"American companies moving American jobs overseas is not good for the US in the long run."
Reducing costs for American companies so they can compete against foreign companies is extremely good for the country in the long run. Of course, if you were to write to your Congressman and demand massive reductions in taxes and other regulations that impose unneccesary costs on those American companies in the first place, then maybe they wouldn't need to ship as many jobs abroad.
"Tax laws could change so US companies that use foreign workers instead of Americans would have to pay into Social Security at a rate AS IF they had employed Americans at the expected salary."
That would be a brilliant idea: then all those US companies would move their headquarters abroad to somewhere that's glad to have them rather than somewhere that believes they're cash cows who only exist to have their money stolen by the government.
"You think they don't have quality workers in India? You think the USA is the only place which has quality workers?"
No, but most of the jobs being outsourced are the low-skilled, crappy ones that can be done by someone who just puts in the hours and has little experience or motivation. The difference in productivity between the top and bottom end of the programmer scale is at least a factor of ten, and there will always be opportunities for the people at the top end of that scale to make a good living.
"seeks to answer an important question: are we alone? Statistically, probably not."
Statistically, almost certainly. Barring accidents or idiotic governments that totally devastate the human species, we will have colonised the entire galaxy in a million years or so, and be conducting engineering projects on a massive scale that would be visible from many light years away: the odds of the only two intelligent species in the galaxy evolving within a million years of each other are probably pretty slim, so if they existed they'd be here by now.
I run seti@home just on the offchance that we're lucky and there is someone else around, but statistically, if there really are aliens out there, they should be as difficult to find as a million-strong herd of penguins running around Manhattan shouting 'Phear The Penguin Horde!'.
"I have never heard an argument against legalising drugs that wasn't based on the fact {or an assumption depending upon the fact} that drugs were already illegal."
And Singapore's wouldn't be any more convincing: I saw a TV show while I was there which was pushing their local anti-drug propaganda and it was just hilariously inept by Western standards... or would have been, if they weren't killing people over it.
Singapore has got to be one of the most boring places I've ever visited, so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of kids turned to drugs to get away from that: lots of hot chicks around though (I was there visiting one of them:)), so it wasn't all bad.
It's already been done, I believe: Mariner Mercury used the orientation of its solar panels for attitude control to extend the mission by reducing fuel usage.
Though, to be fair, at that distance I'm not sure whether most of the resultant force came from photons or the solar wind.
"To do any sorts of useful video editing, you need fast machines; in fact, I'd argue that 3ghz is the minimum you need"
ROTFL. I've edited half-hour DV projects on a PII-350, and a DV feature on a PIII-550. There are things you need 3GHz CPUs for, but standard def video editing is not one of them... faster CPU is nice to have for faster rendering, but far from essential.
That would be great. Suppose my market is being threatened by Megasoft's new Office XYZ product that beats the pants off of mine. All I would need to do is send out spams _advertising_ Office XYZ, and the cops would run over and arrest their CEO and put them out of business. Bwahaha!
"You just have to do a cost/benefit analysis... as long as the new technology saves more lives than it endangers, it's worth pursuing"
Not if it increases the danger to me: if we could all have completely computer-controlled cars with 10% less chance of crashing than the average driver, then you'd want them, whereas you'd be condemning anyone who was more than 10% less likely to crash than the average driver to live with more danger than they would by driving themselves.
This is why I'm happy with passive systems like seat-belts, ABS and so forth, but do not want any of these active systems that interfere with my driving.
It's not viable quite yet, but why keep it if you can back it up on a second hard drive and stick it in a safe somewhere, and/or encrypt it and stick it on a data haven machine? My DVD and CD collections take up a sizable amount of space in my bedroom, and before long I could put all that on a 2.5" drive in a laptop and carry it everywhere with me... why put up with idiots who want to restrict me to sticking some physical object in my computer just to access digital data?
I won't. Personally I'm looking forward to the day when I can put all my (legally purchased) movie and music collection on my hard drive and throw away those DVDs, CDs and VHS tapes that take up so much space. If that means I never upgrade any of those DVDs to a DRM-ed HD-DVD format, then so be it.
I note, BTW, that the article says: "The media barons insist that if consumers are going to listen to music and view movie clips and news headlines on any gadget with a screen, then the rights holders must be paid."
So no mention of _the authors_ being paid, only the rights holders (i.e. the worthless middle-men who'd be eliminated if copyright didn't create a monopoly market).
"Didn't NASA used to keep an extra shuttle on standby?"
No. There have been occasions when there were two shuttles on the pads simultaneously, but there's never been an active requirement to have a second ready to launch... more normally, there's one on the pad and one a month or two away from being ready to go.
"So when bad stuff happens, someone actually does something about it."
They did do something about it. They asked the engineers if it was a safety problem, and the engineers said "No".
"So when bad stuff happens and someone actually does something about it there's a way home."
Yeah, provided you're willing to risk another orbiter and its crew to fly up there, crossing your fingers that whatever bad stuff happened to the first shuttle won't also happen to the other one. Though if you're going to lose the first shuttle anyway it doesn't really matter what happens to the second once since the shuttle program will be dead, dead, dead whether it's left with one or two orbiters.
"Why was nothing done about this previosly?"
NASA were developing a fix for the problem, which would likely have gone into place sometime next year. No-one was ignoring the problem, it just wasn't considered to be as high a priority as fixing the numerous other problems which haven't destroyed a shuttle yet.
Incidentally, I was under the impression that the only launch possibility at or around Dec 18th was a night launch, so if they have to launch in the day, they can't launch then.
"The original was a lot of fun, but it killed itself with the superbaby junk"
However, as I understand it, the original creator was barely involved with the second series with the "superbaby" junk and pretty much disowned it, so there may be hope for a decent show.
"performing a 5 second equation before telling the shuttle to come back could have predicted and prevented this tragedy."
How? There have been similar impacts in the past, and the shuttles have come back fine, so would you have launched a highly dangerous rescue mission for those previous launches based on your "five second equation"?
The fact is, that the extent of the damage was highly dependant on where it hit: previous impacts hit the tiles on the underside and tore through some, but didn't do enough damage to let hot plasma enter the shuttle. This one appears to have hit the RCC covering and opened a gap between the panels, letting the hottest plasma of re-entry directly into the shuttle wing. Had it hit the tiles on the underside as before, the odds are good that Columbia would have survived.
"They worry that hundreds of people tramping through their woods will damage plants and habitat."
Maybe someone should point out to these people that the idea for a park is _for humans to use it_. Now, it's certainly true that you don't want people to use it in such a way as to cause unnecessary damage, but building a park then worrying that people will go there is moronic, to say the least. It often seems to me that "conservationism" has gone so far that the people in charge are forgetting _why_ they're supposed to be conserving these places.
"Europe could fairly easily become self sufficient in fuel if it substituted ethanol for petrol and vegetable oil for Diesel - why we don't do this is a total mystery to me."
Other than because it typically takes more energy to create the ethanol than you get when you burn it, you mean?
"The only vendor that natively supports PS 1.4 is ATI."
Sorry, but that's garbage, pure and simple. Or are you not aware that PS 1.4 support is _required_ for DX9 cards with PS2.0 support. Your complaint may be valid when comparing a GF4 against a Radeon 8500, but is totally bogus when comparing two DX9 cards.
"And their "DX9" onyl test is a piece of crap too. They use one or two new instructions in the VS, and PS2.0 is only used for the sky."
Gee, one minute you're complaining that they use PS1.4 instructions, and now you're complaining that they don't use PS2.0 instructions. PS1.4 instructions _are_ effectively DX9 instructions since other than ATI, no other DX8 chips use them: you need a DX9 chip to run PS1.4 shaders.
And it would appear to be real lucky for nvidia that they don't use many PS2.0 instructions since from the results of their shader test once the nvidia "optimization" of throwing away the shader and running a completely different shader was fixed, shows them running PS2.0 shaders at about half the speed of a Radeon 9800. The low performance of PS2.0 shaders on the FX card seems to be the reason why nvidia hated 3DMark03 so much; there was no way to get a good score without redesigning the chip or "optimizing".
"Besides, pick any other industry, any other product, and companies are optimizing their products to run fast"
Yes, but nvidia's "optimizations" would be equivalent to a database engine that improved its benchmark score by simply throwing away half the requests, or a web server which improved its benchmark score by redirecting half the requests to slashdot. Is that an optimization, or a cheat?
Agreed. I hate to say it, but the action scenes in Matrix 2 were... boring. Cars exploding, slow-motion martial arts, shootouts, yeah, so what, seen it all before, and we know that Neo is never going to get hurt and the heroes will always succeed, so why bother?
Seriously, the first movie was a cool effects demo with no real plot, the second movie wasn't even that impressive as an effects demo. I'll watch the third just in case the plot makes some sense, but it's hard to see it being a better trilogy overall than the original three 'Star Wars' movies.
Doom 3 is _NOT_ a DX9 application, it's OpenGL, even though it uses some of the same hardware on the chip. As for the benchmarks, it's a pre-release version of the game, running on drivers that may or may not ever have been used to run the game or optimised for it, running, I believe, an nvidia-provided demo. Who's to say that nvidia haven't equally 'optimised' their drivers to run that particular demo faster than they could run the full game?
When reviewers have a real, gold Doom3 CD, with real shipped drivers from ATI and nvidia, running an independently produced benchmark demo, I'll start to worry about the numbers. Until then it's all hype.
"Three of four 3DMark03 demos don't use new DirectX9 shaders at all"
No, but they use shaders which are generally only supported on DX9 cards and a few older ATI cards. Just because you have a PS2.0 card that doesn't mean you have to use PS2.0 if PS1.4 can do the same: why deliberately make more work for yourself by not supporting older cards?
"Three of four 3DMark03 demos use Pixel Shader 1.4 which was introduced with DirectX8.1 and isn't natively supported by NVIDIA cards"
Support for PS1.4 is a requirement of DX9, so if the GF FX is a DX9 card then it supports PS1.4, and your claim is therefore bogus. If it doesn't support PS1.4, then it's not a real DX9 card.
"If you read the interview, its even brought up that the 5900 seems to do just fine in all other benchmarks, only futuremark seems to give it a hard time, and im not buying that crap about Doom 3 benchmarks not being readily available."
It seems fairly clear that the FX does well in DX8 benchmarks, and 3DMark03 may be the only widely-available DX9 benchmark around (I can't think of any others). So rather than whine about the benchmark, we might conclude from this that the FX is a good DX8 chip and a slow DX9 chip... after the cheating fix, the web numbers I've seen show that the FX seems to run the 3DMark03 pixel shader test at about half the speed of the 9800 Pro, for example.
As for Doom3, I'll wait for it to be released before I worry about benchmark numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
"American companies moving American jobs overseas is not good for the US in the long run."
Reducing costs for American companies so they can compete against foreign companies is extremely good for the country in the long run. Of course, if you were to write to your Congressman and demand massive reductions in taxes and other regulations that impose unneccesary costs on those American companies in the first place, then maybe they wouldn't need to ship as many jobs abroad.
"Tax laws could change so US companies that use foreign workers instead of Americans would have to pay into Social Security at a rate AS IF they had employed Americans at the expected salary."
That would be a brilliant idea: then all those US companies would move their headquarters abroad to somewhere that's glad to have them rather than somewhere that believes they're cash cows who only exist to have their money stolen by the government.
"You think they don't have quality workers in India? You think the USA is the only place which has quality workers?"
No, but most of the jobs being outsourced are the low-skilled, crappy ones that can be done by someone who just puts in the hours and has little experience or motivation. The difference in productivity between the top and bottom end of the programmer scale is at least a factor of ten, and there will always be opportunities for the people at the top end of that scale to make a good living.
"seeks to answer an important question: are we alone? Statistically, probably not."
Statistically, almost certainly. Barring accidents or idiotic governments that totally devastate the human species, we will have colonised the entire galaxy in a million years or so, and be conducting engineering projects on a massive scale that would be visible from many light years away: the odds of the only two intelligent species in the galaxy evolving within a million years of each other are probably pretty slim, so if they existed they'd be here by now.
I run seti@home just on the offchance that we're lucky and there is someone else around, but statistically, if there really are aliens out there, they should be as difficult to find as a million-strong herd of penguins running around Manhattan shouting 'Phear The Penguin Horde!'.
"I have never heard an argument against legalising drugs that wasn't based on the fact {or an assumption depending upon the fact} that drugs were already illegal."
:)), so it wasn't all bad.
And Singapore's wouldn't be any more convincing: I saw a TV show while I was there which was pushing their local anti-drug propaganda and it was just hilariously inept by Western standards... or would have been, if they weren't killing people over it.
Singapore has got to be one of the most boring places I've ever visited, so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of kids turned to drugs to get away from that: lots of hot chicks around though (I was there visiting one of them
It's already been done, I believe: Mariner Mercury used the orientation of its solar panels for attitude control to extend the mission by reducing fuel usage.
Though, to be fair, at that distance I'm not sure whether most of the resultant force came from photons or the solar wind.
"To do any sorts of useful video editing, you need fast machines; in fact, I'd argue that 3ghz is the minimum you need"
ROTFL. I've edited half-hour DV projects on a PII-350, and a DV feature on a PIII-550. There are things you need 3GHz CPUs for, but standard def video editing is not one of them... faster CPU is nice to have for faster rendering, but far from essential.
That would be great. Suppose my market is being threatened by Megasoft's new Office XYZ product that beats the pants off of mine. All I would need to do is send out spams _advertising_ Office XYZ, and the cops would run over and arrest their CEO and put them out of business. Bwahaha!
"I killed jarjar many times in beta"
:).
Gotta be worth $50 to kill Jar-Jar many times
"You just have to do a cost/benefit analysis... as long as the new technology saves more lives than it endangers, it's worth pursuing"
Not if it increases the danger to me: if we could all have completely computer-controlled cars with 10% less chance of crashing than the average driver, then you'd want them, whereas you'd be condemning anyone who was more than 10% less likely to crash than the average driver to live with more danger than they would by driving themselves.
This is why I'm happy with passive systems like seat-belts, ABS and so forth, but do not want any of these active systems that interfere with my driving.
It's not viable quite yet, but why keep it if you can back it up on a second hard drive and stick it in a safe somewhere, and/or encrypt it and stick it on a data haven machine? My DVD and CD collections take up a sizable amount of space in my bedroom, and before long I could put all that on a 2.5" drive in a laptop and carry it everywhere with me... why put up with idiots who want to restrict me to sticking some physical object in my computer just to access digital data?
I won't. Personally I'm looking forward to the day when I can put all my (legally purchased) movie and music collection on my hard drive and throw away those DVDs, CDs and VHS tapes that take up so much space. If that means I never upgrade any of those DVDs to a DRM-ed HD-DVD format, then so be it.
I note, BTW, that the article says: "The media barons insist that if consumers are going to listen to music and view movie clips and news headlines on any gadget with a screen, then the rights holders must be paid."
So no mention of _the authors_ being paid, only the rights holders (i.e. the worthless middle-men who'd be eliminated if copyright didn't create a monopoly market).
"Didn't NASA used to keep an extra shuttle on standby?"
No. There have been occasions when there were two shuttles on the pads simultaneously, but there's never been an active requirement to have a second ready to launch... more normally, there's one on the pad and one a month or two away from being ready to go.
"So when bad stuff happens, someone actually does something about it."
They did do something about it. They asked the engineers if it was a safety problem, and the engineers said "No".
"So when bad stuff happens and someone actually does something about it there's a way home."
Yeah, provided you're willing to risk another orbiter and its crew to fly up there, crossing your fingers that whatever bad stuff happened to the first shuttle won't also happen to the other one. Though if you're going to lose the first shuttle anyway it doesn't really matter what happens to the second once since the shuttle program will be dead, dead, dead whether it's left with one or two orbiters.
"Why was nothing done about this previosly?"
NASA were developing a fix for the problem, which would likely have gone into place sometime next year. No-one was ignoring the problem, it just wasn't considered to be as high a priority as fixing the numerous other problems which haven't destroyed a shuttle yet.
Incidentally, I was under the impression that the only launch possibility at or around Dec 18th was a night launch, so if they have to launch in the day, they can't launch then.
"The original was a lot of fun, but it killed itself with the superbaby junk"
However, as I understand it, the original creator was barely involved with the second series with the "superbaby" junk and pretty much disowned it, so there may be hope for a decent show.
"performing a 5 second equation before telling the shuttle to come back could have predicted and prevented this tragedy."
How? There have been similar impacts in the past, and the shuttles have come back fine, so would you have launched a highly dangerous rescue mission for those previous launches based on your "five second equation"?
The fact is, that the extent of the damage was highly dependant on where it hit: previous impacts hit the tiles on the underside and tore through some, but didn't do enough damage to let hot plasma enter the shuttle. This one appears to have hit the RCC covering and opened a gap between the panels, letting the hottest plasma of re-entry directly into the shuttle wing. Had it hit the tiles on the underside as before, the odds are good that Columbia would have survived.
"They worry that hundreds of people tramping through their woods will damage plants and habitat."
Maybe someone should point out to these people that the idea for a park is _for humans to use it_. Now, it's certainly true that you don't want people to use it in such a way as to cause unnecessary damage, but building a park then worrying that people will go there is moronic, to say the least. It often seems to me that "conservationism" has gone so far that the people in charge are forgetting _why_ they're supposed to be conserving these places.
"Europe could fairly easily become self sufficient in fuel if it substituted ethanol for petrol and vegetable oil for Diesel - why we don't do this is a total mystery to me."
Other than because it typically takes more energy to create the ethanol than you get when you burn it, you mean?
"The only vendor that natively supports PS 1.4 is ATI."
Sorry, but that's garbage, pure and simple. Or are you not aware that PS 1.4 support is _required_ for DX9 cards with PS2.0 support. Your complaint may be valid when comparing a GF4 against a Radeon 8500, but is totally bogus when comparing two DX9 cards.
"And their "DX9" onyl test is a piece of crap too. They use one or two new instructions in the VS, and PS2.0 is only used for the sky."
Gee, one minute you're complaining that they use PS1.4 instructions, and now you're complaining that they don't use PS2.0 instructions. PS1.4 instructions _are_ effectively DX9 instructions since other than ATI, no other DX8 chips use them: you need a DX9 chip to run PS1.4 shaders.
And it would appear to be real lucky for nvidia that they don't use many PS2.0 instructions since from the results of their shader test once the nvidia "optimization" of throwing away the shader and running a completely different shader was fixed, shows them running PS2.0 shaders at about half the speed of a Radeon 9800. The low performance of PS2.0 shaders on the FX card seems to be the reason why nvidia hated 3DMark03 so much; there was no way to get a good score without redesigning the chip or "optimizing".
"Besides, pick any other industry, any other product, and companies are optimizing their products to run fast"
Yes, but nvidia's "optimizations" would be equivalent to a database engine that improved its benchmark score by simply throwing away half the requests, or a web server which improved its benchmark score by redirecting half the requests to slashdot. Is that an optimization, or a cheat?
I'd pay $20 for that :).
Agreed. I hate to say it, but the action scenes in Matrix 2 were... boring. Cars exploding, slow-motion martial arts, shootouts, yeah, so what, seen it all before, and we know that Neo is never going to get hurt and the heroes will always succeed, so why bother?
Seriously, the first movie was a cool effects demo with no real plot, the second movie wasn't even that impressive as an effects demo. I'll watch the third just in case the plot makes some sense, but it's hard to see it being a better trilogy overall than the original three 'Star Wars' movies.
Doom 3 is _NOT_ a DX9 application, it's OpenGL, even though it uses some of the same hardware on the chip. As for the benchmarks, it's a pre-release version of the game, running on drivers that may or may not ever have been used to run the game or optimised for it, running, I believe, an nvidia-provided demo. Who's to say that nvidia haven't equally 'optimised' their drivers to run that particular demo faster than they could run the full game?
When reviewers have a real, gold Doom3 CD, with real shipped drivers from ATI and nvidia, running an independently produced benchmark demo, I'll start to worry about the numbers. Until then it's all hype.
"Three of four 3DMark03 demos don't use new DirectX9 shaders at all"
No, but they use shaders which are generally only supported on DX9 cards and a few older ATI cards. Just because you have a PS2.0 card that doesn't mean you have to use PS2.0 if PS1.4 can do the same: why deliberately make more work for yourself by not supporting older cards?
"Three of four 3DMark03 demos use Pixel Shader 1.4 which was introduced with DirectX8.1 and isn't natively supported by NVIDIA cards"
Support for PS1.4 is a requirement of DX9, so if the GF FX is a DX9 card then it supports PS1.4, and your claim is therefore bogus. If it doesn't support PS1.4, then it's not a real DX9 card.
So you mean that nvidia drivers just randomly replace shaders with different versions which produce different results but run at twice the speed?
"If you read the interview, its even brought up that the 5900 seems to do just fine in all other benchmarks, only futuremark seems to give it a hard time, and im not buying that crap about Doom 3 benchmarks not being readily available."
It seems fairly clear that the FX does well in DX8 benchmarks, and 3DMark03 may be the only widely-available DX9 benchmark around (I can't think of any others). So rather than whine about the benchmark, we might conclude from this that the FX is a good DX8 chip and a slow DX9 chip... after the cheating fix, the web numbers I've seen show that the FX seems to run the 3DMark03 pixel shader test at about half the speed of the 9800 Pro, for example.
As for Doom3, I'll wait for it to be released before I worry about benchmark numbers.