I remember when Creative and a few other companies had media decoder/encoader boards packaged with DVDROMS when they first came out, seems like a step back IMHO.
"Nintendo at times has this thing for insanely ridiculous hardware requirements for their console games, but if you manage to gather the hardware, it's definitely a worthy gaming experience."
As an owner of crystal chronicles, it was a complete letdown even with mutiplayer. The game was too simplified and it wasn't final fantasy at all, not in the slightest. Everything about FF: CC was disjoint and disconnected. They had some wonderful graphics but the world did not cohere well at all, FF: CC is probably one of the craziest projects square has ever green lighted, I can't understand how they would make a different game for the gamecube and not a true final fantasy.
FF: CC was originally some other game whom they grafted into the fold, I wish they had not named it FF:CC but they wanted free money and a lot of stupid people bought it on the name (as they knew)
It was a dishonest thing IMHO. I thought they were seriously releasing an FF, when I played FF:CC I was like : WTF IS THIS?? that's what my reaction was... a crappy overly simplistic button mashing action game.
I definitely think we were always on the same page, just we weren't hearing one another:)
What I meant by "physics" was not the 'stuffy' stuff, I meant simple things in general terms - i.e. what everybody understands naturally. Life has existed for many years and many academics like to 'hold truth' bondage saying 'this is the only valid form of knowledge', and I find it disheartening because we shut down curiousity in kids, and because many academics and working mathematicians, etc, are outright incorrect. I am reminded of George cantor and what he had to endure amongst 'the most learned'.
(wikipedia)
"The objections to his work were occasionally fierce: Poincaré referred to Cantor's ideas as a "grave disease" infecting the discipline of mathematics,[6] and Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth."[7] Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory," which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".[8] Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life were once blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries,"
"Mathematics in necessarily abstract. It is the science in which one disconnects interesting patterns from their context and studies them in their own right. A great deal of effort also goes in to applying general mathematical knowledge in a particular context."
You're not grasping what I'm saying, I'm saying the expression of math - i.e. the current symbolic form it takes, can be expressed in many different ways.
"The stickiest issue is that a lot of us are conflicted. It pisses us off that WoW is a little less fair but on the surface this was a guy who avoided all technical attempts Blizzard tried to thwart him in a great game of cat & mouse. In the end, he could claim he was just selling software that users happened to use to violate Blizzard's TOS and EULA with. I've heard the same arguments about BitTorrent and would probably side with the software makers in this case... "
Personally I think liberty takes precedence here, software vendors are way too authoritarian already. Would you accept it if someone told you how to use your car, or your house? I don't buy the "software as a service" argument at all, it is not the same classification at all. If WoW was standalone it would fall under doctrine of first sale and all that, i.e. ownership. The fact that MMO's can get away with telling paying customers how they use "their" product is a bit of a slap in the face.
I may be in the wrong here (since I have not played wow in a long time) but isn't wow glider just a bot kind of application, it doesn't actually cheat or violate the rules of the game technically?
"A lot of people devote a lot of their time in explaining their areas of mathematics to the general public (including myself). And as for your distaste for abstraction."
It's not the abstraction that's hard, it's the divorced nature of mathematics from the physics of the everyday world, I've been studying physics again in my off time and I am certain that math and physics are the same subject and should be studied as a unified subject, not divorced as they currently are in most schools around the world.
Not only that, the actual number systems themselves make math a lot harder then it is for some people. I've been experimenting and researching numeral systems that use geometric patterns, and many mathematical abstractions become infinitely easier when you use shapes and color as represnetations for your numerals, and it makes addition and subtraction (of some kinds) that much easier to see at a glance, instead of playing with rather clumsy arabic script.
If we think about it from a physics standpoint, all truth is derived from information from the environment is bombarding us with, is math really just inequalities in the information our body is receiving? I have to wonder, consider "A house" and "1 house" technically you could do computations with "a" and not lose any meaning whatsoever.
"Amazon.com Review
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems."
I personally thing neurological sciences are going to have a lot to say about mathematical knowledge and many mathematicians and math buffs are not going to like it.
Quotes:"Thought and language are neural systems, they work by neural computation, not formal symbol manipulation." -- Page 8, embodied processing. (Molecule to metaphor)
"Language is inextricable from thought and experience" - Page 1. (molecule to metaphor)
"but it leads me to believe that the opposite may be true. Time will tell."
Many rumors on the net frequently become true, especially in regards to financial transactions. I've noticed quite a few rumors come true over the years, and while we should take things with a grain of salt, we should also analyze the situation for the likelyness of the statement itself.
"Actually it is rather specific. They want you to build a working brain simulator with a math foundation rather then guesses at what the brain is doing biologically."
What they are asking for is a contradiction in terms, math is derived from thought, we do not think using abstract formal systems, we think using direct neurological computation, the "mathematics" we have invented is not the language of the brain, it is a derivitive language of some more basic unified language.
Math is the problem, the brain does not work by formal symbol computation, math is derived from neurological computation. This has been scientifically studied. See:
Yes I did, but what does he think he's going to accomplish by shifting the service into the cloud, why not just have backup servers in many datacenters? What exactly is the difference?
All the apps I have used on "the cloud" are over-rated, if google would have just stuck to a few apps and focused on improving them, they would not have spread themselves so remarkably thin. I think this is where independent smaller software companies can have a big advantage if they are any good at recognizing the users needs.
A user wants to:
-Save time -Save money or both
Users will gladly part with money if your software adds real value to their lives, they won't if you're just trying to repackage the same old stuff ad infinitum, some companies can get away with packaged crap, but sooner or later they will decay due to the needs of the customers not being fulfilled and someone will come up and snap up those customers.
Software engineering right now is in the dark ages IMHO, too much is asked of the user, many programs are incompetently designed and rushed to "market" (google chrome I'm looking at you), imagine what google chrome could have been, if it accepted firefox plugins and other enhancements other browsers have had for a while.
Google chrome is 1) fast 2) simple
But that's all I use google chrome for, the hidden benefits of better engineered browser will be lost without meeting user needs. Google is definitely losing its focus IMHO in many aspects of software development, becoming "jack of all trades, mater of none" at least when it comes to a lot of their software.
"I'm not saying it's for everything, but the fact of the matter is most people don't want to mess with their TVs. The same way they don't want to mess with their cars, microwaves, blenders and -- yes -- computers. Most people just want to watch the damn TV."
This is what modern designers don't understand, especially geeks and engineers - the job is to offload complexity and increase a persons time available for other pursuits or offload tasks. I bet if AI was sufficiently advanced enough and everything was self-programming and automated, people wouldn't mind something like myth TV if it was just "plug it in, turn it on, and I (the device) will do the work for you!" that's what people want in their lives - to offload tasks to other devices so that they have more time for leisure and self-realization.
This is so often lost on designers who don't understand the average human being doesn't want to have to learn anything, or spend any more time expending effort on another task/job, when they are overwhelmed enough already.
"Yeah, but as a life long geek and software development major, I find that these kids are the best kind of competition. Seriously, I know a bunch of kids that just don't have a passion for CS, and I can run circles around them just from experiences I've had messing around as a kid."
Have you ever considered most kids don't have access to an environment that allows them to grow? Have you ever considered their talents will bloom with age? i.e. is their mind ripe for the task at hand, in terms of development and maturity?
When I was a kid I needed guidance, I wasted a lot of years because the place I grew up was a small town filled with christian fundies, not the brightest bunch in the drawer. Not only that most teachers don't even have a clue what has been discovered in the neurological sciences over the last 30 years and how it undermines the enlightenments view of reason and enlightenment's view of education. Most people still operate under the enlightenment's view of reason
This idea that kids can be forced to develop is due to mistaken ideas of how reasoning works and how people's bodies biologically develop over time. No one understands fully what reason is, and how it works, not mathematicians, not scientists, not anyone right now, that is for certain.
"When it gets to the harder subject matter (SPARC ASM, anyone?), they just can't compete unless they've got a passion for the subject. Passion will get you further than talent any day of the week."
Passion can only take you so far, a retarded kid with a lot of passion will not get to the same place as someone who hates their job but has incredible ability and can focus and keep on task.
The truth is they both matter, you have to have some amount of ability and some amount of passion. Passion can make up for some lack of ability, and ability can make up for some lack of passion.
It still comes down to discipline whether you love your job or not, what drives a person to work hard and learn.
... on your house or car? If you wouldn't for these products, why should you for your software? DRM like anything will be abused by the powers that be, I don't want to go down the road of trusted computing where your hardware is never your own.
"If you can't open it, you don't own it!" as far as I'm concerned. If modern software is not owned at all, then why "buy" it? Since it's not really yours. Unfortunately, I disagree with the current software model where the user never really owns his software, no one would accept that for their house or car they wanted to modify, fix or renovate. Why the hell do we accept it for software?
... is that the values of patents are in contention with one another, the idea of patents is to:
1) Incentivize people to invent 2) Protect the inventor's investment/hardwork in said ideas so he (potentially/does) see some renumeration for adding value to society 2) Expire patents to give that knowledge back to society so it can be freely used without royalty.
Unfortunately most patents are useless, like patenting language or air. The less a person knows about new or emerging industries the more useless patents become. Any idiot can get a patent on things. They do so by patenting things that should never be patented, and by overstuffing the patent office with applications so that overruns and overtaxes their ability to cull the wheat from the chaff.
The history of patents prove that patents are merely monopoly on knowledge in another form, it would be like trying to patent the equation 1+1 = 2. Everything we do is merely reshaping of old stuff into new patterns, all value was already there. The idea that we "add" value is the illusion, we merely potentialize value that was already inherent to begin with (i.e. you can't make a glass bottle if you don't have any glass).
I say we just do away with the whole thing entirely unless there are good arguments for to keep it only for exceptional cases.
... it seems since the advent of 3D cards they've held roughly at around $300-500, I remember paying $400 for a brand new voodoo/voodoo2 card when they first came out, it seems a little strange that prices have been eeking ever higher or have held all this time.
"Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."--Ibn al-Haytham
This is what too few human beings do, they always trust in what they have been taught... when much of what they know is fraught with error. I am weary of anything I say as well as anything any other man says, that cannot be demonstrated. Therefore, I only defend what can be demonstrated.
The majority of people do not take the above view, they are overconfident in what they think they know when they hardly know anything at all.
"...ever looked at gaming benchmarks? Server benchmarks? Productivity benchmarks? Rendering benchmarks? In fact, any kind of benchmark? Seen how they all differ depending on the product and test run? Same with supercomputers, you got some synthetic benchmarks, and you got some real world benchmarks."
I hear what you're saying, but if we look at application complexity (modern games for instance) there really there isn't any such thing as "real world benchmarks" since each application is specific because of the design. Design is just as important as the hardware, you can have a really fast computer and a bunch of bloated code running on it. My guess is that a lot of modern apps are very bloated.
I'd love to see some supercomputing power dedicated to reducing bloat and optimization efficiency in code/languages/compilers, etc.
"Simple: you evaluate how much actual work it can perform across the entire system per unit time, where "actual work" means a mix of operations similar to some real application of interest"
Personally I'd like to see supercomputing power start automating detecting bad design and potential failures of someone elses code, not to mention optimization.
I've always wondered what you could do with google and a few supercomputers coming the open source database where you can deduce what a function does without needing comments based on analysis on many types of projects and code.
I'm sure if we threw enough money at it we could start making software engineering a lot better then it is today.
"Hear hear! Paypal looks like a bank, acts like a bank, and quacks like a bank...therefore, it should be regulated like a bank, and held up to the same laws and legal scrutiny as any bank."
Two words: Money laundering and tax evasion. That's why paypal is so 'beloved'.
... is really about atmosphere. I admit that I never personally had any interest and didn't care either way for such things. But I know that lighting really does have an effect on atmosphere. Doom 3 had great atmosphere because of how the lighting was, even the original Diablo was dark and grey, it had some levels that were really bright, but it also compensated by levels that were really dark (as you go into the last dungeon to fight diablo in teh first one).
One of the cool things about the original diablo (for it's time) was lighting effects from spells/arrows, etc across floors and whatnot and going 'oh shit oh shit oh shit' when monsters were coming or were firing your way and you were trying to make an escape.
"Communism takes away many freedoms, and is only "perfect" from an authoritarian perspective. Perfect to MANY people would be a world in which everyone gets along without a strong government to impede."
This is nonsense, there has been what could be termed communism in many ancient societies with no loss of freedom, the ideologies are vague ever shifting and ever redefining entities. In fact total freedom leads exactly to the same outcome, to tyranny.
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty. -- Plato
Freedom without restraint and sound judgment and character is Tyranny.
To put it another way -- Libertarianism without restraint and character is tyranny.
It all comes back to human values, institutions and the environment itself. It's highly likely that new technologies will transform economic systems as they emerge and will slowly transform what we currently think of as economy into something else entirely over time long after we're dead.
What people fail to understand is that reality is ever changing, today's vaunted ideology of freedom will be tomorrows outmoded tyrannical dictatorship as technology moves forward.
Reality is a self referencing tautology, existence is the most basic truth which is itself. Think about how science works, it works from the idea that nature is itself, and that all truths are of nature (of A). Therefore we already accept A is A whether we are aware of it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember when Creative and a few other companies had media decoder/encoader boards packaged with DVDROMS when they first came out, seems like a step back IMHO.
"Nintendo at times has this thing for insanely ridiculous hardware requirements for their console games, but if you manage to gather the hardware, it's definitely a worthy gaming experience."
As an owner of crystal chronicles, it was a complete letdown even with mutiplayer. The game was too simplified and it wasn't final fantasy at all, not in the slightest. Everything about FF: CC was disjoint and disconnected. They had some wonderful graphics but the world did not cohere well at all, FF: CC is probably one of the craziest projects square has ever green lighted, I can't understand how they would make a different game for the gamecube and not a true final fantasy.
FF: CC was originally some other game whom they grafted into the fold, I wish they had not named it FF:CC but they wanted free money and a lot of stupid people bought it on the name (as they knew)
It was a dishonest thing IMHO. I thought they were seriously releasing an FF, when I played FF:CC I was like : WTF IS THIS?? that's what my reaction was... a crappy overly simplistic button mashing action game.
I definitely think we were always on the same page, just we weren't hearing one another :)
What I meant by "physics" was not the 'stuffy' stuff, I meant simple things in general terms - i.e. what everybody understands naturally. Life has existed for many years and many academics like to 'hold truth' bondage saying 'this is the only valid form of knowledge', and I find it disheartening because we shut down curiousity in kids, and because many academics and working mathematicians, etc, are outright incorrect. I am reminded of George cantor and what he had to endure amongst 'the most learned'.
(wikipedia)
"The objections to his work were occasionally fierce: Poincaré referred to Cantor's ideas as a "grave disease" infecting the discipline of mathematics,[6] and Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth."[7] Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory," which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".[8] Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life were once blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries,"
"Mathematics in necessarily abstract. It is the science in which one disconnects interesting patterns from their context and studies them in their own right. A great deal of effort also goes in to applying general mathematical knowledge in a particular context."
You're not grasping what I'm saying, I'm saying the expression of math - i.e. the current symbolic form it takes, can be expressed in many different ways.
See here:
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/
"The stickiest issue is that a lot of us are conflicted. It pisses us off that WoW is a little less fair but on the surface this was a guy who avoided all technical attempts Blizzard tried to thwart him in a great game of cat & mouse. In the end, he could claim he was just selling software that users happened to use to violate Blizzard's TOS and EULA with. I've heard the same arguments about BitTorrent and would probably side with the software makers in this case ... "
Personally I think liberty takes precedence here, software vendors are way too authoritarian already. Would you accept it if someone told you how to use your car, or your house? I don't buy the "software as a service" argument at all, it is not the same classification at all. If WoW was standalone it would fall under doctrine of first sale and all that, i.e. ownership. The fact that MMO's can get away with telling paying customers how they use "their" product is a bit of a slap in the face.
I may be in the wrong here (since I have not played wow in a long time) but isn't wow glider just a bot kind of application, it doesn't actually cheat or violate the rules of the game technically?
"A lot of people devote a lot of their time in explaining their areas of mathematics to the general public (including myself). And as for your distaste for abstraction."
It's not the abstraction that's hard, it's the divorced nature of mathematics from the physics of the everyday world, I've been studying physics again in my off time and I am certain that math and physics are the same subject and should be studied as a unified subject, not divorced as they currently are in most schools around the world.
Not only that, the actual number systems themselves make math a lot harder then it is for some people. I've been experimenting and researching numeral systems that use geometric patterns, and many mathematical abstractions become infinitely easier when you use shapes and color as represnetations for your numerals, and it makes addition and subtraction (of some kinds) that much easier to see at a glance, instead of playing with rather clumsy arabic script.
If we think about it from a physics standpoint, all truth is derived from information from the environment is bombarding us with, is math really just inequalities in the information our body is receiving? I have to wonder, consider "A house" and "1 house" technically you could do computations with "a" and not lose any meaning whatsoever.
"Amazon.com Review
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems."
I've been studying this -- see here:
http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/
http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741/
I personally thing neurological sciences are going to have a lot to say about mathematical knowledge and many mathematicians and math buffs are not going to like it.
Quotes:"Thought and language are neural systems, they work by neural computation, not formal symbol manipulation." -- Page 8, embodied processing. (Molecule to metaphor)
"Language is inextricable from thought and experience" - Page 1. (molecule to metaphor)
"but it leads me to believe that the opposite may be true. Time will tell."
Many rumors on the net frequently become true, especially in regards to financial transactions. I've noticed quite a few rumors come true over the years, and while we should take things with a grain of salt, we should also analyze the situation for the likelyness of the statement itself.
"Actually it is rather specific. They want you to build a working brain simulator with a math foundation rather then guesses at what the brain is doing biologically."
What they are asking for is a contradiction in terms, math is derived from thought, we do not think using abstract formal systems, we think using direct neurological computation, the "mathematics" we have invented is not the language of the brain, it is a derivitive language of some more basic unified language.
Math is the problem, the brain does not work by formal symbol computation, math is derived from neurological computation. This has been scientifically studied. See:
http://www.amazon.com/Molecule-Metaphor-Neural-Language-Bradford/dp/0262562359/
Yes I did, but what does he think he's going to accomplish by shifting the service into the cloud, why not just have backup servers in many datacenters? What exactly is the difference?
All the apps I have used on "the cloud" are over-rated, if google would have just stuck to a few apps and focused on improving them, they would not have spread themselves so remarkably thin. I think this is where independent smaller software companies can have a big advantage if they are any good at recognizing the users needs.
A user wants to:
-Save time
-Save money
or both
Users will gladly part with money if your software adds real value to their lives, they won't if you're just trying to repackage the same old stuff ad infinitum, some companies can get away with packaged crap, but sooner or later they will decay due to the needs of the customers not being fulfilled and someone will come up and snap up those customers.
Software engineering right now is in the dark ages IMHO, too much is asked of the user, many programs are incompetently designed and rushed to "market" (google chrome I'm looking at you), imagine what google chrome could have been, if it accepted firefox plugins and other enhancements other browsers have had for a while.
Google chrome is
1) fast
2) simple
But that's all I use google chrome for, the hidden benefits of better engineered browser will be lost without meeting user needs. Google is definitely losing its focus IMHO in many aspects of software development, becoming "jack of all trades, mater of none" at least when it comes to a lot of their software.
"I'm not saying it's for everything, but the fact of the matter is most people don't want to mess with their TVs. The same way they don't want to mess with their cars, microwaves, blenders and -- yes -- computers. Most people just want to watch the damn TV."
This is what modern designers don't understand, especially geeks and engineers - the job is to offload complexity and increase a persons time available for other pursuits or offload tasks. I bet if AI was sufficiently advanced enough and everything was self-programming and automated, people wouldn't mind something like myth TV if it was just "plug it in, turn it on, and I (the device) will do the work for you!" that's what people want in their lives - to offload tasks to other devices so that they have more time for leisure and self-realization.
This is so often lost on designers who don't understand the average human being doesn't want to have to learn anything, or spend any more time expending effort on another task/job, when they are overwhelmed enough already.
"Yeah, but as a life long geek and software development major, I find that these kids are the best kind of competition. Seriously, I know a bunch of kids that just don't have a passion for CS, and I can run circles around them just from experiences I've had messing around as a kid."
Have you ever considered most kids don't have access to an environment that allows them to grow? Have you ever considered their talents will bloom with age? i.e. is their mind ripe for the task at hand, in terms of development and maturity?
When I was a kid I needed guidance, I wasted a lot of years because the place I grew up was a small town filled with christian fundies, not the brightest bunch in the drawer. Not only that most teachers don't even have a clue what has been discovered in the neurological sciences over the last 30 years and how it undermines the enlightenments view of reason and enlightenment's view of education. Most people still operate under the enlightenment's view of reason
(quick version)
http://i35.tinypic.com/10fruxh.jpg
Longer version:
http://www.linktv.org/video/2142
This idea that kids can be forced to develop is due to mistaken ideas of how reasoning works and how people's bodies biologically develop over time. No one understands fully what reason is, and how it works, not mathematicians, not scientists, not anyone right now, that is for certain.
"When it gets to the harder subject matter (SPARC ASM, anyone?), they just can't compete unless they've got a passion for the subject. Passion will get you further than talent any day of the week."
Passion can only take you so far, a retarded kid with a lot of passion will not get to the same place as someone who hates their job but has incredible ability and can focus and keep on task.
The truth is they both matter, you have to have some amount of ability and some amount of passion. Passion can make up for some lack of ability, and ability can make up for some lack of passion.
It still comes down to discipline whether you love your job or not, what drives a person to work hard and learn.
... on your house or car? If you wouldn't for these products, why should you for your software? DRM like anything will be abused by the powers that be, I don't want to go down the road of trusted computing where your hardware is never your own.
"If you can't open it, you don't own it!" as far as I'm concerned. If modern software is not owned at all, then why "buy" it? Since it's not really yours. Unfortunately, I disagree with the current software model where the user never really owns his software, no one would accept that for their house or car they wanted to modify, fix or renovate. Why the hell do we accept it for software?
... is that the values of patents are in contention with one another, the idea of patents is to:
1) Incentivize people to invent
2) Protect the inventor's investment/hardwork in said ideas so he (potentially/does) see some renumeration for adding value to society
2) Expire patents to give that knowledge back to society so it can be freely used without royalty.
Unfortunately most patents are useless, like patenting language or air. The less a person knows about new or emerging industries the more useless patents become. Any idiot can get a patent on things. They do so by patenting things that should never be patented, and by overstuffing the patent office with applications so that overruns and overtaxes their ability to cull the wheat from the chaff.
The history of patents prove that patents are merely monopoly on knowledge in another form, it would be like trying to patent the equation 1+1 = 2. Everything we do is merely reshaping of old stuff into new patterns, all value was already there. The idea that we "add" value is the illusion, we merely potentialize value that was already inherent to begin with (i.e. you can't make a glass bottle if you don't have any glass).
I say we just do away with the whole thing entirely unless there are good arguments for to keep it only for exceptional cases.
... it seems since the advent of 3D cards they've held roughly at around $300-500, I remember paying $400 for a brand new voodoo/voodoo2 card when they first came out, it seems a little strange that prices have been eeking ever higher or have held all this time.
... I doubt they will choose the best ideas. There are a tonne of great ideas with no voice to the ones who are capable of implementing them.
I hope for the best, but I'm a bit skeptical of this.
"Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."--Ibn al-Haytham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-haytham
This is what too few human beings do, they always trust in what they have been taught... when much of what they know is fraught with error. I am weary of anything I say as well as anything any other man says, that cannot be demonstrated. Therefore, I only defend what can be demonstrated.
The majority of people do not take the above view, they are overconfident in what they think they know when they hardly know anything at all.
"...ever looked at gaming benchmarks? Server benchmarks? Productivity benchmarks? Rendering benchmarks? In fact, any kind of benchmark? Seen how they all differ depending on the product and test run? Same with supercomputers, you got some synthetic benchmarks, and you got some real world benchmarks."
I hear what you're saying, but if we look at application complexity (modern games for instance) there really there isn't any such thing as "real world benchmarks" since each application is specific because of the design. Design is just as important as the hardware, you can have a really fast computer and a bunch of bloated code running on it. My guess is that a lot of modern apps are very bloated.
I'd love to see some supercomputing power dedicated to reducing bloat and optimization efficiency in code/languages/compilers, etc.
"Simple: you evaluate how much actual work it can perform across the entire system per unit time, where "actual work" means a mix of operations similar to some real application of interest"
Personally I'd like to see supercomputing power start automating detecting bad design and potential failures of someone elses code, not to mention optimization.
I've always wondered what you could do with google and a few supercomputers coming the open source database where you can deduce what a function does without needing comments based on analysis on many types of projects and code.
I'm sure if we threw enough money at it we could start making software engineering a lot better then it is today.
Oldschool games no DRM
http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/
I meant two things... ahh well lol.
"Hear hear! Paypal looks like a bank, acts like a bank, and quacks like a bank...therefore, it should be regulated like a bank, and held up to the same laws and legal scrutiny as any bank."
Two words: Money laundering and tax evasion. That's why paypal is so 'beloved'.
... is really about atmosphere. I admit that I never personally had any interest and didn't care either way for such things. But I know that lighting really does have an effect on atmosphere. Doom 3 had great atmosphere because of how the lighting was, even the original Diablo was dark and grey, it had some levels that were really bright, but it also compensated by levels that were really dark (as you go into the last dungeon to fight diablo in teh first one).
One of the cool things about the original diablo (for it's time) was lighting effects from spells/arrows, etc across floors and whatnot and going 'oh shit oh shit oh shit' when monsters were coming or were firing your way and you were trying to make an escape.
"Communism takes away many freedoms, and is only "perfect" from an authoritarian perspective. Perfect to MANY people would be a world in which everyone gets along without a strong government to impede."
This is nonsense, there has been what could be termed communism in many ancient societies with no loss of freedom, the ideologies are vague ever shifting and ever redefining entities. In fact total freedom leads exactly to the same outcome, to tyranny.
Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty. -- Plato
Freedom without restraint and sound judgment and character is Tyranny.
To put it another way -- Libertarianism without restraint and character is tyranny.
It all comes back to human values, institutions and the environment itself. It's highly likely that new technologies will transform economic systems as they emerge and will slowly transform what we currently think of as economy into something else entirely over time long after we're dead.
What people fail to understand is that reality is ever changing, today's vaunted ideology of freedom will be tomorrows outmoded tyrannical dictatorship as technology moves forward.
Reality is a self referencing tautology, existence is the most basic truth which is itself. Think about how science works, it works from the idea that nature is itself, and that all truths are of nature (of A). Therefore we already accept A is A whether we are aware of it or not.