And what about a fail-safe, "zero bugs here" TCP/IP stack, running on a dedicated card and using an almost human-readable format to communicate with the kernel, or even directly with the apps?
The firmware in such a card would not even have to be upgradeable...
(And don't come whining that zero bugs is impossible. MY programs have zero bugs, thanks to testing each and every possible and impossible case for everything. Takes time? Yup. Zero bugs == priceless.)
The reason to add extra cores is that, with our current processors made for single-tasking, with their only stack and set of registers - hyperthreading is the exact same thing, with only 2 stacks and register sets - programs (threads, processes, whatever) are supposed to be run one on each processor.
Let's change that, first. Let's put, say, a whole lot more registers, drop the hardware stack and use a software one - make everything software-based, reduce the instruction sets, use WAY more powerful SIMD, and add numerous cores.
THAT is the design we NEED since forever.
As for GPUs, RPUs, and so on - let's just drop it. They offer nothing really valuable. Raytracing has been The One True Way since forever. Now we have the CPU power to use it in real-time.
Why has no one ever thought of using numerous general-purpose chips (68000s?) on additional cards to do only raytracing? Because it would be BETTER? Raster graphics have always sucked.
Or simply deem that there is zero value in immaterial goods that can be copied at near-zero costs. Stop prosecuting people who simply download music/movies/whatever, which costs nothing to anyone, and get profits from SELLING the HARDWARE, as in "the original CD copies" - those might get scratched, borrowed, stolen, lost, broken, or more generally unusable, but they are things. Material things. Things that can NOT be copied at zero cost.
BUT prosecute people that make money off pirated software. No pity whatsoever. They could use free or Free, if their business depends on software that much. And if they need commercial software, well, they can either buy it, or, if it makes no economic sense, change their business plan. Or look for other alternatives, such as in-house development... Or open source in-house software... There is no excuse for a company that is supposed to turn a profit to use pirated software. I know many companies, and I can count those in order with licenses for all their software on one hand without using a single finger...
For movies, well, as I've said before, "a movie that does not cover its production costs in its first week in theaters is a commercial failure" - and it will make several orders of magnitude of times more money when on rental and such.
And don't come saying that downloading will kill rental. It has not. And it will always involve some steps to get from "pirate copy in the form of byte stream" to "DVD that works on real hardware (home players)" than going down the block and shell out $3 to rent it. That does not mean only idiots will still rent movies. That means that I might find it more *profitable* to use my time (5 mins) to rent it than to use my time (days?) to find the movie, download torrent, wait wait wait, seed seed seed, burn, try - "Oh, shit, doesn't work. Zone 3." De-zone iso file, burn. "Oh shit, my real DVD player can't read DVD-R,-RW or +RW, only +R" Go buy DVD+R, burn. "Oh shit, only in swedish with swahili subs"...
And if the teacher is distributing content in violation of the law, then that teacher should be fired.
FWIW, here in Belgium, our computer arts and computer programming teachers just hand us Adobe CS2, PS, and MS Visual Studio DVDs. As in "You're needing that for my class and there is not a single one of you with enough money to buy any of these." And they teach us how to rip DVDs so as to get material to learn use of AfterFX, Premiere, Combustion and such. (We're taught video manipulation before 3D modeling, and filming is in an other option. (About that, it might be different elsewhere, but I don't want to explain our school system.))
FWIW, I call this bull. I would have LOVED to be taught early in abstract thought, because I would have been able to since - seriously - 8 years old.
I was a clever child, but I don't think I've ever been a genius, thus, other kids should be able to, too. (And if I'm that wrong, at least try with kids who have Asperger's syndrome and 40 IQ above average. That would train an army of über-geeks... )
Re:Walk into the room
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You do know this guy?! That story has been on the 'Net for ages, attributed to an IBM technician
Oh, I forgot...
Who the hell is going to pay 5 to download copyrighted material? Or pay ANY money? I don't have a Visa card anyway, so it will be BitTorrent for the foreseeable future.
Thank you, Bram Cohen.
You know, there is that thing called "common sense" that everyone else seems to be lacking. Or have a different version of than YOU do, which causes them to have different opinions.
Idea 1 : What I, HUMAN, buy, when I buy anyTHING, it BELONGS TO ME, as in "MY book, MY cd-rom, MY computer, MY audio cd, MY dvd." And I can do whatever I want with it, and the first thing I do with each and every data support is to rip and copy it, in hopes of gaining the ability to enjoy it when the support has become unusable (re-sold, given away, destroyed, lost, scratched, missing, stolen, borrowed). I buy a CD, not a nebulous right to play recorded music. I buy a round disc that holds many ones and zeroes, which represent music that can be played back when the round thing is inserted in a suitable device. That is a little far-fetched from buying a right to listen to music. You see, THAT is what I call common sense: WHEN YOU BUY SOMETHING, IT'S YOURS.
Idea 2 : "Information wants to be free" : bullshit. Information IS free. It belongs in the mind of each and everyone that wants it. Information is free because it can be replicated at no cost. Which leads to
Idea 3 : Blah blah the cost of production blah blah : bullshit. A movie that does not return its initial investment in theater tickets many times over in the first week is a commercial failure. Oh, I know, the video market gains The Industry many many more $ even, but I say fuck them. They've earned enough money already. And they might earn even more if I could actually BUY the dvds ($30 a film? Yeah, right. Make that $10 and I'll buy them in six-packs.)
The production costs for a music album could be repaid many times over, too : The more people buy the hardware (i.e. the CD, or whatever other support) or the concert tickets, the more $ you get as a musician. The more people download your music, the more people will listen to it. THAT costs you NOTHING AT ALL.
Idea 4: MY common sense tells me that, as there are zillions of people downloading exabytes of data on various darknets, the statistical chance anyone (i.e. you, reader, or me, writer) will ever be prosecuted for filesharing is very, very near zero.
Other ideas : What "copyrighted material"? I can't copy a CD with its artwork, booklet, and sell the copies. Chinese industries do that, they have printing and CD presses. The ones where CDs get lawfully produced in the day and pirate-copied at night. That amounts to the same as printing money, then: the value of "copyrighted material" is non-zero at industrial scales. Or distributed, as in "ten million BitTorrent users and counting" - the very same people that DO buy round plastic things in artfully decorated jewel cases. But they do not steal anyTHING. Thus, no theft, no crime.
Now, for software. Oh, make everything free for non-commercial use already, or so cheap that it would be more profitable for users to actually buy it instead of d/l'ing the crack from badly-coded, malware-infested and porn-ad-riddled crack sites. I'd have paid, oh, happily 10 to 20 for the whole Creative Suite 2, instead of waiting for a week for Azureus to DL it in English first and in French later. I'm a student and I'm not gonna see a ROI on that before the next version or the one after anyway. Now come sue me, Adobe, with your lawyers at [one year's student's expenses] a day. And it's not as if I didn't have to have the FULL version, not those castrated student editions. Yes, I know, I must still buy the hardware, but it's pretty hard to download it off the 'Net. And it CAN NOT BE COPIED AT ZERO COST. That's why hardware can be stolen. Not software. (Stealing the box in which the software comes IS theft, copying bits around is NOT.)
And while I'm at it, I'm gonna type another rant : hardware prices. Hey, nVidia, does a Quadro chip REALLY cost you one hundred times more to produce than a crippled GeForce *200? Didn't think so, either.
>If you want service, buy a service contract from someone local. As in come to your home and fix it.
Yes. Or, do the same I did : buy a Mac and sign up for their expensive support service.
I first thought it was overpriced, but reading all these stories, and remembering how painful it was to teach non-tech people how to use Mozilla Thunderbird (how much simpler can a program go than THAT?), I think it might just have been a good idea to pay for a service I might need... and paying workers is expensive for everyone, even Apple...
97% No way.
I've been bullied - wait, scratch that - beaten the shit out of, DAILY, for TWELVE F*ING YEARS (age 4 to 16). Because I was different. No, not a retard : a genius. Yes, kids DO hate people not like them.
It magically stopped in the middle of secondary school, after two years of muay-thai training...
About the teens who send porn of themselves : the stupid ones are those spreading it. Most of the time. What, I still have a pic of an ex-girlfriend's ass from when she was 14, and I'm SO never going to post it, ever. (That was 6 years ago, I was 3 years older than her, we split after a week.)
About name-calling : Hm. I've been called names countless times, by countless idiots. There are some times I still remember, because those ones did hurt, but few, so few! (Being called "fat" when you are is not a problem : stop eating, idiot.)
The times that did hurt were all when it was from people I liked, or just trusted...
Hey, imagine plugging your eyes directly to your computer! Now THAT would be cool! What resolution could the brain handle? I suppose, with its abilities to re-wire itself, that can be set to pretty high levels...
Now, as for deciding - ADC, VGA, DVI, DVJ, strange Sun format I can't remember the name of? Or maybe that would be too geeky and we'd just have composite or cinch... at least for the general public...
Note to self : do not post when stoned. You could get bad karma.
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And what about a fail-safe, "zero bugs here" TCP/IP stack, running on a dedicated card and using an almost human-readable format to communicate with the kernel, or even directly with the apps?
...
The firmware in such a card would not even have to be upgradeable
(And don't come whining that zero bugs is impossible. MY programs have zero bugs, thanks to testing each and every possible and impossible case for everything. Takes time? Yup. Zero bugs == priceless.)
The reason to add extra cores is that, with our current processors made for single-tasking, with their only stack and set of registers - hyperthreading is the exact same thing, with only 2 stacks and register sets - programs (threads, processes, whatever) are supposed to be run one on each processor. Let's change that, first. Let's put, say, a whole lot more registers, drop the hardware stack and use a software one - make everything software-based, reduce the instruction sets, use WAY more powerful SIMD, and add numerous cores. THAT is the design we NEED since forever. As for GPUs, RPUs, and so on - let's just drop it. They offer nothing really valuable. Raytracing has been The One True Way since forever. Now we have the CPU power to use it in real-time. Why has no one ever thought of using numerous general-purpose chips (68000s?) on additional cards to do only raytracing? Because it would be BETTER? Raster graphics have always sucked.
Or simply deem that there is zero value in immaterial goods that can be copied at near-zero costs. Stop prosecuting people who simply download music/movies/whatever, which costs nothing to anyone, and get profits from SELLING the HARDWARE, as in "the original CD copies" - those might get scratched, borrowed, stolen, lost, broken, or more generally unusable, but they are things. Material things. Things that can NOT be copied at zero cost.
BUT prosecute people that make money off pirated software. No pity whatsoever. They could use free or Free, if their business depends on software that much. And if they need commercial software, well, they can either buy it, or, if it makes no economic sense, change their business plan. Or look for other alternatives, such as in-house development... Or open source in-house software... There is no excuse for a company that is supposed to turn a profit to use pirated software.
I know many companies, and I can count those in order with licenses for all their software on one hand without using a single finger...
For movies, well, as I've said before, "a movie that does not cover its production costs in its first week in theaters is a commercial failure" - and it will make several orders of magnitude of times more money when on rental and such.
And don't come saying that downloading will kill rental. It has not. And it will always involve some steps to get from "pirate copy in the form of byte stream" to "DVD that works on real hardware (home players)" than going down the block and shell out $3 to rent it.
That does not mean only idiots will still rent movies. That means that I might find it more *profitable* to use my time (5 mins) to rent it than to use my time (days?) to find the movie, download torrent, wait wait wait, seed seed seed, burn, try - "Oh, shit, doesn't work. Zone 3." De-zone iso file, burn. "Oh shit, my real DVD player can't read DVD-R,-RW or +RW, only +R" Go buy DVD+R, burn. "Oh shit, only in swedish with swahili subs"...
And if the teacher is distributing content in violation of the law, then that teacher should be fired.
FWIW, here in Belgium, our computer arts and computer programming teachers just hand us Adobe CS2, PS, and MS Visual Studio DVDs. As in "You're needing that for my class and there is not a single one of you with enough money to buy any of these."
And they teach us how to rip DVDs so as to get material to learn use of AfterFX, Premiere, Combustion and such. (We're taught video manipulation before 3D modeling, and filming is in an other option. (About that, it might be different elsewhere, but I don't want to explain our school system.))
FWIW, I call this bull. I would have LOVED to be taught early in abstract thought, because I would have been able to since - seriously - 8 years old.
I was a clever child, but I don't think I've ever been a genius, thus, other kids should be able to, too.
(And if I'm that wrong, at least try with kids who have Asperger's syndrome and 40 IQ above average. That would train an army of über-geeks... )
You do know this guy?! That story has been on the 'Net for ages, attributed to an IBM technician
The highest possible ego mass for a star must be Francis Ford Coppola then ... or did it collapse under its own weight?
Oh, I forgot... Who the hell is going to pay 5 to download copyrighted material? Or pay ANY money? I don't have a Visa card anyway, so it will be BitTorrent for the foreseeable future. Thank you, Bram Cohen.
You know, there is that thing called "common sense" that everyone else seems to be lacking. Or have a different version of than YOU do, which causes them to have different opinions.
Idea 1 :
What I, HUMAN, buy, when I buy anyTHING, it BELONGS TO ME, as in "MY book, MY cd-rom, MY computer, MY audio cd, MY dvd."
And I can do whatever I want with it, and the first thing I do with each and every data support is to rip and copy it, in hopes of gaining the ability to enjoy it when the support has become unusable (re-sold, given away, destroyed, lost, scratched, missing, stolen, borrowed). I buy a CD, not a nebulous right to play recorded music. I buy a round disc that holds many ones and zeroes, which represent music that can be played back when the round thing is inserted in a suitable device. That is a little far-fetched from buying a right to listen to music.
You see, THAT is what I call common sense: WHEN YOU BUY SOMETHING, IT'S YOURS.
Idea 2 :
"Information wants to be free" : bullshit. Information IS free. It belongs in the mind of each and everyone that wants it. Information is free because it can be replicated at no cost. Which leads to
Idea 3 :
Blah blah the cost of production blah blah : bullshit. A movie that does not return its initial investment in theater tickets many times over in the first week is a commercial failure. Oh, I know, the video market gains The Industry many many more $ even, but I say fuck them. They've earned enough money already. And they might earn even more if I could actually BUY the dvds ($30 a film? Yeah, right. Make that $10 and I'll buy them in six-packs.)
The production costs for a music album could be repaid many times over, too : The more people buy the hardware (i.e. the CD, or whatever other support) or the concert tickets, the more $ you get as a musician. The more people download your music, the more people will listen to it. THAT costs you NOTHING AT ALL.
Idea 4:
MY common sense tells me that, as there are zillions of people downloading exabytes of data on various darknets, the statistical chance anyone (i.e. you, reader, or me, writer) will ever be prosecuted for filesharing is very, very near zero.
Other ideas :
What "copyrighted material"? I can't copy a CD with its artwork, booklet, and sell the copies. Chinese industries do that, they have printing and CD presses. The ones where CDs get lawfully produced in the day and pirate-copied at night. That amounts to the same as printing money, then: the value of "copyrighted material" is non-zero at industrial scales.
Or distributed, as in "ten million BitTorrent users and counting" - the very same people that DO buy round plastic things in artfully decorated jewel cases. But they do not steal anyTHING. Thus, no theft, no crime.
Now, for software. Oh, make everything free for non-commercial use already, or so cheap that it would be more profitable for users to actually buy it instead of d/l'ing the crack from badly-coded, malware-infested and porn-ad-riddled crack sites. I'd have paid, oh, happily 10 to 20 for the whole Creative Suite 2, instead of waiting for a week for Azureus to DL it in English first and in French later. I'm a student and I'm not gonna see a ROI on that before the next version or the one after anyway. Now come sue me, Adobe, with your lawyers at [one year's student's expenses] a day. And it's not as if I didn't have to have the FULL version, not those castrated student editions. Yes, I know, I must still buy the hardware, but it's pretty hard to download it off the 'Net. And it CAN NOT BE COPIED AT ZERO COST. That's why hardware can be stolen. Not software. (Stealing the box in which the software comes IS theft, copying bits around is NOT.)
And while I'm at it, I'm gonna type another rant : hardware prices. Hey, nVidia, does a Quadro chip REALLY cost you one hundred times more to produce than a crippled GeForce *200? Didn't think so, either.
>If you want service, buy a service contract from someone local. As in come to your home and fix it.
Yes. Or, do the same I did : buy a Mac and sign up for their expensive support service.
I first thought it was overpriced, but reading all these stories, and remembering how painful it was to teach non-tech people how to use Mozilla Thunderbird (how much simpler can a program go than THAT?), I think it might just have been a good idea to pay for a service I might need... and paying workers is expensive for everyone, even Apple...
97% No way. I've been bullied - wait, scratch that - beaten the shit out of, DAILY, for TWELVE F*ING YEARS (age 4 to 16). Because I was different. No, not a retard : a genius. Yes, kids DO hate people not like them. It magically stopped in the middle of secondary school, after two years of muay-thai training... About the teens who send porn of themselves : the stupid ones are those spreading it. Most of the time. What, I still have a pic of an ex-girlfriend's ass from when she was 14, and I'm SO never going to post it, ever. (That was 6 years ago, I was 3 years older than her, we split after a week.) About name-calling : Hm. I've been called names countless times, by countless idiots. There are some times I still remember, because those ones did hurt, but few, so few! (Being called "fat" when you are is not a problem : stop eating, idiot.) The times that did hurt were all when it was from people I liked, or just trusted...
I can't wait to get one!
Hey, imagine plugging your eyes directly to your computer! Now THAT would be cool! What resolution could the brain handle? I suppose, with its abilities to re-wire itself, that can be set to pretty high levels...
Now, as for deciding - ADC, VGA, DVI, DVJ, strange Sun format I can't remember the name of? Or maybe that would be too geeky and we'd just have composite or cinch... at least for the general public...
Note to self : do not post when stoned. You could get bad karma.