That, or the Sinclair ZX Spectrum contended memory pages 4-7 which can only be accessed at full speed by the CPU when the display is drawing borders or doing horizontal/vertical retrace.
Toyota already uses QNX - at least in their Touch&Go nav/audio head units sold on european market cars. The OS identifies itself as "QNX Neutrino" and appears to run on OMAP3 ARMv7 hardware (TI DM3730 SoC).
At least some small aircraft have a rotating vane sensor which measures the direction of the airflow in relation to the aircraft, ie. the angle of attack. It may be used to trigger a stall warning if the angle exceeds safe operating limits. I don't know, however, how many larger airliners come with similar equipment - I've seen a picture of one on an A380, at least.
The trick for more sprites on C64 was to generate rasterline interrupts which change the sprite location while the electron gun of the display was still drawing it. This way you could re-use a sprite further down the screen in an area which had not yet been drawn. However, the new location had to be at least 21 (IIRC) rasterlines below the rastercount at which the interrupt occurred for the new sprite to be displayed. Also, you couldn't change the sprite data pointer until the old sprite was fully drawn because weird things would happen.
Also, it should be noted that realtime phong shading was already common in demos/intros running on 33 MHz 386 CPUs back in the 90s
You know, you really shouldn't believe Jmagic if he says an object has 7800 phong shaded polys...
As far as I know, all the software rendering demos and intros in the 90s claiming phong shading faked it either by envmapping with a prerendered texture of a specular highlight or doing gouraud with a non-linear palette. Both looked reasonably convincing, albeit with somewhat rough and/or distorted highlights.
At least on a ZX Spectrum, the psycho-acoustic models do damage the data enough to make it impossible to load. I exported a few.TZX files into.WAV, compressed them into MP3 and tried to load into my 48k Spectrum from a portable MP3 player. I didn't manage to load the program one single time as every attempt ended with an "R Tape load error". I also tried recording the.WAV onto a minidisc (old MZ-R90 portable) but still got similar results, so apparently ATRAC loses too much data as well. Burning the.WAV files onto CD as audio tracks worked flawlessly, though.
I wholeheartedly agree. The label looks strikingly similar to the usual Pepsi Max one, so I picked up a bottle of the cappucino variety at the supermarket. "What the hell, let's give it a try", I thought and put it into my shopping basket - a big mistake. At first, it doesn't taste much different than the usual Max, but the aftertaste is something truly horrible. Avoid it at all costs. Judging from the Google hits for "Pepsi Max Cappucino", it seems that this is a Finland-only product, though.
I just wish they'd bring back the "Wild Cherry" -flavour from a few years back - that was really great, even better than Dr. Pepper (well, better than the watered-down version of it we have here anyway).
Last year, the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority ("Ficora") issued an order to all finnish ISPs, stating that they should block all outgoing connections to port 25, barring the ISP's own SMTP server, from any privately used internet connections. This very effectively blocks any zombie machines from sending out junk email directly to MX servers.
One drawback is, however, that I have to change the outgoing SMTP server whenever I take my laptop from home to work and vice-versa.
Indeed! The yellow specular highlight immediately caught my attention as well and screamed "ray-tracing" in my mind. At one point, however, you can see Australia pass through the hightlight, revealing that it's visible only on water. Also, clouds appear to obscure it slightly.
Now that I think about it, the reflections on the water are very bright when at a seashore, looking towards the sun. Very interesting to find out how visible it actually is from space.
Considering the definitions of art given in some earlier comments, I'd certainly classify demos as art due to their purpose being completely aesthetic. The music and graphical parts of a demo are, of course, easily comparable to their counterparts in contemporary popular art but the code which glues the music and graphics together, is a completely new concept. Still, because the goal of the coder is the same as the rest of the group, to produce an aesthetically pleasing production which serves no practical function, I'd most definintely consider it an artform of its own.
I have to agree with you in the point that, at least for me, coding used to be more fun when it still meant utilizing clever and innovative hardware trickery in pure assembly language. I don't really code demos on cutting-edge PCs anymore because of this but I still have to hand it to the guys who do. It may be that with today's hardware 3D-acceleration, one doesn't have to tweak polyfiller innerloops and optimize code cycle-by-cycle, but the complex 3D systems in demos these days require quite a bit of creative thinking as well. The tricks used for dynamic shadow volumes, reflections, complex pixel shaders, etc. are quite impressive and implementing them requires quite a bit of creativity and imagination from the coder.
A fun thing is also the fact that old computers, no matter how expensive they were as new, are really not worth anything. It's now possible to buy computers which used to be far beyond a normal hobbyist's reach, such as Silicon Graphics workstations or large mainframes. I, for example, got a Sun SparcServer 670MP for free - a really awesome machine the size of a small fridge. Not that it's particulary useful these days, but just exploring the internals of that beast was an adventure by itself.
A somewhat similar program has been running in Finland for about a decade now, starting with only a fraction of the population and now covering most of us.
In the spring, a pre-filled tax form is sent to each participating taxpayer, with the calculations based on previous year's actual income figures. The taxpayer must inspect the form and if there are any errors, fix them and mail the form back - otherwise no action needs to be taken. Those who sent back a fixed form, will receive another one with the new calculations in autumn. Then, based on these numbers, possible tax returns will be paid in the beginning of december. If further tax needs to be paid, it's divided into two payments - one in December and the other in January.
I've been fortunate enough to have been included in the program on it's first year so I've actually never had to fill out a tax form.
Well, the whole thing of giving a prequel the number zero is a pretty tired concept already anyway. How about borrowing a bit from the Gran Turismo series and calling the new movie Star Wars: Prologue.
If one sets the maximum size of the core dump to zero (ulimit -c 0) in.bashrc, the error message will be;
Segmentation fault
However, if the maximum core dump size is greater than zero, a core file will be created to the late process' current working directory and the error message is;
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
AFAIK, most distributions by default set maximum core size to zero so it's quite easy to have never seen the latter version of the error message.
Just because you consider a sixty-cycle hum a catchy tune makes it music not.
Obviously you haven't heard of Pan Sonic (formerly known as Panasonic - they changed their name for obvious reasons). You can listen to some audio clips here.
And thanks to the low prices of swedish ISPs, their counterparts here in Finland have also been forced to significantly drop their prices. While I was paying 59eur/month ($77) for a 1M/768K ADSL connection a year ago, I'm now paying 47eur/month ($61) for a 8M/1M connection from the same ISP. And of course, the transfer is not capped in either direction.
So true. I bought me a laptop last year and decided to go for a second-hand Thinkpad T20 with a P3/750MHz, despite the fact that with the same money, I could've gotten some new laptop with a faster CPU and a bigger screen. However, the ones I looked at in the computer store felt really flimsy and plasticy compared to the sturdy titanium-reinforced IBM. The decision wasn't that difficult and I've been quite satisfied with my T20. which hasn't been giving me any problems whatsoever.
Oh yeah, and those touchpad-mouse-things really suck bigtime. IBM's small "joystick" is sooo much nicer to use - no more accidentally leaning on on the touchpad with my wrist and dragging and dropping random files to even more random locations.
Actually, it might really pay off to patent
the concept of stupid patents. This way, every
time a stupid patent is attempted and then
rejected, Slashdot could sue the person who came
up with the stupid patent. Also, by figuring
out that patenting the concept of stupid patents
is stupid, one could create an extremely stupid
recursive loop of suing the stupid patent of
stupid patents over and over (Andover? Oh, what
kind of verbal stunts I'm pulling today!) again.
Now this sounds very interesting indeed for
software developers working on client/server
systems and embedded Linux systems. No need to
have several physical computers in a network
when one can test applications by running
several separate "computers" on one computer.
How about running a Beowulf cluster on one
physical computer?;)
On the other hand, AFAIK, this has already been
possible with VMWare, right?
Slashdot Mirror
So the Amiga Chip ram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is back in style huh?
That, or the Sinclair ZX Spectrum contended memory pages 4-7 which can only be accessed at full speed by the CPU when the display is drawing borders or doing horizontal/vertical retrace.
Toyota already uses QNX - at least in their Touch&Go nav/audio head units sold on european market cars. The OS identifies itself as "QNX Neutrino" and appears to run on OMAP3 ARMv7 hardware (TI DM3730 SoC).
At least some small aircraft have a rotating vane sensor which measures the direction of the airflow in relation to the aircraft, ie. the angle of attack. It may be used to trigger a stall warning if the angle exceeds safe operating limits. I don't know, however, how many larger airliners come with similar equipment - I've seen a picture of one on an A380, at least.
The trick for more sprites on C64 was to generate rasterline interrupts which change the sprite location while the electron gun of the display was still drawing it. This way you could re-use a sprite further down the screen in an area which had not yet been drawn. However, the new location had to be at least 21 (IIRC) rasterlines below the rastercount at which the interrupt occurred for the new sprite to be displayed. Also, you couldn't change the sprite data pointer until the old sprite was fully drawn because weird things would happen.
Oceanic OC-118N?
Also, it should be noted that realtime phong shading was already common in demos/intros running on 33 MHz 386 CPUs back in the 90s
You know, you really shouldn't believe Jmagic if he says an object has 7800 phong shaded polys...
As far as I know, all the software rendering demos and intros in the 90s claiming phong shading faked it either by envmapping with a prerendered texture of a specular highlight or doing gouraud with a non-linear palette. Both looked reasonably convincing, albeit with somewhat rough and/or distorted highlights.
At least on a ZX Spectrum, the psycho-acoustic models do damage the data enough to make it impossible to load. I exported a few .TZX files into .WAV, compressed them into MP3 and tried to load into my 48k Spectrum from a portable MP3 player. I didn't manage to load the program one single time as every attempt ended with an "R Tape load error". I also tried recording the .WAV onto a minidisc (old MZ-R90 portable) but still got similar results, so apparently ATRAC loses too much data as well. Burning the .WAV files onto CD as audio tracks worked flawlessly, though.
I wholeheartedly agree. The label looks strikingly similar to the usual Pepsi Max one, so I picked up a bottle of the cappucino variety at the supermarket. "What the hell, let's give it a try", I thought and put it into my shopping basket - a big mistake. At first, it doesn't taste much different than the usual Max, but the aftertaste is something truly horrible. Avoid it at all costs. Judging from the Google hits for "Pepsi Max Cappucino", it seems that this is a Finland-only product, though.
I just wish they'd bring back the "Wild Cherry" -flavour from a few years back - that was really great, even better than Dr. Pepper (well, better than the watered-down version of it we have here anyway).
Last year, the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority ("Ficora") issued an order to all finnish ISPs, stating that they should block all outgoing connections to port 25, barring the ISP's own SMTP server, from any privately used internet connections. This very effectively blocks any zombie machines from sending out junk email directly to MX servers.
One drawback is, however, that I have to change the outgoing SMTP server whenever I take my laptop from home to work and vice-versa.
Well, the SA servers are now back online again so you can read Lowtax tell the story himself;
http://www.somethingawful.com/
Now that I think about it, the reflections on the water are very bright when at a seashore, looking towards the sun. Very interesting to find out how visible it actually is from space.
Considering the definitions of art given in some earlier comments, I'd certainly classify demos as art due to their purpose being completely aesthetic. The music and graphical parts of a demo are, of course, easily comparable to their counterparts in contemporary popular art but the code which glues the music and graphics together, is a completely new concept. Still, because the goal of the coder is the same as the rest of the group, to produce an aesthetically pleasing production which serves no practical function, I'd most definintely consider it an artform of its own.
I have to agree with you in the point that, at least for me, coding used to be more fun when it still meant utilizing clever and innovative hardware trickery in pure assembly language. I don't really code demos on cutting-edge PCs anymore because of this but I still have to hand it to the guys who do. It may be that with today's hardware 3D-acceleration, one doesn't have to tweak polyfiller innerloops and optimize code cycle-by-cycle, but the complex 3D systems in demos these days require quite a bit of creative thinking as well. The tricks used for dynamic shadow volumes, reflections, complex pixel shaders, etc. are quite impressive and implementing them requires quite a bit of creativity and imagination from the coder.
A fun thing is also the fact that old computers, no matter how expensive they were as new, are really not worth anything. It's now possible to buy computers which used to be far beyond a normal hobbyist's reach, such as Silicon Graphics workstations or large mainframes. I, for example, got a Sun SparcServer 670MP for free - a really awesome machine the size of a small fridge. Not that it's particulary useful these days, but just exploring the internals of that beast was an adventure by itself.
In the spring, a pre-filled tax form is sent to each participating taxpayer, with the calculations based on previous year's actual income figures. The taxpayer must inspect the form and if there are any errors, fix them and mail the form back - otherwise no action needs to be taken. Those who sent back a fixed form, will receive another one with the new calculations in autumn. Then, based on these numbers, possible tax returns will be paid in the beginning of december. If further tax needs to be paid, it's divided into two payments - one in December and the other in January.
I've been fortunate enough to have been included in the program on it's first year so I've actually never had to fill out a tax form.
Well, the whole thing of giving a prequel the number zero is a pretty tired concept already anyway. How about borrowing a bit from the Gran Turismo series and calling the new movie Star Wars: Prologue.
They all are - after the cement is no longer wet.
If one sets the maximum size of the core dump to zero (ulimit -c 0) in .bashrc, the error message will be;
Segmentation fault
However, if the maximum core dump size is greater than zero, a core file will be created to the late process' current working directory and the error message is;
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
AFAIK, most distributions by default set maximum core size to zero so it's quite easy to have never seen the latter version of the error message.
And people wonder why HST blew his brains out.
What? I thought Mike broke the Hubble?
Obviously you haven't heard of Pan Sonic (formerly known as Panasonic - they changed their name for obvious reasons). You can listen to some audio clips here.
I hear there's one already in Redmond...
And thanks to the low prices of swedish ISPs, their counterparts here in Finland have also been forced to significantly drop their prices. While I was paying 59eur/month ($77) for a 1M/768K ADSL connection a year ago, I'm now paying 47eur/month ($61) for a 8M/1M connection from the same ISP. And of course, the transfer is not capped in either direction.
"...including some Asian delicacies -- dim sum dumplings for Chiao ... and fried rice for Sharipov"
Ah, so they are both gastronauts!
Oh yeah, and those touchpad-mouse-things really suck bigtime. IBM's small "joystick" is sooo much nicer to use - no more accidentally leaning on on the touchpad with my wrist and dragging and dropping random files to even more random locations.
Actually, it might really pay off to patent
the concept of stupid patents. This way, every
time a stupid patent is attempted and then
rejected, Slashdot could sue the person who came
up with the stupid patent. Also, by figuring
out that patenting the concept of stupid patents
is stupid, one could create an extremely stupid
recursive loop of suing the stupid patent of
stupid patents over and over (Andover? Oh, what
kind of verbal stunts I'm pulling today!) again.
Ahem, I think I've had enough Jolt for today...
Now this sounds very interesting indeed for
;)
software developers working on client/server
systems and embedded Linux systems. No need to
have several physical computers in a network
when one can test applications by running
several separate "computers" on one computer.
How about running a Beowulf cluster on one
physical computer?
On the other hand, AFAIK, this has already been
possible with VMWare, right?