Re:Lan Party Fun
on
Fragfest
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Back in the day, we had to deal with DOS network stacks and 10Base-2. I think I'd take DOS over Windows: I kept a stack of boot disks with appropriate drivers, and that would get most people going. Anything with something wierd either had the drivers along or didn't play. The biggest issue was updating everybody to the same version of Doom.
But somebody who has never dealt with 10Base-2 (ethernet over coax) is allowed to complain about setting up LAN parties.
I've still got a stack of about 6 ISA NE2000's along with the cable, T's and terminators. You can borrow it just to experience the pleasure.
It is not a scam to write once, charge many times. Just like any product, the buyer and seller have to agree upon a reasonable prifce for the product. It is up to the buyer to estimate the value. The actual cost of developing said product is irrelevant. When selling goods, you charge so that you not only make up for the production of the goods, but also for the development thereof.
In a perfect market system, the surplus (the difference between what you are willing to pay, and what it cost to produce) go to the consumer.
In a monopoly (like copyright), the surplus goes to the producer.
But about file formats: I will take an interface any day over a file format. But there is no reason we can't have both.
Heh. It's clear that we've both had different experiences in past projects. And a lot of the reason I don't like interfaces is because I've implemented them before:
The customers want an interface, so we slap one together a mess. On the other hand, we'll be using those files for years, so we actually think about it.
But again, you miss the point. The goal here is to get the data on screen, and then to the printer (or straight to the printer, it doesnt matter to us, its up to the user). Users love to be able to change that stuff, tweak it, insert this or that, or whatever.
I'm not sure how that'd be constrained by saving to the OpenOffice file format. They can edit it or it's template, or run some scripts the IT department has whipped up to collect data, insert new meta-data, file it appropriately, whatever.
You don't need to learn the file format. It's XML: there's lots of libraries to do the grunt work. You just need to know what tags you want.
And you don't need to learn how to work with their templates: you just include them from your file: that's one of the main reasons for using templates.
The file formats include a version number, so OO 26 will still read the file in. Meanwhile, your MS Office automation interface will have changed 7 times.
Interfaces suck. I've built them, and I've used them. Give me a nice clean file format that I can easily translate anyday. You can get ugly XML formats, but it's harder to do.
The developers don't need to pick a common automation interface: they need to pick a common file format. And there's been tons of people screaming for it, so they'll get it eventually, because it'll scratch somebody's itch.
We won't see real-time in state of the art for years, but we are starting to see convergence:
Ie, it used to be 1 hour per frame. In the future it might be several seconds per frame. But it won't be 25 per second, not until we can do physical modelling on the human body at just a bit higher than the cell level at real time will Hollywood agree that real-time is good enough.
State of the art Hollywood films are never going to be mastered in real-time. If they can be rendered in real-time, they are not state of the art. Period.
The animators may render in reduced resolution in real-time for the reasons you mentioned, but if it renders in real-time, they'll add more effects/higher resolution/sub-pixel tesselation/whatever, just because they can, for that tiny little bump in quality.
Right now the biggest barrier is faces: CG faces (plus the hair) are a heck of a lot better than they used to be, but they're years away from photographic quality when animated.
Another example where open source software has a missing feature it doesn't need simply because it's open.
At least for your example, you don't want an automation interface. OpenOffice has an open file format: just write out the files from scratch. It may be slightly more work up front, but you'll save tons in support costs, run way faster, and be generally way cleaner.
True enough. There are likely side effects involved in changing even the sequence you want to change. However, I was referring to the likelihood of changes in areas elsewhere.
Because Lord of the Rings on IMAX in Edmonton sucked! (ie, 35mm projector onto massive screen)
it was very grainy/blurry, and the jittering gave me a migraine.
So they may not be increasing the information content so it's not theoretically a better picture, but they are immensively improving the transfer of that information to my brain.
Patents & copyrights protect unlimited goods. Unlimited copies of "Red Hat Linux v7.0" can be made. Patents & copyrights are an artificial mechanism to facilitate the trading of `Intellectual Property' in a market designed to trade limited goods.
But the name "Red Hat" can only be used to unquiely identify one thing, thus is a limited good and fits well into a standard market system.
In 20 years time, the anti-GM people will have 'won'. Automated genetic sequencing will allow standard Mendellian techniques to be much more precisely targetted.
Before GM, researchers irradiated a bunch of seeds to induce mutation, then planted them. Then cross-pollinate plants with interesting characteristics. Rinse and repeat.
With gene sequencing and modelling software, the cycle time can be reduced (ie, you don't have to grow the corn to see how it will turn out). Whammo, GM without GM.
Of course, it's actually worse, because they're be undesired mutations in the crop as well as the ones they were trying to induce. But they'll be able to sell it as "organic' GM free.
Humans have been doing GM work for 10,000 years now. There is no such thing as wild corn, for instance. The scientific method did much more to improve the rate of change than tools like genetic modification.
They claim August, which isn't that far away. They aren't a software company, so they might make the date, but I'd need good odds to lay money on it...
You're right, the comparisons are similar. Lots of people have 3GHz p4's: either early samples or overclocks, but the average Joe doesn't.
Wired ethernet includes collision detection with random back-off. I presume that wireless ethernet has a similar protocol. The effect is noticeable only on saturated networks.
Saying "nVidia is the best" got a lot harder on July 18. Their new 9000 is much nicer than nVidia's crippled 4MX series, and the 9700 is 6 months ahead of nVidia. Which is amazing, because nVidia used to be consistently 6 months ahead of ATI.
Of course, ATI is missing a strong competitor to the 4Ti that the original poster referred to.
ATI will be providing plug ins to compile Renderman or Maya code to run on its Radeon 9700 rather than on the central processor. Although not directly competing with Cg, this does seem to be a much better approach. Provided of course that you could take your 'binaries' from Renderman/Maya and use them in your video game or whatever.
Example: I've played hookey from work for sex. My company was at the time billing me out at US$100 per hour. I was risking losing my job. It was worth it.
The reason you don't pay for sex is because the transaction, the act of paying for it, has a real cost Sex that you pay for is worth less than sex that you get for free.
All of my time has value. I prefer to think of it the other way around, though: All money is time. Money can be limitless. Time marches on.
Did I say anything about it being good for the environment?
If we were running out of oil, we wouldn't need Kyoto, because then the price of oil would go up and people would start switching to alternative fuels.
There's lots of oil in the ground, so the price will go down and people will burn more or it, unless we do something about it.
Because I state some FACTS, you assume that I'm anti-green. When in fact these facts actually mean that it is more important that we ratify Kyoto.
See, the real reason that greens can't handle facts is because they've been running around saying "the sky is falling" for so long, and this fact shows that one keystone of 70s & 80s doomsday-ism is in fact not true. This gives 21st century doomsday hypers problems because they've cried wolf a few too many times.
In 1939 the Department of the Interior predicted we had 13 years of oil left.
Current predictions say we have 40 years of oil left (Fairhead and Leach 1998). That's "known reserves", and assumes that technology will stagnate, the price will stay constant and more oil will not be found. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
They're still not counting the oil sands as part of known reserves: even though they are now profitably extracting. I've heard estimates that there are 100 years of oil in the Alberta oil sands alone.
According to an old IBM study, a good coder is approximately 100 times as productive as an average coder. The big win is not in lines of code produced, but because she tends to get it right the first time. Remember, a bug in the field can easily be 1000x as expensive as a bug caught during development.
Myself I find Lomborg's work makes environmental action more fruitful. I much prefer positive outlooks. "Hey. things are getting better: lets keep doing things to make them keep getting better" instead of "Things are terrible. We're all going to die. Let's go trash our local MacDonald's so that we postpone the date of the world ending by a couple of minutes."
Works like this are important because they attempt to help people make choices.
For instance: on page 80 he references estimates that 2 million people die and 0.5 billion people get sick every year because of lack of access to clean water and sanitation.
How about global warming? Page 291. "Even a small decrease in winter deaths would greatly outweigh a small heat death increase."
Obviously a contrived example. But the book is great for being able to looks things like this up. 1/3 of the book is reference!
Lomborg would be the first to admit that there's lots of room for improvement: he would agree that 2 million deaths is unacceptable. He comes to the conclusion that we should take action on global warming.
"The vast majority of patent cases are fought between the small to mid-sized company against much larger entities. Patents are the vehicle by which small and mid-sized companies --like TiVo--can effectively compete on an equal playing field with their much larger, better capitalized competitors. "
Do you have data for this, anecdotal or otherwise? It certainly seems to me that is much more often the opposite: big companies suing the little ones. Big companies used to be the only guys that filed patents. Since the patent explosion of the 90s though, everybody's been doing it.
He makes a bunch of excellent points, and then he says this:
"Another important factor is that capitalism is in deep crisis.Until the 1970s capitalism promised a better world to people in the Western countries, to people in the former Soviet bloc and to the Third World. It stopped doing it starting in the 1980s and dismissed it completely in the 1990s. Today the capitalist leaders are glad if they are able to fix the biggest leaks in the sinking ship."
By what measure is it failing? My preferred measure of well being is life expectancy: it correlates well with income, and is a good general, objective measure of quality of life. In has increased from 42 to 49 in sub Saharan Africa, from 53 to 64 in the undeveloped countries and from 71 to 76 in the first world.
What's another good measure? Let's use people in extreme poverty. It's remained relatively constant since 1950 at about 1.2 billion people. At the same time, the population of the world more than doubled. In other words, the world gained about 3.4 billion "not poor" people.
Open source will change the world, and it will change economics. But in the realm of scarce goods, capitalism works. No other century in history was as good for the human race as the 20th, despite the efforts of Hitler (6 million Jews), Stalin (20 million Ukrainians and rural Russians) and Mao (30 million)
(but I will say that there's no way to immediately foist them out of your borders like there was in Civ1/2 -- and like they can to you)
Actually, that's not true. Ask twice. The second time they'll apologize profusely and pop outside of your borders.
Unfortunately for me, I was trying to use my borders in a land grab to prevent their settlers from going through. They ended up popping out on the wrong side!
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Back in the day, we had to deal with DOS network stacks and 10Base-2. I think I'd take DOS over Windows: I kept a stack of boot disks with appropriate drivers, and that would get most people going. Anything with something wierd either had the drivers along or didn't play. The biggest issue was updating everybody to the same version of Doom.
But somebody who has never dealt with 10Base-2 (ethernet over coax) is allowed to complain about setting up LAN parties.
I've still got a stack of about 6 ISA NE2000's along with the cable, T's and terminators. You can borrow it just to experience the pleasure.
Bryan
In a perfect market system, the surplus (the difference between what you are willing to pay, and what it cost to produce) go to the consumer.
In a monopoly (like copyright), the surplus goes to the producer.
This dichotomy is unfair and ineffecient.
Bryan
Heh. It's clear that we've both had different experiences in past projects. And a lot of the reason I don't like interfaces is because I've implemented them before:
The customers want an interface, so we slap one together a mess. On the other hand, we'll be using those files for years, so we actually think about it.
But again, you miss the point. The goal here is to get the data on screen, and then to the printer (or straight to the printer, it doesnt matter to us, its up to the user). Users love to be able to change that stuff, tweak it, insert this or that, or whatever. I'm not sure how that'd be constrained by saving to the OpenOffice file format. They can edit it or it's template, or run some scripts the IT department has whipped up to collect data, insert new meta-data, file it appropriately, whatever.
Bryan
You don't need to learn the file format. It's XML: there's lots of libraries to do the grunt work. You just need to know what tags you want.
And you don't need to learn how to work with their templates: you just include them from your file: that's one of the main reasons for using templates.
The file formats include a version number, so OO 26 will still read the file in. Meanwhile, your MS Office automation interface will have changed 7 times.
Interfaces suck. I've built them, and I've used them. Give me a nice clean file format that I can easily translate anyday. You can get ugly XML formats, but it's harder to do.
The developers don't need to pick a common automation interface: they need to pick a common file format. And there's been tons of people screaming for it, so they'll get it eventually, because it'll scratch somebody's itch.
Bryan
We won't see real-time in state of the art for years, but we are starting to see convergence:
Ie, it used to be 1 hour per frame. In the future it might be several seconds per frame. But it won't be 25 per second, not until we can do physical modelling on the human body at just a bit higher than the cell level at real time will Hollywood agree that real-time is good enough.
Bryan
State of the art Hollywood films are never going to be mastered in real-time. If they can be rendered in real-time, they are not state of the art. Period.
The animators may render in reduced resolution in real-time for the reasons you mentioned, but if it renders in real-time, they'll add more effects/higher resolution/sub-pixel tesselation/whatever, just because they can, for that tiny little bump in quality.
Right now the biggest barrier is faces: CG faces (plus the hair) are a heck of a lot better than they used to be, but they're years away from photographic quality when animated.
Bryan
Another example where open source software has a missing feature it doesn't need simply because it's open.
At least for your example, you don't want an automation interface. OpenOffice has an open file format: just write out the files from scratch. It may be slightly more work up front, but you'll save tons in support costs, run way faster, and be generally way cleaner.
Bryan
True enough. There are likely side effects involved in changing even the sequence you want to change. However, I was referring to the likelihood of changes in areas elsewhere.
Why?
Because Lord of the Rings on IMAX in Edmonton sucked! (ie, 35mm projector onto massive screen)
it was very grainy/blurry, and the jittering gave me a migraine.
So they may not be increasing the information content so it's not theoretically a better picture, but they are immensively improving the transfer of that information to my brain.
Bryan
Your argument has sound economic underpinnings:
Patents & copyrights protect unlimited goods. Unlimited copies of "Red Hat Linux v7.0" can be made. Patents & copyrights are an artificial mechanism to facilitate the trading of `Intellectual Property' in a market designed to trade limited goods.
But the name "Red Hat" can only be used to unquiely identify one thing, thus is a limited good and fits well into a standard market system.
Bryan
In 20 years time, the anti-GM people will have 'won'. Automated genetic sequencing will allow standard Mendellian techniques to be much more precisely targetted.
Before GM, researchers irradiated a bunch of seeds to induce mutation, then planted them. Then cross-pollinate plants with interesting characteristics. Rinse and repeat.
With gene sequencing and modelling software, the cycle time can be reduced (ie, you don't have to grow the corn to see how it will turn out). Whammo, GM without GM.
Of course, it's actually worse, because they're be undesired mutations in the crop as well as the ones they were trying to induce. But they'll be able to sell it as "organic' GM free.
Humans have been doing GM work for 10,000 years now. There is no such thing as wild corn, for instance. The scientific method did much more to improve the rate of change than tools like genetic modification.
Bryan
They claim August, which isn't that far away. They aren't a software company, so they might make the date, but I'd need good odds to lay money on it...
You're right, the comparisons are similar. Lots of people have 3GHz p4's: either early samples or overclocks, but the average Joe doesn't.
Bryan
Wired ethernet includes collision detection with random back-off. I presume that wireless ethernet has a similar protocol. The effect is noticeable only on saturated networks.
Bryan
Saying "nVidia is the best" got a lot harder on July 18. Their new 9000 is much nicer than nVidia's crippled 4MX series, and the 9700 is 6 months ahead of nVidia. Which is amazing, because nVidia used to be consistently 6 months ahead of ATI.
Of course, ATI is missing a strong competitor to the 4Ti that the original poster referred to.
Bryan
ATI will be providing plug ins to compile Renderman or Maya code to run on its Radeon 9700 rather than on the central processor. Although not directly competing with Cg, this does seem to be a much better approach. Provided of course that you could take your 'binaries' from Renderman/Maya and use them in your video game or whatever.
Bryan
Sex has a huge dollar value, at least for me.
Example: I've played hookey from work for sex. My company was at the time billing me out at US$100 per hour. I was risking losing my job. It was worth it.
The reason you don't pay for sex is because the transaction, the act of paying for it, has a real cost Sex that you pay for is worth less than sex that you get for free.
All of my time has value. I prefer to think of it the other way around, though: All money is time. Money can be limitless. Time marches on.
Bryan
Did I say anything about it being good for the environment?
If we were running out of oil, we wouldn't need Kyoto, because then the price of oil would go up and people would start switching to alternative fuels.
There's lots of oil in the ground, so the price will go down and people will burn more or it, unless we do something about it.
Because I state some FACTS, you assume that I'm anti-green. When in fact these facts actually mean that it is more important that we ratify Kyoto.
See, the real reason that greens can't handle facts is because they've been running around saying "the sky is falling" for so long, and this fact shows that one keystone of 70s & 80s doomsday-ism is in fact not true. This gives 21st century doomsday hypers problems because they've cried wolf a few too many times.
Bryan
In 1939 the Department of the Interior predicted we had 13 years of oil left.
Current predictions say we have 40 years of oil left (Fairhead and Leach 1998). That's "known reserves", and assumes that technology will stagnate, the price will stay constant and more oil will not be found. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
They're still not counting the oil sands as part of known reserves: even though they are now profitably extracting. I've heard estimates that there are 100 years of oil in the Alberta oil sands alone.
Bryan
According to an old IBM study, a good coder is approximately 100 times as productive as an average coder. The big win is not in lines of code produced, but because she tends to get it right the first time. Remember, a bug in the field can easily be 1000x as expensive as a bug caught during development.
A much better rebuttal than the one in Scientific American, if I may say so, and the climate change rebuttal was much better than the other three.
Do you have links to your work or similar analysis?
Bryan
Myself I find Lomborg's work makes environmental action more fruitful. I much prefer positive outlooks. "Hey. things are getting better: lets keep doing things to make them keep getting better" instead of "Things are terrible. We're all going to die. Let's go trash our local MacDonald's so that we postpone the date of the world ending by a couple of minutes."
Works like this are important because they attempt to help people make choices.
For instance: on page 80 he references estimates that 2 million people die and 0.5 billion people get sick every year because of lack of access to clean water and sanitation.
How about global warming? Page 291. "Even a small decrease in winter deaths would greatly outweigh a small heat death increase."
Obviously a contrived example. But the book is great for being able to looks things like this up. 1/3 of the book is reference!
Lomborg would be the first to admit that there's lots of room for improvement: he would agree that 2 million deaths is unacceptable. He comes to the conclusion that we should take action on global warming.
Bryan
Cows can get 100% of their nutritional requirements from grass or hay.
Humans cannot digest grass or hay.
"The vast majority of patent cases are fought between the small to mid-sized company against much larger entities. Patents are the vehicle by which small and mid-sized companies --like TiVo--can effectively compete on an equal playing field with their much larger, better capitalized competitors. "
Do you have data for this, anecdotal or otherwise? It certainly seems to me that is much more often the opposite: big companies suing the little ones. Big companies used to be the only guys that filed patents. Since the patent explosion of the 90s though, everybody's been doing it.
Bryan
He makes a bunch of excellent points, and then he says this:
"Another important factor is that capitalism is in deep crisis.Until the 1970s capitalism promised a better world to people in the Western countries, to people in the former Soviet bloc and to the Third World. It stopped doing it starting in the 1980s and dismissed it completely in the 1990s. Today the capitalist leaders are glad if they are able to fix the biggest leaks in the sinking ship."
By what measure is it failing? My preferred measure of well being is life expectancy: it correlates well with income, and is a good general, objective measure of quality of life. In has increased from 42 to 49 in sub Saharan Africa, from 53 to 64 in the undeveloped countries and from 71 to 76 in the first world.
What's another good measure? Let's use people in extreme poverty. It's remained relatively constant since 1950 at about 1.2 billion people. At the same time, the population of the world more than doubled. In other words, the world gained about 3.4 billion "not poor" people.
Open source will change the world, and it will change economics. But in the realm of scarce goods, capitalism works. No other century in history was as good for the human race as the 20th, despite the efforts of Hitler (6 million Jews), Stalin (20 million Ukrainians and rural Russians) and Mao (30 million)
Bryan
(but I will say that there's no way to immediately foist them out of your borders like there was in Civ1/2 -- and like they can to you)
Actually, that's not true. Ask twice. The second time they'll apologize profusely and pop outside of your borders.
Unfortunately for me, I was trying to use my borders in a land grab to prevent their settlers from going through. They ended up popping out on the wrong side!