What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage... graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself-- running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.
Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1 GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that it would take somewhere from 7 to 25 Larrabee cores to reach that 60 Hz frame rate.
Larrabee will probably run much faster than that, at least on desktop variants.
Well... rather than writing the whole response here, I think I'd rather write it up for my blog and publish it there. Please surf on over and check it out:
We may have different opinions on Larrabee's technical characteristics, but I'm glad this didn't instantly become a big personal conflict.
. png
Microsoft isn't selling 3.0+ GHz CPUs yet, either
on
The Xbox 360 Unveiled
·
· Score: 1
It's still six or seven months (minimum) before Xbox 360 ships. In that time, you can expect speed bumps for the PowerMac line. You may see dual-core chips, or dual-threaded chips, or both. Microsoft had to preannounce the specs of Xbox 360 so developers would know the performance targets. Apple doesn't preannounce much of anything about hardware specs.
If a company has a good idea and wants to ensure it can use that idea in future products, it will patent the idea.
If a company has a good idea and wants to ensure everyone can use that idea in future products, it will patent the idea.
If a company has a good idea and does not patent it, someone else could come along later and patent it, then prevent the first company and everyone else from using it.
It's true that the inventing company could just publish the idea somewhere and thereby prevent others from patenting it later-- but the level of description that must be published is effectively equivalent to a patent application. Filing a patent application also guarantees the Patent Office knows about the invention. So why not just file the patent?
Wait to see if Amazon tries to use this patent against anyone before you try to deduce their motives for getting it.
It's useless to talk about a battery pack's ampere-hour (AH) rating without also specifying its voltage. In this case, the Electrovaya battery is rated at 7.2V, 10.2AH, for a total energy capacity of about 75 watt-hours (WH) according to the company's specifications. (The math doesn't work out exactly, but rounding errors are common on laptop battery spec sheets.) Internally, it is arranged as five parallel sets of two 3.6V batteries in series-- five "wide" by two "tall."
This ten-cell battery has almost exactly the same rated capacity as any other ten-cell lithium pack. I happen to have an eight-cell ThinkPad X40 battery for comparison, and it is rated at 14.4V and 4.3AH, which works out to about 62WH. With two more cells, it would hold about 77WH, MORE than the rated capacity of the ten-cell Electrovaya battery.
The X40 runs for about seven hours despite the lower capacity, so it's pretty obvious to me that the Electrovaya machine is not as efficient. It wastes a little more power, but has disproportionately more battery capacity, so it gets a little more battery life.
The lesson to learn here is that mAH ratings are USELESS for comparing battery capacity. They tell you NOTHING about how much energy is contained in battery packs, or how long a laptop's battery life will be. Only watt-hour figures are useful for comparing battery capacity.
I think it's reasonable to suspect that Electrovaya engineered this battery pack to produce a high mAH figure at the expense of efficiency, just like Intel designed the Pentium 4 to emphasize GHz at the expense of performance.
Hyper-Threading is a marketing term for a perfectly legitimate microarchitectural feature more generally known as simultaneous multithreading (SMT).
SMT has nothing to do with "dual input pipes" and absolutely requires more than "a single execution unit." The essential features include storage for more than one processor state (data and status registers, program counter, etc.), the ability to mix instructions from multiple threads within the CPU, and multiple execution units.
The Pentium 4 processor with Hyper-Threading has all of those things, including SEVEN execution units that can operate in parallel (but very rarely all at the same time). HT is a simple version of SMT, but it was also fairly inexpensive to add, giving a 20%-30% performance boost for just a few percent more die area.
Yes, a true dual-core processor without SMT can achieve much better throughput on some code than a single-core SMT processor. But that dual-core processor will be almost twice the size of a single-core SMT processor. Dollar for dollar, SMT is a much better way to get more performance than a multi-core design.
The best designs will use both-- SMT within the core because it's such a big win in cost and power efficiency, and multiple cores because that's the most practical way to take advantage of the high transistor counts available in current semiconductor manufacturing processes.
I'll just stick my nose in here long enough to define "natural human right". There is only one natural human right, and it is the right to own property. It is a natural right because we are born owning ourselves. This right is a logical necessity from two axioms: humans are a limited resource, and all humans have equal rights. It is therefore not possible to consider any other way to distribute the ownership of human beings except for each person to own himself or herself.
The right to own oneself conveys all the other "rights" we customarily enumerate independently-- the right to be secure in our possessions; the right to enter into contracts, which gives us the right to own physical and intellectual property; the rights to speak the truth, assemble peacefully, and worship as we choose.
You're correct that corporations have no natural rights, but the owners of corporations do. Corporate property and privileges are a simple legal abstraction for the rights of those owners. You should be able to see that if I have the right to make a profit, it doesn't go away because I'm part of a group of people using a company name to do business.
I was at the Cell event today, and quoted in some of the news stories. I also have the ISSCC technical papers.
The PowerPC core in the Cell prototype chip is NOT a Power5, as speculated here. According to IBM, this core was designed from scratch for this application. One critical difference is that the new pipeline executes instructions in strict program order rather than reordering instructions to improve throughput as is done with Power5.
Also, IBM has not described the core as "simultaneous multithreaded", just "multithreaded." I presume from this that the multithreading is coarse-grained-- only one thread is active at a time, unlike Power5 which can execute instructions from two different threads in the same cycle.
The logic design for the Cell CPU was optimized for higher clock speeds in a given process than Power5 can achieve. This is a good tradeoff for more linear multimedia algorithms, but reduces effective throughput on other types of code.
I think it's reasonable to suppose that if Apple were interested in using the Cell architecture, it would prefer to use a version of the design that includes a Power5 core in place of the one in the Cell prototype.
The Supreme Court is not "the foundation of our legal system." The Constitution is. The Constitution requires Congress "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This refers to securing a right-- not granting a right, not recognizing a right. It says, in plain English, that the right already exists, and Congress is required to protect it.
The limitation in time serves two related purposes-- ensuring that as the creation becomes more and more a part of the social fabric, all of society is free to benefit from it, and recognizing that the value of any individual creative effort declines over time as it becomes more likely that others would have developed the same creation anyway.
I already explained how you don't understand the nature of property, so I won't rehash that again.
You say you're a programmer, but you also say that a computer program is (variously) "a number," "an equation," "a sequence of thoughts." Perhaps you're the genius the world has been looking for, who can reduce any conditional or sequential process into a single combinatorial equation. But I don't think you are.
You quote a Supreme Court decision that turns out to be from Parker vs. Flook, 1978. You took this quote out of context, and you clearly haven't read the actual decision. Go here:
This decision clearly states that a formula alone cannot be patented, but that a process, such as a computer program, that relies on a specific formula or algorithm CAN be patented. In this case, a patent was denied because the process was not novel except for the use of one formula that was not in any way specific to the process. The process was known in the prior art, and the addition of the formula did not in effect create a new process, so the process with the formula was not novel or patentable.
That same decision also states "Yet it is equally clear that a process is not unpatentable simply because it contains a law of nature or a mathematical algorithm."
The fact is that you can (or at least I can) write a computer program that is an essential part of a novel process, and get a patent on the process. This is what the Supreme Court wanted, and this is what it has been getting since 1978. Yes, there are many more of these patents than there ought to be just on the grounds of obviousness and uncited prior art, but I can personally assure you that every other kind of patent has the same problem these days.
The putz who modded my post as a troll will get his reward eventually, but in the meantime, I'd appreciate a couple of positive mod points so more people will see this important series of comments. Thanks in advance.
You said, "The Supreme Court explicitly ruled that there is no inherent right to copy rights."
This proves nothing, as the Supreme Court has made many other silly rulings.
The right to control the distribution of your intellectual property is the SAME right as the right to control your physical property, whether the government-- or you-- recognizes the equivalence or not.
Once again, patents and copyrights are society's way to encourage, reward, and protect the rights of creators in exchange for making their creations public. We could accomplish the same goal with confidentiality agreements signed and witnessed before a person is allowed to learn a patentable method or receive a copy of a book. We DO this, in fact, with some kinds of creations that are felt to be too important to publish. But that solution would be impractical for most kinds of intellectual property, so we have the simpler mechanisms of patent and copyright.
Copyrights, software patents, and business-method patents serve a useful purpose. They are not always an alternative to open source or public-domain distribution; sometimes they're an alternative to complete secrecy, which would prevent all of us from building on the accomplishments of others.
Patenting a business method allows the inventor to profit by licensing the method to other businesses. Clearly methods will be less likely to be shared if patenting is not allowed, and if good methods are not shared, the economy is less efficient.
Distributing a business method may actually be the inventor's ONLY way to profit from the invention; you don't have to own a profitable business to invent a business method. You may own an unprofitable business, or you may own no business at all.
Business methods are as much an expression of ideas as manufacturing processes or other patentable intellectual properties. Don't get confused here; a patent requires reducing an idea to practice-- a combination of components, a sequence of steps, whatever-- but it's still an expression of an idea.
Patents and copyrights aren't some kind of privilege granted by the government or the people. They're an inherent right.
There is, in fact, only one right-- the right to own property. Your body is your first piece of property. You have the right to control it as you see fit.
If you develop a valuable idea and figure out how to reduce it to practice, you may choose to disclose it to others, or not, according to your own judgement. You may choose to insist that others compensate you in exchange for disclosing the idea to them.
Patents and copyrights provide one legal foundation for these agreements. Trade-secret laws are another. By agreeing to disclose your intellectual property to the public, the public-- as represented by the government-- agrees to give you a legal monopoly on the intellectual property for a set period of time.
A business-method patent is no different than any other patent. The inventor develops a method for doing something better than prior practices and discloses it to the public in exchange for a legal monopoly. Even in your own terms, clearly business methods ARE "expressions of ideas," so why do you wish to treat them differently?
Without patent and copyright protection, there will be fewer inventions and less public disclosure and discussion of valuable ideas. This is equally true for business processes, so it's equally important to offer patent protection for business processes.
It's my personal opinion that the US patent office issues five or ten bad patents for every good patent that makes it through the system. Too many claimed inventions are not new; too many of those that are new are obvious. But these problems have to be solved some other way than just shutting down the patent system or excluding important classes of inventions.
In the article, Stallman said "A game scenario can be considered art/fiction rather than software. So it is okay to split the game into engine and scenario, then treat the engine as software and the scenario as art/fiction."
This does NOT mean he believes the scenario can be legally protected. RMS does NOT believe art or fiction are entitled to copyright protection except under limited circumstances.
I had the chance to discuss the issue of copyright protection for art with RMS over Labor Day weekend 2004 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. Also present during the discussion was Keith F. Lynch, a long-time friend of mine.
I asked RMS under what circumstances a person who creates a work of fiction is entitled to restrict its further redistribution, according to his personal beliefs. Initially, he said there were no such circumstances. I described a hypothetical situation in which a person has written down a private sexual fantasy, perhaps for therapeutic reasons, and the document has come into the possession of another person. I asked RMS if the author was entitled to limit the distribution of the document-- basically, if the person had a unique right to control copying it, the essence of copyright law.
Reluctantly, RMS agreed that such a document must be covered by a special exception to his beliefs. After considerable further discussion, he set out the terms of the exception: it applies only to creative works that are highly personal in nature and which have no value to the general public.
This position leaves no room for copyright protection for other kinds of creative works, especially including commercial fiction, video game storylines, or the images and sounds associated with video games.
In his article, Matt Barton clearly failed to comprehend Stallman's position on this issue, and has misled his readers.
Sony originally promised the PS2 could render 75M simple polygons per second, but also said the geometry engine's limit was 36M polygons per second. This figure is accurate, but like all such numbers in the graphics industry, it is achievable only in a single-function demo app. Such figures are useful only for comparing the raw performance of different designs.
Sony never claimed the PS2 could support HDTV resolution. The company was very clear about the limited frame-buffer memory on the Graphics Synthesizer chip.
Sony did, in fact, make a multiprocessor PS2-based workstation, the GSCube, which combined 16 complete PS2-compatible subsystems. The "Graphics Synthesizer I-32" chip used in this system had a 32MB HDTV-sized frame buffer, leading me to speculate at the time (August 2000) that Sony would soon introduce an HD-capable PS2. They could have, but they never did. I can't get 'em all right, I guess. They demonstrated to me (personally) this system rendering scenes from the Final Fantasy movie in real time, so that wasn't hype either.
Here are the Microprocessor Report articles I wrote at the time (subscribers only):
It's a MIPS core with a vector unit, plus a graphics chip with a MIPS core. Basically, the PSP is a cut-down PS2. Very similar system architecture, but simpler. Not software compatible; maintaining 100% PS2 compatibility would have been very bad for battery life. It also would have constrained the form factor of the unit, since most PS2 games require a 4:3 aspect-ratio display.
. png
I developed Peltier microprocessor coolers for internal use at Integrated Device Technology in 1994, and with some leftover pieces, I put together a soda cooler (can't have beer at work). Recognizing the thermal-transfer problem, I milled a block of aluminum to be a snug fit in the bottom of a soda can. This block went on the cold side of the Peltier device to create the cold plate. The hot side was attached to one end of a very hefty heat sink; the other end got a fan to pull air through the sink. The Peltier device was powered by a bench DC power supply. Its maximum power-input rating was about 85W, as I recall.
The cold plate would certainly get cold-- it would pull frost from the air, in fact-- but it would NOT provide useful cooling for the soda. I decided that what I actually needed was to replace the cold plate with another heat sink and use that to cool air recirculating around the can.
Having solved the problem, in theory, I stopped working on the project.:-) The commercial versions of this idea, such as the one mentioned elsewhere in this thread and any number of picnic coolers based on Peltier devices, use the circulating-air approach and work just fine to keep cold things cold.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I appreciate the attention from NVIDIA and Slashdot, I can't support that alleged quote from my blog (http://speedsnfeeds.com).
First, what's being described as a quote is actually just John Montrym's summary from my original post, which is here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10006184-23.html
What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage... graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself-- running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.
Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1 GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that it would take somewhere from 7 to 25 Larrabee cores to reach that 60 Hz frame rate.
Larrabee will probably run much faster than that, at least on desktop variants.
Well... rather than writing the whole response here, I think I'd rather write it up for my blog and publish it there. Please surf on over and check it out:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13512_3-10024280-23.html
Comments are welcome here or there.
. png
We may have different opinions on Larrabee's technical characteristics, but I'm glad this didn't instantly become a big personal conflict.
. png
It's still six or seven months (minimum) before Xbox 360 ships. In that time, you can expect speed bumps for the PowerMac line. You may see dual-core chips, or dual-threaded chips, or both. Microsoft had to preannounce the specs of Xbox 360 so developers would know the performance targets. Apple doesn't preannounce much of anything about hardware specs.
If a company has a good idea and wants to ensure it can use that idea in future products, it will patent the idea.
If a company has a good idea and wants to ensure everyone can use that idea in future products, it will patent the idea.
If a company has a good idea and does not patent it, someone else could come along later and patent it, then prevent the first company and everyone else from using it.
It's true that the inventing company could just publish the idea somewhere and thereby prevent others from patenting it later-- but the level of description that must be published is effectively equivalent to a patent application. Filing a patent application also guarantees the Patent Office knows about the invention. So why not just file the patent?
Wait to see if Amazon tries to use this patent against anyone before you try to deduce their motives for getting it.
. png
It's useless to talk about a battery pack's ampere-hour (AH) rating without also specifying its voltage. In this case, the Electrovaya battery is rated at 7.2V, 10.2AH, for a total energy capacity of about 75 watt-hours (WH) according to the company's specifications. (The math doesn't work out exactly, but rounding errors are common on laptop battery spec sheets.) Internally, it is arranged as five parallel sets of two 3.6V batteries in series-- five "wide" by two "tall."
This ten-cell battery has almost exactly the same rated capacity as any other ten-cell lithium pack. I happen to have an eight-cell ThinkPad X40 battery for comparison, and it is rated at 14.4V and 4.3AH, which works out to about 62WH. With two more cells, it would hold about 77WH, MORE than the rated capacity of the ten-cell Electrovaya battery.
The X40 runs for about seven hours despite the lower capacity, so it's pretty obvious to me that the Electrovaya machine is not as efficient. It wastes a little more power, but has disproportionately more battery capacity, so it gets a little more battery life.
The lesson to learn here is that mAH ratings are USELESS for comparing battery capacity. They tell you NOTHING about how much energy is contained in battery packs, or how long a laptop's battery life will be. Only watt-hour figures are useful for comparing battery capacity.
I think it's reasonable to suspect that Electrovaya engineered this battery pack to produce a high mAH figure at the expense of efficiency, just like Intel designed the Pentium 4 to emphasize GHz at the expense of performance.
There is nothing to see here. Please move along.
. png
Hyper-Threading is a marketing term for a perfectly legitimate microarchitectural feature more generally known as simultaneous multithreading (SMT).
SMT has nothing to do with "dual input pipes" and absolutely requires more than "a single execution unit." The essential features include storage for more than one processor state (data and status registers, program counter, etc.), the ability to mix instructions from multiple threads within the CPU, and multiple execution units.
The Pentium 4 processor with Hyper-Threading has all of those things, including SEVEN execution units that can operate in parallel (but very rarely all at the same time). HT is a simple version of SMT, but it was also fairly inexpensive to add, giving a 20%-30% performance boost for just a few percent more die area.
Yes, a true dual-core processor without SMT can achieve much better throughput on some code than a single-core SMT processor. But that dual-core processor will be almost twice the size of a single-core SMT processor. Dollar for dollar, SMT is a much better way to get more performance than a multi-core design.
The best designs will use both-- SMT within the core because it's such a big win in cost and power efficiency, and multiple cores because that's the most practical way to take advantage of the high transistor counts available in current semiconductor manufacturing processes.
. png
I'll just stick my nose in here long enough to define "natural human right". There is only one natural human right, and it is the right to own property. It is a natural right because we are born owning ourselves. This right is a logical necessity from two axioms: humans are a limited resource, and all humans have equal rights. It is therefore not possible to consider any other way to distribute the ownership of human beings except for each person to own himself or herself.
The right to own oneself conveys all the other "rights" we customarily enumerate independently-- the right to be secure in our possessions; the right to enter into contracts, which gives us the right to own physical and intellectual property; the rights to speak the truth, assemble peacefully, and worship as we choose.
You're correct that corporations have no natural rights, but the owners of corporations do. Corporate property and privileges are a simple legal abstraction for the rights of those owners. You should be able to see that if I have the right to make a profit, it doesn't go away because I'm part of a group of people using a company name to do business.
. png
I was at the Cell event today, and quoted in some of the news stories. I also have the ISSCC technical papers.
The PowerPC core in the Cell prototype chip is NOT a Power5, as speculated here. According to IBM, this core was designed from scratch for this application. One critical difference is that the new pipeline executes instructions in strict program order rather than reordering instructions to improve throughput as is done with Power5.
Also, IBM has not described the core as "simultaneous multithreaded", just "multithreaded." I presume from this that the multithreading is coarse-grained-- only one thread is active at a time, unlike Power5 which can execute instructions from two different threads in the same cycle.
The logic design for the Cell CPU was optimized for higher clock speeds in a given process than Power5 can achieve. This is a good tradeoff for more linear multimedia algorithms, but reduces effective throughput on other types of code.
I think it's reasonable to suppose that if Apple were interested in using the Cell architecture, it would prefer to use a version of the design that includes a Power5 core in place of the one in the Cell prototype.
. png
The Supreme Court is not "the foundation of our legal system." The Constitution is. The Constitution requires Congress "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This refers to securing a right-- not granting a right, not recognizing a right. It says, in plain English, that the right already exists, and Congress is required to protect it.
m (This site is run by the inestimable Greg Aharonian; everything there is useful context for this discussion.)
The limitation in time serves two related purposes-- ensuring that as the creation becomes more and more a part of the social fabric, all of society is free to benefit from it, and recognizing that the value of any individual creative effort declines over time as it becomes more likely that others would have developed the same creation anyway.
I already explained how you don't understand the nature of property, so I won't rehash that again.
You say you're a programmer, but you also say that a computer program is (variously) "a number," "an equation," "a sequence of thoughts." Perhaps you're the genius the world has been looking for, who can reduce any conditional or sequential process into a single combinatorial equation. But I don't think you are.
You quote a Supreme Court decision that turns out to be from Parker vs. Flook, 1978. You took this quote out of context, and you clearly haven't read the actual decision. Go here:
http://www.patenting-art.com/decision/flookp78.ht
This decision clearly states that a formula alone cannot be patented, but that a process, such as a computer program, that relies on a specific formula or algorithm CAN be patented. In this case, a patent was denied because the process was not novel except for the use of one formula that was not in any way specific to the process. The process was known in the prior art, and the addition of the formula did not in effect create a new process, so the process with the formula was not novel or patentable.
That same decision also states "Yet it is equally clear that a process is not unpatentable simply because it contains a law of nature or a mathematical algorithm."
The fact is that you can (or at least I can) write a computer program that is an essential part of a novel process, and get a patent on the process. This is what the Supreme Court wanted, and this is what it has been getting since 1978. Yes, there are many more of these patents than there ought to be just on the grounds of obviousness and uncited prior art, but I can personally assure you that every other kind of patent has the same problem these days.
. png
The putz who modded my post as a troll will get his reward eventually, but in the meantime, I'd appreciate a couple of positive mod points so more people will see this important series of comments. Thanks in advance.
You said, "The Supreme Court explicitly ruled that there is no inherent right to copy rights."
This proves nothing, as the Supreme Court has made many other silly rulings.
The right to control the distribution of your intellectual property is the SAME right as the right to control your physical property, whether the government-- or you-- recognizes the equivalence or not.
Once again, patents and copyrights are society's way to encourage, reward, and protect the rights of creators in exchange for making their creations public. We could accomplish the same goal with confidentiality agreements signed and witnessed before a person is allowed to learn a patentable method or receive a copy of a book. We DO this, in fact, with some kinds of creations that are felt to be too important to publish. But that solution would be impractical for most kinds of intellectual property, so we have the simpler mechanisms of patent and copyright.
Copyrights, software patents, and business-method patents serve a useful purpose. They are not always an alternative to open source or public-domain distribution; sometimes they're an alternative to complete secrecy, which would prevent all of us from building on the accomplishments of others.
. png
Patenting a business method allows the inventor to profit by licensing the method to other businesses. Clearly methods will be less likely to be shared if patenting is not allowed, and if good methods are not shared, the economy is less efficient.
Distributing a business method may actually be the inventor's ONLY way to profit from the invention; you don't have to own a profitable business to invent a business method. You may own an unprofitable business, or you may own no business at all.
Business methods are as much an expression of ideas as manufacturing processes or other patentable intellectual properties. Don't get confused here; a patent requires reducing an idea to practice-- a combination of components, a sequence of steps, whatever-- but it's still an expression of an idea.
. png
Patents and copyrights aren't some kind of privilege granted by the government or the people. They're an inherent right.
There is, in fact, only one right-- the right to own property. Your body is your first piece of property. You have the right to control it as you see fit.
If you develop a valuable idea and figure out how to reduce it to practice, you may choose to disclose it to others, or not, according to your own judgement. You may choose to insist that others compensate you in exchange for disclosing the idea to them.
Patents and copyrights provide one legal foundation for these agreements. Trade-secret laws are another. By agreeing to disclose your intellectual property to the public, the public-- as represented by the government-- agrees to give you a legal monopoly on the intellectual property for a set period of time.
A business-method patent is no different than any other patent. The inventor develops a method for doing something better than prior practices and discloses it to the public in exchange for a legal monopoly. Even in your own terms, clearly business methods ARE "expressions of ideas," so why do you wish to treat them differently?
Without patent and copyright protection, there will be fewer inventions and less public disclosure and discussion of valuable ideas. This is equally true for business processes, so it's equally important to offer patent protection for business processes.
It's my personal opinion that the US patent office issues five or ten bad patents for every good patent that makes it through the system. Too many claimed inventions are not new; too many of those that are new are obvious. But these problems have to be solved some other way than just shutting down the patent system or excluding important classes of inventions.
. png
In the article, Stallman said "A game scenario can be considered art/fiction rather than software. So it is okay to split the game into engine and scenario, then treat the engine as software and the scenario as art/fiction."
This does NOT mean he believes the scenario can be legally protected. RMS does NOT believe art or fiction are entitled to copyright protection except under limited circumstances.
I had the chance to discuss the issue of copyright protection for art with RMS over Labor Day weekend 2004 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. Also present during the discussion was Keith F. Lynch, a long-time friend of mine.
I asked RMS under what circumstances a person who creates a work of fiction is entitled to restrict its further redistribution, according to his personal beliefs. Initially, he said there were no such circumstances. I described a hypothetical situation in which a person has written down a private sexual fantasy, perhaps for therapeutic reasons, and the document has come into the possession of another person. I asked RMS if the author was entitled to limit the distribution of the document-- basically, if the person had a unique right to control copying it, the essence of copyright law.
Reluctantly, RMS agreed that such a document must be covered by a special exception to his beliefs. After considerable further discussion, he set out the terms of the exception: it applies only to creative works that are highly personal in nature and which have no value to the general public.
This position leaves no room for copyright protection for other kinds of creative works, especially including commercial fiction, video game storylines, or the images and sounds associated with video games.
In his article, Matt Barton clearly failed to comprehend Stallman's position on this issue, and has misled his readers.
. png
Sony originally promised the PS2 could render 75M simple polygons per second, but also said the geometry engine's limit was 36M polygons per second. This figure is accurate, but like all such numbers in the graphics industry, it is achievable only in a single-function demo app. Such figures are useful only for comparing the raw performance of different designs.
m l
t ml
Sony never claimed the PS2 could support HDTV resolution. The company was very clear about the limited frame-buffer memory on the Graphics Synthesizer chip.
Sony did, in fact, make a multiprocessor PS2-based workstation, the GSCube, which combined 16 complete PS2-compatible subsystems. The "Graphics Synthesizer I-32" chip used in this system had a 32MB HDTV-sized frame buffer, leading me to speculate at the time (August 2000) that Sony would soon introduce an HD-capable PS2. They could have, but they never did. I can't get 'em all right, I guess. They demonstrated to me (personally) this system rendering scenes from the Final Fantasy movie in real time, so that wasn't hype either.
Here are the Microprocessor Report articles I wrote at the time (subscribers only):
http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/19990419/130501.ht
http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2000/0821/143402.h
. png
John Carmack no longer "simply sits around coding violent computer games." Nor does he need to work for NASA. He has his own spaceship company!
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/
Now, instead of teaching kids to blow up people one at a time, he's trying to blow up Texas all by himself.
. png
It's a MIPS core with a vector unit, plus a graphics chip with a MIPS core. Basically, the PSP is a cut-down PS2. Very similar system architecture, but simpler. Not software compatible; maintaining 100% PS2 compatibility would have been very bad for battery life. It also would have constrained the form factor of the unit, since most PS2 games require a 4:3 aspect-ratio display. . png
I developed Peltier microprocessor coolers for internal use at Integrated Device Technology in 1994, and with some leftover pieces, I put together a soda cooler (can't have beer at work). Recognizing the thermal-transfer problem, I milled a block of aluminum to be a snug fit in the bottom of a soda can. This block went on the cold side of the Peltier device to create the cold plate. The hot side was attached to one end of a very hefty heat sink; the other end got a fan to pull air through the sink. The Peltier device was powered by a bench DC power supply. Its maximum power-input rating was about 85W, as I recall.
:-) The commercial versions of this idea, such as the one mentioned elsewhere in this thread and any number of picnic coolers based on Peltier devices, use the circulating-air approach and work just fine to keep cold things cold.
The cold plate would certainly get cold-- it would pull frost from the air, in fact-- but it would NOT provide useful cooling for the soda. I decided that what I actually needed was to replace the cold plate with another heat sink and use that to cool air recirculating around the can.
Having solved the problem, in theory, I stopped working on the project.
. png