momerath
Ripple: The Most (Demonstrably) Scalable Blockchain
360 video for VR is certainly a bandwidth-hog, but I think that could well be offset by most VR content being game-like, where, though the game might weigh in at 40G, you download it once, and spend 40 hours in it, vs a 4k movie at the same size, which lasts 2 (and which you'd likely re-stream if you watched it again). In other words, widespread VR use, even with next-gen hardware, could actually lead to a reduced demand for bandwidth.
Anecdote: I used Erlang, over the course of several years, for very-high-level bot behavior and multi-player mission control, where performance was much less important than the things Erlang provides, but I still had issues with it. Nonetheless, I felt it had given me great leverage, and I thanked Joe Armstrong profusely, when I met him at a conference. Later at the con, I asked a panel whether there were active efforts at improving performance, perhaps with a JIT. They seemed to take it as an attack, and suggested that if I need performance, I should use another language. I mostly write in Clojure now.
1. Allowing the screen to be much closer, drastically improving practically achievable FOV.
Here's the thread: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=14777
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-d...
Edit: as a quick software-design analogy, I think Cybernetics gets labeled "top down" design, by people who think there are only top-down and bottom-up to choose from. It's more of a middle-out strategy.
Like so many other (game) programmers, Carmack is a hero of mine, and the bias runs deep. In reading the complaint, though, I was starting to feel for Zenimax, but when the "$500 worth of optics" phrase started appearing, they lost me. The kit, as described in the thread where Carmack and Palmer first interacted in public, was to be a display, display-controller, and some sort of ski-goggle based contraption you could put together. And, iirc, $300 was the price discussed.
But I think the really key point, missing from this complaint, is that, before Carmack (and Abrash at Valve) improved on the Rift, it had stirred up interest because of the concept of using simple, _cheap_, optics, that would allow the display to be closer to the eyes (wide FOV), and pre-correcting for the resulting distortion in software.
Carmack and Abrash provided some secret sauce that I'm sure will be vital to the sense of presence that will drive broad appeal, but the breakthrough was saying "so what if the optics massively distort the image; we'll fix it in software". From what I've read, I'm pretty sure that wasn't Palmer's idea to begin with either, but he was the first one to run with it.
I once wrote a _MacOS_ shareware review site for a friend, as a single, small perl script that looked through a tree in the filesystem of a BeOS box (on mac-clone hardware), and spit out html. The descriptions and reviews were just metadata columns I added to the relevant mime-types.
If an Umphrey's McGee fan (I've seen them ~10 times; a close friend has seen them >170x) were interested in an app to play music on their phone, and could only search using vague terms, like "free music", the results will be mainstream and commercially motivated; not a good match for their actual desire, of listening to that one show they went to, back in '05.
I think we can replace this pachinko machine of representative democracy, not with some one or two dimensional direct-democracy, but with the kind of thing that cypherpunks have been thinking about for decades.
But in the short-term, the current zeitgeist, which I _rejoice_ in, as an ex-mormon 'queer' person (so queer I can't categorize myself), I am stricken by the thought that Mozilla may be suffocated by people I would like to hold hands with.
They also have this "hardware upgrade" thing that might make it cheaper at the higher price points, depending on how long you use it, and when each provider eventually upgrades its offerings.
I use them for my personal mail+whatever server, and have been quite happy, for about a year.
Mill CPU Architecture Talk 6/9: Execution (4:30pm PST)
News to me, and I've been using linux since I downloaded SLS floppies from a BBS. As it happens, I'm running Samsung's "flash friendly filesystem" (f2fs) on this machine; I hope I don't need to make sure _it_ is issuing trim instructions.
PS. To build the current source on linux, you have to fix the comment in the Makefile that starts with '//' and lowercase the 'Primitives' directory.
The Mill: Split-stream Encoding
As far as the meat goes, I'm gratified that I'm not the only one to think this is mindbogglingly elegant. I see some misconceptions in this thread, but I'm finding it difficult to explain the divergences without beginning to inexpertly regurgitate large portions of this and the previous talk (on their instruction encoding).