I love using emacs but there is so much to learn. Does anyone know of a great web site for learning emacs? I think a well built web site that was newbie oriented would do emacs well. I used emacs in school, started working with MS IDE and have forgotten so much of what I knew...
To be honest the best places to pick up hints and tips are the various Emacs newsgroups. There are several experienced Emacs hackers on there who know their stuff and who post lucid and useful answers. Try gnu.emacs.help and comp.emacs for general enquiries, and gnu.emacs.sources is a very useful place to pick up new elisp hot off the press.
Where can I find out more about TAGS? Does it support Java? (My employer's language of choice).
TAGS is pretty wide ranging in it's abilities and Java support is somewhere. Ah. Here it is. To create tags for Java, and for Java development under Emacs, take a look at JDE. I've not used it, but it looks pretty wide-ranging. It also features automatic completion of class fields and methods:-)
Do TAGS automatically update whenever you add or modify members or methods in a class?
No - they are updated when you run the TAGS utility. If you update the methods/members, it's best to rerun TAGS to tidy up the database. It's often a good idea to run TAGS as part of your makefile so that whatever changes are put into the binary are reflected in the TAGS database.
The other thing that is missing (or, maybe not?) from emacs is the good integrated debugger that DevStudio has. Can you do an edit and continue on a running C++ or Java program from inside emacs?
Yes - with GUD (Grand Unified Debugger) under Emacs, you can interface with whatever debugger you feel like, from gdb, xdb, etc.. You can mark lines in the code as breakpoints, view variables, step, next, and so forth inside Emacs, plus issue compile and connect to process calls. I note that JDE also features automatic jump-to-offending-line with compilation issues too.
After a brief amount of searching, I discovered QuickPeek for Emacs, which works as follows:
QuickPeek
Quick peek is a tool that uses a second frame to display context sensitive information about where the cursor is. It wants to be the superior copy of "Intellisense".
There is a reason that one of the more popular icons for Emacs is a kitchen sink:-)
No you could not add this to emacs as a "trivial hack". No way.
OOOooo! A CHALLENGE!:-)
Why? Well, the compiler and the IDE talk to each other in DevStudio. The only way you could really get the same level of functionality in Emacs would be to build the first few stages of the C++ compiler pipeline into it.
I disagree, but do continue. I'll explain why later.
If you type:
"pMyDoc->m_pWindo[tab]" it fills in the rest of the member variable. When you get the m_pWindowList you can type "->Head(" and the little tip window pops up and shows you what the arguments are for the Head method of pMyDoc->m_pWindowList.
Several options here for the budding Emacs hacker to get going on. For Emacs users already using Imenu and Speedbar, much of the functionality to chase those variables is in there. Spawning either inset windows or new frames in Emacs is not a difficult task. Dynamic or stati c abbreviation expansion can be used to fire up lisp functions as well as complete text, so having a hook run at buffer entry to set up the abbreviation tables is trivial.
Now, to do that in Emacs you would have to build code to:
Keep track of all temporary variables, their scope, and their type or class
Build tables of all classes and their methods and members, with the class or type of each.
That's why I noted that with TAGS support, most of the work to implement this hack is done. TAGS databases already include a complete list of structs, variables, functions and other such data. Therefore finding out what the definition contains is not difficult and neither is parsing it. Emacs is good with text:-)
Even if it is not the best tool at all for the job. MSVC gives you all that built right in, no need to "spend time getting over the speed bumps."
I'd compare MSVC against Emacs like a Video Recorder vs a Computer. MSVC gives you a set of predefined tools to allow you to do what MSVC is designed to do. If at some point you need something which MSVC doesn't do, you have to either upgrade or switch platforms. However, because the options you have are limited, the amount of time you need to acquaint yourself with the MSVC environment is also limited.
Emacs is daunting for the new user. Why? Because it is a programmable, flexible editing environment. You have a predefined range of tools (libraries) at the start, plus the underlying configuration variables (via Customize or Options for Emacs or XEmacs) plus the Emacs Lisp programming language for more specific customization. There is very little limit to what you can do with Emacs - but becoming familiar with it requires time and patience spent. This time is not wasted - far from it. Every time you learn a new trick or feature in Emacs, you build your knowledge further and next time you need some function, you have a better idea of how to find it or write it.
People jokingly talk about EmacsOS. But it's not so far away from the truth - I know people who rarely step outside Emacs in their interaction with the system - maybe to adjust a window position or to switch to another desktop window. A system this powerful takes time to learn, but I doubt you regret the time taken to learn C? Or Unix?
At the end of the day, it's all about being able to make the best of the tools available. I actually prefer having many specific tools which can be used together. Emacs would seem to contradict that, but the reality is that Emacs provides a framework which helps glue those small tools together in such a way that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
4) And then there's all the little things: DLLs. Installers. Command line tools. Now that I've learned how to use the "find" command...well, there's no superlative strong enough to get across how much I prefer Linux.
Several extra tips on that one. For those times when "find" just isn't quick enough, run "updatedb" as a cron task every night at 4am and use "locate" to near-instantly pull filenames out of the database that updatedb builds. Of course if you are doing things like "find . -cmin -60" then this doesn't help, but then you really do want find.
Of course, you can get fancy after that piping the argument into other commands or into other command arguments (using xargs). But that is the beauty of Unix - everything plugs together!
By far, my favorite feature is the popup Intellisense, when you're working with an object or struct and type "." or "->" you get a window with the details of the object at that level. You will quickly get hooked on this feature.
Hmm. If you like that sort of thing, I can see that might be useful. That's a pretty trivial hack to make something like Emacs do that for you if you wanted it. Maybe forty minutes of thinking and coding to add a reasonable working version which scans all the included files to pick up the struct definitions. Better still, if you use Tags support under Emacs, you don't have to go search either - you can just look up the details.
Plus, you can now edit and recompile c on the fly while debugging. That's a big timesaver for me (for correcting "freshman" mistakes like incorrect loop bounds without having to start all over).
Not to decry this feature - it's extremely useful - but I do this all the time. With Emacs. Now why use Emacs? Mainly because once you have got over the initial speedbump of actually learning how to drive Emacs, you realise that anything you ever find repetitive or clumsy can be automated, speeded up or helped along with either a quick reconfigure, a new library, or in the worst case scenario, a few minutes of thinking and a few more of coding a new Emacs function. It's this extensibility that makes me realise that I shall never really pick up another editor for anything complex. For all you VI users who are gnashing (sic!) your teeth over this, I use vi as well, but more often than not for simpler editing tasks.
it isn't the end of the world (or Bungie for that matter). Read this interview for clarification. Then you'll know that
Bungie remains autonomous inside Microsoft
The decision on which platforms to develop for remains completely with Bungie
yes - Bungie can choose which platforms to develop for, but MS has exclusive distribution rights to Bungie's future output. So - what odds do you give me for MS licensing and distributing Halo on Linux?
I'm stunned. I've just been over to Halo.bungie.org and the amount of invective on the forum is amazing. If Bungie was worried about what effect this announcement would have on their loyal fans, they must be feeling pretty sick at the moment.
Two long time Bungie fan sites seem to be closed or on the verge of closing - The Mill and Marathon Story. For those not in the know, these were the two linchpin sites for Myth and Marathon fans. While the announcement on The Mill is a little overheated (read the source for the real reason) its understandable given that a lot of long time fans feel as though they have just lost a close friend.
I also worry about the possibilities of a Linux port. To my knowledge, not one MS branded game has been ported to Linux, and I believe it is now highly unlikely that a Linux version of Halo or any future game from Bungie will appear, mainly because while Bungie has a say on what versions are produced, MS holds the exclusive distribution rights. MS knows that games are one of it's strongest cards, and that many Linux users keep a Windows partition to play the games available. Hey, with Descent 3, Terminus, Quake 3 Arena, Railroad Tycoon and Sim City 3000 and Halo on Linux, I would kiss my Windows partition goodbye.
For all of you unadventurous souls who seem to believe that giving specific wavebands to astronomy is a waste (and yes I am aware that the article merely points out that the current astronomy wavelengths are going to remain protected) I think I ought to explain why radio astronomy can't function without this protection. Here's a little demonstration:
Put your pen on the floor - a bic biro will do. Lift it above your head. You have just used up more energy than the entire collection of radio telescopes on the surface of the earth has ever collected from the sky. The base unit of energy for most radio astronomers is the Jansky - often written Jy - which is equivalent to 10^{-26} W m^{-2}. Most of the radio objects in the sky have intensities of less than 1 Jy. A few reach up into kJy.
Now consider a mobile phone. These stick out a few watts of energy. So they are about 26 orders of magnitude more powerful than the average radio source appears in the sky.
Any terrestrial transmitter dwarfs the emissions we get from the sky by design. For communications, the radio emissions are background noise to be squashed under the signal. If we are to further our understanding of physics, and radio astronomy provides a unique testing crucible to test the theories against, we need protected bandwidth.
As a matter of interest, do projects using CVS find that the builds of software projects get broken under a concurrent development scheme, as changes by others working on the same files may have unforeseen side effects not picked up by the automated merge tools?
And on a related line of inquiry, do race conditions every occur on busy projects where by the time you have merged and tested the latest additions to some file, someone has already checked in yet another update to a file you are working on forcing you to do another round of merging and testing?
It's instructive to see precisely how Mr Valenti views the whole DVD-on-linux situation. For example:
BY MR. GARBUS: Q I'm not taking now about reverse -- Mr. Valenti. I'm not now talking about the actual reverse engineering. Let's assume man A does the reverse engineering. Man B posts it on the internet. Man C then takes that information, and he's a Linux, user, and he uses that information to play a DVD on a Linux operating system and the Linux operating system has no license from the DVD CCA. Is it your view that that's against the law?
A[Mr Valenti] Yes.
His views on fair use are also interesting and far more restrictive than I believe the law to be. Another excerpt:
Q Did you also testify before congress that the Fair Use Exception was not cut out by the DMCA?
A Yes. The concept of Fair Use is intact in the DMCA.
and a little later...
BY MR. GARBUS: Q What is the concept of Fair Use, as you understand it?
A It means that libraries or schoolteachers can play movies in their classrooms for educational purposes.
I also threw my coffee over the keyboard at this one. Just for educational institutions?
Think! The ultimate expandable system. A rackmount made in Lego could be added to ad nauseum as you expanded your beowulf system in pursuit of SETI@Home glory.
Anti-aliasing on conventional monitors.
on
Cleartype In Depth
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· Score: 4
Cleartype is basically antialiasing which takes note of the way in which the LCD screens make up their pixels. From the comparative samples, it's difficult to compare the two samples given on a normal (i.e. CRT) monitor. I strongly suspect that this is not going to make such an impact on CRT-based techniques for several reasons. The conventional monitor scans a modulated electron beam across a mask before hitting the coloured phosphors which make up the display. Despite the regular display patterns of the mask, a pixel on a conventional CRT could line up with any combination of the coloured phosphors, as the start of each pixel could be on any of red/green or blue phosphors. The Cleartype technology relies on being able to make use of the arrangement of single-coloured pixels to enhance the imagery (and yes, I do believe it can make a difference) and must therefore be aware of the mapping from the resolution of the image on screen to the resolution of the actual screen matrix itself.
Something does strike me as odd in the samples though. One of the things that ideal anti-aliasing should do is give a completely even weight to every letter/symbol in a font (assuming that the base font definition is designed with this in mind). However, scrutiny of the samples seems to suggest that either the font they are using is subtly broken in this respect, or that the anti-aliasing and Cleartype render used here is not ideal - take a look at the weighting of the 'x' character, and slightly less of a problem is the 'k'. This could be hinting gone wrong, or a bad font definition - I'd be interested to know whether it looks better on an LCD screen.
Some years back, in the days of Pyramid 3D (yes, boards existed!) the pixel pipeline of the graphics chip was already programmable in microcode and EMBM was working perfectly in hardware. Slowly, maybe, by today's standards, but visually as attractive as ever. While it's a shame the boards never made it into the public, they still managed to make a significant contribution to PC graphics technology.
So they actually made some prototypes? I remember looking at the early screenshots of the Tritech Pyramid 3D cards and wondering what the frame rate was with bump mapping, reflections and fogging on.
On the flip side, I do wonder whether they will ever get a production board out of the door. The are notorious for not producing.
We live in a confusing mess of EM signals all the time nowadays, plus of course all the natural sources of EM radiation add a considerable background level. So I'm surprised that there isn't shielding on the critical circuitry in a plane already.
On the other hand, the power of EM emissions from a mobile phone are orders of magnitude greater than the background levels. I also suspect that the superstructure of the planes act to channel the signal along the length of the plane rather than merely radiating uniformly out from the plane itself. This has implications for the positioning of critical circuitry in the plane itself - having such mechanisms at resonance points within the plane is going to make shielding either cumbersome or ineffective.
But this also must have implications for the future of mobile transmissions while flying. If people wish to remain connected to the internet or phone people on the ground, it's clear that the current technology quickly runs into difficulties both in routing the wireless mobile phone packets to the mobile phone towers and in keeping a strong EM emission from interfering with systems on the plane. So will we see an internal intranet made available inside the plane with some transmission system suitable for moving data between the ground and an airliner, possibly in the middle of an ocean? I could see a system arising using satellite uplinks and maybe adding Voice-over-IP to the mix to allow incoming/outgoing calls. We're already seeing a lot of Wireless LAN technologies arriving in offices, so I wonder whether we'll see some offshoot of that technology on our flights in the next five years.
Yeah - everybody wants to have a different plural for virus or virii or whatever. But for crying out loud, use an accepted syntax in your titles- after all this is "News for Nerds". We can cope with your glob expressions! We can compose sonnets using regexps! Perl is our friend and pattern matching is our first language! So it's either:
Anyone know how many boxes Loki games have been selling ? I certainly hope they do well. Hell, I might just buy one to show my support ( probably a strategy game since my TNT doesn't seem that well supported )
Bzzzztt. Wrong!
Support for the TNT/Geforce family has taken a big turn for the better with the current beta drivers from Nvidia for Xfree84 4.0. While the drivers are closed sourced for Intellectual Property reasons (supposedly to do with SGI technology), they almost on a par with the Windows drivers. Given that Xfree86 4.0 is still pretty new and that these aren't even v1.0 NVidia drivers yet, this is pretty encouraging and we may in the future see Linux drivers showing a few % improvement over the Windows drivers.
So anything you would consider playing under Windows on your TNT is probably playable on Linux now at similar performance levels. And since Loki distribute demos, you can try before you buy.
I'm pretty darn excited about XFree86's support for this. Should make configuration a lot simpler. I've never been able to get the color depth under X that I could get from Windows.
To be honest, I was pretty underwhelmed with it under Windows - it was undependable to say the least. When your card and monitor get together (TNT2 and IBM C72 monitor if you are interested) and decide that it's okay to have 640x480 at 32bit colour, but 8 and 16bit don't exist, and then all your refresh rates decide that 60Hz is enough for anyone, you would probably do what I did and turn it off. (And yes, I hacked at my Windows config for days to try and fix it - another great example of plug and pray).
Here's me trying to complete my Astronomy PhD while working for a silicon valley internet music company...
Astronomy -> computers/IT is a fairly normal path from where I'm sitting:-) Having done four years of image handling and catalogue analysis for my thesis, working in computers (databases actually) isn't such a stretch.
Given the current cut-and-thrust in the CPU and GPU markets on the PC platform at the moment, I wonder whether basing a console system on them is such a smart move. Let me explain my thoughts on this.
NVidia is producing the graphics processing unit for MS. By their own roadmaps, NVidia is doubling the speed of their graphics hardware inside a year. Similarly, CPUs are still following Moore's law of doubling ever 12-18 months. The X-box is supposed to have a 733MHz PIII in it at release, which given that it is probably 12-18 months away will make it about half the speed of the fastest CPUs on the market even if we are being charitable. So at launch, this platform will have a half-speed CPU and a state-of-the-art graphics processor.
But things don't stand still - so why bother with an XBox. When it comes out, I will probably have a 1.2GHz or better box with a GeForce 2 or better graphics card, so why should I even think about buying this object? It will be 'below spec' for me. Worse still, unless it is extremely upgradable (i.e. rip the CPU and GPU out and upgrade) it will be obsolete hardware when compared with the standard PC of the time only 6-12 months after release. So what is going on?
My thought on this is that MS is having increasing success in the gaming market, both on hardware peripherals such as game pads and also on the games themselves. But the consoles threaten to dilute this market so in goes MS after marketshare. Nothing wrong with that. The question is will MS move firmly into the XBox market to the exclusion of the PC, or will they ensure that the XBox games get ported back to PC land. The former might turn out to be business suicide against the PS2 and Dolphin platforms, since both MS's rivals are more experienced in this field and have an established fan base. The latter might be the real reason for this Xbox at all - to ensure a free-flowing supply of games to MS's dominant platform and therefore help keep people buying Windows - after all, 99% of the time I spend in Windows at home is playing games and all my real work is done under Linux. If Linux starts seeing lots of games, I shall be buying Linux versions in preference, particularly once I get Xfree86 4.0 and the TNT2 drivers installed. And maybe I'll be able to see my way to shrink that Windows partition down until I finally fdisk it out of existence.
I tried to read the patent, and I just couldnt. If someone has to read stuff like this for their job I can imagine it causes great mental damage, possibly enough for them to allow these things to be patented. God, its awful, I've seen random number generators output stuff that makes more sense.
I agree. I haven't seen such a nasty example of repeated loops and aggravated back references in text for ages. I gave up around claim 21. I'm vaguely interested in this one though since it strikes me that the bulk of this patent is tied around a client-server database, so its tricky to see just how specific this patent is. The gist of it centres around trying to give the user on the client sensible access to the information/services on the server as far as I can tell, but I'm going to have to go and lie down before I attempt to distill any more out of the text - I feel like I've just SIGINT'd out of a infinite recursive loop.
For the first time I feel vaguely sorry for the USPTO if they have to read this stuff...
Slashdot Mirror
Damn. I must have messed up my install somewhere.
/lib/modules/0.0.1/construct/left-bit.o /lib/modules/0.0.1/construct/right-bit.o /lib/modules/0.0.1/systems/life-sup.o /lib/modules/0.0.1/constants/gravity.o
[root@localhost]>modprobe zvezda
[root@localhost]>insmod zvezda
[root@localhost]>depmod zvezda
depmod: not an NASA file
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in
depmod: *** Unresolved symbols in
Any one got a clue? It looks like it still needs some work?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I love using emacs but there is so much to learn. Does anyone know of a great web site for learning emacs? I think a well built web site that was newbie oriented would do emacs well. I used emacs in school, started working with MS IDE and have forgotten so much of what I knew...
To be honest the best places to pick up hints and tips are the various Emacs newsgroups. There are several experienced Emacs hackers on there who know their stuff and who post lucid and useful answers. Try gnu.emacs.help and comp.emacs for general enquiries, and gnu.emacs.sources is a very useful place to pick up new elisp hot off the press.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Where can I find out more about TAGS? Does it support Java? (My employer's language of choice).
TAGS is pretty wide ranging in it's abilities and Java support is somewhere. Ah. Here it is. To create tags for Java, and for Java development under Emacs, take a look at JDE. I've not used it, but it looks pretty wide-ranging. It also features automatic completion of class fields and methods :-)
Do TAGS automatically update whenever you add or modify members or methods in a class?
No - they are updated when you run the TAGS utility. If you update the methods/members, it's best to rerun TAGS to tidy up the database. It's often a good idea to run TAGS as part of your makefile so that whatever changes are put into the binary are reflected in the TAGS database.
The other thing that is missing (or, maybe not?) from emacs is the good integrated debugger that DevStudio has. Can you do an edit and continue on a running C++ or Java program from inside emacs?
Yes - with GUD (Grand Unified Debugger) under Emacs, you can interface with whatever debugger you feel like, from gdb, xdb, etc.. You can mark lines in the code as breakpoints, view variables, step, next, and so forth inside Emacs, plus issue compile and connect to process calls. I note that JDE also features automatic jump-to-offending-line with compilation issues too.
After a brief amount of searching, I discovered QuickPeek for Emacs, which works as follows:
QuickPeek
Quick peek is a tool that uses a second frame to display context sensitive information about where the cursor is. It wants to be the superior copy of "Intellisense".
There is a reason that one of the more popular icons for Emacs is a kitchen sink :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
No you could not add this to emacs as a "trivial hack". No way.
OOOooo! A CHALLENGE! :-)
Why? Well, the compiler and the IDE talk to each other in DevStudio. The only way you could really get the same level of functionality in Emacs would be to build the first few stages of the C++ compiler pipeline into it.
I disagree, but do continue. I'll explain why later.
If you type:
"pMyDoc->m_pWindo[tab]" it fills in the rest of the member variable. When you get the m_pWindowList you can type "->Head(" and the little tip window pops up and shows you what the arguments are for the Head method of pMyDoc->m_pWindowList.
Several options here for the budding Emacs hacker to get going on. For Emacs users already using Imenu and Speedbar, much of the functionality to chase those variables is in there. Spawning either inset windows or new frames in Emacs is not a difficult task. Dynamic or stati c abbreviation expansion can be used to fire up lisp functions as well as complete text, so having a hook run at buffer entry to set up the abbreviation tables is trivial.
Now, to do that in Emacs you would have to build code to:
That's why I noted that with TAGS support, most of the work to implement this hack is done. TAGS databases already include a complete list of structs, variables, functions and other such data. Therefore finding out what the definition contains is not difficult and neither is parsing it. Emacs is good with text :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Even if it is not the best tool at all for the job. MSVC gives you all that built right in, no need to "spend time getting over the speed bumps."
I'd compare MSVC against Emacs like a Video Recorder vs a Computer. MSVC gives you a set of predefined tools to allow you to do what MSVC is designed to do. If at some point you need something which MSVC doesn't do, you have to either upgrade or switch platforms. However, because the options you have are limited, the amount of time you need to acquaint yourself with the MSVC environment is also limited.
Emacs is daunting for the new user. Why? Because it is a programmable, flexible editing environment. You have a predefined range of tools (libraries) at the start, plus the underlying configuration variables (via Customize or Options for Emacs or XEmacs) plus the Emacs Lisp programming language for more specific customization. There is very little limit to what you can do with Emacs - but becoming familiar with it requires time and patience spent. This time is not wasted - far from it. Every time you learn a new trick or feature in Emacs, you build your knowledge further and next time you need some function, you have a better idea of how to find it or write it.
People jokingly talk about EmacsOS. But it's not so far away from the truth - I know people who rarely step outside Emacs in their interaction with the system - maybe to adjust a window position or to switch to another desktop window. A system this powerful takes time to learn, but I doubt you regret the time taken to learn C? Or Unix?
At the end of the day, it's all about being able to make the best of the tools available. I actually prefer having many specific tools which can be used together. Emacs would seem to contradict that, but the reality is that Emacs provides a framework which helps glue those small tools together in such a way that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
4) And then there's all the little things: DLLs. Installers. Command line tools. Now that I've learned how to use the "find" command...well, there's no superlative strong enough to get across how much I prefer Linux.
Several extra tips on that one. For those times when "find" just isn't quick enough, run "updatedb" as a cron task every night at 4am and use "locate" to near-instantly pull filenames out of the database that updatedb builds. Of course if you are doing things like "find . -cmin -60" then this doesn't help, but then you really do want find.
Of course, you can get fancy after that piping the argument into other commands or into other command arguments (using xargs). But that is the beauty of Unix - everything plugs together!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
By far, my favorite feature is the popup Intellisense, when you're working with an object or struct and type "." or "->" you get a window with the details of the object at that level. You will quickly get hooked on this feature.
Hmm. If you like that sort of thing, I can see that might be useful. That's a pretty trivial hack to make something like Emacs do that for you if you wanted it. Maybe forty minutes of thinking and coding to add a reasonable working version which scans all the included files to pick up the struct definitions. Better still, if you use Tags support under Emacs, you don't have to go search either - you can just look up the details.
Plus, you can now edit and recompile c on the fly while debugging. That's a big timesaver for me (for correcting "freshman" mistakes like incorrect loop bounds without having to start all over).
Not to decry this feature - it's extremely useful - but I do this all the time. With Emacs. Now why use Emacs? Mainly because once you have got over the initial speedbump of actually learning how to drive Emacs, you realise that anything you ever find repetitive or clumsy can be automated, speeded up or helped along with either a quick reconfigure, a new library, or in the worst case scenario, a few minutes of thinking and a few more of coding a new Emacs function. It's this extensibility that makes me realise that I shall never really pick up another editor for anything complex. For all you VI users who are gnashing (sic!) your teeth over this, I use vi as well, but more often than not for simpler editing tasks.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
it isn't the end of the world (or Bungie for that matter). Read this interview for clarification. Then you'll know that
yes - Bungie can choose which platforms to develop for, but MS has exclusive distribution rights to Bungie's future output. So - what odds do you give me for MS licensing and distributing Halo on Linux?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I'm stunned. I've just been over to Halo.bungie.org and the amount of invective on the forum is amazing. If Bungie was worried about what effect this announcement would have on their loyal fans, they must be feeling pretty sick at the moment.
Two long time Bungie fan sites seem to be closed or on the verge of closing - The Mill and Marathon Story. For those not in the know, these were the two linchpin sites for Myth and Marathon fans. While the announcement on The Mill is a little overheated (read the source for the real reason) its understandable given that a lot of long time fans feel as though they have just lost a close friend.
I also worry about the possibilities of a Linux port. To my knowledge, not one MS branded game has been ported to Linux, and I believe it is now highly unlikely that a Linux version of Halo or any future game from Bungie will appear, mainly because while Bungie has a say on what versions are produced, MS holds the exclusive distribution rights. MS knows that games are one of it's strongest cards, and that many Linux users keep a Windows partition to play the games available. Hey, with Descent 3, Terminus, Quake 3 Arena, Railroad Tycoon and Sim City 3000 and Halo on Linux, I would kiss my Windows partition goodbye.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
IWARA - I Was A Radio Astronomer!
For all of you unadventurous souls who seem to believe that giving specific wavebands to astronomy is a waste (and yes I am aware that the article merely points out that the current astronomy wavelengths are going to remain protected) I think I ought to explain why radio astronomy can't function without this protection. Here's a little demonstration:
Put your pen on the floor - a bic biro will do. Lift it above your head. You have just used up more energy than the entire collection of radio telescopes on the surface of the earth has ever collected from the sky. The base unit of energy for most radio astronomers is the Jansky - often written Jy - which is equivalent to 10^{-26} W m^{-2}. Most of the radio objects in the sky have intensities of less than 1 Jy. A few reach up into kJy.
Now consider a mobile phone. These stick out a few watts of energy. So they are about 26 orders of magnitude more powerful than the average radio source appears in the sky.
Any terrestrial transmitter dwarfs the emissions we get from the sky by design. For communications, the radio emissions are background noise to be squashed under the signal. If we are to further our understanding of physics, and radio astronomy provides a unique testing crucible to test the theories against, we need protected bandwidth.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
As a matter of interest, do projects using CVS find that the builds of software projects get broken under a concurrent development scheme, as changes by others working on the same files may have unforeseen side effects not picked up by the automated merge tools?
And on a related line of inquiry, do race conditions every occur on busy projects where by the time you have merged and tested the latest additions to some file, someone has already checked in yet another update to a file you are working on forcing you to do another round of merging and testing?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It's instructive to see precisely how Mr Valenti views the whole DVD-on-linux situation. For example:
BY MR. GARBUS: Q I'm not taking now about reverse -- Mr. Valenti. I'm not now talking about the actual reverse engineering. Let's assume man A does the reverse engineering. Man B posts it on the internet. Man C then takes that information, and he's a Linux, user, and he uses that information to play a DVD on a Linux operating system and the Linux operating system has no license from the DVD CCA. Is it your view that that's against the law?
A[Mr Valenti] Yes.
His views on fair use are also interesting and far more restrictive than I believe the law to be. Another excerpt:
Q Did you also testify before congress that the Fair Use Exception was not cut out by the DMCA?
A Yes. The concept of Fair Use is intact in the DMCA.
and a little later ...
BY MR. GARBUS: Q What is the concept of Fair Use, as you understand it?
A It means that libraries or schoolteachers can play movies in their classrooms for educational purposes.
I also threw my coffee over the keyboard at this one. Just for educational institutions?
Draw your own conclusions.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Think! The ultimate expandable system. A rackmount made in Lego could be added to ad nauseum as you expanded your beowulf system in pursuit of SETI@Home glory.
Cleartype is basically antialiasing which takes note of the way in which the LCD screens make up their pixels. From the comparative samples, it's difficult to compare the two samples given on a normal (i.e. CRT) monitor. I strongly suspect that this is not going to make such an impact on CRT-based techniques for several reasons. The conventional monitor scans a modulated electron beam across a mask before hitting the coloured phosphors which make up the display. Despite the regular display patterns of the mask, a pixel on a conventional CRT could line up with any combination of the coloured phosphors, as the start of each pixel could be on any of red/green or blue phosphors. The Cleartype technology relies on being able to make use of the arrangement of single-coloured pixels to enhance the imagery (and yes, I do believe it can make a difference) and must therefore be aware of the mapping from the resolution of the image on screen to the resolution of the actual screen matrix itself.
Something does strike me as odd in the samples though. One of the things that ideal anti-aliasing should do is give a completely even weight to every letter/symbol in a font (assuming that the base font definition is designed with this in mind). However, scrutiny of the samples seems to suggest that either the font they are using is subtly broken in this respect, or that the anti-aliasing and Cleartype render used here is not ideal - take a look at the weighting of the 'x' character, and slightly less of a problem is the 'k'. This could be hinting gone wrong, or a bad font definition - I'd be interested to know whether it looks better on an LCD screen.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Some years back, in the days of Pyramid 3D (yes, boards existed!) the pixel pipeline of the graphics chip was already programmable in microcode and EMBM was working perfectly in hardware. Slowly, maybe, by today's standards, but visually as attractive as ever. While it's a shame the boards never made it into the public, they still managed to make a significant contribution to PC graphics technology.
So they actually made some prototypes? I remember looking at the early screenshots of the Tritech Pyramid 3D cards and wondering what the frame rate was with bump mapping, reflections and fogging on.
On the flip side, I do wonder whether they will ever get a production board out of the door. The are notorious for not producing.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
We live in a confusing mess of EM signals all the time nowadays, plus of course all the natural sources of EM radiation add a considerable background level. So I'm surprised that there isn't shielding on the critical circuitry in a plane already.
On the other hand, the power of EM emissions from a mobile phone are orders of magnitude greater than the background levels. I also suspect that the superstructure of the planes act to channel the signal along the length of the plane rather than merely radiating uniformly out from the plane itself. This has implications for the positioning of critical circuitry in the plane itself - having such mechanisms at resonance points within the plane is going to make shielding either cumbersome or ineffective.
But this also must have implications for the future of mobile transmissions while flying. If people wish to remain connected to the internet or phone people on the ground, it's clear that the current technology quickly runs into difficulties both in routing the wireless mobile phone packets to the mobile phone towers and in keeping a strong EM emission from interfering with systems on the plane. So will we see an internal intranet made available inside the plane with some transmission system suitable for moving data between the ground and an airliner, possibly in the middle of an ocean? I could see a system arising using satellite uplinks and maybe adding Voice-over-IP to the mix to allow incoming/outgoing calls. We're already seeing a lot of Wireless LAN technologies arriving in offices, so I wonder whether we'll see some offshoot of that technology on our flights in the next five years.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Yeah - everybody wants to have a different plural for virus or virii or whatever. But for crying out loud, use an accepted syntax in your titles- after all this is "News for Nerds". We can cope with your glob expressions! We can compose sonnets using regexps! Perl is our friend and pattern matching is our first language! So it's either:
vir{i,ii,a,uses} or it's
vir(a|ii?|uses)
Thank you and good night
Anyone know how many boxes Loki games have been selling ? I certainly hope they do well. Hell, I might just buy one to show my support ( probably a strategy game since my TNT doesn't seem that well supported )
Bzzzztt. Wrong!
Support for the TNT/Geforce family has taken a big turn for the better with the current beta drivers from Nvidia for Xfree84 4.0. While the drivers are closed sourced for Intellectual Property reasons (supposedly to do with SGI technology), they almost on a par with the Windows drivers. Given that Xfree86 4.0 is still pretty new and that these aren't even v1.0 NVidia drivers yet, this is pretty encouraging and we may in the future see Linux drivers showing a few % improvement over the Windows drivers.
So anything you would consider playing under Windows on your TNT is probably playable on Linux now at similar performance levels. And since Loki distribute demos, you can try before you buy.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I'm pretty darn excited about XFree86's support for this. Should make configuration a lot simpler. I've never been able to get the color depth under X that I could get from Windows.
To be honest, I was pretty underwhelmed with it under Windows - it was undependable to say the least. When your card and monitor get together (TNT2 and IBM C72 monitor if you are interested) and decide that it's okay to have 640x480 at 32bit colour, but 8 and 16bit don't exist, and then all your refresh rates decide that 60Hz is enough for anyone, you would probably do what I did and turn it off. (And yes, I hacked at my Windows config for days to try and fix it - another great example of plug and pray).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Here's me trying to complete my Astronomy PhD while working for a silicon valley internet music company...
Astronomy -> computers/IT is a fairly normal path from where I'm sitting :-) Having done four years of image handling and catalogue analysis for my thesis, working in computers (databases actually) isn't such a stretch.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Given the current cut-and-thrust in the CPU and GPU markets on the PC platform at the moment, I wonder whether basing a console system on them is such a smart move. Let me explain my thoughts on this.
NVidia is producing the graphics processing unit for MS. By their own roadmaps, NVidia is doubling the speed of their graphics hardware inside a year. Similarly, CPUs are still following Moore's law of doubling ever 12-18 months. The X-box is supposed to have a 733MHz PIII in it at release, which given that it is probably 12-18 months away will make it about half the speed of the fastest CPUs on the market even if we are being charitable. So at launch, this platform will have a half-speed CPU and a state-of-the-art graphics processor.
But things don't stand still - so why bother with an XBox. When it comes out, I will probably have a 1.2GHz or better box with a GeForce 2 or better graphics card, so why should I even think about buying this object? It will be 'below spec' for me. Worse still, unless it is extremely upgradable (i.e. rip the CPU and GPU out and upgrade) it will be obsolete hardware when compared with the standard PC of the time only 6-12 months after release. So what is going on?
My thought on this is that MS is having increasing success in the gaming market, both on hardware peripherals such as game pads and also on the games themselves. But the consoles threaten to dilute this market so in goes MS after marketshare. Nothing wrong with that. The question is will MS move firmly into the XBox market to the exclusion of the PC, or will they ensure that the XBox games get ported back to PC land. The former might turn out to be business suicide against the PS2 and Dolphin platforms, since both MS's rivals are more experienced in this field and have an established fan base. The latter might be the real reason for this Xbox at all - to ensure a free-flowing supply of games to MS's dominant platform and therefore help keep people buying Windows - after all, 99% of the time I spend in Windows at home is playing games and all my real work is done under Linux. If Linux starts seeing lots of games, I shall be buying Linux versions in preference, particularly once I get Xfree86 4.0 and the TNT2 drivers installed. And maybe I'll be able to see my way to shrink that Windows partition down until I finally fdisk it out of existence.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I tried to read the patent, and I just couldnt. If someone has to read stuff like this for their job I can imagine it causes great mental damage, possibly enough for them to allow these things to be patented. God, its awful, I've seen random number generators output stuff that makes more sense.
I agree. I haven't seen such a nasty example of repeated loops and aggravated back references in text for ages. I gave up around claim 21. I'm vaguely interested in this one though since it strikes me that the bulk of this patent is tied around a client-server database, so its tricky to see just how specific this patent is. The gist of it centres around trying to give the user on the client sensible access to the information/services on the server as far as I can tell, but I'm going to have to go and lie down before I attempt to distill any more out of the text - I feel like I've just SIGINT'd out of a infinite recursive loop.
For the first time I feel vaguely sorry for the USPTO if they have to read this stuff ...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
the picture started getting darker, and lighter, darker and lighter, darker and lighter, darker and lighter... ;p
Yes - that's the railgun on your Starwars Defence Initiative (SDI) charging up :-p