I'm not anti- or pro- anything, but headlines like "Marijuana Cures Herpes!" and "Hemp Can Stop Hangnails!" showing up here are quite disappointing
Then show they're not true. I don't know about those, but this one seems to have good research behind it.
chemically-induced reality avoidance.
So's alcohol, which we legalized. Not because it was good, but because the prevention was worse than the cure.
By the way: I don't smoke it, and I probably wouldn't if it was legal. But I think the "war on drugs" goes against my core values -- people should have the right to be stupid, when it doesn't affect others. And said war does affect others -- the death is no longer in our backyard, so to speak, it's just happening in Mexico.
In fact, I'd rather see all of them legalized. Take coca -- coca leaves are used in coca tea, which is a mild stimulant (less so than caffeine), and helps with altitude. Yet it's illegal because coca can be used to make cocaine. (Unless, of course, you are the Coca-Cola company...)
But stop bellyaching about how everyone is mean to marijuana.
Then quit outlawing shit you don't like just because.
No, because there is no such thing as no risk. Every time you walk out the door, there's the risk of getting hit by a car, or a meteor falling on your head, or a heart attack from the stress...
You may as well stay in bed, but then there's the risk of bed sores, atrophy...
The whole plant will NEVER be legalized because the side effects are so severe that there will never be a suitable time to use it.
And when is there a suitable time to use tobacco? Alcohol? How about sugar?
Consider, also, that hemp can be used for things other than smoking.
And while we're at it, coca does not have to be made into cocaine. It also makes a traditional tea, a mild, not particularly addictive stimulant, which is very helpful with altitude sickness.
On the other hand, orange juice can be used as an ingredient for acid -- or napalm.
I do not buy the argument that just because something can be abused, it should be banned. Everything can be abused, and most things do have "legitimate" purposes.
You still need a video BIOS to display VGA until/unless the OS provides real drivers.
Perhaps more importantly, you still need the BIOS to provide hard drive support until the native support is loaded.
In the case of Linux, all the needed drivers will be loaded from the initramfs within the first few seconds of boot, but the bootloader (Grub or Lilo) still needs the BIOS to read the kernel and initrd from disk. Only way around that, that I can think of, is for coreboot to natively support loading and running the kernel/initrd.
Either approach means the BIOS needs to either reproduce the old BIOS bug-for-bug, or be compatible with a specific OS.
We do all kinds of things today considered impossible in earlier times.
We also don't do things today that earlier times would've predicted. That's the problem -- it's not that we won't invent amazing new things. It's that they will, and they'll be what nobody expected.
So how has it always worked before? (Hint: It actually hasn't, not even close, but let's pretend it has.)
Never -- not once has it worked the way we expect.
Once we got rockets, and we got into space, we expected this to be the "space age", where we would develop spaceships fast enough to travel between stars, and we would colonize the moon, maybe mars, so any problem of overpopulation or pollution might be mitigated by no longer being bound to Earth.
And what happened, instead? We got the information age. We got computers which can calculate insanely fast, and communicate enormous amounts of information over vast distances. We got technology which can tell us, in detail, how utterly screwed we are for waiting for the other technology (faster-than-light travel, better telescopes to find viable planets) that never came.
You can see this kind of thing happening all the time, and much faster, in software. In the 90's, it might have made a lot of sense to speculate that Java would take the world by storm, and that developers would be writing new, cross-platform applications, and that new users wouldn't have to care what OS their computer came with, because they'd just use Java.
Well, there's still too much of a legacy codebase to drop Windows entirely, but Java applets, at least, have been pretty much entirely replaced by Flash, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, by Javascript and HTML. Raise your hand if you actually expected to be using an AJAX (or DHTML, if you like) spreadsheet by now.
Without their strong caveats who knows whether enough of us would feel compelled to actually solve those problems before they blindsided us like a stealth missile.
Perhaps TFA is strongly worded. Perhaps we are that good, and we will find a way to solve these problems.
But we won't do it by sticking our fingers in our ears and going "nananana I can't hear you" until the problem goes away.
First, we have to acknowledge that it's a real problem. Then, we have to get to work -- and it will be a lot of work, hard work, probably taking decades, maybe longer than it took to get into this mess.
Global warming brought to you by the same people who can't tell you what the temperature will be next week, yet they can tell you what it will be a thousand years from now.
I can't tell you what temperature it will be tomorrow. We've had days as cold as -15 or so (with wind chill) and as warm as 50 degrees Fahrenheit, all in the same winter.
But I can tell you that it is winter, and without looking at the forecast, I can tell you that it will probably be cold. And I can also tell you, without much difficulty, that summer will be mostly warm, and winter will be mostly cold.
Like the REST of the planet has NOTHING to do with the climate.
Before humans, were forests ever clear-cut? There were forest fires, as a healthy part of the lifecycle of a forest, but were they ever completely cut down to roots?
Before humans, was there ever an atomic explosion on the surface of this planet?
Before humans, was there a way for animals on the opposite end of the planet to communicate with each other?
So why is it so hard to believe that humans could be raising the average temperature of the planet by a few degrees every year?
There may actually be good arguments against global warming, but you're just embarrassing yourself, here. Ice shelves are melting. They are melting farther than before, and faster than before. There is more carbon dioxide, and the average temperature is rising.
Yes, we've had ice ages in the past. Yes, it's possible the planet will survive us -- in fact, it's more than likely that "the planet", the dirty ball of rock hurtling through space, will still be here. But I don't particularly want to live through an ice age, if I can help it -- or the opposite.
Let me ask you something. Since most scientists who actually have more than a passing familiarity with the subject overwhelmingly agree that climate change is happening -- since Ford himself has outright admitted that global warming is real, and that the internal combustion engine is contributing to the problem -- where's the motive for such a vast conspiracy? Or if it's vast stupidity, don't you think an intelligent scientist would have shown it to be so, and provided evidence to that effect -- rather than yet more evidence to support that the climate is changing, and that we are doing it?
Portability was one of the goals of KDE4, and it is encouraging to see it works.
Now if only the other parts of it would stop sucking...
Today's Daily KDE4 WTF: My clock has two lines. The first line is the time, in military time -- 08:31. This works fine. The second line is the date: Tue, 27 Jan. It might be 27 January, but I can't tell, because the T and half the u in Tue, and most of the n in Jan, are cut off.
I realize it's meant to be scalable, but why is it scalable right off the edges of the widget? And in a widget which is in the panel, by default?
Just one of many KDE4 WTFs which makes you wonder, "Forget QA, did anyone actually fucking boot it up to see if it was working?"
Also I use a Mac keyboard in windows all the time. What the problem.
I suppose I'll have to try out a Macbook to see how I like it. So far, the problems with my Aluminum keyboard:
Command/option instead of alt/win. I know, these can be remapped, but it's still annoying.
Just about every symbol on the numpad has been shifted to make room for =.
F13 through F19. Cool, but I'd much rather have printscreen, scroll lock, and pause. I can remap them, but these aren't the kind of keys I know by muscle memory. I suppose I could write on them...
No Insert key. WTF. No, it's not "help" -- instead, that key has been turned into "fn", and is interpreted either in hardware or in firmware. I'm hoping firmware, and one day I'll learn enough to dig into that with a disassembler and set it right.
Of course, I'll need OS X to flash that firmware. No documentation I know of with which to write a driver for another OS.
Now, it's possible I'm completely wrong, and none of this applies to the laptop keyboards. I wouldn't know from actual usage, though. My Powerbook died (and Apple refused to repair it) long before I ever got Linux working on it.
I think apple should get maybe a 3-5 year patent.
Better than what we have now, but consider how fast technology moves in that time. 3-5 years is a long time to wait.
It's worth mentioning that this trend is not only in software. It's easiest to see here, because software moves so much faster, and it's so completely misunderstood by the patent office. But it's not just in software, and it's not recent.
I'm sure someone less lazy than me will find the appropriate paper -- it discussed the development of the first steam engines, often used as an example of the patent system working -- but it illustrates just how clearly the patent system did not work here. Specifically, two competing steam companies couldn't use each other's improvements, so they had to work out less effective, more wasteful workarounds just to avoid being sued.
I often sit and wonder about the cases where this truly causes harm -- suppose someone patented an affordable, powerful, stylish 100 mpg car (urban legend, I know). We'd have 20 more years of other car companies selling gas guzzlers because the one company sat on that patent. Or suppose it was medicine -- you'd have people dying because they couldn't afford the prices of the main supplier, and their competitors couldn't use the formula.
I know I'm talking to myself, but I think I might also be talking myself into releasing my open source projects as public domain.
The whole point of patents is to reward and encourage innovation.
And they have failed miserably at that.
Do you suppose Apple would not have built the iPhone if they couldn't patent its multitouch? Of course not. They'd still have first mover, it'd still have that Apple gleam, and everyone would still want one. And they'd still have carved a large chunk out of the smartphone market -- and expanded it into a large number of people who never wanted a smartphone before -- before anyone else even had a shot.
What this does is prevent other people from building on that work, without Apple's permission.
all the companies since are just jumping on the bandwagon, and generally doing so pretty poorly.
Gee, I wonder why? It couldn't have anything to do with Apple patenting so much of the iPhone that no one else can legally compete with it?
The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'. Developers should be able to innovate their way around that specific interface
Let's pretend, for a moment, that Xerox had been smart, and patented the GUI. So now everyone has to innovate their way around the mouse?
Let's not forget: This is about promoting the general welfare, not the welfare of specific companies. And when someone locks some new development up for 18 years, consumers are the ones who suffer.
Just as an example: I'll bet Apple patented the magnetic cord of the MacBook. That means I won't be able to buy any laptop other than a Macbook for the better part of two decades which has that feature. And they also have iPhone-style multitouch in the touchpad -- probably won't be able to get that anywhere else, either.
Which means I've lost a significant amount of choice. Because I don't want a Macbook -- Linux doesn't run well on them, they have a single-button touchpad instead of two or three, the keyboard is an Apple keyboard -- great for OS X, sucks for anything else...
I think, we should just drop patents altogether. They cause more harm than good. It's still possible to exercise first mover's advantage, or compete on quality or price -- unless, of course, no one out there is up to the task of innovating in their business model.
they can't do a damn thing to stop American Android users from downloading code to do it anyway from a server in Bulgaria, Vanatu, Russia, or anywhere else not subject to the long arm of American patent law.
Except provide the iPhone as an alternative which doesn't force you to do those things.
And users don't particularly want to know or care about patent law. They'll just assume Apple is better or smarter than these other phones, and that the iPhone is better.
Sometimes a patent is not such a good thing for the public.
I'm curious if a patent ever is a good thing for the public. it really only ever seems to do exactly this.
I mean, look at this. It's clearly Apple's IP. It's clearly a new invention.
It's also clear that Apple has already gained the competitive advantage a patent is supposed to provide, without the patent.
Which means that all the patent does, in this case, is retard progress for twenty years by preventing anyone else from beginning to compete with the iPhone. It's the difference between building new and exciting interfaces that start with the iPhone and expand beyond it, and instead having everyone else have to build ugly hacks to avoid infringing on that patent even when the iPhone is a horribly obsolete product.
Patents should last the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market. That's a year, maybe two or three. Not fifteen or twenty.
Given that I was employed then, and this was to be my main work computer -- or at least, that was the justification...
I did get a fast drive -- SSD. They wouldn't ship with less than 4 gigs of RAM. It's a 2.5 ghz core 2 duo with 6 megs of cache.
The main regret was getting this model without checking my basic assumptions -- it does not come with gigabit. Had to get a gigabit PCI express card. I could also have used a newer, better video card, and ideally something for which XP drivers are readily available.
But yes, I do appreciate the speed when I need it -- both for gaming and for the less-optimized work applications. (As in, applications we've developed at work.) In fact, with a scripting language, RAM and CPU are what matter, disk is going to be way smaller, if anything.
For games, which typically run on a single machine, this is a non-issue.
It still is, though, because now there's memory bandwidth to consider. The amount of cache/RAM, and how fast it is -- or worse, requiring more RAM in your system, or on a raytrace-friendly video card...
Contrast with rasterizers, which can at least transfer the scene in discrete, contiguous chunks, whereas a raytracer will hit it more unpredictably, as you said.
The problem is, I, and many other overclockers, had a bit of an attitude about it. Why would you waste an extra $100 to change the clock speed, or open up a few more pipelines, on what is basically an identical chip?
Answer: Because you're also paying for that particular chip to have tested those pipelines, and to have tested and been insulated for that speed.
As long as it's made clear that this is a hobby, that's fine. But it should be made equally clear to anyone going in that this is not a way to save time or money, as it will cost both in the long run.
I've always been more of a fan of underclocking, myself. Or as you say, regular-clocking.
Well, never under spec -- after all, once you're no longer overclocking, you can let the normal CPU scaling kick in.
This laptop is dual-core, capable of 2.5 ghz, usually runs at 800 mhz. If I deliberately clocked it down further, I don't see what I would gain -- and sometimes you do have a CPU-bound application. Especially great if it's a CPU-bound command -- most of the time you run at 800 mhz, then you run a command that takes ten seconds instead of a minute because it slammed the CPU up to 2.5 ghz, then when it's over, drops to 800 mhz again.
30% isn't going to make much difference in UI performance. Spend that money on RAM.
This laptop came with 4 gigs of RAM, so I decided to spend more money on a faster CPU. I don't think it could fit more RAM.
I know I once bought a specific CPU because I knew it would be good for overclocking. It wasn't a bad idea -- a 1.8 ghz CPU that I could get running at 2.4, at perhaps half or a third the price of a similar CPU at 2.4 ghz, and I'd overclock my RAM, also.
I learned two things:
First, you really have to know your stuff. The RAM I had wouldn't overclock very well, and RAM which would cost a bit more. I had the BIOS helping me out, and I still had to fiddle with timings and voltages.
And second, despite all the stress testing I did, it would still occasionally crash. I never tracked down these crashes until I clocked it back to spec. Once I got a job, I decided that shelling out another hundred dollars or so for a faster CPU was a better use of my time than trying to overclock one, and dealing with the instability once I did.
Now, that's probably a completely different area than overclocking to 6.5 ghz, but if I really needed that, I imagine it would be much more cost-effective to buy two or three of them. It won't really help rasterized games (that'd be video-card bound), and raytraced games should scale to multiple machines.
Why do people always compare static rendering with dynamic rendering?
Because the time to render that static image does count.
A billion dollar industry isn't wrong.
Billion dollar industries have been wrong before. And merely because a particular technique is right now, doesn't mean it will be right forever.
Case in point: It used to be, everyone in the industry assumed shadows were too hard to do dynamically. So, as a performance hack, they were projected statically, and incorporated into the textures. If you had a light shining on a fan, you'd have a texture on the wall behind it of a spinning-fan shadow.
Then, computers got powerful enough, and Carmack found a neat little hack, and suddenly, Doom3 had real lighting and shadows, from multiple sources.
One problem you have is that the graphics hardware out there isn't built for ray tracing, it's built for rasterization.
This paper is by Intel, who wants to release video hardware specifically designed for raytracing. It's also embarrassingly parallel -- this example originally ran on a cluster of 20 machines.
Ray tracers do NOT scale well with resolution. Each pixel has to have it's own ray cast.
That's linear. As in, throw in twice as many cores, and you can handle twice as many pixels. How does rasterization scale with pixels?
Ok well that doesn't compare favorably against the rasterizers. They scale extremely well with resolution, and also in terms of anti-aliasing. Many of them can do 4xFSAA with next to no performance penalty...
Alright -- but you haven't actually shown what the requirement is. Is it logarithmic? Linear? Constant?
The net result wouldn't look as good as the equivalent rasterized game.
No, it will look better, when it gets there.
As an example: A mirror in a rasterized game will either require a second rendering pass (that is, render an image from the mirror's perspective, then use it as a texture and render that), or it will require you to duplicate the geometry of everything on one side of the mirror to the other.
Now, what if you have two mirrors facing each other? What if you're playing something like Portal?
With a raytraced mirror, you simply send out another ray from the mirror.
Or, suppose you want to show a reflective sphere. That's a tricky shader, and how many polygons does it take? Too many, and you slow things down. Too few, and it becomes obvious that it's not a sphere, but an n-hedron. With a raytracer, you just throw in a perfect sphere, and with high school math, you can make it reflective. Just like the mirror, it can just send out another ray, at a slightly different angle.
You throw a positively massive system at it and you get poor performance.
From TFA:
With Intelâ(TM)s latest quad-socket systemsâ"equipped with a 2.66 GHz Dunnington processor in each socketâ"we can achieve approximately 20 to 35 fps at a resolution of 1280x720. Nonetheless, this represents a significant improvement over the experiments in 2004 that required 20 machines to render a simpler game more slowly and at a lower resolution.
In other words, what took a positively massive system in 2004, takes a single machine in 2009, if I've read that right. I wonder what it will look like in 2014? Or when Intel comes out with its special-purpose raytracing hardware, that's basically a bunch of CPUs?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not anti- or pro- anything, but headlines like "Marijuana Cures Herpes!" and "Hemp Can Stop Hangnails!" showing up here are quite disappointing
Then show they're not true. I don't know about those, but this one seems to have good research behind it.
chemically-induced reality avoidance.
So's alcohol, which we legalized. Not because it was good, but because the prevention was worse than the cure.
By the way: I don't smoke it, and I probably wouldn't if it was legal. But I think the "war on drugs" goes against my core values -- people should have the right to be stupid, when it doesn't affect others. And said war does affect others -- the death is no longer in our backyard, so to speak, it's just happening in Mexico.
In fact, I'd rather see all of them legalized. Take coca -- coca leaves are used in coca tea, which is a mild stimulant (less so than caffeine), and helps with altitude. Yet it's illegal because coca can be used to make cocaine. (Unless, of course, you are the Coca-Cola company...)
But stop bellyaching about how everyone is mean to marijuana.
Then quit outlawing shit you don't like just because.
Btw, reduced does not equal none.
No, because there is no such thing as no risk. Every time you walk out the door, there's the risk of getting hit by a car, or a meteor falling on your head, or a heart attack from the stress...
You may as well stay in bed, but then there's the risk of bed sores, atrophy...
The whole plant will NEVER be legalized because the side effects are so severe that there will never be a suitable time to use it.
And when is there a suitable time to use tobacco? Alcohol? How about sugar?
Consider, also, that hemp can be used for things other than smoking.
And while we're at it, coca does not have to be made into cocaine. It also makes a traditional tea, a mild, not particularly addictive stimulant, which is very helpful with altitude sickness.
On the other hand, orange juice can be used as an ingredient for acid -- or napalm.
I do not buy the argument that just because something can be abused, it should be banned. Everything can be abused, and most things do have "legitimate" purposes.
Because non-hippies are doing so well at that right now...
You still need a video BIOS to display VGA until/unless the OS provides real drivers.
Perhaps more importantly, you still need the BIOS to provide hard drive support until the native support is loaded.
In the case of Linux, all the needed drivers will be loaded from the initramfs within the first few seconds of boot, but the bootloader (Grub or Lilo) still needs the BIOS to read the kernel and initrd from disk. Only way around that, that I can think of, is for coreboot to natively support loading and running the kernel/initrd.
Either approach means the BIOS needs to either reproduce the old BIOS bug-for-bug, or be compatible with a specific OS.
Wait for Larrabee, which should be available as a discrete card. Buy AMD motherboards and CPUs, and Intel video cards.
Or wait longer, for the open source ATI drivers to start working -- most of the specs have been released.
We do all kinds of things today considered impossible in earlier times.
We also don't do things today that earlier times would've predicted. That's the problem -- it's not that we won't invent amazing new things. It's that they will, and they'll be what nobody expected.
Where's my flying car? Where's my ticket to Mars?
So how has it always worked before? (Hint: It actually hasn't, not even close, but let's pretend it has.)
Never -- not once has it worked the way we expect.
Once we got rockets, and we got into space, we expected this to be the "space age", where we would develop spaceships fast enough to travel between stars, and we would colonize the moon, maybe mars, so any problem of overpopulation or pollution might be mitigated by no longer being bound to Earth.
And what happened, instead? We got the information age. We got computers which can calculate insanely fast, and communicate enormous amounts of information over vast distances. We got technology which can tell us, in detail, how utterly screwed we are for waiting for the other technology (faster-than-light travel, better telescopes to find viable planets) that never came.
You can see this kind of thing happening all the time, and much faster, in software. In the 90's, it might have made a lot of sense to speculate that Java would take the world by storm, and that developers would be writing new, cross-platform applications, and that new users wouldn't have to care what OS their computer came with, because they'd just use Java.
Well, there's still too much of a legacy codebase to drop Windows entirely, but Java applets, at least, have been pretty much entirely replaced by Flash, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, by Javascript and HTML. Raise your hand if you actually expected to be using an AJAX (or DHTML, if you like) spreadsheet by now.
And that is the important point here:
Without their strong caveats who knows whether enough of us would feel compelled to actually solve those problems before they blindsided us like a stealth missile.
Perhaps TFA is strongly worded. Perhaps we are that good, and we will find a way to solve these problems.
But we won't do it by sticking our fingers in our ears and going "nananana I can't hear you" until the problem goes away.
First, we have to acknowledge that it's a real problem. Then, we have to get to work -- and it will be a lot of work, hard work, probably taking decades, maybe longer than it took to get into this mess.
Global warming brought to you by the same people who can't tell you what the temperature will be next week, yet they can tell you what it will be a thousand years from now.
I can't tell you what temperature it will be tomorrow. We've had days as cold as -15 or so (with wind chill) and as warm as 50 degrees Fahrenheit, all in the same winter.
But I can tell you that it is winter, and without looking at the forecast, I can tell you that it will probably be cold. And I can also tell you, without much difficulty, that summer will be mostly warm, and winter will be mostly cold.
Like the REST of the planet has NOTHING to do with the climate.
Before humans, were forests ever clear-cut? There were forest fires, as a healthy part of the lifecycle of a forest, but were they ever completely cut down to roots?
Before humans, was there ever an atomic explosion on the surface of this planet?
Before humans, was there a way for animals on the opposite end of the planet to communicate with each other?
So why is it so hard to believe that humans could be raising the average temperature of the planet by a few degrees every year?
There may actually be good arguments against global warming, but you're just embarrassing yourself, here. Ice shelves are melting. They are melting farther than before, and faster than before. There is more carbon dioxide, and the average temperature is rising.
Yes, we've had ice ages in the past. Yes, it's possible the planet will survive us -- in fact, it's more than likely that "the planet", the dirty ball of rock hurtling through space, will still be here. But I don't particularly want to live through an ice age, if I can help it -- or the opposite.
Let me ask you something. Since most scientists who actually have more than a passing familiarity with the subject overwhelmingly agree that climate change is happening -- since Ford himself has outright admitted that global warming is real, and that the internal combustion engine is contributing to the problem -- where's the motive for such a vast conspiracy? Or if it's vast stupidity, don't you think an intelligent scientist would have shown it to be so, and provided evidence to that effect -- rather than yet more evidence to support that the climate is changing, and that we are doing it?
Portability was one of the goals of KDE4, and it is encouraging to see it works.
Now if only the other parts of it would stop sucking...
Today's Daily KDE4 WTF: My clock has two lines. The first line is the time, in military time -- 08:31. This works fine. The second line is the date: Tue, 27 Jan. It might be 27 January, but I can't tell, because the T and half the u in Tue, and most of the n in Jan, are cut off.
I realize it's meant to be scalable, but why is it scalable right off the edges of the widget? And in a widget which is in the panel, by default?
Just one of many KDE4 WTFs which makes you wonder, "Forget QA, did anyone actually fucking boot it up to see if it was working?"
Also I use a Mac keyboard in windows all the time. What the problem.
I suppose I'll have to try out a Macbook to see how I like it. So far, the problems with my Aluminum keyboard:
Command/option instead of alt/win. I know, these can be remapped, but it's still annoying.
Just about every symbol on the numpad has been shifted to make room for =.
F13 through F19. Cool, but I'd much rather have printscreen, scroll lock, and pause. I can remap them, but these aren't the kind of keys I know by muscle memory. I suppose I could write on them...
No Insert key. WTF. No, it's not "help" -- instead, that key has been turned into "fn", and is interpreted either in hardware or in firmware. I'm hoping firmware, and one day I'll learn enough to dig into that with a disassembler and set it right.
Of course, I'll need OS X to flash that firmware. No documentation I know of with which to write a driver for another OS.
Now, it's possible I'm completely wrong, and none of this applies to the laptop keyboards. I wouldn't know from actual usage, though. My Powerbook died (and Apple refused to repair it) long before I ever got Linux working on it.
I think apple should get maybe a 3-5 year patent.
Better than what we have now, but consider how fast technology moves in that time. 3-5 years is a long time to wait.
It's worth mentioning that this trend is not only in software. It's easiest to see here, because software moves so much faster, and it's so completely misunderstood by the patent office. But it's not just in software, and it's not recent.
I'm sure someone less lazy than me will find the appropriate paper -- it discussed the development of the first steam engines, often used as an example of the patent system working -- but it illustrates just how clearly the patent system did not work here. Specifically, two competing steam companies couldn't use each other's improvements, so they had to work out less effective, more wasteful workarounds just to avoid being sued.
I often sit and wonder about the cases where this truly causes harm -- suppose someone patented an affordable, powerful, stylish 100 mpg car (urban legend, I know). We'd have 20 more years of other car companies selling gas guzzlers because the one company sat on that patent. Or suppose it was medicine -- you'd have people dying because they couldn't afford the prices of the main supplier, and their competitors couldn't use the formula.
I know I'm talking to myself, but I think I might also be talking myself into releasing my open source projects as public domain.
If Apple is willing to license the use of the patent for a royalty fee; sure, it can be advanced by other companies.
Apple isn't even willing to allow an interpreted language on the iPhone. What makes you think they would be willing to relinquish control here?
The whole point of patents is to reward and encourage innovation.
And they have failed miserably at that.
Do you suppose Apple would not have built the iPhone if they couldn't patent its multitouch? Of course not. They'd still have first mover, it'd still have that Apple gleam, and everyone would still want one. And they'd still have carved a large chunk out of the smartphone market -- and expanded it into a large number of people who never wanted a smartphone before -- before anyone else even had a shot.
What this does is prevent other people from building on that work, without Apple's permission.
all the companies since are just jumping on the bandwagon, and generally doing so pretty poorly.
Gee, I wonder why? It couldn't have anything to do with Apple patenting so much of the iPhone that no one else can legally compete with it?
The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'. Developers should be able to innovate their way around that specific interface
Let's pretend, for a moment, that Xerox had been smart, and patented the GUI. So now everyone has to innovate their way around the mouse?
Let's not forget: This is about promoting the general welfare, not the welfare of specific companies. And when someone locks some new development up for 18 years, consumers are the ones who suffer.
Just as an example: I'll bet Apple patented the magnetic cord of the MacBook. That means I won't be able to buy any laptop other than a Macbook for the better part of two decades which has that feature. And they also have iPhone-style multitouch in the touchpad -- probably won't be able to get that anywhere else, either.
Which means I've lost a significant amount of choice. Because I don't want a Macbook -- Linux doesn't run well on them, they have a single-button touchpad instead of two or three, the keyboard is an Apple keyboard -- great for OS X, sucks for anything else...
I think, we should just drop patents altogether. They cause more harm than good. It's still possible to exercise first mover's advantage, or compete on quality or price -- unless, of course, no one out there is up to the task of innovating in their business model.
they can't do a damn thing to stop American Android users from downloading code to do it anyway from a server in Bulgaria, Vanatu, Russia, or anywhere else not subject to the long arm of American patent law.
Except provide the iPhone as an alternative which doesn't force you to do those things.
And users don't particularly want to know or care about patent law. They'll just assume Apple is better or smarter than these other phones, and that the iPhone is better.
Sometimes a patent is not such a good thing for the public.
I'm curious if a patent ever is a good thing for the public. it really only ever seems to do exactly this.
I mean, look at this. It's clearly Apple's IP. It's clearly a new invention.
It's also clear that Apple has already gained the competitive advantage a patent is supposed to provide, without the patent.
Which means that all the patent does, in this case, is retard progress for twenty years by preventing anyone else from beginning to compete with the iPhone. It's the difference between building new and exciting interfaces that start with the iPhone and expand beyond it, and instead having everyone else have to build ugly hacks to avoid infringing on that patent even when the iPhone is a horribly obsolete product.
Patents should last the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market. That's a year, maybe two or three. Not fifteen or twenty.
Given that I was employed then, and this was to be my main work computer -- or at least, that was the justification...
I did get a fast drive -- SSD. They wouldn't ship with less than 4 gigs of RAM. It's a 2.5 ghz core 2 duo with 6 megs of cache.
The main regret was getting this model without checking my basic assumptions -- it does not come with gigabit. Had to get a gigabit PCI express card. I could also have used a newer, better video card, and ideally something for which XP drivers are readily available.
But yes, I do appreciate the speed when I need it -- both for gaming and for the less-optimized work applications. (As in, applications we've developed at work.) In fact, with a scripting language, RAM and CPU are what matter, disk is going to be way smaller, if anything.
They tried, but "Think of the Terrorists!" was too predictable.
Ah, thanks for that...
For games, which typically run on a single machine, this is a non-issue.
It still is, though, because now there's memory bandwidth to consider. The amount of cache/RAM, and how fast it is -- or worse, requiring more RAM in your system, or on a raytrace-friendly video card...
Contrast with rasterizers, which can at least transfer the scene in discrete, contiguous chunks, whereas a raytracer will hit it more unpredictably, as you said.
The problem is, I, and many other overclockers, had a bit of an attitude about it. Why would you waste an extra $100 to change the clock speed, or open up a few more pipelines, on what is basically an identical chip?
Answer: Because you're also paying for that particular chip to have tested those pipelines, and to have tested and been insulated for that speed.
As long as it's made clear that this is a hobby, that's fine. But it should be made equally clear to anyone going in that this is not a way to save time or money, as it will cost both in the long run.
I've always been more of a fan of underclocking, myself. Or as you say, regular-clocking.
Well, never under spec -- after all, once you're no longer overclocking, you can let the normal CPU scaling kick in.
This laptop is dual-core, capable of 2.5 ghz, usually runs at 800 mhz. If I deliberately clocked it down further, I don't see what I would gain -- and sometimes you do have a CPU-bound application. Especially great if it's a CPU-bound command -- most of the time you run at 800 mhz, then you run a command that takes ten seconds instead of a minute because it slammed the CPU up to 2.5 ghz, then when it's over, drops to 800 mhz again.
30% isn't going to make much difference in UI performance. Spend that money on RAM.
This laptop came with 4 gigs of RAM, so I decided to spend more money on a faster CPU. I don't think it could fit more RAM.
I know I once bought a specific CPU because I knew it would be good for overclocking. It wasn't a bad idea -- a 1.8 ghz CPU that I could get running at 2.4, at perhaps half or a third the price of a similar CPU at 2.4 ghz, and I'd overclock my RAM, also.
I learned two things:
First, you really have to know your stuff. The RAM I had wouldn't overclock very well, and RAM which would cost a bit more. I had the BIOS helping me out, and I still had to fiddle with timings and voltages.
And second, despite all the stress testing I did, it would still occasionally crash. I never tracked down these crashes until I clocked it back to spec. Once I got a job, I decided that shelling out another hundred dollars or so for a faster CPU was a better use of my time than trying to overclock one, and dealing with the instability once I did.
Now, that's probably a completely different area than overclocking to 6.5 ghz, but if I really needed that, I imagine it would be much more cost-effective to buy two or three of them. It won't really help rasterized games (that'd be video-card bound), and raytraced games should scale to multiple machines.
Why do people always compare static rendering with dynamic rendering?
Because the time to render that static image does count.
A billion dollar industry isn't wrong.
Billion dollar industries have been wrong before. And merely because a particular technique is right now, doesn't mean it will be right forever.
Case in point: It used to be, everyone in the industry assumed shadows were too hard to do dynamically. So, as a performance hack, they were projected statically, and incorporated into the textures. If you had a light shining on a fan, you'd have a texture on the wall behind it of a spinning-fan shadow.
Then, computers got powerful enough, and Carmack found a neat little hack, and suddenly, Doom3 had real lighting and shadows, from multiple sources.
One problem you have is that the graphics hardware out there isn't built for ray tracing, it's built for rasterization.
This paper is by Intel, who wants to release video hardware specifically designed for raytracing. It's also embarrassingly parallel -- this example originally ran on a cluster of 20 machines.
Ray tracers do NOT scale well with resolution. Each pixel has to have it's own ray cast.
That's linear. As in, throw in twice as many cores, and you can handle twice as many pixels. How does rasterization scale with pixels?
Ok well that doesn't compare favorably against the rasterizers. They scale extremely well with resolution, and also in terms of anti-aliasing. Many of them can do 4xFSAA with next to no performance penalty...
Alright -- but you haven't actually shown what the requirement is. Is it logarithmic? Linear? Constant?
The net result wouldn't look as good as the equivalent rasterized game.
No, it will look better, when it gets there.
As an example: A mirror in a rasterized game will either require a second rendering pass (that is, render an image from the mirror's perspective, then use it as a texture and render that), or it will require you to duplicate the geometry of everything on one side of the mirror to the other.
Now, what if you have two mirrors facing each other? What if you're playing something like Portal?
With a raytraced mirror, you simply send out another ray from the mirror.
Or, suppose you want to show a reflective sphere. That's a tricky shader, and how many polygons does it take? Too many, and you slow things down. Too few, and it becomes obvious that it's not a sphere, but an n-hedron. With a raytracer, you just throw in a perfect sphere, and with high school math, you can make it reflective. Just like the mirror, it can just send out another ray, at a slightly different angle.
You throw a positively massive system at it and you get poor performance.
From TFA:
With Intelâ(TM)s latest quad-socket systemsâ"equipped with
a 2.66 GHz Dunnington processor in each socketâ"we
can achieve approximately 20 to 35 fps at a resolution
of 1280x720. Nonetheless, this represents a significant
improvement over the experiments in 2004 that required
20 machines to render a simpler game more slowly and
at a lower resolution.
In other words, what took a positively massive system in 2004, takes a single machine in 2009, if I've read that right. I wonder what it will look like in 2014? Or when Intel comes out with its special-purpose raytracing hardware, that's basically a bunch of CPUs?