The name of the contributor of the original article? Damian Whitworth. That's right. DAMIAN. *Now* I've got the heebie-jeebies...
So fscking what? My name is Damian Yerrick. Lingua::Romana::Perligata was invented by another Damian. Don't let bad dreams from watching the "Cartman's birthday" episode of South Park influence how you perceive a name, and don't let a name affect how you perceive a person.
In terms of puffs and gives
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 1
In an assembly line, say there are 21 screws to put in. If each step has one person inserting 3 screws, it will take 7 steps to do it. Now if each step has one person inserting one screw, it will take 21 steps, but each step can go three times as fast.
And you lose time while the work is moving to the next person.
In the first case you would have 7 people, in the second case you would have 21 people (stages), but you could do three times as much work per unit time.
Not necessarily. Call each insertion of a screw (or each layer of logic) a "puff" and moving the work to the next worker (or setup and hold for flops between pipeline stages) a "give." If a give takes a significant amount of time, fewer puffs per give can actually bog down performance. No matter how long a puff takes, the slowest worker's puff-puff-give time (or "critical path") always determines the clock frequency of the processor.
Treat r0 more like /dev/zero
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 1
Why, except perhaps that it seems a bit like wasted effort to check for accesses.
It's only a few gates, and it can help spot bugs earlier.
Why would you want a/dev/null in asm?
Not/dev/null but/dev/zero. For example, MIPS doesn't have "load immediate" but does have a 3-way "or immediate", ori r16, r0, 3, which loads register r16 with 3 ORed with the value in r0. It also removes the need for a 'negate' instruction, as sub r16, r0, r16 will negate r16.
Searching Google for 2006 hdtv analog shows that the United States Federal Communications Commission will pull all licenses for analog television broadcast spectrum on January 1, 2006. The new system includes copy protection methods that may let networks specify that "you may not record any part of this program, not even brief fair use excerpts," "you may not watch this program on brand X of television," "your television will not be allowed to change channels for X seconds after the beginning of the commercial break", "you may not watch this program on televisions larger than X cm diagonal, as large TVs are assumed to be used in public performance settings," etc. It's up to you to decide whether this policy represents backward or forward thinking. If you don't like it, ask your congresscritters to repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Apple's got something called the "Key Ring", which keeps all of your passwords in a strongly-encrypted file, on your OWN machine.
Which doesn't work if you happen to use anybody else's machine unless you carry your keyring on a business card CD-R. It's also proprietary, so it won't work on Windows, BSD, etc. There should be some way to store and transport the keyring securely across a public network and some standard for the format of the keyring.
use the same username/password for each account (even worse)
If you make your password hard enough to guess (my password relates to the obscure subj(Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.)), how is a cr4ck3r supposed to break into even one of your accounts?
my MS "Passport" could be a physical smartcard that held authentication data, encryption keys...hell, anything.
And it would get stolen like a paper passport. And the RIAA would require it to be swiped to play a song.
each copy of XP (and each bundled OEM copy) would include a small USB device that could read this card
Which would jack the price up by $100 after retail markup and help consumers realize that XP isn't really worth it, something that Microsoft doesn't want to happen.
Email addresses are available by the thousand from hotmail.com or usa.com or whatever. You only have on passport account.
The fact that a Passport account comes free with every Hotmail account changes the equation: "Microsoft Passport accounts are available by the thousand from hotmail.com or whatever. You only have one passport account" only because you signed up for just one.
When the width of a stroke is around a single pixel, a grey pixel stands out in a big way
That's partially because of a nonlinearity between the number of electrons shot at a phosphor and the luminous intensity. A gray pixel needs to be at 50% luminous intensity, or it'll stand out as you mentioned. To correct for this, video hardware and software raise every displayed pixel to the power of gamma. For most displays, gamma correction of 0.45 or so produces a response that's nice and linear, and you can use traditional time-domain convolution to low-pass filter the text bitmap and remove the spatial frequency aliasing.
a non-anti-aliased, hand-hinted font is much cleaner.
A non-anti-aliased, hand-hinted font is also patented.
but when we get 300 dpi screens
The future is now. Color LCD screens have always been about 300 x 100 dpi; recent versions of Microsoft GDI used in Windows CE and XP can tap into the individual red, green, and blue pixels for even cleaner text.
I game just fine on 2000 professional... Ive run programs that were compiled 10 years ago for a very old dos
Then how do you play closed-source games originally designed for MS-DOS? Windows 2000 Professional is known to have some serious issues with respect to support for DPMI services, sound, and mouse and joystick input, and Microsoft has repeatedly stated that "these bugs are marked WONTFIX; if you want games, wait a couple months and buy an Xbox console and a Microsoft TV Tuner card."
Or do you just dual-boot into DOS and lose all access to NTFS?
I wouldnt know of any other commerical OS that would let you hotswap processors or anything
Several commercial UNIX systems let admins disable processors, exchange them, and enable the new processor. But you shouldn't have to reboot to install a device that connects to the back of the computer, especially a 1394 or USB device.
Find someone who will fight for them pro-bono (as they have a strong case)
There has to be a better term than "pro bono," as the term "pro bono" brings to mind the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which set a precedent to put everything first published in the U.S. on or after January 1, 1923, under perpetual copyright because Di$neyCo can just lobby for another across-the-board term extension act every 20 years.
The DMCA is an american issue. What if the format is hacked outside america and this hack can be downloaded ?
Then the developers of the software will be trapped in their home countries, unable to fly over the airspace of countries who have allied with the United States. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.
Did you say tables? Do you have the slightnest notion how hard it is to implement table support for one format?
Mozilla, Konqueror, etc. handle HTML tables just fine. Just get Office to export legacy documents in conforming XHTML, provide an XHTML input filter, and you'll be fine.
Off-topic: My original subject was "<table>...</table>" but Slashcode escapes & into & and produces "<table>...</table>". However, when I just type <table>...</table>, Slashcode just strips the HTML. There seems to be NO way to get a < sign into a subject.
haven't all versions of Office since 2000 used an XML derivative for file storage?
Office 2000 uses Office 97 formats. Office XP, on the other hand, may use XML, but this doesn't imply that Microsoft will publish a schema, DTD, or other documentation. For example, <uudata>(2000 lines of uuencoded data)</uudata> is XML (save administrivia such as a DOCTYPE), but if you don't have enough information to decode the contents of an entity into something readable, it's still useless.
RTF doesn't support tables, embedded objects, headers/footers, TOC, index, etc
Blue Neon Head brings up a good point: HTML with CSS does support about everything you mentioned and adds hyperlinks, which a print-medium user agent can translate into footnotes, endnotes, or (as Slashdot is starting to do) parenthetical citations.
Social engineering viruses such as ILOVEYOU and SirCam result from the difficulty of telling an executable file from a document (as most users don't know what vbs, com, pif, and lnk are), which is a bug in Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Mail, and most other popular mail clients for Windows. UNIX solves this problem rather easily by including a bit or three for 'x' permissions.
The fact that virus-spreading daemons can run undetected by the average user is a bug in the design of Windows's task manager.
In general, the lack of filesystem access restrictions, which implies that code executed as a user can fill or reformat the C:\ filesystem, is a bug in Windows 9x's design.
It would be nice to have different ranges too- maybe 64K to demo the song
Reminds me of MP3.com's 32 kbps lo-fi stream and 128 kbps download.
and 320K if you actually want it.
You don't really need 320 kbps for CD quality. Recent versions of LAME have a --r3mix switch that allows CD quality (i.e. transparent reproduction of 0-20 kHz stereo audio) at an average rate of 180 to 200 kbps; read the "quality" section of r3mix.net for details.
It works on printers because the physical resolution is high enough that your eye can't pick out the pixels. But monitors do, what, roughly 75dpi?
You're probably used to the blocky "nearest neighbor" form of upsampling that's common in 3D APIs' software mode but carries 6 dB/octave of aliasing into the high frequencies, causing your eyes' high-pass filters to report spurious edges at pixel boundaries. Proper linear upsampling will use bilinear interpolation (aliasing falls off at 12 dB/octave) or cubic spline interpolation (18 dB/octave).
Now, with true type or vector fonts, or something along those lines, text would look OK. Line drawn and filled components would look fine of course. But say goodbye to any bitmapped graphics looking good - icons, etc.
Who says that icons can't be "line drawn and filled" vector graphics? Besides, there are techniques to scale images while adding fake detail, such as nonlinear interpolation and fractal methods.
Not really true. I want "File" to ALWAYS have the same minimum components every time no matter what app it is: open, close, new, etc. There is no valid reason to dick with this. As much as possible, interfaces SHOULD be consistent to MINIMIZE the learning curve.
I agree that some standards are good. However, your widget set has to build in customizability. Some users like the menus at the top of the screen (Mac), at the top of a window (Windows, OS/2), or at the bottom of a window (Newton). Apps should see "this function creates a Menu Bar Or Tool Bar" in the API and leave the physical appearance of the menu bar to the widget set's theme engine. Same with pop-up menus: some users like ring-shaped popups; others like rectangular ones. Some users like their large virtual desktop to be four screens wide with wraparound and one screen tall, while others prefer two screens by two screens with no wrapping.
The point is that the UI should present the application with a set of abstract widgets (menu, window, etc.) and leave their presentation up to the theme, a strategh which in theory would also allow for specialized themes that work with alternative input and output devices for those with disabilities. Does this remind you any of W3C's goals in separating presentation from structure by deprecating HTML's physical markup in favor of CSS?
>> clicking the 'close' button on some program closes them, but clicking the 'close' button on others (like a web browser) just minimizes it?
Eh? On my Mac, the "close" button always closes, web browser or not. I think you're just hitting the wrong button and blaming it on the OS.
I think A.C. was referring to the fact that some Macintosh apps use only one window and die when you close them, whereas others can exist in a state with no documents open, but the application is still in memory, ready at a moment's notice.
For the record, I wrote To: webmaster@osr.com,sales@osr.com and asked for the price of the OSR FSDK. The "before you contact us" page said something to the effect: "If you're not using IE 5.x, we don't want to hear your bitching about how it looks bad in Opera or Konqueror, as all of our target audience (Windows developers with eyesight) can use IE 5.x." I asked "I am using IE 5.5 on Windows ME, but I can't find the price."
I got a reply from sales: "Your browser isn't broken. We weren't displaying the $100,000 price of the package." I guess not putting the price on the web page was their way of saying "if you have to ask, you can't afford it."
Secondly, the idea of running EVERYTHING through OpenGL is particularly bothering. Most video hardware has some very specific optimisations for 2D work and by going through a specific 3D interface you are tossing all those performance advantages out the window.
As Yokaze mentioned, a rectangular window is two triangles. Two. The fact that DirectX 8's 2D API is simply Direct3D 8 with orthographic projection shows that Microsoft has begun to understand this, as Shelrem mentioned. Besides, "OpenGL" != "3D"; OpenGL is just a Graphics Language with an Open specification.
The only difference between rotation and scaling of textures in 2D and in 3D is that in 3D perspective projection, there's a divide by z every few pixels to fixup textures if the plane isn't parallel to the x axis. In 3D parallel projection (of which 2D is a special case), or in 3D perspective with the triangle's plane parallel to the x axis (reminiscent of Super NES Mode 7), it's just an affine transformation (two adds per pixel), that is, unless you count elliptical filtering.
Most people have a hard enough time keeping a 2D desktop organised that they'd hardly want things at arbitrary 3D angles!!
You'd be surprised what you can do with the middle mouse button mapped to toggle between the x-y and x-z plane, especially if you map the mouse's x-axis to theta and rotate the view. With the typical 90 degree field-of-view of most FPS game engines, you already have four desktops.
Who needs a debian system for money when you can get it form your local mirror ?
What if you're in an area where dial-up is billed at a penny a minute (such as Europe), and nobody offers DSL or cable? Then a mirror isn't "local" unless it's on your LAN. So how do you get a mirror onto your LAN when nobody you know has the CD set? Buy a distro.
Slashdot Mirror
The name of the contributor of the original article? Damian Whitworth. That's right. DAMIAN. *Now* I've got the heebie-jeebies...
So fscking what? My name is Damian Yerrick. Lingua::Romana::Perligata was invented by another Damian. Don't let bad dreams from watching the "Cartman's birthday" episode of South Park influence how you perceive a name, and don't let a name affect how you perceive a person.
In an assembly line, say there are 21 screws to put in. If each step has one person inserting 3 screws, it will take 7 steps to do it. Now if each step has one person inserting one screw, it will take 21 steps, but each step can go three times as fast.
And you lose time while the work is moving to the next person.
In the first case you would have 7 people, in the second case you would have 21 people (stages), but you could do three times as much work per unit time.
Not necessarily. Call each insertion of a screw (or each layer of logic) a "puff" and moving the work to the next worker (or setup and hold for flops between pipeline stages) a "give." If a give takes a significant amount of time, fewer puffs per give can actually bog down performance. No matter how long a puff takes, the slowest worker's puff-puff-give time (or "critical path") always determines the clock frequency of the processor.
Why, except perhaps that it seems a bit like wasted effort to check for accesses.
It's only a few gates, and it can help spot bugs earlier.
Why would you want a /dev/null in asm?
Not /dev/null but /dev/zero. For example, MIPS doesn't have "load immediate" but does have a 3-way "or immediate", ori r16, r0, 3, which loads register r16 with 3 ORed with the value in r0. It also removes the need for a 'negate' instruction, as sub r16, r0, r16 will negate r16.
Searching Google for 2006 hdtv analog shows that the United States Federal Communications Commission will pull all licenses for analog television broadcast spectrum on January 1, 2006. The new system includes copy protection methods that may let networks specify that "you may not record any part of this program, not even brief fair use excerpts," "you may not watch this program on brand X of television," "your television will not be allowed to change channels for X seconds after the beginning of the commercial break", "you may not watch this program on televisions larger than X cm diagonal, as large TVs are assumed to be used in public performance settings," etc. It's up to you to decide whether this policy represents backward or forward thinking. If you don't like it, ask your congresscritters to repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Apple's got something called the "Key Ring", which keeps all of your passwords in a strongly-encrypted file, on your OWN machine.
Which doesn't work if you happen to use anybody else's machine unless you carry your keyring on a business card CD-R. It's also proprietary, so it won't work on Windows, BSD, etc. There should be some way to store and transport the keyring securely across a public network and some standard for the format of the keyring.
use the same username/password for each account (even worse)
If you make your password hard enough to guess (my password relates to the obscure subj(Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted.)), how is a cr4ck3r supposed to break into even one of your accounts?
my MS "Passport" could be a physical smartcard that held authentication data, encryption keys...hell, anything.
And it would get stolen like a paper passport. And the RIAA would require it to be swiped to play a song.
each copy of XP (and each bundled OEM copy) would include a small USB device that could read this card
Which would jack the price up by $100 after retail markup and help consumers realize that XP isn't really worth it, something that Microsoft doesn't want to happen.
Email addresses are available by the thousand from hotmail.com or usa.com or whatever. You only have on passport account.
The fact that a Passport account comes free with every Hotmail account changes the equation: "Microsoft Passport accounts are available by the thousand from hotmail.com or whatever. You only have one passport account" only because you signed up for just one.
When the width of a stroke is around a single pixel, a grey pixel stands out in a big way
That's partially because of a nonlinearity between the number of electrons shot at a phosphor and the luminous intensity. A gray pixel needs to be at 50% luminous intensity, or it'll stand out as you mentioned. To correct for this, video hardware and software raise every displayed pixel to the power of gamma. For most displays, gamma correction of 0.45 or so produces a response that's nice and linear, and you can use traditional time-domain convolution to low-pass filter the text bitmap and remove the spatial frequency aliasing.
a non-anti-aliased, hand-hinted font is much cleaner.
A non-anti-aliased, hand-hinted font is also patented.
but when we get 300 dpi screens
The future is now. Color LCD screens have always been about 300 x 100 dpi; recent versions of Microsoft GDI used in Windows CE and XP can tap into the individual red, green, and blue pixels for even cleaner text.
I game just fine on 2000 professional ... Ive run programs that were compiled 10 years ago for a very old dos
Then how do you play closed-source games originally designed for MS-DOS? Windows 2000 Professional is known to have some serious issues with respect to support for DPMI services, sound, and mouse and joystick input, and Microsoft has repeatedly stated that "these bugs are marked WONTFIX; if you want games, wait a couple months and buy an Xbox console and a Microsoft TV Tuner card."
Or do you just dual-boot into DOS and lose all access to NTFS?
I wouldnt know of any other commerical OS that would let you hotswap processors or anything
Several commercial UNIX systems let admins disable processors, exchange them, and enable the new processor. But you shouldn't have to reboot to install a device that connects to the back of the computer, especially a 1394 or USB device.
if I start a corporation by the name Slashdot tomorrow, then can I sue to get this site down?
No. SLASHDOT is a registered trademark of Blockstackers (CmdrTaco's former company and parent of Everything Development Company), licensed to OSDN.
Find someone who will fight for them pro-bono (as they have a strong case)
There has to be a better term than "pro bono," as the term "pro bono" brings to mind the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which set a precedent to put everything first published in the U.S. on or after January 1, 1923, under perpetual copyright because Di$neyCo can just lobby for another across-the-board term extension act every 20 years.
Unless Microsoft starts hiding copyright notices in the doc format
Not as far-fetched as you may think. The Sega Dreamcast console requires a 14 KB block of copyrighted code to appear in the boot track of every Dreamcast title, and the BIOS checks it bit-for-bit against a copy in ROM. The code displays the text "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD" next to a nice big blue SEGA® logo.
The DMCA is an american issue. What if the format is hacked outside america and this hack can be downloaded ?
Then the developers of the software will be trapped in their home countries, unable to fly over the airspace of countries who have allied with the United States. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.
Did you say tables? Do you have the slightnest notion how hard it is to implement table support for one format?
Mozilla, Konqueror, etc. handle HTML tables just fine. Just get Office to export legacy documents in conforming XHTML, provide an XHTML input filter, and you'll be fine.
Off-topic: My original subject was "<table>...</table>" but Slashcode escapes & into & and produces "<table>...</table>". However, when I just type <table>...</table>, Slashcode just strips the HTML. There seems to be NO way to get a < sign into a subject.
haven't all versions of Office since 2000 used an XML derivative for file storage?
Office 2000 uses Office 97 formats. Office XP, on the other hand, may use XML, but this doesn't imply that Microsoft will publish a schema, DTD, or other documentation. For example, <uudata>(2000 lines of uuencoded data)</uudata> is XML (save administrivia such as a DOCTYPE), but if you don't have enough information to decode the contents of an entity into something readable, it's still useless.
RTF doesn't support tables, embedded objects, headers/footers, TOC, index, etc
Blue Neon Head brings up a good point: HTML with CSS does support about everything you mentioned and adds hyperlinks, which a print-medium user agent can translate into footnotes, endnotes, or (as Slashdot is starting to do) parenthetical citations.
Why does this topic use the "bug" icon?
Because viruses exploit bugs.
Social engineering viruses such as ILOVEYOU and SirCam result from the difficulty of telling an executable file from a document (as most users don't know what vbs, com, pif, and lnk are), which is a bug in Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Mail, and most other popular mail clients for Windows. UNIX solves this problem rather easily by including a bit or three for 'x' permissions.
The fact that virus-spreading daemons can run undetected by the average user is a bug in the design of Windows's task manager.
In general, the lack of filesystem access restrictions, which implies that code executed as a user can fill or reformat the C:\ filesystem, is a bug in Windows 9x's design.
For people that pay the extra $$$, make available 160-256 VBR Ogg files
Pointless. Decoding the 128 kbps MP3 songs that artists upload and re-encoding them as 160-256 kbps OGG will only further degrade the sound quality.
It would be nice to have different ranges too- maybe 64K to demo the song
Reminds me of MP3.com's 32 kbps lo-fi stream and 128 kbps download.
and 320K if you actually want it.
You don't really need 320 kbps for CD quality. Recent versions of LAME have a --r3mix switch that allows CD quality (i.e. transparent reproduction of 0-20 kHz stereo audio) at an average rate of 180 to 200 kbps; read the "quality" section of r3mix.net for details.
It works on printers because the physical resolution is high enough that your eye can't pick out the pixels. But monitors do, what, roughly 75dpi?
You're probably used to the blocky "nearest neighbor" form of upsampling that's common in 3D APIs' software mode but carries 6 dB/octave of aliasing into the high frequencies, causing your eyes' high-pass filters to report spurious edges at pixel boundaries. Proper linear upsampling will use bilinear interpolation (aliasing falls off at 12 dB/octave) or cubic spline interpolation (18 dB/octave).
Now, with true type or vector fonts, or something along those lines, text would look OK. Line drawn and filled components would look fine of course. But say goodbye to any bitmapped graphics looking good - icons, etc.
Who says that icons can't be "line drawn and filled" vector graphics? Besides, there are techniques to scale images while adding fake detail, such as nonlinear interpolation and fractal methods.
Not really true. I want "File" to ALWAYS have the same minimum components every time no matter what app it is: open, close, new, etc. There is no valid reason to dick with this. As much as possible, interfaces SHOULD be consistent to MINIMIZE the learning curve.
I agree that some standards are good. However, your widget set has to build in customizability. Some users like the menus at the top of the screen (Mac), at the top of a window (Windows, OS/2), or at the bottom of a window (Newton). Apps should see "this function creates a Menu Bar Or Tool Bar" in the API and leave the physical appearance of the menu bar to the widget set's theme engine. Same with pop-up menus: some users like ring-shaped popups; others like rectangular ones. Some users like their large virtual desktop to be four screens wide with wraparound and one screen tall, while others prefer two screens by two screens with no wrapping.
The point is that the UI should present the application with a set of abstract widgets (menu, window, etc.) and leave their presentation up to the theme, a strategh which in theory would also allow for specialized themes that work with alternative input and output devices for those with disabilities. Does this remind you any of W3C's goals in separating presentation from structure by deprecating HTML's physical markup in favor of CSS?
>> clicking the 'close' button on some program closes them, but clicking the 'close' button on others (like a web browser) just minimizes it?
Eh? On my Mac, the "close" button always closes, web browser or not. I think you're just hitting the wrong button and blaming it on the OS.
I think A.C. was referring to the fact that some Macintosh apps use only one window and die when you close them, whereas others can exist in a state with no documents open, but the application is still in memory, ready at a moment's notice.
For the record, I wrote To: webmaster@osr.com,sales@osr.com and asked for the price of the OSR FSDK. The "before you contact us" page said something to the effect: "If you're not using IE 5.x, we don't want to hear your bitching about how it looks bad in Opera or Konqueror, as all of our target audience (Windows developers with eyesight) can use IE 5.x." I asked "I am using IE 5.5 on Windows ME, but I can't find the price."
I got a reply from sales: "Your browser isn't broken. We weren't displaying the $100,000 price of the package." I guess not putting the price on the web page was their way of saying "if you have to ask, you can't afford it."
Secondly, the idea of running EVERYTHING through OpenGL is particularly bothering. Most video hardware has some very specific optimisations for 2D work and by going through a specific 3D interface you are tossing all those performance advantages out the window.
As Yokaze mentioned, a rectangular window is two triangles. Two. The fact that DirectX 8's 2D API is simply Direct3D 8 with orthographic projection shows that Microsoft has begun to understand this, as Shelrem mentioned. Besides, "OpenGL" != "3D"; OpenGL is just a Graphics Language with an Open specification.
The only difference between rotation and scaling of textures in 2D and in 3D is that in 3D perspective projection, there's a divide by z every few pixels to fixup textures if the plane isn't parallel to the x axis. In 3D parallel projection (of which 2D is a special case), or in 3D perspective with the triangle's plane parallel to the x axis (reminiscent of Super NES Mode 7), it's just an affine transformation (two adds per pixel), that is, unless you count elliptical filtering.
Most people have a hard enough time keeping a 2D desktop organised that they'd hardly want things at arbitrary 3D angles!!
You'd be surprised what you can do with the middle mouse button mapped to toggle between the x-y and x-z plane, especially if you map the mouse's x-axis to theta and rotate the view. With the typical 90 degree field-of-view of most FPS game engines, you already have four desktops.
Who needs a debian system for money when you can get it form your local mirror ?
What if you're in an area where dial-up is billed at a penny a minute (such as Europe), and nobody offers DSL or cable? Then a mirror isn't "local" unless it's on your LAN. So how do you get a mirror onto your LAN when nobody you know has the CD set? Buy a distro.