Slashdot Mirror

All the Amiga people at one time said the same things that are being said here. UAE is too slow, it will never be fast enough, stable enough, etc.

The reason this thing is so slow is because its interpreting the PPC code. Its slow for the same reason that Java is slow (sans JIT). Once they get JIT on it, or some other kind of direct conversion to x86 code, it will get much much faster. Google for JIT, code morphing, check out this link: Dynamo.

Its entirely possible to create an emulator that would approach the speed of the real thing.

I think its only a matter of time before this type of technology gets good enough that CPU compatibility will be irrelevant (even though we could do it now with things like Java or Slim Binaries)...

The best replacement for r3mix.net in my opinion is HydrogenAudio . The forums are frequented by a lot of professionals, as well as developers of LAME, FLAC, Nero AAC, Musepack, Wavpack, and other codecs.

Memorability: door knobs and light switches do not move or change on their own, making their location and operation easy to remember. For example, after living in a new house for a few months, the locations of all the commonly used light switches have usually been "memorized." I put that word in quotation marks because this process of memory formation happens naturally over time, mostly without conscious thought.

Efficiency: conscious thought is also rarely involved when actually using these everyday spatial interfaces. We simply enter and leave rooms and buildings; the doors open before us, and the lights turn on and off as necessary. Although we physically perform these tasks ourselves, we do not have to dedicate any real brain power to them. Similarly, eating is rarely a process of conscious "tool use."

These ideas about how our brains deal with objects in the physical world are very true -- huge portions of the brain are devoted to letting our body interact with physical objects. Not just visual subsystems, but motor-control as well. As someone who can juggle 5 balls reasonably well, I can attest to the power available here -- and just how much work this "subconscious" processing can do for you.

However, there's one thing about interacting with the computer that most people seem to ignore: it's the keyboard that makes use of these abilities, not the mouse. The mouse is an incredibly simplistic tool. Sure, there's some spatial operation in moving the mouse around on the screen, but it's only using a tiny fraction of the agility available in your hand. And yet it requires too much precision -- your hand wants to make gestures, and make big movements. Too often, operating a mouse requires you to freeze your hand in a particular position (e.g. while "dragging"), and engage in pixel-precision movements with the rest of your arm. This is slow and painful. NOT what your hand was built for.

The keyboard, on the other hand, requires less precision -- it doesn't matter whether you hit a key a bit off-center, for example. It also allows for a greater range of movement, and number of movements, AND offers tactile feedback. It's still far from ideal, but it's sufficient to let your motor-control subsystems do enough work for you that you don't really have to think about it (assuming you've had enough practice).

So any kind of "spatial" aspect of a GUI is really wasted. You don't get to take advantage of the brain's and body's abilities that you'd expect. If you go to a real-world example, say walking through your house and turning on or off the lights as you go, imagine doing that where you had no sensation of feeling, and were restricted to standing on a little cart with wheels. In your hand you have a special pencil. To operate the controls on the cart, or to turn on or off the lights, you have to place the end of the pencil on certain, small areas on the cart's control panel or on the light switch, and press a button on the pencil. Now imagine the experience of trying to move around your house and operate the light switches that way.

Now try imagining an alterate interface, where you can instead say "move to the next room", "turn the light on", etc, and it'll just happen instantly. Sounds easier to me than the so-called "spatial" method. Now realize that this is the interface that a commandline-and-keyboard interface gives you -- and that because of your body's spatial abilities, typing on the keyboard can really be as easy as speaking those commands.

And don't forget another thing: there is an additional area of your brain devoted to language! One that has no trouble memorizing hundreds of thousands of words, and attaching meaning to them without having to "think" about it.

So that's the irony: the commandline is actually more of a "spatial interface" -- and makes better use of more of your brain -- than anything you can do with a mouse!!

This article in Ars Technica is the reference for the Spatial Finder that the guys in Gnome used as inspiration for the new Nautilus.

In addition to to opening up a new window for every folder, the folders "cascade" so if you need to get somewhere fast, your screen slowly fills up with folders you have NO USE FOR.

The folders should cascade only once, the first time you ever open the folder. From that point onward, whenever you re-open that folder, it will appear in exactly the same screen location as the previous time it was closed. It will also retain the same window size, and window backgrounds (images, colors, etc) can also be per-folder (though how to do this isn't particularly well documented ATM). This is what "spatial" is about. So you'll only get a "cascade" of windows if you never bother to move the windows into a sensible location.

Put another way, if your windows are always cascading, it's your own falt! (Note "always"; the first time Nautilus opens a folder, the placement is at the discretion of the window manager.)

In addition, there is no location bar where you can "jump" to a place you want

Press Ctrl+L, and you'll get a dialog box that lets you jump to any place you want. It even supports file-name completion! This is also available as a menu item, though I forget what it is.

nor do you get a sense of where you are in the file system.

Please see this image: nautilus-parentfolders.png. The "menu" in the lower-left corner of the window gives tells you precisely where you are on the filesystem, as it contains the full path of the folder. Furthermore, clicking on any of the menu entries will open the specified folder.

And good luck even if you do have a sense of where you are because there are no forward back or up buttons in sight to allow you to get anywhere (I know there is a hidden menu, but it's hidden, it may aswell be a keyboard shortcut for how easy it is to use from a GUI perspective).

I don't consider that menu to be hidden. It also lets you jump up to any parent directory, so this suffices (somewhat) as a "back" button.

All of this reeks of hijacking of the OS by some disgruntled designer, aka a former BeOS dude or whatever. I don't mind you making a BeOS style file browser dudes, but seriously.... make a fork of gnome.... don't just hijack gnome (at a 2.6 release, not some early design stage, a mature 2.6) to your own ends.

Spatial navigation has been around since the original Macintosh, and has a number of proponents. You might find this article useful. As for research, there has been lots of research done in the 80's, and spatial was the preferred approach. This is why "direct manipulation" is so prevalent in desktop environments today. Or have you never used Drag And Drop?

I've had Fedora Core Test 3 installed for about a week now, and I gotta say, I love Gnome 2.6. It's very clean, polished, and the gnome bundled apps are consistent with each other.

That being said, I still haven't decided if I like the spatial file navigation of nautilus, although I'm trying to give it more time. I'm a command line guy, so I tend to think in "browser" mode, and I think most of the people here on /. are probably command line/browser mode entrained people.

For people who started their computer experience on Mac's, they'll probably love the new nautilus, but I started on DOS 2.0, so I might be to old of a dog to teach.

For a better rebuttal of Petreley's article (and how to access "browser" mode in Gnome 2.6), check out: Crack Pipes for Everyone!

I've had Fedora Core Test 3 installed for about a week now, and I gotta say, I love Gnome 2.6. It's very clean, polished, and the gnome bundled apps are consistent with each other.

That being said, I still haven't decided if I like the spatial file navigation of nautilus, although I'm trying to give it more time. I'm a command line guy, so I tend to think in "browser" mode, and I think most of the people here on /. are probably command line/browser mode entrained people.

For people who started their computer experience on Mac's, they'll probably love the new nautilus, but I started on DOS 2.0, so I might be to old of a dog to teach.

For a better rebuttal of Petreley's article (and how to access "browser" mode in Gnome 2.6), check out: Crack Pipes for Everyone!

Honda Insight
2003 Honda Civic Hybrid

Honda Insight
2003 Honda Civic Hybrid

Especially since MS released the sys-req for Longhorn. Seems hardware makers are more and more designing around the software these days...

This seems to be the new trend,
AMD will have dual core opterons next year:

What you should be looking for is a CD/DVD duplicator that's based on RIAA math.... You know, ones that "run at very high speeds: some as high as 40x...," ones that are "well above the average speed." That way, your duplicator will be the equivalent of 421 burners.

From our coverage at Ars, it's not entirely clear that these reports are true. Just a week ago Jobs said that all of these rumors were false.

Wow. This is amazing. The P6 (PPro, PII, PIII) architecture is coming back to the desktop. This does make pretty good sense. The P6 has high IPC, and by applying some Pentium 4 tricks (Quad-pumped FSB, longer pipeline), this can make for a killer CPU. For more information, check out this Ars Technica Article on the Pentium-M's P6 heritage. The chip doesn't even lie about it - its CPUID reports a P6 family CPU.

The PM takes one of the P4's strengths--its branch prediction capabilities--and improves on it, adding its advantages to the strengths of the P6 architecture. The PM also deepens the P6's pipeline a bit, allowing for better clockspeed scaling, but without making clockspeed the central factor driving performance. In short, the PM looks like what the P4 might have been, had Intel not been so obsessed with the MHz race--it's a kind of alternate past, but one that may provide a glimpse of Intel's future.

Eventually they'll be forced to use fictitious cats, such as: Mac OS Pink Panther .

Netcraft confirms it: Intel is dying.

Yet another crippling bombshell hit already beleaguered Intel microprocessor community today when Ars Technica (and Netcraft) confirmed that AMD sold more processors than Intel for the week ending April 24th. Coming on the heels of a recent survey which indicated people like saving money when buying a computer this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along: Intel is collapsing in complete disarray.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Intel's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Intel faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Intel because Intel is dying.Things are looking very bad for Intel. Their offices are dark, the tomb-like sepulchral atmosphere is all that remains. Intel continues to lose market share, red ink flows like a river of blood.

The Intel development team is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that Intel has steadily declined in market share. Intel is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Intel is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers and hangers-on. Intel continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Intel is dead.

Fact: Intel is dying

Depending on what's in Tiger, it may mark the fourth significant release in five years - which is still too many.

10.2: eh.

Well, I guess that counts as linux too.

Final Fantasy (the movie) also did nifty stuff with hair

Jon Jannotti wrote a technical article on this over at Ars a few years ago, if anyone's interested in more information about the project and its techniques. Sorry for the shameless plug, but what can I say but that I love Rome :)

You still have the same problem, Ars Technica has an article on this called The ultimate limits of computers

In short, what the grandparent is saying is that we will soon be able to encrypt so strongly that even with the entire universe as a computer, you wouldn't be able to get through it in a reasonable timeframe. Also, by then quantum crypto should be fairly commonplace, which solves the problem.

I beg to differ. 3D icons are a great idea. They can be scaled without pixellation and will look the same regardless of size.

Furthermore, development of 3d acceleration has vastly outpaced non-overlayed 2d acceleration...meaning that displaying, scaling and manipulating simple 3d widgets might take less processor time and resources, as it can be pushed off onto the GPU.

Despite the assertions in the article, Google doesn't currently pick up any indications of a national school sweep.

FBI raids school district, other targets in piracy crackdown
Ars Technica - 1 hour ago FBI agents raided the Deer Valley [School] district's Administration Services Center, just south of Deer Valley High School in Glendale, at 6 am and stayed ...

What's really funny (I thought) was the Google News link to slashdot...

This could easily be an occasion where they raid a place to make an example. They get media coverage. They use this as a scare tactic to get other places to believe they will do it.

You know, there are words that one could use for a government which has to enforce rule by "scare tactic." And those words get prefaced by other words that Rev. Ashcroft would strongly disapprove of to describe a government that enforces rule by "scare tactic" at the request of private organizations, especially ones membered by companies charged with price fixing.

Never mind the debate over "copyright infringement" vs. "theft"; it's not just a matter of who's not helping the RIAA and MPAA roll around in a big pile of money any more. If the government has to resort to measures like this to enforce unpopular laws, if they have to infringe upon everyone's rights (especially those that weren't even thinking of violating those rules before) in order to inconvenience those responsible, then the law, the FBI, and quite possibly the government itself has to change.

I'd like to think that the Founding Fathers (yes, I'm invoking those hoary old bastards; this doesn't bode well for my Karma) intended that bit in the Constitution about restricted "search and seizure" so that people don't get their rights all infringed and trampled on with jackboots unless there's sufficient probable cause against specific individuals. It would also be useful so that the innocent-but-accused don't get victimized by the authorities that are supposed to be protecting them.

In this case, everyone got their access cut because of the actions of a few. As a precedent, it'd be pathetic if it weren't so scary.

(I also have very specific ideas about "freedom of speech" and "freedom of religion," but those are off-topic for this discussion.)

Most songs just aren't worth $1 per song, especially for a lossy, low-bitrate, DRM-encrusted file. And that's before the major labels try to hike the price up.

Every previous change in standard formats has been an increase in audio quality and/or consistency.

• Examples:
• Vinyl was prone to scratches; 8-tracks weren't.
• Cassettes were an evolution in tape technology (and, iirc, CrO2 was higher quality too).
• CDs brought the consistency and durability of optical digital media to music.

• Airport 3.4 is incompatible with MLdonkey filesharing. If you run MlMac or MlDonkey, the airport will drop the DHCP lease and refuse to renew. Your mac will assign itself a worthless IP.
• PowerPage is reporting that this morning's update is cutting airport range on Extreme clients by up to 60% (!! !!).

On the front page, right now, next to this story is Ars' story entitled "Home broadband adoption up 60% in US" - This states some interesting facts: "There are now 48 million users with broadband at home, up 60% from last year's 30 million figure." - 20 mill. of those are DSL customers - also it states "DSL has climbed in popularity due in large part to price cuts which have brought prices down to the US$30 level for speeds of up to 1.5Mbps. When compared to spending US$20 for a dial-up connection or US$40-50 for high-speed cable, these budget DSL packages have proven to be attractive options.".
So the question remains, why aren't the dial-up users spending the extra US$ 10 to get always-on broadband DSL? I'm guessing many of the dial-up users can't get DSL in the first place. But that doesn't explain this article though.

Don't forget Ars Technica's finding that if you turn off SSID, Windows Wireless Zero Configuration may connect your to other networks that you don't want to connect to.

Earthlink spyware claims overhyped?

According to this thread and thread, 9,200 objects was the record. Now, I don't know if that is possible to get that many. At least the screen shot with 2,022 items looks legit.

I would mod you down if I had the points, not because you disagree, but because you are a dick about it. If the information is wrong, you should be pointing the finger at BBC news, which the headline here is entirely consistant with. Yes, the Arstechnica article has a good point that the article is perhaps wrong, but that is hardly the fault of the slashdot editor. I nice "well, arstechnica has evidence that casts doubt on the validity of this article" would have served the purpose just as well, and you would not looked like an ass doing it. And posting a link would have been nice too like Link would have been nice too.

Ars Technica has a pretty even handed take on this situation. Basically the Spy Audit stuff that Earthlink has comes up with quite a few false positives. A fresh out-of-the-box Dell system even showed alot of "spyware" hits. Makes you wonder if it's at least some marketing hype for Earthlink?

There is a news bit on Ars Technica that the claims are overhyped and the spyware scanning tool returns a lot of false positives.

Maybe you should take a look at this. Everyone knew it wasn't going to last, but I'm shocked at how quickly the music industry has changed their minds on on-line pricing.

Extensions are the worst solution. The file name should be just that - a name, a device for identifying the file and distinguishing it from other files.

Using the name to describe the type of file is like calling yourself "Joe Bloggs Male Student". We don't do this because we know that mixing a person's name and their other vital statistics is a bad idea.

Why should changing the name of a file from

porn.jpg

porn.pdf

porn.exe

If you need some further (and far more eloquent!) convincing I suggest you read this arstechnica article and I think you will change your opinion.

The kind of user who wants to use the standard format for audio compression that is widely used today, was widely used yesterday, and will be supported long into the future. The amount of work done on the mp3 spec is incredible -- check out LAME, which offers speedy, high-quality compression. Ars Technica's Machintoshian Archaia forum had a long thread about optimizing LAME for OS X. I can't find the thread, but I think it indicates that there's still good reason to encode using MP3s.

That's not to say there's anything wrong with using AAC. But mp3 still works for me and numerous others. Until a compelling reason exists for change, I'll continue ripping my CDs to mp3.

Yup, that's PSDoom, as featured in one of Ars Technica's excellent Linux.Ars articles (amongst other places).

Professional VCRs typically have a TBC built in; you can also get a standalone TBC. Either way, they're not particuarly cheap, but if you're going to be backing up a large VHS library, it's probably a good investment.

See the ArsTechnica Guide to Capturing, Cleaning, & Compressing Video and the sci.electronics.repair Macrovision FAQ for more info.

Agreed. I hate this place when the geeks think they're being funny. Slashdot became much more readable when I started assigning a -3 moderation to anything moderated as "Funny" (check the prefs -- great feature). Unfortunately the same trick doesn't work for the front page.

In the meantime, here are some other good tech/news sites to check out while Slashdot is useless:

• Ars Technica
• Kuro5hin
• Plastic
• MetaFilter
• MemePool
• Memigo

Enjoy!

The P4's and the 970's fetch and decode pipeline phases are similar in one very important respect: both processors break down instructions in their native ISA's format into a smaller, simpler format for use inside the CPU. The P4 breaks down each x86 CISC instruction into smaller micro-ops (or "uops"), which more or less resemble the instructions on a RISC machine. Most x86 instructions decode into 2 or 3 uops, but some of the longer, more complex and rarely used instructions decode into many more uops. The 970 breaks its instructions down into what it calls "IOPs", presumably short for "internal operations". Like uops on the P4, it is these IOPs that are actually executed out-of-order by the 970's execution core. And also like uops, cracking instructions down into multiple, more atomic and more strictly defined IOPs can help the back end squeeze out some extra instruction-level parallelism (ILP) by giving it more freedom to schedule code.
link

It's true that many of the more common PPC instructions break down to only a single iop vs 2-3 uops for the P4, but the PPC is pretty far from what I would classify as a RISC chip.

Well, OS X's Finder is steadily getting better. 10.0/10.1 was weak, 10.2 was an improvement, and 10.3 is pretty usable. It really pales in comparison to the software it replaced, though, and Panther's half-assed "spatial Finder" is a pretty weak imitation. (Hopefully Nautilus does a better job.)

Spatial interafaces are not new or revolutionary, but they are extremely effective. I'll let Ars Technica do the talking: they have a really good article that discusses the MacOS Finder and what a spatial interface is. It will give you a better understanding about what Nautilus is trying to accomplish.

let's not forget that konqueror already "kinda" support the "spatial navigation" - right click, open in new tab.

That's got nothing to do with "spatial navigation". Go read this for what it's about. The idea is to maintain the properties of real objects. Consider a real file folder. When you put it on your desk, it exists in only one place, and when you come back to it, it's in the same place. When you move, and perhaps open it to look at a particular piece of paper in it, it stays that way, until you change it.

Whether this is good or bad depends on how you like to work. Some research indicates that the spatial metaphor works better for people learning computers, or infrequent users. If you're used to the standard tree browser, it feels odd.

This is a step backwards, and one that will slow down making any inroads into the corporate or personal desktop.

Absolutely, 100% wrong.

Instead of completely tearing apart your idea that spatial is a "step backwards," I'll let a better-written article say it for me.

As the new owner of an iBook, I have had a lot more to do with Mac owners lately, and let me tell you: Linux zealots can't hold a candle to an enraged Apple fanatic -- take for example the death threats this guy got when he did a parody of changing his PowerMac G5 into a PC. Linux users just don't get that excited, certainly not over hardware.

But then, everybody seems to think Mac users are some sort of peace-loving hippies, and the Linux people are radicals. Guess Steve Ballmer running around and calling us anti-American communists does have an effect after all.

First, I'm going to have to agree with a lot of the other posters and say that this is a poor question for Ask Slashdot; it shouldn't have been hard to research on your own.

Second, Slashdot is not the best place to ask. The quality of your responses would be much better from forums that focus on video capture, such as Ars Technica's Audio/Visual forum and doom9.org's DV forum.

Now, back to your question:

With most DV camcorders, you should be able to feed a composite or s-video source into the camcorder, and then you can use whatever DV software you normally use. I've heard that there are a handful of DV camcorder models that require you to record to tape first, but I don't think they're Sony's. Unfortunately, there will be significant latency.

As for some of the other Slashdot responses so far: No, you don't need a Mac, and no, you don't need Premiere. If you're using Windows and want a lightweight DV capturing app, try Scenalyzer Live! (~$40) or WinDV (free).

Heck, on Windows, a DV camcorder should show up as a DirectShow capture device. If you don't care about recompressing the video stream (e.g. for machine vision), then you can use any DirectShow-based TV/capture app. There are a number of open-source ones out there (e.g. Virtual VCR).

You should mean the M series, because there is a lot more to it than PM and variable clock, something the regular Pentium line has had for years. Read this article and you'll realize just how much went into it.