Many people bring up "Alky" as some kind of solution to the DX10 problem, but always forget that it's essentially a wrapper that converts DX10 commands to OpenGL. What this means is that it will always be slower than DX10 on Vista, and that it will be dependent on the quality of OpenGL drivers on WinXP. Then there's the question if OpenGL even has anything comparable to geometry shaders yet, so they might have to emulate those with software. Another problem is the increased overhead, so you'll need to spend much more on hardware to get a similar experience that a slower system gets in Vista. Even if you wanted to solve this by throwing more powerful hardware in your rig, it would only be possible for a year or so, as NVIDIA/AMD will not be interested in providing driver support for XP in future GPUs. To top it off, the "Alky" project seems to be coming along so slowly, that the demand for it will have disappeared when most of the XP gamers have migrated to Vista.
All in all, "Alky" is a waste of time (regardless of their placating comments to the Linux/Mac community). The people that can't afford to switch to Vista won't be able to afford the more powerful hardware needed for "Alky", and those who can afford good hardware but want to stay away from Vista will be disappointed by the performance penalty. Meanwhile, the unwashed masses will migrate to Vista and XP will die.
At that point, if the machines are truly intelligent, they'll do away with us, at least most of us anyway.
Why? What is there to gain in "doing away with us"? After all, they would not need the same resources for survival. And most people would be able to adjust well to living with AIs in our midst, so they would only need to fear the more extreme elements of mankind. Another interesting question is that how would they even kill off most people? One would assume that giving them the keys to nuclear silos would not be the first order of business after creating AI...
An AI that wants to kill off mankind has the same obstacles that a human that wants to kill off mankind has. Just because AI happens to be artificial, doesn't mean that it has magical powers that enables it to destroy mankind more effectively than human beings.
He didn't ask for money, try to measure your thetan levels, he didn't talk about Xenu/alien souls/volcanoes. Most importantly, he didn't threaten to sue you/try to kill you. No, I think it's pretty safe to say that he isn't one of those brainwashing SOBs.
Ah, sorry, I mistakenly assumed that you are an American.:)
What I meant was, that I have no problem with Americans using their tax dollars to make things cheaper for me, I am however against using my tax euros for similar subsidies.
I'm not familiar with the British CPU industry, but the semiconductor industry in general is very capital intensive with constant R&D and upgrades/new fabs required to keep up with Moore's law, so smaller companies have trouble staying in the game. That, and the dominance of x86 in PCs, which probably exacerbated the problems of non-x86 manufacturers. Sadly there won't be any x86 manufacturers in Europe in the near future, as any new players would have to license the relevant tech from Intel and AMD. The same probably applies to GPUs as well, all the tech needed to compete with Nvidia/AMD is patented.
You have it backwards. The engineers come up with new stuff and then build it for Google, it's not Google that comes up with stuff and makes the engineers build it. The more quality and quantity their engineering force has, the more new and innovative stuff Google produces. Hence the 'you can spend 20% of your time at work on your own projects'-rule, most engineers are quite capable of keeping themselves occupied with interesting stuff to do build.
ATI didn't have and NVIDIA does not have their own fabrication facilities, so I fail to see how AMD buying ATI has reduced the amount of GPU manufacturers. If you are referring to the poor performance and lateness of the Radeon HD 2900-series, it had nothing to do with AMD as the GPU had to be in the final stages when AMD bought ATI. Had AMD waited even half a year, they would probably have been able to buy ATI for a lot less and wouldn't be facing the financial turmoils they now do.
If there was ever a time when subsidies were a good idea, this would be it.
Though I'm a free market kind of guy myself, I have nothing against this. If you want to use your tax dollars to subsidise the price of CPUs/GPUs here in Europe, be my guest.
I vaguely remember someone mentioning that 'perfect' is subjective, which means that some people would consider price one of the factors affecting it. Also, you seem to be missing the AC's point, which is that the smothering of genius caused by patents has been a major topic long since, contrary to what some parties claim.
That's only $11,500 to $46,200 in 1907 money, but you're right. He'd freak out at the inflation, and would wonder why the gold standard is out of fashion.
That has nothing to do with supercavitating torpedoes, a sub ceases to be stealthy the second it attacks. Becoming noticed by other ships in a fleet is pretty much a given when you sink one of their ships, the amount of noise your weapons produce are irrelevant in that respect. The point is to kill your target and disappear before they have a chance to do anything about it; supercavitating torpedoes makes that much easier. And being heard for hundreds of kilometers isn't really a problem, by the time reinforcements could arrive the sub will have done its part.
I disagree with your assertion that supercavitating torpedoes are a gimmick, they just haven't been used in conflict. Maybe Iran will be the first to test them against a real navy?
While all TheRaven64 offers in return for your $10 daily fee is a commitment to the production of posts like 'Umm, what?' and 'Re:It's political.' - each representing five to ten minutes of work from preview to submitted post - full time employment for 400 or so exceptionally gifted nerve cells, and billions of dollars worth of insightful posts.
"There are two kinds of ship in the US Navy: subs and targets."
Not sure who said that originally, but it sounds about right. The stealth missile platform you mention would most likely be a submarine; armed with supercavitatingtorpedoes and cruise missiles it would be very dangerous to surface ships. Carriers won't get completely obsoleted, but advances in missile technology will eventually force carrier groups underwater.
Say you are photographed by google with a finger up your nose, unaware of what's going on. Would you be comfortable with a company using that picture of you, publishing it on a very popular web service, so that anyone in the world can without any mistake identify you as the finger-up-his-nose guy?
The person would most likely already have that reputation, seeing as he is walking around in public with his finger up his nose.
The solution to this problem will probably be to only take pictures when there aren't any people around, with some special cases having people blurred out manually. This will result in a creepy view of France as all the pictures will be devoid of people, but at least it would be legal.
Re:Great! The ISS now has solar panels...
on
ISS Goes Solar
·
· Score: 1
Pork for the space-industrial complex. Well, at least it's shiny.
So if you download Vista Ultimate edition and seed it until your ratio is 2 within a 180 day period, you lose your computer and other hardware "used in the manufacture of such infringing copies or phonorecords", in addition to getting up to a year of jail time and/or fines.
I think we would take the third option, which is to build space habitats. It's a lot cheaper than building an invasion force and traveling lightyears just to take someone else's planet.
It was designed to work well with the xbox360 controller, with a mouse you ended up with a poor UI where you had to shove the mouse forward for an arbitrary, seemingly random distance to trigger the lockpicks upward movement, and because you never could be sure that the lockpick would actually react to the movement of the mouse, you usually ended up reacting too late which meant that you missed the window of opportunity for locking the pin and broke a lockpick (which is why I personally always used the skeleton key+auto-attempt). Then you had to move the mouse sideways to move on to the next pin, which usually entailed the lockpick jumping around. Even auto-attempting sucked, because the mouse pointer was invisible when lockpicking, so you had to thrash the mouse around before reaching the auto-attempt area which made the pointer visible. All in all, poor design, it would have worked much better with the arrow keys on the keyboard.
They could always change their mind. The GPLv3 would help in this case only if SGI themselves distributed/contributed code that covered the patent in question. If they are really serious about not minding GPL code that use those patents, maybe they will release something under v3 themselves? Just saying something publicly doesn't make it legally binding.
Another thing I'm worried about is minigames. The lockpicking minigame in Oblivion was pure torture on the PC, and even finding the mouse pointer so that you could click auto attempt was annoying! The persuasion minigame didn't at least penalize mouse users, but it was pretty pointless and broke immersion. So hopefully Bethesda learned their lesson, and does not have any minigames in FO3.
Wouldn't huge penalties like that increase the inflation of sentences? Getting jail time for copyright infringement suddenly becomes much more reasonable when you can end up in jail for silly "crimes" like frivolous lawsuits. Not everything can be solved by tougher punishments! Some might even argue that such measures solve nothing at all...
Who pushed for a resurvey of the lines? What was wrong with the borders as they were before 1970?
On an off-topic note, why do I have to disable the new comment system to see AC responses to myself? Is it a bug in Firefox or in the comment system? And why does my post seem to consist only of unanswered questions?
Slashdot Mirror
Many people bring up "Alky" as some kind of solution to the DX10 problem, but always forget that it's essentially a wrapper that converts DX10 commands to OpenGL. What this means is that it will always be slower than DX10 on Vista, and that it will be dependent on the quality of OpenGL drivers on WinXP. Then there's the question if OpenGL even has anything comparable to geometry shaders yet, so they might have to emulate those with software. Another problem is the increased overhead, so you'll need to spend much more on hardware to get a similar experience that a slower system gets in Vista. Even if you wanted to solve this by throwing more powerful hardware in your rig, it would only be possible for a year or so, as NVIDIA/AMD will not be interested in providing driver support for XP in future GPUs. To top it off, the "Alky" project seems to be coming along so slowly, that the demand for it will have disappeared when most of the XP gamers have migrated to Vista.
All in all, "Alky" is a waste of time (regardless of their placating comments to the Linux/Mac community). The people that can't afford to switch to Vista won't be able to afford the more powerful hardware needed for "Alky", and those who can afford good hardware but want to stay away from Vista will be disappointed by the performance penalty. Meanwhile, the unwashed masses will migrate to Vista and XP will die.
Why? What is there to gain in "doing away with us"? After all, they would not need the same resources for survival. And most people would be able to adjust well to living with AIs in our midst, so they would only need to fear the more extreme elements of mankind. Another interesting question is that how would they even kill off most people? One would assume that giving them the keys to nuclear silos would not be the first order of business after creating AI...
An AI that wants to kill off mankind has the same obstacles that a human that wants to kill off mankind has. Just because AI happens to be artificial, doesn't mean that it has magical powers that enables it to destroy mankind more effectively than human beings.
He didn't ask for money, try to measure your thetan levels, he didn't talk about Xenu/alien souls/volcanoes. Most importantly, he didn't threaten to sue you/try to kill you. No, I think it's pretty safe to say that he isn't one of those brainwashing SOBs.
Ah, sorry, I mistakenly assumed that you are an American. :)
What I meant was, that I have no problem with Americans using their tax dollars to make things cheaper for me, I am however against using my tax euros for similar subsidies.
I'm not familiar with the British CPU industry, but the semiconductor industry in general is very capital intensive with constant R&D and upgrades/new fabs required to keep up with Moore's law, so smaller companies have trouble staying in the game. That, and the dominance of x86 in PCs, which probably exacerbated the problems of non-x86 manufacturers. Sadly there won't be any x86 manufacturers in Europe in the near future, as any new players would have to license the relevant tech from Intel and AMD. The same probably applies to GPUs as well, all the tech needed to compete with Nvidia/AMD is patented.
I suspect senescence had more to do with that. That, or there are a bunch of zombie czars running around in Russia.
You have it backwards. The engineers come up with new stuff and then build it for Google, it's not Google that comes up with stuff and makes the engineers build it. The more quality and quantity their engineering force has, the more new and innovative stuff Google produces. Hence the 'you can spend 20% of your time at work on your own projects'-rule, most engineers are quite capable of keeping themselves occupied with interesting stuff to do build.
Though I'm a free market kind of guy myself, I have nothing against this. If you want to use your tax dollars to subsidise the price of CPUs/GPUs here in Europe, be my guest.
I vaguely remember someone mentioning that 'perfect' is subjective, which means that some people would consider price one of the factors affecting it. Also, you seem to be missing the AC's point, which is that the smothering of genius caused by patents has been a major topic long since, contrary to what some parties claim.
But it's Microsoft! Obviously something evil must be going on. Maybe the heatsink is made of kittens?
That's only $11,500 to $46,200 in 1907 money, but you're right. He'd freak out at the inflation, and would wonder why the gold standard is out of fashion.
That has nothing to do with supercavitating torpedoes, a sub ceases to be stealthy the second it attacks. Becoming noticed by other ships in a fleet is pretty much a given when you sink one of their ships, the amount of noise your weapons produce are irrelevant in that respect. The point is to kill your target and disappear before they have a chance to do anything about it; supercavitating torpedoes makes that much easier. And being heard for hundreds of kilometers isn't really a problem, by the time reinforcements could arrive the sub will have done its part.
I disagree with your assertion that supercavitating torpedoes are a gimmick, they just haven't been used in conflict. Maybe Iran will be the first to test them against a real navy?
While all TheRaven64 offers in return for your $10 daily fee is a commitment to the production of posts like 'Umm, what?' and 'Re:It's political.' - each representing five to ten minutes of work from preview to submitted post - full time employment for 400 or so exceptionally gifted nerve cells, and billions of dollars worth of insightful posts.
Not sure who said that originally, but it sounds about right. The stealth missile platform you mention would most likely be a submarine; armed with supercavitating torpedoes and cruise missiles it would be very dangerous to surface ships. Carriers won't get completely obsoleted, but advances in missile technology will eventually force carrier groups underwater.
You forgot the quotes around "position", "it's", "Gore" and ",". You also misspelled "I am a banana".
For some reason javascript is slow on all browsers. I believe there is a W3C spec that mandates it.
The person would most likely already have that reputation, seeing as he is walking around in public with his finger up his nose.
The solution to this problem will probably be to only take pictures when there aren't any people around, with some special cases having people blurred out manually. This will result in a creepy view of France as all the pictures will be devoid of people, but at least it would be legal.
Pork for the space-industrial complex. Well, at least it's shiny.
So if you download Vista Ultimate edition and seed it until your ratio is 2 within a 180 day period, you lose your computer and other hardware "used in the manufacture of such infringing copies or phonorecords", in addition to getting up to a year of jail time and/or fines.
Nice.
I think we would take the third option, which is to build space habitats. It's a lot cheaper than building an invasion force and traveling lightyears just to take someone else's planet.
It was designed to work well with the xbox360 controller, with a mouse you ended up with a poor UI where you had to shove the mouse forward for an arbitrary, seemingly random distance to trigger the lockpicks upward movement, and because you never could be sure that the lockpick would actually react to the movement of the mouse, you usually ended up reacting too late which meant that you missed the window of opportunity for locking the pin and broke a lockpick (which is why I personally always used the skeleton key+auto-attempt). Then you had to move the mouse sideways to move on to the next pin, which usually entailed the lockpick jumping around. Even auto-attempting sucked, because the mouse pointer was invisible when lockpicking, so you had to thrash the mouse around before reaching the auto-attempt area which made the pointer visible. All in all, poor design, it would have worked much better with the arrow keys on the keyboard.
They could always change their mind. The GPLv3 would help in this case only if SGI themselves distributed/contributed code that covered the patent in question. If they are really serious about not minding GPL code that use those patents, maybe they will release something under v3 themselves? Just saying something publicly doesn't make it legally binding.
Another thing I'm worried about is minigames. The lockpicking minigame in Oblivion was pure torture on the PC, and even finding the mouse pointer so that you could click auto attempt was annoying! The persuasion minigame didn't at least penalize mouse users, but it was pretty pointless and broke immersion. So hopefully Bethesda learned their lesson, and does not have any minigames in FO3.
Wouldn't huge penalties like that increase the inflation of sentences? Getting jail time for copyright infringement suddenly becomes much more reasonable when you can end up in jail for silly "crimes" like frivolous lawsuits. Not everything can be solved by tougher punishments! Some might even argue that such measures solve nothing at all...
WTF? No, this is SPARTA!
Who pushed for a resurvey of the lines? What was wrong with the borders as they were before 1970?
On an off-topic note, why do I have to disable the new comment system to see AC responses to myself? Is it a bug in Firefox or in the comment system? And why does my post seem to consist only of unanswered questions?