From the perspective of somebody who maintains Mac servers for a living, I have to say that there are plenty of other (and better) reasons that Apple does not dominate the server market. Their off-the-shelf server software products, when using the built-in configuration and administration tools are severely deficient in a few important features, and their mail system is a badly misconfigured implementation of Cyrus+postfix which can cause enormous problems with spam.
From a hardware perspective, the equipment is good and sturdy, runs cool and reliably for years, but the software still has a long way to go.
And let's face it, people don't come to Apple for their hardware, they come for the entire package - software, hardware, support, and using industry standard software (for the industries which do predominantly use Apple.)
It's durable, sure, but that's not a factor in most decisions to go Apple for their server technology.
"Well, he may be an idiot, but at least he's not lazy/evil/actively trying to screw us as far as we know. The other guy was our senator for X years and screwed us over Y times. I'm voting for the dumbass."
You can only really validly apply Darwinian evolutionary principles to the idea itself, not the adherents of the idea.
Or if you insist on applying it, use it as social Darwinism - the evolution of the society which plays host to an idea, not the individual which plays host to it.
Ideas are accepted and perpetuated regardless of their fitness to survive. Ideas are accepted and perpetuated based on how useful they are to the alphas in any society.
For instance (and not escaping the subject of religion) cults have a fairly low survival rate, usually resulting in the death of quite a few followers and permanent psychological, social, and financial damage to their adherents, but only seldom to the fatal detriment of the cult leader.
The ideas that survive, like the major organized religions, survive because they are aesthetically pleasing to their hosts - namely humans. They answer ugly questions in pretty fashions, and cover up doubts with prettier promises. This makes them extremely pleasing to an organism whose approach to survival is to organize, categorize and identify its environment strongly.
Does religion increase the survivability of the organism? It could be said to relieve stress in a majority or at least sizable minority of its adherents, and it could be said to foster cooperation amongst societal groups most likely to breed with each other.
The most important thing to realize here, however, is that a trait which cannot be shown to contribute significantly to the survivability of the organism exhibiting that trait cannot be pointed at and held up as an example of a survivability trait.
Some traits survive because they are simply not sufficiently maladaptive to inhibit the breeding capacity of the organism displaying that trait.
Do violet and green eyes affect survivability in humans who display those traits? It's not been shown that they do. Does male pattern baldness reduce the probability that people will breed? It's never shown significant enough effect to make the effect die out.
Depending on your application, you don't need low-level access to the GPU to utilize shaders for computation. Check out some of Nvidia's tech demos for their CUDA stuff - not saying that the PS3's GPUs support that kind of stuff, but if your software can read shader output, you can utilize basic shader functionality to perform certain kinds of transformations very quickly (cross/dot product, matrix multiplication, etc).
CUDA aside, it's been possible for quite some time to do things like edge detection, producing histograms and frequency analysis on images using only programmable shaders. Additionally, the GPU is fairly well suited to preparing smooth surfaces from MRI images in realtime.
If you'd like to refute a general statement, then it would help to escape the generalization at least a little bit.
All of the points you made about humans in space boil down to that putting them in space is dangerous, difficult, and old-timey nostalgic and emotional (without explaining why that's bad - ad hominem attacks are usually reserved for those occasions where the arguer is incapable of making a useful point).
You refute my point about retrofitting a multiple thousand pound piece of cargo with 30 pounds worth of parts and repurposing it to do something useful by saying that putting another multiple thousand pound one in space would be more expensive. That doesn't follow, nor does it disagree with what I said.
And your point about being able to easily make a robot better able to move on 4 legs than a human can on two shows a lack of respect for the engineering genius displayed by robotics engineers - it's not that easy. There are quite a few teams trying to build stable quadrupedal walkers, and the few which have made really stable platforms have yet to produce one that can get back up if it falls over. Each new robot has a new and dramatically different set of engineering challenges precisely because we have yet to build one which is capable of matching a human for reliability and versatility.
The set of requirements for keeping a human being alive for a few months is pretty clear - we need food, water to drink, we need to be kept in a certain temperature range and atmospheric pressure, and the right atmospheric composition (with a broad range of tolerances).
The most obvious advantage of the human body over any exploratory robot created to date is that it contains a human brain (ignoring completely that the human body is self-repairing for small faults). Whereas it takes a full eight minutes (four minutes each way) to communicate with a Martian robot if it needs correction (eight minutes in which the thing can drive itself off a cliff and set your mission back 2 or 3 years), a human in orbit could adjust the damned thing in milliseconds.
The most significant advantage to putting a human in space is the advantage of putting human judgment within reach of a problem. We have yet to make software versatile enough to be able to handle all of the challenges faced by any exploratory mission. The people on the ground which make these things work are nothing short of miracle workers, and their achievements are doubly astounding when you realize how fuzzy the equipment parameters are at dates ridiculously close to launch. I recommend reading Mpping Mars by Oliver Morton to get a rough idea of just how difficult unmanned missions really are to coordinate.
There are still open questions about Mars which our probes and rovers and decades of looking at photographs have failed to reveal. We have spent decades flinging glorified cameras at other worlds while the powers that be continue canceling funding for decent research probes which would provide more useful information to the scientists back home.
There are still a great deal of open questions about the effects of microgravity and reduced gravity on humans which can only be answered by putting humans into space. If the human race wants to outlive the Earth, it's going to need to go to space eventually.
Finally, to answer stodgy grumblings about how humans don't belong in space: There were people in ancient times who considered that there was no world outside of their own country, or at least nothing worth sending civilized man to. Europe used to be the beginning and the end of the world (at least for the Europeans). Eventually Europeans realized that the world was a big place and expanded. To use a hackneyed example, people thought that humans had no business flying either, and now people fly for business all of the t
I was just going to moderate this, but I figured I had to comment. The chief argument used in discussions like this by the person taking your position is essentially:
"Oh, it's really hard for people to do things outside of Earth, therefore let's just send a machine."
Difficulty and expense really have no bearing on the history of human endeavor. A transcontinental railroad in any continent was absurdly expensive to create and maintain and immensely difficult, but that doesn't mean that in the long run it wasn't worthwhile.
There are distinct advantages to putting humans on other worlds; advantages directly related to what humans do easily but machines have to be carefully engineered just to fail spectacularly while doing.
The mars rovers may be able to take samples of rock, but can they repair each other? What is a 3 day hike for some humans with an electric mule (a flatbed powered handcart) is over a year of travel time for a rover - a year in which it may become stuck and become useless itself.
We have quite a few pieces of defunct robotics and electronics sitting right square on the Martian and Lunar surfaces which are of no further use to anybody without major modification and resupply. What would otherwise be junk just sitting on the moon uselessly could be retrofitted with a new antenna, a pair of batteries, and a solar panel and used as a radio repeater for future missions - or as a monitor of radio noise and radioactivity for studying solar weather on the lunar surface.
We could engineer a three hundred million dollar autonomous robot to make these modifications and expect a reasonably high chance of failure - or we could spend that same three hundred million dollars putting 4 guys on the moon and have them make the conversion on everything up there, and dig up some more soil samples, take more pictures, and flub more lines while they're at it.
The fact is that the abilities of the machines which humans produce pale in comparison to the abilities of a reasonably healthy human being. We can alternate between running quickly and walking on all but the roughest terrain more easily than any machine yet engineered by mankind. We have more dexterity, flexibility, and fine motor control than all but the most delicate robotics, and those typically are run in clean room environments. The human hand isn't going to stop working because of a little moon dust. A human can continue to operate (under cover) during a Martian dust storm which would bring electrically powered machines to their proverbial knees.
Send machines where humans can't survive very easily or the likelihood of return is low - like the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, the surface of Venus, the dark side of Mercury (for a few hours).
Let humans do what humans do best, explore, adapt, and build tools to help them survive their environments. Put up a sign advertising for volunteers to go on a one-way trip to Europa with a high likelihood of death and you'll have a line backing up for miles. If you'd prefer to sit at home and look at the vacation slides of the real explorers, whether they be machine or man, nobody will stop you.
Cingular's (now AT&T) prepaid setup works like this. $1 for 1 day of usage. $0.10 per minute. Minutes last until you use them or until X amount of time passes since you bought them and X varies depending on how many you bought at once.
If you don't have minutes, you can still make emergency calls (which is good). Mobile-to-mobile calls on AT&T are free after the $1 a day usage charge.
I pay about $15 every 2 months for the amount I use the phone, which beats the hell out of most contracts.
I agree, If you don't live and breathe cellphone and text messages, prepaid in the states is plenty cheap. I can't imagine a future in which I'd need a full-on cellphone plan that I couldn't get my work to pay for (as that'd be the only reason I'd need one).
I find it's a great way to share information with friends if you happen to use IRC as your preferred means of digital communication instead of IM.
Maintain a nonstandard port webserver with a dummy index.html file, dump any files you'd like to share with friends in there, have a little alias script which fills in the blanks with your site address (like "/myweb whatever.jpg") and then let rip.
It's a lot easier to show people what your most recent project is without having to deal with crap like Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, and whatnot. Saves you having to upload everything first to your web host, then have your friends download it, especially when it's just something small like 35kb jpeg or the like (or even something larger, like your most recent composition in mp3 format). A good DSL connection these days can push 80kb/s, which is fast enough to stream a low-fi mp3 to 4 or more people at once.
Additionally, having your own local webserver set up was a tremendous help when I was teaching myself PHP, and later when I was developing some rather tricky websites for subcontract work. Beats having to hit upload in your HTML editor of choice, or having to deal with the lag of working over SFTP, then refresh the web browser after the transfer finishes.
This is assuming you're not completely hardcore and do all of your PHP/HTML/CSS in vi or emacs instead of a more modern code editor (code collapse, color highlighting, and completion is your friend).
The websites I administer at work all have plain email links in them and have been active since about 1996, so naturally they're constantly being scraped, not to mention being hammered by everybody who is using old mailing lists.
To stop all the scrapers, the first 10 email addresses on the page go directly to my Spam Assassin training addresses, all of which are stuck in a single div whose CSS style is "visibility: hidden; display: none".
Nobody accidentally clicks the links, and Spam Assassin is given adequate reading material.
Honestly, I don't see why they'd have to simulate it at all.
You could get people to line up to pay for the privilege of being on a reality show on a real space station.
With a billion dollar budget and some Russian rockets you could easily stuff season after season of people in a state-of-the-art space station making them perform all sorts of humiliating experiments.
Get Bigelow to underwrite it, develop a cheap emergency reentry vehicle based on some X-Prize winners, send them up with one actual doctor with flight experience, and you've got a killer TV show.
Not all tasks are created equal. Ignoring completely the synchronization problems inherent in multithreading, the fact is you'll have cores lying idle instead of doing their share simply because the thread you've thrown on there doesn't have enough work to do.
Bearing in mind that I've never had to do anything other than throw physics and graphics on one thread and AI and input processing in another, I've found even that to be a huge pain in the ass for synchronization and keeping everything busy and balanced.
When we're dealing with huge amounts of somewhat weak individual cores, just splitting the program into four or five discrete threads is probably a terrible idea for parallelizing a game.
Ideally for a massively multi-core system like the new processors, you'd have the individual subsystems of the game dump discrete work units or jobs into a queue. These would have to be atomic work units - small bite sized tasks which should be doable in a fixed timeframe - like processing a single AI cycle for a single AI actor, performing collision detection in a single volume, updating the positions of graphical elements, etc.
All of this work would get unloaded from the work queue by a few threads of dispatchers which would check for locks on the required resources, push it back in the queue if the resources the task needed were locked, and otherwise throw the task onto its own thread with a callback to unlock itself when it is done.
Following behind those workers would be a cleanup thread whose job it is to make sure that each of the tasks which hasn't phoned in as complete in a timely fashion isn't locked up doing something and has properly unlocked all of its resources.
Figuring out how to atomize tasks which have traditionally been extremely linear or recursive is going to be a serious challenge for game programmers.
While an application like Photoshop can just split up an image into different regions and process each part of those, some tasks just don't divide that well.
Parallelizing collision detection for instance is most likely a complete nightmare - imagine trying to decide how to split up objects so that all possible collisions take place in the same space, and yet still split up the space into equal sized units without ignoring any potential intersections.
Basically, games aren't a special case - like all other programming applications, learning to parallelize is not going to be easy for a generation of people growing up linear or OO.
Neither James Cameron or original star Arnold Schwarzenegger...
Clearly this is a negation of a logical OR operation. NOT( James Cameron OR Arnold Schwarzenegger). This statement is only true so long as the first fails to be involved in the film as well as the second fails to be involved in the film. This could also be (not Cameron AND not Ahnold)...
he sound from the theater above,below,right, left is seeping through the walls..... a chair that is not falling apart..... Toilet fee
Is this a third world country you're talking about, or are theater operators outside the US actively attempting to kill their own business?
Toilet fee? Please tell me what country this is in so that I may avoid it. If it's not free to urinate, it is surely going to be costly for me to ever visit.
Maybe my experience is biased from living in a reasonably prosperous part of the USA most of my life, but the theaters are good quality, the seats are always in good maintenance and clean, the bathrooms are clean (and free), the theaters are insulated well against sound and light pollution, and there is a projectionist in every booth to make sure the sound and picture are working properly.
This is all made possible by the exorbitant rates they charge for food and drink - and the fact that one ticket costs one hour's wages for an employee.
This has honestly been true of every movie theater I've been to in the last 20 years. Not saying the aisles are paved with gold, but at least you usually don't stick to the floor while being stabbed by a faulty seat.
Presumably, with the limited amount of movies which sit in the box office at any given time, this could be done pretty easily.
You begin precaching chapters of the movie at the same time they get sent off to reproduction for theater distribution, and push them over the course of 6 to 8 weeks to all of the set-top boxes.
Even at the worst broadband speeds, a high definition movie could be easily streamed to one of these boxes.
Throw a cheap 1 tb RAID0 in the machine and you've got enough space to store 20 full blu-ray movies, or more than enough to keep every major studio picture on set top boxes for the first 3 weeks of its run time, even during the summer release rush.
Slashdot Mirror
From the perspective of somebody who maintains Mac servers for a living, I have to say that there are plenty of other (and better) reasons that Apple does not dominate the server market. Their off-the-shelf server software products, when using the built-in configuration and administration tools are severely deficient in a few important features, and their mail system is a badly misconfigured implementation of Cyrus+postfix which can cause enormous problems with spam.
From a hardware perspective, the equipment is good and sturdy, runs cool and reliably for years, but the software still has a long way to go.
And let's face it, people don't come to Apple for their hardware, they come for the entire package - software, hardware, support, and using industry standard software (for the industries which do predominantly use Apple.)
It's durable, sure, but that's not a factor in most decisions to go Apple for their server technology.
"Well, he may be an idiot, but at least he's not lazy/evil/actively trying to screw us as far as we know. The other guy was our senator for X years and screwed us over Y times. I'm voting for the dumbass."
That's a moot point.
You can only really validly apply Darwinian evolutionary principles to the idea itself, not the adherents of the idea.
Or if you insist on applying it, use it as social Darwinism - the evolution of the society which plays host to an idea, not the individual which plays host to it.
Ideas are accepted and perpetuated regardless of their fitness to survive. Ideas are accepted and perpetuated based on how useful they are to the alphas in any society.
For instance (and not escaping the subject of religion) cults have a fairly low survival rate, usually resulting in the death of quite a few followers and permanent psychological, social, and financial damage to their adherents, but only seldom to the fatal detriment of the cult leader.
The ideas that survive, like the major organized religions, survive because they are aesthetically pleasing to their hosts - namely humans. They answer ugly questions in pretty fashions, and cover up doubts with prettier promises. This makes them extremely pleasing to an organism whose approach to survival is to organize, categorize and identify its environment strongly.
Does religion increase the survivability of the organism? It could be said to relieve stress in a majority or at least sizable minority of its adherents, and it could be said to foster cooperation amongst societal groups most likely to breed with each other.
The most important thing to realize here, however, is that a trait which cannot be shown to contribute significantly to the survivability of the organism exhibiting that trait cannot be pointed at and held up as an example of a survivability trait.
Some traits survive because they are simply not sufficiently maladaptive to inhibit the breeding capacity of the organism displaying that trait.
Do violet and green eyes affect survivability in humans who display those traits? It's not been shown that they do. Does male pattern baldness reduce the probability that people will breed? It's never shown significant enough effect to make the effect die out.
Depending on your application, you don't need low-level access to the GPU to utilize shaders for computation. Check out some of Nvidia's tech demos for their CUDA stuff - not saying that the PS3's GPUs support that kind of stuff, but if your software can read shader output, you can utilize basic shader functionality to perform certain kinds of transformations very quickly (cross/dot product, matrix multiplication, etc).
A couple of the CUDA examples include a Mersenne twister implemented on the GPU and fluid dynamics simulations.
CUDA aside, it's been possible for quite some time to do things like edge detection, producing histograms and frequency analysis on images using only programmable shaders. Additionally, the GPU is fairly well suited to preparing smooth surfaces from MRI images in realtime.
If you'd like to refute a general statement, then it would help to escape the generalization at least a little bit.
All of the points you made about humans in space boil down to that putting them in space is dangerous, difficult, and old-timey nostalgic and emotional (without explaining why that's bad - ad hominem attacks are usually reserved for those occasions where the arguer is incapable of making a useful point).
You refute my point about retrofitting a multiple thousand pound piece of cargo with 30 pounds worth of parts and repurposing it to do something useful by saying that putting another multiple thousand pound one in space would be more expensive. That doesn't follow, nor does it disagree with what I said.
And your point about being able to easily make a robot better able to move on 4 legs than a human can on two shows a lack of respect for the engineering genius displayed by robotics engineers - it's not that easy. There are quite a few teams trying to build stable quadrupedal walkers, and the few which have made really stable platforms have yet to produce one that can get back up if it falls over. Each new robot has a new and dramatically different set of engineering challenges precisely because we have yet to build one which is capable of matching a human for reliability and versatility.
The set of requirements for keeping a human being alive for a few months is pretty clear - we need food, water to drink, we need to be kept in a certain temperature range and atmospheric pressure, and the right atmospheric composition (with a broad range of tolerances).
The most obvious advantage of the human body over any exploratory robot created to date is that it contains a human brain (ignoring completely that the human body is self-repairing for small faults). Whereas it takes a full eight minutes (four minutes each way) to communicate with a Martian robot if it needs correction (eight minutes in which the thing can drive itself off a cliff and set your mission back 2 or 3 years), a human in orbit could adjust the damned thing in milliseconds.
The most significant advantage to putting a human in space is the advantage of putting human judgment within reach of a problem. We have yet to make software versatile enough to be able to handle all of the challenges faced by any exploratory mission. The people on the ground which make these things work are nothing short of miracle workers, and their achievements are doubly astounding when you realize how fuzzy the equipment parameters are at dates ridiculously close to launch. I recommend reading Mpping Mars by Oliver Morton to get a rough idea of just how difficult unmanned missions really are to coordinate.
There are still open questions about Mars which our probes and rovers and decades of looking at photographs have failed to reveal. We have spent decades flinging glorified cameras at other worlds while the powers that be continue canceling funding for decent research probes which would provide more useful information to the scientists back home.
There are still a great deal of open questions about the effects of microgravity and reduced gravity on humans which can only be answered by putting humans into space. If the human race wants to outlive the Earth, it's going to need to go to space eventually.
Finally, to answer stodgy grumblings about how humans don't belong in space:
There were people in ancient times who considered that there was no world outside of their own country, or at least nothing worth sending civilized man to. Europe used to be the beginning and the end of the world (at least for the Europeans). Eventually Europeans realized that the world was a big place and expanded. To use a hackneyed example, people thought that humans had no business flying either, and now people fly for business all of the t
I was just going to moderate this, but I figured I had to comment. The chief argument used in discussions like this by the person taking your position is essentially:
"Oh, it's really hard for people to do things outside of Earth, therefore let's just send a machine."
Difficulty and expense really have no bearing on the history of human endeavor. A transcontinental railroad in any continent was absurdly expensive to create and maintain and immensely difficult, but that doesn't mean that in the long run it wasn't worthwhile.
There are distinct advantages to putting humans on other worlds; advantages directly related to what humans do easily but machines have to be carefully engineered just to fail spectacularly while doing.
The mars rovers may be able to take samples of rock, but can they repair each other? What is a 3 day hike for some humans with an electric mule (a flatbed powered handcart) is over a year of travel time for a rover - a year in which it may become stuck and become useless itself.
We have quite a few pieces of defunct robotics and electronics sitting right square on the Martian and Lunar surfaces which are of no further use to anybody without major modification and resupply. What would otherwise be junk just sitting on the moon uselessly could be retrofitted with a new antenna, a pair of batteries, and a solar panel and used as a radio repeater for future missions - or as a monitor of radio noise and radioactivity for studying solar weather on the lunar surface.
We could engineer a three hundred million dollar autonomous robot to make these modifications and expect a reasonably high chance of failure - or we could spend that same three hundred million dollars putting 4 guys on the moon and have them make the conversion on everything up there, and dig up some more soil samples, take more pictures, and flub more lines while they're at it.
The fact is that the abilities of the machines which humans produce pale in comparison to the abilities of a reasonably healthy human being. We can alternate between running quickly and walking on all but the roughest terrain more easily than any machine yet engineered by mankind. We have more dexterity, flexibility, and fine motor control than all but the most delicate robotics, and those typically are run in clean room environments. The human hand isn't going to stop working because of a little moon dust. A human can continue to operate (under cover) during a Martian dust storm which would bring electrically powered machines to their proverbial knees.
Send machines where humans can't survive very easily or the likelihood of return is low - like the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, the surface of Venus, the dark side of Mercury (for a few hours).
Let humans do what humans do best, explore, adapt, and build tools to help them survive their environments. Put up a sign advertising for volunteers to go on a one-way trip to Europa with a high likelihood of death and you'll have a line backing up for miles. If you'd prefer to sit at home and look at the vacation slides of the real explorers, whether they be machine or man, nobody will stop you.
It was believed by our Department that there were sharks involved.
I used to live in Seattle, and I can say with some certainty that driving an hour and a half away from Seattle will probably only get you 20 miles.
Floating face-up or face-down?
Cingular's (now AT&T) prepaid setup works like this. $1 for 1 day of usage. $0.10 per minute. Minutes last until you use them or until X amount of time passes since you bought them and X varies depending on how many you bought at once.
If you don't have minutes, you can still make emergency calls (which is good).
Mobile-to-mobile calls on AT&T are free after the $1 a day usage charge.
I pay about $15 every 2 months for the amount I use the phone, which beats the hell out of most contracts.
I agree, If you don't live and breathe cellphone and text messages, prepaid in the states is plenty cheap. I can't imagine a future in which I'd need a full-on cellphone plan that I couldn't get my work to pay for (as that'd be the only reason I'd need one).
That must make potty time awkward.
I find it's a great way to share information with friends if you happen to use IRC as your preferred means of digital communication instead of IM.
Maintain a nonstandard port webserver with a dummy index.html file, dump any files you'd like to share with friends in there, have a little alias script which fills in the blanks with your site address (like "/myweb whatever.jpg") and then let rip.
It's a lot easier to show people what your most recent project is without having to deal with crap like Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, and whatnot. Saves you having to upload everything first to your web host, then have your friends download it, especially when it's just something small like 35kb jpeg or the like (or even something larger, like your most recent composition in mp3 format). A good DSL connection these days can push 80kb/s, which is fast enough to stream a low-fi mp3 to 4 or more people at once.
Additionally, having your own local webserver set up was a tremendous help when I was teaching myself PHP, and later when I was developing some rather tricky websites for subcontract work. Beats having to hit upload in your HTML editor of choice, or having to deal with the lag of working over SFTP, then refresh the web browser after the transfer finishes.
This is assuming you're not completely hardcore and do all of your PHP/HTML/CSS in vi or emacs instead of a more modern code editor (code collapse, color highlighting, and completion is your friend).
Another reason to blow
The websites I administer at work all have plain email links in them and have been active since about 1996, so naturally they're constantly being scraped, not to mention being hammered by everybody who is using old mailing lists.
To stop all the scrapers, the first 10 email addresses on the page go directly to my Spam Assassin training addresses, all of which are stuck in a single div whose CSS style is "visibility: hidden; display: none".
Nobody accidentally clicks the links, and Spam Assassin is given adequate reading material.
As a former boy scout, I must profess complete confidence in their ability to at least finish melting it. Fire!
Mmm, genetically modified bread.
Honestly, I don't see why they'd have to simulate it at all.
You could get people to line up to pay for the privilege of being on a reality show on a real space station.
With a billion dollar budget and some Russian rockets you could easily stuff season after season of people in a state-of-the-art space station making them perform all sorts of humiliating experiments.
Get Bigelow to underwrite it, develop a cheap emergency reentry vehicle based on some X-Prize winners, send them up with one actual doctor with flight experience, and you've got a killer TV show.
It'd pay for itself in advertising.
Not all tasks are created equal. Ignoring completely the synchronization problems inherent in multithreading, the fact is you'll have cores lying idle instead of doing their share simply because the thread you've thrown on there doesn't have enough work to do.
Bearing in mind that I've never had to do anything other than throw physics and graphics on one thread and AI and input processing in another, I've found even that to be a huge pain in the ass for synchronization and keeping everything busy and balanced.
When we're dealing with huge amounts of somewhat weak individual cores, just splitting the program into four or five discrete threads is probably a terrible idea for parallelizing a game.
Ideally for a massively multi-core system like the new processors, you'd have the individual subsystems of the game dump discrete work units or jobs into a queue. These would have to be atomic work units - small bite sized tasks which should be doable in a fixed timeframe - like processing a single AI cycle for a single AI actor, performing collision detection in a single volume, updating the positions of graphical elements, etc.
All of this work would get unloaded from the work queue by a few threads of dispatchers which would check for locks on the required resources, push it back in the queue if the resources the task needed were locked, and otherwise throw the task onto its own thread with a callback to unlock itself when it is done.
Following behind those workers would be a cleanup thread whose job it is to make sure that each of the tasks which hasn't phoned in as complete in a timely fashion isn't locked up doing something and has properly unlocked all of its resources.
Figuring out how to atomize tasks which have traditionally been extremely linear or recursive is going to be a serious challenge for game programmers.
While an application like Photoshop can just split up an image into different regions and process each part of those, some tasks just don't divide that well.
Parallelizing collision detection for instance is most likely a complete nightmare - imagine trying to decide how to split up objects so that all possible collisions take place in the same space, and yet still split up the space into equal sized units without ignoring any potential intersections.
Basically, games aren't a special case - like all other programming applications, learning to parallelize is not going to be easy for a generation of people growing up linear or OO.
Shit, I can't afford a graphics card before giving away 10% of my income!
I can't be the only one that read "WiTricity" as "Witchery" and thought, "Yeah, that'd do it."
Clearly this is a negation of a logical OR operation.
NOT( James Cameron OR Arnold Schwarzenegger).
This statement is only true so long as the first fails to be involved in the film as well as the second fails to be involved in the film. This could also be (not Cameron AND not Ahnold)...
Ah fuck, I hate electronics class.
Is this a third world country you're talking about, or are theater operators outside the US actively attempting to kill their own business?
Toilet fee? Please tell me what country this is in so that I may avoid it. If it's not free to urinate, it is surely going to be costly for me to ever visit.
Maybe my experience is biased from living in a reasonably prosperous part of the USA most of my life, but the theaters are good quality, the seats are always in good maintenance and clean, the bathrooms are clean (and free), the theaters are insulated well against sound and light pollution, and there is a projectionist in every booth to make sure the sound and picture are working properly.
This is all made possible by the exorbitant rates they charge for food and drink - and the fact that one ticket costs one hour's wages for an employee.
This has honestly been true of every movie theater I've been to in the last 20 years. Not saying the aisles are paved with gold, but at least you usually don't stick to the floor while being stabbed by a faulty seat.
Presumably, with the limited amount of movies which sit in the box office at any given time, this could be done pretty easily.
You begin precaching chapters of the movie at the same time they get sent off to reproduction for theater distribution, and push them over the course of 6 to 8 weeks to all of the set-top boxes.
Even at the worst broadband speeds, a high definition movie could be easily streamed to one of these boxes.
Throw a cheap 1 tb RAID0 in the machine and you've got enough space to store 20 full blu-ray movies, or more than enough to keep every major studio picture on set top boxes for the first 3 weeks of its run time, even during the summer release rush.
Note - that should be a network of 50 OS X systems.
Not a lot, but more than you'd want to have to fix if the latest whack-a-mole game installed a rootkit on your boxen.