Remembering a long way back, the absurdly powerful 12Mhz 286 with 287 souped-up IBM PC-AT that I first worked with when I left school wasn't beige at all, it was an almost-white shade of grey, and the PC-junior that th eoffice secretary craved was a darker grey. Can anyone confirm that the original IBM PC wasn't beige either?
This story seems to indicate that a librarian has the power to write or alter laws. None of the Americans posting seem to think this is in any way odd or inappropriate, but I'm sitting here in Britain thinking 'wtf?'
I'm used to the US governing system being a bit impenetrable (Gore getting more votes than Bush but still losing, for example) but this one really is rather perplexing to an outsider, could anyone explain what's going on here?
Of course it's far less shocking that the same bug is present in IE6 and IE7! I wonder which browser you will be recommending... do you know of one that passes the test-case linked to from the bugzilla page?
Mathematical Models by H. M. Cundy, A. P. Rollett A 55 year old textbook that has stood the test of time amazingly well. If you've ever wanted to make a paper model of a stellated icosadodecahedron, this book will tell you how, and if you haven't ever wanted to, then you soon will. The mix of slightly dry writing from english mathematics professors, high math and solid tips on the best way to manufacture glass nibs for a twin-elliptic harmonograph really captured my imagination as a child, and I was soon adapting my lego railway set to draw Lissajous's figures. Even now, some of the math is beyond me, but the fact that the book explains everything in terms of physical models and their manufacture makes the hard parts seem very much within reach. The final section on computing is perhaps only of historical interest, unless you fancy making an and gate the hard way, but it (like the rest of the book) undoubtedly has charm, an adjective that can rarely be applied to math textbooks!
The Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford A celebration of post-war British engineering. Spufford takes 6 examples of British Boffinhood and narrates the events in a style that I found unputdownable. While you probably know how some of the events covered will turn out (Concorde doesn't get cancelled in the 1970s, and the two 1980s geeks do manage to finish writing "Elite" for the BBC micro) others, like the take of the British independent space programme might be more of a surprise.
Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh More history of geekdom, this time a history of Fremat's Last Theorem. The math is presented in a form your mom would be able to follow, so this is one to read fro fun rather than enlightenment, but Singh really tells a tale well, and Andrew Wiles becomes the unlikely hero in a true story of mathematical genius, triumph, tials and tribulations (whatever a tribulation might be).
My Sony(spit!)Ericsson phone does that too - but in such an obscure way that I didn't discover that feature until I had the phone for about a year, long after the irritating micro-joystick used to choose which of a contacts's numbers to dial had clogged up. The software is at best clunky, the bare minimum that the makes could get away with, unless they the developers thought of something that would add a bullet point to the feature list. So I have a built in multi-track music sequencer, but not the ability to take a photo without a 5 second wait.
There really is a huge gap in the market for a phone that's well designed and has a well written software, rather than the botchware that my past SE and Nokia phones shipped with. How did my phone ship with the ability to play a 45 minute video clip, but no way to pause, rewind or fast-forward it?
Apple's problem is not that the other makers are subsidised, because their phones will undoubtedly be subsidised too (why on earth does the analyst think this would be an issue?) but that one size doesn't fit all. I want at least a 2 megapixel camera and 4Gb of ram, or if wish fulfillment is an option, OSX on a transmeta cpu... but the 'bare bones' market wants just a phone/ipod nano combo in a small form factor. If we don't see iPhone, iPhone Nano, and iPhonePro then a big share of the potential audience will be disappointed.
Well at least it makes a change from hearing "We're not going to port our games to your PPC architecture". Now the games industry will be saying "We're too busy writing for PPC chips to port to your x86 architecture".
"...digital content creation systems, for video, photo editing or digital audio. In other words, Kentsfield is for high-end desktops or workstations only"
That sounds like a Mac user to me. The Article says "New systems boasting the CPU set to be announced today", and it's a Tuesday, the traditional launch day for new Macs. Do I see a pattern emerging here?
U&I software's "Artmatic Voyager" (successor to the much better known but non-procedural landscape renderer Bryce), and it's 2D companion Artmatic Pro are excellent tools for creating procedural art. No programming experience is necessary to create quite stunning stuff, and there is a wealth of possibilities under the hood once you start building your own algorythms. Take a look at the Artmatic Voyager Gallery for some beautiful procedural planets.
Way back in 1984, the game "Elite" used procedural techniques to generate it's galaxy maps, allowing 8 galaxies with 256 individally named and described stars to fit in a tiny fraction of it's 32k memory. A derivative of the fibonnaci sequence saved the BBC's 1Mhz processor having to do FFTs. The idea of using procedures to generate 3D graphics has been around since another BBC game, "The Sentinel", where 9999 levels of 3D landscape were generated at up to 1fps (if you were lucky!)
Sony has been hyping procedural texturing recently, the PS3's Cell architecture is supposedly ideal for doing this kind of thing.
Actually, I did read the article, and nowhere does it say there is a headphone socket, and nowhere in the pictures does it show one. I have never heard of "microSD", so I had no idea that was a memory slot... it's certainly not a slot I can put any of my existing memory sticks in.
Blame the journalist for writing a bad article, not me for reading it. Yes my post was flawed, and it didn't deserve the +5 it was modded up to because I missed the memory slot, but my fundamental point, that this phone looks horribly under-specced to me, stands.
I'm choosing my next free upgrade soon... I can get a 3.2 mexapixel cameraphone or an 4Gb mp3/video player phone, so I'm not going to hold out for a 128Mb no-camera phone.
If I was a naysayer, I'd have probably pointed out that this phone was vapourware and that GPS is useless for in-car navigation without an up-to date open-source roadmap, which doesn't exist, and wouldn't fit in the memory even if it did.
Someone sent me a floppy with the WDEF B virus on it, but my Mac IIci's antivirus software caught it. Of course, since those days Apple have really got their act together and I don't get viruses nearly as often.
My PC is virus-free too, probably because it doesn't have a network card or modem, a surprisingly difficult combination to achieve when buying it. I gave up trying to spec a machine without ethernet and settled for opening up a brand new computer, pulling the unwanted card and binning it.
Buy a console if you want to play games. A Wii is going to be cheaper than a top of the range graphics card, it will be up-to-date for many more years. Unless you are a fps addict (read that a first-person-shooter or frames-per-second to taste) the games are probably better too.
It's an absurdly thin (9mm) phone, not a bare bones phone. The lack of features has a lot more to do with it's exotic display that with the demand for a simple device.
I'm not one of the anti-gadget brigade myself, but if I was I'd definitely swap the thinness for more battery life, a bigger keypad, a backlight and the feeling that it won't snap in half at any moment.
The British Phonographic Industry Association (Our RIAA) are lobbying for a disney-style extension of copyright, citing artists like Sir Cliff Richard who are about to have their early works go into the public domain (BBC story with details here)
Guess where our Prime Minister Tony Blair went for a free summer holiday? That's right, Cliff Richard's private island in Barbados (another BBC story)
Does anyone want to bet that sanity and common sense will triumph over bribery?
Replying to my own post with suggested examples...
Play the class a few bars of "Pretty fly for a white guy" by Offspring - specifically the part that includes the words "Gunter glieben glauchen globen".
Ask the class if you owe Offspring money because you used their work? Lead into 'fair use' exemptions.
Play Def Leppard's song "Rock of Ages" - specifically the part that offspring sampled the words "Gunter glieben glauchen globen" from. Ask the class if Offspring owe Def Leppard money? Lead into the way both artists signed their copyrights away.
Play "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi". Ask the class if he owes Offspring money, and if Offspring should have the right to say "no don't mess with our song".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's the SI unit for measuring Mexican Waves
Remembering a long way back, the absurdly powerful 12Mhz 286 with 287 souped-up IBM PC-AT that I first worked with when I left school wasn't beige at all, it was an almost-white shade of grey, and the PC-junior that th eoffice secretary craved was a darker grey. Can anyone confirm that the original IBM PC wasn't beige either?
This story seems to indicate that a librarian has the power to write or alter laws. None of the Americans posting seem to think this is in any way odd or inappropriate, but I'm sitting here in Britain thinking 'wtf?'
I'm used to the US governing system being a bit impenetrable (Gore getting more votes than Bush but still losing, for example) but this one really is rather perplexing to an outsider, could anyone explain what's going on here?
Australia IS under the EU, just check any Globe. Damn flat earthers....
Of course it's far less shocking that the same bug is present in IE6 and IE7! I wonder which browser you will be recommending... do you know of one that passes the test-case linked to from the bugzilla page?
According to the Bugzilla link, this bug is also present in pre 2.0 releases of Firefox, and IE 6/7.
So much for me being smug about going back to Firefox 1.5!
Mathematical Models by H. M. Cundy, A. P. Rollett
A 55 year old textbook that has stood the test of time amazingly well. If you've ever wanted to make a paper model of a stellated icosadodecahedron, this book will tell you how, and if you haven't ever wanted to, then you soon will. The mix of slightly dry writing from english mathematics professors, high math and solid tips on the best way to manufacture glass nibs for a twin-elliptic harmonograph really captured my imagination as a child, and I was soon adapting my lego railway set to draw Lissajous's figures. Even now, some of the math is beyond me, but the fact that the book explains everything in terms of physical models and their manufacture makes the hard parts seem very much within reach. The final section on computing is perhaps only of historical interest, unless you fancy making an and gate the hard way, but it (like the rest of the book) undoubtedly has charm, an adjective that can rarely be applied to math textbooks!
The Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford
A celebration of post-war British engineering. Spufford takes 6 examples of British Boffinhood and narrates the events in a style that I found unputdownable. While you probably know how some of the events covered will turn out (Concorde doesn't get cancelled in the 1970s, and the two 1980s geeks do manage to finish writing "Elite" for the BBC micro) others, like the take of the British independent space programme might be more of a surprise.
Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh
More history of geekdom, this time a history of Fremat's Last Theorem. The math is presented in a form your mom would be able to follow, so this is one to read fro fun rather than enlightenment, but Singh really tells a tale well, and Andrew Wiles becomes the unlikely hero in a true story of mathematical genius, triumph, tials and tribulations (whatever a tribulation might be).
My Sony(spit!)Ericsson phone does that too - but in such an obscure way that I didn't discover that feature until I had the phone for about a year, long after the irritating micro-joystick used to choose which of a contacts's numbers to dial had clogged up. The software is at best clunky, the bare minimum that the makes could get away with, unless they the developers thought of something that would add a bullet point to the feature list. So I have a built in multi-track music sequencer, but not the ability to take a photo without a 5 second wait.
There really is a huge gap in the market for a phone that's well designed and has a well written software, rather than the botchware that my past SE and Nokia phones shipped with. How did my phone ship with the ability to play a 45 minute video clip, but no way to pause, rewind or fast-forward it?
Apple's problem is not that the other makers are subsidised, because their phones will undoubtedly be subsidised too (why on earth does the analyst think this would be an issue?) but that one size doesn't fit all. I want at least a 2 megapixel camera and 4Gb of ram, or if wish fulfillment is an option, OSX on a transmeta cpu... but the 'bare bones' market wants just a phone/ipod nano combo in a small form factor. If we don't see iPhone, iPhone Nano, and iPhonePro then a big share of the potential audience will be disappointed.
You'll never be able to actually buy Vista, just a very limited licence to run it.
Not that anybody sane would want to...
That's just ad hominem praise, it's not scentifically provably "nice"
Well at least it makes a change from hearing "We're not going to port our games to your PPC architecture". Now the games industry will be saying "We're too busy writing for PPC chips to port to your x86 architecture".
"...digital content creation systems, for video, photo editing or digital audio. In other words, Kentsfield is for high-end desktops or workstations only"
That sounds like a Mac user to me. The Article says "New systems boasting the CPU set to be announced today", and it's a Tuesday, the traditional launch day for new Macs. Do I see a pattern emerging here?
I trust myself, it's everyone else in the building I have a problem with!
U&I software's "Artmatic Voyager" (successor to the much better known but non-procedural landscape renderer Bryce), and it's 2D companion Artmatic Pro are excellent tools for creating procedural art. No programming experience is necessary to create quite stunning stuff, and there is a wealth of possibilities under the hood once you start building your own algorythms. Take a look at the Artmatic Voyager Gallery for some beautiful procedural planets.
Way back in 1984, the game "Elite" used procedural techniques to generate it's galaxy maps, allowing 8 galaxies with 256 individally named and described stars to fit in a tiny fraction of it's 32k memory. A derivative of the fibonnaci sequence saved the BBC's 1Mhz processor having to do FFTs. The idea of using procedures to generate 3D graphics has been around since another BBC game, "The Sentinel", where 9999 levels of 3D landscape were generated at up to 1fps (if you were lucky!)
Sony has been hyping procedural texturing recently, the PS3's Cell architecture is supposedly ideal for doing this kind of thing.
Actually, I did read the article, and nowhere does it say there is a headphone socket, and nowhere in the pictures does it show one. I have never heard of "microSD", so I had no idea that was a memory slot... it's certainly not a slot I can put any of my existing memory sticks in.
Blame the journalist for writing a bad article, not me for reading it. Yes my post was flawed, and it didn't deserve the +5 it was modded up to because I missed the memory slot, but my fundamental point, that this phone looks horribly under-specced to me, stands.
I'm choosing my next free upgrade soon... I can get a 3.2 mexapixel cameraphone or an 4Gb mp3/video player phone, so I'm not going to hold out for a 128Mb no-camera phone.
If I was a naysayer, I'd have probably pointed out that this phone was vapourware and that GPS is useless for in-car navigation without an up-to date open-source roadmap, which doesn't exist, and wouldn't fit in the memory even if it did.
Someone sent me a floppy with the WDEF B virus on it, but my Mac IIci's antivirus software caught it. Of course, since those days Apple have really got their act together and I don't get viruses nearly as often.
My PC is virus-free too, probably because it doesn't have a network card or modem, a surprisingly difficult combination to achieve when buying it. I gave up trying to spec a machine without ethernet and settled for opening up a brand new computer, pulling the unwanted card and binning it.
...no headphone socket, no memory card socket, not enough memory to be a great mp3 or video player.
Great software can't fix harware problems, so no sale here.
Well I suppose that would *just about* make them as evil as Sony and Microsoft... not quite enough for me to boycott them though.
Sticking with your wildly inaccurate measures...
Wii: 1-core G3 @ 729Mhz
Xbox 360: 3-core G3 @ 3200Mhz
Roughly 13 times the cpu power, meaning about twice the instructions per pixel. Hmmm.
Buy a console if you want to play games. A Wii is going to be cheaper than a top of the range graphics card, it will be up-to-date for many more years. Unless you are a fps addict (read that a first-person-shooter or frames-per-second to taste) the games are probably better too.
It's an absurdly thin (9mm) phone, not a bare bones phone. The lack of features has a lot more to do with it's exotic display that with the demand for a simple device.
I'm not one of the anti-gadget brigade myself, but if I was I'd definitely swap the thinness for more battery life, a bigger keypad, a backlight and the feeling that it won't snap in half at any moment.
The British Phonographic Industry Association (Our RIAA) are lobbying for a disney-style extension of copyright, citing artists like Sir Cliff Richard who are about to have their early works go into the public domain (BBC story with details here)
Guess where our Prime Minister Tony Blair went for a free summer holiday? That's right, Cliff Richard's private island in Barbados (another BBC story)
Does anyone want to bet that sanity and common sense will triumph over bribery?
Err... that's the way I suggested it went!
Replying to my own post with suggested examples...
Play the class a few bars of "Pretty fly for a white guy" by Offspring - specifically the part that includes the words "Gunter glieben glauchen globen".
Ask the class if you owe Offspring money because you used their work? Lead into 'fair use' exemptions.
Play Def Leppard's song "Rock of Ages" - specifically the part that offspring sampled the words "Gunter glieben glauchen globen" from. Ask the class if Offspring owe Def Leppard money? Lead into the way both artists signed their copyrights away.
Play "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi". Ask the class if he owes Offspring money, and if Offspring should have the right to say "no don't mess with our song".