You can't have DRM because MS patented the form of DRM that Silverlight uses. Which is presumably at least one of the reasons why de Icaza says he won't allow it to be implemented.
I'm sure there is an element of this, but it's not just about the nickel ; it's about the dollars he'd have to spend on wages for employees that were no longer terrified of losing their jobs.
People who aren't worried about their healthcare costs are less scared of losing their job. The American healthcare system is a nightmare because a single accident can bankrupt you, wipe you out, make you choose between keeping a finger and sending your kids to college.
People like this ass perceive their employees as convenient victims, not partners in their pizza enterprise. Making them happier and more content is not on their agenda, because happy contented people are less likely to want to work for minimum wage and clock out when the restaurant is empty.
It uses a lot more power while you are using it. Because it runs 500x faster you have to use it for a lot less time though, and it doesn't need power to retain state.
It uses 5x more power for that 500x performance. Of course, people will think up new ways to use that kind of performance.
It's more efficient than oral, because it bypasses the first pass metabolism ; a large fraction of many drugs are metabolised by the liver on the first pass of the substance through the bloodstream out of the intestine, whereas the venous plexuses of the anus go straight into the main blood system.
You can achieve the same effect with a lower dose and fewer toxic effects. Some nations don't have the hangups about their arseholes that we do in the English speaking nations and consider suppositories a normal form of medication.
It's like the argument put forward by Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon - the Allies won WWII because they had the best technology, and the reason they had the best technology was because they were't the biggest assholes.
If you swallow one, it's fine. If you swallow a second one, it may stick to the first one... but the first one may have gone around the bend in the intestine first. The pressure from the magnets causes blood to be forced out of the tissues compressed between them, you get a dead spot, then a punctured intestine, which causes peritonitis, a potentially fatal condition.
Just to clarify further, the USA pays nearly twice per capita what the UK does (for roughly equivalent outcomes), but that only covers around 50M of their 320M citizens.
The UK population is around 63M people.
Yes, you pay roughly 12 times as much as us per treated patient, to treat fewer people with similar outcomes.
( 320 / 50 is 1 sixth of your population, you pay about double what the UK does per capita population, so that's 12 times as much per patient who actually gets treated)
If they're working two jobs to make ends meet, then sure, their course is more difficult.
I believe the point he was making that raising tuition fees selects for rich students who are more likely to have the advantages in life that predispose you to academic success, like having the time to study (not working two jobs), having facilities, textbooks, computers, proper nutrition, non-abusive parents, etc.
The technology will get cheaper and easier - it's inevitable that ubiquitous surveillance will be in economic reach of large corporate players soon. Since it's inevitable that such a system will exist, you may as well have it serve us, rather than rule us. The hard part is knowing where that line is and ensuring that people do not cross it.
The other take I've seen on this is by howstuffworks.com 's Marshall Brain ; his ""Manna" short story portrays two visions of the future.
* One is a future what automation has taken over so many jobs that there is a large underclass of impoverished unemployed who are rounded up into social security camps, chemically sterilised, and guarded by robots. * One is a future where automation has taken over so many jobs that everyone can have a basic income that ensure they can live "comfortably" doing whatever the hell they like - and the increasing efficiency of the technology means the level of comfort increases every year.
The privacy angle is that in the utopian version of all this, people voluntarily have implants that record and process all their sensory input, and AI agents watch to see if they are about to commit a violent action, and switch their motor neurones off to prevent them from doing it. I'm in two minds about this - on the one hand, I really don't like the idea of a machine watching me all the time, let alone able to paralyse me on demand. On the other hand, I would probably appreciate the sense of safety, and in a society where there are no unmet material needs, I'm guessing the pressure to commit violent crime would be virtually nil anyway. It relies on the proviso that the AI is both neutral and carefully monitored. If you concentrated this level of power in the hands of a dictator, you'd be screwed.
The natural trend with increasing technology in corporate hands is ubiquitous surveillance and enforcement of rules anyway - so you may as well pre-empt it and develop a system that serves us, instead of ruling us. If we just stick our fingers in our ears and ignore the problem, or stamp our feet and shout really hard that we don't like it, the technology is not going to go away.
At least Google Talk is based on an open protocol, which means you are not locked in, and have a chance of having a half-decent client for your chosen platform which isn't bogged down with adware.
I tried out the Skype client for Windows recently - the Linux client may lag behind on features, codecs, etc, but it has Zen-like simplicity compared to the Windows client which seems to exist purely to sell me things, in a visually noisy way.
Speaking as someone who does understand some of these technologies, I am one of the people least likely to trust an electronic voting system.
Politicians should take note - here, in one of the most self-selecting pro-tech forums on the internet, there is a substantial contingent amongst those best equipped to understand the problem who believe that voting should be done with a pencil and paper, and counted by Mark 1 Eyeball.
They introduce one doozy of a problem though - everyone understands paper ballots well enough to audit them. Only a tiny fraction of the population understands voting machines well enough to audit them*.
And that fraction gets smaller and smaller the more complex you make them. And coincidentally, that small fraction of people with "the knowledge" are exactly the kind of people you want to keep away from the innards of your voting process, because they are also the only people who understand it well enough to subvert it, so you have a great justification for making the whole thing as locked down and private as possible.
Use a pencil. Keep it human.
* As someone in this fraction, I have to say that I find the problems fascinating, and the solutions as well. I think this fascination is behind a lot of the positive attitude that a lot of the geek community have to electronic voting. But this is one form of elitism I can't get behind - voting should be by the people, for the people, and therefore should be understandable by the people.
The wiki page is community managed. The community is more progressive than the corporate side of Canonical who control that download page.
It may just be an oversight, as well. That page has been around a long time, and it's probably designed for maximum adoption, rather than maximum performance. If you recommended a 64-bit as a suitable replacement for Windows on older hardware which was likely to be 32-bit, the users first experience of Linux would be "I can't run on this hardware....". The 32-bit distro has the advantage of running on nearly everything, including netbooks (of which there are plenty of 32-bit models).
32-bit pointers may consume less space (unless you start using 64-bit pointers with pointer compression like newer JVMs do), but in general this is offset by the ability to use 64-bit CPU instructions which can manipulate more raw data per clock.
Most benchmarks show that 64-bit is faster than 32-bit.
But games (especially 3D games) are probably amongst those few processes that could benefit from it, being the only thing apart from some very niche apps that consume more than 1.5GB of RAM on my desktop.
The improvements they made to the engine for Linux also improved the Windows version a little - but still not as fast as the Linux version. I think the edge is about 4% for Linux.
* Open the "Software Sources" applet * Go to the "Additional Drivers" tab * Find NVIDIA card in the list * Choose the driver package of your choice (currently I have four options, including the newest main line 304 version and the option to revert back to the OSS nouveau driver)
The dog fight in the skies of Earth is less alien to us because it occurs in a viscous medium with a fixed frame of reference. As humans, we are used to air, and water, and gravity. Vacuum is strange and unintuitive to us. We are used to things having a limited delta-V compared to each other - as your speed increases relative to your viscous medium, drag increases dramatically, which prevents you from travelling at a velocity vastly different to other bodies in the same medium.
Star Wars made it's fighters act like aircraft because it was intuitively satisfying to us, and the extended universe literature goes to great effort to back this contradiction of real physics up with "etheric rudders" and the like.
The old BSG followed the same trope. The new BSG does Newton, but distracts you from it's strangeness with a lot of clutter on the screen - smoke trails, lots of fighters and tracer rounds, shaky camera. And the fighter dogfights are dogfights, they tend to match velocities reasonably closely, and when they have a external reference - like asteroids - they behave as if that reference was static and their delta-V was limited compared to that reference.
Us space fiends all know that probably the best way to defeat a Cylon base star is to accelerate a cloud of gravel to a nasty fraction of lightspeed and arrange for it to park in it's path. The problem is that there isn't a lot of room for fighter-jock skills in there. Winning would be about having good sensors and lots of math. The game would be vast periods of waiting punctuated by sudden explosions as you win or lose instantly.
The fly-by-wire systems in i-War and the new one in Star Citizen are both mostly about taking the vacuum of space, and simulating that viscous medium with a static frame of reference so that the poor monkeys in the cockpit can keep up. Which makes for a game that is fun, hopefully, rather than realistic.
Frontier was too realistic (or the the fly-by-wire was too primitive) ; the ships could accelerate at absurd G counts (20G for the small fighters) which placed their movements way outside of the human response curve. The only way to get a kill in my experience was to reduce your delta-V WRT the enemy as much as possible at a range that was large but not outside your weapons range. This meant that they couldn't just fire their thruster and instantly defeat your turn rate. The struggle to match velocities was what lead to the rubber-band jousting.
In the case of Star Citizen, Chris Roberts has venture capital waiting in the wings as well ; the main point of the crowdfunding was to raise enough to prove that his game has a market.
It may be the same with Frontier as well, but Braben is also emphasising procedural generation. It remains to be seen how successful this will be - the environments in Elite 2 ranged from samey to insane - but that could take a huge chunk off the art and content development budget. Engine developers just need to be locked in a box and fed Pizza and Jolt, as we all know.
The main problem for me in the original X : Beyond the Frontier was a lack of patience.
Elite included the device that let your ship skip boring bits by default.
In X, you have to buy it, so you have to sit through an interminable amount of waiting before you can buy this thing... which then puts you back to square one because it just consumed all your capital.
I found the combat in X terrible as well - it really needed decent ship handling, but didn't have it.
Braben made the same mistake with Frontier as well - the combat was no fun, because of the insistence on Newtonian mechanics.
The combat in EVE is of course, boring point-and-clickery.
Wing Commander was all about great dogfighting, which is why I have hopes for Star Citizen - if Roberts can include the same living economic systems as X3 or EVE, but keep the combat intense, enjoyable, and above all, based on your own skill rather than that of your character sheet, well, that's the game that gets my vote. It already sounds like he's going for the i-War kind of level of pseudo-realistic flight, so here's hoping...
Slashdot Mirror
You can't have DRM because MS patented the form of DRM that Silverlight uses. Which is presumably at least one of the reasons why de Icaza says he won't allow it to be implemented.
I'm sure there is an element of this, but it's not just about the nickel ; it's about the dollars he'd have to spend on wages for employees that were no longer terrified of losing their jobs.
People who aren't worried about their healthcare costs are less scared of losing their job. The American healthcare system is a nightmare because a single accident can bankrupt you, wipe you out, make you choose between keeping a finger and sending your kids to college.
People like this ass perceive their employees as convenient victims, not partners in their pizza enterprise. Making them happier and more content is not on their agenda, because happy contented people are less likely to want to work for minimum wage and clock out when the restaurant is empty.
It uses a lot more power while you are using it. Because it runs 500x faster you have to use it for a lot less time though, and it doesn't need power to retain state.
It uses 5x more power for that 500x performance. Of course, people will think up new ways to use that kind of performance.
Not very fast, even if the hard drive is thrashing really, really hard.
It's more efficient than oral, because it bypasses the first pass metabolism ; a large fraction of many drugs are metabolised by the liver on the first pass of the substance through the bloodstream out of the intestine, whereas the venous plexuses of the anus go straight into the main blood system.
You can achieve the same effect with a lower dose and fewer toxic effects. Some nations don't have the hangups about their arseholes that we do in the English speaking nations and consider suppositories a normal form of medication.
Einstein-Bose Condensate.
It's like the argument put forward by Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon - the Allies won WWII because they had the best technology, and the reason they had the best technology was because they were't the biggest assholes.
http://markpasc.org/blog/gems/athena.html
If you swallow one, it's fine. If you swallow a second one, it may stick to the first one... but the first one may have gone around the bend in the intestine first. The pressure from the magnets causes blood to be forced out of the tissues compressed between them, you get a dead spot, then a punctured intestine, which causes peritonitis, a potentially fatal condition.
Just to clarify further, the USA pays nearly twice per capita what the UK does (for roughly equivalent outcomes), but that only covers around 50M of their 320M citizens.
The UK population is around 63M people.
Yes, you pay roughly 12 times as much as us per treated patient, to treat fewer people with similar outcomes.
( 320 / 50 is 1 sixth of your population, you pay about double what the UK does per capita population, so that's 12 times as much per patient who actually gets treated)
If they're working two jobs to make ends meet, then sure, their course is more difficult.
I believe the point he was making that raising tuition fees selects for rich students who are more likely to have the advantages in life that predispose you to academic success, like having the time to study (not working two jobs), having facilities, textbooks, computers, proper nutrition, non-abusive parents, etc.
The technology will get cheaper and easier - it's inevitable that ubiquitous surveillance will be in economic reach of large corporate players soon. Since it's inevitable that such a system will exist, you may as well have it serve us, rather than rule us. The hard part is knowing where that line is and ensuring that people do not cross it.
The other take I've seen on this is by howstuffworks.com 's Marshall Brain ; his ""Manna" short story portrays two visions of the future.
* One is a future what automation has taken over so many jobs that there is a large underclass of impoverished unemployed who are rounded up into social security camps, chemically sterilised, and guarded by robots.
* One is a future where automation has taken over so many jobs that everyone can have a basic income that ensure they can live "comfortably" doing whatever the hell they like - and the increasing efficiency of the technology means the level of comfort increases every year.
The privacy angle is that in the utopian version of all this, people voluntarily have implants that record and process all their sensory input, and AI agents watch to see if they are about to commit a violent action, and switch their motor neurones off to prevent them from doing it. I'm in two minds about this - on the one hand, I really don't like the idea of a machine watching me all the time, let alone able to paralyse me on demand. On the other hand, I would probably appreciate the sense of safety, and in a society where there are no unmet material needs, I'm guessing the pressure to commit violent crime would be virtually nil anyway. It relies on the proviso that the AI is both neutral and carefully monitored. If you concentrated this level of power in the hands of a dictator, you'd be screwed.
The natural trend with increasing technology in corporate hands is ubiquitous surveillance and enforcement of rules anyway - so you may as well pre-empt it and develop a system that serves us, instead of ruling us. If we just stick our fingers in our ears and ignore the problem, or stamp our feet and shout really hard that we don't like it, the technology is not going to go away.
At least Google Talk is based on an open protocol, which means you are not locked in, and have a chance of having a half-decent client for your chosen platform which isn't bogged down with adware.
I tried out the Skype client for Windows recently - the Linux client may lag behind on features, codecs, etc, but it has Zen-like simplicity compared to the Windows client which seems to exist purely to sell me things, in a visually noisy way.
Speaking as someone who does understand some of these technologies, I am one of the people least likely to trust an electronic voting system.
Politicians should take note - here, in one of the most self-selecting pro-tech forums on the internet, there is a substantial contingent amongst those best equipped to understand the problem who believe that voting should be done with a pencil and paper, and counted by Mark 1 Eyeball.
They introduce one doozy of a problem though - everyone understands paper ballots well enough to audit them. Only a tiny fraction of the population understands voting machines well enough to audit them*.
And that fraction gets smaller and smaller the more complex you make them. And coincidentally, that small fraction of people with "the knowledge" are exactly the kind of people you want to keep away from the innards of your voting process, because they are also the only people who understand it well enough to subvert it, so you have a great justification for making the whole thing as locked down and private as possible.
Use a pencil. Keep it human.
* As someone in this fraction, I have to say that I find the problems fascinating, and the solutions as well. I think this fascination is behind a lot of the positive attitude that a lot of the geek community have to electronic voting. But this is one form of elitism I can't get behind - voting should be by the people, for the people, and therefore should be understandable by the people.
The wiki page is community managed. The community is more progressive than the corporate side of Canonical who control that download page.
It may just be an oversight, as well. That page has been around a long time, and it's probably designed for maximum adoption, rather than maximum performance. If you recommended a 64-bit as a suitable replacement for Windows on older hardware which was likely to be 32-bit, the users first experience of Linux would be "I can't run on this hardware....". The 32-bit distro has the advantage of running on nearly everything, including netbooks (of which there are plenty of 32-bit models).
32-bit pointers may consume less space (unless you start using 64-bit pointers with pointer compression like newer JVMs do), but in general this is offset by the ability to use 64-bit CPU instructions which can manipulate more raw data per clock.
Most benchmarks show that 64-bit is faster than 32-bit.
But games (especially 3D games) are probably amongst those few processes that could benefit from it, being the only thing apart from some very niche apps that consume more than 1.5GB of RAM on my desktop.
The improvements they made to the engine for Linux also improved the Windows version a little - but still not as fast as the Linux version. I think the edge is about 4% for Linux.
If Valve are involved, then you can be sure that audio will start to receive some love - games need audio (and love) too.
And in 12.10 :
* Open the "Software Sources" applet
* Go to the "Additional Drivers" tab
* Find NVIDIA card in the list
* Choose the driver package of your choice (currently I have four options, including the newest main line 304 version and the option to revert back to the OSS nouveau driver)
Google use Ubuntu internally (with a few packages added, a few packages taken away).
The dog fight in the skies of Earth is less alien to us because it occurs in a viscous medium with a fixed frame of reference. As humans, we are used to air, and water, and gravity. Vacuum is strange and unintuitive to us. We are used to things having a limited delta-V compared to each other - as your speed increases relative to your viscous medium, drag increases dramatically, which prevents you from travelling at a velocity vastly different to other bodies in the same medium.
Star Wars made it's fighters act like aircraft because it was intuitively satisfying to us, and the extended universe literature goes to great effort to back this contradiction of real physics up with "etheric rudders" and the like.
The old BSG followed the same trope. The new BSG does Newton, but distracts you from it's strangeness with a lot of clutter on the screen - smoke trails, lots of fighters and tracer rounds, shaky camera. And the fighter dogfights are dogfights, they tend to match velocities reasonably closely, and when they have a external reference - like asteroids - they behave as if that reference was static and their delta-V was limited compared to that reference.
Us space fiends all know that probably the best way to defeat a Cylon base star is to accelerate a cloud of gravel to a nasty fraction of lightspeed and arrange for it to park in it's path. The problem is that there isn't a lot of room for fighter-jock skills in there. Winning would be about having good sensors and lots of math. The game would be vast periods of waiting punctuated by sudden explosions as you win or lose instantly.
The fly-by-wire systems in i-War and the new one in Star Citizen are both mostly about taking the vacuum of space, and simulating that viscous medium with a static frame of reference so that the poor monkeys in the cockpit can keep up. Which makes for a game that is fun, hopefully, rather than realistic.
Frontier was too realistic (or the the fly-by-wire was too primitive) ; the ships could accelerate at absurd G counts (20G for the small fighters) which placed their movements way outside of the human response curve. The only way to get a kill in my experience was to reduce your delta-V WRT the enemy as much as possible at a range that was large but not outside your weapons range. This meant that they couldn't just fire their thruster and instantly defeat your turn rate. The struggle to match velocities was what lead to the rubber-band jousting.
In the case of Star Citizen, Chris Roberts has venture capital waiting in the wings as well ; the main point of the crowdfunding was to raise enough to prove that his game has a market.
It may be the same with Frontier as well, but Braben is also emphasising procedural generation. It remains to be seen how successful this will be - the environments in Elite 2 ranged from samey to insane - but that could take a huge chunk off the art and content development budget. Engine developers just need to be locked in a box and fed Pizza and Jolt, as we all know.
The main problem for me in the original X : Beyond the Frontier was a lack of patience.
Elite included the device that let your ship skip boring bits by default.
In X, you have to buy it, so you have to sit through an interminable amount of waiting before you can buy this thing... which then puts you back to square one because it just consumed all your capital.
I found the combat in X terrible as well - it really needed decent ship handling, but didn't have it.
Braben made the same mistake with Frontier as well - the combat was no fun, because of the insistence on Newtonian mechanics.
The combat in EVE is of course, boring point-and-clickery.
Wing Commander was all about great dogfighting, which is why I have hopes for Star Citizen - if Roberts can include the same living economic systems as X3 or EVE, but keep the combat intense, enjoyable, and above all, based on your own skill rather than that of your character sheet, well, that's the game that gets my vote. It already sounds like he's going for the i-War kind of level of pseudo-realistic flight, so here's hoping...