Traditional advertising routes are failing because people:
1. Hate ads 2. Stop noticing them after a while 3. See them absolutely bloody everywhere.
Just because I can tune them out doesn't mean I want to, and I'd rather pay for the game, thanks. Actually, I wouldn't mind paying for tv with no ads too. It's not like the advertisers get much "value" from my watching anyway. I drink english ale and I get excited about a new NAS, not the sort of thing you see on tv that much...
Who said anything about "optimized" multithreaded languages. I'm only trying to argue that threads are and have been in use for a good long time now and aren't some sort of bizarre weird futurisic thing that nobody uses.
But then I'm talking from the perspective of the server class software industry, not the hobbyist or web programmer.
And yes, I know VB is in widespread use. From where I am, though, it's almost invisible. I too have written a few VB apps in my time.
One more comment -
"That alone keeps it out of the mainstream."
It doesn't keep t out of the mainstream of decent, solid software engineering houses, just away from the amateurs.
I got a phoneline fitted, then got Be. It was stable at 16-17 Mbps.
Then BT cut the phoneline for no reason - some sort of "maintenance" - left us with no service for two weeks, then a week's service, then off again....
Now they've eventually decided to stop dicking around with the line I only get 10-12 Mbps. Bastards.
Well, I live in the UK and have for some time. And if you look around you'll find that a few ISPs will give you a fast speed an no caps.
eclipse have been good to me in the past. bethere.co.uk are even better. They're not capped, I get a static IP and the speed is 24Mbps (sure, I only get 12 or so, but it's better than anyone else is able to give me). All for 19 quid a month.
Yes, they have a FUP, no, I haven't been called on it yet despite frequent torreent traffic.
"There has been alot of research into improving the state of the state, but until it goes mainstream it's not going to be used by alot of developers."
It already is used by many, many people, that's the point.
Good design skills and a reasonable brain are all one needs to avoid threading pitfalls (oh, a decent debugger sometimes helps). No different from other code. C handles threads perfectly well, like it does everything else, by giving you complete control.
Oh, and repeat after me - VB is not a mainstream language!
If we go back to the original poster's idea - that HT is like Two teams sharing a set of vehicles - then the problem is that there are times when one team has one of the vehicles and the other team needs it. The other team just sits around waiting at that point.
Hyperthreading was a stopgap that gave a little more performance than a single core. In most applications. For database use it decreased performance by up to 30% because the DBs are so cache intensive and contention for the cache is fundamental to hyperthreading.
Yeah, I've used MPI myself, which writes similarly in some ways (IIRC). A bit of a tricky mindset to get into. The example we did was fractal generation, getting each instance to generate a line of the image and return it to the central process, then ask for the next line. You simply start the program with a number (the number of workers, MPI starts them of (locally or on the network) and it just goes. Quite a nice paradigm.
Whether those sorts of things or threading are more appropriate is down to the task you're doing. Do you have lots of small, identical tasks that need results as soon as possible? MPL/MPI is probably for you.
Do you want to take advantage of multiple cores whilst performing several totally different roles with a reasonably long lifetime? Then threads or classic multiprocess/IPC are probably what you want. Threads are nice because they are lightweight and you don't have to deal with shared memory, a pet hate of mine. And synchronisation is fun!
Sony put in an equally stupid check in order to sign up to the PS3 online. I brought one home to the UK from Singapore. I think it's of Japanese origin. When I tried to sign up I was told by the website that there is no PS3 in Europe, so I couldn't register. Despite doing this from a PS3.
One quick google later and I live at Sony US headquarters:)
that future is most certainly now. It's been here for a while.
Parallel processing is not some weird dream, way off in the future, that lots of people here on slashdot think it is. It's a reality and it's here now.
In fact it's been with us since the 70s in the form of multi-process software. Multithreading has some idiots running scared ("It's so *hard*!" being their favourite lie), but it's been with us for quite some time. I've been writing multi threaded server and workstation software for about 8 years now and I'm not any sort of pioneer.
The fact that GAMES currently don't usually have threads is not in any way the same thing. And even a game benefitss from being able to run on one of the cores whilst the whole OS (and anything else running) gets shipped off to the other.
The "enemy" (and i don't really like the phrase) is the group of people seeking to perpetually extend copyright. And those who seek to monitor everyone's internet traffic to check if they're infringeing on said law.
Those are the people who have already gone too far, IMHO. Instead of governments rolling over and granting them ever longer terms and ever more outrageous powers, we need someone to challenge them.
I don't propose copyright be abolished. I do propose that it expire in a reasonable (i.e. small number of decades) term, and that publishers be required to file a non-encrypted version of their work with a central authority (library) so that when copyright expires the work can properly pass into the public domain.
I also motion that copyright is not an important enough issue to start state mandated surveillance of internet traffic, nor is it important enough to bankrupt people who do get caught doing it.
I don't have a solution to the issue as a whole - that people are not respecting any copyright term at all - but we at least need to have the dialogue.
We also need, perhaps, to realise that the society in which an artist can write a song and then sit back and reap profits on it until the end of time may be over.
Your opening comments about the sides in the debate are silly and clearly meant to be inflammatory so I shall pay them scant notice.
Could be the one. I had heard that deluxe versions (that come with the movie) were region locked, but other versions were not.
Either way, I prefer region locking not come in, or I'm only going to be playing Japanese games. It's already annoying enough that Resistance matches me only against people in Japan and gives me Japanese game news in kanji/katakana, which I can't read.
I believe there is one that does now. As in one game is region coded. Something about it being distributed with a copy of the movie it's based on and the movie studio wanting that coded.
It may be a slippery slope, I hope not because I have a Japanese PS3 and live in the UK, we'll see.
Oh, and the other two consoles are thoroughly region coded, which annoys the hell out of me because games are available cheaper and sooner from pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Please elaborate. BluRay isn't proprietary. Also the drive plays cds and dvds. The hd is sata and replaceable. there maywell be on-processor DRM but that doesn't mean you can't play open media.
Sorry, but it really is only the USians that are scared shitless of socialism, marxism or communism because of the systems themselves. Everyone else recognises that they're flawed systems that allowed cruel dictators to come to power. It was the evil of humanity, as ever, that caused millions of deaths, not the political system itself. Whereas in the US people seem to get upset by the idea of sharing...
Only in your fucked up world. If one day I decide that your work is worth nothing...
Blah blah blah. No, if one day the whole of society decides that they're not going to grant you a monopoly on part of shared culture any more, then you'll be fucking grateful that you were given the monopoly even for a short while. Or do you somehow deserve to make a profit forever from that poem you wrote when you were a tenager, you know, that one about the pretty girl in class who wouldn't even look at you? Because of your gigantic deformed head.
"But it's a logical fallacy to respect someone purely because their profits rely on winning that argument."
Sorry, which side are you talking about, whose making a profit here? I respect the pirate party because they represent a challenge to the out of control status-quo.
"Personally, I find it difficult to like someone whose arguments always seem to rely upon how nasty the enemy is,"
They don't. The enemy *is* nasty and very much is trying to claim ownership over culture and punish anyone that transgresses, on what it sees as its property, very harshly. But that isn't the only issue. Even if the holders of intellectual properties gave everyone that broke the current laws a cake and a kiss, we'd still need to be looking at this area because the laws are extremely overbearing and their ramifications scary.
"or how they simply cannot be stopped."
There is a difference between saying "people aren't going to stop filesharing, elect us and we'll try to resolve this issue in a democratic rather than authoritarian way" and "ha! you can't stop us!!"
"Comparing yourself to Gandhi while staunchly defending your profits is distasteful."
Again, who is profiting here? Please provide evidence that the leader of this party is somehow making a profit from his arguments. Also, I didn't see him comparing himself to ghandi. I saw him quoting ghandi. Or is nobody now allowed to take the advice of great men in the past and declare their sources of inspiration? Ghandi had a lot to say about struggle against a political tide, I don't consider using his sayings inappropriate. Why do you?
"People are going to begin to lose respect for the people behind torrent sites if they start spewing pseudo-Marxist ideas as their defense."
Outside of the USA not everyone fears the words "socialist", "marxist" or even (to a lesser extent) "communist".
"People who download music and movies aren't doing it to assert their solidarity with the Sandinistas, they're doing it because they can"
And if you'd bothered to think about this, you'd realise that nobody's asking you to declare solidarity. What this part seems to be asking people is "What should the rules be?". Many people are now starting to realise that beyond wanting free stuff, the surveillance culture and the ever increasing copyright terms and assertions of ownership of intellectual property are damaging to society. Copyright is a social contract, not an absolute right. It is granted in order to enrich us all by encouraging people to produce.
Over the last few decades various corporate interests in various countries, coupled with international agreements, have seen massive, one sided change in the laws surrounding copyright. We're in the midst of many countries pushing it even further. And we live in a world where DRM means that in future, were keys to be lost, some cultural artifacts could be lost to us forever.
What this party and what many people truly believe is that it's time to examine the situation and restore some sanity and restore the balance.
"and frankly most of us don't have enough cash free to go buy the entire discography of say Miles Davis or Bob Dylan."
And some would say that those names and their work have become so much part of our culture that you shouldn't have to pay. It's been a few decades since they started. They made some money, they made their names. Now maybe it belongs to all of us.
You`ve read about the studios starting to lose court cases and release non-DRM music to the online stores, right?
Seems to be working OK, though I agree we could do with reduction of copyright term limits too. The thing is that copyright infringers aren`t actually making it public that that`s what they`re doing (other than in places where it`s legal) so the law isn`t catching up.
Well, he and a bunch of others were made redundant by the company (company A) they worked for. So they decided to do it themselves (at company B) and do it better. He's worth a few million now IIRC.
What happened was they bought in a solution from another competitor (company C) and acted as a reseller to get the company off the ground whilst they wrote their own software. Company A then accused them of theft of code and used the fact that Company B were selling software so soon after startup as "proof". FACT/FAST and the police presumed guilt and immediately impounded all their equipment. My friend spent some time in a cells at a police station. There were various court appearances.
After about a year it was all cleared up, but they went through hell first. And this didn't even involve and patent disputes.
You, sir, have aperfectly valid reason for using Whatever system the control software runs on. I was more curious about somebody wanting 95 around for file operations when Linux was a very good (and more stable and modern) alternative.
It means they were working on it, and would/will get there eventually.
I agree that region coding sucks balls, I just think that HD-DVD was/is moving in that direction. Likely because some studios demanded it. I can't imagine that, if it does win, the studios backing the BD won't use their clout to push it through.
OK, this is the post my original comment was aimed at. A linux LiveCD (like Ubuntu installation media) or a linux machine will do this stuff *very* well indeed. It'll give you full access to FAT or NTFS drives, allow you to copy what you like, up to and including full drive images*.
There's no issue with windows systems that may be rooted or infected because the stuff just won't run. What do your low level DOS utils do?
I must mention here, too, that a lot of the tools provided in Linux are intuitive and easy to use. "gparted" is a godsend.
*(which is easy BTW, dd if=/dev/disktocopy of=./imagefile, restore by switching if and of)
(if you're happy using Win95, it's good with me, just felt like getting in a bit of Linux advocacy seeing as I'm using it loads for disk and filesystem stuf at the moment)
Slashdot Mirror
Or at least those games.
Traditional advertising routes are failing because people:
1. Hate ads
2. Stop noticing them after a while
3. See them absolutely bloody everywhere.
Just because I can tune them out doesn't mean I want to, and I'd rather pay for the game, thanks. Actually, I wouldn't mind paying for tv with no ads too. It's not like the advertisers get much "value" from my watching anyway. I drink english ale and I get excited about a new NAS, not the sort of thing you see on tv that much...
Who said anything about "optimized" multithreaded languages. I'm only trying to argue that threads are and have been in use for a good long time now and aren't some sort of bizarre weird futurisic thing that nobody uses.
But then I'm talking from the perspective of the server class software industry, not the hobbyist or web programmer.
And yes, I know VB is in widespread use. From where I am, though, it's almost invisible. I too have written a few VB apps in my time.
One more comment -
"That alone keeps it out of the mainstream."
It doesn't keep t out of the mainstream of decent, solid software engineering houses, just away from the amateurs.
"Apparently piratebay has finally figured out a way to determine harm when it comes to digital goods were no one else has."
Pirate Party != Pirate Bay
I'd err on the side of blaming BT.
I got a phoneline fitted, then got Be. It was stable at 16-17 Mbps.
Then BT cut the phoneline for no reason - some sort of "maintenance" - left us with no service for two weeks, then a week's service, then off again....
Now they've eventually decided to stop dicking around with the line I only get 10-12 Mbps. Bastards.
Well, I live in the UK and have for some time. And if you look around you'll find that a few ISPs will give you a fast speed an no caps.
eclipse have been good to me in the past. bethere.co.uk are even better. They're not capped, I get a static IP and the speed is 24Mbps (sure, I only get 12 or so, but it's better than anyone else is able to give me). All for 19 quid a month.
Yes, they have a FUP, no, I haven't been called on it yet despite frequent torreent traffic.
"There has been alot of research into improving the state of the state, but until it goes mainstream it's not going to be used by alot of developers."
It already is used by many, many people, that's the point.
Good design skills and a reasonable brain are all one needs to avoid threading pitfalls (oh, a decent debugger sometimes helps). No different from other code. C handles threads perfectly well, like it does everything else, by giving you complete control.
Oh, and repeat after me - VB is not a mainstream language!
Hyperthreading is flawed from the ground up.
If we go back to the original poster's idea - that HT is like Two teams sharing a set of vehicles - then the problem is that there are times when one team has one of the vehicles and the other team needs it. The other team just sits around waiting at that point.
Hyperthreading was a stopgap that gave a little more performance than a single core. In most applications. For database use it decreased performance by up to 30% because the DBs are so cache intensive and contention for the cache is fundamental to hyperthreading.
Dual core is better all round.
Yeah, I've used MPI myself, which writes similarly in some ways (IIRC). A bit of a tricky mindset to get into. The example we did was fractal generation, getting each instance to generate a line of the image and return it to the central process, then ask for the next line. You simply start the program with a number (the number of workers, MPI starts them of (locally or on the network) and it just goes. Quite a nice paradigm.
Whether those sorts of things or threading are more appropriate is down to the task you're doing. Do you have lots of small, identical tasks that need results as soon as possible? MPL/MPI is probably for you.
Do you want to take advantage of multiple cores whilst performing several totally different roles with a reasonably long lifetime? Then threads or classic multiprocess/IPC are probably what you want. Threads are nice because they are lightweight and you don't have to deal with shared memory, a pet hate of mine. And synchronisation is fun!
I have a new one.
:)
Sony put in an equally stupid check in order to sign up to the PS3 online. I brought one home to the UK from Singapore. I think it's of Japanese origin. When I tried to sign up I was told by the website that there is no PS3 in Europe, so I couldn't register. Despite doing this from a PS3.
One quick google later and I live at Sony US headquarters
that future is most certainly now. It's been here for a while.
Parallel processing is not some weird dream, way off in the future, that lots of people here on slashdot think it is. It's a reality and it's here now.
In fact it's been with us since the 70s in the form of multi-process software.
Multithreading has some idiots running scared ("It's so *hard*!" being their favourite lie), but it's been with us for quite some time. I've been writing multi threaded server and workstation software for about 8 years now and I'm not any sort of pioneer.
The fact that GAMES currently don't usually have threads is not in any way the same thing. And even a game benefitss from being able to run on one of the cores whilst the whole OS (and anything else running) gets shipped off to the other.
The "enemy" (and i don't really like the phrase) is the group of people seeking to perpetually extend copyright. And those who seek to monitor everyone's internet traffic to check if they're infringeing on said law.
Those are the people who have already gone too far, IMHO. Instead of governments rolling over and granting them ever longer terms and ever more outrageous powers, we need someone to challenge them.
I don't propose copyright be abolished. I do propose that it expire in a reasonable (i.e. small number of decades) term, and that publishers be required to file a non-encrypted version of their work with a central authority (library) so that when copyright expires the work can properly pass into the public domain.
I also motion that copyright is not an important enough issue to start state mandated surveillance of internet traffic, nor is it important enough to bankrupt people who do get caught doing it.
I don't have a solution to the issue as a whole - that people are not respecting any copyright term at all - but we at least need to have the dialogue.
We also need, perhaps, to realise that the society in which an artist can write a song and then sit back and reap profits on it until the end of time may be over.
Your opening comments about the sides in the debate are silly and clearly meant to be inflammatory so I shall pay them scant notice.
Could be the one. I had heard that deluxe versions (that come with the movie) were region locked, but other versions were not.
Either way, I prefer region locking not come in, or I'm only going to be playing Japanese games. It's already annoying enough that Resistance matches me only against people in Japan and gives me Japanese game news in kanji/katakana, which I can't read.
I believe there is one that does now. As in one game is region coded. Something about it being distributed with a copy of the movie it's based on and the movie studio wanting that coded.
It may be a slippery slope, I hope not because I have a Japanese PS3 and live in the UK, we'll see.
Oh, and the other two consoles are thoroughly region coded, which annoys the hell out of me because games are available cheaper and sooner from pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Please elaborate. BluRay isn't proprietary. Also the drive plays cds and dvds. The hd is sata and replaceable. there maywell be on-processor DRM but that doesn't mean you can't play open media.
So what was your point?
What an enlightened and useful response!
...
Sorry, but it really is only the USians that are scared shitless of socialism, marxism or communism because of the systems themselves. Everyone else recognises that they're flawed systems that allowed cruel dictators to come to power. It was the evil of humanity, as ever, that caused millions of deaths, not the political system itself.
Whereas in the US people seem to get upset by the idea of sharing...
Only in your fucked up world. If one day I decide that your work is worth nothing
Blah blah blah. No, if one day the whole of society decides that they're not going to grant you a monopoly on part of shared culture any more, then you'll be fucking grateful that you were given the monopoly even for a short while. Or do you somehow deserve to make a profit forever from that poem you wrote when you were a tenager, you know, that one about the pretty girl in class who wouldn't even look at you? Because of your gigantic deformed head.
"Personally, I find it difficult to like someone whose arguments always seem to rely upon how nasty the enemy is,"
Pray tell, what are your feelings when the enemy truly is nasty?
Do you dislike churchill as a historical figure?
And before you misunderstand, no I'm not comparing anyone to churchill, I'm poking holes in your argument.
"But it's a logical fallacy to respect someone purely because their profits rely on winning that argument."
Sorry, which side are you talking about, whose making a profit here?
I respect the pirate party because they represent a challenge to the out of control status-quo.
"Personally, I find it difficult to like someone whose arguments always seem to rely upon how nasty the enemy is,"
They don't. The enemy *is* nasty and very much is trying to claim ownership over culture and punish anyone that transgresses, on what it sees as its property, very harshly. But that isn't the only issue. Even if the holders of intellectual properties gave everyone that broke the current laws a cake and a kiss, we'd still need to be looking at this area because the laws are extremely overbearing and their ramifications scary.
"or how they simply cannot be stopped."
There is a difference between saying "people aren't going to stop filesharing, elect us and we'll try to resolve this issue in a democratic rather than authoritarian way" and "ha! you can't stop us!!"
"Comparing yourself to Gandhi while staunchly defending your profits is distasteful."
Again, who is profiting here? Please provide evidence that the leader of this party is somehow making a profit from his arguments.
Also, I didn't see him comparing himself to ghandi. I saw him quoting ghandi. Or is nobody now allowed to take the advice of great men in the past and declare their sources of inspiration? Ghandi had a lot to say about struggle against a political tide, I don't consider using his sayings inappropriate. Why do you?
"People are going to begin to lose respect for the people behind torrent sites if they start spewing pseudo-Marxist ideas as their defense."
Outside of the USA not everyone fears the words "socialist", "marxist" or even (to a lesser extent) "communist".
"People who download music and movies aren't doing it to assert their solidarity with the Sandinistas, they're doing it because they can"
And if you'd bothered to think about this, you'd realise that nobody's asking you to declare solidarity. What this part seems to be asking people is "What should the rules be?". Many people are now starting to realise that beyond wanting free stuff, the surveillance culture and the ever increasing copyright terms and assertions of ownership of intellectual property are damaging to society. Copyright is a social contract, not an absolute right. It is granted in order to enrich us all by encouraging people to produce.
Over the last few decades various corporate interests in various countries, coupled with international agreements, have seen massive, one sided change in the laws surrounding copyright. We're in the midst of many countries pushing it even further. And we live in a world where DRM means that in future, were keys to be lost, some cultural artifacts could be lost to us forever.
What this party and what many people truly believe is that it's time to examine the situation and restore some sanity and restore the balance.
"and frankly most of us don't have enough cash free to go buy the entire discography of say Miles Davis or Bob Dylan."
And some would say that those names and their work have become so much part of our culture that you shouldn't have to pay. It's been a few decades since they started. They made some money, they made their names. Now maybe it belongs to all of us.
You`ve read about the studios starting to lose court cases and release non-DRM music to the online stores, right?
Seems to be working OK, though I agree we could do with reduction of copyright term limits too. The thing is that copyright infringers aren`t actually making it public that that`s what they`re doing (other than in places where it`s legal) so the law isn`t catching up.
"if a company doesn't want to hire someone based on race, that's their choice."
Really? Is that how it works? And what about when everyone takes that choice, as happened in the past?
Your free market is not as self rgulating as you like to think, nor should it be allowed to run entirely free.
A friend of mine did that.
Well, he and a bunch of others were made redundant by the company (company A) they worked for. So they decided to do it themselves (at company B) and do it better. He's worth a few million now IIRC.
What happened was they bought in a solution from another competitor (company C) and acted as a reseller to get the company off the ground whilst they wrote their own software. Company A then accused them of theft of code and used the fact that Company B were selling software so soon after startup as "proof". FACT/FAST and the police presumed guilt and immediately impounded all their equipment. My friend spent some time in a cells at a police station. There were various court appearances.
After about a year it was all cleared up, but they went through hell first.
And this didn't even involve and patent disputes.
You, sir, have aperfectly valid reason for using Whatever system the control software runs on. I was more curious about somebody wanting 95 around for file operations when Linux was a very good (and more stable and modern) alternative.
It means they were working on it, and would/will get there eventually.
I agree that region coding sucks balls, I just think that HD-DVD was/is moving in that direction. Likely because some studios demanded it. I can't imagine that, if it does win, the studios backing the BD won't use their clout to push it through.
OK, this is the post my original comment was aimed at. A linux LiveCD (like Ubuntu installation media) or a linux machine will do this stuff *very* well indeed. It'll give you full access to FAT or NTFS drives, allow you to copy what you like, up to and including full drive images*.
There's no issue with windows systems that may be rooted or infected because the stuff just won't run. What do your low level DOS utils do?
I must mention here, too, that a lot of the tools provided in Linux are intuitive and easy to use. "gparted" is a godsend.
*(which is easy BTW, dd if=/dev/disktocopy of=./imagefile, restore by switching if and of)
(if you're happy using Win95, it's good with me, just felt like getting in a bit of Linux advocacy seeing as I'm using it loads for disk and filesystem stuf at the moment)
That's a hell of an annoyance. You too seem to have a good reason for keeping 95 about. Shame it's a necessity.
I'd say "try wine, or maybe DOSBox, on Linux", but I've no idea what their older DX support is like. DOSBox on a later windows *might* work.