so does this mean that certain books will be able to be published and not need permission to be copied? (not copyrighted)
That's not the way I read it - although I'm still digesting the information. The work remains copyrighted - what you do have under the license is the right to make copies of the complete work and to create derivative works, while abiding by certain restrictions. There are requirements when making larger copy runs (i.e. > 100 copies) of these documents - I can see these applying in large software development groups for example - where you must also ensure that Cover texts are correctly added and that the publisher(s) and titles is/are visible and legible. There are also other responsibilities when modifying the document - I assume this is to avoid mis-attribution and possible 'viral' slanders introduced into the document by malicious authors later down the line. The License basically ensures that the integrity of the document is not compromised by alteration and that all alterations are clearly demarcated.
what about plagarism? will our teachers be able to spot these new uncopyrighted works?
I wouldn't worry. To copy one person is plagiarism, to copy two is research.:-)
Why does Loki have to release all these games? I get so much done at the moment when I'm booted into Linux because there is not much in the way of games installed to distract me (apart from FreeCiv which doesn't complain if you leave it for a while). But now I see that Loki are about to port my nemesis of productivity - racing games. I mean, look at this quote:
Well, we definitely want to support different gaming genres, and are in discussions now to license a racing game.
Just how cruel and heartless can you get?! If it turns out to be Mobil 1 Rally Championship my coding days are over... *sob*:-)
This is a good move by Loki and Creative, although Creatives involvement might put off other audio companies from wanting to use it - I bet the API is particularly suited towards Creative chipsets. A 3D Open API at this early stage should be something almost any company should be looking hard at. If at the moment it has features that favour Creative, then it is up to Aureal to get in there, do some spade work and add and help form the API to be more balanced. From the sounds of it, the audio geometry processing that A3D 2.0 does is under consideration by the OpenAL team, so if Aureal sees this as a worthwhile opportunity (and I think they should) they should contribute. Like the argument over open/closed source drivers, these big audio card companies make their money from the hardware - getting widespread acceptance of that hardware by making sure that it is widely usable is essential, and OpenAL can only help in getting these cards working in more environments on more platforms. But it does require the companies to seize the moment and help build the API.
It seems that while the push for ever increasing image quality is going on, we are getting much closer to realistic, real time rendering of scenes. I wonder just what else is needed to really be able to push the envelope of visualization and realism further. Here's my current wish list.
Proper curved surface rendering - not just pushing the polygon count ever higher but actually rendering, for example, bezier patches with multi-pass textures.
Depth of field - most graphic cards today blur the insides of polygons when they are close (tri-linear mapping) but do nothing to blur the edges of the polygon, breaking the realism. And everything in the far field is in clean focus. Having real depth of field, so that there is some defined focal distance would help.
Integrated collision detection - we pass the cards all these vertex coordinates, fans and strips. It must be possible to pass some of the collision detection from the CPU to the graphics card. Using something like Orientated-bounding boxes at various detail levels and then passing the final collision detection to the card for some arbitration at the polygon level might help.
Integrated physics engine - gravity, flexion, distortion both plastic and elastic, hinges, rotation and friction. And anything else:-)
Volume rendering - either voxels per se or some iso-surface rendering based on potential fields.
There must be others - it looks like ATI is going to finally give us proper bump mapping and range-based fogging. Do we also need a proper chromatic model so that we can get rainbows through glass objects? Should there be real-time ray-casting or radiosity support so that real lighting effects (say carrying a flaming torch down a corridor and having proper soft-edged shadows) can be achieved?
Hey! I play ZAngband, so I still eat ancient multi-hued dragons for breakfast. Or was that just a capital 'D' that kept changing colors?
Paah! Multi-hued dragons are for wimps! I eat the Serpent of Chaos for breakfast! Muahahah!
Diablo (and all its graphical predecessors) took the mindless dungeon crawl out of the Alphabits era and into eyecandyland. Here's hoping the sequel is worth the wait and has more depth to the story.
This is one area where I'm still not convinced that the graphical RPG has surpassed the older character-graphic Rogue-like games. In terms of longevity and replayability, I still rate games like Angband and it's many variants (Sangband, Zangband, Omega and others) more highly than a lot of the modern 3D/isometric eye-candy experiences. Hey - I even turned off the 16x16 graphic tiles and went back to the colour font displays because they are clearer and easier to analyse quickly. Maybe DungeonSiege will finally provide the immersive fantasy world with enough depth to keep the 'one more try to slay the X of Y' replayability but for the moment I'll stick with Zangband.
Even if fellow/.ers don't think this is such a huge milestone, AMD certainly do. Reading through that press release reveals just how much both AMD and Intel wanted to have the bragging rights to the first 1GHz x86 chip - likening it in achievement terms to 'breaking the sound barrier' is definitely a little extreme in my book, but I think the general public and the marketroids will have a field day with a 1GHz processor. I suspect that Intel will be extremely anxious to get their own press release announcing the 1GHz Coppermine out as fast as possible now to stop AMD claiming all the glory, but AMD will get some very useful publicity over the next 24 hours. Intel and the Pentium brand are still the CPU type that over half the computer-buying populace recognise in isolation and it is a major publicity boost to AMD to hit the 1GHz milestone first.
Possibly. In an effort to maintain their lead through other means than performance, Intel keeps inventing new SSE SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions. You will have noticed that the K7 covers all the standard PII instructions now, and has it's own set of SIMD instructions which go under the moniker of 3DNow. So if you get hold of an application which is *very* heavily optimised to use only the latest SSE instructions, you might see a *slight* performance hit. I think Adobe Photoshop is the only major suite I can think of which has gone this route, and even then there is not much to pick between the Athlon and the PIII. Most other application makers have kept out of the SSE/3DNow battle and just support the more basic SSE instructions which are covered in both CPUs and don't hurt older processors much.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If you enjoyed this book ...
on
Inversions
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· Score: 3
Reading through this review reminded me of several other books which might be of interest. Set at about the same time at the end of the medieval period is "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco, which also deals with a society, in this case a monastic one, reacting to a world of learning on the edge of many advances.
If you enjoy tales with a twist (and if you like reading Iain M. Banks I think that's given) I'd also suggest Guy Gavriel Kaye's 'Tigana' as being a worthwhile read.
Any other suggestions out there for books to explore?
I bought an Athlon system as soon as I saw that it was designed by some of the Alpha 21264 team. So here's the differences as far as I remember - Tom's hardware has far more detail in it's articles on the K7 (Athlon).
Floating point on the Athlon is faster - as much as 30% faster - than the equivalent PIII. This is a big win for me as most of the code I write is floating-point heavy.
Integer performance is fairly equal between the two.
Athlons have 9 instruction pipelines - PIIIs have 5.
Athlon has a faster Bus to the motherboard - 200 MHz as opposed to the 133MHz you find in the fastest PIII systems.
Early Athlons come with 512KB of L2 cache - you can find more on PIII systems.
Athlons are cheaper at the same speed than the PIII.
Real benchmarks (i.e. application runs) suggest that there is little to choose between the Athlon and the Coppermine PIII's. The Athlons are maybe 10% faster than the pre-Coppermine chips.
Take your pick - I've been extremely pleased with my Athlon 650MHz. In fact the only thing I'm less pleased about is that this MHz race is making my processor look slower much too quickly - I'd usually upgrade once the top of the line processor gets to 2-3 times the clock speed of my current one, but at this rate that will mean an upgrade in Q4 this year:-)
Nice to see that NASA has finally woken up to the problem of space rubbish around other planets. If Gallileo does have Earth-born bacteria on it which have survived in space (there are various theories about life spreading from planet to planet by this method) it would be extremely frustrating to disrupt any current ecosystem on Europa. On the other hand, this concern will make the job of examining Europa in the future more tricky, regardless of what they do with Galileo (dropping it into the Jovian atmosphere or crashing it into Io both sound like possibilities to gain interesting data on either planet/moon). If we are going to go explore Europa for signs of life, we are almost certainly going to have to do it remotely with 'sterilized' equipment - sending a few astronauts down to have look isn't going to help in the attempts to not disrupt any life already there.
Of course, our own orbit is now strewn with bits of satellites and rocket boosters - thankfully it all tends to wander around at the same speeds as the spacecraft in orbit, but it gets a little bit unnerving to wonder about the future of colonizing the galaxy when you have to dodge the last 100 years of waste products in getting started.
It does appear that Intel may hurt its own marketing if it does jump the gun on this one. If AMD's strategy of releasing 900MHz, 950MHz and 1GHz Athlons at the end of this month in production quantities appears, then the later Intel releases of 866MHz and 933MHz are going to be blighted by the time they hit the market. Of course, if there are 1GHz Athlon machines appearing in the market place well before the appearance of similar Pentium III systems, the initial shock value of a 1GHz chip may backfire as the computer-buying public gets frustrated that they can't get hold of a Pentium processor which is 'available'. Remember also that a recent survey suggested that a fair number of people thought that CPU's were made by 'Pentium' - the last thing Intel wants to do is give it's top visibility line a black eye.
If they have done it right, when you save the file foo.conf, it will initially be saved as a normal file - i.e. don't mess with it too quickly. Remember that this is a server-based file system, so it gets a certain amount of give and take in what it does - as long as the user is able to load and save files to it transparently, it's fulfilling it's goals. foo.conf.old will still be symlinked, but it will be symlinked to a server copy that is held in a database under a unique key. If, on the save of foo.conf, the server recognises that this file was previously symlinked, it should run it's hashing function over the file to see whether it has changed, and probably also do some sanity checking in the form of looking at the file length. Even if the symlink checking is done later asynchronously, there should not be a problem, as long as the hashing function can't be fooled into giving the same signature to different files of the same length.
Of course, there may be bugs in the system. I'd worry about making sure that there are no opportunities for a user to obtain a truncated file during a file request, just because the server has just switched the file from a real file to a symbolic one. I'd also be wary of try to implement a scheme to save duplication on parts of files, although I can see that if you run some sort of binary diff on two files and save the diff and the base files you may also save a lot of space.
When I first heard about the Mac OS X GUI I was both impressed by the visually clean and clear appearance of the interface and the use of transparency to improve the relationship between sub-windows and the 'main' window. Reading through this Ars Technica article though, I begin to wonder whether all these special effects included with Mac OS X are an improvement to the original Mac interface or whether they are crucifying their principles of simplicity of use in order to appear more flashy.
For example, the Dock bar at the bottom of the screen which progressively shrinks as you add more items to it and magnifies the few documents around the mouse when you move to it. This looks like a neat idea at first, especially when you look at the example screenshots given on Apple's site. But distinguishing between even 10 text documents is difficult using this method (the icon reflects the real document) and the example given of 1000+ documents in the bar in Ars is a nightmare!
The use of a button on every title bar to switch between single and multi-window mode is also odd. I guess this is a more interactive way of minimizing windows for the new user, but it's strange to see an option like this as a window button everywhere.
Don't get me wrong - I'm impressed by much of what I see in the Mac OS X GUI. The clear use of colour - i.e. generally neutral colours for windows, with primary colours for important window tool buttons on the active window - along with the Quartz technology and the XML integration are all worthy additions to the interface. But I do worry that some of the features are more a triumph of style over substance when it comes to real usability. As GNOME and KDE move to improve their interfaces, there is much to learn from the way Apple has designed their GUI. As long as nobody forces me to use a one-button mouse...
You know when you go to University and you look around and wonder who'll end up being the captains of industry, the Nobel prize winners and the people behind the next great innovation, or who'll be practicing their lines "Would you like fries with that?"? Well it's still a major shock when I read this story and recognized the name Dr Russell Cowburn - this guy was the person who showed me the ropes when I first went to Uni. All I can say is that if he makes a mint out of this, I wish him well! And given that Cambridge Uni generally tends towards reticence rather than early disclosure on these sort of news items, you can guarantee that this technique has seem some serious peer review already. That doesn't necessarily mean that scaling this technique up to marketable levels is easy, but it sounds like the science is well understood.
Just goes to show... I really should studied harder in those lectures on condensed matter physics.:-)
One of the big problems with storing data is the sheer size of it. In astronomy, almost all data collected by telescopes, be they radio, optical or otherwise, goes through a stage known as 'Reduction'. I've put this in quotes, mainly because it doesn't necessarily reduce the size of it. In essence, Reduction is about obtaining the most important or most complete information out of the data and discarding or minimizing the redundant, the useless and the misleading out of the data so that future analysis can be carried out on the important stuff without having to wade through all the noise. For instance, 70 or 80 images of one optical observation in various wavelength bands will be collapsed into three to five optimal images, one for each band. In Radio Astronomy, collating 60 - 80 12hr observations into one file removes all the 'bad' data and is optimal for future reuse.
To effectively make a useful archive requires some filtering of what goes into the archive. Nowadays I work for IBM on DB2 UDB, and the roadmaps suggest that the size of databases is growing exponentially - fortunately this is balanced by a proportional growth in both processor power and storage space and access speed. So while we have terabyte databases today, we could easily be looking at petabyte databases in a few years. These databases will probably hold a vast amount of digitized analogue information - memos, diagrams, papers - which currently is stored in more convential storage. The advantages of moving to a fully digital archive are great - searching and retrieval are faster, and the space saved by putting scans of 20 boxes of papers onto a hard drive or other storage are also great. However, there is a danger with archives growing out of control - if you initiate a search which will visit every part of a petabyte database, you are going to have to wait for it to finish, even with the best search algorithms and vastly faster hardware. Making sure that information is not multiply duplicated in the database, or that redundant data is not added without regard to the database retrieval performance is extremely important. If we set up a project to 'mirror the web' for archival purposes, we'll be hamstringing ourselves right at the start - most data is not needed for future reference. By applying methods to distill the important information, archives can be updated, maintained and searched without exhausting the available resources.
How about giving me a browser that just does browsing? I know it's a novel concept, but why should my WEB BROWSER do Usenet and email? That's why I have slrn and mutt... I know, I know: "use lynx". But the formatting and graphics are tough to do in a tty...
Someone should write a patch for lynx to use the ascii graphics library - aalib to render web graphics as ascii text. Anyone who's missed this gem should check out ttyQuake.:-) Or maybe not...!
Yes - I've already downloaded and installed 4.72. Why? Because I'm fed up with having the 4.71 browser flake out every day or so with another error. So far, so good - nothing has died yet:-)
I've been tracking the Mozilla Seamonkey Milestones since M11, and it seems to be stabilizing up nicely but I'm stuck with using it for browsing behind the firewall at work because we use a SOCKS proxy to the outside world. Alas, as far as I can see this is not supported in Mozilla yet. Anyone have any clues on this one - what is needed to persuade Seamonkey to use the SOCKS proxy? Or does some SOCKS expert wish to sign up for this post on the Mozilla team? It was empty last time I looked.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. If I see any posts with the title 'Shoes?' following this one...:-)
Then we get Toby here with the hydrogen fuel on the Hindenberg (Sorry, Toby, nothing personal, I was just full to bursting when I hit your posting). Q: How much hydrogen fuel was there on the Hindenberg? A: None. All the hydrogen was in the lift cells, none was burned. Q: How many people in the Hindenberg disaster were killed by Hydrogen flames? A: Probably none. A number were killed by the fall and structural collapse. Many were fatally burned, but (near as we can tell) they were all burned by the fuel - the Deisel Oil fuel. The hydrogen was to light and just went straight up - very fast.
Actually I wasn't offended as you actually expand on the point I was trying to make in my posting. Hydrogen is very light, hence it's use as the buoyancy in the Hindenburg (I'm assuming this is now the correct spelling since someone pointed it out). It's role in the Hindenburg accident is still contested, although I lean towards the flammable casing theories nowadays. Anyway, to make an effective portable fuel you can't just carry Hydrogen around in a bottle without seriously compressing it. As far as energy of combustion is concerned, to get close to the energy output from a litre of petroleum, you need to compress it massively - without looking at the figures I suspect that there are limitations on compression technologies for hydrogen, plus storage difficulties and explosive (from the pressure alone) problems. To replace the petrol tank in a car with hydrogen gas in a portable format will take some work - maybe we'll see clip-in gas canisters at 'Gas' stations so that as you burn off hydrogen you leave the empty canisters behind and replace them with pre-filled ones. These are technological problems though, rather than scientific ones, and given the opportunity in an emerging market, I don't doubt that some major corporations will be funding their R&D divisions in search of a viable product.
I remember reading about the 'Holy Grail' of Hydrogen Farms back when I was eight or nine in one of my 'Science Fiction or Science Fact' books. If these scientists really have cracked this problem, then this could be as fundamental a shift in energy generation as the nuclear reactor.
Of course, Hydrogen is not necessarily the most well behaved fuel (witness the Hindenberg disaster, although in that case there is concern that doping the skin of the Hindenberg with a mixture resembling gunpowder was also a problem...) but the possibilities of having a reasonably clean environmentally friendly fuel ready to take over from Crude oil derivatives is something we should be thankful for.
I think you mean Venus. Mars' atmosphere is mostly Carbon Dioxide, so there's not much Oxygen to actually oxidise anything with. Venus has a very nasty atmosphere (I.E huge clouds of sulphuric acid) that tend to corode things.
No - I did mean the Martian atmosphere. The gases which make up the Martian atmosphere are about 95% CO2, about 3% Nitrogen and 2% Argon. But there is also dust and UV. Because the Martian atmosphere is so thin and the thin ozone layer on Mars, the UV levels on Mars are quite extreme. This UV bombardment of the surface rocks (aka regolith) is thought to result in the formation of strong oxidants on the surface of these rocks. And while the atmosphere is thin, there is enough wind to pick up the surface dust and carry it around, resulting in those pristine circuits and mechanical joints getting gummed up with highly oxidizing muck.
If you are interested in more information, there is an interesting summary of the Martian environment and the possibilities of terraforming Mars here .
From what I remember of my Martian atmospheric chemistry (which is not much - I was much more involved in extragalactic stuff), the environment oxidizes anything it can get its winds on like there is no tomorrow. So given the length of time that the Martian Lander has been out there, I'd be surprised if much of it was still functioning even if it had landed softly in the first place. So I'd be very surprised if we heard anything now, and even more surprised if the NASA team was able to do anything useful with the lander now.
While NASA does lots of testing in harsh environments on the Earth's surface, nothing quite matches up to the difficulties of making a complex system lasts in the Martian environment.
Intriguingly, this article totally fails to mention just how much cooling the Williamette required for operation, or how stable it was in operation. The mention that it 'barely made 1.5GHz' doesn't suggest to me that stability was an important part of this demonstration. It's also interesting to note that the time line for Williamette is still scheduled for late this year, so I suspect this sample is one of the best off the line so far. The recent fan-cooled 1.1GHz Athlon demonstration may prove to be a more realistic view of the Q4 performance we are likely to be able to get our hands on, although Kryotech may prove me wrong.
Also intriguing is Intel's reluctance to push up the speeds of the Celerons closer to their limits. This is rapidly turning into an overclocking dream - I've seen 500MHz Celerons go easily to 640MHz, whereas the Pentium IIIs seem to be selected to be much more difficult to successfully overclock. So the announcement of 600MHz Celerons seems long overdue - my only thought is that Intel does not want the Celeron line encroaching on their Pentium sales, since there appear to be no technical reasons for the delay.
While I agree with Charles that Linux is not there for the average user yet, I'm worried about some of the points that he makes about project management and open-source development.
The arrival of Mission Critical applications is here. Right now, Apache is probably the top application contender but there will be others. And that is not to neglect the Linux kernel itself. With Mission Critical software, all of a sudden you get situations where companies (possibly large companies) lose money as soon as their server goes down or their processing cluster dies. This might have put huge demands on the development community. But along with the arrival of Mission Critical applications has come the involvement of the big software companies, and here the small developer can benefit as well. Where companies are betting big on Linux, you can guarantee that they will want to be able to deliver any requirements that a customer wants too. This means that any support they offer on Linux has to be backed up with an experienced Linux development crew, and the nature of the licensing on much of open source software (GPL, LGPL and others) means that the open source community can reap the benefits of these developments.
There will be more large projects. The development of the KDE and GNOME desktop environments are huge projects in terms of potential scope. For one, I hope that we will not see a flood of MS Windows-lookalike applications - part of the reason I like Linux is that it as the opportunity to rework some of the user interfaces we currently struggle with, and I see so many inconsistencies in the MS Windows user interface I could cry. But I appreciate that average-Joe-user may not wish to learn a new GUI paradigm from scratch, so if someone wants to skin a UI in such a way as to not intimidate a former Windows user, fine. As long as I can still exercise some choice!
I also hope that the open source community does not get to a point where deadlines start appearing left, right and centre in public forums and software appears according to schedule. It's fine for the developers to set themselves targets for development times - in my opinion it helps keep a project moving forward - but especially for software which is developed in someone's free time, tight schedules lead to botched and buggy releases. Just because we can fix these later doesn't help the 'now', and this brave new Linux world where not every user is an Unix guru will not be helped by 'official' releases which die at an errant mouse click.
For more than a thousand years, writes Walker in this complex and haunting book, philosophers, scientists and theologians have battled furiously to explain the phenomenon of human consciousness, believed to be unique among the world's species.
Is it only me who thinks that assuming consciousness is a human-only trait is just a little bit arrogant? I see no evidence in any of my scientific training to suggest that consciousness is limited to the human experience - in fact having watched numerous stunning nature programs (thanks BBC:-) ) I'd say consciousness was a far more widespread condition than we give it credit for.
Given what we know about the development of life, and the success of the Darwinian model of evolution, I think that hypothesising that consciousness is this big prize that only humans are the recipient of is way off target. If we pursue this line of reasoning though, when did we recieve this 'prize'? Homo Erectus? Earlier? How much earlier? Leaving the trees? And just what is consciousness, that it is so unique to us?
Just because we fail to acheive a level of communication with the rest of the natural world around us which might let us in on the spread of consciousness around us does not imply that it is not there.
I was intrigued to note that these high resolutions screens are causing problems because of the way that much of the screen tools are designed in terms of pixel size. This failure to deal with having a GUI which is resolution independent, or at least resolution-abstracted presents many problems for GUI design. I wonder just how much of a legacy this will prove to be as display devices improve further down the line.
It strikes me that there are several ways to get around this from a GUI point of view. One work around is to move from a pixel-based paradigm to a vector-based paradigm. With the introduction of the Quartz technology in Mac OS X, Apple has made a first step towards this, but it doesn't extend to the toolbars or window decorations. I seem to remember from my distant past a SGI windowing system which was fully vectorized, but whether it was a toy or a real environment I do not recall.
On the other hand I think it is extremely unlikely that we are likely to see a wholesale switch from pixel based windowing GUIs to vector ones for the foreseeable future. If this is what we are working with, pixel size is not going to work as a base measurement and we need to abstract the size of windows and toolbars from the resolution at some level. One operating system I have used which went some way towards this is Acorn's Risc OS, which had a scaling function allowing you to rescale graphics at powers of two for the entire windowing system, including pointers and icons, while doing 'the-right-thing' with regard to text (properly anti-aliased alpha blended hinted Type 1 style fonts). Apple's Mac OS X allows scaling of its icons between tiny and 128x128, but this doesn't solve the problem of ending up with the other window real estate becoming unuseably tiny. Some scaling factor to represent the scaling between pixel and window-size is essential to preserving the window tool bars from shrinking into insignificance.
To sum up, these new high resolution screens hold up a challenge to GUI designers to give us some reasonable level of resolution-independence in the way the windows are displayed. Once screen resolutions start pushing up beyond 2560x2048 on 17" monitors, current windowing systems will become unuseable to those with less-than-perfect eyesight. Coming up with a method for changing the scaling between pixel and screen size for the desktop will give the advantages of superb image quality while maintain useablity for users and will open the doors for disabled users to tweak the size of the desktop tools to their needs.
Slashdot Mirror
so does this mean that certain books will be able to be published and not need permission to be copied? (not copyrighted)
That's not the way I read it - although I'm still digesting the information. The work remains copyrighted - what you do have under the license is the right to make copies of the complete work and to create derivative works, while abiding by certain restrictions. There are requirements when making larger copy runs (i.e. > 100 copies) of these documents - I can see these applying in large software development groups for example - where you must also ensure that Cover texts are correctly added and that the publisher(s) and titles is/are visible and legible. There are also other responsibilities when modifying the document - I assume this is to avoid mis-attribution and possible 'viral' slanders introduced into the document by malicious authors later down the line. The License basically ensures that the integrity of the document is not compromised by alteration and that all alterations are clearly demarcated.
what about plagarism? will our teachers be able to spot these new uncopyrighted works?
I wouldn't worry. To copy one person is plagiarism, to copy two is research. :-)
Cheers
Toby Haynes
Damn!
Damn Damn Damn!
Why does Loki have to release all these games? I get so much done at the moment when I'm booted into Linux because there is not much in the way of games installed to distract me (apart from FreeCiv which doesn't complain if you leave it for a while). But now I see that Loki are about to port my nemesis of productivity - racing games. I mean, look at this quote:
Well, we definitely want to support different gaming genres, and are in discussions now to license a racing game.
Just how cruel and heartless can you get?! If it turns out to be Mobil 1 Rally Championship my coding days are over ... *sob* :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
This is a good move by Loki and Creative, although Creatives involvement might put off other audio companies from wanting to use it - I bet the API is particularly suited towards Creative chipsets. A 3D Open API at this early stage should be something almost any company should be looking hard at. If at the moment it has features that favour Creative, then it is up to Aureal to get in there, do some spade work and add and help form the API to be more balanced. From the sounds of it, the audio geometry processing that A3D 2.0 does is under consideration by the OpenAL team, so if Aureal sees this as a worthwhile opportunity (and I think they should) they should contribute. Like the argument over open/closed source drivers, these big audio card companies make their money from the hardware - getting widespread acceptance of that hardware by making sure that it is widely usable is essential, and OpenAL can only help in getting these cards working in more environments on more platforms. But it does require the companies to seize the moment and help build the API.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It seems that while the push for ever increasing image quality is going on, we are getting much closer to realistic, real time rendering of scenes. I wonder just what else is needed to really be able to push the envelope of visualization and realism further. Here's my current wish list.
There must be others - it looks like ATI is going to finally give us proper bump mapping and range-based fogging. Do we also need a proper chromatic model so that we can get rainbows through glass objects? Should there be real-time ray-casting or radiosity support so that real lighting effects (say carrying a flaming torch down a corridor and having proper soft-edged shadows) can be achieved?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Hey! I play ZAngband, so I still eat ancient multi-hued dragons for breakfast. Or was that just a capital 'D' that kept changing colors?
Paah! Multi-hued dragons are for wimps! I eat the Serpent of Chaos for breakfast! Muahahah!
Diablo (and all its graphical predecessors) took the mindless dungeon crawl out of the Alphabits era and into eyecandyland. Here's hoping the sequel is worth the wait and has more depth to the story.
This is one area where I'm still not convinced that the graphical RPG has surpassed the older character-graphic Rogue-like games. In terms of longevity and replayability, I still rate games like Angband and it's many variants (Sangband, Zangband, Omega and others) more highly than a lot of the modern 3D/isometric eye-candy experiences. Hey - I even turned off the 16x16 graphic tiles and went back to the colour font displays because they are clearer and easier to analyse quickly. Maybe DungeonSiege will finally provide the immersive fantasy world with enough depth to keep the 'one more try to slay the X of Y' replayability but for the moment I'll stick with Zangband.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Even if fellow /.ers don't think this is such a huge milestone, AMD certainly do. Reading through that press release reveals just how much both AMD and Intel wanted to have the bragging rights to the first 1GHz x86 chip - likening it in achievement terms to 'breaking the sound barrier' is definitely a little extreme in my book, but I think the general public and the marketroids will have a field day with a 1GHz processor. I suspect that Intel will be extremely anxious to get their own press release announcing the 1GHz Coppermine out as fast as possible now to stop AMD claiming all the glory, but AMD will get some very useful publicity over the next 24 hours. Intel and the Pentium brand are still the CPU type that over half the computer-buying populace recognise in isolation and it is a major publicity boost to AMD to hit the 1GHz milestone first.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Possibly. In an effort to maintain their lead through other means than performance, Intel keeps inventing new SSE SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions. You will have noticed that the K7 covers all the standard PII instructions now, and has it's own set of SIMD instructions which go under the moniker of 3DNow. So if you get hold of an application which is *very* heavily optimised to use only the latest SSE instructions, you might see a *slight* performance hit. I think Adobe Photoshop is the only major suite I can think of which has gone this route, and even then there is not much to pick between the Athlon and the PIII. Most other application makers have kept out of the SSE/3DNow battle and just support the more basic SSE instructions which are covered in both CPUs and don't hurt older processors much.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Reading through this review reminded me of several other books which might be of interest. Set at about the same time at the end of the medieval period is "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco, which also deals with a society, in this case a monastic one, reacting to a world of learning on the edge of many advances.
If you enjoy tales with a twist (and if you like reading Iain M. Banks I think that's given) I'd also suggest Guy Gavriel Kaye's 'Tigana' as being a worthwhile read.
Any other suggestions out there for books to explore?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I bought an Athlon system as soon as I saw that it was designed by some of the Alpha 21264 team. So here's the differences as far as I remember - Tom's hardware has far more detail in it's articles on the K7 (Athlon).
Take your pick - I've been extremely pleased with my Athlon 650MHz. In fact the only thing I'm less pleased about is that this MHz race is making my processor look slower much too quickly - I'd usually upgrade once the top of the line processor gets to 2-3 times the clock speed of my current one, but at this rate that will mean an upgrade in Q4 this year :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Nice to see that NASA has finally woken up to the problem of space rubbish around other planets. If Gallileo does have Earth-born bacteria on it which have survived in space (there are various theories about life spreading from planet to planet by this method) it would be extremely frustrating to disrupt any current ecosystem on Europa. On the other hand, this concern will make the job of examining Europa in the future more tricky, regardless of what they do with Galileo (dropping it into the Jovian atmosphere or crashing it into Io both sound like possibilities to gain interesting data on either planet/moon). If we are going to go explore Europa for signs of life, we are almost certainly going to have to do it remotely with 'sterilized' equipment - sending a few astronauts down to have look isn't going to help in the attempts to not disrupt any life already there.
Of course, our own orbit is now strewn with bits of satellites and rocket boosters - thankfully it all tends to wander around at the same speeds as the spacecraft in orbit, but it gets a little bit unnerving to wonder about the future of colonizing the galaxy when you have to dodge the last 100 years of waste products in getting started.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It does appear that Intel may hurt its own marketing if it does jump the gun on this one. If AMD's strategy of releasing 900MHz, 950MHz and 1GHz Athlons at the end of this month in production quantities appears, then the later Intel releases of 866MHz and 933MHz are going to be blighted by the time they hit the market. Of course, if there are 1GHz Athlon machines appearing in the market place well before the appearance of similar Pentium III systems, the initial shock value of a 1GHz chip may backfire as the computer-buying public gets frustrated that they can't get hold of a Pentium processor which is 'available'. Remember also that a recent survey suggested that a fair number of people thought that CPU's were made by 'Pentium' - the last thing Intel wants to do is give it's top visibility line a black eye.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If they have done it right, when you save the file foo.conf, it will initially be saved as a normal file - i.e. don't mess with it too quickly. Remember that this is a server-based file system, so it gets a certain amount of give and take in what it does - as long as the user is able to load and save files to it transparently, it's fulfilling it's goals. foo.conf.old will still be symlinked, but it will be symlinked to a server copy that is held in a database under a unique key. If, on the save of foo.conf, the server recognises that this file was previously symlinked, it should run it's hashing function over the file to see whether it has changed, and probably also do some sanity checking in the form of looking at the file length. Even if the symlink checking is done later asynchronously, there should not be a problem, as long as the hashing function can't be fooled into giving the same signature to different files of the same length.
Of course, there may be bugs in the system. I'd worry about making sure that there are no opportunities for a user to obtain a truncated file during a file request, just because the server has just switched the file from a real file to a symbolic one. I'd also be wary of try to implement a scheme to save duplication on parts of files, although I can see that if you run some sort of binary diff on two files and save the diff and the base files you may also save a lot of space.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
When I first heard about the Mac OS X GUI I was both impressed by the visually clean and clear appearance of the interface and the use of transparency to improve the relationship between sub-windows and the 'main' window. Reading through this Ars Technica article though, I begin to wonder whether all these special effects included with Mac OS X are an improvement to the original Mac interface or whether they are crucifying their principles of simplicity of use in order to appear more flashy.
For example, the Dock bar at the bottom of the screen which progressively shrinks as you add more items to it and magnifies the few documents around the mouse when you move to it. This looks like a neat idea at first, especially when you look at the example screenshots given on Apple's site. But distinguishing between even 10 text documents is difficult using this method (the icon reflects the real document) and the example given of 1000+ documents in the bar in Ars is a nightmare!
The use of a button on every title bar to switch between single and multi-window mode is also odd. I guess this is a more interactive way of minimizing windows for the new user, but it's strange to see an option like this as a window button everywhere.
Don't get me wrong - I'm impressed by much of what I see in the Mac OS X GUI. The clear use of colour - i.e. generally neutral colours for windows, with primary colours for important window tool buttons on the active window - along with the Quartz technology and the XML integration are all worthy additions to the interface. But I do worry that some of the features are more a triumph of style over substance when it comes to real usability. As GNOME and KDE move to improve their interfaces, there is much to learn from the way Apple has designed their GUI. As long as nobody forces me to use a one-button mouse ...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
You know when you go to University and you look around and wonder who'll end up being the captains of industry, the Nobel prize winners and the people behind the next great innovation, or who'll be practicing their lines "Would you like fries with that?"? Well it's still a major shock when I read this story and recognized the name Dr Russell Cowburn - this guy was the person who showed me the ropes when I first went to Uni. All I can say is that if he makes a mint out of this, I wish him well! And given that Cambridge Uni generally tends towards reticence rather than early disclosure on these sort of news items, you can guarantee that this technique has seem some serious peer review already. That doesn't necessarily mean that scaling this technique up to marketable levels is easy, but it sounds like the science is well understood.
Just goes to show ... I really should studied harder in those lectures on condensed matter physics. :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
One of the big problems with storing data is the sheer size of it. In astronomy, almost all data collected by telescopes, be they radio, optical or otherwise, goes through a stage known as 'Reduction'. I've put this in quotes, mainly because it doesn't necessarily reduce the size of it. In essence, Reduction is about obtaining the most important or most complete information out of the data and discarding or minimizing the redundant, the useless and the misleading out of the data so that future analysis can be carried out on the important stuff without having to wade through all the noise. For instance, 70 or 80 images of one optical observation in various wavelength bands will be collapsed into three to five optimal images, one for each band. In Radio Astronomy, collating 60 - 80 12hr observations into one file removes all the 'bad' data and is optimal for future reuse.
To effectively make a useful archive requires some filtering of what goes into the archive. Nowadays I work for IBM on DB2 UDB, and the roadmaps suggest that the size of databases is growing exponentially - fortunately this is balanced by a proportional growth in both processor power and storage space and access speed. So while we have terabyte databases today, we could easily be looking at petabyte databases in a few years. These databases will probably hold a vast amount of digitized analogue information - memos, diagrams, papers - which currently is stored in more convential storage. The advantages of moving to a fully digital archive are great - searching and retrieval are faster, and the space saved by putting scans of 20 boxes of papers onto a hard drive or other storage are also great. However, there is a danger with archives growing out of control - if you initiate a search which will visit every part of a petabyte database, you are going to have to wait for it to finish, even with the best search algorithms and vastly faster hardware. Making sure that information is not multiply duplicated in the database, or that redundant data is not added without regard to the database retrieval performance is extremely important. If we set up a project to 'mirror the web' for archival purposes, we'll be hamstringing ourselves right at the start - most data is not needed for future reference. By applying methods to distill the important information, archives can be updated, maintained and searched without exhausting the available resources.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
How about giving me a browser that just does browsing? I know it's a novel concept, but why should my WEB BROWSER do Usenet and email? That's why I have slrn and mutt... I know, I know: "use lynx". But the formatting and graphics are tough to do in a tty...
Someone should write a patch for lynx to use the ascii graphics library - aalib to render web graphics as ascii text. Anyone who's missed this gem should check out ttyQuake. :-) Or maybe not ...!
Cheers
Toby Haynes
Yes - I've already downloaded and installed 4.72. Why? Because I'm fed up with having the 4.71 browser flake out every day or so with another error. So far, so good - nothing has died yet :-)
I've been tracking the Mozilla Seamonkey Milestones since M11, and it seems to be stabilizing up nicely but I'm stuck with using it for browsing behind the firewall at work because we use a SOCKS proxy to the outside world. Alas, as far as I can see this is not supported in Mozilla yet. Anyone have any clues on this one - what is needed to persuade Seamonkey to use the SOCKS proxy? Or does some SOCKS expert wish to sign up for this post on the Mozilla team? It was empty last time I looked.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
P.S. If I see any posts with the title 'Shoes?' following this one ... :-)
Then we get Toby here with the hydrogen fuel on the Hindenberg (Sorry, Toby, nothing personal, I was just full to bursting when I hit your posting). Q: How much hydrogen fuel was there on the Hindenberg? A: None. All the hydrogen was in the lift cells, none was burned. Q: How many people in the Hindenberg disaster were killed by Hydrogen flames? A: Probably none. A number were killed by the fall and structural collapse. Many were fatally burned, but (near as we can tell) they were all burned by the fuel - the Deisel Oil fuel. The hydrogen was to light and just went straight up - very fast.
Actually I wasn't offended as you actually expand on the point I was trying to make in my posting. Hydrogen is very light, hence it's use as the buoyancy in the Hindenburg (I'm assuming this is now the correct spelling since someone pointed it out). It's role in the Hindenburg accident is still contested, although I lean towards the flammable casing theories nowadays. Anyway, to make an effective portable fuel you can't just carry Hydrogen around in a bottle without seriously compressing it. As far as energy of combustion is concerned, to get close to the energy output from a litre of petroleum, you need to compress it massively - without looking at the figures I suspect that there are limitations on compression technologies for hydrogen, plus storage difficulties and explosive (from the pressure alone) problems. To replace the petrol tank in a car with hydrogen gas in a portable format will take some work - maybe we'll see clip-in gas canisters at 'Gas' stations so that as you burn off hydrogen you leave the empty canisters behind and replace them with pre-filled ones. These are technological problems though, rather than scientific ones, and given the opportunity in an emerging market, I don't doubt that some major corporations will be funding their R&D divisions in search of a viable product.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I remember reading about the 'Holy Grail' of Hydrogen Farms back when I was eight or nine in one of my 'Science Fiction or Science Fact' books. If these scientists really have cracked this problem, then this could be as fundamental a shift in energy generation as the nuclear reactor.
Of course, Hydrogen is not necessarily the most well behaved fuel (witness the Hindenberg disaster, although in that case there is concern that doping the skin of the Hindenberg with a mixture resembling gunpowder was also a problem...) but the possibilities of having a reasonably clean environmentally friendly fuel ready to take over from Crude oil derivatives is something we should be thankful for.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I think you mean Venus. Mars' atmosphere is mostly Carbon Dioxide, so there's not much Oxygen to actually oxidise anything with. Venus has a very nasty atmosphere (I.E huge clouds of sulphuric acid) that tend to corode things.
No - I did mean the Martian atmosphere. The gases which make up the Martian atmosphere are about 95% CO2, about 3% Nitrogen and 2% Argon. But there is also dust and UV. Because the Martian atmosphere is so thin and the thin ozone layer on Mars, the UV levels on Mars are quite extreme. This UV bombardment of the surface rocks (aka regolith) is thought to result in the formation of strong oxidants on the surface of these rocks. And while the atmosphere is thin, there is enough wind to pick up the surface dust and carry it around, resulting in those pristine circuits and mechanical joints getting gummed up with highly oxidizing muck.
If you are interested in more information, there is an interesting summary of the Martian environment and the possibilities of terraforming Mars here .
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
From what I remember of my Martian atmospheric chemistry (which is not much - I was much more involved in extragalactic stuff), the environment oxidizes anything it can get its winds on like there is no tomorrow. So given the length of time that the Martian Lander has been out there, I'd be surprised if much of it was still functioning even if it had landed softly in the first place. So I'd be very surprised if we heard anything now, and even more surprised if the NASA team was able to do anything useful with the lander now.
While NASA does lots of testing in harsh environments on the Earth's surface, nothing quite matches up to the difficulties of making a complex system lasts in the Martian environment.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Intriguingly, this article totally fails to mention just how much cooling the Williamette required for operation, or how stable it was in operation. The mention that it 'barely made 1.5GHz' doesn't suggest to me that stability was an important part of this demonstration. It's also interesting to note that the time line for Williamette is still scheduled for late this year, so I suspect this sample is one of the best off the line so far. The recent fan-cooled 1.1GHz Athlon demonstration may prove to be a more realistic view of the Q4 performance we are likely to be able to get our hands on, although Kryotech may prove me wrong.
Also intriguing is Intel's reluctance to push up the speeds of the Celerons closer to their limits. This is rapidly turning into an overclocking dream - I've seen 500MHz Celerons go easily to 640MHz, whereas the Pentium IIIs seem to be selected to be much more difficult to successfully overclock. So the announcement of 600MHz Celerons seems long overdue - my only thought is that Intel does not want the Celeron line encroaching on their Pentium sales, since there appear to be no technical reasons for the delay.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
While I agree with Charles that Linux is not there for the average user yet, I'm worried about some of the points that he makes about project management and open-source development.
The arrival of Mission Critical applications is here. Right now, Apache is probably the top application contender but there will be others. And that is not to neglect the Linux kernel itself. With Mission Critical software, all of a sudden you get situations where companies (possibly large companies) lose money as soon as their server goes down or their processing cluster dies. This might have put huge demands on the development community. But along with the arrival of Mission Critical applications has come the involvement of the big software companies, and here the small developer can benefit as well. Where companies are betting big on Linux, you can guarantee that they will want to be able to deliver any requirements that a customer wants too. This means that any support they offer on Linux has to be backed up with an experienced Linux development crew, and the nature of the licensing on much of open source software (GPL, LGPL and others) means that the open source community can reap the benefits of these developments.
There will be more large projects. The development of the KDE and GNOME desktop environments are huge projects in terms of potential scope. For one, I hope that we will not see a flood of MS Windows-lookalike applications - part of the reason I like Linux is that it as the opportunity to rework some of the user interfaces we currently struggle with, and I see so many inconsistencies in the MS Windows user interface I could cry. But I appreciate that average-Joe-user may not wish to learn a new GUI paradigm from scratch, so if someone wants to skin a UI in such a way as to not intimidate a former Windows user, fine. As long as I can still exercise some choice!
I also hope that the open source community does not get to a point where deadlines start appearing left, right and centre in public forums and software appears according to schedule. It's fine for the developers to set themselves targets for development times - in my opinion it helps keep a project moving forward - but especially for software which is developed in someone's free time, tight schedules lead to botched and buggy releases. Just because we can fix these later doesn't help the 'now', and this brave new Linux world where not every user is an Unix guru will not be helped by 'official' releases which die at an errant mouse click.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
For more than a thousand years, writes Walker in this complex and haunting book, philosophers, scientists and theologians have battled furiously to explain the phenomenon of human consciousness, believed to be unique among the world's species.
Is it only me who thinks that assuming consciousness is a human-only trait is just a little bit arrogant? I see no evidence in any of my scientific training to suggest that consciousness is limited to the human experience - in fact having watched numerous stunning nature programs (thanks BBC :-) ) I'd say consciousness was a far more widespread condition than we give it credit for.
Given what we know about the development of life, and the success of the Darwinian model of evolution, I think that hypothesising that consciousness is this big prize that only humans are the recipient of is way off target. If we pursue this line of reasoning though, when did we recieve this 'prize'? Homo Erectus? Earlier? How much earlier? Leaving the trees? And just what is consciousness, that it is so unique to us?
Just because we fail to acheive a level of communication with the rest of the natural world around us which might let us in on the spread of consciousness around us does not imply that it is not there.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I was intrigued to note that these high resolutions screens are causing problems because of the way that much of the screen tools are designed in terms of pixel size. This failure to deal with having a GUI which is resolution independent, or at least resolution-abstracted presents many problems for GUI design. I wonder just how much of a legacy this will prove to be as display devices improve further down the line.
It strikes me that there are several ways to get around this from a GUI point of view. One work around is to move from a pixel-based paradigm to a vector-based paradigm. With the introduction of the Quartz technology in Mac OS X, Apple has made a first step towards this, but it doesn't extend to the toolbars or window decorations. I seem to remember from my distant past a SGI windowing system which was fully vectorized, but whether it was a toy or a real environment I do not recall.
On the other hand I think it is extremely unlikely that we are likely to see a wholesale switch from pixel based windowing GUIs to vector ones for the foreseeable future. If this is what we are working with, pixel size is not going to work as a base measurement and we need to abstract the size of windows and toolbars from the resolution at some level. One operating system I have used which went some way towards this is Acorn's Risc OS, which had a scaling function allowing you to rescale graphics at powers of two for the entire windowing system, including pointers and icons, while doing 'the-right-thing' with regard to text (properly anti-aliased alpha blended hinted Type 1 style fonts). Apple's Mac OS X allows scaling of its icons between tiny and 128x128, but this doesn't solve the problem of ending up with the other window real estate becoming unuseably tiny. Some scaling factor to represent the scaling between pixel and window-size is essential to preserving the window tool bars from shrinking into insignificance.
To sum up, these new high resolution screens hold up a challenge to GUI designers to give us some reasonable level of resolution-independence in the way the windows are displayed. Once screen resolutions start pushing up beyond 2560x2048 on 17" monitors, current windowing systems will become unuseable to those with less-than-perfect eyesight. Coming up with a method for changing the scaling between pixel and screen size for the desktop will give the advantages of superb image quality while maintain useablity for users and will open the doors for disabled users to tweak the size of the desktop tools to their needs.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes