Here down under, we've been watching HDTV via DVB-T (terrestrial) card for a couple of months - there are a fewcardsavailable, even with good Linux support.
Since the cards are basically just a tuner with a PCI bridge, all they do is receive the digital signal and dump it to your machine. The rest is software, and if you have the codecs (and the grunt), you can watch/record/timeshift an HDTV signal just as easily as SDTV.
I use mine under Windows (yeah, sorry), but I have a friend who's building a multi-tuner networked MythTV box, and is reporting great sucecss under Linux.
Man, is there nothing they don't have their claws into?
Blake Stowell: C++ is one of the properties that SCO owns today and we frequently are approached by customers who wish to license C++ from us and we do charge for that.
This isn't a new story, but I missed it amongst all the Linux reaction..
Unless you already bought one
on
OpenGL 1.5
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· Score: 2, Informative
...drivers will adapt by simply compiling the code before passing it to the card
Sure, if you already HAVE a fancy-schmancy GeForceFX/Radeon 9500+ level card. For previous-generation hardware, you might get very simple shaders to work, but for more complex shaders that require looping, data-dependant branching, overbright float pixels etc, you're still gonna need new hardware:-) Even earlier hardware, well, tough - you might get vertex shaders if you're lucky.
Now if the cards can accept the high-level language itself...
No chance:-) It's difficult enough to decode the time-encrusted x86 instruction set for efficient hardware execution by a flexible CPU. It'd be a helluva lot harder to decode modern, high level, arbitrary-syntax code for execution on a much less flexible, highly parallely & extremely specialised GPU...
I kinda doubt there would be much hydrogen left after any sort of combustion, even if there was any to start with. The hydrogen would be the first to oxidise, and you'd be left with water.
And if there had already been a strike or an explosion, I don't think you'd need nanosensors to detect it...
Why stop at 8? At last count, I have 9 IR remotes (two of them universal, one learning, one with macros), 2 RF remotes with X10 and mouse control, a BlueTooth phone I control my MP3 collection with, and a full wireless mouse & keyboard. Am I a geek yet?
Thankfully I don't feel compelled to use most of them...
I read my books on my P800 these days. The screen's smaller than this thing, but it's backlit, very crisp, and so easy to turn pages that I don't mind turning them more often. It's smaller & lighter than a real book, too - I find I prefer it to the real thing, overall.
Conveniently enough, there are whole communities of people out there who scan in new releases & make them available as txt or HTML (just be sure to buy the real book before downloading).
And best of all, since it doubles as a phone, my current books are always with me:-)
As has been repeatedly stated, using gcc on each machine does not standardize the test!
The part of gcc that actually generates the code - the part that is important to the compiled app's performance - is, of course, completely different for each CPU. The rest of gcc is irrelevant; it's only interface & syntax parsing stuff, it doesn't affect the compiled code's performance. gcc/x86 and gcc/G5 might as well be completely different programs. It wouldn't matter dick if Intel did provide a G5 compiler. You simply can't "standardize" the compiler for two incompatible CPUs.
The only meaningful comparison is to use the compilers that app developers on each platform are likely to use - and for performance-oriented apps, that's the Intel compiler, since it is so much faster.
MMDIV, yes. We are finding gcc's results to be around half the speed of the Intel compiler's results, sometimes quite a bit worse. In fact, it's coming out slower even than VC++.
This is in a 2D compositer, code with intensive integer and FP operations and quite a bit of bandwidth usage.
The article & fevered imaginations of Gareth Powell aside, can anyone point me to an example (or recommendation) of calling a USB 1.1 device "USB2"?
This page specifically recommends against calling USB 1.1 devices "USB 2.0" as it "can be confusing for consumers whose expectation is that a USB 2.0 product is by definition high-speed."
Of course, they do say it's OK to call USB 1.1 "USB Full Speed" (which is historically valid but misleading these days), or to describe them as "USB 2.0 compatible" (not "compliant", but nonetheless clearly misleading), but I still don't see where, as the article claims, the USB Forum announced that "henceforth USB 1.1 would be called USB 2".
I'm on Internode myself, the 512/128 option. Couldn't quite stretch to the 1.5M/256 plan, too bad.
Some of my tracerts do go through.nz, but this apparently doesn't help much, just adds extra hops.
And yeah, looking forward to getting the Agile network into Sydney:-) They're apparently now Telstra-free for their uplinks at least, but still stuck with them for the ADSL tail. Wonder if joining the main peering net will help out any - if the ACCC forces Telstra into it...
Satellite is an option here, but it was one-way only, until recently (need an ordinary modem for the uplink). There are at last now two-way systems, but the monthly cost is comparable with ADSL, the install cost is higher, you can only get volume-capped plans with an excess charge, and your latency sucks:-)
Suitable for people who can't get cable, ADSL or even ISDN, but there's not much to recommend it otherwise.
Well, there's not a bit more competition in Canada. Where I was (Toronto), the only cable option was Rogers, but I could choose a Bell Canada ADSL link. Those were my only real options, though.
Where I am in Sydney, I can choose Telsta cable, or Telstra for ADSL (directly, or indirectly through a third-party ISP). In other areas, you can at least choose Optus cable instead of Telstra's. A few areas even have the choice of both.
However, Optus (who are supposed to provide competition) isn't much better than Telstra, these days. They used to offer uncapped cable, but not any more - perhaps because of the charges I mention above?
I once made the mistake of trying out the then-new BitTorrent protocol to download an ISO, while staying at a friend's place. He was (but no longer is) connected to Telstra.
I didn't give much thought to BitTorrent's uploading while downloading, other than thinking it was a good idea, nor did I realise that my friend's data cap included upload bandwidth..
A day later, my friend got around to checking his email, and found a series of messages warning him that he was over his cap, and that charges were accumulating at 14c/MB. I consider myself lucky that, despite my carelessness, I escaped with a mere $110 of excess bandwidth fees... (Mark, when are you going to let me pay you back?;-)
4 years ago, I got cable internet within a few months of its initial availability in Sydney, and it was capped, believe me.
For $65/month, I was capped at a mere 100 MB, including both upload and download. Excess bandwidth was 33c/MB! Imagine what downloading a "free" RedHat ISO cost.
Broadband is simply too expensive here in Australia for the majority of customers - that's why the takeup rate is so slow.
While living in Canada for the last 4 years, for about CDN$40/month (about AU$48/month, including the modem rental) I enjoyed unlimited high-speed cable internet. But when I moved back to Australia, I found that cable internet would cost about AU$65/month, plus the cost of the modem ($300 I think), with a 3 GB cap (including both uploaded and downloaded data). Any traffic beyond that was ~14c/MB. This was a lot better than before I left Australia 4 years ago ($65/month, $500 modem, 100 MB cap (yes, MB) and 33c/MB beyond that!), but still a big let down.
I ended up with a third-party (Internode) ADSL link at only 512/128 Kb/s for $99/month (and a $200 modem) which is uncapped, but prioritises me down the more I download (upload is unmetered).
I'm told the Canadian government ensures that broadband prices are kept at reasonable levels. The Australian government certainly doesn't. I was also told that Australia must pay for all traffic both to and from the US. 4 years ago, this was apparently about 12c/MB, and was the justification for the traffic caps and excess charges.
However, these traffic charges are not only passed on to the consumer, they are also apply to everything - even Australian sites, and even if the content is cached by a local web proxy. Certain "popular" files may be mirrored for free by the ISP, if you're lucky.
It's not hard to see why Australian broadband costs so much, and why so few people can afford it.
Here, they rejected one customer applying through iiNet, a smaller ISP, claiming line quality was insufficient. The customer applied again through Telstra's own ISP, and was accepted. His ADSL service worked perfectly.
He complained to the Telecommunications Ombudsman publicised this, and shortly afterwards received an offer from Telstra to refund his connection fee, provide discounted service & upgrade his link too. He accepted, and also publicised Telstra's offer, causing more controversy. Telstra's explanation for the original problem was that "line test quality tests varied according to the weather".
Shortly after that, he was notified by Telstra that his service was to be disconnected, as he was "too far from the exchange". His ADSL service was still working perfectly, but apparently he shouldn't have been connected at all, regardless of the line quality...
Actually, you can get fixed-rate ADSL from quite a few provides - see Whirlpool for a list. Most will slow you down to modem speeds past the cap point, but at least you don't get whacked with thousand-dollar service bills.
Still, you can get ""unlimited" ADSL plans for as little as $65, e.g. from TPG. Only 256/64 Kb/s, and it can get pretty choked at peak times. It does exist, but it's a far, far cry from the unlimited cable I enjoyed in Canada for $40/month...
The Australian monopoly Telstra is supposed share their bandwidth too - they provide many base exchange services for smaller ISPs, and usually the uplink as well.
The problem is that all of the smaller ISPs are therefore dependant on Telstra's goodwill & timeliness. If Telstra "forget" to give the ISPs up-to-date information, or give their own ISP arm service priority, there's little the smaller ISPs can do.
You may not have to use ADSL - cable is an option for some (through Telstra). Optus are another major telco who provide local calls and broadband, through their own cable, though their market share is considerably less than Telstra's. Unfortunately, few areas have both Telstra and Optus cable available, so there's little actual competition between them. And only a relatively small % of the population can get cable at all, so ADSL is the only option for many, which means you're dependant on Telstra again.
Those are good points, and slot machine manufacturers often do make machines with a variety of payback profiles, as you describe. Smaller & more frequent payouts are often chosen to keep the player hopeful - still with the (lowered) possibility of a major jackpot - but sometimes a machine will by design make less frequent but larger payouts.
However, I don't recall in my experience ever seeing a machine that claims anything more than "you can win the following amounts", so I don't see how you can see it as a "breach of contract" if the odds of winning in a particular way are not what you expected them to be. If the machine claimed, "you have a 0.0001% chance of winning $50,000" when you didn't, then yes, but they don't (correct me if I'm wrong here). They only claim that you could win the jackpot, not how often.
Your issue, I think, is that you believe the game has better odds of paying out big on a given game than it perhaps does - regardless of the overall odds. What has led you to that belief? I doubt the manufacturer would make claims that could be proved to be lies. What has suggested to you that the game pays out jackpots at particular odds? Can whatever this is actually be construed as a legally binding statement of risk?
Perhaps they're playing on people's assumptions about the odds involved, but last I checked that was merely unethical, not illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe it was still working it out... I'll check again in six million years, Vogons permitting.
Since the cards are basically just a tuner with a PCI bridge, all they do is receive the digital signal and dump it to your machine. The rest is software, and if you have the codecs (and the grunt), you can watch/record/timeshift an HDTV signal just as easily as SDTV.
I use mine under Windows (yeah, sorry), but I have a friend who's building a multi-tuner networked MythTV box, and is reporting great sucecss under Linux.
Blake Stowell: C++ is one of the properties that SCO owns today and we frequently are approached by customers who wish to license C++ from us and we do charge for that.
http://mozillaquest.com/Linux03/ScoSource-02_Story 03.html#C++_Issues
This isn't a new story, but I missed it amongst all the Linux reaction..
Sure, if you already HAVE a fancy-schmancy GeForceFX/Radeon 9500+ level card. For previous-generation hardware, you might get very simple shaders to work, but for more complex shaders that require looping, data-dependant branching, overbright float pixels etc, you're still gonna need new hardware :-) Even earlier hardware, well, tough - you might get vertex shaders if you're lucky.
Now if the cards can accept the high-level language itself...
No chance :-) It's difficult enough to decode the time-encrusted x86 instruction set for efficient hardware execution by a flexible CPU. It'd be a helluva lot harder to decode modern, high level, arbitrary-syntax code for execution on a much less flexible, highly parallely & extremely specialised GPU...
And if there had already been a strike or an explosion, I don't think you'd need nanosensors to detect it...
Thnaks mate.
Sure, but they make the warnings 10x longer on VHS tape, so you still have to sit there watching them for the same length of time.
At least you're not forced to FF through 10 minutes of "trailers" to get to the thing you actually wanted to watch.
Thankfully I don't feel compelled to use most of them...
As you should - since we all know "security through obscurity" is a Bad Thing..
Conveniently enough, there are whole communities of people out there who scan in new releases & make them available as txt or HTML (just be sure to buy the real book before downloading).
And best of all, since it doubles as a phone, my current books are always with me :-)
The part of gcc that actually generates the code - the part that is important to the compiled app's performance - is, of course, completely different for each CPU. The rest of gcc is irrelevant; it's only interface & syntax parsing stuff, it doesn't affect the compiled code's performance. gcc/x86 and gcc/G5 might as well be completely different programs. It wouldn't matter dick if Intel did provide a G5 compiler. You simply can't "standardize" the compiler for two incompatible CPUs.
The only meaningful comparison is to use the compilers that app developers on each platform are likely to use - and for performance-oriented apps, that's the Intel compiler, since it is so much faster.
This is in a 2D compositer, code with intensive integer and FP operations and quite a bit of bandwidth usage.
This page specifically recommends against calling USB 1.1 devices "USB 2.0" as it "can be confusing for consumers whose expectation is that a USB 2.0 product is by definition high-speed."
Of course, they do say it's OK to call USB 1.1 "USB Full Speed" (which is historically valid but misleading these days), or to describe them as "USB 2.0 compatible" (not "compliant", but nonetheless clearly misleading), but I still don't see where, as the article claims, the USB Forum announced that "henceforth USB 1.1 would be called USB 2".
Some of my tracerts do go through .nz, but this apparently doesn't help much, just adds extra hops.
And yeah, looking forward to getting the Agile network into Sydney :-) They're apparently now Telstra-free for their uplinks at least, but still stuck with them for the ADSL tail. Wonder if joining the main peering net will help out any - if the ACCC forces Telstra into it...
Suitable for people who can't get cable, ADSL or even ISDN, but there's not much to recommend it otherwise.
OK, admittedly it was unlimited for a while there - only in response to Optus's uncapped plan :-)
But back in my day (ahem, 1997), it was a lot more capped than it is now, as I describe.
An example of competition at work - which then fell apart when both of them switched back to capped plans :-(
Well, there's not a bit more competition in Canada. Where I was (Toronto), the only cable option was Rogers, but I could choose a Bell Canada ADSL link. Those were my only real options, though.
Where I am in Sydney, I can choose Telsta cable, or Telstra for ADSL (directly, or indirectly through a third-party ISP). In other areas, you can at least choose Optus cable instead of Telstra's. A few areas even have the choice of both.
However, Optus (who are supposed to provide competition) isn't much better than Telstra, these days. They used to offer uncapped cable, but not any more - perhaps because of the charges I mention above?
I once made the mistake of trying out the then-new BitTorrent protocol to download an ISO, while staying at a friend's place. He was (but no longer is) connected to Telstra.
I didn't give much thought to BitTorrent's uploading while downloading, other than thinking it was a good idea, nor did I realise that my friend's data cap included upload bandwidth..
A day later, my friend got around to checking his email, and found a series of messages warning him that he was over his cap, and that charges were accumulating at 14c/MB. I consider myself lucky that, despite my carelessness, I escaped with a mere $110 of excess bandwidth fees... (Mark, when are you going to let me pay you back? ;-)
4 years ago, I got cable internet within a few months of its initial availability in Sydney, and it was capped, believe me.
For $65/month, I was capped at a mere 100 MB, including both upload and download. Excess bandwidth was 33c/MB! Imagine what downloading a "free" RedHat ISO cost.
Broadband is simply too expensive here in Australia for the majority of customers - that's why the takeup rate is so slow.
While living in Canada for the last 4 years, for about CDN$40/month (about AU$48/month, including the modem rental) I enjoyed unlimited high-speed cable internet. But when I moved back to Australia, I found that cable internet would cost about AU$65/month, plus the cost of the modem ($300 I think), with a 3 GB cap (including both uploaded and downloaded data). Any traffic beyond that was ~14c/MB. This was a lot better than before I left Australia 4 years ago ($65/month, $500 modem, 100 MB cap (yes, MB) and 33c/MB beyond that!), but still a big let down.
I ended up with a third-party (Internode) ADSL link at only 512/128 Kb/s for $99/month (and a $200 modem) which is uncapped, but prioritises me down the more I download (upload is unmetered).
I'm told the Canadian government ensures that broadband prices are kept at reasonable levels. The Australian government certainly doesn't. I was also told that Australia must pay for all traffic both to and from the US. 4 years ago, this was apparently about 12c/MB, and was the justification for the traffic caps and excess charges.However, these traffic charges are not only passed on to the consumer, they are also apply to everything - even Australian sites, and even if the content is cached by a local web proxy. Certain "popular" files may be mirrored for free by the ISP, if you're lucky.
It's not hard to see why Australian broadband costs so much, and why so few people can afford it.
Here, they rejected one customer applying through iiNet, a smaller ISP, claiming line quality was insufficient. The customer applied again through Telstra's own ISP, and was accepted. His ADSL service worked perfectly.
He complained to the Telecommunications Ombudsman publicised this, and shortly afterwards received an offer from Telstra to refund his connection fee, provide discounted service & upgrade his link too. He accepted, and also publicised Telstra's offer, causing more controversy. Telstra's explanation for the original problem was that "line test quality tests varied according to the weather".
Shortly after that, he was notified by Telstra that his service was to be disconnected, as he was "too far from the exchange". His ADSL service was still working perfectly, but apparently he shouldn't have been connected at all, regardless of the line quality...
Actually, you can get fixed-rate ADSL from quite a few provides - see Whirlpool for a list. Most will slow you down to modem speeds past the cap point, but at least you don't get whacked with thousand-dollar service bills.
Still, you can get ""unlimited" ADSL plans for as little as $65, e.g. from TPG. Only 256/64 Kb/s, and it can get pretty choked at peak times. It does exist, but it's a far, far cry from the unlimited cable I enjoyed in Canada for $40/month...
The Australian monopoly Telstra is supposed share their bandwidth too - they provide many base exchange services for smaller ISPs, and usually the uplink as well.
The problem is that all of the smaller ISPs are therefore dependant on Telstra's goodwill & timeliness. If Telstra "forget" to give the ISPs up-to-date information, or give their own ISP arm service priority, there's little the smaller ISPs can do.
You may not have to use ADSL - cable is an option for some (through Telstra). Optus are another major telco who provide local calls and broadband, through their own cable, though their market share is considerably less than Telstra's. Unfortunately, few areas have both Telstra and Optus cable available, so there's little actual competition between them. And only a relatively small % of the population can get cable at all, so ADSL is the only option for many, which means you're dependant on Telstra again.
Apple are suing God as well? How do they intend to serve him the notice?
Are there any non-Christian mythoi also involving apples?Those are good points, and slot machine manufacturers often do make machines with a variety of payback profiles, as you describe. Smaller & more frequent payouts are often chosen to keep the player hopeful - still with the (lowered) possibility of a major jackpot - but sometimes a machine will by design make less frequent but larger payouts.
However, I don't recall in my experience ever seeing a machine that claims anything more than "you can win the following amounts", so I don't see how you can see it as a "breach of contract" if the odds of winning in a particular way are not what you expected them to be. If the machine claimed, "you have a 0.0001% chance of winning $50,000" when you didn't, then yes, but they don't (correct me if I'm wrong here). They only claim that you could win the jackpot, not how often.
Your issue, I think, is that you believe the game has better odds of paying out big on a given game than it perhaps does - regardless of the overall odds. What has led you to that belief? I doubt the manufacturer would make claims that could be proved to be lies. What has suggested to you that the game pays out jackpots at particular odds? Can whatever this is actually be construed as a legally binding statement of risk?
Perhaps they're playing on people's assumptions about the odds involved, but last I checked that was merely unethical, not illegal.