These things are still made with a certain amount of built in obsolescence in mind. Make them too durable, and you quickly saturate the market, resulting in a big price collapse. That's a big no-no.
According to the wear monitor on my laptop SSD, it's going to expire around the year 2200. I suspect I'll have replaced it with a bigger drive well before then.
Well, you have a point if a law needs to prevent bad things from happing, but by that standard murder laws don't work.
The whole point of a law is to prevent bad things from happening, or at least discourage them. The bad things people seem to think they can prevent by regulating drones are, say, people flying bombs into your house, or flying drones into airliners. Laws won't stop that, when anyone can make a drone with a 3D printer, a few common electrical and electronic items, and some open source software.
Outlawing flight over certain places won't stop some people from doing it, but prosecuting the ones you catch will discourage some of them.
OK. A drone is flying over your house. You shoot it out of the sky. Now what? How are you going to catch whoever was flying it?
And it's not like this is 1995; periodically connecting to the Internet to download a dataset isn't exactly a hardship.
Who's going to buy a DRM-ed drone when they can buy or build a non-DRMed drone instead?
The only thing regulation will do is ensure that the bad guys import foreign drones, or build their own.
I've already seen reviews on the web from drone owners pissed off that theirs now demands to be connected to the Internet on a regular basis to download a list of places it's not going to fly in future. Do you think they'll be buying a US drone next time?
Except if one of them is American, thanks to the IRS. No-one I know who got a Green Card has any intention of becoming a US citizen, because they don't want to be lumbered with the IRS for the rest of their life.
Plus, you continually have to be figuring out which passport you should be showing to which burrowcrat when you travel anywhere.
I would assume they'd be willing to sell a license to you, if you really wanted to use the engine but not put it on Steam. But I'm not sure why anyone would use Source if they don't intend to release on Steam.
The MMO Tera uses the UE3 engine. So I would say that it handles huge, open worlds just fine. The others I couldnt tell you.
To be fair, the Tera world isn't that open. It tends to be separated into relatively small areas with hills and walls between them that would allow you to avoid drawing most of the map... not sure whether it actually takes advantage of that fact, but I would presume they designed it that way for a reason.
Except if you bothered to watch the video linked above for actual in-game performance testing (NOT synthetic benchmarks), you'll see that most of the time Intel is neck and neck with AMD - not "smoking" them.
Is this the lame old 'look! If I run a game that's GPU-limited, my AMD machine is just as fast as that Intel machine that costs twice as much!' nonsense?
AMD fanboys have been doing that for years when they can't find any legitimate way to beat Intel.
It does work. There's 4GB of RAM. It's fully usable. It's just slower. Just like my laptop.
So are you saying I should be suing Toshiba because the top 2GB of RAM in my laptop is half the speed of the bottom 4GB?
And note that the actual frame-rate tests I've seen show only a few percent difference, because you'll rarely be accessing data in that upper 512MB. You need artificial tests to make it run drastically slower.
I don't get your problem with the people suing. They were promised X for Y dollars. They only got a fraction of X.
They were promised 4GB. They got 4GB. Complaining that 0.5GB of that runs slow is like complaining that 2GB of the 6GB in my laptop runs at half the speed of the other 4GB.
The only valid complaint they have is that Nvidia said it had 64 ROPs when it only has 56. That's not really something worth a lawsuit, when, as I understand it, the chip isn't capable of generating pixels fast enough to make use of 64.
As I said above, the only people who will really benefit from this are lawyers.
Yeah, this must be the reason the UK has such a high crime rate in comparison with the US.
Oh wait...
It does have relatively high crime rates (just not murder), and those rates were significantly lower when gun ownership was common and anyone could carry one so long as they had ten shillings to pay for a license.
Ah, an optimist, I see. 'Agitating for access to the technology' would inevitably result in eliminating most of the government and business in that country, and they will fight that to the bitter end. Big Business and Big Government just don't work in a world where anyone can make anything they want at any time.
I think it's far more likely that most of the West will ban it, until their economies collapse as other nations that don't have the same industrial baggage overtake them.
high quality high detail 3d printing of metals and other materials. Good luck trying to enforce IP rights once this tech hits the market.
High quality, high detail 3D printing of metals and other materials will be banned, because 'public safety!' After all, evil people COULD PRINT GUNS!
Seriously, governments are going to do everything they can to restrict this technology, because the ability to make anything you want at home would destroy the entire economic and political system. How can Big Business make money if anyone can print stuff? How can Big Government regulate things if anyone can just print them?
I have to adapt or pretend the market hasn't changed and sue everyone (while spending even more money on not making my product).
Or you can pay the government to pass a law banning the cheap alternatives because 'public safety!', which is usually much cheaper. This is exactly what's likely to happen with, say, people printing new car parts on a 3D printer. Clearly that's a risk to 'public safety!' because those parts haven't been tested like the real parts. And as for printing complete cars that haven't been crash-tested and may not meet CAFE standards...
Yes, of course, because technology doesn't improve and get cheaper. No, no, no.
i remember when the first personal computers came out, people would buy them and everyone else would ask why they did that, because what could you do on them other than play some game where you had to guide the asterisk to avoid the evil dollar signs? What a silly toy.
Then, today, few people could imagine living without one.
I was a bit surprised that the person would tell so much to a random stranger.
Why? Do you think some random stranger was going to report them to the Imaginary Property Police?
I doubt you'll find one random stranger in a thousand who thinks there's anything wrong with what this guy is doing, and they probably work for the Imaginary Property industry.
1. Designs change to match production ability. If you can't print a boat in one piece, you print it in multiple pieces and fit them together. Just like you didn't make a wooden galleon out of one tree trunk. My guess is that future 3D-printed boats will look very little like current designs.
2. You don't need the printer in your garage, you design the boat on your computer, then email the design to your local print shop to print out the parts for you. Unless the Imaginary Property Barons managed to get in the way and stop you because they have a patent on 'Making Things That Float... Using A 3D Printer'.
And, yes, it will prove to be one of the biggest revolutions in the history of the human race. In particular, it's pretty much required to enable us to finally get off this planet and live elsewhere; no-one's going to want to ship a boat to Titan if they can print one there instead.
But if you could print a replacement for that cheap plastic part that breaks every couple of years so you have to go out and spend $100 on replacing the entire Widget, the Widget-makers would go out of business!
Slashdot Mirror
I propose a new rule similar to Godwin's rule about the first to mention the word "Nazi" loses the argument.
Uh, there's no such thing. Godwin's Law just says that, in any discussion that goes on long enough, someone will call another poster a Nazi.
Your supposed 'Godwin's Law' would be absurd:
'I think we should murder all the Jews'
'Hitler, you're a Naz!'
'Ha-ha! Godwin's Law! You lose!'
These things are still made with a certain amount of built in obsolescence in mind. Make them too durable, and you quickly saturate the market, resulting in a big price collapse. That's a big no-no.
According to the wear monitor on my laptop SSD, it's going to expire around the year 2200. I suspect I'll have replaced it with a bigger drive well before then.
Well, you have a point if a law needs to prevent bad things from happing, but by that standard murder laws don't work.
The whole point of a law is to prevent bad things from happening, or at least discourage them. The bad things people seem to think they can prevent by regulating drones are, say, people flying bombs into your house, or flying drones into airliners. Laws won't stop that, when anyone can make a drone with a 3D printer, a few common electrical and electronic items, and some open source software.
Outlawing flight over certain places won't stop some people from doing it, but prosecuting the ones you catch will discourage some of them.
OK. A drone is flying over your house. You shoot it out of the sky. Now what? How are you going to catch whoever was flying it?
And it's not like this is 1995; periodically connecting to the Internet to download a dataset isn't exactly a hardship.
Who's going to buy a DRM-ed drone when they can buy or build a non-DRMed drone instead?
The only thing regulation will do is ensure that the bad guys import foreign drones, or build their own.
I've already seen reviews on the web from drone owners pissed off that theirs now demands to be connected to the Internet on a regular basis to download a list of places it's not going to fly in future. Do you think they'll be buying a US drone next time?
To use a car analogy: Most people don't, and shouldn't, forfeit owning a second car simply because the first car has most of the same advantages.
Except, in this case, the second car burns a gallon of oil every hundred miles, and randomly sets the first car on fire every now and again.
Dual passports is usually a win.
Except if one of them is American, thanks to the IRS. No-one I know who got a Green Card has any intention of becoming a US citizen, because they don't want to be lumbered with the IRS for the rest of their life.
Plus, you continually have to be figuring out which passport you should be showing to which burrowcrat when you travel anywhere.
Or you could just do it in a sane country that encourages innovation.
I would assume they'd be willing to sell a license to you, if you really wanted to use the engine but not put it on Steam. But I'm not sure why anyone would use Source if they don't intend to release on Steam.
The MMO Tera uses the UE3 engine. So I would say that it handles huge, open worlds just fine. The others I couldnt tell you.
To be fair, the Tera world isn't that open. It tends to be separated into relatively small areas with hills and walls between them that would allow you to avoid drawing most of the map... not sure whether it actually takes advantage of that fact, but I would presume they designed it that way for a reason.
Except if you bothered to watch the video linked above for actual in-game performance testing (NOT synthetic benchmarks), you'll see that most of the time Intel is neck and neck with AMD - not "smoking" them.
Is this the lame old 'look! If I run a game that's GPU-limited, my AMD machine is just as fast as that Intel machine that costs twice as much!' nonsense?
AMD fanboys have been doing that for years when they can't find any legitimate way to beat Intel.
Intel's competition isn't AMD, it's ARM. AMD are pretty much irrelevant to them at this point.
No. The reason it affects the 970 is because it's missing some of the hardware that's in the 980.
It does work. There's 4GB of RAM. It's fully usable. It's just slower. Just like my laptop.
So are you saying I should be suing Toshiba because the top 2GB of RAM in my laptop is half the speed of the bottom 4GB?
And note that the actual frame-rate tests I've seen show only a few percent difference, because you'll rarely be accessing data in that upper 512MB. You need artificial tests to make it run drastically slower.
I don't get your problem with the people suing. They were promised X for Y dollars. They only got a fraction of X.
They were promised 4GB. They got 4GB. Complaining that 0.5GB of that runs slow is like complaining that 2GB of the 6GB in my laptop runs at half the speed of the other 4GB.
The only valid complaint they have is that Nvidia said it had 64 ROPs when it only has 56. That's not really something worth a lawsuit, when, as I understand it, the chip isn't capable of generating pixels fast enough to make use of 64.
As I said above, the only people who will really benefit from this are lawyers.
Who would go to the trouble of starting a class action suit over this sort of trivia?
Lawyers?
They'll make a few million, and all the GTX970 owners will get a $5 discount coupon off their next Nvidia card.
Because everything is like the PC.
Very few mass-market technologies become more expensive over time. Plastic printers were expensive not long ago. They're not any more.
Sintered metal printers are very cool. But expensive as shit.
And will, in technological time, soon be cheap enough for everyone to have one.
This is how it is across USA politics.
You seem to believe it's somehow different in other countries.
Yeah, this must be the reason the UK has such a high crime rate in comparison with the US.
Oh wait...
It does have relatively high crime rates (just not murder), and those rates were significantly lower when gun ownership was common and anyone could carry one so long as they had ten shillings to pay for a license.
Ah, an optimist, I see. 'Agitating for access to the technology' would inevitably result in eliminating most of the government and business in that country, and they will fight that to the bitter end. Big Business and Big Government just don't work in a world where anyone can make anything they want at any time.
I think it's far more likely that most of the West will ban it, until their economies collapse as other nations that don't have the same industrial baggage overtake them.
high quality high detail 3d printing of metals and other materials. Good luck trying to enforce IP rights once this tech hits the market.
High quality, high detail 3D printing of metals and other materials will be banned, because 'public safety!' After all, evil people COULD PRINT GUNS!
Seriously, governments are going to do everything they can to restrict this technology, because the ability to make anything you want at home would destroy the entire economic and political system. How can Big Business make money if anyone can print stuff? How can Big Government regulate things if anyone can just print them?
I have to adapt or pretend the market hasn't changed and sue everyone (while spending even more money on not making my product).
Or you can pay the government to pass a law banning the cheap alternatives because 'public safety!', which is usually much cheaper. This is exactly what's likely to happen with, say, people printing new car parts on a 3D printer. Clearly that's a risk to 'public safety!' because those parts haven't been tested like the real parts. And as for printing complete cars that haven't been crash-tested and may not meet CAFE standards...
Yes, of course, because technology doesn't improve and get cheaper. No, no, no.
i remember when the first personal computers came out, people would buy them and everyone else would ask why they did that, because what could you do on them other than play some game where you had to guide the asterisk to avoid the evil dollar signs? What a silly toy.
Then, today, few people could imagine living without one.
I was a bit surprised that the person would tell so much to a random stranger.
Why? Do you think some random stranger was going to report them to the Imaginary Property Police?
I doubt you'll find one random stranger in a thousand who thinks there's anything wrong with what this guy is doing, and they probably work for the Imaginary Property industry.
1. Designs change to match production ability. If you can't print a boat in one piece, you print it in multiple pieces and fit them together. Just like you didn't make a wooden galleon out of one tree trunk. My guess is that future 3D-printed boats will look very little like current designs.
2. You don't need the printer in your garage, you design the boat on your computer, then email the design to your local print shop to print out the parts for you. Unless the Imaginary Property Barons managed to get in the way and stop you because they have a patent on 'Making Things That Float... Using A 3D Printer'.
And, yes, it will prove to be one of the biggest revolutions in the history of the human race. In particular, it's pretty much required to enable us to finally get off this planet and live elsewhere; no-one's going to want to ship a boat to Titan if they can print one there instead.
But if you could print a replacement for that cheap plastic part that breaks every couple of years so you have to go out and spend $100 on replacing the entire Widget, the Widget-makers would go out of business!