I thought the whole idea of an *international* space station was that we didn't have to duplicate technology efforts between the partners? ESA developed the ATV for the express purpose of resupplying the ISS, so what's this duplicate piece of tech doing?
You're not considering the cost of entry. You can develop software using a cheap personal computer, single handedly, with free software. Doing research requires:
Large machines to ensure humidity/temperature is kept and fluids are continually stirred
Physical materials (beakers, pressurized chambers to avoid a Level 4 threat escaping the labs, pressure suits, ventilators)
Samples (which may have a great cost to create and ship since few labs worldwide can do them)
Expensive training (there is no Visual Basic Biology edition, so you need years of training to understand the concepts)
Space (greenhouses, showers etc.)
Security clearances (if you work with dangerous materials, which most labs do in some form)
Waste disposal systems (you don't just pour a level 2 agent down the drain)
Since many of the above things can only be built cost effectively on a site, a support system (gardeners, cafeterias, toilets, cleaners, vending machines etc.)
Many of those things come a great cost. A PC can be had for €500.
... and I'm sure saying this will burn some karma here on Slashdot, but you, Sir, are wrong.
First of all, you supply no evidence for your hokey-pokey, companies-against-the-people attitude. 100 mpg, puhlese. Show me a patent filing and I'll start listening. Even if you did dig up a patent, that really provides no guarantee of the idea working in practice. People have been patenting perpetual motion machines for years (perhaps that is one of the patents you hold), and last I heard the laws of thermo-dynamics still applies.
But whatever, I'm sure you've posted your ideas on Wikipedia so it must be true, of course. To be honest, that's not really what irks me with your post.
What bothers me is your claim that "abolishing the patent system so that a level playing field is attained" would somehow benefit us all. Have you lost your mind?
My brother works in molecular biology. At the moment he's working with RNA silencing in Barley plants to find cures for some of the diseases that affect third world country crop yields. At the end of the year, there's a chance he might work on cracking the Epsteing Barr virus, which causes Infectious Mononucleosis and have been associated with many types of cancer, but especially breast cancer, it seems.
There is no chance in hell that research would even happen could the potential results not be patented. No chance, I say, because investors expect return. In your world, you might say this research should happen pro bono, and I'm sure my brother would like that, but he also likes to eat and pay rent. You know, fundamental stuff for living.
I'd like to hear your suggestion on how money would funnel its way towards research like this without the chance of return. Who would invest in it, expect Bono and Dalai Lama?
I've used FogBugz for external clients and it works a treat. Sure, there's an initial outlay, but it's definitely worth it. Very user friendly and doesn't require much admin.
That part of the Wikipedia article wasn't sourced, and has a big red Neutrality-disputed sign next to it. If you quote from Wikipedia, it better be a sourced part of Wikipedia. Hell, I could go in and write whatever I want to support my argument.
I'm not saying you are wrong about the 2-21 days, merely that you use a bad argument to support your case. Instead, you could have used Questions and Answers about Ebola. Don't worry, I already added that as a source in Wikipedia.
Half Life 2 was incredibly well received, both in terms of reviews (metacritic, rottentomatoes and sales numbers.
It sold massively, created a new method of distribution, which other vendors have embraced and cuts out the middle men so hated on Slashdot.
It was first to feature real-time radiosity lighting, scaled from DirectX 6 to 9 and pushed the character animation and expression envelope considerably.
Do you ever look in the mirror and ask: "Maybe I am wrong this time?"
Because, you know, for a moment there, you sounded like a communist.
Come on, you remember: Those people who dragged Russia and a bunch of other countries into economic ruin because they thought the concept of profit hurt everyone instead of helped everyone.
Unless of course you're saying that only elected governments should be allowed to invest in curing diseases, in which case my question is: Overall, do monopolies have a history of providing better products compared to an open market? And what makes you think the lure of profit wouldn't cause governments to charge "extra" (I use the word "extra" here, because that indeed seems to be how you view profit, as an extra charge on an otherwise fixed price product)?
If your intention is to put independent tasks out to different processors, you will run into huge issues like the ones you describe.
Instead, consider the beginning of each logical step in the game loop as a "constriction/delegation" point: You constrict, meaning that only one thread is running right now. Then, say, it's time for particles. You now wake up your eight particle worker threads, divy up the gargantuan 2000 particle emitter loop into 250 emitters each. You then instruct each particle thread to work through the 250 emitters and wait for them all to finish.
Naturally your real performance won't be as if you only had to process 250 emitters, but let's say you lose 50% due to internal synchronization, you've still processed all your particles in 25% of the time.
Another way is to pipeline the tasks: You know that all your game gizmos have to first do this, then that and then the other. You create three task threads, one that does "this", one that does "that" and one that does "the other". You feed the first gizmo to the "this" thread. When it is done, it will feed the gizmo on towards the "that"-thread. When the "that"-thread is done, it will in lastly feed the gizmo on the "the other"-thread.
But once the first thread (the "this" task) is done, it can accept a new gizmo while the "that"-thread munches on the first.
Advantage to this scheme is better memory locality (which seems like it is more important on PS3 that, say, PC) that the divide'n'conquer approach described first. Of course, individual game gizmos may have dependencies in between them, so you need a proper dependency graph to feed gizmos off the right order.
It's doable, as long as you don't think 8 threads have to independently work on completely different tasks at the same time.
Multicore CPUs, and multiprocessor systems, are only going to be as fast as the software can make them. Concurrency is a major focus of software programming research at the moment.
Well, I picked it up of from an article in Jyllands Posten, the largest Danish newspaper. But seeing as it was in Danish, I figured it wouldn't make much sense to post the link in the submission.
But you can pick up the current issue of Journal of Materials Chemistry if you want to read the article about it. I can't post a link for it as the online edition seems to be for subscribers only.
While I'm prone to speculation, I usually stay away from speculating about other people's speculations when submitting Slashdot articles.
I live in the UK and I pay £0.90 (1.32/1.65) a litre. My family, living in Denmark, pay 12 DKR (1.60/2.00).
And that is partly the reason it's good business
on
Firefox In Print
·
· Score: 1
Any book that grows stale quite fast is due for an update quite soon, which means more sales, which means happy managers, which means managers green-lighting a book such as this.
All my earnings are reported, all my tax breaks pre-calculculated, interest reported by the banks. Only thing I have to add are tax deductible donations like Red Cross stuff.
Takes me about 15 seconds to do my taxes.
I have NO privacy in my life, but it sure is easy.
===================== This comment down here is only to circumwent the postercomment compression filter, which all in all makes little sense since people like me can just type a long comment like this to get around it and make my silly joke anyway
... watching TV on plasmas and TFTs? Since they don't form a picture by updating one dot at the time, you would by your idea be less prone to advertisement?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the whole idea of an *international* space station was that we didn't have to duplicate technology efforts between the partners? ESA developed the ATV for the express purpose of resupplying the ISS, so what's this duplicate piece of tech doing?
... when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands!
- Large machines to ensure humidity/temperature is kept and fluids are continually stirred
- Physical materials (beakers, pressurized chambers to avoid a Level 4 threat escaping the labs, pressure suits, ventilators)
- Samples (which may have a great cost to create and ship since few labs worldwide can do them)
- Expensive training (there is no Visual Basic Biology edition, so you need years of training to understand the concepts)
- Space (greenhouses, showers etc.)
- Security clearances (if you work with dangerous materials, which most labs do in some form)
- Waste disposal systems (you don't just pour a level 2 agent down the drain)
- Since many of the above things can only be built cost effectively on a site, a support system (gardeners, cafeterias, toilets, cleaners, vending machines etc.)
Many of those things come a great cost. A PC can be had for €500.... and I'm sure saying this will burn some karma here on Slashdot, but you, Sir, are wrong.
First of all, you supply no evidence for your hokey-pokey, companies-against-the-people attitude. 100 mpg, puhlese. Show me a patent filing and I'll start listening. Even if you did dig up a patent, that really provides no guarantee of the idea working in practice. People have been patenting perpetual motion machines for years (perhaps that is one of the patents you hold), and last I heard the laws of thermo-dynamics still applies.
But whatever, I'm sure you've posted your ideas on Wikipedia so it must be true, of course. To be honest, that's not really what irks me with your post.
What bothers me is your claim that "abolishing the patent system so that a level playing field is attained" would somehow benefit us all. Have you lost your mind?
My brother works in molecular biology. At the moment he's working with RNA silencing in Barley plants to find cures for some of the diseases that affect third world country crop yields. At the end of the year, there's a chance he might work on cracking the Epsteing Barr virus, which causes Infectious Mononucleosis and have been associated with many types of cancer, but especially breast cancer, it seems.
There is no chance in hell that research would even happen could the potential results not be patented. No chance, I say, because investors expect return. In your world, you might say this research should happen pro bono, and I'm sure my brother would like that, but he also likes to eat and pay rent. You know, fundamental stuff for living.
I'd like to hear your suggestion on how money would funnel its way towards research like this without the chance of return. Who would invest in it, expect Bono and Dalai Lama?
I've used FogBugz for external clients and it works a treat. Sure, there's an initial outlay, but it's definitely worth it. Very user friendly and doesn't require much admin.
I'm not saying you are wrong about the 2-21 days, merely that you use a bad argument to support your case. Instead, you could have used Questions and Answers about Ebola. Don't worry, I already added that as a source in Wikipedia.
Half Life 2 was incredibly well received, both in terms of reviews (metacritic, rottentomatoes and sales numbers.
It sold massively, created a new method of distribution, which other vendors have embraced and cuts out the middle men so hated on Slashdot.
It was first to feature real-time radiosity lighting, scaled from DirectX 6 to 9 and pushed the character animation and expression envelope considerably.
Do you ever look in the mirror and ask: "Maybe I am wrong this time?"
Because, you know, for a moment there, you sounded like a communist.
Come on, you remember: Those people who dragged Russia and a bunch of other countries into economic ruin because they thought the concept of profit hurt everyone instead of helped everyone.
Unless of course you're saying that only elected governments should be allowed to invest in curing diseases, in which case my question is: Overall, do monopolies have a history of providing better products compared to an open market? And what makes you think the lure of profit wouldn't cause governments to charge "extra" (I use the word "extra" here, because that indeed seems to be how you view profit, as an extra charge on an otherwise fixed price product)?
PS3 actual development screenshot
PS3 hype "screenshot"
Yes, Sony, of coooourse we believe you.
There are other ways to divy up work.
If your intention is to put independent tasks out to different processors, you will run into huge issues like the ones you describe.
Instead, consider the beginning of each logical step in the game loop as a "constriction/delegation" point: You constrict, meaning that only one thread is running right now. Then, say, it's time for particles. You now wake up your eight particle worker threads, divy up the gargantuan 2000 particle emitter loop into 250 emitters each. You then instruct each particle thread to work through the 250 emitters and wait for them all to finish.
Naturally your real performance won't be as if you only had to process 250 emitters, but let's say you lose 50% due to internal synchronization, you've still processed all your particles in 25% of the time.
Another way is to pipeline the tasks: You know that all your game gizmos have to first do this, then that and then the other. You create three task threads, one that does "this", one that does "that" and one that does "the other". You feed the first gizmo to the "this" thread. When it is done, it will feed the gizmo on towards the "that"-thread. When the "that"-thread is done, it will in lastly feed the gizmo on the "the other"-thread.
But once the first thread (the "this" task) is done, it can accept a new gizmo while the "that"-thread munches on the first.
Advantage to this scheme is better memory locality (which seems like it is more important on PS3 that, say, PC) that the divide'n'conquer approach described first. Of course, individual game gizmos may have dependencies in between them, so you need a proper dependency graph to feed gizmos off the right order.
It's doable, as long as you don't think 8 threads have to independently work on completely different tasks at the same time.
Did you watch the talk bitch?
Multicore CPUs, and multiprocessor systems, are only going to be as fast as the software can make them. Concurrency is a major focus of software programming research at the moment.
For some more info, check out:
The Free Lunch is Over, the article that sparked the discussion.
A talk Herb Sutter did on the Concur project, a research project into abstracting concurrency, sorry IE only but it's worth it
"Ehm, same change takes place on Mars"
"Oh, let's not then. Instead, let's spend the money instead on Malaria treatment and clean water or other things that actually makes sense"
Now, if this turns out to be true, who can honestly say that there's no cost-benefit to space research.
But you can pick up the current issue of Journal of Materials Chemistry if you want to read the article about it. I can't post a link for it as the online edition seems to be for subscribers only.
While I'm prone to speculation, I usually stay away from speculating about other people's speculations when submitting Slashdot articles.
I live in the UK and I pay £0.90 (1.32/1.65) a litre. My family, living in Denmark, pay 12 DKR (1.60/2.00).
Any book that grows stale quite fast is due for an update quite soon, which means more sales, which means happy managers, which means managers green-lighting a book such as this.
All my earnings are reported, all my tax breaks pre-calculculated, interest reported by the banks. Only thing I have to add are tax deductible donations like Red Cross stuff.
Takes me about 15 seconds to do my taxes.
I have NO privacy in my life, but it sure is easy.
I read the fucking article. You are correct; I was wrong.
The EU is the European Union. Switzerland, while being wholly a part of Europe, is not a member state of the European Union.
Are you suggesting you are willing to pay USD 100 for a device that does nothing?
Fork! Fork! Fork! Fork! Fork!
=====================
This comment down here is only to circumwent the postercomment compression filter, which all in all makes little sense since people like me can just type a long comment like this to get around it and make my silly joke anyway
www.blitzbasic.com ... easiest language that you can actually produce something interesting with.
Everything is state of the art, trains are rarely delayed, and they enter the city centre as opposed to off-city airports.
Service is expanding, new trains are purchased, there's a high attention to design and usability and connections are good. For travels in between major cities in Denmark, it's simply hard to find arguments for cars.
... watching TV on plasmas and TFTs? Since they don't form a picture by updating one dot at the time, you would by your idea be less prone to advertisement?
Kill All Humans Day