We have all been seeing DHTML being an incredible fad for so long time and without there ever being anything really dynamic to it.
Now that we finally see dynamic HTML happen (even if the name has changed), how could we not expect the hype about the real thing to at least match the past hype about the early attempts?
Sure the name is stupid, but who cares! We do need some good hype to get standardization of something like that xml request object done and a catchy name can only help.
sure this should better read "casual passwords", like those used for posting on random forums and stuff like that. still better than using the one-passwords-fits-all approach.
but it goes beyond casual passwords if you use something like GPG: what would be a safer place for your passwords than an encrypted email to yourself locked behind your GPG secret key and passphrase?
Do you really buy all those games that you "try" through more than 10%?
I doubt that, even though i expect you to deny.
But hte surprising new is, this still works out as soon as you take sequels into account. "Try before you buy" is the logical explanation for this oh so ill-reputed focus on sequels:
They don't do sequels because they lack ideas, they do them because if the first game was really good, then many of those who played the first version will buy the sequel. Notice that i said "played" not "bought". Everybody knows about the insane ratio between copies sold and copies played and doing sequels is the most practical way of turning that ratio into profit.
Pirated games obviously don't get the publisher any money, but they can act as a big huge interactive advertisement for the sequel. The problem, of course, is, that the audience of that advertisement exclusively consists of game pirates notorious for not getting the publisher any money, but as long as there are gamers who will pirate one game and buy the other there will be an economic reason for sequels.
> If you don't want other people using your wireless network, > secure your goddamn router. It's trivially easy, and the > responsibility for it rests on you and you alone.
with wireless routers there happens to be security and "security". Setting up WPA encryption is certainly not inviting, but it does not provide much technical security eiter.
Making too much of a difference between that kind of "security" and openness is quite close to DMCAthink along the lines of "if there is some deliberate defectiveness on the CD that prevents copying on 10% of all computers then it is highly illegal to copy on the other 90%".
maybe it would be a good idea to have some kind of opt-in openness flag (with a definable bandwidth allowance?), with that in place you could even think of having protocols that would allow you to easily open your router to visitors without sacrificing encryption of your personal LAN connections.
appearently those people are thinking that the ipod brand is so powerful that people would rather pay for somegadget+ipod than just for somegadget, even if only for the difference of somegadget alone lacking the ipod brand.
add some of that ultra-fast memory from the GPU to the CPU as some kind of level-whatever cache, and you get closer.
then, realizing that graphics work can be parallelized like flies you then replace half of your complicated out-of-order-execution general purpose cores with a number of smaller cores that each get half the bang out of 1/10 the transistors. those would still be general purpose, but there is so little left in today's GPUs that is really specific to a graphics pipeline, that it would not make much of a difference. still, those cores (or mmx style special units) would be much easier be brought to use for purposes other than gaming than today's GPUs.
we agree that the basic nature of graphics processing lies in the parallelism. why limit your parallelism-oriented resources to graphics processing?
> I'm going to come out and say that, within 5 years, we'll be seeing GPU processors > integrated into the motherboard, accessable to both ATI and NVidia (and Matrox, and > S3, and...) The power and bandwidth demands for next gen GPUs are becoming more > than expansion boards can handle.
I really did not see this coming until after the merger, but now i realized that the maths is quite simple:
Back in the days of 3dfx (and, of course, earlier) the speed from cpu to video DAC was a bottleneck that had to be overcome by painting to framebuffer with an accompanying RAMDAC and trying to generate as much of the framebuffer content updates by some external chip (the GPU).
In the days of digital displays we don't even need a video DAC anymore and at the same our CPUs are starting to come with an external bandwidth that could easily carry multiple DVI links (a quick check at wikipedia rates hypertransport at roughly 20 GByte/s while dual link DVI is rated less than 1 GByte/s). To make matters even more clear, the current ways of externally generating the content of the framebuffer often demand more bandwidth for communicating between CPU/RAM and GPU (AGP 8x is listed as 2 GByte/s, 16 times as much as dual link DVI) than for moving the result down the DVI 60 times per second.
Conclusion: the bottleneck has moved, once it made sense to move as much of the image creation as close to the RAMDAC as possible, today everything looks like moving the image creation as close to CPU/RAM as possible is the thing to do. As it happens, in the AMD world CPU and RAM are effektively at the same place.
Today we have very fast RAM at the GPU end of things, but moving that closer to the CPU, acting as another caching stage for both general purpose and the moved graphics units could only make things faster.
Add to that the fact that todays GPU pipelines have little in them that is strictly graphic specific and that external number crunching chips (that seem to have a lot in common with those still-GPUs) seem to be taking over both the entertainment PC and the high performance clusters and you get a glimpse of an x86 future that looks as surprising and strange as it looks promising.
what makes you assume that the protals are bidirectional?
iirc the demo even had a part showing the player running against an output portal (or _the_ output portal, since there is always just one) as if it was a brick wall. the first portal you make is the output, so there is no "portal leading nowhere".
i strongly assume it's "click: red -> click: blue -> click: red..." and so on.
where one color means input and the other means output, effectively you will always have exactly one pair of portals. if the last portal you made for your loop was the output in the ceiling then "shooting" anywhere else will result in you hitting the floor where the input portal was before and if the last portal you made was the input in the floor then the next will be the output, so you will fall into the input and emerge where you last shot at at infinite-loop-falling-speed (which is probably limited, think of increased air friction). iirc they even demoed this effect in the video.
falling damage is a parameter that can easily be set to 0
i don't think a game like this would give much about physical realism, instead it would only care about making for interesting gameplay. instant-death loops are not part of that. i guess they would even implement some kind of (not too high) upper limit for falling speed, because otherwise you would quickly end up with funny temporal aliasing effects between frame rate and loop speed. this would probably be interesting for us techies but be harmful for immersion.
there's a simple answer: input/ouput portals are not first/secondary fire, but are even/uneven "shots".
so a situation where an "input" exists without an output does not occur.
you should also note that the video displays traditional hl2 "grav gun" functionality too, so it's probably like this: primary: make in/out portals, secondary: grip/release with grav gun (or switched)
A: "i just pushed the EasyButton(tm) and then the lights went out, EasyButton was not supposed to have that postcondition"
and
B: "i repeatedly ran that custom script i made for getting rid of last year's september worm on our brand new heisenberg compensator and then suddenly the lights went out, no idea how it could lead to that"
B guy would probably be more competent and achieve a longer average system uptime if he is good enough, but who will be more likely to be in trouble with his boss when something goes wrong?
boss is usually not competent enough to judge wether B is an genious and only the baddest of luck brought the system down or if he is just a jerk who is risking the system every day. B could be lucky if boss is not feeling too much intimidated by all that inunderstandable stuff B is doing.
A on the other hand, A will blame EasyButton, and while boss could well throw thunder and lightning at A for trusting EasyButton, he would more likely join in on blaming EasyButton, not only because it's the only thing he can try to avoid the anger of bossboss, but also because it's something he can understand: "Oh, EasyButton, you push it, and then it works or it does not work. Just like the button on my AOL internets."
Because Joe Taxpayer is considerably more frequently at an airport than at the white house (and airports are easily associated with terrorist attacks, one reason being the airport-airplane-911 link, the other the fact that everybody has to leave his protective shell aka SUV behind at the airport).
I think it is safe to assume that "airport" is used merely as a shorthand for "dear taxpayer, of course it will not protect _you_, but It Is For National Security! if the rocket hits you while the whilte house is protected then you have died heroically for the flag!"
Were people born preferring adidas over generic sports gear?
Fanatical ideas are not based on logical concepts, but there is a logic behind the circumstances that are needed to successfully implant them in brains.
which provokes the question: "why is this in any way newsworthy at this point in time?"
starting a project and having dreams may be some kind of accomplishement in itself, but it's by so many magnitudes smaller than sticking to a project long (and skillfully) enough to achive something like nexius (which i still found very lacking last time i checked, mostly because of squishy controls) that it hardly matters any more than stories about overbalancing sacks of raw food in foreign countries. the only thing that could make a project in this state any newsworthy would be if the core team would include some developers who are already known for one or two successful projects, but i did not see that anywhere.
and don't even think of "but only a news story will get them more developers", because no open source project will ever achieve anything if the original core developers are not ready to go all the way alone if neccessary.
haven't seen any new competition to the real ipod (30+ gb) since the iadio x5, and that one is prohibitively expensive while being limited by "joystick" navigation which we all know from our mobile phones as being not-so-good for scrolling through longer lists (which is key for big music collections, even with tree organisation)
most companies are only building things that are either video players first and audio players only second, or lack the capacity to hold a complete collection.
that still means different algorithms. gp poster was mainly complaining that ggp poster was completely ignoring the algorithmic dimension of the problems mentioned.
give the dog enough speed, memory and smart algos and it might end up enjoying the whole crotch sniffing thing because it makes humans blush and act funny.
Slashdot Mirror
We have all been seeing DHTML being an incredible fad for so long time and without there ever being anything really dynamic to it.
Now that we finally see dynamic HTML happen (even if the name has changed), how could we not expect the hype about the real thing to at least match the past hype about the early attempts?
Sure the name is stupid, but who cares! We do need some good hype to get standardization of something like that xml request object done and a catchy name can only help.
sure this should better read "casual passwords", like those used for posting on random forums and stuff like that. still better than using the one-passwords-fits-all approach.
but it goes beyond casual passwords if you use something like GPG: what would be a safer place for your passwords than an encrypted email to yourself locked behind your GPG secret key and passphrase?
i also thought of civilization as an example of a non-trashy game.
while this is not false, colonization is so more to highbrow that the civ series looks like cheap entertainment
i also consider the alpha centauri spinoff an artistically valuable game, so many questions about the spectrum of human ideologies...
I looked at piracy as "Try before you buy."
Do you really buy all those games that you "try" through more than 10%?
I doubt that, even though i expect you to deny.
But hte surprising new is, this still works out as soon as you take sequels into account. "Try before you buy" is the logical explanation for this oh so ill-reputed focus on sequels:
They don't do sequels because they lack ideas, they do them because if the first game was really good, then many of those who played the first version will buy the sequel. Notice that i said "played" not "bought". Everybody knows about the insane ratio between copies sold and copies played and doing sequels is the most practical way of turning that ratio into profit.
Pirated games obviously don't get the publisher any money, but they can act as a big huge interactive advertisement for the sequel. The problem, of course, is, that the audience of that advertisement exclusively consists of game pirates notorious for not getting the publisher any money, but as long as there are gamers who will pirate one game and buy the other there will be an economic reason for sequels.
and supply us with good replicas of the original Robo Rally?
> If you don't want other people using your wireless network,
> secure your goddamn router. It's trivially easy, and the
> responsibility for it rests on you and you alone.
with wireless routers there happens to be security and "security". Setting up WPA encryption is certainly not inviting, but it does not provide much technical security eiter.
Making too much of a difference between that kind of "security" and openness is quite close to DMCAthink along the lines of "if there is some deliberate defectiveness on the CD that prevents copying on 10% of all computers then it is highly illegal to copy on the other 90%".
maybe it would be a good idea to have some kind of opt-in openness flag (with a definable bandwidth allowance?), with that in place you could even think of having protocols that would allow you to easily open your router to visitors without sacrificing encryption of your personal LAN connections.
it's called brand name highjacking.
appearently those people are thinking that the ipod brand is so powerful that people would rather pay for somegadget+ipod than just for somegadget, even if only for the difference of somegadget alone lacking the ipod brand.
the scary thing is, i think they might be right
add some of that ultra-fast memory from the GPU to the CPU as some kind of level-whatever cache, and you get closer.
then, realizing that graphics work can be parallelized like flies you then replace half of your complicated out-of-order-execution general purpose cores with a number of smaller cores that each get half the bang out of 1/10 the transistors. those would still be general purpose, but there is so little left in today's GPUs that is really specific to a graphics pipeline, that it would not make much of a difference. still, those cores (or mmx style special units) would be much easier be brought to use for purposes other than gaming than today's GPUs.
we agree that the basic nature of graphics processing lies in the parallelism. why limit your parallelism-oriented resources to graphics processing?
> I'm going to come out and say that, within 5 years, we'll be seeing GPU processors ...) The power and bandwidth demands for next gen GPUs are becoming more
> integrated into the motherboard, accessable to both ATI and NVidia (and Matrox, and
> S3, and
> than expansion boards can handle.
I really did not see this coming until after the merger, but now i realized that the maths is quite simple:
Back in the days of 3dfx (and, of course, earlier) the speed from cpu to video DAC was a bottleneck that had to be overcome by painting to framebuffer with an accompanying RAMDAC and trying to generate as much of the framebuffer content updates by some external chip (the GPU).
In the days of digital displays we don't even need a video DAC anymore and at the same our CPUs are starting to come with an external bandwidth that could easily carry multiple DVI links (a quick check at wikipedia rates hypertransport at roughly 20 GByte/s while dual link DVI is rated less than 1 GByte/s). To make matters even more clear, the current ways of externally generating the content of the framebuffer often demand more bandwidth for communicating between CPU/RAM and GPU (AGP 8x is listed as 2 GByte/s, 16 times as much as dual link DVI) than for moving the result down the DVI 60 times per second.
Conclusion: the bottleneck has moved, once it made sense to move as much of the image creation as close to the RAMDAC as possible, today everything looks like moving the image creation as close to CPU/RAM as possible is the thing to do. As it happens, in the AMD world CPU and RAM are effektively at the same place.
Today we have very fast RAM at the GPU end of things, but moving that closer to the CPU, acting as another caching stage for both general purpose and the moved graphics units could only make things faster.
Add to that the fact that todays GPU pipelines have little in them that is strictly graphic specific and that external number crunching chips (that seem to have a lot in common with those still-GPUs) seem to be taking over both the entertainment PC and the high performance clusters and you get a glimpse of an x86 future that looks as surprising and strange as it looks promising.
what makes you assume that the protals are bidirectional?
iirc the demo even had a part showing the player running against an output portal (or _the_ output portal, since there is always just one) as if it was a brick wall. the first portal you make is the output, so there is no "portal leading nowhere".
i strongly assume it's "click: red -> click: blue -> click: red..." and so on.
where one color means input and the other means output, effectively you will always have exactly one pair of portals. if the last portal you made for your loop was the output in the ceiling then "shooting" anywhere else will result in you hitting the floor where the input portal was before and if the last portal you made was the input in the floor then the next will be the output, so you will fall into the input and emerge where you last shot at at infinite-loop-falling-speed (which is probably limited, think of increased air friction). iirc they even demoed this effect in the video.
falling damage is a parameter that can easily be set to 0
i don't think a game like this would give much about physical realism, instead it would only care about making for interesting gameplay. instant-death loops are not part of that. i guess they would even implement some kind of (not too high) upper limit for falling speed, because otherwise you would quickly end up with funny temporal aliasing effects between frame rate and loop speed. this would probably be interesting for us techies but be harmful for immersion.
this is about gameplay and not about culling methods.
there's a simple answer: input/ouput portals are not first/secondary fire, but are even/uneven "shots".
so a situation where an "input" exists without an output does not occur.
you should also note that the video displays traditional hl2 "grav gun" functionality too, so it's probably like this: primary: make in/out portals, secondary: grip/release with grav gun (or switched)
i guess those really massive workstation PCs beat the desktop macs in both performance and being ridiculously expensive
i don't think it's just lack of intelligence:
there's a big difference between
A: "i just pushed the EasyButton(tm) and then the lights went out, EasyButton was not supposed to have that postcondition"
and
B: "i repeatedly ran that custom script i made for getting rid of last year's september worm on our brand new heisenberg compensator and then suddenly the lights went out, no idea how it could lead to that"
B guy would probably be more competent and achieve a longer average system uptime if he is good enough, but who will be more likely to be in trouble with his boss when something goes wrong?
boss is usually not competent enough to judge wether B is an genious and only the baddest of luck brought the system down or if he is just a jerk who is risking the system every day. B could be lucky if boss is not feeling too much intimidated by all that inunderstandable stuff B is doing.
A on the other hand, A will blame EasyButton, and while boss could well throw thunder and lightning at A for trusting EasyButton, he would more likely join in on blaming EasyButton, not only because it's the only thing he can try to avoid the anger of bossboss, but also because it's something he can understand: "Oh, EasyButton, you push it, and then it works or it does not work. Just like the button on my AOL internets."
poor anonymous paranoia victim...
i owe you a beer when "they" get me earlier than they get you, ok?
Because Joe Taxpayer is considerably more frequently at an airport than at the white house (and airports are easily associated with terrorist attacks, one reason being the airport-airplane-911 link, the other the fact that everybody has to leave his protective shell aka SUV behind at the airport).
I think it is safe to assume that "airport" is used merely as a shorthand for "dear taxpayer, of course it will not protect _you_, but It Is For National Security! if the rocket hits you while the whilte house is protected then you have died heroically for the flag!"
"They want to throw every non-muslim to the sea."
And you think they were born that way?
Were people born preferring adidas over generic sports gear?
Fanatical ideas are not based on logical concepts, but there is a logic behind the circumstances that are needed to successfully implant them in brains.
seen videos, was not impressed, at least in terms of beauty.
i guess it's just that some people correlate beauty and novelty more and some correlate those terms less. call it taste if everything else fails.
which provokes the question: "why is this in any way newsworthy at this point in time?"
starting a project and having dreams may be some kind of accomplishement in itself, but it's by so many magnitudes smaller than sticking to a project long (and skillfully) enough to achive something like nexius (which i still found very lacking last time i checked, mostly because of squishy controls) that it hardly matters any more than stories about overbalancing sacks of raw food in foreign countries. the only thing that could make a project in this state any newsworthy would be if the core team would include some developers who are already known for one or two successful projects, but i did not see that anywhere.
and don't even think of "but only a news story will get them more developers", because no open source project will ever achieve anything if the original core developers are not ready to go all the way alone if neccessary.
haven't seen any new competition to the real ipod (30+ gb) since the iadio x5, and that one is prohibitively expensive while being limited by "joystick" navigation which we all know from our mobile phones as being not-so-good for scrolling through longer lists (which is key for big music collections, even with tree organisation)
most companies are only building things that are either video players first and audio players only second, or lack the capacity to hold a complete collection.
it's the usual phrasing for that certain kind of bicycle speed record.
i wonder if this one is standing start or flying start.
"bought" is a funny term to describe those events
that still means different algorithms. gp poster was mainly complaining that ggp poster was completely ignoring the algorithmic dimension of the problems mentioned.
give the dog enough speed, memory and smart algos and it might end up enjoying the whole crotch sniffing thing because it makes humans blush and act funny.