Every few years, there are efforts to remove X, to address a perception that X is a source of bloat. GTK has a few framebuffer backends, for example.
They ultimately fail for a few reasons.
I don't think that the problem is X, it's Parkinson's Law.
X ran perfectly well on a 20MHz machine with 16Mb RAM in 1989. (In fact, it still ran okay on the Sun 3/50 I had on my desk in 1996.) Part of the subsequent bloat has been due to proliferation of graphics hardware, and some of it has been due to the demands of graphics-heavy applications such as video and games. But a lot of it has been because the RAM and CPU cycles were just there to be used.
We don't need to get rid of X, but we do need to have a compile flag that will produce version that will run acceptably on a 500MHz machine with 128Mb RAM.
Any way you look at it, it's a colossal waste of money and expertise. The shuttles represent an existing viable launch platform with all the necessary manufacturing, engineering and logistical support already in place.
Not really. Most of the infrastructure was shut down ten years ago.
But honestly, if you think like that, you'll never progress. Remember, it's partly because of the huge amount of money and effort that went into the shuttle programme that NASA has forgotten how to make it to the Moon.
Speaking as someone who's going to be counting your votes, please don't do this. At the end of election day, we have to account for every ballot paper that we can, and it causes no end of headaches if there's a significant discrepancy between the number of ballot papers issued and the number counted. In the worst case, it can trigger a complete recount of that polling station, and we all have to go home late (at no extra pay, I might add).
If you're upset by the rules, I understand that, but it's not those who make the rules who are going to be inconvenienced by this action.
If you honestly want to vote informal, that's your right. We can't stop you. But please take some pity on your polling officials and just drop the ballot paper in the damn box. It's no less convenient for you and a lot more convenient for us.
There used to be much concern about copying overhead in microkernels, but that's less of an issue in modern CPUs.
That copying is still present in monolithic kernels, it's just from user space to kernel space instead of user space to user space. The difference is that microkernels such as Neutrino are highly optimised to make that message passing fast, whereas Linux tries to optimise all things for all people. Well, everything except Flash video.
You can only conclude that NDE's are completely unrelated to heaven [...]
That's the only way you can conclude it, true. However, as you said yourself a few posts back:
Only a few on the fringes seriously took NDEs as evidence for heaven, because the possibility of hallucinations was too obvious.
This is, perhaps, the most important point. If NDEs were never seriously considered as evidence for "heaven" (beyond the fringes), then evidence that NDEs are brain chemistry does not constitute evidence against "heaven".
Think about where corporate profits are going; if they're not being sank right back into the company, then they're being payed out in dividends to shareholders.... where they're taxed again as personal income.
I don't know what the situation is in the US, but most tax systems go to a lot of trouble to ensure that dividends aren't taxed twice. Here in Australia, we have dividend imputation. Other countries have other mechanisms.
While there's no real excuse for these kind of slight of hand tax dodges, neither is there a justification for a tax rate near 40 percent on companies.
Aye, there's the rub. The dodges exist because of the high tax rate, and the high tax rate exists because of the dodges.
OpenGL is indeed platform independent, apart from opening a window or getting input from the user. So long as you never need to do either of those, you don't need a platform-specific tutorial.
They don't associate themselves with or identify themselves as a member of some class. They make their own decisions.
Right, and that's a good point. I would imagine that there would be a just as significant, but higher-strength correlation between high IQ and having different religious views than what you were brought up with.
High IQ enables you to examine what you grew up with critically. Sometimes that results in atheism, sometimes it results in moving from fundamentalism to the mainstream, and sometimes it leads to non-traditional religious positions such as Bahai, John Shelby Spong-style ultra-liberal Christianity, and "spiritual but not religious".
Most religions were started by exceptionally smart people, and most religious reformers were, too.
I think you're conflating meanings of realism - a dancing penguin may obviously not be real, but it can still look realistic in the sense of being indistinguishable from a real penguin that was dancing, if such a thing could happen.
I'm making a crucial point: The goal is not realism, but verisimilitude.
The term "photorealism", where it applies to the use of CGI by the film industry, implies that what a movie camera sees is "real". It is not.
Otherwise I could just as well say that your photo isn't "realistic", because the characters aren't really who they say they are, they're just actors.
A movie frame isn't "realistic" because if you went to an actual scene and took a snapshot, it would look nothing like the carefully made-up, carefully lit, carefully composed scene that a good DP would shoot.
There is nothing that is even the slightest bit realistic about movies. Stories are not history, characters are not people, dialogue is not conversation and sets are not places. (Even scenes shot on location are usually heavily modified, either practically or in post.)
How many "movie myths" have you seen Adam and Jamie bust?
If you want "realism", shoot a documentary. Even then, you have an editing room at your disposal.
OK, if that didn't convince you, think of it this way: There's a reason why Yoda worked as a puppet in episodes 4, 5 and 6 but not in episode 1. Every other creature in episode 4, 5 and 6 was a puppet, so he looked like he inhabited that universe. In episode 1, he was the only puppet, so he looked out of place.
Neither Yoda was more "photorealistic" than the other, but the CGI version had greater verisimilitude.
You're mostly right but what's different with CG is that you can build it faster. What would have taken a model builder 1 year to manufacture can be done on a computer in a fraction of the time.
Not really, no. Any nontrivial model (e.g. a creature) is going to have to go through several iterations of design and physical modelling (e.g. maquette building) anyway. The construction is probably not that much of the process. These days, 3D printing is good enough that it might be partly computer-assisted anyway.
I could model a room in 1/100th the time it would take 4 carpenters.
I dare say you probably could. Empty rooms are trivial. But I bet you couldn't source the props and dress the set quicker than could be done traditionally.
And I could change the color of the paint in real-time.
...which you will never have to do, since the colour script is probably locked by the time you build your set.
We aren't more than 10 years away from the first non-fantasy photoreal movie imo.
If by "non-fantasy" you mean "period piece", then perhaps. Even then, designing costumes and sets are usually a pretty significant fraction of the cost.
But if you're talking about an urban romantic comedy, then while we may well be 10 years away from having the technology and process in place, we are far more than 10 years away from it being cost-effective. We have been shooting on stages and on location for 100 years. We know how to do it very efficiently.
Blinn's Law states that the amount of time it takes to compute a frame of film remains constant over time, because audience expectation rises at the same speed as computer power.
I think it was Tom Duff who commented that one eyeball in a modern Pixar film requires roughly the same amount of work as a frame of Toy Story.
Absolutely true, but there is an apex that both achieve to reach which is photo realistic rendering.
No, because "photo realism" is not a goal that visual effects aspires to. If you can take a photo of something, then it's almost always cheaper and better to do that, even though it usually requires many thousands of dollars on crew, make up, sets and lighting.
CGI is used for things that you can't take a photo of, such as a Na'vi or a talking ant. If the space ship can travel faster than light, or the penguin can dance, then "realistic" is not a goal.
Anyone can already make movies without a billion dollars worth of computers and a billion dollars worth of actors. The difficulty is finding a million dollars worth of animators and fifty thousand dollars worth of screenwriters.
The null hypothesis is that if you take the set of pedophiles who are also in relationships with adults, the distribution of those adult relationships between different-sex and same-sex would be the same as what you would find in the general population, controlled for socioeconomics and geography.
The controls are important, since same-sex relationships are more socially discouraged in some places and in some social groups than in others. It would also be a hard hypothesis to disprove, since the numbers are so very low to begin with. But that's what I would expect.
Disclaimer: I do not condone the DDoS attacks. I think they are childish, stupid, illegal and counter-productive.
We elected this government and the previous one which planned the censorship originally.
That's true, but there's one issue here which is important for everyone.
The previous government didn't "plan the censorship". Their plan was to clamp down on what is hosted in Australia that violates local content laws. The idea was to bring local Internet hosting under the same rules as local book shops. You may or may not agree with the classification rules, but that doesn't seem unreasonable to me, at least in principle. If you don't like the rules on what is refused classification, you should change the classification rules, not the rules which brings everyone under the same rules.
The current government was not elected on the basis of what they are currently proposing. The policy that they ran on has mysteriously disappeared from the ALP's web site, but a copy remains at the APH library. Here's they key snippet:
Provide a mandatory ‘clean feed’ internet service for all homes, schools and public computers that are used by Australian children. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will filter out content that is identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The ACMA ‘blacklist’ will be made more comprehensive to ensure that children are protected from harmful and inappropriate online material.
Senator Conroy says anyone wanting uncensored access to the internet will have to opt out of the service.
I, and everyone else who actually read the policy prior to the 2007 election, interpreted this as meaning that ISPs will be required to provide a feed filtered with an ACMA-provided blacklist which filters only RC material, which will be provided by default, and that customers (possibly excluding schools etc) may opt out.
Essentially, the proposal looked like it was intended to move Net Alert from the client to the ISP, and restrict the filtering to the same standard that all other media are covered by, namely RC. Yes, this would have put a burden on smaller ISPs. Yes, it might give parents a false sense of security that the feed is "clean". Yes, details would have to be worked out. Nonetheless, everyone who read the policy document seemed to agree that it wasn't a ridiculous idea in principle and it might be worth trialling.
What is on the table now is something quite different. If the proposal happens, not only will you not be able to opt out (contrary to pre- and post-election promises), but classification decisions will also be secret (at the moment, every OFLC decision is in a public database).
Wherever you stand on Internet censorship, the bait-and-switch is something that you should be angry about, and I don't think you need to be Australian to feel that anger.
One mistake in your reasoning is in assuming that an adult who sexually abuses a pre-adolescent child of the same sex would be attracted to adults of the same sex (if they were also attracted to adults). This is not a given.
Pre-pubescent girls and pre-pubescent boys look almost identical, physically speaking. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that pedophiles may be attracted to the pre-pubescent body/innocence of childhood/whatever rather than being attracted to one sex or the other specifically.
Nice if you're in the right sort of business. Around here, the bosses don't like the idea of Google getting a free copy of all our IP as well as perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free rights to it.
For the record, Jung and Campbell were not talking specifically about religious institutions, and definitely not state religions, but rather the "on the ground" stuff such as the mythological archetypes, ethical codes and ceremonial practices.
No universal definition of "spiritual" exists. An australian abo, a Buddhist, or a Muslim Sufi all see it differently.
(Disclaimer: The term that you used to describe Indigenous Australians is considered offensively racist these days. I realise you may not have known this, but you do now. Please don't use it in future.)
Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell argued that in reality, what an Australian Aboriginie, a Buddhist and a Sufi practice are all pretty much the same if you ignore all of the culture-specific details.
[...] and if some pitiful affairs are a consistant element of given religion, then that is also what this religion represents deep down.
So if some supposedly democratic countries have a habit of invading other countries crying "freedom" and "democracy", would it be fair to say that democracy is inherently violent and imperialistic?
You're both right. It's technically accurate to say that the Commonwealth of Australia does not have a Supreme Court. It's also true that Australia is home to eight entities which have the name "Supreme Court", and that within their respective judrisdictions, they are, indeed, the courts of last appeal.
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Every few years, there are efforts to remove X, to address a perception that X is a source of bloat. GTK has a few framebuffer backends, for example.
They ultimately fail for a few reasons.
I don't think that the problem is X, it's Parkinson's Law.
X ran perfectly well on a 20MHz machine with 16Mb RAM in 1989. (In fact, it still ran okay on the Sun 3/50 I had on my desk in 1996.) Part of the subsequent bloat has been due to proliferation of graphics hardware, and some of it has been due to the demands of graphics-heavy applications such as video and games. But a lot of it has been because the RAM and CPU cycles were just there to be used.
We don't need to get rid of X, but we do need to have a compile flag that will produce version that will run acceptably on a 500MHz machine with 128Mb RAM.
Any way you look at it, it's a colossal waste of money and expertise. The shuttles represent an existing viable launch platform with all the necessary manufacturing, engineering and logistical support already in place.
Not really. Most of the infrastructure was shut down ten years ago.
But honestly, if you think like that, you'll never progress. Remember, it's partly because of the huge amount of money and effort that went into the shuttle programme that NASA has forgotten how to make it to the Moon.
Speaking as someone who's going to be counting your votes, please don't do this. At the end of election day, we have to account for every ballot paper that we can, and it causes no end of headaches if there's a significant discrepancy between the number of ballot papers issued and the number counted. In the worst case, it can trigger a complete recount of that polling station, and we all have to go home late (at no extra pay, I might add).
If you're upset by the rules, I understand that, but it's not those who make the rules who are going to be inconvenienced by this action.
If you honestly want to vote informal, that's your right. We can't stop you. But please take some pity on your polling officials and just drop the ballot paper in the damn box. It's no less convenient for you and a lot more convenient for us.
That copying is still present in monolithic kernels, it's just from user space to kernel space instead of user space to user space. The difference is that microkernels such as Neutrino are highly optimised to make that message passing fast, whereas Linux tries to optimise all things for all people. Well, everything except Flash video.
That's the only way you can conclude it, true. However, as you said yourself a few posts back:
This is, perhaps, the most important point. If NDEs were never seriously considered as evidence for "heaven" (beyond the fringes), then evidence that NDEs are brain chemistry does not constitute evidence against "heaven".
I have to say, that's completely insane. But I guess you already knew that. At least you now know that it need not be thus.
Think about where corporate profits are going; if they're not being sank right back into the company, then they're being payed out in dividends to shareholders.... where they're taxed again as personal income.
I don't know what the situation is in the US, but most tax systems go to a lot of trouble to ensure that dividends aren't taxed twice. Here in Australia, we have dividend imputation. Other countries have other mechanisms.
While there's no real excuse for these kind of slight of hand tax dodges, neither is there a justification for a tax rate near 40 percent on companies.
Aye, there's the rub. The dodges exist because of the high tax rate, and the high tax rate exists because of the dodges.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the phrase "my Dad's C64".
Either your memory is fading, or you're not old enough to remember the S-100 bus.
OpenGL is indeed platform independent, apart from opening a window or getting input from the user. So long as you never need to do either of those, you don't need a platform-specific tutorial.
They don't associate themselves with or identify themselves as a member of some class. They make their own decisions.
Right, and that's a good point. I would imagine that there would be a just as significant, but higher-strength correlation between high IQ and having different religious views than what you were brought up with.
High IQ enables you to examine what you grew up with critically. Sometimes that results in atheism, sometimes it results in moving from fundamentalism to the mainstream, and sometimes it leads to non-traditional religious positions such as Bahai, John Shelby Spong-style ultra-liberal Christianity, and "spiritual but not religious".
Most religions were started by exceptionally smart people, and most religious reformers were, too.
I think you're conflating meanings of realism - a dancing penguin may obviously not be real, but it can still look realistic in the sense of being indistinguishable from a real penguin that was dancing, if such a thing could happen.
I'm making a crucial point: The goal is not realism, but verisimilitude.
The term "photorealism", where it applies to the use of CGI by the film industry, implies that what a movie camera sees is "real". It is not.
Otherwise I could just as well say that your photo isn't "realistic", because the characters aren't really who they say they are, they're just actors.
A movie frame isn't "realistic" because if you went to an actual scene and took a snapshot, it would look nothing like the carefully made-up, carefully lit, carefully composed scene that a good DP would shoot.
There is nothing that is even the slightest bit realistic about movies. Stories are not history, characters are not people, dialogue is not conversation and sets are not places. (Even scenes shot on location are usually heavily modified, either practically or in post.)
How many "movie myths" have you seen Adam and Jamie bust?
If you want "realism", shoot a documentary. Even then, you have an editing room at your disposal.
OK, if that didn't convince you, think of it this way: There's a reason why Yoda worked as a puppet in episodes 4, 5 and 6 but not in episode 1. Every other creature in episode 4, 5 and 6 was a puppet, so he looked like he inhabited that universe. In episode 1, he was the only puppet, so he looked out of place.
Neither Yoda was more "photorealistic" than the other, but the CGI version had greater verisimilitude.
Not really, no. Any nontrivial model (e.g. a creature) is going to have to go through several iterations of design and physical modelling (e.g. maquette building) anyway. The construction is probably not that much of the process. These days, 3D printing is good enough that it might be partly computer-assisted anyway.
I dare say you probably could. Empty rooms are trivial. But I bet you couldn't source the props and dress the set quicker than could be done traditionally.
We aren't more than 10 years away from the first non-fantasy photoreal movie imo.
If by "non-fantasy" you mean "period piece", then perhaps. Even then, designing costumes and sets are usually a pretty significant fraction of the cost.
But if you're talking about an urban romantic comedy, then while we may well be 10 years away from having the technology and process in place, we are far more than 10 years away from it being cost-effective. We have been shooting on stages and on location for 100 years. We know how to do it very efficiently.
Blinn's Law states that the amount of time it takes to compute a frame of film remains constant over time, because audience expectation rises at the same speed as computer power.
I think it was Tom Duff who commented that one eyeball in a modern Pixar film requires roughly the same amount of work as a frame of Toy Story.
Absolutely true, but there is an apex that both achieve to reach which is photo realistic rendering.
No, because "photo realism" is not a goal that visual effects aspires to. If you can take a photo of something, then it's almost always cheaper and better to do that, even though it usually requires many thousands of dollars on crew, make up, sets and lighting.
CGI is used for things that you can't take a photo of, such as a Na'vi or a talking ant. If the space ship can travel faster than light, or the penguin can dance, then "realistic" is not a goal.
(Disclaimer: I used to work in visual effects.)
Anyone can already make movies without a billion dollars worth of computers and a billion dollars worth of actors. The difficulty is finding a million dollars worth of animators and fifty thousand dollars worth of screenwriters.
"Several" is not the same as "32%".
The null hypothesis is that if you take the set of pedophiles who are also in relationships with adults, the distribution of those adult relationships between different-sex and same-sex would be the same as what you would find in the general population, controlled for socioeconomics and geography.
The controls are important, since same-sex relationships are more socially discouraged in some places and in some social groups than in others. It would also be a hard hypothesis to disprove, since the numbers are so very low to begin with. But that's what I would expect.
Disclaimer: I do not condone the DDoS attacks. I think they are childish, stupid, illegal and counter-productive.
That's true, but there's one issue here which is important for everyone.
The previous government didn't "plan the censorship". Their plan was to clamp down on what is hosted in Australia that violates local content laws. The idea was to bring local Internet hosting under the same rules as local book shops. You may or may not agree with the classification rules, but that doesn't seem unreasonable to me, at least in principle. If you don't like the rules on what is refused classification, you should change the classification rules, not the rules which brings everyone under the same rules.
The current government was not elected on the basis of what they are currently proposing. The policy that they ran on has mysteriously disappeared from the ALP's web site, but a copy remains at the APH library. Here's they key snippet:
And just after the election, news reports were still saying:
I, and everyone else who actually read the policy prior to the 2007 election, interpreted this as meaning that ISPs will be required to provide a feed filtered with an ACMA-provided blacklist which filters only RC material, which will be provided by default, and that customers (possibly excluding schools etc) may opt out.
Essentially, the proposal looked like it was intended to move Net Alert from the client to the ISP, and restrict the filtering to the same standard that all other media are covered by, namely RC. Yes, this would have put a burden on smaller ISPs. Yes, it might give parents a false sense of security that the feed is "clean". Yes, details would have to be worked out. Nonetheless, everyone who read the policy document seemed to agree that it wasn't a ridiculous idea in principle and it might be worth trialling.
What is on the table now is something quite different. If the proposal happens, not only will you not be able to opt out (contrary to pre- and post-election promises), but classification decisions will also be secret (at the moment, every OFLC decision is in a public database).
Wherever you stand on Internet censorship, the bait-and-switch is something that you should be angry about, and I don't think you need to be Australian to feel that anger.
One mistake in your reasoning is in assuming that an adult who sexually abuses a pre-adolescent child of the same sex would be attracted to adults of the same sex (if they were also attracted to adults). This is not a given.
Pre-pubescent girls and pre-pubescent boys look almost identical, physically speaking. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that pedophiles may be attracted to the pre-pubescent body/innocence of childhood/whatever rather than being attracted to one sex or the other specifically.
Or they could just build a wall to keep them out, like Emperor Nasi Goreng did.
(Apologies for those who don't get the Australian cultural reference, but it seemed on-topic.)
Nice if you're in the right sort of business. Around here, the bosses don't like the idea of Google getting a free copy of all our IP as well as perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free rights to it.
For the record, Jung and Campbell were not talking specifically about religious institutions, and definitely not state religions, but rather the "on the ground" stuff such as the mythological archetypes, ethical codes and ceremonial practices.
(Disclaimer: The term that you used to describe Indigenous Australians is considered offensively racist these days. I realise you may not have known this, but you do now. Please don't use it in future.)
Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell argued that in reality, what an Australian Aboriginie, a Buddhist and a Sufi practice are all pretty much the same if you ignore all of the culture-specific details.
So if some supposedly democratic countries have a habit of invading other countries crying "freedom" and "democracy", would it be fair to say that democracy is inherently violent and imperialistic?
You're both right. It's technically accurate to say that the Commonwealth of Australia does not have a Supreme Court. It's also true that Australia is home to eight entities which have the name "Supreme Court", and that within their respective judrisdictions, they are, indeed, the courts of last appeal.