As we are constantly reminded by the GPL zealots, the only "moral" way to make money from your software is to release it under the GPL for free and then charge for support. The article gives a fine example, IMO, why this business plan will fail and if anyone makes money from your GPL software, it would not be you.
> What if Phelps had his hands surgically altered so he had webbed fingers, > and got fingertip extensions so he could hit the pool wall a split-second > faster? It perverts the message that sports is supposed to be about.
Oh? But he does have these alterations! His feet are size 14, practically flippers, giving him much stronger kicks and making him faster. He has very long arms too, which are handy not only for touching the wall sooner, but for extending the length of his power stroke. Both of these are far more significant than a what a simple drug injection would give. So what were you saying about "perverting the message"?
> It's supposed to be about achievement, not competition.
Then why do we give out medals? The Olympics is very specifically a competition, with the winners getting the gold and the losers getting ignored.
> Any game needs firmly established rules so you know where to draw the line at cheating.
If it's about achievement and not competition, what do you care about cheating? You are not competing, are you?
> "trying hard will make anyone perform better than not trying." > If you let the drugs in then that message gets distorted with > "you can achieve the same results with less effort by finding things that make the problem easier to solve."
Why is that worse than "you can achieve the same results easier and get further than anyone else by having the right genese"? Does it really matter whether you are born with the enhancement, like Phelps was, or have to take one as a supplement? And compare this with a diabetic, who has to inject insulin to stay healthy. Is he an inferior person because he is "cheating" on his metabolism?
> most people will hear that message and think that sneaking notes > into a test or copying an essay off the internet is the same thing.
Isn't it? Suppose one man passed all his tests honestly and got a 4.0 GPA, which got him a good job and a decent income. Another man cheated on all his tests, got the same 4.0 GPA, and then got himself the same job and income for a lot less effort. The cheater is obviously more efficient, since he got more with less effort. Sure, he didn't educate himself as much as the other guy, you might say, but if all you want is enough money, that is irrelevant. There will always be more hardworking suckers to exploit, who'll cry that these actions are unfair and immoral, but the cheater will get a management job, lots of money, and a trophy wife, while the hard worker will hang out on Slashdot and spend the rest of his childless life complaining bitterly. Darwin says the cheater wins.
I don't know about you, but the majority of us simply aren't built to compete in sports any more. How can I compete with Michael Phelps's body, that's designed for swimming? Sure, training helps, but the current top-level competitions are accessible only to those genetically suited for them. The Olympics might have had some relevance back in the Greek days, when you could look at the athletes and say "well, if I trained hard, I could run as fast as these guys". These days, there is no amount of training that can let me swim as fast as Phelps or run as fast as Bolt. So what's the point? All these athletes are necessarily "freaks" now, and the only way to beat them is to become a bigger freak.
A much simpler explanation is that a north-facing cow does not have the sun in her eyes? Cows have eyes on the sides of their heads, so looking directly away from the sun is the only way to avoid glare. Cows would rest during the hottest part of the day - in the afternoon, when the sun would be furthest to the south, so resting cows would naturally tend to face north. A simple experiment could be devised to verify this hypothesis with a shade and a giant mirror.
Oh, my God! This means that anybody can just read those 1600 pages and build one for himself! Get out the lawyers and the DMCA, people, and let's fight!
In general, yes. I would not live in the communist state of California in the first place, but that's beside the point. The most important issue to solve here is noise control. Nothing makes you hate your apartment like noisy neighbours having parties at all hours of the night. If the apartments in the Ziggurat were perfectly insulated from all sound and vibration, then it would be a good place to live.
Yes, that was the theme, but not the question. The example of the creativity of Shigeru Miamoto was meant to disprove the assertion "all old men are uncreative". I counter that my statement was actually "most old men are uncreative", for which Shigeru's efforts make no difference whatsoever. Coming back to the statement "Biden is old, so he is not capable of change" you ought to notice that Shigeru's existence is irrelevant here as well. The bias is "most old men are uncreative", which means that to prove that Biden can be creative you must show that he does not fall into the "most old men" set defined in context of the bias. The existence of exceptions to a bias does not invalidate the bias, nor does it give significant evidence that the bias should not apply to some other person.
There is an unfortunate tendency in some people to interpret every statement in an absolute sense. Here, the statement "old people are incapable of innovation" is interpreted as "all old people are incapable of innovation". This error is the cause of many ridiculous arguments, since the speaker usually means "most" rather than "all", as he is stating a bias, not an absolute universal truth. It seems to be caused by the extension of the mind projection fallacy to actually assume that everyone else commits this same fallacy all the time! Please, correct your erroneous defaults and henceforth assume "most" instead of "all". When you do this, you'll understand that giving a counterexample only invalidates universal statements while having very little effect on bias, and that your statement is irritating (due to the sudden need to clarify what should not have needed clarification) rather than insightful.
A company does not develop new products. A company's employees develop new products. A 65 year old company does not exclusively employ 65 year old people; it can employ younger people, who can think of new things. It doesn't work that way with people; if you are 65 years old, that's how old you are, with all your 65 years of experiences, biases, and a stone-hard mindset.
Bullshit. The difference between a 130W Nehalem and a 65W Core2 is 65W, which is 11 cents per day (at 7c/kW) or $39/year if you run the computer 24/7. Most people turn the computer off when it's not in use, and 8 hours per day is more likely, or 3 cents per day and maybe $10/year. I'd say the cost is entirely negligible, especially when you compare it to your $80/month Comcast bill.
No they are not. At least, either my nVidia 7600 card does not implement it. I have not heard of any other card that implements it either. 2D acceleration is limited to BitBlt, a monochrome blit (for printing fonts), and sometimes a scaling blit (which my card can do). A masked blit always had to be done in software.
> Problem is that, the loop in GGP post, simply cannot be implemented efficiently. > That loop is slow and unscalable regardless where you would put it: CPU or GPU.
What are you, a total n00b? The loop is completely parallelizable; each pixel operation is independent - if the value is not zero, you write it, if it is, you don't. You could do the whole thing in one cycle if you wanted to.
> But since most expensive operation happens to be communication with video H/W, > they pack whole bunch of operations into one big operation called "scene rendering."
And it's also why many cards (like my 7600) support DMA transfers of image data from the CPU to the GPU.
> Again: that acceleration would be dog slow because communication over bus is slow
If you read my proposal, instead of skipping every third word or so, you'd notice that I'm asking for a BitBlt-like function, which is done from one part of the video card memory to another. No communication is involved except for the command itself, which is the whole bloody point in the first place.
I am talking about hardware implementation on the video card, not the API. Yes, you can do masked blits in OpenGL and DirectX, but they are implemented in software, and are not nearly as fast as they could be.
Who would want it? Surely, even butt-ugly people realize that eventually they'll have to meet their dates in person, and not being recognized is not going to be a desirable outcome. All those "more attractive" results look nothing like the original person. If I wanted to lie about my appearance, I'd sent a picture of Jean Claude Van Damme or something.
for (coord_t y = 0; y < m_Width; ++y)
for (coord_t x = 0; x < m_Height; ++x)
if (m_pPixels[y * m_Width + x])
g_pScreen[y * g_ScreenWidth + x] = m_pPixels[y * m_Width + x];
In real code you'd also have custom offset, clipping, and obsessive optimizations in the inner loop, but this is the gist of it. This makes color zero transparent, which is useful if you want to, say, draw a tree or the player sprite on top of your adventure game tile map.
> But reality is that several best games I have played were... 2D.
Damn right. And you know what capability I would really like to have on a card? Masked blit. That is the single most time-consuming operation on all 2D games. If you could copy all your tiles to the video card memory and then maskblit them onto the visible page (or blit and flip if it's too slow), that would really make 2D games smooth as silk and leave more CPU power for AI and real gameplay.
Yes, and if you are running X and Linux crashes, your machine would just lock up, since your drivers don't implement kernel mode switching. Windows has it much better with the BSOD.
> I have chatlogs & emails dating back 12+ years, so having a good (context-aware) interface for searching all at > once would be great. I don't always remember in which medium I spoke with someone. Was it on IRC? Was it on AIM? Email?
Why would you want to? This is a professional question; I'm thinking about implementing a mail client. Why would you care what you said to somebody five years ago? I have difficulty understanding why people keep their email for years and years. If it was some important document, you'd have it archived elsewhere, not in an email attachment. If it was some important idea, you'd know what it was even now. If it was the details of something, like say, a brainstorming program design session, you would have written up a real spec when it ended. So what exactly do you find in those old emails? Can you give me a concrete example of you finding something useful that could have only been stored as an email or a chatlog?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still waiting for broadband here in the US. That last mile is a killer...
I guess this is a good place to link to my own review, which isn't as good as this one, and so did not make the front page.
Do you think I overreacted, Hal?
> We'll gene splice them so that they can very quickly when fed on a high nutrient liquid like animal blood.
Of course, nothing could possibly go wrong when you build your house from a living tree that likes drinking blood...
As we are constantly reminded by the GPL zealots, the only "moral" way to make money from your software is to release it under the GPL for free and then charge for support. The article gives a fine example, IMO, why this business plan will fail and if anyone makes money from your GPL software, it would not be you.
Who wants to think?
> I have created a new type of open source license, that allows my code to be
> used in any other project, regardless of what license it uses
Well gee, you just reinvented the MIT license.
> What if Phelps had his hands surgically altered so he had webbed fingers,
> and got fingertip extensions so he could hit the pool wall a split-second
> faster? It perverts the message that sports is supposed to be about.
Oh? But he does have these alterations! His feet are size 14, practically flippers, giving him much stronger kicks and making him faster. He has very long arms too, which are handy not only for touching the wall sooner, but for extending the length of his power stroke. Both of these are far more significant than a what a simple drug injection would give. So what were you saying about "perverting the message"?
> It's supposed to be about achievement, not competition.
Then why do we give out medals? The Olympics is very specifically a competition, with the winners getting the gold and the losers getting ignored.
> Any game needs firmly established rules so you know where to draw the line at cheating.
If it's about achievement and not competition, what do you care about cheating? You are not competing, are you?
> "trying hard will make anyone perform better than not trying."
> If you let the drugs in then that message gets distorted with
> "you can achieve the same results with less effort by finding things that make the problem easier to solve."
Why is that worse than "you can achieve the same results easier and get further than anyone else by having the right genese"? Does it really matter whether you are born with the enhancement, like Phelps was, or have to take one as a supplement? And compare this with a diabetic, who has to inject insulin to stay healthy. Is he an inferior person because he is "cheating" on his metabolism?
> most people will hear that message and think that sneaking notes
> into a test or copying an essay off the internet is the same thing.
Isn't it? Suppose one man passed all his tests honestly and got a 4.0 GPA, which got him a good job and a decent income. Another man cheated on all his tests, got the same 4.0 GPA, and then got himself the same job and income for a lot less effort. The cheater is obviously more efficient, since he got more with less effort. Sure, he didn't educate himself as much as the other guy, you might say, but if all you want is enough money, that is irrelevant. There will always be more hardworking suckers to exploit, who'll cry that these actions are unfair and immoral, but the cheater will get a management job, lots of money, and a trophy wife, while the hard worker will hang out on Slashdot and spend the rest of his childless life complaining bitterly. Darwin says the cheater wins.
I don't know about you, but the majority of us simply aren't built to compete in sports any more. How can I compete with Michael Phelps's body, that's designed for swimming? Sure, training helps, but the current top-level competitions are accessible only to those genetically suited for them. The Olympics might have had some relevance back in the Greek days, when you could look at the athletes and say "well, if I trained hard, I could run as fast as these guys". These days, there is no amount of training that can let me swim as fast as Phelps or run as fast as Bolt. So what's the point? All these athletes are necessarily "freaks" now, and the only way to beat them is to become a bigger freak.
A much simpler explanation is that a north-facing cow does not have the sun in her eyes? Cows have eyes on the sides of their heads, so looking directly away from the sun is the only way to avoid glare. Cows would rest during the hottest part of the day - in the afternoon, when the sun would be furthest to the south, so resting cows would naturally tend to face north. A simple experiment could be devised to verify this hypothesis with a shade and a giant mirror.
> Obviously the LHC is not adequately complex.
Oh, my God! This means that anybody can just read those 1600 pages and build one for himself! Get out the lawyers and the DMCA, people, and let's fight!
In general, yes. I would not live in the communist state of California in the first place, but that's beside the point. The most important issue to solve here is noise control. Nothing makes you hate your apartment like noisy neighbours having parties at all hours of the night. If the apartments in the Ziggurat were perfectly insulated from all sound and vibration, then it would be a good place to live.
Yes, that was the theme, but not the question. The example of the creativity of Shigeru Miamoto was meant to disprove the assertion "all old men are uncreative". I counter that my statement was actually "most old men are uncreative", for which Shigeru's efforts make no difference whatsoever. Coming back to the statement "Biden is old, so he is not capable of change" you ought to notice that Shigeru's existence is irrelevant here as well. The bias is "most old men are uncreative", which means that to prove that Biden can be creative you must show that he does not fall into the "most old men" set defined in context of the bias. The existence of exceptions to a bias does not invalidate the bias, nor does it give significant evidence that the bias should not apply to some other person.
There is an unfortunate tendency in some people to interpret every statement in an absolute sense. Here, the statement "old people are incapable of innovation" is interpreted as "all old people are incapable of innovation". This error is the cause of many ridiculous arguments, since the speaker usually means "most" rather than "all", as he is stating a bias, not an absolute universal truth. It seems to be caused by the extension of the mind projection fallacy to actually assume that everyone else commits this same fallacy all the time! Please, correct your erroneous defaults and henceforth assume "most" instead of "all". When you do this, you'll understand that giving a counterexample only invalidates universal statements while having very little effect on bias, and that your statement is irritating (due to the sudden need to clarify what should not have needed clarification) rather than insightful.
A company does not develop new products. A company's employees develop new products. A 65 year old company does not exclusively employ 65 year old people; it can employ younger people, who can think of new things. It doesn't work that way with people; if you are 65 years old, that's how old you are, with all your 65 years of experiences, biases, and a stone-hard mindset.
> Desktop users think electricity costs.
Bullshit. The difference between a 130W Nehalem and a 65W Core2 is 65W, which is 11 cents per day (at 7c/kW) or $39/year if you run the computer 24/7. Most people turn the computer off when it's not in use, and 8 hours per day is more likely, or 3 cents per day and maybe $10/year. I'd say the cost is entirely negligible, especially when you compare it to your $80/month Comcast bill.
> Uhm... They ARE implemented in hardware.
No they are not. At least, either my nVidia 7600 card does not implement it. I have not heard of any other card that implements it either. 2D acceleration is limited to BitBlt, a monochrome blit (for printing fonts), and sometimes a scaling blit (which my card can do). A masked blit always had to be done in software.
> Problem is that, the loop in GGP post, simply cannot be implemented efficiently.
> That loop is slow and unscalable regardless where you would put it: CPU or GPU.
What are you, a total n00b? The loop is completely parallelizable; each pixel operation is independent - if the value is not zero, you write it, if it is, you don't. You could do the whole thing in one cycle if you wanted to.
> But since most expensive operation happens to be communication with video H/W,
> they pack whole bunch of operations into one big operation called "scene rendering."
And it's also why many cards (like my 7600) support DMA transfers of image data from the CPU to the GPU.
> Again: that acceleration would be dog slow because communication over bus is slow
If you read my proposal, instead of skipping every third word or so, you'd notice that I'm asking for a BitBlt-like function, which is done from one part of the video card memory to another. No communication is involved except for the command itself, which is the whole bloody point in the first place.
> OpenGL has that from the beginning.
I am talking about hardware implementation on the video card, not the API. Yes, you can do masked blits in OpenGL and DirectX, but they are implemented in software, and are not nearly as fast as they could be.
Who would want it? Surely, even butt-ugly people realize that eventually they'll have to meet their dates in person, and not being recognized is not going to be a desirable outcome. All those "more attractive" results look nothing like the original person. If I wanted to lie about my appearance, I'd sent a picture of Jean Claude Van Damme or something.
In real code you'd also have custom offset, clipping, and obsessive optimizations in the inner loop, but this is the gist of it. This makes color zero transparent, which is useful if you want to, say, draw a tree or the player sprite on top of your adventure game tile map.
> But reality is that several best games I have played were ... 2D.
Damn right. And you know what capability I would really like to have on a card? Masked blit. That is the single most time-consuming operation on all 2D games. If you could copy all your tiles to the video card memory and then maskblit them onto the visible page (or blit and flip if it's too slow), that would really make 2D games smooth as silk and leave more CPU power for AI and real gameplay.
Nothing, because rats do not like cheese.
Yes, and if you are running X and Linux crashes, your machine would just lock up, since your drivers don't implement kernel mode switching. Windows has it much better with the BSOD.
> vs the cost of losing some data point you didn't know was important two years ago.
Losing what data point? Give an example. I can't think of a single "data point" you could possibly find in an email that you couldn't Google for.
> I have chatlogs & emails dating back 12+ years, so having a good (context-aware) interface for searching all at
> once would be great. I don't always remember in which medium I spoke with someone. Was it on IRC? Was it on AIM? Email?
Why would you want to? This is a professional question; I'm thinking about implementing a mail client. Why would you care what you said to somebody five years ago? I have difficulty understanding why people keep their email for years and years. If it was some important document, you'd have it archived elsewhere, not in an email attachment. If it was some important idea, you'd know what it was even now. If it was the details of something, like say, a brainstorming program design session, you would have written up a real spec when it ended. So what exactly do you find in those old emails? Can you give me a concrete example of you finding something useful that could have only been stored as an email or a chatlog?