They say they used the latest nVidia driver, so I'd assume they are using the actual hardware driver. Compositing can still cause a hit to performance, but if the game is run in full screen mode it should not be doing any compositing (it is hard to tell if they were in full screen or not).
And yes, they were using an nVidia card, and nVidia with Ubuntu always makes me cringe (and I am a huge fan of nVidia) because most people don't know they need to install the hardware driver and that it won't install on its own for political* reasons.
*Ubuntu subscribes to the Richard M Stallman school of thought - if it doesn't have free source, it can't be included in the distro, and nVidia only releases binary drivers. However, they at least make it easy to find in their package manager, provided you know you need it. I have helped several Ubuntu (and Debian) Linux noobs with this, the most recent was my best friend's wife. She was having performance issues with Boxee - and yes, she is a techie, far geekier than my friend (she plays in an all girl D&D group, plays MMOs, actually tries different OS's like Linux [my friend wouldn't], etc) - so now she has a re-purposed retired game machine, mainly for their kid to watch internet TV on.
Communism isn't necessarily a bad idea, but true communism relies on everyone buying into the idea, not a strong arm dictatorship forcing it to work. It is built around the idea of everyone sharing what they have or skills they have voluntarily for the benefit of others. Star Trek was actually quite communistic when you think about it - everyone worked together for the benefit of the whole. Star Wars was similar, but the rebels all had a buy in (defeat the evil dictator). The revisited Battlestar Galactica was pretty much just the opposite of both of those.
The only successful "communists" I know of are communal Mennonites and Amish. Their buy in is religion, and they've managed to successfully keep their communes in capitalist countries, though not without some hiccups - there's a reason many of them fled the US for Canada during the first World War - religious persecution in the US (like tossing 4 kids into Leavenworth prison for being conscientious objectors and killing 3 of them).
I like the ideals of Communism, but the reality is we can't even keep marriages together, and getting an entire country to work together like that is like keeping a big marriage together. It looks nice on paper, but since there is no buy in except a promise, the only way to make it work is to force it with a strong dictatorship - in marriage terms, you need an abusive husband to beat his wife and children into being completely submissive, with the husband being the dictator and the wife and children being his people.
A significant percentage of all UK citizens already are law breakers. It's against the law to format shift here (rip a CD to mp3 for example) yet millions of people here own mp3 players.
There technically is no such thing as format shift under copyright law in the US, which was designed for written works (and nothing else), but due to copyright law being applied to other media types, a judge ruled that archival copies can be in different formats than the original (so format shifting is allowed - section 117 of the copyright code doesn't specify). Still, it is only supposed to be a single archival copy, made by the owner, and transferred to any other copyright holder with the work, so ripping to a computer and then copying to an mp3 player is definitely a violation, unless you destroy the original media or the copy on computer. To further confuse the issue, it is explicitly forbidden by the DMCA to decrypt encrypted data despite being allowed to create said backup in any format we desire, so there is no legal way to, say, copy a DVD that is encrypted and/or copy protected. We also are not allowed to play or share any particular media with anyone else, but we can transfer the license to them. Playing a CD loudly enough so that others can hear? Illegal by copyright law*. Watch a DVD with loved ones? Also illegal by copyright law* (both are single user licenses).
The law makes a lot more sense when applied to written works than other media. For instance, I own a book. I can lend, give, or sell the book to you, transferring the license to you for a time. You can then lend, give, or sell the book back to me, transferring the license back. Also the owner can copy the book for archival (backup) purposes. In lending a license you own the license for a specific period of time, and then the license transfers back to the owner, whether they have the physical media back or not. Incidentally, an overdue library book is a form of copyright violation.
* Fair use, however, does allow us to watch DVDs, listen to music, etc. with others, but is ambiguous and up to a judge to decide if a violation occurred and the copyright holder to prosecute. Copyright holders tend to be litigious even when they have no chance under fair use. Fair use came into play more because of other types of media being used with copyright protection, but does to some extent apply to written works, if they are, say, shared by a family.
I don't remember ever re-mailing or seeing anyone re-mail anything to the USPS during the time I sort-of worked for UPS (a 3 week full time temp job during the summer while I was still in high school), nor did I see anything like that when I worked in billing (another temp job just before college, but 2 weeks this time, filling in for a lady on maternity leave). I'm not saying it isn't possible, I just didn't see it, nor did I load anything that was delivered to the post office, or see any billing code for re-billing to the post office, though there was a misc category that was mainly used for, say, checks missing a billing statement (so we didn't know where to file them). I did see mail delivered from the post office, however, in massive quantities (20+ mail bags a day).
Delaying packages for several days to maximize efficiency delivering to an area was very common, though (probably much more-so than today), and that isn't a luxury the USPS gets. A few trucks went out with only a few packages destined for remote locations, but it wasn't too often, and when you see something like a "3-7 day window," hitting 7 days, it usually was for remote deliveries. The USPS, on the other hand, has to visit every house every day, 6 days a week, even if it is in the middle of nowhere, while companies like UPS only visit if they need to drop off or pick-up. I remember reading about some guy in Nevada over 100 miles from the nearest post office and they have to visit him even if there is no mail to deliver or pick up at the cost of hundreds of dollars a day. The post office wanted to end Saturday service just for those people and they threatened to sue, because it is their constitutional right to get mail delivery (the constitution says nothing about daily delivery, but that was the argument I remember).
The one problem with breeder reactor designs and facilities reprocessing nuclear materials on the scale to get rid of these "spent fuel rods" is more political than technical.
correction - The only problem with breeder reactor designs and facilities reprocessing nuclear materials on the scale to get rid of these "spent fuel rods" is more PROFITABLE than technical.
We actually know how to build much better fission reactors (as in simpler, less dangerous, burns raw fuel and far more completely to the tune of 99% vs 1%, scales well, creates very little waste, doesn't require high pressure or active cooling, and with a salt plug has passive shutdown) that utilities won't develop because they want to make money selling nuclear weapons grade uranium to the government and reprocessed rods back to nuclear reactors. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor.
Well 9 came with SATA drivers, and they were the first major Linux distribution to come with them. I had just built a new PC at the time with SATA and didn't know that Linux SATA drivers were still in beta. I was happy to find a Linux distribution I didn't have to hack to install, and I really enjoyed the distribution, but the move to Mandriva was awkward and I didn't follow it, choosing to move to a different dist (and I went with the difficult to use GenToo source distribution, but not for long - having my machine compiling all day for weeks for a tiny boost in performance was just silly).
Also losing OnStar and other contracts, spinning off profitable divisions like UGS to save their stock from junk (their spin was they were realigning to be service only, but the bottom line is if they didn't sell UGS, their stock was going to be junk). I watched Control Data do a similar tailspin, so I can't say I didn't see it coming. Unisys, you're up next. HP, you're on deck.
EDS was bleeding money when HP bought them, and had spun off profitable divisions to keep their stock from going junk. The remaining company was a services company that had lost major contracts like Onstar. Palm also had been bleeding money and losing marketshare, as well, as they lost big time in the move from PDA to Blackberry and smart phones. HP wanted to move out of the low profit PC market and into the high profit services company like IBM did, but buying failing services companies is probably not the way to do that, unless you're just building staff. The road to successful services based companies is littered with corpses that tried to keep alive their services division at the cost of everything else like Control Data, and Unisys would have joined them if it wasn't for the GIF patent, but they're well on their way now, outsourcing services jobs to India... I don't think services is a market you can really buy your way in to, especially buying failing companies that had lost major services contracts. Also as much as I despise SAP for HR, I don't think you'll ever dethrone SAP from HR departments because HR is a career for sadists that like to make their customers (employees) use the most difficult, obtuse tools because they make nice pie charts.
Also Autonomy... ugh. It is a decent product, but they have been rubbing their customers the wrong way, increasingly demanding more money (I don't have access to financials, but corporate makes it sound like extortion). We have multiple teams working on integrating alternatives to Autonomy, so if they aren't careful, they'll soon be kicked to the curb by at least one major customer. I think the major reason HP bought Autonomy was EDS was heavily invested in their search technology.
Actually, they say GT555M, which is on the low end of the high end and seems like an odd choice for gamers. The emphasis seems to be on CPU, packing an 2.8GHz Intel® CoreTM i7 2640M, which is the fastest clocked dual core mobile CPU (but not necessarily fastest performing). I would agree that is a design mistake - I'd stick in an i5 and a Geforce GTX 580M or 590M because GPU is more important to gamers than CPU, but perhaps the 555 conserves battery much better than those other ones (nVidia claims it is a good tradeoff of performance vs battery life), so they may be aiming for longer battery life.
I have a suspicion that the 7200 rpm drive is an error, but I could be wrong. I would guess it is a 7200 rpm hybrid drive like the Seagate Momentus XT, which combines a 320GB HDD with a 4GB SSD drive and costs around $100, and they claim it is around 80% as fast as a SSD, wheras an SSD at that size would be about $500 for 20% more speed.
That GPU also supports 3D Vision, so there is the possibility that it may also include 3D glasses.
As for the $2800 price tag, Razor anythings are always expensive - looks like standard price doubling over cost, so they are going Apple-like or Alienware-like margins. I have friends with Razor mice and I have a logitech performance laser mouse and I've tried both and I don't really see any improvement in gaming (in fact, I like mine better). On the other hand, their keyboards roll mine for gaming - one has a $200 (at the time - I think they're $160-170 now) G19 Logitech keyboard and the other has a ~$130 Razor keyboard (the WoW model). My non-gaming keyboard has 5 programmable macro keys, their keyboards have... many, many more. I also only paid only $30 for mine (I don't really play a lot of games that need macros, anyway).
Technically Apple isn't even successful in the tablet business - as zdnet pointed out a few days ago on their blog (sorry, can't find ref - too many posts on HP touchpad and Apple there), the iPad isn't marketed as a tablet, and therefore consumers see it not as an oversized phone or undersized PC, but as a unique product. Likewise, the iPod wasn't marketed as an mp3 player, and therefore wasn't seen as a competitor in the then established mp3 player market, where they would be seen as overpriced and of meager capacity.
For some people like Russell Mulcahy it took the 5 year gap between Highlander and Highlander II.
To be honest, Resurrection and Resident Evil: Extinction (later Mulcahy works) weren't that bad. Not good, but not drivel like Tales of the Mummy (but even that is a masterpiece compared to some of the crap I've seen - Vampires vs Zombies, I'm calling you out here, and you aren't even the worst movie I've seen, but I can't remember the name of it at the moment). Most of his stuff is mediocre, like Michael Bay, but Michael bay is given $200,000,000 to cover up the lousy acting and plot with special effects.
Now that I've said that, name one bad movie directed by Ridley Scott. I can't because there aren't any. There are some mediocre ones like Black Rain, but nothing really bad.
I have a data plan, and texting IS free. Not through those bloodsuckers at Verizon, though, who want $30/month for a family plan or $1 per text, but rather through a downloaded app that uses email and sends through my data plan. I also set up a number on the internet that is used to receive texts and convert them to email (which pings on my phone, just like a text message - hopefully I won't get spammers on that email acct... - works great as long as people send to that number and not my cell number). The downside is I need to know if my friends have ported their numbers, but I only have about 8 friends I would even send or receive a text to or from, so that wasn't hard to do.
Unfortunately my phone service choices are limited pretty much to Verizon and Sprint (can't get AT&T or T-Mobile at home - no or 1 bar reception when people on those networks visit - my stucco house probably has a very interfering wire mesh), and I had Sprint for 2 years and can't stand them (spotty service, dropped calls, BAD customer support... but note this was 10 years ago or maybe a bit more - I nicknamed my phone services US Worst and Splint at the time, and then Qworst when Qwest bought US West).
Yes - and picking the better solution does not equal lazy - NASA was set on their mainframes for years when a Beowulf cluster of Linux boxes did a better job in less time - just because the technology was relevant yesterday doesn't mean it still is today. At least C++11 is finally adding features I have believed were desperately needed 20 years ago - native threading being one. On the minus side, many memory access issues are still not addressed and Microsoft will probably continue to list numerous functions as "deprecated" or possibly not support them at all, fragmenting the language. C++ threads are also incompatible with Microsoft's Windows native threads (as far as I can tell), so I probably still will need to fragment my code for Windows and other OS's like I do now (currently Windows threads and pthreads are managed separately - I can change pthreads to C++ threads).
I currently work on a client written in.NET silverlight, and despite my personal aversion for Microsoft proprietary products, it was written in about 1/2 the time of our java client (and far, far less than our C++ client) and is definitely less buggy (and yes, I DO have metrics). I suspect we'll move to html5 eventually, especially if MS moves that way, but for at least the short term we're sticking with silverlight and we baseline on 3 even though 4 is out and mono supports it (which is important for iPad support).
Keep in mind that id tech is and always has been designed for a specific game/game genre and UE3 is not - it is designed for many different types of games. Different types of games need different asset management systems (an RPG is far different than a shooter).
That makes sense - I've done streamed terrain quadtrees and they are essentially a megatexture, but contains just height data (1 float of 4 bytes, but I've used 8 bits and 16 bits in the past). At the granularity I was using, I used up 2GB of disk for my terrain, and it wasn't overly large. Megatexturing simply is the same thing, but adds 12 (or 16, but terrain rarely needs alpha, so my bet is 12) bytes for color data, which would bring my quadtree up to 8GB. Oblivion was much larger than my terrain, but may have had less granularity, but if the terrain data alone took 8GB, the stuff on top probably would kick it up to 15 (uncompressed), and imagine doubling or quadrupling that, as each iteration of TES has done.
Heh - my engine supports megatexturing already... some shaders would need to be rewritten, but we already stream tiles of terrain and load it to texture (the shader sees it as 4 heights per "pixel," so the change would be 1 height and 3 colors).
Sounds like my HP laptop, and the designer decided to bury that failure prone component under over 100 screws and requires the removal of nearly every component to get to it (and doesn't sell the fan itself individually, only with the heat sink, and it costs $85-200 for their proprietary heat sink). On the plus side, I can disassemble and reassemble an HP laptop now, minus a few screws.
I very much miss my ASUS, with only 32 screws to get to any component (too bad the mobo kept blowing, or more specifically, the 8600M GPU).
I'd hope he is talking about ray tracing - I'm basically doing ray tracing inside of polygons in shaders today, and I'm sure he has, too. I really don't think ray casting has enough advantages over polygons that would make it worth it, and has significant disadvantages that would need to be worked around (no reflections, shadows, etc). Back in the 1980/1990s, programmers used the painter's algorithm instead of zbuffer because it was significantly slower to use zbuffer up to a certain number of polygons, and right as zbuffer was becoming practical consumer hardware became available that used it, killing the painter's algorithm. Ray tracing actually falls into a similar category - as the number of objects in a scene grows, it scales linearly, so at some point it will be cheaper or as cheap to use ray tracing as it is to use polygons. If monitors had stuck with 640x480, we'd easily be there today.
Not that ray tracing doesn't have issues - it needs access to the entire scene in memory (GPU memory optimally - GPU parallel processing is ideal), creates hard shadows only (without photon mapping or similar - I'd say Radiosity, but I doubt we'll see that full scene in realtime anytime soon - O(n^5) I believe), requires a lot more processing power for larger monitors (640x480 is 307200 rays, 1920x1200 is 2304000 rays or 7.5x more expensive - in contrast, polygons don't increase in cost by monitor size), and displays reflective lighting far better than diffuse.
All of the problems above are solvable by lots of GPU horsepower and memory - we're not there yet, but in 10 years, who knows?
It says agree, not somewhat agree, but here are my two bits on the questions:
1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree). If there was a way I could make "strongly agree" say "damn straight" I would - call _me_ biased on this one, but observation has yet to prove otherwise. Ever hire Electricians, Plumbers, or HVAC? They get incredibly high salaries even for trivial work. In addition, they are often required to pull permits to verify their work. I can't even legally do my own HVAC (nor can I even get replacement parts due to a monopoly that requires a license to even buy them - I had a vent hit with a sledgehammer during bathroom tear-down) work in my area. I can do plumbing and electricity with a $100+ permit - and something like a bathroom ceiling fan requires both an electrical and mechanical permit (to ensure proper venting) that costs 3x what the fan did - and it is a good fan. In addition, rental property owners are not allowed to do work on their rental properties for even trivial work, and for plumbing issues like snaking a drain are not allowed to call technicians due to laws pushed through by generally liberal unions they belong to (renters can, not owners). I don't understand why I can't, say, install a water softener or a dishwasher or a garbage disposal at my rental property if I already have to pay for a permit to get my work inspected (all of which I have done at that property before it was a rental property - I still replace the garbage disposals myself because renters keep destroying them without a permit - as long as I'm not caught in the act, the city will never know). Licensing costs money, and licensees will add that to costs.
Biased or not? Not biased.
2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree). Incomes are up, but not when adjusted for inflation, we have a higher jobless rate now, home ownership is higher, but so are foreclosures, and the rich and poor divide is greater. This is an easy one where disagree could be picked, so I consider the question loaded.
Biased or not? Biased.
3) Rent control leads to housing shortages (unenlightened answer: disagree). Rent control, if you don't know, is a ceiling price for rents. Most economists say disagree (I've heard that at least - I could probably easily dig up a link if I tried), and some places with rent control have had housing shortages because of it (*cough* Hanoi *cough*), but there are arguments for both sides so I can see either way.
Biased or not? Biased.
4) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (unenlightened answer: agree). A monopoly is unambiguously the only company in that line business in a particular area or the world, not the largest market share.
Biased or not? Not Biased, and shows how ignorant people are of what constitutes a monopoly.
5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree). American Businesses with employees overseas have to obey a certain code of conduct, so I could never see agree to this, but I could see somewhat agree (I'm sure it is possible to find cases of labor abuse).
Biased or not? somewhat Biased
6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree). This was the key point given by those that opposed NAFTA, and proved to be wrong. Since this hasn't really been confirmed over a long period of time, I'd lean toward biased.
Biased or not? somewhat Biased.
7) Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree). I don't see how you could say agree here - it increases base cost, so therefore less people can be hired. At BEST you can say it keeps employment flat.
Biased or not? Not biased
So 2 questions are biased, 2 slightly biased, and 3 not biased at least in my opinion. The very liberal got a 5.6 - even giving them the monopoly one wrong, how the f*ck do you get almost 6?
Most of that censorship (like the ban on red blood causing games to use green blood or android armies) was pre-PEGI. These days Germany mostly follows PEGI recommendations without additional censorship except for certain things (like swastikas), or so my German friends say.
I still laugh at their crazy taxes, though - for instance, computers are taxed as TVs even if they aren't used as TVs. I'm waiting for smartphones to get that tax bitch slap...
Except this isn't USB 3.0 - 3.0 version 1.0 (yes, it is called 3.0v1 in documentation) is out the door and in devices from several manufacturers already. Since they made careful note that it is version 1.0 of the 3.0 specification, this upcoming version could be anything from 3.0v2 or 3.1 or even 4.0 - whatever their product marketing elves decide. As for whether it is less CPU intensive or not, you've got me. I also haven't heard anything about polling vs interrupt, but it is backward compatible with 2.0 (you need special 3.0 cables to use a 3.0 device), so if they did make such a switch it probably has to support both. The one thing I had heard is it is full duplex now. Oh, and Intel is holding back support at the moment (rumor has it to promote Thunderbolt, which they co-developed with Apple), but board manufacture MSI has one (in fact, I just built a computer with one, and apparently I got lucky on the crap shoot with that board because they seem to have an extremely high failure rate - mine works perfectly... makes me wonder if there is a BIOS issue [like memory timings specced too high for the cheap memory people tend to buy - I've actually had that problem on an ASUS board and it looked like the board was DOA]), and I think AMD has some as well.
Actually, if you read through the slideshow at the end of TFA it points out that security is getting much better on macs in the past couple of releases. The main vulnerability, and where Windows is significantly better, seems to be network exploits from within the LAN, since kerberos can be bypassed in several ways to fall back to the default security and there are exploits to that. It should allow forcing kerberos only with no fallback, and if it did that would match it with Windows. Kerberos is a very good protocol and has been beaten on for many years (it is the required security model for IPv6 support because it is used by IPsec).
I like the bonjour hack best - Apple's "nice network" vulnerability exploit (if hostnames conflict, one will change itself allowing the other to spoof).
Some of the exploits I have noticed from version 10.0 - like how easy it would be to spoof the credentials page (which they say is harder on Windows, but I think in some ways it is easier since all you need to do is get them to click a button).
This is ARM talking, and where is ARM used? In mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc) and controllers. This is like asking Microsoft what the future of the OS market is.
That said, I think there is a huge market for handheld games, especially a casual market where the player wouldn't normally buy a handheld game platform, but if one came with their phone or iPad, they will take advantage of it. If these systems come with more gaming power, developers will take advantage of it, as well, and make games for both casual and hardcore players. The only real downside is the brain leeching of talent from other platforms to program for mobile.
yeah - me too - unfortunately from what was reported, the Vista/Windows 7 driver model killed it (my guess is the hardware GUI code that was added doesn't allow graphics to be directed along the USB2 bus, but I don't think Thunderbolt will have that issue because it interconnects with the same bus that graphics cards use).
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They say they used the latest nVidia driver, so I'd assume they are using the actual hardware driver. Compositing can still cause a hit to performance, but if the game is run in full screen mode it should not be doing any compositing (it is hard to tell if they were in full screen or not).
And yes, they were using an nVidia card, and nVidia with Ubuntu always makes me cringe (and I am a huge fan of nVidia) because most people don't know they need to install the hardware driver and that it won't install on its own for political* reasons.
*Ubuntu subscribes to the Richard M Stallman school of thought - if it doesn't have free source, it can't be included in the distro, and nVidia only releases binary drivers. However, they at least make it easy to find in their package manager, provided you know you need it. I have helped several Ubuntu (and Debian) Linux noobs with this, the most recent was my best friend's wife. She was having performance issues with Boxee - and yes, she is a techie, far geekier than my friend (she plays in an all girl D&D group, plays MMOs, actually tries different OS's like Linux [my friend wouldn't], etc) - so now she has a re-purposed retired game machine, mainly for their kid to watch internet TV on.
Communism isn't necessarily a bad idea, but true communism relies on everyone buying into the idea, not a strong arm dictatorship forcing it to work. It is built around the idea of everyone sharing what they have or skills they have voluntarily for the benefit of others. Star Trek was actually quite communistic when you think about it - everyone worked together for the benefit of the whole. Star Wars was similar, but the rebels all had a buy in (defeat the evil dictator). The revisited Battlestar Galactica was pretty much just the opposite of both of those.
The only successful "communists" I know of are communal Mennonites and Amish. Their buy in is religion, and they've managed to successfully keep their communes in capitalist countries, though not without some hiccups - there's a reason many of them fled the US for Canada during the first World War - religious persecution in the US (like tossing 4 kids into Leavenworth prison for being conscientious objectors and killing 3 of them).
I like the ideals of Communism, but the reality is we can't even keep marriages together, and getting an entire country to work together like that is like keeping a big marriage together. It looks nice on paper, but since there is no buy in except a promise, the only way to make it work is to force it with a strong dictatorship - in marriage terms, you need an abusive husband to beat his wife and children into being completely submissive, with the husband being the dictator and the wife and children being his people.
There technically is no such thing as format shift under copyright law in the US, which was designed for written works (and nothing else), but due to copyright law being applied to other media types, a judge ruled that archival copies can be in different formats than the original (so format shifting is allowed - section 117 of the copyright code doesn't specify). Still, it is only supposed to be a single archival copy, made by the owner, and transferred to any other copyright holder with the work, so ripping to a computer and then copying to an mp3 player is definitely a violation, unless you destroy the original media or the copy on computer. To further confuse the issue, it is explicitly forbidden by the DMCA to decrypt encrypted data despite being allowed to create said backup in any format we desire, so there is no legal way to, say, copy a DVD that is encrypted and/or copy protected. We also are not allowed to play or share any particular media with anyone else, but we can transfer the license to them. Playing a CD loudly enough so that others can hear? Illegal by copyright law*. Watch a DVD with loved ones? Also illegal by copyright law* (both are single user licenses).
The law makes a lot more sense when applied to written works than other media. For instance, I own a book. I can lend, give, or sell the book to you, transferring the license to you for a time. You can then lend, give, or sell the book back to me, transferring the license back. Also the owner can copy the book for archival (backup) purposes. In lending a license you own the license for a specific period of time, and then the license transfers back to the owner, whether they have the physical media back or not. Incidentally, an overdue library book is a form of copyright violation.
* Fair use, however, does allow us to watch DVDs, listen to music, etc. with others, but is ambiguous and up to a judge to decide if a violation occurred and the copyright holder to prosecute. Copyright holders tend to be litigious even when they have no chance under fair use. Fair use came into play more because of other types of media being used with copyright protection, but does to some extent apply to written works, if they are, say, shared by a family.
I don't remember ever re-mailing or seeing anyone re-mail anything to the USPS during the time I sort-of worked for UPS (a 3 week full time temp job during the summer while I was still in high school), nor did I see anything like that when I worked in billing (another temp job just before college, but 2 weeks this time, filling in for a lady on maternity leave). I'm not saying it isn't possible, I just didn't see it, nor did I load anything that was delivered to the post office, or see any billing code for re-billing to the post office, though there was a misc category that was mainly used for, say, checks missing a billing statement (so we didn't know where to file them). I did see mail delivered from the post office, however, in massive quantities (20+ mail bags a day).
Delaying packages for several days to maximize efficiency delivering to an area was very common, though (probably much more-so than today), and that isn't a luxury the USPS gets. A few trucks went out with only a few packages destined for remote locations, but it wasn't too often, and when you see something like a "3-7 day window," hitting 7 days, it usually was for remote deliveries. The USPS, on the other hand, has to visit every house every day, 6 days a week, even if it is in the middle of nowhere, while companies like UPS only visit if they need to drop off or pick-up. I remember reading about some guy in Nevada over 100 miles from the nearest post office and they have to visit him even if there is no mail to deliver or pick up at the cost of hundreds of dollars a day. The post office wanted to end Saturday service just for those people and they threatened to sue, because it is their constitutional right to get mail delivery (the constitution says nothing about daily delivery, but that was the argument I remember).
Not quite - Scheme is more a subset of lisp with a few different features and a much smaller standard library.
I personally hate them both because (over(use(and(need(for(lots(of(parens(without(format(requirements)(drives me))))(crazy))))).
unless you take RadAway, er, this stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-Androstenediol
correction - The only problem with breeder reactor designs and facilities reprocessing nuclear materials on the scale to get rid of these "spent fuel rods" is more PROFITABLE than technical.
We actually know how to build much better fission reactors (as in simpler, less dangerous, burns raw fuel and far more completely to the tune of 99% vs 1%, scales well, creates very little waste, doesn't require high pressure or active cooling, and with a salt plug has passive shutdown) that utilities won't develop because they want to make money selling nuclear weapons grade uranium to the government and reprocessed rods back to nuclear reactors.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor.
Well 9 came with SATA drivers, and they were the first major Linux distribution to come with them. I had just built a new PC at the time with SATA and didn't know that Linux SATA drivers were still in beta. I was happy to find a Linux distribution I didn't have to hack to install, and I really enjoyed the distribution, but the move to Mandriva was awkward and I didn't follow it, choosing to move to a different dist (and I went with the difficult to use GenToo source distribution, but not for long - having my machine compiling all day for weeks for a tiny boost in performance was just silly).
Also losing OnStar and other contracts, spinning off profitable divisions like UGS to save their stock from junk (their spin was they were realigning to be service only, but the bottom line is if they didn't sell UGS, their stock was going to be junk). I watched Control Data do a similar tailspin, so I can't say I didn't see it coming. Unisys, you're up next. HP, you're on deck.
EDS was bleeding money when HP bought them, and had spun off profitable divisions to keep their stock from going junk. The remaining company was a services company that had lost major contracts like Onstar. Palm also had been bleeding money and losing marketshare, as well, as they lost big time in the move from PDA to Blackberry and smart phones. HP wanted to move out of the low profit PC market and into the high profit services company like IBM did, but buying failing services companies is probably not the way to do that, unless you're just building staff. The road to successful services based companies is littered with corpses that tried to keep alive their services division at the cost of everything else like Control Data, and Unisys would have joined them if it wasn't for the GIF patent, but they're well on their way now, outsourcing services jobs to India... I don't think services is a market you can really buy your way in to, especially buying failing companies that had lost major services contracts. Also as much as I despise SAP for HR, I don't think you'll ever dethrone SAP from HR departments because HR is a career for sadists that like to make their customers (employees) use the most difficult, obtuse tools because they make nice pie charts.
Also Autonomy... ugh. It is a decent product, but they have been rubbing their customers the wrong way, increasingly demanding more money (I don't have access to financials, but corporate makes it sound like extortion). We have multiple teams working on integrating alternatives to Autonomy, so if they aren't careful, they'll soon be kicked to the curb by at least one major customer. I think the major reason HP bought Autonomy was EDS was heavily invested in their search technology.
Actually, they say GT555M, which is on the low end of the high end and seems like an odd choice for gamers. The emphasis seems to be on CPU, packing an 2.8GHz Intel® CoreTM i7 2640M, which is the fastest clocked dual core mobile CPU (but not necessarily fastest performing). I would agree that is a design mistake - I'd stick in an i5 and a Geforce GTX 580M or 590M because GPU is more important to gamers than CPU, but perhaps the 555 conserves battery much better than those other ones (nVidia claims it is a good tradeoff of performance vs battery life), so they may be aiming for longer battery life.
I have a suspicion that the 7200 rpm drive is an error, but I could be wrong. I would guess it is a 7200 rpm hybrid drive like the Seagate Momentus XT, which combines a 320GB HDD with a 4GB SSD drive and costs around $100, and they claim it is around 80% as fast as a SSD, wheras an SSD at that size would be about $500 for 20% more speed.
That GPU also supports 3D Vision, so there is the possibility that it may also include 3D glasses.
As for the $2800 price tag, Razor anythings are always expensive - looks like standard price doubling over cost, so they are going Apple-like or Alienware-like margins. I have friends with Razor mice and I have a logitech performance laser mouse and I've tried both and I don't really see any improvement in gaming (in fact, I like mine better). On the other hand, their keyboards roll mine for gaming - one has a $200 (at the time - I think they're $160-170 now) G19 Logitech keyboard and the other has a ~$130 Razor keyboard (the WoW model). My non-gaming keyboard has 5 programmable macro keys, their keyboards have... many, many more. I also only paid only $30 for mine (I don't really play a lot of games that need macros, anyway).
Technically Apple isn't even successful in the tablet business - as zdnet pointed out a few days ago on their blog (sorry, can't find ref - too many posts on HP touchpad and Apple there), the iPad isn't marketed as a tablet, and therefore consumers see it not as an oversized phone or undersized PC, but as a unique product. Likewise, the iPod wasn't marketed as an mp3 player, and therefore wasn't seen as a competitor in the then established mp3 player market, where they would be seen as overpriced and of meager capacity.
For some people like Russell Mulcahy it took the 5 year gap between Highlander and Highlander II.
To be honest, Resurrection and Resident Evil: Extinction (later Mulcahy works) weren't that bad. Not good, but not drivel like Tales of the Mummy (but even that is a masterpiece compared to some of the crap I've seen - Vampires vs Zombies, I'm calling you out here, and you aren't even the worst movie I've seen, but I can't remember the name of it at the moment). Most of his stuff is mediocre, like Michael Bay, but Michael bay is given $200,000,000 to cover up the lousy acting and plot with special effects.
Now that I've said that, name one bad movie directed by Ridley Scott. I can't because there aren't any. There are some mediocre ones like Black Rain, but nothing really bad.
I have a data plan, and texting IS free. Not through those bloodsuckers at Verizon, though, who want $30/month for a family plan or $1 per text, but rather through a downloaded app that uses email and sends through my data plan. I also set up a number on the internet that is used to receive texts and convert them to email (which pings on my phone, just like a text message - hopefully I won't get spammers on that email acct... - works great as long as people send to that number and not my cell number). The downside is I need to know if my friends have ported their numbers, but I only have about 8 friends I would even send or receive a text to or from, so that wasn't hard to do.
Unfortunately my phone service choices are limited pretty much to Verizon and Sprint (can't get AT&T or T-Mobile at home - no or 1 bar reception when people on those networks visit - my stucco house probably has a very interfering wire mesh), and I had Sprint for 2 years and can't stand them (spotty service, dropped calls, BAD customer support... but note this was 10 years ago or maybe a bit more - I nicknamed my phone services US Worst and Splint at the time, and then Qworst when Qwest bought US West).
Yes - and picking the better solution does not equal lazy - NASA was set on their mainframes for years when a Beowulf cluster of Linux boxes did a better job in less time - just because the technology was relevant yesterday doesn't mean it still is today. At least C++11 is finally adding features I have believed were desperately needed 20 years ago - native threading being one. On the minus side, many memory access issues are still not addressed and Microsoft will probably continue to list numerous functions as "deprecated" or possibly not support them at all, fragmenting the language. C++ threads are also incompatible with Microsoft's Windows native threads (as far as I can tell), so I probably still will need to fragment my code for Windows and other OS's like I do now (currently Windows threads and pthreads are managed separately - I can change pthreads to C++ threads).
I currently work on a client written in .NET silverlight, and despite my personal aversion for Microsoft proprietary products, it was written in about 1/2 the time of our java client (and far, far less than our C++ client) and is definitely less buggy (and yes, I DO have metrics). I suspect we'll move to html5 eventually, especially if MS moves that way, but for at least the short term we're sticking with silverlight and we baseline on 3 even though 4 is out and mono supports it (which is important for iPad support).
Keep in mind that id tech is and always has been designed for a specific game/game genre and UE3 is not - it is designed for many different types of games. Different types of games need different asset management systems (an RPG is far different than a shooter).
That makes sense - I've done streamed terrain quadtrees and they are essentially a megatexture, but contains just height data (1 float of 4 bytes, but I've used 8 bits and 16 bits in the past). At the granularity I was using, I used up 2GB of disk for my terrain, and it wasn't overly large. Megatexturing simply is the same thing, but adds 12 (or 16, but terrain rarely needs alpha, so my bet is 12) bytes for color data, which would bring my quadtree up to 8GB. Oblivion was much larger than my terrain, but may have had less granularity, but if the terrain data alone took 8GB, the stuff on top probably would kick it up to 15 (uncompressed), and imagine doubling or quadrupling that, as each iteration of TES has done.
Heh - my engine supports megatexturing already... some shaders would need to be rewritten, but we already stream tiles of terrain and load it to texture (the shader sees it as 4 heights per "pixel," so the change would be 1 height and 3 colors).
Sounds like my HP laptop, and the designer decided to bury that failure prone component under over 100 screws and requires the removal of nearly every component to get to it (and doesn't sell the fan itself individually, only with the heat sink, and it costs $85-200 for their proprietary heat sink). On the plus side, I can disassemble and reassemble an HP laptop now, minus a few screws.
I very much miss my ASUS, with only 32 screws to get to any component (too bad the mobo kept blowing, or more specifically, the 8600M GPU).
I'd hope he is talking about ray tracing - I'm basically doing ray tracing inside of polygons in shaders today, and I'm sure he has, too. I really don't think ray casting has enough advantages over polygons that would make it worth it, and has significant disadvantages that would need to be worked around (no reflections, shadows, etc). Back in the 1980/1990s, programmers used the painter's algorithm instead of zbuffer because it was significantly slower to use zbuffer up to a certain number of polygons, and right as zbuffer was becoming practical consumer hardware became available that used it, killing the painter's algorithm. Ray tracing actually falls into a similar category - as the number of objects in a scene grows, it scales linearly, so at some point it will be cheaper or as cheap to use ray tracing as it is to use polygons. If monitors had stuck with 640x480, we'd easily be there today.
Not that ray tracing doesn't have issues - it needs access to the entire scene in memory (GPU memory optimally - GPU parallel processing is ideal), creates hard shadows only (without photon mapping or similar - I'd say Radiosity, but I doubt we'll see that full scene in realtime anytime soon - O(n^5) I believe), requires a lot more processing power for larger monitors (640x480 is 307200 rays, 1920x1200 is 2304000 rays or 7.5x more expensive - in contrast, polygons don't increase in cost by monitor size), and displays reflective lighting far better than diffuse.
All of the problems above are solvable by lots of GPU horsepower and memory - we're not there yet, but in 10 years, who knows?
It says agree, not somewhat agree, but here are my two bits on the questions:
1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree).
If there was a way I could make "strongly agree" say "damn straight" I would - call _me_ biased on this one, but observation has yet to prove otherwise. Ever hire Electricians, Plumbers, or HVAC? They get incredibly high salaries even for trivial work. In addition, they are often required to pull permits to verify their work. I can't even legally do my own HVAC (nor can I even get replacement parts due to a monopoly that requires a license to even buy them - I had a vent hit with a sledgehammer during bathroom tear-down) work in my area. I can do plumbing and electricity with a $100+ permit - and something like a bathroom ceiling fan requires both an electrical and mechanical permit (to ensure proper venting) that costs 3x what the fan did - and it is a good fan. In addition, rental property owners are not allowed to do work on their rental properties for even trivial work, and for plumbing issues like snaking a drain are not allowed to call technicians due to laws pushed through by generally liberal unions they belong to (renters can, not owners). I don't understand why I can't, say, install a water softener or a dishwasher or a garbage disposal at my rental property if I already have to pay for a permit to get my work inspected (all of which I have done at that property before it was a rental property - I still replace the garbage disposals myself because renters keep destroying them without a permit - as long as I'm not caught in the act, the city will never know). Licensing costs money, and licensees will add that to costs.
Biased or not? Not biased.
2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree).
Incomes are up, but not when adjusted for inflation, we have a higher jobless rate now, home ownership is higher, but so are foreclosures, and the rich and poor divide is greater. This is an easy one where disagree could be picked, so I consider the question loaded.
Biased or not? Biased.
3) Rent control leads to housing shortages (unenlightened answer: disagree).
Rent control, if you don't know, is a ceiling price for rents. Most economists say disagree (I've heard that at least - I could probably easily dig up a link if I tried), and some places with rent control have had housing shortages because of it (*cough* Hanoi *cough*), but there are arguments for both sides so I can see either way.
Biased or not? Biased.
4) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (unenlightened answer: agree).
A monopoly is unambiguously the only company in that line business in a particular area or the world, not the largest market share.
Biased or not? Not Biased, and shows how ignorant people are of what constitutes a monopoly.
5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree).
American Businesses with employees overseas have to obey a certain code of conduct, so I could never see agree to this, but I could see somewhat agree (I'm sure it is possible to find cases of labor abuse).
Biased or not? somewhat Biased
6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree).
This was the key point given by those that opposed NAFTA, and proved to be wrong. Since this hasn't really been confirmed over a long period of time, I'd lean toward biased.
Biased or not? somewhat Biased.
7) Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree).
I don't see how you could say agree here - it increases base cost, so therefore less people can be hired. At BEST you can say it keeps employment flat.
Biased or not? Not biased
So 2 questions are biased, 2 slightly biased, and 3 not biased at least in my opinion. The very liberal got a 5.6 - even giving them the monopoly one wrong, how the f*ck do you get almost 6?
Most of that censorship (like the ban on red blood causing games to use green blood or android armies) was pre-PEGI. These days Germany mostly follows PEGI recommendations without additional censorship except for certain things (like swastikas), or so my German friends say.
I still laugh at their crazy taxes, though - for instance, computers are taxed as TVs even if they aren't used as TVs. I'm waiting for smartphones to get that tax bitch slap...
Except this isn't USB 3.0 - 3.0 version 1.0 (yes, it is called 3.0v1 in documentation) is out the door and in devices from several manufacturers already. Since they made careful note that it is version 1.0 of the 3.0 specification, this upcoming version could be anything from 3.0v2 or 3.1 or even 4.0 - whatever their product marketing elves decide. As for whether it is less CPU intensive or not, you've got me. I also haven't heard anything about polling vs interrupt, but it is backward compatible with 2.0 (you need special 3.0 cables to use a 3.0 device), so if they did make such a switch it probably has to support both. The one thing I had heard is it is full duplex now. Oh, and Intel is holding back support at the moment (rumor has it to promote Thunderbolt, which they co-developed with Apple), but board manufacture MSI has one (in fact, I just built a computer with one, and apparently I got lucky on the crap shoot with that board because they seem to have an extremely high failure rate - mine works perfectly... makes me wonder if there is a BIOS issue [like memory timings specced too high for the cheap memory people tend to buy - I've actually had that problem on an ASUS board and it looked like the board was DOA]), and I think AMD has some as well.
Actually, if you read through the slideshow at the end of TFA it points out that security is getting much better on macs in the past couple of releases. The main vulnerability, and where Windows is significantly better, seems to be network exploits from within the LAN, since kerberos can be bypassed in several ways to fall back to the default security and there are exploits to that. It should allow forcing kerberos only with no fallback, and if it did that would match it with Windows. Kerberos is a very good protocol and has been beaten on for many years (it is the required security model for IPv6 support because it is used by IPsec).
I like the bonjour hack best - Apple's "nice network" vulnerability exploit (if hostnames conflict, one will change itself allowing the other to spoof).
Some of the exploits I have noticed from version 10.0 - like how easy it would be to spoof the credentials page (which they say is harder on Windows, but I think in some ways it is easier since all you need to do is get them to click a button).
This is ARM talking, and where is ARM used? In mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc) and controllers. This is like asking Microsoft what the future of the OS market is.
That said, I think there is a huge market for handheld games, especially a casual market where the player wouldn't normally buy a handheld game platform, but if one came with their phone or iPad, they will take advantage of it. If these systems come with more gaming power, developers will take advantage of it, as well, and make games for both casual and hardcore players. The only real downside is the brain leeching of talent from other platforms to program for mobile.
yeah - me too - unfortunately from what was reported, the Vista/Windows 7 driver model killed it (my guess is the hardware GUI code that was added doesn't allow graphics to be directed along the USB2 bus, but I don't think Thunderbolt will have that issue because it interconnects with the same bus that graphics cards use).