I would like to point out a few incorrect things with the parent post.
1) The telnet server, while part of the source code on the client, is not ever run by the client, and there are protections within the code to keep it from being run on the client. The reason it is in the code is because some of the source is shared between both the server and the client, and the telnet server is intended to be run on the serverside, presumably for live debugging.
3) This is completely false. Even without the source code, you can see that the EVE servers do not send any information about ships or even most objects within the current system (zone), unless they are within 200km of you. Anything within this 200km is shown to the client anyways, as EVE is very good about giving the player basically all information that is sent to the client. You can see who has entered the system you are in, but this is also shown to you in the client. Knowing their specific location is not possible, as that information is neither sent to the client, nor stored there, unless in the above stated case where they are on the same grid (within 200km) as you.
To be rather cynical about all this, even ignoring the forfeiture of rights by invoking your right to privacy, what about those who are too poor to afford a "Life Recorder"?
If you work a minimum wage (if such a thing still exists at that point), it could be a very long time before such devices cheap enough to produce that a corporation would even consider selling at a price you could afford. During this time where the lowest paid workers, not a small segment of the population, and certainly one that is more likely to be involved in criminal legal disputes, statistically, when these people are unable to afford Life Recorders, what will be done? Will they still have equal treatment even if they cannot "prove" their innocence because they are unable to purchase such an item?
Additionally, let us not forget to consider the possiblity that these complicated devices would fail, possibly at a time when you need them most to help prove your innocence. Life Recorder devices would not solve anything (atleast in legal situations), in fact they would likely make things worse. The case you present is of a very simple kind, verifying that a person was at the location they say they were. While at first it seems like a useful "auto-alibi", in reality the trustworthyness of it could be called into question with arguments about tampering or as mentioned, being turned off. In more normal circumstances, where things are less simple, the recording could lose credibility more easily. I can't imagine that it would be too difficult for a good lawyer to argue that what was on the recording, even in the unlikely case that everything was clear, was percieved in the same way, or even seen by the user. The recording would become just one more thing to interpret, in addition to an additional burden on underpaid workers.
A recording device as described would not solve the issues that you are putting forth as examples, because those issues are not technical problems. They are problems either of our social and governmental system, or of the reality that we live in. Creating more technology and more things to have people buy is not going to fix those issues, if they can be fixed at all.
They are beginning work on a World of Darkness game. I don't believe there is any other information currently available, and it is certainly early on in pre-production.
Perhaps we could get rid of the traditional browser metaphor?
With most every desktop now supporting widgets or "web objects", perhaps that should be the area of focus. Right now they are seen as, and used as, little tools that fill a very small purpose, such as displaying the weather. I think that using this format for applications of more importance (not necessarily larger though), could prove more useful than the standard browser. Of course this is moving back in the direction of applications, which seems antithetical to the idea of Web 2.0. If, however, these applications were to take advantage of the level of interoperability that web applications are beginning to build, if they remained just as connected, and possibly shareable, they would represent a real step forward.
The browser is a very constrained environment, and the content within it has been trying to break out, which is why we have so many extensions, so many tabs, and are beginning to see rich, application-style UIs from AJAX web applications. The web browser also continues the idea of the internet and the web being separate from your computer, when instead we should be moving to make the desktop and the rest of our computer the point of connection.
If AJAX-based web applications do become extensive, and you begin doing all of your work with them, wouldn't it look absurd to start a single application to do all of your work within? Either the shell becomes that application, or that application becomes the shell. (I'm in favor of the former.)
I'm all for people using and having websites and domains in their native language and alphabet, however it would be very difficult for me to find traditional Persian music (which I happen to be fond of) if the domain were.sa (if that doesn't show up, it was a simple translation of persianmusic.sa into Arabic). On the other hand, I could probably find that site through Google, and largely would have to go through Google or some other search engine, to find and visit websites and domains in another alphabet.
On the other hand, I suppose that's how I do it now.
I think the article's point was that once you get more and more transistors on there it becomes very difficult to design things to not end up overheating all the time and not use up insane amounts of power, not to mention just becoming extremely complex like x86 cores today.
Thusly, you're right, the parallelization is the answer (atleast according to the Cell design philosophy). Because it's possible to put so many transistors on there, the way to do it without running into as many problems would be to create a large number of parallel, simpler cores. This, of course, works best if what you are parallelizing is well suited to it, for example vector processing which Cell is built to do.
So basically the article was reiterating the idea that while we continue to be able to build transistors at smaller size, and fit more on a chip, continuing in the "old" way (or atleast in the way that x86 processors are designed) is/was leading to problems in terms of design: runs too hot, uses too much power, and really complicated designs for things like out of order execution etc. This I assume has been pretty widely known for a few years atleast, since both Intel and AMD have moved towards multiple cores.
Sure, over the past 150-200 years much of the world has fallen into the habit of putting up with what's "good enough", because it's damned hard to fight for what you believe in, what is right, all the time.
To survive the next hundred years, we're going to need to go back to that struggle.
But seriously, I like the Python model of "code the performance intensive parts in lower-level languages, code the rest in higher level languages that control it." If using an interpreted language would afford you more flexibility, more powerful language constructs, and faster development times, without much negative impact on parts of your system that are not performance-critical, it's almost a no-brainer to use them for those areas.
USPS has been using handwriting recognition hardware and software for some time. They do, however, implement relatively state of the art neural nets and other AI algorithms to interpret the handwriting, so it's probably not feasible for most people. More information on the system they use is here.
I think (or atleast hope) the point the original post was trying to make, is that a movie that is only good as seen through the eyes of someone who has played all the games (or read all the books, or seen all the TV episodes) isn't as good as a movie that can stand on it's own.
I don't remember the X-Files movie, but I can guess from its 70% rating on rottentomatoes.com that it was atleast good enough to be likable on it's own.
There's nothing wrong with crossing over types of media. If a movie based upon a book can be exciting and interesting, and many have been, then that's just fine. But if your movie, or your book, or whatever work, isn't enjoyable without having already consumed the work it's based upon, it's not going to be a very successful work. I imagine that if Jurrasic Park wasn't interesting at all unless you had already read the book, then it wouldn't have been succesful.
>And now Microsoft is worried that they are going to lose to Linux, so they want to undermine the OpenGL 3D graphics standard which Linux shares.
Yes, because when I think of what makes Linux so great, I think of OpenGL. If they want to take a stab at Linux (and they do/are), they wouldn't do it through OpenGL. It's not one of the major selling points for Linux. It's not easy to setup and get accelerated correctly, the drivers can be buggy, it's just not where Microsoft would focus their attention.
It's one thing to write an article about how, if you put the best features of every game into one game, and made them all perfect, you'd have the best MMOG ever.
It's something else completely to reasonably expect any development team to be able to create such a design. It takes several years to make an MMOG that does just ONE of those features very well, let alone every feature under the sun.
None of this to mention that all the author does is select which games currently do the best at gameplay element X. He doesn't really posit a new system that might be better than the current "best" game's capabilities, nor does he mention any gameplay elements that aren't evident in major MMOGs right now.
It just seems to me that he would be the kind of designer that makes solely knock-off games, trying to take the best elements from earlier games, without really improving on them, figuring that they're good enough as it is. The best of the next generation MMOGs likely will not be rehashes of exactly what we are offered today, just cherry-picking the implimentations. Instead, games will offer new implimentations, and new gameplay elements (perhaps taken from MUDs or other genres entirely).
Frankly, I've seen the same exact stuff from a thousand "MMOG Design" IRC channels.
Because the screenshot isn't good enough quality to see any details, there could easily just be a G5 under the table that the monitor is connected to, rather than the compaq.
While this would logically make sense, it takes away the possibility of gameplay that uses sound and graphics for central parts of the gameplay.
Also, with adventure games, while you could create puzzles that have nothing to do with the story to show gameplay, that's generally not the best way to go.The puzzles will either be unlike the ones you'd find in the actual game, and without any context, or the developers would spend an exorbitant amount of time creating puzzles they won't use.
Basically, not all gameplay needs story, graphics, and sound to be understood and consumed. But keep in mind that you can have gameplay that needs certain elements to work, and some of those designs are pushing the bounds of interactive entertainment to be more than what we could do with traditional games and other media.
Gameplay isn't a buzzword. The fact that what the gameplay is differs from game to game, doesn't make it a non-existant concept.
That's like saying, because the manner in which you drive a car is different from the manner in which you drive a boat or drive an airplane, the action of driving a vehicle doesn't actually exist, or the word driving is a buzzword.
When thinking of gameplay in general, people will think of different things. However, if you bring up the subject of gameplay in an FPS, no one is going to think about dialog boxes or the different weaknesses of unit types in an RTS, nor are they going to think about graphics.
Now all I need to do is submit a proposal for a perl script that will read all of the email-addresses out of the adduser proposals, and sell them to random spammers. *Pats himself on the back*
Interestingly, this current version (perhaps they will fix it later on), will happily lose many of the paragraphs I wrote before I told Windows to kill the process...
Even after letting the text sit there for several minutes, none of it was ever saved. I'd expect a system designed to "never lose your work", to do some level of automatic saving.
In addition, the application uses staggering amounts of memory, simply browsing up and down a text file, it ended up using over 100MB!
It appears that he was trying to make the argument that GPL was not "some money making scheme for rising third world nations," and that instead it would hurt those nations by forcing them to make their IP freely available to the US and other developed countries.
Basically, he's making a convoluted argument that GPL is infact far too capitalist to work in today's hugs-and-kisses technology industry. It's probably one of the more insane accusations cast against the GPL, if only because it directly contradicts the conventional wisdom that the GPL is a huge communist scheme.
Proper physics engines make it possible to model reality, and that's the goal of every game from fantasy to sports: to render a consistent world.
Not every game's goal is to simulate reality as much as possible. Some games purposefully differ drastically from reality, including in the physics. Some games are helped by being more accurate simulations, some aren't. Even the Havok engine purposefully doesn't simulate everything as accurately as it could, because it doesn't look right in the game.
I'm quite a bit surprised that this hasn't been done already.
Academics and scientists are already using modern GPUs to speed up scientific applications and other non-visual calculations by enormous amounts.
If they can jump to the idea of doing non-visual work on the GPU, it's a surprise they didn't think of rendering video with it...
Slashdot Mirror
Seem is the operative word in that sentence.
I would like to point out a few incorrect things with the parent post.
1) The telnet server, while part of the source code on the client, is not ever run by the client, and there are protections within the code to keep it from being run on the client. The reason it is in the code is because some of the source is shared between both the server and the client, and the telnet server is intended to be run on the serverside, presumably for live debugging.
3) This is completely false. Even without the source code, you can see that the EVE servers do not send any information about ships or even most objects within the current system (zone), unless they are within 200km of you. Anything within this 200km is shown to the client anyways, as EVE is very good about giving the player basically all information that is sent to the client. You can see who has entered the system you are in, but this is also shown to you in the client. Knowing their specific location is not possible, as that information is neither sent to the client, nor stored there, unless in the above stated case where they are on the same grid (within 200km) as you.
To be rather cynical about all this, even ignoring the forfeiture of rights by invoking your right to privacy, what about those who are too poor to afford a "Life Recorder"?
If you work a minimum wage (if such a thing still exists at that point), it could be a very long time before such devices cheap enough to produce that a corporation would even consider selling at a price you could afford. During this time where the lowest paid workers, not a small segment of the population, and certainly one that is more likely to be involved in criminal legal disputes, statistically, when these people are unable to afford Life Recorders, what will be done? Will they still have equal treatment even if they cannot "prove" their innocence because they are unable to purchase such an item?
Additionally, let us not forget to consider the possiblity that these complicated devices would fail, possibly at a time when you need them most to help prove your innocence. Life Recorder devices would not solve anything (atleast in legal situations), in fact they would likely make things worse. The case you present is of a very simple kind, verifying that a person was at the location they say they were. While at first it seems like a useful "auto-alibi", in reality the trustworthyness of it could be called into question with arguments about tampering or as mentioned, being turned off. In more normal circumstances, where things are less simple, the recording could lose credibility more easily. I can't imagine that it would be too difficult for a good lawyer to argue that what was on the recording, even in the unlikely case that everything was clear, was percieved in the same way, or even seen by the user. The recording would become just one more thing to interpret, in addition to an additional burden on underpaid workers.
A recording device as described would not solve the issues that you are putting forth as examples, because those issues are not technical problems. They are problems either of our social and governmental system, or of the reality that we live in. Creating more technology and more things to have people buy is not going to fix those issues, if they can be fixed at all.
They are beginning work on a World of Darkness game. I don't believe there is any other information currently available, and it is certainly early on in pre-production.
I do believe that the first PAX was actually in 2004, not 2005.
Perhaps we could get rid of the traditional browser metaphor?
With most every desktop now supporting widgets or "web objects", perhaps that should be the area of focus. Right now they are seen as, and used as, little tools that fill a very small purpose, such as displaying the weather. I think that using this format for applications of more importance (not necessarily larger though), could prove more useful than the standard browser. Of course this is moving back in the direction of applications, which seems antithetical to the idea of Web 2.0. If, however, these applications were to take advantage of the level of interoperability that web applications are beginning to build, if they remained just as connected, and possibly shareable, they would represent a real step forward.
The browser is a very constrained environment, and the content within it has been trying to break out, which is why we have so many extensions, so many tabs, and are beginning to see rich, application-style UIs from AJAX web applications. The web browser also continues the idea of the internet and the web being separate from your computer, when instead we should be moving to make the desktop and the rest of our computer the point of connection.
If AJAX-based web applications do become extensive, and you begin doing all of your work with them, wouldn't it look absurd to start a single application to do all of your work within? Either the shell becomes that application, or that application becomes the shell. (I'm in favor of the former.)
This could certainly be a big win for Google.
.sa (if that doesn't show up, it was a simple translation of persianmusic.sa into Arabic). On the other hand, I could probably find that site through Google, and largely would have to go through Google or some other search engine, to find and visit websites and domains in another alphabet.
I'm all for people using and having websites and domains in their native language and alphabet, however it would be very difficult for me to find traditional Persian music (which I happen to be fond of) if the domain were
On the other hand, I suppose that's how I do it now.
I'll bet if Microsoft issued a software patch to shutdown your computer as soon as windows booted, they'd save a shitload of energy!
Unless some number of older guilds were disbanded, thus putting it close enough to the current oldest guild to be labeled "one of the oldest."
I think the article's point was that once you get more and more transistors on there it becomes very difficult to design things to not end up overheating all the time and not use up insane amounts of power, not to mention just becoming extremely complex like x86 cores today.
Thusly, you're right, the parallelization is the answer (atleast according to the Cell design philosophy). Because it's possible to put so many transistors on there, the way to do it without running into as many problems would be to create a large number of parallel, simpler cores. This, of course, works best if what you are parallelizing is well suited to it, for example vector processing which Cell is built to do.
So basically the article was reiterating the idea that while we continue to be able to build transistors at smaller size, and fit more on a chip, continuing in the "old" way (or atleast in the way that x86 processors are designed) is/was leading to problems in terms of design: runs too hot, uses too much power, and really complicated designs for things like out of order execution etc. This I assume has been pretty widely known for a few years atleast, since both Intel and AMD have moved towards multiple cores.
Tenacity.
Sure, over the past 150-200 years much of the world has fallen into the habit of putting up with what's "good enough", because it's damned hard to fight for what you believe in, what is right, all the time.
To survive the next hundred years, we're going to need to go back to that struggle.
The blinking lights, obviously!
But seriously, I like the Python model of "code the performance intensive parts in lower-level languages, code the rest in higher level languages that control it." If using an interpreted language would afford you more flexibility, more powerful language constructs, and faster development times, without much negative impact on parts of your system that are not performance-critical, it's almost a no-brainer to use them for those areas.
Actually, the Cell processor does not use cache for the SPEs/SPUs, and so you wouldn't get cache misses (except on the POWER processing element).
USPS has been using handwriting recognition hardware and software for some time. They do, however, implement relatively state of the art neural nets and other AI algorithms to interpret the handwriting, so it's probably not feasible for most people. More information on the system they use is here.
I think (or atleast hope) the point the original post was trying to make, is that a movie that is only good as seen through the eyes of someone who has played all the games (or read all the books, or seen all the TV episodes) isn't as good as a movie that can stand on it's own.
I don't remember the X-Files movie, but I can guess from its 70% rating on rottentomatoes.com that it was atleast good enough to be likable on it's own.
There's nothing wrong with crossing over types of media. If a movie based upon a book can be exciting and interesting, and many have been, then that's just fine. But if your movie, or your book, or whatever work, isn't enjoyable without having already consumed the work it's based upon, it's not going to be a very successful work. I imagine that if Jurrasic Park wasn't interesting at all unless you had already read the book, then it wouldn't have been succesful.
>And now Microsoft is worried that they are going to lose to Linux, so they want to undermine the OpenGL 3D graphics standard which Linux shares.
Yes, because when I think of what makes Linux so great, I think of OpenGL. If they want to take a stab at Linux (and they do/are), they wouldn't do it through OpenGL. It's not one of the major selling points for Linux. It's not easy to setup and get accelerated correctly, the drivers can be buggy, it's just not where Microsoft would focus their attention.
It's one thing to write an article about how, if you put the best features of every game into one game, and made them all perfect, you'd have the best MMOG ever.
It's something else completely to reasonably expect any development team to be able to create such a design. It takes several years to make an MMOG that does just ONE of those features very well, let alone every feature under the sun.
None of this to mention that all the author does is select which games currently do the best at gameplay element X. He doesn't really posit a new system that might be better than the current "best" game's capabilities, nor does he mention any gameplay elements that aren't evident in major MMOGs right now.
It just seems to me that he would be the kind of designer that makes solely knock-off games, trying to take the best elements from earlier games, without really improving on them, figuring that they're good enough as it is. The best of the next generation MMOGs likely will not be rehashes of exactly what we are offered today, just cherry-picking the implimentations. Instead, games will offer new implimentations, and new gameplay elements (perhaps taken from MUDs or other genres entirely).
Frankly, I've seen the same exact stuff from a thousand "MMOG Design" IRC channels.
Because the screenshot isn't good enough quality to see any details, there could easily just be a G5 under the table that the monitor is connected to, rather than the compaq.
While this would logically make sense, it takes away the possibility of gameplay that uses sound and graphics for central parts of the gameplay.
Also, with adventure games, while you could create puzzles that have nothing to do with the story to show gameplay, that's generally not the best way to go.The puzzles will either be unlike the ones you'd find in the actual game, and without any context, or the developers would spend an exorbitant amount of time creating puzzles they won't use.
Basically, not all gameplay needs story, graphics, and sound to be understood and consumed. But keep in mind that you can have gameplay that needs certain elements to work, and some of those designs are pushing the bounds of interactive entertainment to be more than what we could do with traditional games and other media.
Gameplay isn't a buzzword. The fact that what the gameplay is differs from game to game, doesn't make it a non-existant concept.
That's like saying, because the manner in which you drive a car is different from the manner in which you drive a boat or drive an airplane, the action of driving a vehicle doesn't actually exist, or the word driving is a buzzword.
When thinking of gameplay in general, people will think of different things. However, if you bring up the subject of gameplay in an FPS, no one is going to think about dialog boxes or the different weaknesses of unit types in an RTS, nor are they going to think about graphics.
Now all I need to do is submit a proposal for a perl script that will read all of the email-addresses out of the adduser proposals, and sell them to random spammers. *Pats himself on the back*
Imagine a system that never loses your work
Interestingly, this current version (perhaps they will fix it later on), will happily lose many of the paragraphs I wrote before I told Windows to kill the process... Even after letting the text sit there for several minutes, none of it was ever saved. I'd expect a system designed to "never lose your work", to do some level of automatic saving. In addition, the application uses staggering amounts of memory, simply browsing up and down a text file, it ended up using over 100MB!
It appears that he was trying to make the argument that GPL was not "some money making scheme for rising third world nations," and that instead it would hurt those nations by forcing them to make their IP freely available to the US and other developed countries.
Basically, he's making a convoluted argument that GPL is infact far too capitalist to work in today's hugs-and-kisses technology industry. It's probably one of the more insane accusations cast against the GPL, if only because it directly contradicts the conventional wisdom that the GPL is a huge communist scheme.
Proper physics engines make it possible to model reality, and that's the goal of every game from fantasy to sports: to render a consistent world. Not every game's goal is to simulate reality as much as possible. Some games purposefully differ drastically from reality, including in the physics. Some games are helped by being more accurate simulations, some aren't. Even the Havok engine purposefully doesn't simulate everything as accurately as it could, because it doesn't look right in the game.
I'm quite a bit surprised that this hasn't been done already. Academics and scientists are already using modern GPUs to speed up scientific applications and other non-visual calculations by enormous amounts.
If they can jump to the idea of doing non-visual work on the GPU, it's a surprise they didn't think of rendering video with it...