If I check my paper agains plagiarism, will it be added to their database or not? I'm fine with the prof checking my paper with whatever software or service he wants but I would hate if I were required to use a commercial service myself to "proof" that my work is original. Double so, if the license for the service required me to give rights to distribute my work via the service.
As I can see it, I return my paper to the prof and because I have the copyright to the paper, it cannot be stored by some for-profit-company unless I license it. Perhaps I should hand out my paper to the prof with a written license that he can use it as required for grading it but the paper may not be redistributed. If this web service doesn't allow comparing the paper without adding the content to their database, then the prof cannot use this service. If, on the other hand, the service allows checking papers without adding the content to the database, I can see absolutely no reason why the prof shouldn't be allowed to use the service if he feels that it's the most effective way to work. If the professor or the university pays the bill, of course.
Its so simple, it works without JavaScript, loads faster, cross-browser compatible, and if the user is running a non-graphical browser, it's still accessible. Here's a quick example (where somepic.png contains both roll over states, one at (0, 0) and the other at (0, 20):
a.Foo { display: block; width: 100; height: 20; background: url("somepic.png") top left no-repeat; }
If you start throwing out examples, it would be nice to check that those work. You've a mistake there as "width:100;" or "height:20;" mean nothing. You have to define the unit unless the value you're trying to set is zero. Yep, they work in MSIE, but when did that browser knew anything about the standards? The correct format is width: 100px and height: 20px.
[The] code runnable by your CPU is technically already in a readable form. Anything can be understood and debugged, source code or not. It just takes LONGER without the source.
Plus, it can be really hard to fix the issue after you find the problem in the binary driver. Sometimes the new code doesn't fit the existing space (fixed binary code requires more bytes than the original) and extra code is required to jump to another location to execute all the code then then jump back to continue original code. If the problem was in performance critical location this isn't an option and it might be that the problem is practically impossible to fix without the source. Sure, you can more and more code but where's the point? To help the vendor that's not willing to co-operate to make more money? For free? Why??
The creators of binary modules are *hardware vendors* and they are "contributing" by making their hardware compatible with the free system. This is not parasitic; if they want, they can just not bother, and you can just not use that hardware in Linux.
If the vendor is selling hardware, they have nothing to lose if they release the source code for the drivers. However, if they are selling software combined with some hardware parts, like some winmodem, they are clearly parasitic; they want to use free code (linux) to help selling their proprietary software product (codec for their modem) and they do that by linking those pieces of software together. The 'hardware' is just the required dongle to make the software to work.
The border area is definately grey.
And I think that having no driver at all is better than having a binary driver. Yes, it sucks if you've already bought the piece of hardware and cannot make it work but how's that different from not being able to use Commadore C64 diskette drive with your PC? Or if the piece of hardware had "Designed for Windows XP" logo on it, why do you think it would work with anything else - like Linux, for example? How about if it had "Designed for Mac" logo? If it doesn't say it works with Linux, don't buy that piece of crap. If we allow binary drivers, the box can say that the hardware "Works with Linux" when they really mean "Works with RedHat(r) Linux Desktop(tm) 10.5 on AMD(r) Opteron(r)" because that's the only environment/CPU they decided to compile the driver for.
In the end, if the only way to have Linux driver is to open source the driver, a vendor is either going to release the source or lose all the customers using Linux. It seems pretty clear to me that Linux is going to get big enough in any case so the difference in potential customer base is going to force the hardware vendors to release the source. It might be that Linux could get bigger faster if we allow binary drivers now and disallow those later, but I think it's cheating and against the spirit of open source movement and free software.
like, 15 mph on the interstate. i'll go 14. i'll end up with 500 feet clear in front of me
Seriously though, while this is the way you SHOULD be driving in traffic, keeping adequate (not excessive!) space between you and the car in front of you to avoid jamming your brakes
Try that sometimes. The important thing to notice is that not everybody overtakes you, not everybody changes lanes every time it's possible. It's all those other nicely behaving people that allow one to keep space by keeping the stupid people in the traffic behind you, running smoothly instead of constant accelerating and breaking. Notice that the target isn't to grow the spece ad infinium but to create fixed size, large space. Once you have the space, you just keep going and you allow the space to shrink some if the car in front of you temporarily slows down.
If everybody kept adequate space then everything would be fine and there wouldn't be any grindlock jams. The thing is, there're way too many dumb people who think that the jam disappears faster if they drive closer to the guy in front of them. Well, it doesn't. So, to fix the issue, some people have to keep HUGE space in front of them to make average space adequate. Otherwise, nobody can change lanes to hit their exits and some stupid fuck thinks he's missing the exit, hits the breaks, stops the whole lane and tries to cut in into other lane to get to his exit. He doesn't care if the stops two or four lanes to do it. Were there huge space in the traffic, he could go over the lane without stopping the traffic on the very same lane.
I don't want shit on-board sound when doing real sound work.
Pretty much any on-board sound system can output PCM via SPDIF. Do you think that the PCM output from el cheapo on-board sound chipset is somehow different from the same signal outputted via the most expensive external system?
I don't have enough money to buy amplifier that has multichannel PCM input so I'll rather take a board based on nForce2 (x86) that has Dolby Digital multichannel output via SPDIF. Yeah, the signal is compressed but I consider DD signal better than any analog audio path.
If you're one with the golden ears and you think you can hear the difference between DD and PCM audio, I feel sorry for you.
I live in Finland and my cell phone had visible antenna about 3 years ago and I haven't missed it once since then. I'd have already bought one of these new PDA+cell phone combos if only one decent device came without external antenna. Internal antenna works just fine in much smaller devices so PDA sized device should work at least equally fine without huge antenna on top. So why the antenna? Do some people still think it cannot work if it doesn't have huge antenna? That antenna is a little too small to play the part of fallos symbol either;-)
I created my own player in Madden
2003 in which I placed myself [...] when I showed up for training camp earlier this year they kept telling me to get the hell off the field.
It's about the last season. You were late for almost a year from the training camp. I think it's understandable that they didn't want to see you anymore. You know, those teams require strict discipline.
Perhaps all that is needed is a big screen that can't be skipped at the begining of the game that says, in giant bold white letters on a black background[...]
No thanks. The packaging already says M(ature) and Grand Theft Auto - how much more clues you need that the actions shouldn't be followed? What's next? "THIS IS NOT REAL. DO NOT EAT ALL PILLS THAT YOU FIND IN REAL LIFE. DO YOURSELF A FAVOR: KEEP IT IN THE GAME" in the Pac-Man startup screen?
Take your average ignorant North American and ask him to tell the difference between 3 different Asian individuals. There is a good chance that we would fail that test because we are not used to spot the difference.
Fine, but there are things that the computer can tell better than humans, even things that humans "should" be able to do better. [...] I imagine that a computer would also be at least comparably able to tell apart similar-looking Asians.
I think you missed the point. If you're the programmer of the system and you cannot see the difference between images of three people, how on the earth are you going to come up with an algorithm for the computer to do the thing instead? You can try something like neural networks but unless you understand what to look for, the changes are pretty slim that the system works at acceptable quality. I consider programming as writing formal instructions to do something - how do you teach something you've no faintest idea about?
Where's the research results for this area? I guess inputting different measurements of the face for many enough test subjects, vectorizing the data set and throwing off the axles that contain very little information could provide some generic information what to look for.
I can't believe nobody (or at least no high-scored-post) has yet mentioned that Scott Adams has written many books about this. All the books are full of real life examples of stupid boss behaviour but some of the content is disguised as humorous instead of being documentation for real life. Don't fall into that pit! Scott Adams has even a web site dedicated for idiot boss and cow-orkers. You might want to become a member of DNRC, too.
Second, don't forget that a 64 bit CPU doesn't mean 64 bit of addressable space (usually it's around 40-48)
AFAIK, that 40-48 bit addressing (depending on architecture) is a limitation of the memory bus. However, the whole 64 bit addressing space can be used for virtual memory. As a result the whole 64 bit address space cannot point to real memory, but who needs 2^64 bytes of RAM anyway[1]? Some x86 motherboards support 4GB of memory but one cannot use that effectively because the whole addressing space is also 4GB and the OS needs some for its own stuff and all memory mapped devices (that is, devices that use the same address space but the real data is on the device) also eat some of that address space.
[1] Nowadays. I guess somebody needs more RAM in the future but I've hard time to figure out why anybody would need that much for a desktop machine.
I consider Forrest Gump to be THE landmark movie in this area. It is FULL of "invisible effects"
I agree. Forrest Gump was the first movie with lots of CGI stuff that went unnoticed by most people.
My list would be like:
Terminator 2 (1991) - the first movie where the computer animation didn't look cheesy and still played a major part.
Jurassic Park (1993) - the first movie to have believable CGI characters. Jurassic Park was scheduled to be shot with animatronics only but some stuff was later remade with computers. Contrary to belief of many, the whole Jurassic Park movie had only a few minutes of CGI animation. However, nobody ever noticed the seams between animatronics and CGI.
Forrest Gump (1994) - the first movie that had lots of CGI shots without the audience acknowledging it.
Toy Story (1995) - the first full length fully CGI animated movie
Final Fantasy (2001) - the first movie that was fully CGI animated and still looked a little bit like the real stuff.
??????????? - the first movie that was fully CGI animated but the audience didn't acknowledge it unless pointed out.
It would be wise to mention that most (all?) new animations are done with computers. I don't know which was the first movie to use mostly computers to render the final picture instead of handpainting everything. It's also worth pointing out that latest consumer hardware could probably render Jurassic Park level graphics in real time. We still need some time before our games look like Jurassic Park because games don't have the luxury of hand tweaked animation for every single frame.
Now if I buy a game or something that I do not have the source for and it doesn't work what then? Companies will continue to distribute 32Bit applications, because they can support the most amount of platforms that way. As a result the 64 bit processor will just sit there doing 32bit operations.
Yes, not all applications are or will be 64 bit. You're practically guaranteed not to ever see 16 bit programs again because a 16 bit processor can address only 64 KB of memory without some hack like segmented memory. 32 bit processor can address 4 GB of memory and for many programs, that is more than is needed for the task even in theory. It simply doesn't make sense to use 64 bit programs for such applications unless those applications do some heavy integer math. The 64 bit accessing mode is for programs that require that much memory that 4GB simply isn't enough. Currently, it's only databases that require that much memory.
The future is different, though. I predict that within 5 years, some computer games require more than 4GB of memory to run effectively. In addition to that, multitasking is becoming more and more important and if we want to keep linear address space then we need more virtual memory. Even today, a single threaded program can exhaust the whole 4GB address space with thread stacks (every thread has 2MB of virtual address space for its stack by default; start 1000 threads and you just lost half of the usable addresses...). If that program needs to access some devices via mmap()ed memory, then the address space comes as a limitation again. Think about a web server that runs with 1000 threads and serves 3 GB worth of content: it cannot use mmap()ed access to those files in a 32 bit processor or at least it must close some files before opening the rest. Latest P4 or Athlon CPUs could probably do the require computing but 32 bit addressing isn't enough for the task.
In short, we need at least 64 bit CPU and OS. It could be even wiser to run mostly 32 bit applications on top of that to preserve some L1 instruction cache (64 bit instructions take more space), however. The whole point of using Opteron instead of some other 64 bit processor is that it doesn't take meaningful performance hit running legacy code (= 32 bit code compiled for older CPUs) and it can run those legacy apps native without some software emulation layer. If all you need is a 64 bit CPU, there're better choices.
We really need only 64 bit addressing space but if you do that right, you get a 64 bit CPU as a result.
unfortunately, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have decided that users can't turn off RPC's network functionality.
Actually, it's possible to close all ports in windows, but it's harder than it should be. Just close all those services that nobody needs and run dcomcnfg.exe and remove all remote DCOM/COM+/whatever support. If you know that you need those, you obviously shouldn't do this. But if you know that you need those protocols, you probably work for Microsoft anyway. Dinkumware's fport helps you to find out which programs keep all those ports open.
Yes, the default settings from redmond are brain-dead at best - what else is new?
I don't run a firewall on my windows workstation but on the other hand it doesn't have any ports open, other than those opened by Mozilla to browse the web and those opened by miranda. Having a firewall doesn't help with those ports. Obviously, running a firewall could help catching software that's trying to call home, but I don't run every random piece of software I can get my hands on. If somebody can still crash a windows that doesn't have a single port open, you're fucked anyway.
If I press the [cd-rom] eject button while in [common windowing environment] and the CD cannot be ejected because some file is in use, I really ought to get a popup window
That's a nice idea, until you remember that Linux is really a multi-user OS. Which desktop and which user should the message popup to? Usually a system has only one active X server, but it's the kernel that receives the "eject" signal. How it's supposed to know how to inform one non-root user about the fact? MS Windows seems to decide the desktop for all popup dialogs more or less on random. Try running Windows XP for instance, use switch user feature and see how some dialogs popup to the user that isn't the current one.
The best way would be to have one signal for "umount" which all processes with open files on device would get when the umount is about to happen. Default action would be same as with SIGHUP, but the process could close all files related to signal and keep on going. OTOH, if the process kept files open and ignored the signal then the umount would still fail and we still need
When you're being really productive towards the end of the day, stop before you're finished. Then you'll have something easy to start with at the beginning of the next day.
I think it's usually easier to code one block (a complex method, a class or something else) to finish if I have time. If you've trouble getting on the right track the next morning, I'd suggest code reviewing previous day's changes. Do a diff -u and think why you did write that code yesterday. If you cannot figure out, then there must be something wrong with the code. If it looks good, then by the time you get to the end of the diff your thoughts should be on the right track again. Of course, the project quality as a whole might benefit more if you reviewed code written by somebody else, but that somebody else probably has pretty different way to think about the problems to solve so it probably wouldn't help your thinking. If that somebody else is much better coder than you're, then by all means, read his code instead of yours - perhaps you learn something new during the process.
On the other hand, when my thoughts are lost, I usually read email, check/. and end up spending half a day looking through all linked the stuff from the discussions, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
Re:Just wait for the game with this feature...
on
Mutating Animations
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Download the E3 demo of Half-Life 2. In it there is a section where people are fighting alongside Gordon. This didn't look too spectacular until the presenter announced that these characters were NOT moving according to a script.
Call me a skeptic, but I don't swallow that immediately. When Black and White was still in production there was some press that stated that the game had such a great AI that if the developers dropped a ball to the citizens, they started to play soccer by their own, assisted by the AI only. Did anybody ever see anything even remotely near that level of intelligence in the final release?
Yes, that scene could really use AI to move all the characters but it remains to be seen if the scene is constructed specially so that AI can survive on its own or was the AI really intelligent? Don't expect too much. It's AI instead of I for a reason.
Re:Cool.. but my Xbox does that as well...
on
New Linux PVR Box
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· Score: 1
Does Linux have drivers for USB TV Tuners?
If you want any quality you can forget the USB thingies or at least low costs. Say we want to capture NTSC with full quality: the resolution is 640x480 and it takes about 2 bytes per pixel (YUV 4:2:0 color mode commonly used in DVDs). That's 640x480x2x30 bytes = ~18MB per second or 140Mbps. Unless the USB thingy compresses the incoming stream to MPEG2 by itself that isn't going to fly and having a good MPEG2 encoder in a USB device is going to be quite expensive or the resulting MPEG2 stream has highly probably poor quality.
Apple at least used to publish a set of UI Guidelines which talked about this issue.
And they used to follow such guidelines, too. However, as time has elapsed, Apple has decided not to follow their own guidelines (everybody has color monitors right now anyway, right?). See buttons in the corner of every window in MacOS X for an example. If you haven't seen MacOS X, the close (red?) and maximize (green?) buttons look just the same. Much have been said about QuickTime user interface, too.
Most recent graphics cards allow loading user defined gamma ramp. Does anybody know if colorblindness could be emulated with suitable gamma ramp only and perhaps even way to generate one? If the effect is created by hardware, every application could be easily tested and one could toggle the "colorblindness mode" on and off on the fly.
Colorblindess emulation modes that require cross-mixing color channels would require more than a simple gamma ramp modification AFAIK but if you're just interested if some colors are distinguishable, monocrome emulation should do just fine.
I should also note that a P4 would not perform as well in a dual system as the G5 does. So your 500 MFLOPS number is a little rediculous.
Yes, but P4 sucks in dual systems because its shared bus, not because the chip was bad. The test required very little memory: "The input data for this case consists of an 11 block structured grid with 164790 nodes and 80352 cells (requiring about 1MB of memory to run)." I'd guess that this benchmark isn't bandwidth limited so running dual P4 shouldn't be problem. However, they were testing MFLOPS/MHz instead of MFLOPS/system performance so SMP performance doesn't really matter. (Who tests anything/MHz with P4, anyway? The thing is designed to run at high frequency without doing much work.)
Bill Gates is 100,000 times better of a person than I am. He obviously deserves 100,000 times as much money.
Money != quality. And I think one should compare the earned amounts on logarithmic scale. Lets see, log_10(100000) = 5 so I guess BillG is 5 times better businessman than you're. Of course, if you select lower base for that logarithm, the multiplier gets larger but it should stay below 100 anyway.
The reason I believe a logarithmic scale should be used is that once you've X dollars, it much easier to invest that money to get X*2 dollars, after you invest that, you have (X*2)*2 dollars instead of (X*2)+X dollars, and so on and so on...
The only thing that I have to wonder is how come BillG only needs to invest on MSFT and it just happens to become largest corporation of all? Pure luck?
So, BillG gets 1.18 billion dollars in dividend - but what does that really mean? He's soon 50 years old and, lets face it, he'll probably live for another 30 years. If he didn't have any other money and he had to live with that money for the rest of his life you could spend only 107688 dollars per day ($1.18e9/30/365.25). I could live with that, but let's remember that that's only one diviend and not his whole wealth!
Certain items (such as light bulbs, and possibly fluorescent tubes) are actually damaged each time they are turned on, but aren't damaged while they are left on.
Yep, but they are still worn if left on. A standard light bulb has life time of about 6000 hours and say it takes one hour off the life time every time it's turned on. If the light is continuously off for at least 2 hours by average it's more economical to turn off the light - especially if replacing it is expensive. Having special electronics to run the bulb with lower current when the light isn't needed might make some sense as it should worn less as the temperature drops with the current. That is, if the light is needed for short periods of time pretty often. Such electronics would often cost more than changing the bulb, though.
[> if you use some b0rken software like Photoshop to produce those PNGs the resulting filesize will be larger than with GIF...] Even if you use the same quality (compression ratio)
Eh, compression ratio? PNG? GIF? Do you know what lossless format means?
Read the specs, PNG can store both 24bit RGB images, 32bit RGBA images and 8bit indexed palette images (and some other formats) but the format never[1] discards anything. GIF supports 8bit indexed palette (there're some hacks to get 16bit color IIRC...) and my point was that if you store the same image as GIF and 8bit indexed palette PNG, the PNG one will be smaller. That is, if the PNG isn't created with b0rken software like Photoshop which always generates bigger file for PNG. Try Gimp or pngcrush instead.
[1] JNG format uses lossy JPEG compression for animation but I don't think it's part of PNG format.
Slashdot Mirror
As I can see it, I return my paper to the prof and because I have the copyright to the paper, it cannot be stored by some for-profit-company unless I license it. Perhaps I should hand out my paper to the prof with a written license that he can use it as required for grading it but the paper may not be redistributed. If this web service doesn't allow comparing the paper without adding the content to their database, then the prof cannot use this service. If, on the other hand, the service allows checking papers without adding the content to the database, I can see absolutely no reason why the prof shouldn't be allowed to use the service if he feels that it's the most effective way to work. If the professor or the university pays the bill, of course.
If you start throwing out examples, it would be nice to check that those work. You've a mistake there as "width:100;" or "height:20;" mean nothing. You have to define the unit unless the value you're trying to set is zero. Yep, they work in MSIE, but when did that browser knew anything about the standards? The correct format is width: 100px and height: 20px .
After saying that, yes, for simple roll-overs and cascading menus, the CSS is much better choice than javascript. Javascript should be used when the functionality required is much more complex.
Plus, it can be really hard to fix the issue after you find the problem in the binary driver. Sometimes the new code doesn't fit the existing space (fixed binary code requires more bytes than the original) and extra code is required to jump to another location to execute all the code then then jump back to continue original code. If the problem was in performance critical location this isn't an option and it might be that the problem is practically impossible to fix without the source. Sure, you can more and more code but where's the point? To help the vendor that's not willing to co-operate to make more money? For free? Why??
Some things that you can do aren't worth doing.
If the vendor is selling hardware, they have nothing to lose if they release the source code for the drivers. However, if they are selling software combined with some hardware parts, like some winmodem, they are clearly parasitic; they want to use free code (linux) to help selling their proprietary software product (codec for their modem) and they do that by linking those pieces of software together. The 'hardware' is just the required dongle to make the software to work.
The border area is definately grey.
And I think that having no driver at all is better than having a binary driver. Yes, it sucks if you've already bought the piece of hardware and cannot make it work but how's that different from not being able to use Commadore C64 diskette drive with your PC? Or if the piece of hardware had "Designed for Windows XP" logo on it, why do you think it would work with anything else - like Linux, for example? How about if it had "Designed for Mac" logo? If it doesn't say it works with Linux, don't buy that piece of crap. If we allow binary drivers, the box can say that the hardware "Works with Linux" when they really mean "Works with RedHat(r) Linux Desktop(tm) 10.5 on AMD(r) Opteron(r)" because that's the only environment/CPU they decided to compile the driver for.
In the end, if the only way to have Linux driver is to open source the driver, a vendor is either going to release the source or lose all the customers using Linux. It seems pretty clear to me that Linux is going to get big enough in any case so the difference in potential customer base is going to force the hardware vendors to release the source. It might be that Linux could get bigger faster if we allow binary drivers now and disallow those later, but I think it's cheating and against the spirit of open source movement and free software.
Try that sometimes. The important thing to notice is that not everybody overtakes you, not everybody changes lanes every time it's possible. It's all those other nicely behaving people that allow one to keep space by keeping the stupid people in the traffic behind you, running smoothly instead of constant accelerating and breaking. Notice that the target isn't to grow the spece ad infinium but to create fixed size, large space. Once you have the space, you just keep going and you allow the space to shrink some if the car in front of you temporarily slows down.
If everybody kept adequate space then everything would be fine and there wouldn't be any grindlock jams. The thing is, there're way too many dumb people who think that the jam disappears faster if they drive closer to the guy in front of them. Well, it doesn't. So, to fix the issue, some people have to keep HUGE space in front of them to make average space adequate. Otherwise, nobody can change lanes to hit their exits and some stupid fuck thinks he's missing the exit, hits the breaks, stops the whole lane and tries to cut in into other lane to get to his exit. He doesn't care if the stops two or four lanes to do it. Were there huge space in the traffic, he could go over the lane without stopping the traffic on the very same lane.
Pretty much any on-board sound system can output PCM via SPDIF. Do you think that the PCM output from el cheapo on-board sound chipset is somehow different from the same signal outputted via the most expensive external system?
I don't have enough money to buy amplifier that has multichannel PCM input so I'll rather take a board based on nForce2 (x86) that has Dolby Digital multichannel output via SPDIF. Yeah, the signal is compressed but I consider DD signal better than any analog audio path.
If you're one with the golden ears and you think you can hear the difference between DD and PCM audio, I feel sorry for you.
I live in Finland and my cell phone had visible antenna about 3 years ago and I haven't missed it once since then. I'd have already bought one of these new PDA+cell phone combos if only one decent device came without external antenna. Internal antenna works just fine in much smaller devices so PDA sized device should work at least equally fine without huge antenna on top. So why the antenna? Do some people still think it cannot work if it doesn't have huge antenna? That antenna is a little too small to play the part of fallos symbol either ;-)
It's about the last season. You were late for almost a year from the training camp. I think it's understandable that they didn't want to see you anymore. You know, those teams require strict discipline.
No thanks. The packaging already says M(ature) and Grand Theft Auto - how much more clues you need that the actions shouldn't be followed? What's next? "THIS IS NOT REAL. DO NOT EAT ALL PILLS THAT YOU FIND IN REAL LIFE. DO YOURSELF A FAVOR: KEEP IT IN THE GAME" in the Pac-Man startup screen?
I think you missed the point. If you're the programmer of the system and you cannot see the difference between images of three people, how on the earth are you going to come up with an algorithm for the computer to do the thing instead? You can try something like neural networks but unless you understand what to look for, the changes are pretty slim that the system works at acceptable quality. I consider programming as writing formal instructions to do something - how do you teach something you've no faintest idea about?
Where's the research results for this area? I guess inputting different measurements of the face for many enough test subjects, vectorizing the data set and throwing off the axles that contain very little information could provide some generic information what to look for.
I can't believe nobody (or at least no high-scored-post) has yet mentioned that Scott Adams has written many books about this. All the books are full of real life examples of stupid boss behaviour but some of the content is disguised as humorous instead of being documentation for real life. Don't fall into that pit! Scott Adams has even a web site dedicated for idiot boss and cow-orkers. You might want to become a member of DNRC, too.
AFAIK, that 40-48 bit addressing (depending on architecture) is a limitation of the memory bus. However, the whole 64 bit addressing space can be used for virtual memory. As a result the whole 64 bit address space cannot point to real memory, but who needs 2^64 bytes of RAM anyway[1]? Some x86 motherboards support 4GB of memory but one cannot use that effectively because the whole addressing space is also 4GB and the OS needs some for its own stuff and all memory mapped devices (that is, devices that use the same address space but the real data is on the device) also eat some of that address space.
[1] Nowadays. I guess somebody needs more RAM in the future but I've hard time to figure out why anybody would need that much for a desktop machine.
I agree. Forrest Gump was the first movie with lots of CGI stuff that went unnoticed by most people.
My list would be like:
It would be wise to mention that most (all?) new animations are done with computers. I don't know which was the first movie to use mostly computers to render the final picture instead of handpainting everything. It's also worth pointing out that latest consumer hardware could probably render Jurassic Park level graphics in real time. We still need some time before our games look like Jurassic Park because games don't have the luxury of hand tweaked animation for every single frame.
Yes, not all applications are or will be 64 bit. You're practically guaranteed not to ever see 16 bit programs again because a 16 bit processor can address only 64 KB of memory without some hack like segmented memory. 32 bit processor can address 4 GB of memory and for many programs, that is more than is needed for the task even in theory. It simply doesn't make sense to use 64 bit programs for such applications unless those applications do some heavy integer math. The 64 bit accessing mode is for programs that require that much memory that 4GB simply isn't enough. Currently, it's only databases that require that much memory.
The future is different, though. I predict that within 5 years, some computer games require more than 4GB of memory to run effectively. In addition to that, multitasking is becoming more and more important and if we want to keep linear address space then we need more virtual memory. Even today, a single threaded program can exhaust the whole 4GB address space with thread stacks (every thread has 2MB of virtual address space for its stack by default; start 1000 threads and you just lost half of the usable addresses...). If that program needs to access some devices via mmap()ed memory, then the address space comes as a limitation again. Think about a web server that runs with 1000 threads and serves 3 GB worth of content: it cannot use mmap()ed access to those files in a 32 bit processor or at least it must close some files before opening the rest. Latest P4 or Athlon CPUs could probably do the require computing but 32 bit addressing isn't enough for the task.
In short, we need at least 64 bit CPU and OS. It could be even wiser to run mostly 32 bit applications on top of that to preserve some L1 instruction cache (64 bit instructions take more space), however. The whole point of using Opteron instead of some other 64 bit processor is that it doesn't take meaningful performance hit running legacy code (= 32 bit code compiled for older CPUs) and it can run those legacy apps native without some software emulation layer. If all you need is a 64 bit CPU, there're better choices.
We really need only 64 bit addressing space but if you do that right, you get a 64 bit CPU as a result.
Actually, it's possible to close all ports in windows, but it's harder than it should be. Just close all those services that nobody needs and run dcomcnfg.exe and remove all remote DCOM/COM+/whatever support. If you know that you need those, you obviously shouldn't do this. But if you know that you need those protocols, you probably work for Microsoft anyway. Dinkumware's fport helps you to find out which programs keep all those ports open.
Yes, the default settings from redmond are brain-dead at best - what else is new?
I don't run a firewall on my windows workstation but on the other hand it doesn't have any ports open, other than those opened by Mozilla to browse the web and those opened by miranda. Having a firewall doesn't help with those ports. Obviously, running a firewall could help catching software that's trying to call home, but I don't run every random piece of software I can get my hands on. If somebody can still crash a windows that doesn't have a single port open, you're fucked anyway.
That's a nice idea, until you remember that Linux is really a multi-user OS. Which desktop and which user should the message popup to? Usually a system has only one active X server, but it's the kernel that receives the "eject" signal. How it's supposed to know how to inform one non-root user about the fact? MS Windows seems to decide the desktop for all popup dialogs more or less on random. Try running Windows XP for instance, use switch user feature and see how some dialogs popup to the user that isn't the current one.
The best way would be to have one signal for "umount" which all processes with open files on device would get when the umount is about to happen. Default action would be same as with SIGHUP, but the process could close all files related to signal and keep on going. OTOH, if the process kept files open and ignored the signal then the umount would still fail and we still need
I think it's usually easier to code one block (a complex method, a class or something else) to finish if I have time. If you've trouble getting on the right track the next morning, I'd suggest code reviewing previous day's changes. Do a diff -u and think why you did write that code yesterday. If you cannot figure out, then there must be something wrong with the code. If it looks good, then by the time you get to the end of the diff your thoughts should be on the right track again. Of course, the project quality as a whole might benefit more if you reviewed code written by somebody else, but that somebody else probably has pretty different way to think about the problems to solve so it probably wouldn't help your thinking. If that somebody else is much better coder than you're, then by all means, read his code instead of yours - perhaps you learn something new during the process.
On the other hand, when my thoughts are lost, I usually read email, check /. and end up spending half a day looking through all linked the stuff from the discussions, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
Call me a skeptic, but I don't swallow that immediately. When Black and White was still in production there was some press that stated that the game had such a great AI that if the developers dropped a ball to the citizens, they started to play soccer by their own, assisted by the AI only. Did anybody ever see anything even remotely near that level of intelligence in the final release?
Yes, that scene could really use AI to move all the characters but it remains to be seen if the scene is constructed specially so that AI can survive on its own or was the AI really intelligent? Don't expect too much. It's AI instead of I for a reason.
If you want any quality you can forget the USB thingies or at least low costs. Say we want to capture NTSC with full quality: the resolution is 640x480 and it takes about 2 bytes per pixel (YUV 4:2:0 color mode commonly used in DVDs). That's 640x480x2x30 bytes = ~18MB per second or 140Mbps. Unless the USB thingy compresses the incoming stream to MPEG2 by itself that isn't going to fly and having a good MPEG2 encoder in a USB device is going to be quite expensive or the resulting MPEG2 stream has highly probably poor quality.
And they used to follow such guidelines, too. However, as time has elapsed, Apple has decided not to follow their own guidelines (everybody has color monitors right now anyway, right?). See buttons in the corner of every window in MacOS X for an example. If you haven't seen MacOS X, the close (red?) and maximize (green?) buttons look just the same. Much have been said about QuickTime user interface, too.
Colorblindess emulation modes that require cross-mixing color channels would require more than a simple gamma ramp modification AFAIK but if you're just interested if some colors are distinguishable, monocrome emulation should do just fine.
Yes, but P4 sucks in dual systems because its shared bus, not because the chip was bad. The test required very little memory: "The input data for this case consists of an 11 block structured grid with 164790 nodes and 80352 cells (requiring about 1MB of memory to run)." I'd guess that this benchmark isn't bandwidth limited so running dual P4 shouldn't be problem. However, they were testing MFLOPS/MHz instead of MFLOPS/system performance so SMP performance doesn't really matter. (Who tests anything/MHz with P4, anyway? The thing is designed to run at high frequency without doing much work.)
Money != quality. And I think one should compare the earned amounts on logarithmic scale. Lets see, log_10(100000) = 5 so I guess BillG is 5 times better businessman than you're. Of course, if you select lower base for that logarithm, the multiplier gets larger but it should stay below 100 anyway.
The reason I believe a logarithmic scale should be used is that once you've X dollars, it much easier to invest that money to get X*2 dollars, after you invest that, you have (X*2)*2 dollars instead of (X*2)+X dollars, and so on and so on...
The only thing that I have to wonder is how come BillG only needs to invest on MSFT and it just happens to become largest corporation of all? Pure luck?
So, BillG gets 1.18 billion dollars in dividend - but what does that really mean? He's soon 50 years old and, lets face it, he'll probably live for another 30 years. If he didn't have any other money and he had to live with that money for the rest of his life you could spend only 107688 dollars per day ($1.18e9/30/365.25). I could live with that, but let's remember that that's only one diviend and not his whole wealth!
Yep, but they are still worn if left on. A standard light bulb has life time of about 6000 hours and say it takes one hour off the life time every time it's turned on. If the light is continuously off for at least 2 hours by average it's more economical to turn off the light - especially if replacing it is expensive. Having special electronics to run the bulb with lower current when the light isn't needed might make some sense as it should worn less as the temperature drops with the current. That is, if the light is needed for short periods of time pretty often. Such electronics would often cost more than changing the bulb, though.
Eh, compression ratio? PNG? GIF? Do you know what lossless format means?
Read the specs, PNG can store both 24bit RGB images, 32bit RGBA images and 8bit indexed palette images (and some other formats) but the format never[1] discards anything. GIF supports 8bit indexed palette (there're some hacks to get 16bit color IIRC...) and my point was that if you store the same image as GIF and 8bit indexed palette PNG, the PNG one will be smaller. That is, if the PNG isn't created with b0rken software like Photoshop which always generates bigger file for PNG. Try Gimp or pngcrush instead.
[1] JNG format uses lossy JPEG compression for animation but I don't think it's part of PNG format.