Isn't the idea of a prison to restrict people's freedom? If being locked up in a prison would amount to getting fed at regular intervals an playing CounterStrike all day long, quite a lot of people would actually WANT to get imprisoned.
To get smooth real-time graphics, you always use 100% cpu. As soon as you're done with one frame, you start producing the next one. At textmode resolutions you might end up producing the exact same picture a few times though. And besides all that, making text show up on your screen also takes some time.
Why don't they just use some (public key?) challenge/response type authentication with the cards, at the range that these badges are supposed to work at, there shouldn't be a real problem with getting enough power for such a system.
Not until they put readers on every street corner. If you have an RFID tag implanted, and every item has one in it, they can track where you're going, and what items you carry with you. This would be wonderful for security purposes, but may 'slightly limit' your privacy.
I don't have any long term experience with these TVs, but a relative of mine works at Philips making the software that controls these TVs. He told me that the software has to start adjusting the color intensities after 300 hours of operation already to keep it bright. The effect is that dark parts of the screen will gradually become brighter. If the software would not adjust the screen would turn darker over time. 300 hours is just 12 and a half day of continuous operation. Of course the difference after those 300 hours is not yet noticeable but it makes me wonder what such a screen would look like after 2-3 years.
I've been playing with one of those TVs for a weekend. The digital natural motion makes movies look like a cheap soap opera, news broadcast, or, indeed, 'making of' footage. And you can actually see that the explosions are just special effects. I tried watching Saving Private Ryan with DNM turned on, but I quickly turned it off. I suppose the real problem is that all the special effects in films were never meant to be watched in such smooth motion, and they only look convincing at the original framerate. Remember that there is quite a bit of processing between the original footage and the final movie, and it's there to make sure the movie looks good. If you then add things like DNM on top of that, you break all that. The right way to make movies look good at high framerates is to shoot the movie at the higher framerate first, and do all the processing to make sure it looks good at that framerate.
Just search google for i2o split driver model. I'm not sure what ever happened to it, but the idea was to split the driver into two parts. One was a device specific OS independent driver which resided on the device (which had a processor on it), and the other part was an OS specific driver for a particular class of device, which would then work with all devices of this class. (One driver for all disk controllers, etc)
Besides, doesn't USB do something similar too? Quite a lot of devices work just fine with the standard driver for their device class. Think input devices, storage, etc.
RISCs have several advantages, but the biggest (IMHO) is the simplicity: no akward rules (non-GP registers), no special case instructions, easy to pipeline, easy to understand and easy to optimize code for (since the instruction set is smaller).
Not entirely true. RISC instruction sets can be quite huge too. And the whole idea of RISC is to take the complexity out of the hardware and put it into the compiler instead. It is easier to optimize for x86 than RISC.
I drink Diet Coke not because I care about the calories, but because it doesn't leave a sticky layer in your mouth after drinking like regular sodas do. Oh and the stains it leaves when you spill it (say, over your keyboard) aren't sticky.
Italy is quite amazing in that when ruins are found, they are generally left untouched. Rome is a great example of this in that there are vast ruins right in the downtown areas!!
They dug those up under Mussolini's rule, and destroyed quite a few Renaissance-era buildings for it. It's not like they just accidentally stumbled upon them.
They should give the thing electric engines. They should cover the top half with solar cells, add something to store the engergy in (the fuel cells they are going to put on helios), and a small diesel generator in case all of that is not enough. Then it would be much more NT than it is now.
Re:Star Trek similarities unsurprising.
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 1
(In case there are a few people that don't realize it, Gene Roddenberry is the creator of Star Trek. Majel is his widow, the voice of most computers and Deanna Troi's mother.)
It looks just fine on my screen, then again, it is a diamondtron tube (kind of like trinitron) which has the same grid-like RGB pixel layout LCD screens have.
On a related note: No non-volatile memory will not help you computer boot faster. Why do you reboot your computer? Because 1) something is messed up and you need to reload the contents of your RAM to fix the problem or 2) because a configuration change was made, and the reload is needed.
3) You want to get some sleep and the thing is making noise!
About 90% of the time when I boot up it is because the computer was off, not because I rebooted it. If instead I could just hibernate it, that would save me a lot of time.
I think quite often people just leave their computer on all the time because it takes so much time for the thing to boot up again... With MRAM and an appropriate BIOS + OS support, by the time the monitor would finally be fully awake, the system would be up and running.
It will however offer a lower power sleep mode.
Actually it will power off completely. Imagine the improvement on notebook battery life if you could just completely turn it of if you wouldn't need it for just a few minutes, without having to wait for ages till it booted up again. (Even save to/restore from disk takes some time)
Well.... When you boot up, your computer starts up from ROM, reads some stuff from disk into memory, runs that etc. So it doesn't really matter what was left in the ram from the previous session, it gets overwritten. And viruses rather infect stuff on your harddrive anyway. Why bother with the memory?
Actually, now that I think of it, if you can count on the ram contents being unchanged after a power cycle, you could just more or less continue where you left off when you turned off the computer. Sort of like normal hibernation, except way faster, because you don't have to save to/restore from disk. Boot up in like a second!
Scientific American had an article about MRAM a while ago. You appear to be confusing two things.. RDRAM and DDR DRAM are about the way the ram communicates with the rest of the computer, while magnetic ram is a different storage technology on the memory chips themselves, like SRAM, and thus could be used instead of DRAM on both Rambus and regular DDR memory modules.
You know what's kind of silly? There is a special AGP bus for video cards which goes (n) X (the normal speed of the bus), and must transfer all kinds of data back and forth. Why can't Intel or VIA or someone come up with a special bus that connects the AGP bus with the RAM. That way, you could buy a video card with just some ROM, and no RAM, and the video card could use as much of the system memory as you needed. You could have 64MB of RAM now, and when your games run slow, upgrade to 256MB and everything will run faster. You could even have the AGP->RAM bus work for only one or two RAM slots, because I can imagine how out-of-sync ISA and PCI cards could get running at AGP speeds.
Isn't that actually exactly what the AGP bus is? To use main system ram as texture memory? Of course, you would still need some ram for the frame buffer. However, main system ram is slower than typical ram found on video cards, which is why they just stick a load of ram on the card instead of using main system ram.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the idea of a prison to restrict people's freedom? If being locked up in a prison would amount to getting fed at regular intervals an playing CounterStrike all day long, quite a lot of people would actually WANT to get imprisoned.
To get smooth real-time graphics, you always use 100% cpu. As soon as you're done with one frame, you start producing the next one. At textmode resolutions you might end up producing the exact same picture a few times though. And besides all that, making text show up on your screen also takes some time.
Why don't they just use some (public key?) challenge/response type authentication with the cards, at the range that these badges are supposed to work at, there shouldn't be a real problem with getting enough power for such a system.
Not until they put readers on every street corner. If you have an RFID tag implanted, and every item has one in it, they can track where you're going, and what items you carry with you. This would be wonderful for security purposes, but may 'slightly limit' your privacy.
I don't have any long term experience with these TVs, but a relative of mine works at Philips making the software that controls these TVs. He told me that the software has to start adjusting the color intensities after 300 hours of operation already to keep it bright. The effect is that dark parts of the screen will gradually become brighter. If the software would not adjust the screen would turn darker over time. 300 hours is just 12 and a half day of continuous operation. Of course the difference after those 300 hours is not yet noticeable but it makes me wonder what such a screen would look like after 2-3 years.
I've been playing with one of those TVs for a weekend. The digital natural motion makes movies look like a cheap soap opera, news broadcast, or, indeed, 'making of' footage. And you can actually see that the explosions are just special effects. I tried watching Saving Private Ryan with DNM turned on, but I quickly turned it off. I suppose the real problem is that all the special effects in films were never meant to be watched in such smooth motion, and they only look convincing at the original framerate. Remember that there is quite a bit of processing between the original footage and the final movie, and it's there to make sure the movie looks good. If you then add things like DNM on top of that, you break all that. The right way to make movies look good at high framerates is to shoot the movie at the higher framerate first, and do all the processing to make sure it looks good at that framerate.
Just search google for i2o split driver model. I'm not sure what ever happened to it, but the idea was to split the driver into two parts. One was a device specific OS independent driver which resided on the device (which had a processor on it), and the other part was an OS specific driver for a particular class of device, which would then work with all devices of this class. (One driver for all disk controllers, etc)
Besides, doesn't USB do something similar too? Quite a lot of devices work just fine with the standard driver for their device class. Think input devices, storage, etc.
I drink Diet Coke not because I care about the calories, but because it doesn't leave a sticky layer in your mouth after drinking like regular sodas do. Oh and the stains it leaves when you spill it (say, over your keyboard) aren't sticky.
Yes, and now the aliens figured out we are making a big mess out of their future colony and are coming here to get rid of us?
They wouldn't release a cure for cancer as long as they make more money off someone who still has the disease.
Philips already makes DVD recorders. I suppose that answers your question?
They dug those up under Mussolini's rule, and destroyed quite a few Renaissance-era buildings for it. It's not like they just accidentally stumbled upon them.
They should give the thing electric engines. They should cover the top half with solar cells, add something to store the engergy in (the fuel cells they are going to put on helios), and a small diesel generator in case all of that is not enough. Then it would be much more NT than it is now.
It looks just fine on my screen, then again, it is a diamondtron tube (kind of like trinitron) which has the same grid-like RGB pixel layout LCD screens have.
I heard a quote (I think on CBS) along the lines of "as tight as a too small bikini on a too long ride home from the beach"
Try reading the article....
it's flat allright
3) You want to get some sleep and the thing is making noise!
About 90% of the time when I boot up it is because the computer was off, not because I rebooted it. If instead I could just hibernate it, that would save me a lot of time.
I think quite often people just leave their computer on all the time because it takes so much time for the thing to boot up again... With MRAM and an appropriate BIOS + OS support, by the time the monitor would finally be fully awake, the system would be up and running.
Actually it will power off completely. Imagine the improvement on notebook battery life if you could just completely turn it of if you wouldn't need it for just a few minutes, without having to wait for ages till it booted up again. (Even save to/restore from disk takes some time)
Well.... When you boot up, your computer starts up from ROM, reads some stuff from disk into memory, runs that etc. So it doesn't really matter what was left in the ram from the previous session, it gets overwritten. And viruses rather infect stuff on your harddrive anyway. Why bother with the memory?
Actually, now that I think of it, if you can count on the ram contents being unchanged after a power cycle, you could just more or less continue where you left off when you turned off the computer. Sort of like normal hibernation, except way faster, because you don't have to save to/restore from disk. Boot up in like a second!
Scientific American had an article about MRAM a while ago. You appear to be confusing two things.. RDRAM and DDR DRAM are about the way the ram communicates with the rest of the computer, while magnetic ram is a different storage technology on the memory chips themselves, like SRAM, and thus could be used instead of DRAM on both Rambus and regular DDR memory modules.
> With napster, the tail of the music is always cut off.
That bug was fixed ages ago
RPM in car engines doesn't say that much to most people either, I'm afraid..