There are already companies that offer this. For example, metroPCS which offers unlimited calls. No minute counting. For $40 a month, you get unlimited local and long distance calls.
There are numerous games that cannot be installed without admin rights
First off, this is true of *nix as well. Remember that lest step of installing new software, 'make install'? That one usually has to be done as a super-user, as it installs into common areas.
and plenty who cannot even be EXECUTED without admin rights. All because the devs are lazy morons.
Actually, this has nothing to do with the developers being lazy morons (which they're not). It has to do with MS' broken security model. The place where they chose to draw the line between user and admin restrictions in the API is so asinine that it's virtually impossible to write any sort of complex app that *doesn't* require some admin functionality to run.
But to be honest, why does it even matter? A lot of the vulnerabilities on Windows have nothing to do with installing software, or who has the permissions to run operations. They have to do with services' exploits and buffer overruns, which are already running as 'System' level (super-user) in the background.
Again, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (I keep quoting them because, oddly enough, they're the primary source for this information. They GENERATE the unemployment statistics that everyone quotes).
Some people think that to get these figures on unemployment the Government uses the number of persons filing claims for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits under State or Federal Government programs. But some people are still jobless when their benefits run out, and many more are not eligible at all or delay or never apply for benefits. So, quite clearly, UI information cannot be used as a source for complete information on the number of unemployed.
It's called statistics. They interview a certain portion of unemployed people, and then set up recurring interviews with them until they become employed, or leave the labor market (ie, they are neither employed nor unemployed).
Primary sources and not pulling material out of my ass for teh win!
No, that's absolutely not what the unemployment rate represents.
Unemployed persons (Current Population Survey)
Persons aged 16 years and older who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. Persons who were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed.
Reaching the end of your benefits has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you are counted as unemployed. You are considered unemployed so long as you are not working but were available to work and have actively been seeking employment.
Fortunately for us, Philips will continue to have something to say about it as they own the rights to trademark "Compact Disc", and do not allow the trademark to be placed on anything that doesn't strictly conform to the redbook standard.
It's not like telling a programmer how to communicate with the underlying hardware is going to tell them how it (the PCB/silicon) was designed, so why make this information secret?"
No, that's definitely one of the reasons it's done. Giving specs of how to communicate with the device gives the competition the chance to write very thorough and directed tests to determine with much greater ease how things were implemented in the hardware. Plus, just seeing in general how the driver is communicating with the hardware can yield great clues about the internals of the hardware.
In that case, B&N has granted you the permission to come on their premises and read their books without purchasing them. They do this in the hopes that (and this seems true in your case) when you do purchase books, you will purchase from them.
Most software does not grant you this license. (At least, not software that you are having to pirate).
But the bottom line is that it is up to the owner of the property to determine what sort of license they want to release under. Not the consumer. The consumer's legal choices are to abide by the producer's license (and any overriding regulatory licenses / allowances) or to take their business elsewhere.
When doing big-O analysis in computer science we always assume n large enough to overtake constant losses.
Yes, when doing analysis in CS via O(n), you get to ignore those pesky constants.
However, in that pesky real-world, O(n) is just a guide. The constants are quite meaningful in a lot of cases. Locking a mutex costs *thousands of clocks*. Each time. Incrementing or decrementing a semaphore also costs thousands of clocks. (You should also consider the fact that sometimes for performance metrics, it's more meaningful to use theta(n).)
Bottom line, if you were trying to get maximum performance out of that simple loop that I posted, you'd care very much about those costs, I assure you.
Re:Studies on Dvorak - the patent holder
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 1
I used to get in an argument at work all the time about DVORAK vs. QWERTY. At the end of the day, all that really matters is individual comfort and style. (It's a bit like where to put the curly braces in C++). But this guy would argue and argue with me that DVORAK is better. He'd send me all this literature and claim that if I could come up with one counter-example...
I pointed him to the "Fable of the Keys," and he never brought the argument up again.
Which was why I said that the example is not really a great one. (It does represent a class of problems that are hard to parallelize efficiently, though).
The speed and memory tradeoffs come from the two parallel implementations of the code I posted.
If you do what you suggest, the performance loss is in the step that you sorta gloss over: "wait for all the threads to finish." Semaphores and mutexes are notoriously expensive to lock and unlock. The original code I posted completed on the order of dozens of clocks per loop iteration. Locking a single mutex or incrementing (or decrementing) a semaphore costs thousands of cycles.
The memory explosion that I refer to comes from the temporary variables that you've added per thread. Of course, there is the phenomenal overhead of the thread itself (which is on the order of several K), but ignoring that there are now extra temporaries that are necessary; one per thread to avoid having to lock a mutex at each step of the loop.
Of course, in your implementation (with 4 threads) this is only a 4x increase in the memory requirements of my implementation. However, in an N-thread implementation, this is an Nx increase in memory requirements.
This is not an insignificant number of cycles or memory increase.
Any loop that can be automatically unrolled can be parallelized instead.
Please unroll the following loop automatically (not FORTRAN, but simple enough to translate):
void AccumulateLoopCount(int N) {
int accumulator = 0;
for (int i = 1; i < N; ++i) {
accumulator += i;
}
return accumulator; }
Now make the code parallel.
(I realize that this solution could actually be computed at compile-time for any known value of N, and I realize that there is a formula to compute this answer in constant time). My point is that just because a loop can be unrolled automatically (this loop can) does not mean that it can be executed in parallel. Executing this code in parallel would result in a *massive* performance hit or a tremendous memory size explosion.
My PowerBook has never had a single problem with sound or video, and based on this I can only extrapolate that nobody ever has had problems with sound on the Mac.
Wow, with one data point you can extend a theory to an entire class of dozens of... err, hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of users?
You should go work at Blizzard. I hear they're having problems with testing and deployment on World of Warcraft. But with your clairvoyance, I'm sure they'll be putting out flawless software in no time.;p
Let's not forget Truman vs. Dewey where the Chicago Tribune announced the wrong winner. This is famous because it was the first time it happened - I believe it was the first time the election was close enough that the results were not finally known until hours after the newspaper was printed. Close elections were a rarity, so this didn't come up.
No, the problem with the Truman vs Dewey election was telephone polling. In 1948, there were many, many telephone polls conducted about the election. Unfortunately, at that time, if you were wealthy enough to own a telephone, you were probably going to vote republican. Ergo, the polls pointed to Dewey having a strong lead. The media picked up on this and ran with it.
The great thing about the whole endeavor is that if Sony somehow manages to succeed, Philips will slap them back into submission like they did the last time a record label pulled this.
I think your definitions might be a little crossed:defense.
I believe the word you were looking for was imperialist.
As for the filibuster, the filibuster is necessary to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
Read the damn federalist papers sometime. Much like book to movie translation, a lot of intent on the founding of our nation was lost in the translation from federalist papers to the Constitution. Or perhaps it was the fact that HTML wasn't popular yet, so the nation was unable to hyperlink them where appropriate.
It's not just games that are online, although there are those. (For example, Galactic Civilizations).
There's also games from smaller publishers. In general, I find Strategy First will usually give games a try that no one else will look at. But don't get me wrong, there are other publishers who look to Indy titles first.
Re:A game developer's response...
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I think what you fail to realize is that the graphics are very much a part of the marketing campaign.
If a game looks like crap and people don't get to see any screenshots before release, they're not idiots. They'll realize that the game looks crappy so all they're getting to see is marketting materials and concept art (assuming that the team has a good concept guy).
As far as it goes though, this is simple supply and demand... There is a demand for crappy titles and sequels, because people keep buying them. As long as their is such a demand, supply will exist, or will rise to exist. Even if every single video game developer quit his job today, tomorrow you'd hear about all the new startups. And they wouldn't be any different.
The ball is in the hands of the consumer. To think that any single individual in the game development community has the power to affect the kind of change that gamers are calling for is silly.
However, there are a few things you should consider about raytracing.. While it is easy to do in parallel, it is also very limiting from a hardware standpoint. The problem is that those pesky rays can go anywhere once they hit a surface, including directions that you didn't intend for them to go in.
This means that more data has to be loaded in the scene (because the rays can even go back behind you or off perpendicular to the scene). There's also the problem of what the data storage is going to look like. IE, in order for this to be expressed in a way that is going to be extremely efficient to a GPU, you're going to have to come up with a common data format that works for all applications that intend on doing raytracing via a hardware solution.
Finally there's the problem that raytracing is O(resolution). That is to say that 800x600 is exactly twice as bad as 640x480. 1600x1200 is 4x worse than 800x600, and any sort of antialiasing on top of that is pure pain.
As for your other (implicit) question, "Why don't interesting games use interesting game engines?"
Because they cost an arm and a leg. Last time I checked, a license for the upcoming Unreal Engine 3 cost between 700K and 1 million dollars. Quake 3 was 1 million, without support. HL2 is in the same ballpark.
Considering that the "interesting" games often have a budget of less than a million bucks total, it's pretty easy to see why it's hard for the little shops that come out with good games to buy the big engines.
It's not where you were going to go. It's how much content was loaded during the trek.
If I write a game that manages to tax your system completely (ie, uses most or all of your RAM for assets which are actually in use), then by definition I cannot avoid having a load screen at the end of the hall.
I could half the content and then have both areas loaded, but what happens when you come to a T-junction and have a choice? Should I cut the content delivery down to a third of what it would otherwise be?
Oftentimes if something seems simple but hasn't been solved, then it really isn't that simple.
A game developer's response...
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
(I've developed several titles, including the top selling PC game a few years ago. And no, not the Sims.)
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then. Actually, this is the point of the cell processor. The cell is meant to allow lots of pipelined tasks to happen with little additional overhead. This means that the difference between a "simple" AI and a complex "AI" (in terms of performance) is little different. And the cell is actually seperate from the RSX, which is the graphics chip from NVIDIA.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
The fallacy of this statement is laughable. Games don't simply exist. The reason that a particlar game genre is produced again and again is become you asshats keep buying them. Again and again and again. Want more games like Katamari Damacy? Then buy the game. No, pirating a copy doesn't count. Want games of alternative genres? They're out there. They're just not advertised and they're not always available at your local Best Buy. They will often be at your smaller game store, or available online. So get off your lazy ass and go vote with your dollars.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics We wouldn't have to, except that by the logic in argument 2 this seems to be the #1 thing that people care about. You vote with your dollars. Your mouth is saying "graphics don't matter" but your wallet says "grapihcs are all that I care about. Shit in the box as long as the graphics are top notch." Doom 3, Unreal 3, Half-life 2... All top sellers because of their stellar unrelated gameplay?
4. Nipples? 5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin... A game these day costs in the tens of millions of dollars to release. A company is simply not going to risk that kind of green (and possibly the fate of the company) on an analyst's hunch. There has to be something more than a gut feeling to release that kind of game. I mean, when's the last time you bought a Japanese dating simulation? (NSFW)
6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them. Agree.
7. Loading... As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
8. I understand that John Madden was raised by wild boars... This hooks in with #7. Bottom line, consider the requirements of this. It's a simple M*N cost to have more sounds. (M events by N events per sound, assuming a flat distribution of sounds). Of course, one could argue (successfully) that an increase in all sounds isn't necessary, and just in the sounds that come up again and again. Of course, you could also forsake the Madden franchise in favor of a lesser known football series. (This would also have the side benefit of ceasing to support the EA cartel.)
9. Immersion and the invisible hand of God Agree. This is generally just laziness (or a very tight schedule).
10. And while we're at it... I sort of agree here, but I see the other side of the coin as well. I mean, if I let you get to areas that aren't important for gameplay, then I need to populate them with content. You also might become lost and frustrated, which is something I don't want to happen either.
11. And while we're still at it... I agree, with the caveat that this is a genre-specific complaint. For example, I don't mind health bars imposed in an RTS, because I realize it's just a game that I'm playing. On the other hand, having numerous hea
Well, I'm guessing you're French (or at least Canadian) based on your spelling of 'check.'
If I'm wrong and you're from the US, then you're exactly part of the problem. Being passive agressive to a bunch of other people who are also busily keeping quiet is no way to affect change.
Clearly the lobbies have a strong hold. On the other hand, lobbies can't get a congressman or senator elected.
It takes actual votes for that to happen. Instead of bitching and moaning about how the system is broken, take the time to actually understand the system.
Write them a letter. With an envelope. And a stamp. It carries a tremendous amount of weight (it really does). Don't use a form letter. Don't type it. Don't call them. Write a legible, clean and concise letter expressing your viewpoint. Tell them that you do not agree with the upcoming changes to copyright laws. While you're at it, tell them you don't appreciate parts of the PATRIOT act becoming legitimate law either. Tell them that the erosion of your rights in the name of fighting "terrorists" isn't something that you're willing to tolerate anymore.
Instead of whining and bitching to people who--by and large--agree with you, write to someone who can make a difference.
When you're finished with that, write your senator as well.
This might be true in enterprise programming, but my point was specifically directed towards game programming, game programmers and game companies.
In game programming, you can be wasteful. Within the realms of viable solutions to the particular problem that you are solving at the time. Keep in mind that a game programmer would not consider using (for example) EJB to solve his scripting language problem.
Because unlike enterprise applications, time to execute is always something that has to be thought about. It's just not something that has to always be thought hard about.
My point is that in 90% of the code, getting your execution within the same order of magnitude is sufficient. In the last 10% of the code, the constants and factors become a very big deal. Things like cache misses, cache warming, function call overhead, etc, all become things that are important to the speed of the application.
Slashdot Mirror
There are already companies that offer this. For example, metroPCS which offers unlimited calls. No minute counting.
For $40 a month, you get unlimited local and long distance calls.
Actually, this has nothing to do with the developers being lazy morons (which they're not). It has to do with MS' broken security model. The place where they chose to draw the line between user and admin restrictions in the API is so asinine that it's virtually impossible to write any sort of complex app that *doesn't* require some admin functionality to run.
But to be honest, why does it even matter? A lot of the vulnerabilities on Windows have nothing to do with installing software, or who has the permissions to run operations. They have to do with services' exploits and buffer overruns, which are already running as 'System' level (super-user) in the background.
Again, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (I keep quoting them because, oddly enough, they're the primary source for this information. They GENERATE the unemployment statistics that everyone quotes).
It's called statistics. They interview a certain portion of unemployed people, and then set up recurring interviews with them until they become employed, or leave the labor market (ie, they are neither employed nor unemployed).
Primary sources and not pulling material out of my ass for teh win!
(From the Bureau of Labor and Statistics Glossary)
Reaching the end of your benefits has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you are counted as unemployed. You are considered unemployed so long as you are not working but were available to work and have actively been seeking employment.
Fortunately for us, Philips will continue to have something to say about it as they own the rights to trademark "Compact Disc", and do not allow the trademark to be placed on anything that doesn't strictly conform to the redbook standard.
No, it's really not the same principle.
In that case, B&N has granted you the permission to come on their premises and read their books without purchasing them. They do this in the hopes that (and this seems true in your case) when you do purchase books, you will purchase from them.
Most software does not grant you this license. (At least, not software that you are having to pirate).
But the bottom line is that it is up to the owner of the property to determine what sort of license they want to release under. Not the consumer. The consumer's legal choices are to abide by the producer's license (and any overriding regulatory licenses / allowances) or to take their business elsewhere.
Anything else is humbug.
However, in that pesky real-world, O(n) is just a guide. The constants are quite meaningful in a lot of cases. Locking a mutex costs *thousands of clocks*. Each time. Incrementing or decrementing a semaphore also costs thousands of clocks. (You should also consider the fact that sometimes for performance metrics, it's more meaningful to use theta(n).)
Bottom line, if you were trying to get maximum performance out of that simple loop that I posted, you'd care very much about those costs, I assure you.
Here's a link to the Fable of the Keys.
I used to get in an argument at work all the time about DVORAK vs. QWERTY. At the end of the day, all that really matters is individual comfort and style. (It's a bit like where to put the curly braces in C++). But this guy would argue and argue with me that DVORAK is better. He'd send me all this literature and claim that if I could come up with one counter-example...
I pointed him to the "Fable of the Keys," and he never brought the argument up again.
The speed and memory tradeoffs come from the two parallel implementations of the code I posted.
If you do what you suggest, the performance loss is in the step that you sorta gloss over: "wait for all the threads to finish." Semaphores and mutexes are notoriously expensive to lock and unlock. The original code I posted completed on the order of dozens of clocks per loop iteration. Locking a single mutex or incrementing (or decrementing) a semaphore costs thousands of cycles.
The memory explosion that I refer to comes from the temporary variables that you've added per thread. Of course, there is the phenomenal overhead of the thread itself (which is on the order of several K), but ignoring that there are now extra temporaries that are necessary; one per thread to avoid having to lock a mutex at each step of the loop.
Of course, in your implementation (with 4 threads) this is only a 4x increase in the memory requirements of my implementation. However, in an N-thread implementation, this is an Nx increase in memory requirements.
This is not an insignificant number of cycles or memory increase.
(I realize that this solution could actually be computed at compile-time for any known value of N, and I realize that there is a formula to compute this answer in constant time). My point is that just because a loop can be unrolled automatically (this loop can) does not mean that it can be executed in parallel. Executing this code in parallel would result in a *massive* performance hit or a tremendous memory size explosion.
Wow, with one data point you can extend a theory to an entire class of dozens of... err, hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of users?
You should go work at Blizzard. I hear they're having problems with testing and deployment on World of Warcraft. But with your clairvoyance, I'm sure they'll be putting out flawless software in no time.
No, the problem with the Truman vs Dewey election was telephone polling. In 1948, there were many, many telephone polls conducted about the election. Unfortunately, at that time, if you were wealthy enough to own a telephone, you were probably going to vote republican. Ergo, the polls pointed to Dewey having a strong lead. The media picked up on this and ran with it.
Wish I had the mod points... Mod parent up.
The great thing about the whole endeavor is that if Sony somehow manages to succeed, Philips will slap them back into submission like they did the last time a record label pulled this.
OT to be sure, but...
I think your definitions might be a little crossed:defense.
I believe the word you were looking for was imperialist.
As for the filibuster, the filibuster is necessary to prevent the tyranny of the majority.
Read the damn federalist papers sometime. Much like book to movie translation, a lot of intent on the founding of our nation was lost in the translation from federalist papers to the Constitution. Or perhaps it was the fact that HTML wasn't popular yet, so the nation was unable to hyperlink them where appropriate.
Sometimes I wish /. had a 'Sad' moderation.
It's not just games that are online, although there are those. (For example, Galactic Civilizations).
There's also games from smaller publishers. In general, I find Strategy First will usually give games a try that no one else will look at. But don't get me wrong, there are other publishers who look to Indy titles first.
I think what you fail to realize is that the graphics are very much a part of the marketing campaign.
If a game looks like crap and people don't get to see any screenshots before release, they're not idiots. They'll realize that the game looks crappy so all they're getting to see is marketting materials and concept art (assuming that the team has a good concept guy).
As far as it goes though, this is simple supply and demand... There is a demand for crappy titles and sequels, because people keep buying them. As long as their is such a demand, supply will exist, or will rise to exist. Even if every single video game developer quit his job today, tomorrow you'd hear about all the new startups. And they wouldn't be any different.
The ball is in the hands of the consumer. To think that any single individual in the game development community has the power to affect the kind of change that gamers are calling for is silly.
Your post is very good...
However, there are a few things you should consider about raytracing.. While it is easy to do in parallel, it is also very limiting from a hardware standpoint. The problem is that those pesky rays can go anywhere once they hit a surface, including directions that you didn't intend for them to go in.
This means that more data has to be loaded in the scene (because the rays can even go back behind you or off perpendicular to the scene). There's also the problem of what the data storage is going to look like. IE, in order for this to be expressed in a way that is going to be extremely efficient to a GPU, you're going to have to come up with a common data format that works for all applications that intend on doing raytracing via a hardware solution.
Finally there's the problem that raytracing is O(resolution). That is to say that 800x600 is exactly twice as bad as 640x480. 1600x1200 is 4x worse than 800x600, and any sort of antialiasing on top of that is pure pain.
As for your other (implicit) question, "Why don't interesting games use interesting game engines?"
Because they cost an arm and a leg. Last time I checked, a license for the upcoming Unreal Engine 3 cost between 700K and 1 million dollars. Quake 3 was 1 million, without support. HL2 is in the same ballpark.
Considering that the "interesting" games often have a budget of less than a million bucks total, it's pretty easy to see why it's hard for the little shops that come out with good games to buy the big engines.
Where was I going to go?
It's not where you were going to go. It's how much content was loaded during the trek.
If I write a game that manages to tax your system completely (ie, uses most or all of your RAM for assets which are actually in use), then by definition I cannot avoid having a load screen at the end of the hall.
I could half the content and then have both areas loaded, but what happens when you come to a T-junction and have a choice? Should I cut the content delivery down to a third of what it would otherwise be?
Oftentimes if something seems simple but hasn't been solved, then it really isn't that simple.
(I've developed several titles, including the top selling PC game a few years ago. And no, not the Sims.)
1. Give us A.I. that will actually outsmart us now and then.
Actually, this is the point of the cell processor. The cell is meant to allow lots of pipelined tasks to happen with little additional overhead. This means that the difference between a "simple" AI and a complex "AI" (in terms of performance) is little different. And the cell is actually seperate from the RSX, which is the graphics chip from NVIDIA.
2. Give us a genre of game we've never seen before. Something that's not an FPS or an RPG or Madden NFL or...
The fallacy of this statement is laughable. Games don't simply exist. The reason that a particlar game genre is produced again and again is become you asshats keep buying them. Again and again and again. Want more games like Katamari Damacy? Then buy the game. No, pirating a copy doesn't count. Want games of alternative genres? They're out there. They're just not advertised and they're not always available at your local Best Buy. They will often be at your smaller game store, or available online. So get off your lazy ass and go vote with your dollars.
3. Don't bullshit me about your graphics
We wouldn't have to, except that by the logic in argument 2 this seems to be the #1 thing that people care about. You vote with your dollars. Your mouth is saying "graphics don't matter" but your wallet says "grapihcs are all that I care about. Shit in the box as long as the graphics are top notch." Doom 3, Unreal 3, Half-life 2... All top sellers because of their stellar unrelated gameplay?
4. Nipples?
5. And on the opposite side of the nipple coin...
A game these day costs in the tens of millions of dollars to release. A company is simply not going to risk that kind of green (and possibly the fate of the company) on an analyst's hunch. There has to be something more than a gut feeling to release that kind of game. I mean, when's the last time you bought a Japanese dating simulation? (NSFW)
6. All of the new consoles will have hard drives. Use them.
Agree.
7. Loading...
As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
8. I understand that John Madden was raised by wild boars...
This hooks in with #7. Bottom line, consider the requirements of this. It's a simple M*N cost to have more sounds. (M events by N events per sound, assuming a flat distribution of sounds). Of course, one could argue (successfully) that an increase in all sounds isn't necessary, and just in the sounds that come up again and again. Of course, you could also forsake the Madden franchise in favor of a lesser known football series. (This would also have the side benefit of ceasing to support the EA cartel.)
9. Immersion and the invisible hand of God
Agree. This is generally just laziness (or a very tight schedule).
10. And while we're at it...
I sort of agree here, but I see the other side of the coin as well. I mean, if I let you get to areas that aren't important for gameplay, then I need to populate them with content. You also might become lost and frustrated, which is something I don't want to happen either.
11. And while we're still at it...
I agree, with the caveat that this is a genre-specific complaint. For example, I don't mind health bars imposed in an RTS, because I realize it's just a game that I'm playing. On the other hand, having numerous hea
Well, I'm guessing you're French (or at least Canadian) based on your spelling of 'check.'
If I'm wrong and you're from the US, then you're exactly part of the problem. Being passive agressive to a bunch of other people who are also busily keeping quiet is no way to affect change.
Clearly the lobbies have a strong hold. On the other hand, lobbies can't get a congressman or senator elected.
It takes actual votes for that to happen. Instead of bitching and moaning about how the system is broken, take the time to actually understand the system.
Write your congressperson.
Write them a letter. With an envelope. And a stamp. It carries a tremendous amount of weight (it really does). Don't use a form letter. Don't type it. Don't call them. Write a legible, clean and concise letter expressing your viewpoint. Tell them that you do not agree with the upcoming changes to copyright laws. While you're at it, tell them you don't appreciate parts of the PATRIOT act becoming legitimate law either. Tell them that the erosion of your rights in the name of fighting "terrorists" isn't something that you're willing to tolerate anymore.
Instead of whining and bitching to people who--by and large--agree with you, write to someone who can make a difference.
When you're finished with that, write your senator as well.
In SLI configurations, only the first graphics card can be used to output a signal.
All traffic that goes out from the other boards goes across the SLI bus.
I think you might have misunderstood my post.
This might be true in enterprise programming, but my point was specifically directed towards game programming, game programmers and game companies.
In game programming, you can be wasteful. Within the realms of viable solutions to the particular problem that you are solving at the time. Keep in mind that a game programmer would not consider using (for example) EJB to solve his scripting language problem.
Because unlike enterprise applications, time to execute is always something that has to be thought about. It's just not something that has to always be thought hard about.
My point is that in 90% of the code, getting your execution within the same order of magnitude is sufficient. In the last 10% of the code, the constants and factors become a very big deal. Things like cache misses, cache warming, function call overhead, etc, all become things that are important to the speed of the application.