> Only thing I haven't any solid data on is the > likelihood of dead pixels with OLED displays, > although it can be assumed that this will be far > more rare than with TFTs, considering that the > production process is far less complex.
I'd think that 'dead pixels' are caused by having a broken transistor activating or not a pixel, I'd think that for OLED you need the same type of transistor activating or not a pixel, so why the 'dead pixel' problem be different?
I'd think that it could be different if the electrical characteric of the transistor needed are different: if they are more difficult to generate then there will be more dead pixel, otherwise less..
Now there are different versions of OLED also, so..
You're right in the telecommunication work 1 Kb/s = 1000 b/s.
I know: I'm working at Alcatel and I was very surprised the first time I saw, so the bitrate is 1.024 Kb/s and I asked ok so this Kb is obviously 1000b why not use Kib/s instead and I was answered that Kibi and Mibi were not really accepted in the telecom world..
Please someone mod the parent up, he clearly shows that the distinction between Kilo and Kibi must be clearly used..
Thanks for clearing things up, in fact it is 64 or 128 bit for the total!
We're still at 16 or 32 bit per component, which is what matters, as AFAIK there is no way to combine the component to do a floating point calculation with a precision of 64bit.
Except of course that what is 100fps in a game, will be much lower in a newer game, so you'll be happy to have a powerfull videocard.
Do you play Flight Simulators? Currently nobody is able to play Forgotten Battle at 1600*1200 with AA at perfect settings (well you can play if you want to see a slide show), and I won't even talk about Lock On which is even more hungry for power I've heard (both CPU and videocard).
Well it is still better to have propietary 64bit floating points than true 32bit floating point I think..
And thanks phsdv for pointing to me that the 6800 can do some 64bit calculation, I didn't know it.
I'm really surprised that NVidia did this as 32bit should be enough precision for video rendering for a long time, even for non real time rendering, strange. Apparently they even support 128floating point calculation, it will be interesting to see the scientific papers which talks about using the 6800, with the PCI express bus, the GPU may be even really usefull as a math accelerator, much faster than I thought!
Now the power consumption of several 6800 in a PC should be "interesting" to say the least..
> DX won a long time ago (around ver 6) for game development. > And we (the developers) let it. > Fortunately nVidia, Mac, Linux, and id are keeping it on life support.
Gasp, I think that Apple is the most guilty here for why DX has won! Back in the past, instead of using OpenGL, it created its own technology (can't remember the word) which of course was nearly totally unused..
Only recently Apple switched to OpenGL, if Apple had suffer less from the "Not Invented Here" syndrome, OpenGL may have won..
Also ID is not the only one using OpenGL, I'm playing a flight simulator IL2 Sturmovick which is using OpenGL (it is available also in DirectX but OpenGL's rendering is better).
Be careful with The OpenGL Programming Guide, Fourth Edition!
Contrary to what is written on the cover, that is to say: "Most importantly, the ARB vertex and fragment program extension is introduced.", the book doesn't talk at all about the vertex and fragment programs (also known as shaders).
Despite this important false-advertising (lie?), it is still a good book for learning pure OpenGL 1.4.
But you'll have to buy another book to learn to use shaders..
> the recent ban on religiously-mandated clothing shows. > As an American, I find the slight to the Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh communities to be highly offensive and oppressive
Sorry but the ban is for 1) public state school: I think the state can choose what clothing is considered as correct in state's schools. 2) not related to any particular religion: a Christian who would wear an enormous cross would have the same problem as the other religion.
IMHO religion is a serious matter who should be restricted to adults, I don't see why the state should allow religions to make differences between children within a state school.
"laicity" is the separation of goverment from church.
It is one of the pilar of modern French state: governement, schools are all 'religion-free', religious activities are considered are purely private issue.
It is very strange for French people to see the US president using the bible during his nomination, or witness swearing on the bible during a trial..
>I think Christianity should be mentioned since its role in Europe's history was indeed crucial.
And? The constitution is for the future not for the past and in Europe it has been pretty well established that religions should be kept separated from governments..
So Christianity shouldn't be mentioned, it is just one religion among many other, currently and in the past it is one of the strongest religion in Europe, that's true but should we modify Europe's constition if/when Islam becomes the first? I don't think so!
I think that SpecInt would be more interesting as a basis for comparison than GHz.
- 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition: 1570 Base SpecInt (couldn't find the 3.4 GHz version sorry).
- AMD Opteron (TM) Model 146 HE: 1289 Base SpecInt.
I couldn't find SpecInt figures for the PPC970.
Anyway, the P4 is more than 20% more powerfull than the Opteron (as 20% is the figure for the 3.2GHz P4EE) and consumes 87% more power.
But there is a problem with these figure: performance/power ratio is not constant: it is easy to have a good ratio when the performance is low, but when you try to reach the "best" performance, the ratio diminish fast..
The price should be taken into account also: usually CPU makers makes you pay a premium for low power CPU over regular CPU.
You make it sound like memory management is very easy, if it is so easy, why do we need GCs?
>Good programming style also avoids the use of global variables.
Well now, we don't use global variables, we use singleton class, it's better but it doesn't change the problem much..
Also you basically divide the objects in two: objects that live only for the duration of a method call or objects that live forever. Well, the problem is of course for the objects which need to live for more than a method call and that don't need to live forever..
That is where the problem arise: reference an object from an attribute and don't delete the attribute even when the object will not be used anymore.. Do this all the time with a few singleton class in the mix and you have memory leaks..
I believe that the reason why language with GCs have such a bad reputation concerning memory usage is programmers that mismanage memory "oh, it is the GC's problem".
GCs are very helpfull but to be memory efficient one still must be carefull to free unneeded references to long lived object when we're sure will not need those anymore in this part of the program.
One of the difference between US and Europe (well at least France) is the way sports is handled: in US, guys who are very good at sports at the "star" of their university, in France guys who are very good at sports usually goes to separated specialised schools..
>When ref goes out of scope, the object it references becomes available for collection. It's that simple.
Except that it may take *much longer* to have ref going out of scope after you don't have the need of the object it references.
During this time, your program is using more memory than it needs.. This time may be the whole duration of the program if your reference is referenced by a global variable --> memory leak.
>In fact, your misconceived example negates the whole point of GC-- your ref = 0, in terms of programmer logic, amounts to free(ref), which is exactly what you don't have to do if you have GC!
Not really, the difference between a free(ref) and a ref=0, is that if another part of the program have another reference to the same object, in the first case you have a core dump when it tries to access the object, in the second part it works correctly.
I agree that if the other part of the program share the same reference there is a problem, but it is much more easier to have different references to the same object and to free references as soon as it isn't needed anymore, this way it is possible to have simple reference management and still avoid consuming too much memory, as it is unfortunately too common for programs using sloppily a GC..
GC doesn't protect against memory leaks, so I fail to see how it relevant to the GC vs no-GC discussion?
Also considering that nearly all the languages currently used do not allow you to create function at runtime, you could have a serious problem finding a job if you refuse learning them..
If I remember well, he knows how to speak modern Egyptian, and he is able to read ancient Egyptian.
I doubt very much that anybody on Earth knows how to speak ancient Egyptian: modern Egyptian is likely to be quite different from ancient Egyptian, a few thousands years tends to change quite a lot a language as evidenced by the fact that until the 'pierre de rosette' was found nobody was able to read ancient Egyptian anymore.
1) They send through a gate some kind of probe and seconds after they activate it, they receive a signal that the probe sent through the space and they say the probe is at XXX light years.
2) An Egyptian expert learns to speak old Egyptian in an afternoon..
Avoid generalisation like this: do you really avoid using journalised filesystem on Linux because there are more complicated than needed and you can use fsck by hand?
>>It's be nice if people stopped and remembered a few basic facts. #1, Palestinians were there first. >No, they weren't. Jews have been there for many thousands of years. Arabs didn't migrate out of Arabia until recently (1600 years or so).
Who cares what happened centuries ago? What only matters is recent history and the fact is this: Palestinians were far more numerous than Jews in this area before the invasion..
>Terrorists are those who delibrately attack civilians. If the shoe fits, wear it.
From the webster dictionnary: terrorism: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.
I'd say that both Israelians and Palestinians use terror here, so both fits the definition..
As for choosing the path to war, the good question is: had the UN the moral right to create the Israel state? The UN 'validated' the invasion and of course the arabs deemed it unacceptable..
Slashdot Mirror
I played with BeOS and was really blown away by its speed: it was very responsive and booted under 20s!
I know why it was responsive: heavy usage of multi-threading, which is difficult to do on Linux because it means recoding all the applications!
But how could BeOS boot so fast??
Does someone know? And why isn't it possible to do the same on Linux?
> Only thing I haven't any solid data on is the
> likelihood of dead pixels with OLED displays,
> although it can be assumed that this will be far
> more rare than with TFTs, considering that the
> production process is far less complex.
I'd think that 'dead pixels' are caused by having a broken transistor activating or not a pixel, I'd think that for OLED you need the same type of transistor activating or not a pixel, so why the 'dead pixel' problem be different?
I'd think that it could be different if the electrical characteric of the transistor needed are different: if they are more difficult to generate then there will be more dead pixel, otherwise less..
Now there are different versions of OLED also, so..
Bah, it depends on the game, for a FPS usually having a recent videocard is enough, now for recent flight simulators, it is very different.
I have a 2400+ and a 9800Pro and I'd love to be able to have a faster CPU for playing IL2, sometimes the framerate can be under 10fps!!
And IL2 is not even the most demanding flight simulators, I think that it is LockOn is..
As far as I know, the 'quantum encryption' which allow secure communication, also prevent routing..
So I don't think that it is really a network..
OK, a fully meshed network is a network, but having to put a link between each node is not a very usable network when the number of node increase!
Or am I missing something? The article is quite low on detail..
You're right in the telecommunication work 1 Kb/s = 1000 b/s.
I know: I'm working at Alcatel and I was very surprised the first time I saw, so the bitrate is 1.024 Kb/s and I asked ok so this Kb is obviously 1000b why not use Kib/s instead and I was answered that Kibi and Mibi were not really accepted in the telecom world..
Please someone mod the parent up, he clearly shows that the distinction between Kilo and Kibi must be clearly used..
Thanks for clearing things up, in fact it is 64 or 128 bit for the total!
We're still at 16 or 32 bit per component, which is what matters, as AFAIK there is no way to combine the component to do a floating point calculation with a precision of 64bit.
Except of course that what is 100fps in a game, will be much lower in a newer game, so you'll be happy to have a powerfull videocard.
Do you play Flight Simulators?
Currently nobody is able to play Forgotten Battle at 1600*1200 with AA at perfect settings (well you can play if you want to see a slide show), and I won't even talk about Lock On which is even more hungry for power I've heard (both CPU and videocard).
Well it is still better to have propietary 64bit floating points than true 32bit floating point I think..
And thanks phsdv for pointing to me that the 6800 can do some 64bit calculation, I didn't know it.
I'm really surprised that NVidia did this as 32bit should be enough precision for video rendering for a long time, even for non real time rendering, strange.
Apparently they even support 128floating point calculation, it will be interesting to see the scientific papers which talks about using the 6800, with the PCI express bus, the GPU may be even really usefull as a math accelerator, much faster than I thought!
Now the power consumption of several 6800 in a PC should be "interesting" to say the least..
Yes, one thing shocked me in their paper: they don't talk much about the precision they use..
Strange because it is a big problem for using GPU as coprocessors: usually scientific computation use 64bit floats or on Intel 80-bit floats!
> DX won a long time ago (around ver 6) for game development.
> And we (the developers) let it.
> Fortunately nVidia, Mac, Linux, and id are keeping it on life support.
Gasp, I think that Apple is the most guilty here for why DX has won!
Back in the past, instead of using OpenGL, it created its own technology (can't remember the word) which of course was nearly totally unused..
Only recently Apple switched to OpenGL, if Apple had suffer less from the "Not Invented Here" syndrome, OpenGL may have won..
Also ID is not the only one using OpenGL, I'm playing a flight simulator IL2 Sturmovick which is using OpenGL (it is available also in DirectX but OpenGL's rendering is better).
Be careful with The OpenGL Programming Guide, Fourth Edition!
Contrary to what is written on the cover, that is to say: "Most importantly, the ARB vertex and fragment program extension is introduced.", the book doesn't talk at all about the vertex and fragment programs (also known as shaders).
Despite this important false-advertising (lie?), it is still a good book for learning pure OpenGL 1.4.
But you'll have to buy another book to learn to use shaders..
> the recent ban on religiously-mandated clothing shows.
> As an American, I find the slight to the Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh communities to be highly offensive and oppressive
Sorry but the ban is for
1) public state school: I think the state can choose what clothing is considered as correct in state's schools.
2) not related to any particular religion: a Christian who would wear an enormous cross would have the same problem as the other religion.
IMHO religion is a serious matter who should be restricted to adults, I don't see why the state should allow religions to make differences between children within a state school.
"laicity" is the separation of goverment from church.
It is one of the pilar of modern French state: governement, schools are all 'religion-free', religious activities are considered are purely private issue.
It is very strange for French people to see the US president using the bible during his nomination, or witness swearing on the bible during a trial..
>I think Christianity should be mentioned since its role in Europe's history was indeed crucial.
And? The constitution is for the future not for the past and in Europe it has been pretty well established that religions should be kept separated from governments..
So Christianity shouldn't be mentioned, it is just one religion among many other, currently and in the past it is one of the strongest religion in Europe, that's true but should we modify Europe's constition if/when Islam becomes the first?
I don't think so!
PS: I'm an agnostic.
I think that SpecInt would be more interesting as a basis for comparison than GHz.
- 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition: 1570 Base SpecInt (couldn't find the 3.4 GHz version sorry).
- AMD Opteron (TM) Model 146 HE: 1289 Base SpecInt.
I couldn't find SpecInt figures for the PPC970.
Anyway, the P4 is more than 20% more powerfull than the Opteron (as 20% is the figure for the 3.2GHz P4EE) and consumes 87% more power.
But there is a problem with these figure: performance/power ratio is not constant: it is easy to have a good ratio when the performance is low, but when you try to reach the "best" performance, the ratio diminish fast..
The price should be taken into account also: usually CPU makers makes you pay a premium for low power CPU over regular CPU.
You make it sound like memory management is very easy, if it is so easy, why do we need GCs?
>Good programming style also avoids the use of global variables.
Well now, we don't use global variables, we use singleton class, it's better but it doesn't change the problem much..
Also you basically divide the objects in two: objects that live only for the duration of a method call or objects that live forever.
Well, the problem is of course for the objects which need to live for more than a method call and that don't need to live forever..
That is where the problem arise: reference an object from an attribute and don't delete the attribute even when the object will not be used anymore..
Do this all the time with a few singleton class in the mix and you have memory leaks..
I believe that the reason why language with GCs have such a bad reputation concerning memory usage is programmers that mismanage memory "oh, it is the GC's problem".
GCs are very helpfull but to be memory efficient one still must be carefull to free unneeded references to long lived object when we're sure will not need those anymore in this part of the program.
>Maybe it's a cutural thing?
I think so.
One of the difference between US and Europe (well at least France) is the way sports is handled: in US, guys who are very good at sports at the "star" of their university, in France guys who are very good at sports usually goes to separated specialised schools..
>When ref goes out of scope, the object it references becomes available for collection. It's that simple.
Except that it may take *much longer* to have ref going out of scope after you don't have the need of the object it references.
During this time, your program is using more memory than it needs.. This time may be the whole duration of the program if your reference is referenced by a global variable --> memory leak.
>In fact, your misconceived example negates the whole point of GC-- your ref = 0, in terms of programmer logic, amounts to free(ref), which is exactly what you don't have to do if you have GC!
Not really, the difference between a free(ref) and a ref=0, is that if another part of the program have another reference to the same object, in the first case you have a core dump when it tries to access the object, in the second part it works correctly.
I agree that if the other part of the program share the same reference there is a problem, but it is much more easier to have different references to the same object and to free references as soon as it isn't needed anymore, this way it is possible to have simple reference management and still avoid consuming too much memory, as it is unfortunately too common for programs using sloppily a GC..
Unfortunately you can have memory leaks with a GC: what if you are sloppy and don't put some 'ref = 0;'
in your program?
You have a memory leak..
> Memory leaks are actually much worse
GC doesn't protect against memory leaks, so I fail to see how it relevant to the GC vs no-GC discussion?
Also considering that nearly all the languages currently used do not allow you to create function at runtime, you could have a serious problem finding a job if you refuse learning them..
If I remember well, he knows how to speak modern Egyptian, and he is able to read ancient Egyptian.
I doubt very much that anybody on Earth knows how to speak ancient Egyptian: modern Egyptian is likely to be quite different from ancient Egyptian, a few thousands years tends to change quite a lot a language as evidenced by the fact that until the 'pierre de rosette' was found nobody was able to read ancient Egyptian anymore.
1) They send through a gate some kind of probe and seconds after they activate it, they receive a signal that the probe sent through the space and they say the probe is at XXX light years.
2) An Egyptian expert learns to speak old Egyptian in an afternoon..
Avoid generalisation like this: do you really avoid using journalised filesystem on Linux because there are more complicated than needed and you can use fsck by hand?
IGI: I'm Going In is a FPS which plays outside which feels more free.
All and all a good FPS even if I couldn't finish it because of a 'too hard' level..
>>It's be nice if people stopped and remembered a few basic facts. #1, Palestinians were there first.
>No, they weren't. Jews have been there for many thousands of years. Arabs didn't migrate out of Arabia until recently (1600 years or so).
Who cares what happened centuries ago?
What only matters is recent history and the fact is this: Palestinians were far more numerous than Jews in this area before the invasion..
>Terrorists are those who delibrately attack civilians. If the shoe fits, wear it.
From the webster dictionnary: terrorism: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.
I'd say that both Israelians and Palestinians use terror here, so both fits the definition..
As for choosing the path to war, the good question is: had the UN the moral right to create the Israel state?
The UN 'validated' the invasion and of course the arabs deemed it unacceptable..