That's only a valid argument when dealing with who created the song. This is not a fight about the origin of the work, but proper use of that work.
One possible defense would be to say that the origin of the song is in question, as 8 Mile Style didn't have the song registered. Considering the circumstances, it looks like that would be a very poor plan.
Do they have any idea how much something like this woulf f-ing piss me off? Thinking about it pisses me off. I don't drink... Never have, and I doubt I ever will. To have a device to keep me from driving drunk that interferes with the startup and continued operation of my vehicle is just a pain in the ass. This sounds really invasive. I would ~not~ be happy. In fact, I'd be so unhappy as to go buy a car in another state. I bet the dealerships will LOVE to hear that.
Well, it says there's a software renderer in there. So if nothing else, that should work without the vid. card. Though, I can certainly see why you would want your vid card enabled.
From what the site says, there's a software renderer that's supposed to be pretty good (They specifically mention laptops). Can't hurt to download it and try it out.
Webserver Tracker BT Client with complete files Torrent files Clients
On a lot of systems, you'll also need custom configuration or software running on your web server (Which sometimes isn't available if you're renting web space).
For mine, you only need some kind of scripting language on your webserver. Drop the files in, and you're good to go. ~very~ simple configuration. The interface is more like FTP, which is nice too.
One of the current projects I'm working on is something of a solution to this. It's 1 part torrent, and 1 part normal download. Each file shared has a required origin web server. The program will then download from whoever's handy, be it peers or the webserver. This means that if the webserver is busy, the program can use other clients. If the other clients are busy (or nonexistant), you still have a guarunteed source.
When I first started the project, I didn't even know about BT. Once I learned, I was scared, since someone already did most of what I was proposing... But I think having the central website adds a lot of value because it guaruntees you'll be able to connect with someone, has a definitive list of peers, stores centralized usage statistics, and more.
The program is called PeerShare, and you'll eventually be able to learn more at dracosoftware.com. The program is in beta, but I've been too busy to push it out the door for public testing.
I had a professor in graduate school, she said she still gets that treatment, especially since she's middle-aged. All these 20-something computer retailers treating a CS professor like she doesn't know a thing.
Use it to your advantage. Surprise people. Never let them see you comin'.
Go to Best Buy, and purchase a new PCMCIA WiFi NIC with cash. Go to the airport, swap your old card for the new one. When you leave the airport, leave your shiny new NIC at a local garbage can. Voila: Anonymous MAC address only used once ever.
"Formal capactity testing? Screw that. Let's build a site and try to get it listed on slashdot. Just watch the sucker for a couple minutes and when it dies, go back and read the log to see how ya did!"
Great, lets link to a website that has nothing but photos and thumbnails! Ooh wait, better yet! Let's find one that organizes them dynamically with non-trivial algorithms!!
Are we going for a new slashdotting record or something?
I think the point here is: The people are going to be stupid drivers (Reading while driving? Cell phones AND notes while driving?) no matter what you do (I don't see how they can get much worse, honestly. They're already doing the bare minimum), so you design the cars to squeeze as much out of a few IQ points as you can. Hell, if people are reading the newspaper in today's cars, you might as well have the CAR pay attention to what's going on.
Of course, what goes along with this: Person makes a bad lane-change, gets in accident. Complains that car didn't bleep, and is therefore not responsible. Officer then gives them a ticket for causing an accident, and not maintaining the safety features in their vehicle properly. Maybe the wallet incentive will work.
I agree. I've been a developer for government/military funded software for a while. Over the years, I've begun to get a feel for what is a pet project or idea that won't really be used, and what is software that actually has a purpose. From how the article reads, I feel this system will either go mostly unused or the data from it will be unhelpful/misleading.
You know, after reading the article, I'm skeptical that this software is of any real use. I mean, it sounds like an interesting idea or theory, but actually carrying it out to practice with any sort of reliability or usefulness is questionable.
Of course, I find it interesting that people are relying more and more on computers to do this kind of work. I mean, computers are very gullible. What's to say that people won't use code, euphamisms, or lie to send programs off on the wrong track? From how this article reads, it really wouldn't be hard.
So don't mind me... I'll just sit here trying to take over the world whilst sitting under Niagra Falls.
That's the threading model I discussed. Each of those jobs is a single thread, and each processor can have multiple threads. In your example, processor 2 would then have non-used cycles when there are fewer AI opponents (In many cases, it's common to have each AI be its own thread, so that processor 1 could handle sound and bad guys 0-2, while processor 2 just does bad guys 3-7). No matter how you balance/schedule those jobs, there are still inefficiencies and problems if one job becomes really taxing (Sound takes up extra time for some reason, so bad guys 0-2 get extra stupid and start running into walls). To counteract that for commercial purposes, you have to give yourself some "wiggle room", so one area doesn't suffer just because another needs a couple of extra cycles to do its job. There is also the problem of communications between Processors which can be painfully slow in comparison with doing the acual processing (though the shared memory may help with this).
In gaming, frame rate is king. Having processor cycles and not taking advantage of them means a slower frame rate. This is bad because the end experience is not all it could be. It may also kick you in the ass during marketing.
From what I understand of console programming, right now the max numbers of frames/sec a TV can show is 30, so actually any frames above that are lost. I'm not sure if this applies or not since XB2 is designed for HDTV. I don't know what refresh rates are like on an HDTV, but if they're like monitors (And I think they are from what I've read), refresh rates of 80-120 times are not only possible, but commonplace.
Even still, extra processor cycles can be used to make AI smarter, the physics more realistic, the view depth longer, etc.
All that said, parallel programming is almost never 100% efficient. If you synchronized the processors, there are some tasks that cannot be done on multiple processors... Meaning that the other processors would have to wait for the busy one to finish its job.
A potential advantage of 3 Processors, have single-processor intensive jobs, and then leave tandem jobs to the other 2 Processors. There are massively parallel computers that have done this, though they had 1024+ processors with a front-end to handle single-processor tasks while the array of processors were doing their work on something else. The MASPAR comes to mind (Description at http://www.jics.utk.edu/resources/machines-descrip.html).
It may also be that the Graphics card is considered a 4th processor. While that would be rather untraditional, it does solve the funky addressing issue. It would be impossible to synchronize it with the others since its architecture is different though.
The fact that they have shared memory hints towards some kind of synchronization, though is certainly not a dead give-away. Having two processors do totally different things in the same memory address space is risky, to be sure.
I'd like to take this moment to thank Dr. Wang. 6 months ago I would have said "Huh, 3 CPUs, that's a weird number", instead of actually knowing something about the subject.:)
Depends on how you have them configured, and what you're doing with them. If you look at multiple CPUs just from the threading level (Like MS has been known to do), you're being really inefficient with the processing power available.
First of all, from an addressing perspective, 3 CPUs is a weird number. In almost all multiprocessor systems (Where the processors share a single board) I know of have a number of processors that is a power of 2. This is because if you're going to build an architecture that addresses a certain number of CPUs, you usually have the full compliment of CPUs to make use of the architecture you've provided for them. Whithout exception, CPU addressing on a single board is done in binary. In a few cases you'll have boards that can have a capacity higher than the number of existing CPUs, but even then the number of existing CPUs uses the full range of addresses given by a certain subset of bits (4 CPUs on an 8 CPU board, using 2 of 3 addressing bits). From a hardware multiprocessing perspective, 3 is a ~really~ weird number.
When programming from a threading perspective, it's quite common to have one thread that will have too much to do, while the other threads aren't particularly active (leaving their CPUs wasting cycles). This is very inefficient behavior.
An alternative to this is to synchronize the CPUs and do a single instruction on multiple sets of data (SIMD multi-processing architype). This is especially useful for things like array transformations (common in 3d gaming and graphics applications) where you can do the work in a fraction of the time, with very little additional overhead. The shared memory model also would help facilitate this kind of work in an efficient manner.
Many tried-and-true parallel programming algorithms are also designed for divide-and-conquor apporaches for solving problems. In these cases, more often than not, the algorithms are designed to deal with a number of CPUs that are a power of 2.
Let's take ordering an unorderd list as an example:
Threaded approach: One CPU orders the list, two CPUs are bored.
Synchronized approach: Have three CPUs ordering the same data. I'm not sure how this algorithm would look/work.
Divide & Conquor: Each CPU gets its own sub-section of the data. Then, each of those sub-sections gets divided recursively... Aside from dividing data by three (much more common for arrays to be multiple of 2 than 3 in my experience), it's not so bad. When you get to merging the sorted results with threes instead of twos, the merges would get complicated and ugly (Differing lengths, differences between origional division and sub-division). So, it would work, but a well-known elegant algorithm for sorting would become much more cumbersome.
As someone who has worked with parallel programming, three is a really strange number of CPUs. In a performance-intense area like gaming, I'd find it hard to believe that they'd really accept many of the inefficiencies of high-level programming. At the same time, it's hard to see the usefulness of a 3 CPU architecture for lower-level programming.
As I stated earlier, they may have 2 in tandem, with one doing other things like sound. However, any divergence in that direction is pure speculation. I'm sure they have some well thought-out plan for the design.
It'll be interesting to see what they finally decide to put out on the market, because the current spec leaves me decidedly curious.
It said in the article that MS was developing game prototypes on G5s. So, I can't figure out what they're doing OS wise... But I'll be chuckling for the next couple hours for sure.
That's all the XBox has ever been... A small PC in a fancy box.
Check out what's in the current version: Celeron 677 CPU Customized nVidia card 8/10 GB HDD (Depending on place of manufacture) 64 Megs of RAM Network Card
Also note that the OS is a stripped down version of Windows (2000 I think).
These have been really popular with some linux tinkerers because the XBox is so similar to the PC. You can load Linux on it (With a little bit of shoe-horning) and can even make clusters out of them. At $175 or so each, they make for real cheap CPU power.
What's even better is that the Xbox sells at a loss. That means Linuxoids can build a cheap cluster, and hurt Gates' bottom line all at the same time.
It will be interesting to see what people do with the next Xbox. The fact that they seem to be going to a more propritary architecture tells me that cost and security are to really major concerns.
It will be interesting to see what they do with a 3 CPU architecture. They could use it to calculate things in three dimensions simultaneously, or work with RGB color components simultaneously.
I doubt they'll go that route though. The number three is ~really~ weird to work with, so it might be a dual-CPU arrangement for general computing, with the 3rd doing graphics work.
~D
Re:Sometimes dying is a good thing.
on
United Linux Dead
·
· Score: 1
As is mirrored in nature: The death of one thing leaves room for new things to grow.
If the loss of circulation in the hands didn't have some kind of effect during the reproductive stages then it would only happen to some people (Such as Alzheimer's). The fact that it is (as far as I know) a biological constant amongst humans suggests that there was some reason for it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's only a valid argument when dealing with who created the song. This is not a fight about the origin of the work, but proper use of that work.
One possible defense would be to say that the origin of the song is in question, as 8 Mile Style didn't have the song registered. Considering the circumstances, it looks like that would be a very poor plan.
~D
Do they have any idea how much something like this woulf f-ing piss me off? Thinking about it pisses me off. I don't drink... Never have, and I doubt I ever will. To have a device to keep me from driving drunk that interferes with the startup and continued operation of my vehicle is just a pain in the ass. This sounds really invasive. I would ~not~ be happy. In fact, I'd be so unhappy as to go buy a car in another state. I bet the dealerships will LOVE to hear that.
Don't punish me for other peoples' stupidity.
~D
(Scratches head)
Well, it says there's a software renderer in there. So if nothing else, that should work without the vid. card. Though, I can certainly see why you would want your vid card enabled.
~D
From what the site says, there's a software renderer that's supposed to be pretty good (They specifically mention laptops). Can't hurt to download it and try it out.
~D
So, here's an idea of what's in the download that you may find interesting:
6 maps
The new Onslought game type
Assault is back!!
Voice chat
Turrets
New levels
Sniper rifle is back
Voice recognition (bot commands)
I've heard reports of, but haven't seen yet for UT2K4:
Vehicles
New weapons (spider mines)
Anti-Vehicle rockets
Nade launcher
Play from laptop!!!
~D
Assault is back, in-game voice chat is supported. Find a mirror/torrent, and start sucking down some bytes.
~D
Sonofabitch.
Well, I'm glad I got credit for the work so far as a distributed programming project.
~D
For BT, you need a lot of parts:
Webserver
Tracker
BT Client with complete files
Torrent files
Clients
On a lot of systems, you'll also need custom configuration or software running on your web server (Which sometimes isn't available if you're renting web space).
For mine, you only need some kind of scripting language on your webserver. Drop the files in, and you're good to go. ~very~ simple configuration. The interface is more like FTP, which is nice too.
~D
One of the current projects I'm working on is something of a solution to this. It's 1 part torrent, and 1 part normal download. Each file shared has a required origin web server. The program will then download from whoever's handy, be it peers or the webserver. This means that if the webserver is busy, the program can use other clients. If the other clients are busy (or nonexistant), you still have a guarunteed source.
When I first started the project, I didn't even know about BT. Once I learned, I was scared, since someone already did most of what I was proposing... But I think having the central website adds a lot of value because it guaruntees you'll be able to connect with someone, has a definitive list of peers, stores centralized usage statistics, and more.
The program is called PeerShare, and you'll eventually be able to learn more at dracosoftware.com. The program is in beta, but I've been too busy to push it out the door for public testing.
~D
(Chuckles)
I had a professor in graduate school, she said she still gets that treatment, especially since she's middle-aged. All these 20-something computer retailers treating a CS professor like she doesn't know a thing.
Use it to your advantage. Surprise people. Never let them see you comin'.
~D
Go to Best Buy, and purchase a new PCMCIA WiFi NIC with cash. Go to the airport, swap your old card for the new one. When you leave the airport, leave your shiny new NIC at a local garbage can. Voila: Anonymous MAC address only used once ever.
~D
Idle hands are the devil's workshop is a very old saying which proves (religious conotations aside) that you are not alone in this belief.
~D
"Formal capactity testing? Screw that. Let's build a site and try to get it listed on slashdot. Just watch the sucker for a couple minutes and when it dies, go back and read the log to see how ya did!"
~D
Great, lets link to a website that has nothing but photos and thumbnails! Ooh wait, better yet! Let's find one that organizes them dynamically with non-trivial algorithms!!
Are we going for a new slashdotting record or something?
~D
I think the point here is: The people are going to be stupid drivers (Reading while driving? Cell phones AND notes while driving?) no matter what you do (I don't see how they can get much worse, honestly. They're already doing the bare minimum), so you design the cars to squeeze as much out of a few IQ points as you can. Hell, if people are reading the newspaper in today's cars, you might as well have the CAR pay attention to what's going on.
Of course, what goes along with this: Person makes a bad lane-change, gets in accident. Complains that car didn't bleep, and is therefore not responsible. Officer then gives them a ticket for causing an accident, and not maintaining the safety features in their vehicle properly. Maybe the wallet incentive will work.
~D
I agree. I've been a developer for government/military funded software for a while. Over the years, I've begun to get a feel for what is a pet project or idea that won't really be used, and what is software that actually has a purpose. From how the article reads, I feel this system will either go mostly unused or the data from it will be unhelpful/misleading.
~D
You know, after reading the article, I'm skeptical that this software is of any real use. I mean, it sounds like an interesting idea or theory, but actually carrying it out to practice with any sort of reliability or usefulness is questionable.
Of course, I find it interesting that people are relying more and more on computers to do this kind of work. I mean, computers are very gullible. What's to say that people won't use code, euphamisms, or lie to send programs off on the wrong track? From how this article reads, it really wouldn't be hard.
So don't mind me... I'll just sit here trying to take over the world whilst sitting under Niagra Falls.
~D
Yeah, I got the CPU wrong. PC memory is more reliable than my own. :)
~D
That's the threading model I discussed. Each of those jobs is a single thread, and each processor can have multiple threads. In your example, processor 2 would then have non-used cycles when there are fewer AI opponents (In many cases, it's common to have each AI be its own thread, so that processor 1 could handle sound and bad guys 0-2, while processor 2 just does bad guys 3-7). No matter how you balance/schedule those jobs, there are still inefficiencies and problems if one job becomes really taxing (Sound takes up extra time for some reason, so bad guys 0-2 get extra stupid and start running into walls). To counteract that for commercial purposes, you have to give yourself some "wiggle room", so one area doesn't suffer just because another needs a couple of extra cycles to do its job. There is also the problem of communications between Processors which can be painfully slow in comparison with doing the acual processing (though the shared memory may help with this).
p .html).
:)
In gaming, frame rate is king. Having processor cycles and not taking advantage of them means a slower frame rate. This is bad because the end experience is not all it could be. It may also kick you in the ass during marketing.
From what I understand of console programming, right now the max numbers of frames/sec a TV can show is 30, so actually any frames above that are lost. I'm not sure if this applies or not since XB2 is designed for HDTV. I don't know what refresh rates are like on an HDTV, but if they're like monitors (And I think they are from what I've read), refresh rates of 80-120 times are not only possible, but commonplace.
Even still, extra processor cycles can be used to make AI smarter, the physics more realistic, the view depth longer, etc.
All that said, parallel programming is almost never 100% efficient. If you synchronized the processors, there are some tasks that cannot be done on multiple processors... Meaning that the other processors would have to wait for the busy one to finish its job.
A potential advantage of 3 Processors, have single-processor intensive jobs, and then leave tandem jobs to the other 2 Processors. There are massively parallel computers that have done this, though they had 1024+ processors with a front-end to handle single-processor tasks while the array of processors were doing their work on something else. The MASPAR comes to mind (Description at http://www.jics.utk.edu/resources/machines-descri
It may also be that the Graphics card is considered a 4th processor. While that would be rather untraditional, it does solve the funky addressing issue. It would be impossible to synchronize it with the others since its architecture is different though.
The fact that they have shared memory hints towards some kind of synchronization, though is certainly not a dead give-away. Having two processors do totally different things in the same memory address space is risky, to be sure.
I'd like to take this moment to thank Dr. Wang. 6 months ago I would have said "Huh, 3 CPUs, that's a weird number", instead of actually knowing something about the subject.
~D
Depends on how you have them configured, and what you're doing with them. If you look at multiple CPUs just from the threading level (Like MS has been known to do), you're being really inefficient with the processing power available.
First of all, from an addressing perspective, 3 CPUs is a weird number. In almost all multiprocessor systems (Where the processors share a single board) I know of have a number of processors that is a power of 2. This is because if you're going to build an architecture that addresses a certain number of CPUs, you usually have the full compliment of CPUs to make use of the architecture you've provided for them. Whithout exception, CPU addressing on a single board is done in binary. In a few cases you'll have boards that can have a capacity higher than the number of existing CPUs, but even then the number of existing CPUs uses the full range of addresses given by a certain subset of bits (4 CPUs on an 8 CPU board, using 2 of 3 addressing bits). From a hardware multiprocessing perspective, 3 is a ~really~ weird number.
When programming from a threading perspective, it's quite common to have one thread that will have too much to do, while the other threads aren't particularly active (leaving their CPUs wasting cycles). This is very inefficient behavior.
An alternative to this is to synchronize the CPUs and do a single instruction on multiple sets of data (SIMD multi-processing architype). This is especially useful for things like array transformations (common in 3d gaming and graphics applications) where you can do the work in a fraction of the time, with very little additional overhead. The shared memory model also would help facilitate this kind of work in an efficient manner.
Many tried-and-true parallel programming algorithms are also designed for divide-and-conquor apporaches for solving problems. In these cases, more often than not, the algorithms are designed to deal with a number of CPUs that are a power of 2.
Let's take ordering an unorderd list as an example:
Threaded approach: One CPU orders the list, two CPUs are bored.
Synchronized approach: Have three CPUs ordering the same data. I'm not sure how this algorithm would look/work.
Divide & Conquor: Each CPU gets its own sub-section of the data. Then, each of those sub-sections gets divided recursively... Aside from dividing data by three (much more common for arrays to be multiple of 2 than 3 in my experience), it's not so bad. When you get to merging the sorted results with threes instead of twos, the merges would get complicated and ugly (Differing lengths, differences between origional division and sub-division). So, it would work, but a well-known elegant algorithm for sorting would become much more cumbersome.
As someone who has worked with parallel programming, three is a really strange number of CPUs. In a performance-intense area like gaming, I'd find it hard to believe that they'd really accept many of the inefficiencies of high-level programming. At the same time, it's hard to see the usefulness of a 3 CPU architecture for lower-level programming.
As I stated earlier, they may have 2 in tandem, with one doing other things like sound. However, any divergence in that direction is pure speculation. I'm sure they have some well thought-out plan for the design.
It'll be interesting to see what they finally decide to put out on the market, because the current spec leaves me decidedly curious.
~D
It said in the article that MS was developing game prototypes on G5s. So, I can't figure out what they're doing OS wise... But I'll be chuckling for the next couple hours for sure.
~D
"Internally, Microsoft has begun developing game prototypes, and it is using G5 systems to do so."
Thanks MS... I'm gonna have a smile on my face all goddamned day.
~D
That's all the XBox has ever been... A small PC in a fancy box.
Check out what's in the current version:
Celeron 677 CPU
Customized nVidia card
8/10 GB HDD (Depending on place of manufacture)
64 Megs of RAM
Network Card
Also note that the OS is a stripped down version of Windows (2000 I think).
These have been really popular with some linux tinkerers because the XBox is so similar to the PC. You can load Linux on it (With a little bit of shoe-horning) and can even make clusters out of them. At $175 or so each, they make for real cheap CPU power.
What's even better is that the Xbox sells at a loss. That means Linuxoids can build a cheap cluster, and hurt Gates' bottom line all at the same time.
It will be interesting to see what people do with the next Xbox. The fact that they seem to be going to a more propritary architecture tells me that cost and security are to really major concerns.
It will be interesting to see what they do with a 3 CPU architecture. They could use it to calculate things in three dimensions simultaneously, or work with RGB color components simultaneously.
I doubt they'll go that route though. The number three is ~really~ weird to work with, so it might be a dual-CPU arrangement for general computing, with the 3rd doing graphics work.
~D
As is mirrored in nature: The death of one thing leaves room for new things to grow.
~D
Counterpoint:
If the loss of circulation in the hands didn't have some kind of effect during the reproductive stages then it would only happen to some people (Such as Alzheimer's). The fact that it is (as far as I know) a biological constant amongst humans suggests that there was some reason for it.
~D