Well when you look at human you see a beautiful unique snowflake. But when when a wall street broker looks at a client they see worst case $20,000 worth of kidneys, $40,000 worth of corneas and so on.
What the CIA is doing is nasty. But it's nowhere near as bad as the KGB got up to. The difference is that the CIA is doing to to foreigners abroad and the KGB did it to citizens inside the country. You're also free to criticize the CIA in a way that would have caused Russians to be sent on a one way trip to the gulag if they did the same about the KGB.
I also think the US system - in this case the judiciary - will eventually put an end to CIA's secret prisons or at least gradually move them back inside the US judicial system. But the KGB was the Russian system so there was no possible way for politicians to stop it's abuses.
And for what it's worth Anglo Saxon democracies have always dealt with their foreign enemies with a sort of amoral but highly practical ruthlessness. Watch Elizabeth which is essentially about the England vs Catholic Religious extremists, or anything about US policy in South America in the Cold War. In fact given the sort of enemies they have it's pretty much a necessity - it's not like any of them could have been stopped in any other way other than adopting the sort of theocratic system they were loyal to.
I think the people that do this sort of thing are actually a sort of immune system for the state. So long as they only do it to foreigners I'm not too worried. An 'autoimmune response' against domestic critics of the government would bring the whole state down of course, but the state has developed ways to prevent this like the judiciary. By that analogy, left wingers want an immunocompromised state where any infection is welcome.
But if the enemies of freedom won, we would literally live in a state under attack by own immune system as happened in Russian - tens of millions of innocent Russians were killled by the KGB. It's important to note that this is just a problem with communism - the immune system of an Islamic theocracy would be just as bad, maybe worse.
The CIA by contrast is detaining a few hundred non citizens who are mostly violent advocates of theocracy. The fact that they are violent makes it morally acceptable to use force against them incidentally, and the fact that they believe in a theocracy means that they would inevitably use more violence against their opponents if they were in charge.
So it seems like all things considered you're better off with the CIA/MI5, or whatever your local immune system is called assuming you live in a democracy.
Now I don't think they should torture or disappear them which certainly seems to have happened. But I also don't think they should let them go. But I'm sure some lawyer will figure out a solution to the problem sooner or later.
Funny how most of the people who say that the US is a police state are Americans who've never actually been to or met anyone who has lived in a real police states.
Though if course they're still far preferable to the tiny minority of people from free countries that have visited a few Potemkin Villages in police states and decided that those police states are more efficient.
We still make those decisions even today when we're doing the Rage code when we have decisions about "do we want to integrate some other vendor's solution, some proprietary code into this". And the answer's usually no, because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we're not going to integrate stuff that's going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release. We can argue the exact pros and cons from a pure business standpoint on it, and I can at least make some, perhaps somewhat, contrived cases that I think it's good for the business, but as a personal conviction it's still pretty important to me and I'm standing by that.
You realise that comment explains why a lot of software will never be open source, right? Most things are cobbled together out of closed source third party stuff. It's only because of personal conviction that iD don't do this too.
Re:JC's D3D criticisms are dated, likes modern D3D
on
Is id Abandoning Linux?
·
· Score: 1, Troll
That interview reminds me of the bit in "System Shock 2" where some character says something like
"He doesn't understand what we're doing down here or the [voice changes from human to distorted alien]GLORY OF OUR PURPOSE. GLORY TO THE MANY!"
I want specific examples in which "The actors are not rational" and in which "The actors do not possess complete and accurate information." (that second point is kinda bullshit, but still give me an good example.)
People paying $500 for a cellphone or continuing to buy MP3 players despite a hefty markup are not being rational - they have an emotional attachment to the brand. They will continue to buy Apple even when better, cheaper, more open alternatives exist.
If you click on this post, you'll no doubt see a few downmods which sort of proves my point. People aren't rational once they start to love companies and companies exploit this irrationality by charging them a hefty premium, and that's the reason they get angry when this is pointed out.
No, no. Everyone knows that profitable businesses only make money by exploitation of the proletariat. In a true socialist society like North Korea there'd be no advertising, businesses, internet or food and thus no exploitation.
Unfortunately, Microsoft made a decision not to use the boundary protection in their new operating system called "Windows". They ignored most of the work that Intel did providing support in the silicon for a decent micro operating system. The boundary protection could have been built into the programming language and runtime. Things would have been much better in the long term.
16 bit Windows did use it, but just not for protection.
Originally 8086s had a simple segmentation mode without protection. Each address was built up of seg<<16|offset. Since both segment and offset were 16 bit, this limited the address space to 1MB. Famously, the designers of the IBM PC reservered the upper 384K for IO, and this is where the 640K limit came from.
Later on the 80286, protected mode was supported, where the value you loaded into a segment register was a selector, and index into a table of segments. The CPU supported different privilege levels called Rings with only the highly privileged ones allowed to create entries in this table.
16 bit Windows did used 286 protected mode - it had to to get access to memory above 1MB. When it loaded it would install a DOS extender which would switch the PC into protected mode and allow 16 bit protected mode tasks to run on top of DOS. Since the 286 didn't allow you to switch back, each call into DOS used a triple fault to reset the processor and some Bios code to jump back into Windows.
It was even possible to allocate buffers bigger than 64K. In that case, windows would set up an array of selectors for each 64K chunk. If C code wanted to access an arbitrary location in the buffer, the compiler would work out which 64K chunk it was in, load a segment register with the corrrect selector (this was a very slow operation since microcode in the 286 had to check permissions), calculate the offset and load it into one of the normal registers and then do the segment read. This was an incredibly slow process.
It's also worth pointing out that 16 bit Windows used protected mode to get access to more memory, the like Dos the OS didn't protect itself from being damaged by third party applications. And it didn't stop third party applications damaging each other. As Walter Oney put it the philosphy was that it's a personal computer after all - If you're a programmer you can do what you like to it, just like you're free to run your car without oil until it seizes up.
Once the 386 came out and allowed offsets into segments to be bigger than 64K Windows would even set the limit on the first selector to allow you to access the whole buffer with operand size overides. The 386 also supported Virtual 8086 mode, so protected mode could jump into DOS and segments would work like a 8086. But loading segment registers was still a very slow operation, and Windows NT and Linux which are both designed to stop applications corrupting each other or the system both used page tables to do it instead. But page tables don't protect against buffer overruns.
Mind you segmentation only protects against buffer overruns if you malloc the buffers. Automatic variables on the stack are not protected. And allocing a stack variable is just a subtract instruction - it is orders of magnitude faster than calling into the OS, switching to Ring 0, allocating the memory, filling in the segment table and the returning to the caller who would load the selector into a segment register. Worse, there are very few segment registers, an each time you access any buffer you need to reload one. On a 286 there is CS,DS,ES.CS and DS are needed for near code and data, so only ES is free for far pointers. The 386 has FS and GS too, but three registers with very slow loads is not a recipe for a speedy machine.
So Microsoft tried it and it was slow. If they'd have used it enough to avoid buffer overruns - i.e. malloc every buffer rather than allocating some on the stack it would have been really slow. And so all modern OSs rely on the page table for protection instead of segments so they can run on multiple processors. In x64 mode, segment limits aren't even checked by hardware anymore.
I dunno, maybe it counts as copyright license. In which case his label will be really annoyed with him. E.g. imagine if a programmer said "please steal my code" and that code was something he'd written while employed by some company. Now the programmer doesn't own the copyright but he is an employee of the company. And pirates might say that as an employee he was speaking for the company and thus the company has given them a license to copy the music.
I certainly wouldn't take the risk with code I'd written but sold to someone else, which is essentially the same situation.
Because maintaining a secure system written in C requires paranoia, obsessive concentration on small details and merciless flaming of n00bs when they screw up.
I can't see how that can be true. Suppose the yield is 90%. Now if you make single core processorrs, you chuck away 10% away. But with dual core some percentage of those 10% can be fused and sold as single core.
Of course maybe the yield on the new process is really bad, like 10%. But even then that's the yield at quad core. I think of the 90% that fail quad core, most can be fused into single or dual or tricore. And I don't really believe that the yield of the new process would be this bad - they just wait until they could get 90% before using it, and then crank that close to 100% by selling bad chips as n core where n < 4. They could fuse out some of the cache too.
Dam"#$%#"mn straight. I'm running this Athlon just fine at 1.2 Ghz faster than it was sold at and it'"#%#"s rock solid. Just buy the cheap"##"est chip, unlock it and clock it up until you see blue smoke and th"#$#"en back off a few Mhz. I saved a for"#$#"tune, which is lucky because Quicken screwed up my tax return, so I gotta pay lo"#$#"ads of tax.
Essentially if you use a very fast video card and change processors, any single core processor no matter how fast gets 40 fps. And any dual core processor gets around 61-65. It looks like the game FPS saturates quite easily, but the speed up from dual core is pretty impressive.
So on the one hand they get accused of dumping, on the other price fixing. Mind you DRAM manufacturers used to accuse each othe of (and I suspect probably did) both at various times, so it's not necessarily impossible.
Though actually, the US has always been rather interventionist. Much like the UK actually. Other European countries have been interventionist in the past but apart from the UK most of them don't have the ability or the will to be interventionist now. China has historically been much less interventionist especially outside its immediate neighbourhood, though this may be changing.
http://netwar.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/americas-small-wars/ Between 1783-1993 the US engaged in 234 military interventions over 216 years in foreign nations ranging from humanitarian missions to small wars to major interstate wars. In addition, there were 23 major Indian Wars. The United States engaged in an average 1.19 foreign interventions per year throughout history. The duration of these wars varies, so many wars and engagements overlapped.
The figure of 234 makes me think that he's counting things that are not wars but looking at this it does seem that the US was involved in some kind of war for a large percentage of its existence.
Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality.
I have no idea what you mean...
I expect to find your idea implemented in US and UK airports in the near future, and a long line of people queueing behind each scanner machine. Quite a few of whom will probably feel reassured that the terrorists are all being exposed by their anti-freedom thoughts.
I picture it like this
As you went into airport ThoughtSecurity, someone would hand you a piece of paper with a legal disclaimer full of incomprehensible medicalese and advise you menacingly that your journey time maybe 'seriously increased' if you decline to sign.
Ahead of you in the queue a man with a large beard and baggy clothes would go absolutely apeshit, trying to pull a helmet off his head before collapsing into an epileptic seizure, frothing at the mouth. Guards would haul his twitching body away to a small room whilst talking about the new war themed reality show. As the door opened, you'd catch a glimpse of heap of people with nosebleeds, all staring vacantly into space, sobbing or curled into foetal postions.
Later in the queue, well armed HomSec soldiers in high tech black armour would lock a helmet to your head and the helmet would flash shocking images. Then the helmet would be removed and you'd proceed dazed to the plane. Some people would fall asleep immediately and a red light over their seats would flash, but worried looking stewardesses would run down the aisles with air inject guns, injecting them with something. The sleepers would then wake up, but look very groggy for the rest of the flight.
Sort of a mixture of Max Headroom, Brazil and a Philip K Dick novel.
Isn't it cheaper just to provide excellent tech support to Havok and a bunch of other companies though?
Seems like Intel should just hire a guru per third party who can help the programmers at there optimize for Intel CPUs. Since Intel has more cash they can just outspend AMD on this, and their CPUs will do better in benchmarks because all the inner loop stuff is running as well as it possibly can.
Buying the company seems like you want to fold some of its technology into some Intel product, or you want to employ its designers.
Quad Core CPUs are pretty much going unused desktops.
Never used quad code, but on a Core Duo 2 Bioshock can max out both cores.
Of course, video games tend to handle things in a dumb way so the renderer will render frames as fast as it can - faster than the sync rate of the monitor, so not all of the CPU cycles are actually used usefully, but it does show that Bioshock is parallel enough to have two threads ready constantly.
Back in the old days, video games would have one CPU at 100% and the other essentially unused. I'm not sure how modern game engines do this and whether dual core is a special case they optimized for of course.
Well I should have said "some advanced form or brain scan" rather than MRI. And for all the talk about my idea not working, I can tell the politics of most of the people who replied from the bits of my post that made them angry. So it's not like it's impossible.
Incidentally, the idea of the gay rights stuff is that Islamic Fundamentalists should be driven crazy, conservatives should be slightly annoyed and left wingers should have no problem. I.e. the terrorists are still extremists but they're on the opposite side of the left right spectrum than they are with respect to foreign policy. Which is useful, since you want to be able to distinguish the three groups.
Slashdot Mirror
Well when you look at human you see a beautiful unique snowflake. But when when a wall street broker looks at a client they see worst case $20,000 worth of kidneys, $40,000 worth of corneas and so on.
What the CIA is doing is nasty. But it's nowhere near as bad as the KGB got up to. The difference is that the CIA is doing to to foreigners abroad and the KGB did it to citizens inside the country. You're also free to criticize the CIA in a way that would have caused Russians to be sent on a one way trip to the gulag if they did the same about the KGB.
I also think the US system - in this case the judiciary - will eventually put an end to CIA's secret prisons or at least gradually move them back inside the US judicial system. But the KGB was the Russian system so there was no possible way for politicians to stop it's abuses.
And for what it's worth Anglo Saxon democracies have always dealt with their foreign enemies with a sort of amoral but highly practical ruthlessness. Watch Elizabeth which is essentially about the England vs Catholic Religious extremists, or anything about US policy in South America in the Cold War. In fact given the sort of enemies they have it's pretty much a necessity - it's not like any of them could have been stopped in any other way other than adopting the sort of theocratic system they were loyal to.
I think the people that do this sort of thing are actually a sort of immune system for the state. So long as they only do it to foreigners I'm not too worried. An 'autoimmune response' against domestic critics of the government would bring the whole state down of course, but the state has developed ways to prevent this like the judiciary. By that analogy, left wingers want an immunocompromised state where any infection is welcome.
But if the enemies of freedom won, we would literally live in a state under attack by own immune system as happened in Russian - tens of millions of innocent Russians were killled by the KGB. It's important to note that this is just a problem with communism - the immune system of an Islamic theocracy would be just as bad, maybe worse.
The CIA by contrast is detaining a few hundred non citizens who are mostly violent advocates of theocracy. The fact that they are violent makes it morally acceptable to use force against them incidentally, and the fact that they believe in a theocracy means that they would inevitably use more violence against their opponents if they were in charge.
So it seems like all things considered you're better off with the CIA/MI5, or whatever your local immune system is called assuming you live in a democracy.
Now I don't think they should torture or disappear them which certainly seems to have happened. But I also don't think they should let them go. But I'm sure some lawyer will figure out a solution to the problem sooner or later.
Funny how most of the people who say that the US is a police state are Americans who've never actually been to or met anyone who has lived in a real police states.
Though if course they're still far preferable to the tiny minority of people from free countries that have visited a few Potemkin Villages in police states and decided that those police states are more efficient.
I bet people were quiet in the library afterwards though and returned the books on time.
We still make those decisions even today when we're doing the Rage code when we have decisions about "do we want to integrate some other vendor's solution, some proprietary code into this". And the answer's usually no, because eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id, that the policy is that we're not going to integrate stuff that's going to make it impossible for us to do an eventual open source release. We can argue the exact pros and cons from a pure business standpoint on it, and I can at least make some, perhaps somewhat, contrived cases that I think it's good for the business, but as a personal conviction it's still pretty important to me and I'm standing by that.
You realise that comment explains why a lot of software will never be open source, right? Most things are cobbled together out of closed source third party stuff. It's only because of personal conviction that iD don't do this too.
That interview reminds me of the bit in "System Shock 2" where some character says something like
"He doesn't understand what we're doing down here or the [voice changes from human to distorted alien]GLORY OF OUR PURPOSE. GLORY TO THE MANY!"
And then you know he's been assimilated
I want specific examples in which "The actors are not rational" and in which "The actors do not possess complete and accurate information." (that second point is kinda bullshit, but still give me an good example.)
People paying $500 for a cellphone or continuing to buy MP3 players despite a hefty markup are not being rational - they have an emotional attachment to the brand. They will continue to buy Apple even when better, cheaper, more open alternatives exist.
If you click on this post, you'll no doubt see a few downmods which sort of proves my point. People aren't rational once they start to love companies and companies exploit this irrationality by charging them a hefty premium, and that's the reason they get angry when this is pointed out.
IE7's link prefetching feature must cost Google a fortune too.
No, no. Everyone knows that profitable businesses only make money by exploitation of the proletariat. In a true socialist society like North Korea there'd be no advertising, businesses, internet or food and thus no exploitation.
Unfortunately, Microsoft made a decision not to use the boundary protection in their new operating system called "Windows". They ignored most of the work that Intel did providing support in the silicon for a decent micro operating system. The boundary protection could have been built into the programming language and runtime. Things would have been much better in the long term.
16 bit Windows did use it, but just not for protection.
Originally 8086s had a simple segmentation mode without protection. Each address was built up of seg<<16|offset. Since both segment and offset were 16 bit, this limited the address space to 1MB. Famously, the designers of the IBM PC reservered the upper 384K for IO, and this is where the 640K limit came from.
Later on the 80286, protected mode was supported, where the value you loaded into a segment register was a selector, and index into a table of segments. The CPU supported different privilege levels called Rings with only the highly privileged ones allowed to create entries in this table.
16 bit Windows did used 286 protected mode - it had to to get access to memory above 1MB. When it loaded it would install a DOS extender which would switch the PC into protected mode and allow 16 bit protected mode tasks to run on top of DOS. Since the 286 didn't allow you to switch back, each call into DOS used a triple fault to reset the processor and some Bios code to jump back into Windows.
It was even possible to allocate buffers bigger than 64K. In that case, windows would set up an array of selectors for each 64K chunk. If C code wanted to access an arbitrary location in the buffer, the compiler would work out which 64K chunk it was in, load a segment register with the corrrect selector (this was a very slow operation since microcode in the 286 had to check permissions), calculate the offset and load it into one of the normal registers and then do the segment read. This was an incredibly slow process.
It's also worth pointing out that 16 bit Windows used protected mode to get access to more memory, the like Dos the OS didn't protect itself from being damaged by third party applications. And it didn't stop third party applications damaging each other. As Walter Oney put it the philosphy was that it's a personal computer after all - If you're a programmer you can do what you like to it, just like you're free to run your car without oil until it seizes up.
Once the 386 came out and allowed offsets into segments to be bigger than 64K Windows would even set the limit on the first selector to allow you to access the whole buffer with operand size overides. The 386 also supported Virtual 8086 mode, so protected mode could jump into DOS and segments would work like a 8086. But loading segment registers was still a very slow operation, and Windows NT and Linux which are both designed to stop applications corrupting each other or the system both used page tables to do it instead. But page tables don't protect against buffer overruns.
Mind you segmentation only protects against buffer overruns if you malloc the buffers. Automatic variables on the stack are not protected. And allocing a stack variable is just a subtract instruction - it is orders of magnitude faster than calling into the OS, switching to Ring 0, allocating the memory, filling in the segment table and the returning to the caller who would load the selector into a segment register. Worse, there are very few segment registers, an each time you access any buffer you need to reload one. On a 286 there is CS,DS,ES.CS and DS are needed for near code and data, so only ES is free for far pointers. The 386 has FS and GS too, but three registers with very slow loads is not a recipe for a speedy machine.
So Microsoft tried it and it was slow. If they'd have used it enough to avoid buffer overruns - i.e. malloc every buffer rather than allocating some on the stack it would have been really slow. And so all modern OSs rely on the page table for protection instead of segments so they can run on multiple processors. In x64 mode, segment limits aren't even checked by hardware anymore.
I dunno, maybe it counts as copyright license. In which case his label will be really annoyed with him. E.g. imagine if a programmer said "please steal my code" and that code was something he'd written while employed by some company. Now the programmer doesn't own the copyright but he is an employee of the company. And pirates might say that as an employee he was speaking for the company and thus the company has given them a license to copy the music.
I certainly wouldn't take the risk with code I'd written but sold to someone else, which is essentially the same situation.
And he continues to write code in C...why?
Because maintaining a secure system written in C requires paranoia, obsessive concentration on small details and merciless flaming of n00bs when they screw up.
I can't see how that can be true. Suppose the yield is 90%. Now if you make single core processorrs, you chuck away 10% away. But with dual core some percentage of those 10% can be fused and sold as single core.
Of course maybe the yield on the new process is really bad, like 10%. But even then that's the yield at quad core. I think of the 90% that fail quad core, most can be fused into single or dual or tricore. And I don't really believe that the yield of the new process would be this bad - they just wait until they could get 90% before using it, and then crank that close to 100% by selling bad chips as n core where n < 4. They could fuse out some of the cache too.
Dam"#$%#"mn straight. I'm running this Athlon just fine at 1.2 Ghz faster than it was sold at and it'"#%#"s rock solid. Just buy the cheap"##"est chip, unlock it and clock it up until you see blue smoke and th"#$#"en back off a few Mhz. I saved a for"#$#"tune, which is lucky because Quicken screwed up my tax return, so I gotta pay lo"#$#"ads of tax.
What about a Cowon iAudio D2?
http://www.google.com/products?q=iaudio+d2+Cowon&btnG=Search&hl=en&show=dd
$185 for 4GB, $150 for 2GB. It has an SDHC slot though, like the Sansa, except it is full size SD slot not MicroSD.
Both you are your parent are wrong. Neither one is definitively better than the other, for simple fact that people like different interfaces.
Don't say that. Make them fight to the death with gardening implements. Winner puts the video on youtube and gets to decide the best UI.
Actually I looked up some benchmarks
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6177688/p-7.html
Essentially if you use a very fast video card and change processors, any single core processor no matter how fast gets 40 fps. And any dual core processor gets around 61-65. It looks like the game FPS saturates quite easily, but the speed up from dual core is pretty impressive.
The odd thing is that in Korea Samsung was investigated by the Korean FTC for selling flash chips to Apple at below the manufacturing price -
http://filesharingtalk.com/vb3/f-news-section-95/t-korean-ftc-could-investigate-apple-samsung-103919
So on the one hand they get accused of dumping, on the other price fixing. Mind you DRAM manufacturers used to accuse each othe of (and I suspect probably did) both at various times, so it's not necessarily impossible.
I meant wars per year since 1945.
Though actually, the US has always been rather interventionist. Much like the UK actually. Other European countries have been interventionist in the past but apart from the UK most of them don't have the ability or the will to be interventionist now. China has historically been much less interventionist especially outside its immediate neighbourhood, though this may be changing.
http://netwar.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/americas-small-wars/
Between 1783-1993 the US engaged in 234 military interventions over 216 years in foreign nations ranging from humanitarian missions to small wars to major interstate wars. In addition, there were 23 major Indian Wars. The United States engaged in an average 1.19 foreign interventions per year throughout history. The duration of these wars varies, so many wars and engagements overlapped.
The figure of 234 makes me think that he's counting things that are not wars but looking at this it does seem that the US was involved in some kind of war for a large percentage of its existence.
Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality.
I have no idea what you mean...
I expect to find your idea implemented in US and UK airports in the near future, and a long line of people queueing behind each scanner machine. Quite a few of whom will probably feel reassured that the terrorists are all being exposed by their anti-freedom thoughts.
I picture it like this
As you went into airport ThoughtSecurity, someone would hand you a piece of paper with a legal disclaimer full of incomprehensible medicalese and advise you menacingly that your journey time maybe 'seriously increased' if you decline to sign.
Ahead of you in the queue a man with a large beard and baggy clothes would go absolutely apeshit, trying to pull a helmet off his head before collapsing into an epileptic seizure, frothing at the mouth. Guards would haul his twitching body away to a small room whilst talking about the new war themed reality show. As the door opened, you'd catch a glimpse of heap of people with nosebleeds, all staring vacantly into space, sobbing or curled into foetal postions.
Later in the queue, well armed HomSec soldiers in high tech black armour would lock a helmet to your head and the helmet would flash shocking images. Then the helmet would be removed and you'd proceed dazed to the plane. Some people would fall asleep immediately and a red light over their seats would flash, but worried looking stewardesses would run down the aisles with air inject guns, injecting them with something. The sleepers would then wake up, but look very groggy for the rest of the flight.
Sort of a mixture of Max Headroom, Brazil and a Philip K Dick novel.
3MB seems like a lot to me.
"Rock and Roll high school" by the Ramones encoded at 40kpbs is only 476K.
Even stupider, they show just how far behind the times they are by measuring things in "emails, songs and pictures". Welcome to 1998, friends.
It works both ways though.
1) Get a musician friend to produce a monstrously long prog rock track encoded as WAV and sign over the copyright to you.
2) FTP it back and forth betweeen two machines over their network.
3) Sue them for breach of non verbal contract when they cut you off.
Isn't it cheaper just to provide excellent tech support to Havok and a bunch of other companies though?
Seems like Intel should just hire a guru per third party who can help the programmers at there optimize for Intel CPUs. Since Intel has more cash they can just outspend AMD on this, and their CPUs will do better in benchmarks because all the inner loop stuff is running as well as it possibly can.
Buying the company seems like you want to fold some of its technology into some Intel product, or you want to employ its designers.
Quad Core CPUs are pretty much going unused desktops.
Never used quad code, but on a Core Duo 2 Bioshock can max out both cores.
Of course, video games tend to handle things in a dumb way so the renderer will render frames as fast as it can - faster than the sync rate of the monitor, so not all of the CPU cycles are actually used usefully, but it does show that Bioshock is parallel enough to have two threads ready constantly.
Back in the old days, video games would have one CPU at 100% and the other essentially unused. I'm not sure how modern game engines do this and whether dual core is a special case they optimized for of course.
Well I should have said "some advanced form or brain scan" rather than MRI. And for all the talk about my idea not working, I can tell the politics of most of the people who replied from the bits of my post that made them angry. So it's not like it's impossible.
Incidentally, the idea of the gay rights stuff is that Islamic Fundamentalists should be driven crazy, conservatives should be slightly annoyed and left wingers should have no problem. I.e. the terrorists are still extremists but they're on the opposite side of the left right spectrum than they are with respect to foreign policy. Which is useful, since you want to be able to distinguish the three groups.