Never for performance reasons. Computers than run x86 instructions are business machines designed to be cheap and ubiquitous. Faster platforms and more elegant ISAs exist, but they still don't have the acceptance that x86 machines do. I don't believe they will until x86 machines are no longer a market force.
When power requirements and die size become paramount. Everything Intel and AMD engineers currently do to make their processors run faster requires additional hardware. All this next-generation translation business requires additional hardware. The Crusoe chip does not throw additional hardware at the problem, and suffers a performance hit because of it. An ISA designed to be implemented on a low power, teeny-tiny die should kick these chips butts. Such a chip is a requirement for powerful embedded systems, like those that might fit in your pen or glasses or cell phone.
When 64 bit memory addresses are required by the majority of users. In my opinion, this is one of the most fundamental limitations of any 32 bit architecture. With time (a lot of time) 64 bit memory addressing will become a must, and that will mandate widespread adoptance of 64 bit machines. I don't expect early adopters of 64 bit platforms to be in short supply, however; they're already out there.
IMHO there's no need for gigahertz PIIIs or Athlons to be able to run WordStar.
True. There's also no need to delete Lord-knows-many programs written and compiled for x86 machines. Using the x86 ISA is a question of economics, not of "genuine improvement or development." The field of computer architecture has come a long way since some Intel engineers sat down and designed the 8086. I hope nobody refutes that.
But, today architects have some awfully good ideas about how to squeeze more performance out of a machine that has to be able to execute x86 instructions. These sorts of breakthroughs keep the performance of x86-compatible machines climbing with minimal performance hits compared to other architectures. If maintaining x86 compatiblity is so "expensive and counterproductive" that it makes sense to leapfrog from architecture to architecture, then modern (i.e. designed in the last decade) architectures would rule the market in terms of sales and performance. They do not; hence, maintaining backwards compatibility does not significantly adversely affect an architecture.
What are your gripes with the x86 ISA? It is rather clunky and, from an academic standpoint, not optimal. Also, I'm sure the Intel engineers curse themselves (or their predecessors) on a weekly basis.;) In spite of that, though, machines which execute x86 instructions have the advantages of low price and large amounts of software; what more can you ask for? Lucky you, I'll tell you:
The two problems of the machines which execute x86 instructions currently are power requirements and die size, because all the current schemes for circumventing the problems of x86 require additional hardware. These are not serious issues currently because of the widespread desktop computing paradigm. As the market moves away from big, stationary computers and towards smaller devices, x86 will become less and less viable. You can already see this trend happening. How many hand-held devices can you think of that execute x86 instructions?
Did you, in fact, read the article? Hannibal said as much in his article. Obsolescence is the wrong question here; timothy should be ashamed of himself for titling this Is The x86 Obsolete?.
Here's the short version for people too lazy to read the article or too dumb to understand what Hannibal is talking about:
Due to incredible amount of programs written for the x86 architecture, machines that execute x86 instructions will be around for some time yet. Everyone agrees (even Intel) that x86 is not a good ISA (instruction set architecture), but the ability to run all the programs written for it make it too costly to scrap. In order to achieve better and better performance, the current generation of microprocessors (Athlons and PIIIs) emulate x86 in hardware. The actual execution on these machines takes place using a completely different, RISC-style set of instructions (x86 being CISC for those who don't know).
This information addresses only half of Hannibal's article. The other and more interesting half describes the latest ideas computer architects have for circumventing the problems of the x86 ISA. The primary advancement is translation of x86 instructions into another architecture; this translation occurs only once, as opposed to emulation, and can be very aggressively optimized for the particular hardware it is running on because it is performed at runtime. Because the performance hit is only incurred once and because of the further, machine-specific optimizations, machines which execute x86 instructions will continue to increase in performance.
Furthermore, executing x86 instructions by translation means that computer architects have the freedom to change the native architecture of their machines without worrying about executing legacy code. These issues were addressed by emulation; translation is a further step in this direction.
As I said before, the obsolescence of the x86 ISA is a ridiculous and unanswerable question. However, I believe that the x86 ISA will continue to be a relevant problem until we leave 32 bit machines behind for 64 bit and larger.
I was the systems manager for a large student organization last year (no link, the website's down *sigh*). Most of my headaches came from users, and the odd things they thought of to do to my computers in their spare time. And that was with a relatively restricted user base of about 50. If you have more users which change frequently over the space of a year, I think they'll be even more trouble.
I'd say the difficult thing is not getting teenagers to properly administer and staff a computer lab, but getting teenagers to be good users. Here is where your OS can be your best friend or your worst nightmare. Maintaining a multi-user cluster of computers is much easier with a multi-user OS. Which one you pick depends on the knowledge and needs of your users, but I would highly suggest at least getting Windows NT, if not something beefier. Having a clearly defined policy on recreational use helps, too. Is web surfing okay? Would game-playing be tolerated? What about pornography (yes, it comes up!)? When users know what's expected of them, a large majority of them will try to fulfill those expectations.
Another thing which will make maintaining your computers easier is separating the duties of those involved. It sounds as if you in the sort of environment where everyone knows everyone else and they all get along. Trusting one guy to be completely in charge of purchases, for example, and another to handle installations means that your team won't be working at cross-purposes. Nothing is worse than having to spend hours of your time to fix someone else's 'fix'. Find some way of identifying what each person is responsible for and make certain they stick to it. The former because people get very unhappy when they perceive someone else is doing their job and the latter because people get very unhappy when they perceive they're doing someone else's job.
From a current Mac World news summary (http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/00/mwsf200 0/index.shtml):
"We asked them what was next for ATI: Would we get a Mac version of the Rage 128 Fury MAXX, their dual-chip 3D monster that tops even the nVidia GeForce?
"Well, sadly, the answer is no. ATI claims that a technical limitation of the Sawtooth motherboard's AGP controller chip prevents the card from working properly, only allowing one of the two processors to operate. This is a hardware issue, and can only be fixed by a motherboard revision, according to ATI. AGP Mac owners are likely to find this VERY disappointing."
Sure, you can buy a MAXX product for $200~250 and have yourself a kick-ass video card. Or, you could shell out $200~300 for a GeForce-based card and get a kick-ass video card that might just have a longer lifetime in it.
S3's and nVidia's new chipsets support hardware transformation and lighting--done right on the video card, instead of the CPU (which would be software). 3dfx's and ATI's new products don't. Now, it depends on game developer's support for this new technology, but chances are good that many games in the coming couple years will count on offloading these calculations to the video card in hardware T&L enabled cards. If that happens, then owners of these cards will experience serious performance boosts or be able to run games their non-T&L-card-owning bethren can't.
Don't be fooled by the 64 Megs of RAM on the MAXX, either. It doesn't increase the total textures the card can handle, because each chip has to keep track of (almost) all the textures simultaneously. The RAM on this video card is not a particular selling point compared to other 32M cards.
One point ATI might be able to score on is price. The MAXX is expected to retail for less than GeForce products, and may offer a better deal. Only time and the market will tell.
Of course, MAXX products will really succeed in the OEM market, where ATI's strength is. And when (if) this technology gets ported to the Mac, it'll be a major boon to Mac gaming. Given ATI's current stranglehold on the Mac 3D video card market, I expect this card will find it's way there soon enough.
Just to clarify, the outcome of this incident is that the dorm ethernet outlet of the guilty student was deactivated until the end of the semester or Thanksgiving, depending on whether he attended the copyright lecture and wrote the paper.
You're clearly not reading the other posts on this thread. The students involved did NOT put files in their public folders or www folders on their Andrew accounts (as our UNIX accounts here are called). All of the busted students were sharing files on the campus Microsoft SMB Network. These files resided on the students' own computers.
Some of these students had password-protected their files. Some did in fact use no passwords or common passwords like 'mp3'. It isn't these students who we're concerned about. It is those students who thought they were obeying the CMU Computer Use Policy Agreement by passwording their shared copyrighted files (not with 'mp3' or 'guest', either).
Some students who fell into this latter category were removed from the network. Some students who were sharing legally redistributable mp3s were also temporarily denied network access. More than one student's school work was affected by the sudden drop of the network connection without warning. It is about these situations that CMU students and others are raising protests about this incident. For more coverage of the student's opinions, read The Tartan's article on the incident a couple weeks ago.
It is obviously the University's perogative to deny network access to those they feel are abusing their network privilege or violating the Computer Code of Ethics. I believe, and I think others would agree with me, that how the University handled this crackdown leaves something to be desired.
What I as a CMU student would like to see is a clear explanation of what constitutes a public share--obviously the description currently given to us leaves some things out. I would also like to see Computing Services give people 24 hours notice before they deactivate an outlet. It's a fairly simple courtesy, after all.
What I as a music-lover would like to see is more artists taking the power of distribution and copyright into their own hands. I bought a couple songs off They Might Be Giants' latest album mostly because I support that kind of distribution model, and wish more bands would use it.
Anybody who really believes in BWP is either insane or lives in a cave (possibly a cave with Net access, but a cave). Heather, Josh, and Michael have been doing interviews, for pete's sake.
I think it's safe to say that Linux users will always demand flexibility and choice.
But there certainly are a lot of popular window managers out there, not to mention our friends KDE & GNOME. What changes, if any, do you foresee in the current Linux model of desktop environments? Will GNOME and KDE agree to some kind of standard? Will each solution specialize further, so as to appeal more to a specific group of users?
Have the GUIs usable with Linux matured to something resembling their final state, or do we have some distance to cover yet?
Alright, let's have a (completely unscientific, informal) vote to determine preference.
Seems there's two ways to determine preference to me. One can look at the number of apps developed with GNOME in mind versus the number of apps developed with KDE in mind, or one can ask everybody to vote for either GNOME or KDE.
You'd think the first would be relatively easy to determine. Unfortunately, I haven't the slightest idea how to go about finding out. Any ideas?
Now, the second is a lot harder--"everybody" is a lot of people. But we can conduct a nice informal poll whose results mean nothing quite easily (a la the/. poll). Fun fun fun.
Interestingly, the Editors picked KDE as their winner over GNOME because "KDE is as stable as a rock, [but] the GNOME panel and file manager have a few bugs left to iron out." In your experience, are the KDE launch panel and file manager more stable and robust than their GNOME counterparts?
Has anyone installed both Debian and Caldera recently? I would like to know if the differences in installation are as significant as the Editors seem to think they are; they claim Debian is "one of the most difficult distributions to install" while Caldera "coddles you through the most pleasant installation experience available."
Is this true? What do users experienced with both think?
NOTE: I'm just interested in the relative merits of these distros' installations. Stick to the installations, please.
High framerate is pretty, but nowhere near a necessity for enjoyment.
High framerates aren't necessary, but sufficiently high framerates are. When the game dips to 13 fps and below, I find it difficult to retain control of the situation, especially in a multiplayer game. I've lost too many units to low framerate. A guaranteed 20 fps would eliminate that kind of waste. Unfortunately, no hardware setup can guarantee any framerate. The best you can do is try to keep the average framerate as high as possible so the low framerate doesn't impede gameplay.
The reviewer didn't mention the fact that Myth II is a real resource hog. Most significantly, the 3-D modeled objects such as walls and windmills create a big performance hit whenever they come on-screen. Playing on Pentium II's when the game first came out, my friends and I were dismayed to find occasionally unplayable framerates in multiplayer, and, to a lesser extent, single player. It's a great game, but we had difficulty sustaining interest in the face of 13 frames per second. Note: Your mileage may vary. The situation I described above used varying makes of 3D video cards, none of them comparable to today's TNT2s and Voodoo3s.
Myth ain't all that bad. The author made it sound like Myth players wandered endless deserts, looking for Thralls to kill. I'll admit I did some cross-country work on one or two Myth levels, but on the whole it was quite enjoyable. Almost as enjoyable as Myth II would be if I could get the blasted framerate up.
I don't think this is ridiculous. I do think you have pointed out the flaws in the SPP. Obviously something must be done about the current state of copyright law in the near future. I think the SPP, being a work in progress, can be modified to fix the holes in it that you pointed out.
1) Serialization. You're right. I agree that there's not enough demand for serialized works to move entire markets to that model. The burden of trust needs to be moved back to the consumers, not the suppliers, as other slashdotters have mentioned. Consumers should be sending money to suppliers for content they've already created--like the market works currently. But the mechanism for doing so would be a quick and easy, privacy-assured electronic system for payment such as the authors of SPP described. Analogous systems exist today in the service industry: whenever I tip a waitress, we are having the exact same sort of transaction that I described above, only on more mundane terms. Think about it.
2) Artist Frustration. I don't think the artist is forced to use the SPP. SPP, and the variations we discuss here, are just ways of exchanging content without the protection of existing copyright law. Artists will be free to release and distribute their content however they wish, including circumventing any SPP or similar system.
3) Who's going to pay? I think the majority of consumers are willing to pay for what they perceive to be worthy content. The trick is getting the mass market to accept these rules of commerce as thoroughly as they do the ones of our current cash system--not impossible, but certainly something that needs to be looked after. The other trick is having a electronic standard as good as cash for making payments. I agree with you about the credit cards--they are not an truly acceptable method of conducting business electronically. I believe a government-backed standard is in order, much the same as cash is today. The more ecommerce is like plunking down your twenties at the Wal-Mart (or Lord & Taylor), the better. Honestly, I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say they tried to sell content once and failed. Are you talking about efforts to charge subscription rates on websites? Or perhaps you are taking the view that the history of information and art cash-exchanges is really about material, distribution, and storage costs? I can't tell.
4) Servers are getting better and cheaper. I agree with you here, and honestly do not see this as a problem. Kudos to the start-up artists that operate their own servers, or the big-name author who bypass the publishing middlemen by making his own site. But, for many of the rest, having a publisher or some other promoter will be essential. Every author needs an editor, every musician needs an engineer. The middlemen will continue to serve these roles, as well as distribution, most likely. It has been and will always be true that division of labor leads to more efficiency and greater production. Would you rather have your favorite musician worrying about their next album or the scalability of their server?
5) Online novels, maybe the only thing that could succeed on this payment plan, won't happen. Not on a CRT monitor, they won't. Displays will be developed that feature the portability and legibility of books, but in electronic format. That is crucial to the sale of electronic books; without the invention of something comparable to electronic printing press, you are quite right: online novels will not happen.
Re:An Investor in the "Morality Industry" speaks o
on
South Park The Movie
·
· Score: 1
>>south park is a hilarious reminder why we try to be civilized.
That's an important point to remember. I loved South Park. I would never want to live in a world like South Park, though. Matt and Trey give us an unbelievable, ridiculous, and even frightening world filled with slapstick humor and fart jokes. That's funny--that's entertainment. Any social commentary or satire one derives from the movie comes from the parallels between the awful world of South Park and our own.
There is more going on in the movie than what I'm addressing right now, but the big picture is clear to me. I want to live in a society where the situations in South Park are completely fictional; I choose to strive to make that so.
Slashdot Mirror
Transmeta's crusoe is the first of a generation of processors that can execute X86 efficiently without having a hardware implementation of it.
No, both modern Intel and AMD processor decode x86 instructions into microcode in order to process them.
Jonathan David Pearce
Never for performance reasons. Computers than run x86 instructions are business machines designed to be cheap and ubiquitous. Faster platforms and more elegant ISAs exist, but they still don't have the acceptance that x86 machines do. I don't believe they will until x86 machines are no longer a market force.
When power requirements and die size become paramount. Everything Intel and AMD engineers currently do to make their processors run faster requires additional hardware. All this next-generation translation business requires additional hardware. The Crusoe chip does not throw additional hardware at the problem, and suffers a performance hit because of it. An ISA designed to be implemented on a low power, teeny-tiny die should kick these chips butts. Such a chip is a requirement for powerful embedded systems, like those that might fit in your pen or glasses or cell phone.
When 64 bit memory addresses are required by the majority of users. In my opinion, this is one of the most fundamental limitations of any 32 bit architecture. With time (a lot of time) 64 bit memory addressing will become a must, and that will mandate widespread adoptance of 64 bit machines. I don't expect early adopters of 64 bit platforms to be in short supply, however; they're already out there.
Jonathan David Pearce
True. There's also no need to delete Lord-knows-many programs written and compiled for x86 machines. Using the x86 ISA is a question of economics, not of "genuine improvement or development." The field of computer architecture has come a long way since some Intel engineers sat down and designed the 8086. I hope nobody refutes that.
But, today architects have some awfully good ideas about how to squeeze more performance out of a machine that has to be able to execute x86 instructions. These sorts of breakthroughs keep the performance of x86-compatible machines climbing with minimal performance hits compared to other architectures. If maintaining x86 compatiblity is so "expensive and counterproductive" that it makes sense to leapfrog from architecture to architecture, then modern (i.e. designed in the last decade) architectures would rule the market in terms of sales and performance. They do not; hence, maintaining backwards compatibility does not significantly adversely affect an architecture.
What are your gripes with the x86 ISA? It is rather clunky and, from an academic standpoint, not optimal. Also, I'm sure the Intel engineers curse themselves (or their predecessors) on a weekly basis. ;) In spite of that, though, machines which execute x86 instructions have the advantages of low price and large amounts of software; what more can you ask for? Lucky you, I'll tell you:
The two problems of the machines which execute x86 instructions currently are power requirements and die size, because all the current schemes for circumventing the problems of x86 require additional hardware. These are not serious issues currently because of the widespread desktop computing paradigm. As the market moves away from big, stationary computers and towards smaller devices, x86 will become less and less viable. You can already see this trend happening. How many hand-held devices can you think of that execute x86 instructions?
Jonathan David Pearce
Did you, in fact, read the article? Hannibal said as much in his article. Obsolescence is the wrong question here; timothy should be ashamed of himself for titling this Is The x86 Obsolete?.
Here's the short version for people too lazy to read the article or too dumb to understand what Hannibal is talking about:
Due to incredible amount of programs written for the x86 architecture, machines that execute x86 instructions will be around for some time yet. Everyone agrees (even Intel) that x86 is not a good ISA (instruction set architecture), but the ability to run all the programs written for it make it too costly to scrap. In order to achieve better and better performance, the current generation of microprocessors (Athlons and PIIIs) emulate x86 in hardware. The actual execution on these machines takes place using a completely different, RISC-style set of instructions (x86 being CISC for those who don't know).
This information addresses only half of Hannibal's article. The other and more interesting half describes the latest ideas computer architects have for circumventing the problems of the x86 ISA. The primary advancement is translation of x86 instructions into another architecture; this translation occurs only once, as opposed to emulation, and can be very aggressively optimized for the particular hardware it is running on because it is performed at runtime. Because the performance hit is only incurred once and because of the further, machine-specific optimizations, machines which execute x86 instructions will continue to increase in performance.
Furthermore, executing x86 instructions by translation means that computer architects have the freedom to change the native architecture of their machines without worrying about executing legacy code. These issues were addressed by emulation; translation is a further step in this direction.
As I said before, the obsolescence of the x86 ISA is a ridiculous and unanswerable question. However, I believe that the x86 ISA will continue to be a relevant problem until we leave 32 bit machines behind for 64 bit and larger.
Jonathan David Pearce
I was the systems manager for a large student organization last year (no link, the website's down *sigh*). Most of my headaches came from users, and the odd things they thought of to do to my computers in their spare time. And that was with a relatively restricted user base of about 50. If you have more users which change frequently over the space of a year, I think they'll be even more trouble.
I'd say the difficult thing is not getting teenagers to properly administer and staff a computer lab, but getting teenagers to be good users. Here is where your OS can be your best friend or your worst nightmare. Maintaining a multi-user cluster of computers is much easier with a multi-user OS. Which one you pick depends on the knowledge and needs of your users, but I would highly suggest at least getting Windows NT, if not something beefier. Having a clearly defined policy on recreational use helps, too. Is web surfing okay? Would game-playing be tolerated? What about pornography (yes, it comes up!)? When users know what's expected of them, a large majority of them will try to fulfill those expectations.
Another thing which will make maintaining your computers easier is separating the duties of those involved. It sounds as if you in the sort of environment where everyone knows everyone else and they all get along. Trusting one guy to be completely in charge of purchases, for example, and another to handle installations means that your team won't be working at cross-purposes. Nothing is worse than having to spend hours of your time to fix someone else's 'fix'. Find some way of identifying what each person is responsible for and make certain they stick to it. The former because people get very unhappy when they perceive someone else is doing their job and the latter because people get very unhappy when they perceive they're doing someone else's job.
Jonathan David Pearce
From a current Mac World news summary (http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/00/mwsf200 0/index.shtml):
Hence, no MAXX for Macs.
Sure, you can buy a MAXX product for $200~250 and have yourself a kick-ass video card. Or, you could shell out $200~300 for a GeForce-based card and get a kick-ass video card that might just have a longer lifetime in it.
S3's and nVidia's new chipsets support hardware transformation and lighting--done right on the video card, instead of the CPU (which would be software). 3dfx's and ATI's new products don't. Now, it depends on game developer's support for this new technology, but chances are good that many games in the coming couple years will count on offloading these calculations to the video card in hardware T&L enabled cards. If that happens, then owners of these cards will experience serious performance boosts or be able to run games their non-T&L-card-owning bethren can't.
Don't be fooled by the 64 Megs of RAM on the MAXX, either. It doesn't increase the total textures the card can handle, because each chip has to keep track of (almost) all the textures simultaneously. The RAM on this video card is not a particular selling point compared to other 32M cards.
One point ATI might be able to score on is price. The MAXX is expected to retail for less than GeForce products, and may offer a better deal. Only time and the market will tell.
Of course, MAXX products will really succeed in the OEM market, where ATI's strength is. And when (if) this technology gets ported to the Mac, it'll be a major boon to Mac gaming. Given ATI's current stranglehold on the Mac 3D video card market, I expect this card will find it's way there soon enough.
You're clearly not reading the other posts on this thread. The students involved did NOT put files in their public folders or www folders on their Andrew accounts (as our UNIX accounts here are called). All of the busted students were sharing files on the campus Microsoft SMB Network. These files resided on the students' own computers.
Some of these students had password-protected their files. Some did in fact use no passwords or common passwords like 'mp3'. It isn't these students who we're concerned about. It is those students who thought they were obeying the CMU Computer Use Policy Agreement by passwording their shared copyrighted files (not with 'mp3' or 'guest', either).
Some students who fell into this latter category were removed from the network. Some students who were sharing legally redistributable mp3s were also temporarily denied network access. More than one student's school work was affected by the sudden drop of the network connection without warning. It is about these situations that CMU students and others are raising protests about this incident. For more coverage of the student's opinions, read The Tartan's article on the incident a couple weeks ago.
It is obviously the University's perogative to deny network access to those they feel are abusing their network privilege or violating the Computer Code of Ethics. I believe, and I think others would agree with me, that how the University handled this crackdown leaves something to be desired.
What I as a CMU student would like to see is a clear explanation of what constitutes a public share--obviously the description currently given to us leaves some things out. I would also like to see Computing Services give people 24 hours notice before they deactivate an outlet. It's a fairly simple courtesy, after all.
What I as a music-lover would like to see is more artists taking the power of distribution and copyright into their own hands. I bought a couple songs off They Might Be Giants' latest album mostly because I support that kind of distribution model, and wish more bands would use it.
Anybody who really believes in BWP is either insane or lives in a cave (possibly a cave with Net access, but a cave). Heather, Josh, and Michael have been doing interviews, for pete's sake.
How would you respond to the four most highly moderated comments in "Ask Slashdot: Comparing the GUIs"?
To summarize the questions in that link, how do you respond to the feelings of some that X is outdated and should be replaced?
I think it's safe to say that Linux users will always demand flexibility and choice.
But there certainly are a lot of popular window managers out there, not to mention our friends KDE & GNOME. What changes, if any, do you foresee in the current Linux model of desktop environments? Will GNOME and KDE agree to some kind of standard? Will each solution specialize further, so as to appeal more to a specific group of users?
Have the GUIs usable with Linux matured to something resembling their final state, or do we have some distance to cover yet?
What do you think makes GNOME fundamentally different from KDE? Or do you think that GNOME and KDE are a duplication of effort?
Alright, let's have a (completely unscientific, informal) vote to determine preference.
Seems there's two ways to determine preference to me. One can look at the number of apps developed with GNOME in mind versus the number of apps developed with KDE in mind, or one can ask everybody to vote for either GNOME or KDE.
You'd think the first would be relatively easy to determine. Unfortunately, I haven't the slightest idea how to go about finding out. Any ideas?
Now, the second is a lot harder--"everybody" is a lot of people. But we can conduct a nice informal poll whose results mean nothing quite easily (a la the /. poll). Fun fun fun.
Interestingly, the Editors picked KDE as their winner over GNOME because "KDE is as stable as a rock, [but] the GNOME panel and file manager have a few bugs left to iron out." In your experience, are the KDE launch panel and file manager more stable and robust than their GNOME counterparts?
Not including Suse was silly.
Has anyone installed both Debian and Caldera recently? I would like to know if the differences in installation are as significant as the Editors seem to think they are; they claim Debian is "one of the most difficult distributions to install" while Caldera "coddles you through the most pleasant installation experience available."
Is this true? What do users experienced with both think?
High framerate is pretty, but nowhere near a necessity for enjoyment.
High framerates aren't necessary, but sufficiently high framerates are. When the game dips to 13 fps and below, I find it difficult to retain control of the situation, especially in a multiplayer game. I've lost too many units to low framerate. A guaranteed 20 fps would eliminate that kind of waste. Unfortunately, no hardware setup can guarantee any framerate. The best you can do is try to keep the average framerate as high as possible so the low framerate doesn't impede gameplay.
The reviewer didn't mention the fact that Myth II is a real resource hog. Most significantly, the 3-D modeled objects such as walls and windmills create a big performance hit whenever they come on-screen. Playing on Pentium II's when the game first came out, my friends and I were dismayed to find occasionally unplayable framerates in multiplayer, and, to a lesser extent, single player. It's a great game, but we had difficulty sustaining interest in the face of 13 frames per second.
Note: Your mileage may vary. The situation I described above used varying makes of 3D video cards, none of them comparable to today's TNT2s and Voodoo3s.
Myth ain't all that bad. The author made it sound like Myth players wandered endless deserts, looking for Thralls to kill. I'll admit I did some cross-country work on one or two Myth levels, but on the whole it was quite enjoyable. Almost as enjoyable as Myth II would be if I could get the blasted framerate up.
I don't think this is ridiculous. I do think you have pointed out the flaws in the SPP. Obviously something must be done about the current state of copyright law in the near future. I think the SPP, being a work in progress, can be modified to fix the holes in it that you pointed out.
1) Serialization. You're right. I agree that there's not enough demand for serialized works to move entire markets to that model. The burden of trust needs to be moved back to the consumers, not the suppliers, as other slashdotters have mentioned. Consumers should be sending money to suppliers for content they've already created--like the market works currently. But the mechanism for doing so would be a quick and easy, privacy-assured electronic system for payment such as the authors of SPP described. Analogous systems exist today in the service industry: whenever I tip a waitress, we are having the exact same sort of transaction that I described above, only on more mundane terms. Think about it.
2) Artist Frustration. I don't think the artist is forced to use the SPP. SPP, and the variations we discuss here, are just ways of exchanging content without the protection of existing copyright law. Artists will be free to release and distribute their content however they wish, including circumventing any SPP or similar system.
3) Who's going to pay? I think the majority of consumers are willing to pay for what they perceive to be worthy content. The trick is getting the mass market to accept these rules of commerce as thoroughly as they do the ones of our current cash system--not impossible, but certainly something that needs to be looked after. The other trick is having a electronic standard as good as cash for making payments. I agree with you about the credit cards--they are not an truly acceptable method of conducting business electronically. I believe a government-backed standard is in order, much the same as cash is today. The more ecommerce is like plunking down your twenties at the Wal-Mart (or Lord & Taylor), the better.
Honestly, I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say they tried to sell content once and failed. Are you talking about efforts to charge subscription rates on websites? Or perhaps you are taking the view that the history of information and art cash-exchanges is really about material, distribution, and storage costs? I can't tell.
4) Servers are getting better and cheaper. I agree with you here, and honestly do not see this as a problem. Kudos to the start-up artists that operate their own servers, or the big-name author who bypass the publishing middlemen by making his own site. But, for many of the rest, having a publisher or some other promoter will be essential. Every author needs an editor, every musician needs an engineer. The middlemen will continue to serve these roles, as well as distribution, most likely. It has been and will always be true that division of labor leads to more efficiency and greater production. Would you rather have your favorite musician worrying about their next album or the scalability of their server?
5) Online novels, maybe the only thing that could succeed on this payment plan, won't happen. Not on a CRT monitor, they won't. Displays will be developed that feature the portability and legibility of books, but in electronic format. That is crucial to the sale of electronic books; without the invention of something comparable to electronic printing press, you are quite right: online novels will not happen.
>>south park is a hilarious reminder why we try to be civilized.
That's an important point to remember. I loved South Park. I would never want to live in a world like South Park, though. Matt and Trey give us an unbelievable, ridiculous, and even frightening world filled with slapstick humor and fart jokes. That's funny--that's entertainment. Any social commentary or satire one derives from the movie comes from the parallels between the awful world of South Park and our own.
There is more going on in the movie than what I'm addressing right now, but the big picture is clear to me. I want to live in a society where the situations in South Park are completely fictional; I choose to strive to make that so.