Yea, let's pay for a full new Windows licence, as well as extra hardware that's not needed. Given how Microsoft has eBay squash sales of Windows, I don't think that they'd be happy if you resold the older system either.
Activation is arrogant and assinine. It's a software company's way of saying, "I don't trust you to fulfill your part of the social contract."
"- how can a driver have the same bug on windows and macos x?"
Quite simply; the Intel card is, in both cases, doing things like UDP and TCP offload from the main system. This means the card and driver together have an internal state in software to manage it, and (due to the asynchronus nature of networking) you can get the hardware and driver software's core into a situation where they don't agree on the state.
The small glue layer that deals with the OS hooks is a static translation layer that wouldn't be involved. The SB Live! and Audigy drivers in Linux are the same driver as the Windows Creative driver (well, they were about 6 years ago when they contributed the code). nVidia uses the same driver code on all platforms as well. For anyone who's written a driver, this is easy to understand.
"- why use this stupid external card? what are the chances it did have the same chipset as the internal one?"
He uses it because it's a timing race, and because it's easier to demonstrate with 2 cards in the system. With a 4000 microsecond delay, this means it's likely taking a bit longer for the OS to service the interrupts between the two cards; enough that the driver bug can show itself. There are likely other ways to tickle this bug that don't require multiple cards, but then you'd have to have something running on the OS. Still, If you setup a machine to throw packets around, you could make an intermittent crash bug appear on an OS -- that's not cool.
"- and odds are the bug is a buffer overrun... does it take a SO LONG for apple to fix a stupid memory overrun?"
A stupid memory overrun? Man, you haven't programmed ever, have you? A timing related bug in device driver code is probably the second hardest bug you'll ever encounter to debug (the first would be the core of the OS itself). Concurrent programming is difficult.
It's responses like these that show why this person had been light on detail. Most people lack the technical background in OS design to understand this issue.
The local drive doesn't matter; it's got gigE, as does my fileserver. I can happily have terabytes of data mounted via NFS (currently, though, there's only most of a terabyte addressable at home).
The $500 MacMini does a lot more than a $50 DVD player (MythTV front end, Frontrow + remote, gigE/wifi, bluetooth, StepMania, other emulated games, etc).
Yes, it's 10x the price, but you get at least 10x the features, with the only limit being what a computer can do.
Get a MacMini. $500 -- built in IR/remote, bluetooth for wireless keyboard/mice, DVI, S-video, multiple USB ports, gigE, wifi, optical audio out, etc.
If you really want to make it more silent (even though they're quiet), you could disconnect the power on the onboard HD and have it boot via network, although I haven't experimented with that. The MacMini is far quieter than the Xbox Media Centre it replaced, and much more capable of decoding higher-resolution movies.
Yes, the software will autoupdate itself. In a year of using software update on various Macs, I've never had the service cause an issue like the Xorg update in Ubuntu did recently.
Use the MacMini as a DVD jukebox (it's easy enough to make in a normal DVD player, so why stop there?), and don't forget it also runs MythTV's front end easily, and comes with a remote (and receiver) built in and FrontRow (easy access to pictures, music, movies via an interface designed to be used on a TV).
Yes, it also does DVI out as well as optical out (and S-svideo), and happens to be cheaper than a $2,000 DVD player (about $1,500). All you need to do is go spend some of that saved money on a bluetooth mouse and keyboard which will work with it just fine (look, Ma, no wires!).
"I have an old 386 running fedora and samba on a 120GB drive with no RAID whatsoever. The machine won't fit another drive and an upgrade will involve so much hassle I've been putting it off over and over. Any reasonable upgrade would have to involve a terabyte machine because I don't want to go through the hassle of upgrading too soon after."
Yea, well, 1986 called, they want their CPU back.
Your system isn't a 386, though; old PATA IDE controllers on those things couldn't address more than 4 or 8gb (the first lip; then there were controller issues at 20, 32 or 36, and 160gb as well). Given that a real 386 won't have the PCI slot for a modern IDE controller, I call bullshit. Just spend the 400$ to get a basic system with a decent IO subsystem, spend 400$ to get the 4gb of RAM to buffer it, and then spend the 800$ to put 1Tb of disk space in (RAID5). That's a fileserver.
You know, most people would call it statistics (in this example, using a mathematical model to predict results), or the scientific method (in general, observing repeatable events).
"I saw a 5-port gigabit switch at a retailer yesterday for under $12/port. Cards are equally cheap. The problem is that for most users, they won't notice the difference,"
I think the problem is that it's unlikely that switch supports JUMBO frames. 1500 bytes don't cut it at gigE speeds. Even on a Barton XP 2500+, you get 100% CPU saturation around 250MBps with 1500 byte ethernet packets. My very high quality Intel gigE NICs support jumbo frames of 9000 mtu (and up), but this cheap Airlink switch (the only one I could find in town) is broken past 1500 MTU, meaning it's garbage (don't buy Airlink gear).
I'm sure the Airlink would be fine if you had garbage gigE nics, though, which is probably their target market.
" or they'd have to change the cabling fro cat5 to cat6, or they have one or more boxes that are still runing 100mb, so there is zero point in upgrading."
All of these are bunk. Most cat5 that's properly wired has 4 conductors in it (which is what you need for gigE) and are shielded well enough. You mentioned a switch; you should know that a switch allows for mixed speed devices with no general speed drop (unlike the old hubs that used to exist).
If you have a fileserver in your house serving up to 3-4 client machines like I do, gigE is well worth it, since the network is no longer the bottleneck.
"That's cool, I can't wait to get my new mac and start playing..oh..uhm. I guess I better buy a console or something to go with it."
* Bootcamp, Parallels, etc.
* Xbox360 is the same as a video card that plays Oblivion decently, and it'll also play Oblivion decently (as well as other PC titles, since Xbox360 == little PC).
As you can see, for n less than 7, n * log n + 100 (which assumes our language is 100 times slower to run our n*log(n) algorithm vs. our 2^n language), the boundary exists at 6. If our language is only 50 times slower, the boundary is 5.
How much slower would a language have to be (in units) for that n to be not incredibly small; say you have AI for an RTS where you want 20 units on screen? Well, if we scale up our little speadsheet table, we see that 2^20 is 1.0x10^6 larger than 20 * log(20). This leads us to the conclusion that if we are writing AI for a game (such as Warcraft) where we want 20 units on screen, and we have a choice between C with a 2^n decision algorithm, or an interpreted language with an n*log n decision algorithm, the interpreted language would have to be 1048550.0 units slower -- or, 52428.0 units of time slower per iteration of the algorithm to be equally effective (and it'd have to have an overhead of greater than 52,428 units/iteration to be LESS effective!).
The order of the algorithm is the dominant factor in time performance of input to output. Compilers are not little god boxes, and will not fix broken algorithms. Even a very large per-iteration overhead (which doesn't exist, since interpretted languages will use caches, P-code, or even decent JIT techniques) isn't enough to sink the performance of them.
It's the algorithm. It's straight complexity theory; C/C++ is not a panacea. If you write a 2^n or n! algorithm in C, it'll have its doors blown off by an nlogn algorithm in Python.
Either you have constant time, nlogn, or even n algorithms that run OK (CPUs today are fast enough that even for a decent sized n, an n algorithm will be executed shortly). However, no computer humans can ever build that works on the same principles as your desktop computer will be able to do 2^n, n^n, or n! algortihms in any kind of useful time for large n.
You might be able to get results in a lesser amount of time if you can parallelize the work (see the Distributed.net cracking efforts on factoring into large prime numbers), but if you can't make the algorithm work in parallel or otherwise reduce it to a polynomial time algorithm, even a supercomputer from the year 50,000 won't solve these problems for large n.
Don't focus on the language; that's the wrong area to look.
Ever been to a Honda dealer? It's pretty outrageous what they charge for "factory options" too.
It's cheaper to buy DDR SODIMMs from a 3rd party than to go through Apple from factory (in fact, it works about to be about 300$ cheaper). It's demonstrably simple to replace the RAM -- look at all the MacBook RAM+HD user swaps without doing more than taking out the battery!
So, if it's AppleEasy to swap RAM and HD from somewhere else, why whine about it?
"Man, those Honda dealers sure charge a lot! What gives?"
"If Apple takes a large chunk of the market, we're going to have to hold them to the same standard we do Microsoft, meaning that we should be demanding an end to their anticompetitive practices of bundling their own software."
If I wanted some random PC components without worrying about software, I'd buy some random PC laptop or the nice, naked Linux laptops that are out there. Apple's software is the value-add that makes the laptop worth buying. I'd never submit to having a Linux or a Windows laptop because the OS X experience is so good -- when you have the same people making the hardware as writing the software, things Just Work (TM). Not like when you have random 3rd-party OEMs writing broken drivers for a closed OS, or patient programmers desperately trying to reverse engineer specs for hardware which also has undocumented bugs and problems!
"I plan to be very very careful when buying ATI again."
After learning exactly how "awesome" ATI's driver support was when I tried to setup 3D with my Radeon 8500 (and also Xinerama, etc) to play WoW under Cedega, in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes, I switched to nVidia and haven't looked back (yes, nVidia's drivers ran with Cedega and WoW in both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux installs perfectly well).
So, I suggest to you, to never buy ATI again. Saying you'll be careful when buying ATI again, is like saying you'll be careful when shoving a live scorpion into your pants again. ATI is shit. Regardless of what their hardware might do, if you don't have drivers to make it do it, it's the same as not having the card!
"You're right, but this is one of the natural "phenomena" of the market -- no one wants to really follow anyone else's standards."
Basically, IE has about CSS2 20-30% coverage, while Konq, Opera, Safari (which is Konq), FireFox/Mozilla/Camino have between 70-90% CSS2 coverage. The second group ("standards compliant" I think I'll call them) have 95+% of CSS1 in, while IE has 40%. And IE also likes to do things Just A Bit Differently, ya know. MS doesn't seem inclined to follow the spec, but the other people have their shit together.
Now, since none of these are sold, and the marority are FOSS or Freeware, I fail to see the argument for market forces. This is not 1997, with two companies fighting to have their server software be dominant via browsers.
This post, and your other post, reveal flaws in your understanding that I think should be addressed. For the majority of your work, if you target standards compliant browers, you're golden. If you decide you must support IE, then you have to develop a second path for IE. If Safari or Konq is on the standards path and it misrenders something, no big deal. The intelligent users will file a bug. If something won't work on the IE path, it's also not a big deal. Just mention to the end-user that they can stop using the worst browser on the planet Earth to view webpages.
Not entirely accurate. SuSE is derived from Slackware, for example. The fork was originally in the mid-1990s, but as of the early 2000s they still had the same disk set structure.
The same trend occurs for PC games. In the early 1990s, developers would write their own engines. Now, specialized houses write the engines, and out source it. Most developers retain a staff of developers that's just specialized enough to customize the engine and put the game content into it.
Most development houses now have a much larger staff of content generators as well. In Doom, you had sprites. In Quake, you had incredibly low-polygon models (remember the Quake 1 guy's jarhead?). Oblivion, comparatively, uses as many polygons on a small object in a complex scene as Quake 1 used on half of a scene. PC developers have been conglomerating left, right, and centre, with far fewer houses producing the higher-content titles, and most of the smaller publishers sticking to simpler games that emphasize gameplay over graphics. In this arena, they can succeed.
So, I guess, it's not true what you stated; you can't just plot vectors and let the GPU do the work, because you have to develop a model with 30,000-60,000 polygons, maybe render that into a bump-mapping + simplified model, and then add on top the actual item textures; these same textures must be rendered at a high quality, so they can be included in dithered down versions for LOD and general management of GPU RAM. Those polygon numbers only go up with each generation of PC and console games, which requires more time to model (until rendering software gets better, and can magically generate content for you).
Unless your system is 100% proven for all inputs (of the input classes you are using), there is the possibility that an attacker can feed an input for which your program's state machine does not halt (and, instead, goes into other states, perhaps escalating privileges or otherwise doing anything).
So this means you either have completely disconnected systems, or you only use things like Spin which are provably correct.
The ATI driver support isn't much rosier on Windows. ATI cards need a hotfix to get Oblivion working!
(Disclaimer: I'm a Linux guy; I bought a GeForce 6800 based entirely on nVidia's Linux support -- the fact that it runs WoW @ 1600x900 4xFSAA and other settings maxed at an average of 50fps is a nice bonus!)
"On the morning of July 8, 2005, fourteen-year-old Duong Ba Tien left to go work in the peanut fields of Vietnam. He never came back. Hours later, his mother found him, his life snuffed out by a Vietnam War era explosive he encountered while digging in the ground."
Read more about how land mines suck. Do you know why landmines are popular? It's more demoralizing for an army to have to leave wounded soldiers behind (or carry maimed soldiers, which puts them at a tactical disadvantage) as compared to a clean kill.
There is such a thing as in imoral technology. That this was posted to Slashdot is disgusting.
Slashdot Mirror
"Perhaps a new PC would be a better option... "
Yea, let's pay for a full new Windows licence, as well as extra hardware that's not needed. Given how Microsoft has eBay squash sales of Windows, I don't think that they'd be happy if you resold the older system either.
Activation is arrogant and assinine. It's a software company's way of saying, "I don't trust you to fulfill your part of the social contract."
"- how can a driver have the same bug on windows and macos x?"
Quite simply; the Intel card is, in both cases, doing things like UDP and TCP offload from the main system. This means the card and driver together have an internal state in software to manage it, and (due to the asynchronus nature of networking) you can get the hardware and driver software's core into a situation where they don't agree on the state.
The small glue layer that deals with the OS hooks is a static translation layer that wouldn't be involved. The SB Live! and Audigy drivers in Linux are the same driver as the Windows Creative driver (well, they were about 6 years ago when they contributed the code). nVidia uses the same driver code on all platforms as well. For anyone who's written a driver, this is easy to understand.
"- why use this stupid external card? what are the chances it did have the same chipset as the internal one?"
He uses it because it's a timing race, and because it's easier to demonstrate with 2 cards in the system. With a 4000 microsecond delay, this means it's likely taking a bit longer for the OS to service the interrupts between the two cards; enough that the driver bug can show itself. There are likely other ways to tickle this bug that don't require multiple cards, but then you'd have to have something running on the OS. Still, If you setup a machine to throw packets around, you could make an intermittent crash bug appear on an OS -- that's not cool.
"- and odds are the bug is a buffer overrun... does it take a SO LONG for apple to fix a stupid memory overrun?"
A stupid memory overrun? Man, you haven't programmed ever, have you? A timing related bug in device driver code is probably the second hardest bug you'll ever encounter to debug (the first would be the core of the OS itself). Concurrent programming is difficult.
It's responses like these that show why this person had been light on detail. Most people lack the technical background in OS design to understand this issue.
The local drive doesn't matter; it's got gigE, as does my fileserver. I can happily have terabytes of data mounted via NFS (currently, though, there's only most of a terabyte addressable at home).
The local drive is nothing more than a cache.
768Kbps == 6MBps
as
768*8 = 6144KBps or 6MBps.
The $500 MacMini does a lot more than a $50 DVD player (MythTV front end, Frontrow + remote, gigE/wifi, bluetooth, StepMania, other emulated games, etc).
Yes, it's 10x the price, but you get at least 10x the features, with the only limit being what a computer can do.
Get a MacMini. $500 -- built in IR/remote, bluetooth for wireless keyboard/mice, DVI, S-video, multiple USB ports, gigE, wifi, optical audio out, etc.
If you really want to make it more silent (even though they're quiet), you could disconnect the power on the onboard HD and have it boot via network, although I haven't experimented with that. The MacMini is far quieter than the Xbox Media Centre it replaced, and much more capable of decoding higher-resolution movies.
Yes, the software will autoupdate itself. In a year of using software update on various Macs, I've never had the service cause an issue like the Xorg update in Ubuntu did recently.
Use the MacMini as a DVD jukebox (it's easy enough to make in a normal DVD player, so why stop there?), and don't forget it also runs MythTV's front end easily, and comes with a remote (and receiver) built in and FrontRow (easy access to pictures, music, movies via an interface designed to be used on a TV).
Yes, it also does DVI out as well as optical out (and S-svideo), and happens to be cheaper than a $2,000 DVD player (about $1,500). All you need to do is go spend some of that saved money on a bluetooth mouse and keyboard which will work with it just fine (look, Ma, no wires!).
"I have an old 386 running fedora and samba on a 120GB drive with no RAID whatsoever. The machine won't fit another drive and an upgrade will involve so much hassle I've been putting it off over and over. Any reasonable upgrade would have to involve a terabyte machine because I don't want to go through the hassle of upgrading too soon after."
Yea, well, 1986 called, they want their CPU back.
Your system isn't a 386, though; old PATA IDE controllers on those things couldn't address more than 4 or 8gb (the first lip; then there were controller issues at 20, 32 or 36, and 160gb as well). Given that a real 386 won't have the PCI slot for a modern IDE controller, I call bullshit. Just spend the 400$ to get a basic system with a decent IO subsystem, spend 400$ to get the 4gb of RAM to buffer it, and then spend the 800$ to put 1Tb of disk space in (RAID5). That's a fileserver.
"The second I'll call "intelligent observation"."
You know, most people would call it statistics (in this example, using a mathematical model to predict results), or the scientific method (in general, observing repeatable events).
"I saw a 5-port gigabit switch at a retailer yesterday for under $12/port. Cards are equally cheap. The problem is that for most users, they won't notice the difference,"
I think the problem is that it's unlikely that switch supports JUMBO frames. 1500 bytes don't cut it at gigE speeds. Even on a Barton XP 2500+, you get 100% CPU saturation around 250MBps with 1500 byte ethernet packets. My very high quality Intel gigE NICs support jumbo frames of 9000 mtu (and up), but this cheap Airlink switch (the only one I could find in town) is broken past 1500 MTU, meaning it's garbage (don't buy Airlink gear).
I'm sure the Airlink would be fine if you had garbage gigE nics, though, which is probably their target market.
" or they'd have to change the cabling fro cat5 to cat6, or they have one or more boxes that are still runing 100mb, so there is zero point in upgrading."
All of these are bunk. Most cat5 that's properly wired has 4 conductors in it (which is what you need for gigE) and are shielded well enough. You mentioned a switch; you should know that a switch allows for mixed speed devices with no general speed drop (unlike the old hubs that used to exist).
If you have a fileserver in your house serving up to 3-4 client machines like I do, gigE is well worth it, since the network is no longer the bottleneck.
"That's cool, I can't wait to get my new mac and start playing..oh..uhm. I guess I better buy a console or something to go with it."
* Bootcamp, Parallels, etc.
* Xbox360 is the same as a video card that plays Oblivion decently, and it'll also play Oblivion decently (as well as other PC titles, since Xbox360 == little PC).
They're in the process of finishing their death throes. Will this still be an issue when they're gone in 18 months? I hope not.
Column 1: n. Column 2: 2^n. Colunm 3: n * log n. Column 4: n * log n + 100.
1 2 0 100
2 4 0.602059991327962 100.602059991328
3 8 1.43136376415899 101.431363764159
4 16 2.40823996531185 102.408239965312
5 32 3.49485002168009 103.49485002168
6 64 4.66890750230186 104.668907502302
7 128 5.9156862800998 105.9156862801
As you can see, for n less than 7, n * log n + 100 (which assumes our language is 100 times slower to run our n*log(n) algorithm vs. our 2^n language), the boundary exists at 6. If our language is only 50 times slower, the boundary is 5.
How much slower would a language have to be (in units) for that n to be not incredibly small; say you have AI for an RTS where you want 20 units on screen? Well, if we scale up our little speadsheet table, we see that 2^20 is 1.0x10^6 larger than 20 * log(20). This leads us to the conclusion that if we are writing AI for a game (such as Warcraft) where we want 20 units on screen, and we have a choice between C with a 2^n decision algorithm, or an interpreted language with an n*log n decision algorithm, the interpreted language would have to be 1048550.0 units slower -- or, 52428.0 units of time slower per iteration of the algorithm to be equally effective (and it'd have to have an overhead of greater than 52,428 units/iteration to be LESS effective!).
The order of the algorithm is the dominant factor in time performance of input to output. Compilers are not little god boxes, and will not fix broken algorithms. Even a very large per-iteration overhead (which doesn't exist, since interpretted languages will use caches, P-code, or even decent JIT techniques) isn't enough to sink the performance of them.
It's the algorithm. It's straight complexity theory; C/C++ is not a panacea. If you write a 2^n or n! algorithm in C, it'll have its doors blown off by an nlogn algorithm in Python.
Either you have constant time, nlogn, or even n algorithms that run OK (CPUs today are fast enough that even for a decent sized n, an n algorithm will be executed shortly). However, no computer humans can ever build that works on the same principles as your desktop computer will be able to do 2^n, n^n, or n! algortihms in any kind of useful time for large n.
You might be able to get results in a lesser amount of time if you can parallelize the work (see the Distributed.net cracking efforts on factoring into large prime numbers), but if you can't make the algorithm work in parallel or otherwise reduce it to a polynomial time algorithm, even a supercomputer from the year 50,000 won't solve these problems for large n.
Don't focus on the language; that's the wrong area to look.
Ever been to a Honda dealer? It's pretty outrageous what they charge for "factory options" too.
It's cheaper to buy DDR SODIMMs from a 3rd party than to go through Apple from factory (in fact, it works about to be about 300$ cheaper). It's demonstrably simple to replace the RAM -- look at all the MacBook RAM+HD user swaps without doing more than taking out the battery!
So, if it's AppleEasy to swap RAM and HD from somewhere else, why whine about it?
"Man, those Honda dealers sure charge a lot! What gives?"
"If Apple takes a large chunk of the market, we're going to have to hold them to the same standard we do Microsoft, meaning that we should be demanding an end to their anticompetitive practices of bundling their own software."
If I wanted some random PC components without worrying about software, I'd buy some random PC laptop or the nice, naked Linux laptops that are out there. Apple's software is the value-add that makes the laptop worth buying. I'd never submit to having a Linux or a Windows laptop because the OS X experience is so good -- when you have the same people making the hardware as writing the software, things Just Work (TM). Not like when you have random 3rd-party OEMs writing broken drivers for a closed OS, or patient programmers desperately trying to reverse engineer specs for hardware which also has undocumented bugs and problems!
MacOS X is why I buy Apple equipment.
"I plan to be very very careful when buying ATI again."
After learning exactly how "awesome" ATI's driver support was when I tried to setup 3D with my Radeon 8500 (and also Xinerama, etc) to play WoW under Cedega, in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes, I switched to nVidia and haven't looked back (yes, nVidia's drivers ran with Cedega and WoW in both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux installs perfectly well).
So, I suggest to you, to never buy ATI again. Saying you'll be careful when buying ATI again, is like saying you'll be careful when shoving a live scorpion into your pants again. ATI is shit. Regardless of what their hardware might do, if you don't have drivers to make it do it, it's the same as not having the card!
"raid starts at 8:00 and at +/- 23:30 you can go to sleep."
And if you don't want 15 hours of raiding?
"You're right, but this is one of the natural "phenomena" of the market -- no one wants to really follow anyone else's standards."
Basically, IE has about CSS2 20-30% coverage, while Konq, Opera, Safari (which is Konq), FireFox/Mozilla/Camino have between 70-90% CSS2 coverage. The second group ("standards compliant" I think I'll call them) have 95+% of CSS1 in, while IE has 40%. And IE also likes to do things Just A Bit Differently, ya know. MS doesn't seem inclined to follow the spec, but the other people have their shit together.
Now, since none of these are sold, and the marority are FOSS or Freeware, I fail to see the argument for market forces. This is not 1997, with two companies fighting to have their server software be dominant via browsers.
This post, and your other post, reveal flaws in your understanding that I think should be addressed. For the majority of your work, if you target standards compliant browers, you're golden. If you decide you must support IE, then you have to develop a second path for IE. If Safari or Konq is on the standards path and it misrenders something, no big deal. The intelligent users will file a bug. If something won't work on the IE path, it's also not a big deal. Just mention to the end-user that they can stop using the worst browser on the planet Earth to view webpages.
Not entirely accurate. SuSE is derived from Slackware, for example. The fork was originally in the mid-1990s, but as of the early 2000s they still had the same disk set structure.
The same trend occurs for PC games. In the early 1990s, developers would write their own engines. Now, specialized houses write the engines, and out source it. Most developers retain a staff of developers that's just specialized enough to customize the engine and put the game content into it.
Most development houses now have a much larger staff of content generators as well. In Doom, you had sprites. In Quake, you had incredibly low-polygon models (remember the Quake 1 guy's jarhead?). Oblivion, comparatively, uses as many polygons on a small object in a complex scene as Quake 1 used on half of a scene. PC developers have been conglomerating left, right, and centre, with far fewer houses producing the higher-content titles, and most of the smaller publishers sticking to simpler games that emphasize gameplay over graphics. In this arena, they can succeed.
So, I guess, it's not true what you stated; you can't just plot vectors and let the GPU do the work, because you have to develop a model with 30,000-60,000 polygons, maybe render that into a bump-mapping + simplified model, and then add on top the actual item textures; these same textures must be rendered at a high quality, so they can be included in dithered down versions for LOD and general management of GPU RAM. Those polygon numbers only go up with each generation of PC and console games, which requires more time to model (until rendering software gets better, and can magically generate content for you).
Exactly what I already had with Capcom vs. SNK 2 on the XBox and the Streetfighter Anniversary collection, but on the 360 instead of the Xbox.
The Xbox 360 sure gets all the great stuff, just like the Sony PSP!
Unless your system is 100% proven for all inputs (of the input classes you are using), there is the possibility that an attacker can feed an input for which your program's state machine does not halt (and, instead, goes into other states, perhaps escalating privileges or otherwise doing anything).
So this means you either have completely disconnected systems, or you only use things like Spin which are provably correct.
The ATI driver support isn't much rosier on Windows. ATI cards need a hotfix to get Oblivion working!
(Disclaimer: I'm a Linux guy; I bought a GeForce 6800 based entirely on nVidia's Linux support -- the fact that it runs WoW @ 1600x900 4xFSAA and other settings maxed at an average of 50fps is a nice bonus!)
"On the morning of July 8, 2005, fourteen-year-old Duong Ba Tien left to go work in the peanut fields of Vietnam. He never came back. Hours later, his mother found him, his life snuffed out by a Vietnam War era explosive he encountered while digging in the ground."
Read more about how land mines suck. Do you know why landmines are popular? It's more demoralizing for an army to have to leave wounded soldiers behind (or carry maimed soldiers, which puts them at a tactical disadvantage) as compared to a clean kill.
There is such a thing as in imoral technology. That this was posted to Slashdot is disgusting.
If you're going to report on anything, ScuttleMonkey, try posting about technology that saves lives.