard Koman is a freelance writer and editor. He has written for Salon, New Architect, Internet World, and the O'Reilly Network.
I can't believe that the parent has been modded to +4 informative. It's not even about the goddamned post! Take your retoric elsewhere.
Mod me down, I don't care. But at least mod the idiot down who can't keep on-topic. It's about science and batteries, not fucking French oil interests.
The article states:
Though this was hard to explain, and did not sit comfortably with the religious ideology of the time, he published his conclusions.
How did identifying it as a battery conflict with religious ideology of the time? I'm truly curious. Any suggestions?
I mean, it couldn't have been because there's no passage saying "And then God invented the battery and said it was good".
Did it confict with the European idea that they were the center of science and religion?
So the Xbox is a PC made for console gaming.
He switched the Xbox into a PC.
Wow...you just blew my mind.
The girl in HS who kept visiting you and you couldn't figure out why...she wanted to fuck you.
The girls who were making out and you chose to just fuck one of them...you should have done them at the same time and made them do some crazy lesbian shit.
The girl who you considered your best friend...she wanted to fuck you, but you were too much of an idiot
The girl in German class with the tongue piercing and huge boobs...should have slipper her the sausage. What were you thinking???
You're going to marry a wonderful woman when you're 27, but for god's sake, fuck those chicks!!!!
Oops, I stand corrected.
I'm going to go now...
Be aware that the New Scientist is not a peer reviewed journal.
/., is that usual?).
The two guys who claimed that they produced cold fusion in a laboratory also didn't publish in a peer reviewed journal. It turns out they were full of crap. Just 'cause it's written doesn't make it so. Once it's in a peer reviewed journal, I'll seriously be interested (chemistry news on
Anyway, the New Scientist is well known for its overhyping of science.
Prof. Frink(past): Sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch it, but I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe can own one.
Apu: Could it be used for dating?
Prof. Frink: Well theoretically yes, but, the matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest.
See, he doesn't say anything about bacteria making the computers!!!
...was the use of the word "panoply".
That word simply isn't used enough in the modern vernacular.
Okay, mod me down now...
I don't know if this point has been brought up, but did they tell you about the credit check before hiring you?
I would be pissed too if I went through the hiring process and thought everything was cool then they say they need your credit report.
That would seem underhanded that they would tell you about it after you're hired.
Me post first? That's unpossible...
Why do I need this protocol when I already bought a Pentium 4 processor to make the internet go faster? :)
Name: John Carmack
t of Direct-X is the primary reason I have been attending the Windows
Email:
Description: Programmer
Project:
Jan 29, 2003
NV30 vs R300, current developments, etc
At the moment, the NV30 is slightly faster on most scenes in Doom than the
R300, but I can still find some scenes where the R300 pulls a little bit
ahead. The issue is complicated because of the different ways the cards can
choose to run the game.
The R300 can run Doom in three different modes: ARB (minimum extensions, no
specular highlights, no vertex programs), R200 (full featured, almost always
single pass interaction rendering), ARB2 (floating point fragment shaders,
minor quality improvements, always single pass).
The NV30 can run DOOM in five different modes: ARB, NV10 (full featured, five
rendering passes, no vertex programs), NV20 (full featured, two or three
rendering passes), NV30 ( full featured, single pass), and ARB2.
The R200 path has a slight speed advantage over the ARB2 path on the R300, but
only by a small margin, so it defaults to using the ARB2 path for the quality
improvements. The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path.
Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an
exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks
twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.
The reason for this is that ATI does everything at high precision all the
time, while Nvidia internally supports three different precisions with
different performances. To make it even more complicated, the exact
precision that ATI uses is in between the floating point precisions offered by
Nvidia, so when Nvidia runs fragment programs, they are at a higher precision
than ATI's, which is some justification for the slower speed. Nvidia assures
me that there is a lot of room for improving the fragment program performance
with improved driver compiler technology.
The current NV30 cards do have some other disadvantages: They take up two
slots, and when the cooling fan fires up they are VERY LOUD. I'm not usually
one to care about fan noise, but the NV30 does annoy me.
I am using an NV30 in my primary work system now, largely so I can test more
of the rendering paths on one system, and because I feel Nvidia still has
somewhat better driver quality (ATI continues to improve, though). For a
typical consumer, I don't think the decision is at all clear cut at the
moment.
For developers doing forward looking work, there is a different tradeoff --
the NV30 runs fragment programs much slower, but it has a huge maximum
instruction count. I have bumped into program limits on the R300 already.
As always, better cards are coming soon.
-------------
Doom has dropped support for vendor-specific vertex programs
(NV_vertex_program and EXT_vertex_shader), in favor of using
ARB_vertex_program for all rendering paths. This has been a pleasant thing to
do, and both ATI and Nvidia supported the move. The standardization process
for ARB_vertex_program was pretty drawn out and arduous, but in the end, it is
a just-plain-better API than either of the vendor specific ones that it
replaced. I fretted for a while over whether I should leave in support for
the older APIs for broader driver compatibility, but the final decision was
that we are going to require a modern driver for the game to run in the
advanced modes. Older drivers can still fall back to either the ARB or NV10
paths.
The newly-ratified ARB_vertex_buffer_object extension will probably let me do
the same thing for NV_vertex_array_range and ATI_vertex_array_object.
Reasonable arguments can be made for and against the OpenGL or Direct-X style
of API evolution. With vendor extensions, you get immediate access to new
functionality, but then there is often a period of squabbling about exact
feature support from different vendors before an industry standard settles
down. With central planning, you can have "phasing problems" between
hardware and software releases, and there is a real danger of bad decisions
hampering the entire industry, but enforced commonality does make life easier
for developers. Trying to keep boneheaded-ideas-that-will-haunt-us-for-years
ou
Graphics Summit for the past three years, even though I still code for OpenGL.
The most significant functionality in the new crop of cards is the truly
flexible fragment programming, as exposed with ARB_fragment_program. Moving
from the "switches and dials" style of discrete functional graphics
programming to generally flexible programming with indirection and high
precision is what is going to enable the next major step in graphics engines.
It is going to require fairly deep, non-backwards-compatible modifications to
an engine to take real advantage of the new features, but working with
ARB_fragment_program is really a lot of fun, so I have added a few little
tweaks to the current codebase on the ARB2 path:
High dynamic color ranges are supported internally, rather than with
post-blending. This gives a few more bits of color precision in the final
image, but it isn't something that you really notice.
Per-pixel environment mapping, rather than per-vertex. This fixes a pet-peeve
of mine, which is large panes of environment mapped glass that aren't
tessellated enough, giving that awful warping-around-the-triangulation effect
as you move past them.
Light and view vectors normalized with math, rather than a cube map. On
future hardware this will likely be a performance improvement due to the
decrease in bandwidth, but current hardware has the computation and bandwidth
balanced such that it is pretty much a wash. What it does (in conjunction
with floating point math) give you is a perfectly smooth specular highlight,
instead of the pixelish blob that we get on older generations of cards.
There are some more things I am playing around with, that will probably remain
in the engine as novelties, but not supported features:
Per-pixel reflection vector calculations for specular, instead of an
interpolated half-angle. The only remaining effect that has any visual
dependency on the underlying geometry is the shape of the specular highlight.
Ideally, you want the same final image for a surface regardless of if it is
two giant triangles, or a mesh of 1024 triangles. This will not be true if
any calculation done at a vertex involves anything other than linear math
operations. The specular half-angle calculation involves normalizations, so
the interpolation across triangles on a surface will be dependent on exactly
where the vertexes are located. The most visible end result of this is that
on large, flat, shiny surfaces where you expect a clean highlight circle
moving across it, you wind up with a highlight that distorts into an L shape
around the triangulation line.
The extra instructions to implement this did have a noticeable performance
hit, and I was a little surprised to see that the highlights not only
stabilized in shape, but also sharpened up quite a bit, changing the scene
more than I expected. This probably isn't a good tradeoff today for a gamer,
but it is nice for any kind of high-fidelity rendering.
Renormalization of surface normal map samples makes significant quality
improvements in magnified textures, turning tight, blurred corners into shiny,
smooth pockets, but it introduces a huge amount of aliasing on minimized
textures. Blending between the cases is possible with fragment programs, but
the performance overhead does start piling up, and it may require stashing
some information in the normal map alpha channel that varies with mip level.
Doing good filtering of a specularly lit normal map texture is a fairly
interesting problem, with lots of subtle issues.
Bump mapped ambient lighting will give much better looking outdoor and
well-lit scenes. This only became possible with dependent texture reads, and
it requires new designer and tool-chain support to implement well, so it isn't
easy to test globally with the current Doom datasets, but isolated demos are
promising.
The future is in floating point framebuffers. One of the most noticeable
thing this will get you without fundamental algorithm changes is the ability
to use a correct display gamma ramp without destroying the dark color
precision. Unfortunately, using a floating point framebuffer on the current
generation of cards is pretty difficult, because no blending operations are
supported, and the primary thing we need to do is add light contributions
together in the framebuffer. The workaround is to copy the part of the
framebuffer you are going to reference to a texture, and have your fragment
program explicitly add that texture, instead of having the separate blend unit
do it. This is intrusive enough that I probably won't hack up the current
codebase, instead playing around on a forked version.
Floating point framebuffers and complex fragment shaders will also allow much
better volumetric effects, like volumetric illumination of fogged areas with
shadows and additive/subtractive eddy currents.
John Carmack
Opening day is the day to for this type of movie (AOTC, FOTR, TPM, etc...).
Do you know why? The the people there are the ones that are genuinely excited about the movie. It's not a bunch of ho-hum families going to see 'cause they have nothing better to do on Christmas day. These are the people who know the story and cheer at the opening credits.
The excited crowd enhances the movie, as far as I'm concerned.
Just my $.02.
Put down your chainsaw and listen to me
It's time for us to join in the fight
It's time to let your babies grow up to be cowboys
It's time to let the bedbugs bite
You better put all your eggs in one basket
You better count your chickens before they hatch
You better sell some wine before it's/its time
You better find yourself an itch to scratch
You better squeeze all the Charmin you can while Mr. Wimpole's not around
Stick your head in the microwave and get yourself a tan
Talk with your mouth full; Bite the hand that feeds you
Bite on more than you chew; What can you do
Dare to be stupid
Take some wooden nickles; Look for Mr. Goodbar
Get your mojo working now; I'll show you how
You can dare to be stupid
You can turn the other cheek; You can just give up the ship
You can eat a bunch of sushi and forget to leave a tip
Dare to be stupid
Come on and dare to be stupid
It's so easy to do
Dare to be stupid
We're all waiting for you
Let's go
It's time to make a mountain out of a molehill
So can I have a volunteer
There's no more time for crying over spilled milk Now it's time for crying in your beer
Settle down, raise a family, join the PTA
Buy some sensible shoes and a Chevyrolet
And party 'till you're broke and they drive you away
It's OK, you can dare to be stupid
It's like spitting on a fish
It's like barking up a tree
It's like I said you gotta buy one if you wanna get one free
Dare to be stupid (yes)
Why don't you dare to be stupid
It's so easy to do
Dare to be stupid
We're all waiting for you
Dare to be stupid
Burn your candle at both ends
Look a gift horse in the mouth
Mashed potatoes can be your friends
You can be a coffee achiever
You can sit around the house and watch Leave It To Beaver
The future's up to you
So what you gonna do
Dare to be stupid
I have been addicted. It/I ruined my life for years. When I tried to stop, all I'd think about was the addiction. Then I'd just let myself have a taste. Just a taste, that's all I need. A taste and then I can get back to what I need to do. Then a taste would turn into a gorge. The process would begin again.
To me it came down to this. It's an addiction when it's easier to get high than to just deal with everyday life.
How many potheads to you know that will have a hard day and insist on getting high "rather than having to think about it"? That's an addiction. They'll come right back and say "Hey, it's just pot. It's not physically addictive. What they don't want you to know is that it's also mentally addictive. You get to the point where you can't live without it. Where it's easier to get high than to deal with the hardships of life. That's the mental addiction.
I believe that video games can be addictive as well. Hell, one of the guys in my lab group is addicted to Ultima Online. If you suggest to him that he might be addicted, he'll blow up at you and insist you don't know shit. If you ask him why he's only gotten 4 hours of sleep per night for the past few months, he'll tell you that work is too hard. If you ask him why he doesn't spend time with his wife anymore, he'll say she just doesn't understand his gameplaying and she's been getting pretty bitchy lately. It's getting easier for this dude to get online an play with some "friends" (non of which he actually knows locally) than to deal with a normal life.
So what's the point of my post. I'm kinda lost myself. Addiction is real and it doesn't matter what form it takes. It's really something that can ruin lives and relationships.
It's SiS, it's graphics, who cares?
I really doubt that SiS will really compete with nVidia and ATi in the near future.
What sucks has sucked and will always suck.
As a person who is seriously afraid to fly, I think these things would be great.
Granted, it wouldn't stop the plane from blowing up, but it could do a lot of good.
It certainly will be interesting to myself, and people who are afraid to fly like me, to see how the technology developes in the future.
fp
...the Smart Pool Table is 11% better than the utterly stupid, useless, feltless Pool Table.
Eh?
I really can't wait to see the the air car come out!
Now that's going to be exciting. I highly recommend reading the site. Also if I read the FAQ correctly it says that the vehicles will cost between $8000 and $10,000.
An interesting fact is that the air that comes out of the Air Car is cleaner that when it entered the car. Not only is it zero pollution, but it cleans the air!
I'm telling you, hybrids are great!
When I was looking for a new car, I test drove the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insite. Both cars were awesomely silent when you got up to cruising mode. It was actually kinda eerie!
Anyway, I ended up going with a VW Golf TDi (another high efficiency vehicle).
Long story short, hybrid vehicles are really great and they're a good intermediate step between petroleum based fuels and electric cars.