Yeesh. The way people respond to this stuff is so predictable. "OMG, Microsoft is trying to control every bit on earth!"
Let's step back a minute and actually think about Palladium as it currently stands, shall we? Can we?
To start with; I know lots of people on/. don't want to believe this, but Microsoft is a market-driven company -- at least to some exent. If the market doesn't embrace something they drop it (Microsoft Bob). If they aren't sure how the market will respond they will float trial balloons for months or even years before shipping it; and then drop it before it even launches if appropriate (Hailstorm).
Right now Palladium is just a flag flying. They know that the entertainment industry and the politicians in the entertainment industry's pocket will salute. But they aren't sure about everyone else. I will admit that breathless scare mongering is one reaction they will pay attention to, but a more rational approach is to simply point out clearly (and without running in circles decrying the evil-that-is-Microsoft) that there are alternatives (Linux).
Personally I think the latter is a tactic Microsoft will pay more attention to. That, and supporting the EFF as they fight against technology like Palladium being required.
Ya, but did Herodotus blog it? Or just write it to some scroll and stick it in a hole?
On a more serious note; you are absolutely right. You will note the various Marxists coming out of the woodwork on this one and posting about how Capitalism sucks because it allows such terrible inequalities. Pure crap, because every socialist system results in 20% of the people holding 80% of the power as well. (Sometimes it is more like 2% of the population holding 100% of the power). It just isn't measured with money. My favorite story about Soviet Russia has to do with phone numbers: It seems you could tell how high someone ranked in the party structure by their phone number; the higher you were the less digits it had. Those on the Politbureau had 3 digit numbers.
We will always see these kinds of inequalities whenever randomness or freedom of choice is applied, making me wonder to what extent those are the same thing. And every attempt to add rules to such a system in order to reduce the randomness (choice) only adds the ability to game (hack) the system.
In the case of weblogs you can claim that 'quality matters' and therefore links and pageviews go to the better weblogs, but that clearly isn't the only answer. There are plenty of weblogs of great quality and low readership. In fact the Power Law applies in much the same way to all social systems where people can express preferences in some way. The end result is a star system and, likely, some abuses as people try to cash in on success. Although the cashing in part might be a little harder than for, say, a sports star pushing Nikes: "I only blog with my Compaq! It gets my vacuous rants right."
Why does everyone expect a Neuromancer redux?
on
Pattern Recognition
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeesh. Sometimes it seems like everyone expects Gibson to just write the same novel over and over and over. If what you want is a Neuromancer/Count Zero clone then write it yourself. Chances are you won't be able to sell it...
Besides Gibson tends to cover the same ground in his novels perhaps a little too much as it is. Personally I am happy to see him stretch a little, and applaud him for trying even if it isn't entirely successful. If you are going to critisize Pattern Recognition on its merits as a novel unconnected to the Sprawl trilogy, fine. But please don't bitch because it isn't Neuromancer v2.0!
I agree. There is nothing inherently wrong with seeing applications, or even components, as black boxes. And those working to develop business or shrink-wrap applications are in an entirely different problem domain than embedded system programmers anyway. The difference in the complexity of the OS alone is enough to require several levels of abstraction.
The problems arising from a lack of of a wholistic view are real as stated by the article, but they are not something we can easily work around. What we need is a better way of working with the black boxes such that, although we don't have time to learn what is in them, we can see how they fit together.
I certainly agree that real-time speech recognition is a killer app that is also dependant on faster processors.
I agree that digital video isn't for everyone. But it will eventually become as common as painting and drawing applications, and will need considerable horsepower.
The big one is games. Gamers are one consumer group willing to pay to stay on the leading edge. And, as the technology improves, games require more and more horsepower because the goal is incredibly high realism. Which leads to . ..
. . . the fact that immersive Virtual Reality of some sort will eventually become possible (and will eat megatons of CPU cycles). What consumer uses will grow out of that, other than games, is anyone's guess. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps entire new classes of applications.
Cheaper doesn't mean better either
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem is that cheaper processors don't make much money -- there isn't the markup on commodity parts that there is on the high end. The big chip companies are used to charging through the nose for their latest and greatest and they use much of that money to pay for the R & D, but the rest is profit.
However profit on the low end stuff is very slight because you are competing with chip fabs that don't spend time and money on R & D; buying the rights to older technology instead. (We are talking commodity margins now, not what the market will bear.) So if the market for the latest and greatest collapses the entire landscape changes.
Should that occur my prediction is that R & D will change from designing faster chips to getting better yields from the fabs. Because, at commodity margins, it will be all about lowering production costs.
However I think it is still more likely that, Google aside, there will remain a market for the high end large enough to continue to support Intel and AMD as they duke it out on technological edge. At least for a while.
I haven't read the rest, but I second the recommendations for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Girl Genius. Both are wonderful examples of graphic storytelling and a lot of fun.
Mind you these are also the only 'American' comics I collect. I used to do single issues of everthing I liked, but sometimes the series would disapear (Shotgun Mary) and other times I would miss an issue or two and end up buying the collections anyway. So I promised myself I would always wait for the collections.
But then I sort of know Phil and Kaja, so I started buying Girl Genius from day one after running into them at an SF convention right before they launched it. And, as for LoXG... Well I did wait for the collection for the first set. And it was so amazing I that I went down the local comic store and started a pull list for the new series.
Well, mostly because of Rick Berman. In my/. journal entry after I saw the film I said: "Well, now that I have seen Nemesis I can positively state, without fear of contradiction, that someone really needs to kick Rick Berman's ass. There is probably a line forming as I speak. If the people that own the franchise want to keep it viable they will make certain he has nothing ever to do with another Star Trek film."
Mozilla has an active SVG project. The renderer is not yet included in the main build, mostly for licensing reasons. But you can build it in yourself and there is someone that maintains a Windows build. See the link for more info.
The UMod they are using is here. There are installation instructions and more info here. The FAQ is here.
Still looking for the actual Mimesis codebase (the UMod communicates with Mimesis via XML, it doesn't actually implement it).
They are using Unreal Tournament!
on
Infinite Games?
·
· Score: 1
Cool! UT is just about the only online game I play, but I have been wanting more interaction of some kind rather than just doing the same old thing over and over. Since they have the Mimesis system working on UT Server I am not wondering how I can get hold of the code and fool with this myself.
Note: I am currently working on a UT 2K3 Map, so this is of great interest to me...
They tried this with catalog sales too and the results were mixed. It comes down to one simple factor -- either they all have to do it or it will never work well.
Why is this? Simple, if ten states enact Internet sales taxes and agree to cross-enforce then a company selling out of one of those states may be prosecuted by another state party to the agreement if they don't collect sales taxes for that state. But a company in a state not party to the agreement can thumb their nose at them!
IANAL, but my understanding of the Interstate Commerce clause of the US Constitution is that a state cannot enforce laws restricting commerce between states and this applies. Only when you can get the government of the other state to act as your enforcer can you accomplish anything.
All well and good, and perhaps lots of states will sign up to act as enforcers for each other. But all it takes is one state to hold out. Say Oregon, which has no sales tax and could use the extra business and employee income taxes if Amazon relocated south to Portland. Suddenly the states with the reciprocal agreement are not only *not* collecting sales taxes, they are also losing jobs as Internet companies move where they don't have to pay the tax. It is a loose/loose proposition and fundementally regressive.
And, unless the consititution is changed, the US congress critters can't do anything about it either. That is, with one exception; they can enact a nationwide VAT and enforce that. But who gets those tax revenues?
Once again, IANAL and might be blowing smoke. If Glenn Reynolds is reading this perhaps he can give us the real skinny...
Sure, I know they are claiming that the so-called 'Slashdot Effect' has rendered it invisible, but do we have any independent witnesses? Any physical proof? No...
Slashdot.com annouced they will drop banner advertising in favor of articles shilling products for a fee. "What the hell," said Rob Malda, "we have been doing it for a year now, and we are still getting first posts and tons of trolls."
In fact video games may well be one of only a few new art forms to come out of the nineties. (Yes I know there were video games before then, but they were amateurish compared to the games that started coming out in the mid-nineties.)
But they are 'art' in the same way that cinema is 'art'. In other words they are 'collaborationist' art, requiring the efforts of many people to create. Because of this fact it requires a great deal of money to complete a decent video game, and no-one will put up that money without expecting a return. So video games must be commercial. You must make, or at least attempt to make, video games (and films) that will return a profit.
This results in many comprimises. One of these is the fact that sex and violence sell. Don't believe me? Count the number of R and PG-13 rated films and compare them to those PG and below. Or just go see 'Adaptation' (in theaters now) and try to catch what Charlie Kaufman was really trying to say with that script...
The danger is that the governement will find excuses like this to use in an attempt to control the video game market -- and will be able to get such controls past the courts because of public opinion. For this reason one of two things must happen; either the video game market implements its own system akin to the movie rating system, (which it has done) and puts out an equivalent effort to enforce it (which it is not doing). Or, my preference, someone produces tools that allow people to create video games on their own quite easily.
This last is coming to pass, we have all seen the recent/. articles on the various FPS vendors making sure their game engines are easily available to modders. But we need the other types of game engines to do the same thing. And we need some way for modded games to get into the console market. This will put many of the big gaming houses out of business though, the surviving vendors will be those that produce the best game engines and do the most to encourage third-party development.
I suspect the game vendors will prefer the first scenario. But I think the second will result in things that few people would argue are 'art'. They may not be games as we now know them though...
Sounds like Microsoft Sharepoint to me. Sorry, but that doesn't excite me too much...
If so, and based on the bad Sharepoint implementations I have seen, this seems unlikely to be world-shaking. How about a follow-up article on this in a year?
Ahh... The Cinerama. I saw FoTR there with a bunch of friends a year ago. The only redeeming fact about working across the country this year is I got to see TT three hours earlier than the same friends, so I called some on my cell phone and taunted them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeesh. The way people respond to this stuff is so predictable. "OMG, Microsoft is trying to control every bit on earth!"
/. don't want to believe this, but Microsoft is a market-driven company -- at least to some exent. If the market doesn't embrace something they drop it (Microsoft Bob). If they aren't sure how the market will respond they will float trial balloons for months or even years before shipping it; and then drop it before it even launches if appropriate (Hailstorm).
Let's step back a minute and actually think about Palladium as it currently stands, shall we? Can we?
To start with; I know lots of people on
Right now Palladium is just a flag flying. They know that the entertainment industry and the politicians in the entertainment industry's pocket will salute. But they aren't sure about everyone else. I will admit that breathless scare mongering is one reaction they will pay attention to, but a more rational approach is to simply point out clearly (and without running in circles decrying the evil-that-is-Microsoft) that there are alternatives (Linux).
Personally I think the latter is a tactic Microsoft will pay more attention to. That, and supporting the EFF as they fight against technology like Palladium being required.
About time we could score one for the good guys. Now, how do we keep this from coming back?
Heh! I laughed out loud at that one! I have mod points too, but you were already maxed.
Ya, but did Herodotus blog it? Or just write it to some scroll and stick it in a hole?
On a more serious note; you are absolutely right. You will note the various Marxists coming out of the woodwork on this one and posting about how Capitalism sucks because it allows such terrible inequalities. Pure crap, because every socialist system results in 20% of the people holding 80% of the power as well. (Sometimes it is more like 2% of the population holding 100% of the power). It just isn't measured with money. My favorite story about Soviet Russia has to do with phone numbers: It seems you could tell how high someone ranked in the party structure by their phone number; the higher you were the less digits it had. Those on the Politbureau had 3 digit numbers.
We will always see these kinds of inequalities whenever randomness or freedom of choice is applied, making me wonder to what extent those are the same thing. And every attempt to add rules to such a system in order to reduce the randomness (choice) only adds the ability to game (hack) the system.
A quote from my journal entry:
Yeesh. Sometimes it seems like everyone expects Gibson to just write the same novel over and over and over. If what you want is a Neuromancer/Count Zero clone then write it yourself. Chances are you won't be able to sell it...
Besides Gibson tends to cover the same ground in his novels perhaps a little too much as it is. Personally I am happy to see him stretch a little, and applaud him for trying even if it isn't entirely successful. If you are going to critisize Pattern Recognition on its merits as a novel unconnected to the Sprawl trilogy, fine. But please don't bitch because it isn't Neuromancer v2.0!
I agree. There is nothing inherently wrong with seeing applications, or even components, as black boxes. And those working to develop business or shrink-wrap applications are in an entirely different problem domain than embedded system programmers anyway. The difference in the complexity of the OS alone is enough to require several levels of abstraction.
The problems arising from a lack of of a wholistic view are real as stated by the article, but they are not something we can easily work around. What we need is a better way of working with the black boxes such that, although we don't have time to learn what is in them, we can see how they fit together.
I certainly agree that real-time speech recognition is a killer app that is also dependant on faster processors.
.
I agree that digital video isn't for everyone. But it will eventually become as common as painting and drawing applications, and will need considerable horsepower.
The big one is games. Gamers are one consumer group willing to pay to stay on the leading edge. And, as the technology improves, games require more and more horsepower because the goal is incredibly high realism. Which leads to . .
. . . the fact that immersive Virtual Reality of some sort will eventually become possible (and will eat megatons of CPU cycles). What consumer uses will grow out of that, other than games, is anyone's guess. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps entire new classes of applications.
The problem is that cheaper processors don't make much money -- there isn't the markup on commodity parts that there is on the high end. The big chip companies are used to charging through the nose for their latest and greatest and they use much of that money to pay for the R & D, but the rest is profit.
However profit on the low end stuff is very slight because you are competing with chip fabs that don't spend time and money on R & D; buying the rights to older technology instead. (We are talking commodity margins now, not what the market will bear.) So if the market for the latest and greatest collapses the entire landscape changes.
Should that occur my prediction is that R & D will change from designing faster chips to getting better yields from the fabs. Because, at commodity margins, it will be all about lowering production costs.
However I think it is still more likely that, Google aside, there will remain a market for the high end large enough to continue to support Intel and AMD as they duke it out on technological edge. At least for a while.
Ya, I bet. Mountains that come in pairs. With knobbly little tips.
Yeesh...
I haven't read the rest, but I second the recommendations for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Girl Genius. Both are wonderful examples of graphic storytelling and a lot of fun.
Mind you these are also the only 'American' comics I collect. I used to do single issues of everthing I liked, but sometimes the series would disapear (Shotgun Mary) and other times I would miss an issue or two and end up buying the collections anyway. So I promised myself I would always wait for the collections.
But then I sort of know Phil and Kaja, so I started buying Girl Genius from day one after running into them at an SF convention right before they launched it. And, as for LoXG... Well I did wait for the collection for the first set. And it was so amazing I that I went down the local comic store and started a pull list for the new series.
I am weak, weak person...
Well, mostly because of Rick Berman. In my /. journal entry after I saw the film I said: "Well, now that I have seen Nemesis I can positively state, without fear of contradiction, that someone really needs to kick Rick Berman's ass. There is probably a line forming as I speak. If the people that own the franchise want to keep it viable they will make certain he has nothing ever to do with another Star Trek film."
Mozilla has an active SVG project. The renderer is not yet included in the main build, mostly for licensing reasons. But you can build it in yourself and there is someone that maintains a Windows build. See the link for more info.
The UMod they are using is here. There are installation instructions and more info here. The FAQ is here.
Still looking for the actual Mimesis codebase (the UMod communicates with Mimesis via XML, it doesn't actually implement it).
Cool! UT is just about the only online game I play, but I have been wanting more interaction of some kind rather than just doing the same old thing over and over. Since they have the Mimesis system working on UT Server I am not wondering how I can get hold of the code and fool with this myself.
Note: I am currently working on a UT 2K3 Map, so this is of great interest to me...
They tried this with catalog sales too and the results were mixed. It comes down to one simple factor -- either they all have to do it or it will never work well.
Why is this? Simple, if ten states enact Internet sales taxes and agree to cross-enforce then a company selling out of one of those states may be prosecuted by another state party to the agreement if they don't collect sales taxes for that state. But a company in a state not party to the agreement can thumb their nose at them!
IANAL, but my understanding of the Interstate Commerce clause of the US Constitution is that a state cannot enforce laws restricting commerce between states and this applies. Only when you can get the government of the other state to act as your enforcer can you accomplish anything.
All well and good, and perhaps lots of states will sign up to act as enforcers for each other. But all it takes is one state to hold out. Say Oregon, which has no sales tax and could use the extra business and employee income taxes if Amazon relocated south to Portland. Suddenly the states with the reciprocal agreement are not only *not* collecting sales taxes, they are also losing jobs as Internet companies move where they don't have to pay the tax. It is a loose/loose proposition and fundementally regressive.
And, unless the consititution is changed, the US congress critters can't do anything about it either. That is, with one exception; they can enact a nationwide VAT and enforce that. But who gets those tax revenues?
Once again, IANAL and might be blowing smoke. If Glenn Reynolds is reading this perhaps he can give us the real skinny...
6. Mandatory Porn joke/serious reference.
-- AND --
7. You know, a Beowulf cluster of these would make a real display!
Some Anonymous Coward says:
Oh yeah? Like that proves anything. That page was probably Notepadded...
Sure, I know they are claiming that the so-called 'Slashdot Effect' has rendered it invisible, but do we have any independent witnesses? Any physical proof? No...
- Initial investment is one half of the cost of a Radeon 9700
- You screw it up in any one of a hundred different ways and the magic smoke escapes
- You get pissed off and purchase a the new GeForce card when it comes out instead
Final cost is nearly twice a Radeon 9700. Hmmm...Slashdot.com annouced they will drop banner advertising in favor of articles shilling products for a fee. "What the hell," said Rob Malda, "we have been doing it for a year now, and we are still getting first posts and tons of trolls."
In fact video games may well be one of only a few new art forms to come out of the nineties. (Yes I know there were video games before then, but they were amateurish compared to the games that started coming out in the mid-nineties.)
/. articles on the various FPS vendors making sure their game engines are easily available to modders. But we need the other types of game engines to do the same thing. And we need some way for modded games to get into the console market. This will put many of the big gaming houses out of business though, the surviving vendors will be those that produce the best game engines and do the most to encourage third-party development.
But they are 'art' in the same way that cinema is 'art'. In other words they are 'collaborationist' art, requiring the efforts of many people to create. Because of this fact it requires a great deal of money to complete a decent video game, and no-one will put up that money without expecting a return. So video games must be commercial. You must make, or at least attempt to make, video games (and films) that will return a profit.
This results in many comprimises. One of these is the fact that sex and violence sell. Don't believe me? Count the number of R and PG-13 rated films and compare them to those PG and below. Or just go see 'Adaptation' (in theaters now) and try to catch what Charlie Kaufman was really trying to say with that script...
The danger is that the governement will find excuses like this to use in an attempt to control the video game market -- and will be able to get such controls past the courts because of public opinion. For this reason one of two things must happen; either the video game market implements its own system akin to the movie rating system, (which it has done) and puts out an equivalent effort to enforce it (which it is not doing). Or, my preference, someone produces tools that allow people to create video games on their own quite easily.
This last is coming to pass, we have all seen the recent
I suspect the game vendors will prefer the first scenario. But I think the second will result in things that few people would argue are 'art'. They may not be games as we now know them though...
Sounds like Microsoft Sharepoint to me. Sorry, but that doesn't excite me too much...
If so, and based on the bad Sharepoint implementations I have seen, this seems unlikely to be world-shaking. How about a follow-up article on this in a year?
Ahh... The Cinerama. I saw FoTR there with a bunch of friends a year ago. The only redeeming fact about working across the country this year is I got to see TT three hours earlier than the same friends, so I called some on my cell phone and taunted them.
Heh...