Really? I've got an iMac at home (long story) and it's the suckiest piece of junk ever designed. Maybe Macs were cool when virtual-memory-less, single-threaded, single-focus "operating systems" were the norm. But not now.
"Hey, Mr Jobs, I've got a great design for a GUI - force the user to constantly switch from mouse to keyboard."
"Hey, Mr Jobs, I've decided to remove the "delete backwards" key and instead have a key combination to delete the entire rest of the document. That should be useful."
"Hey, Mr Jobs, don't worry about multithreading. Users won't mind having a modal dialog box up the entire time the modem is connecting."
Sorry if I'm offending any religious believers out there, but my experience of Macs has been atrocious, and I'm also having a bad day at work <g> Apple have given us some fantastic technology (ObQuicktime), but Mac OS 8 isn't it.
And to think, for the price of my 15" iMac, I could've bought a 19" PC that actually ran some useful software.
Have you yourself succumbed? Or do you see yourself as the only true honest person posting on Slashdot?
I post regularly, and I have unorthodox opinions for Slashdot (e.g. I think Linux is the most boring piece of software ever devised). I have on occasion been moderated down unfairly. I have also been moderated up to my surprise. On other occasions, I have posted a little slice of my life - pure experience - and they always get moderated up. But I have never posted a dishonest opinion, and I never will.
But the one lesson I've learned - which is the one way I have "restructured my views" - is that it's not what you say, it's the way that you say it.
Anyway, your comment got moderated to +4, which, ironically, completely defuses your statements;)
You've obviously never used the API in a professional capacity. DirectX 7 is a useless pile of junk. Even ignoring the unnecessary complexities of the API itself, the lack of a conformance suite ensures that all drivers are different, therefore DirectX fails in it's ONLY TASK - that of shielding the developer from the specific hardware.
according tO the user pAge, this siG can only bE 120 characTers long. That seems rAther arbitrAry. use a Power of two!
Why is 120 more arbitrary than 128?
Maybe they have a couple of DWORDs in the structure, and make the structure 128 bytes long? That's more cache-friendly, and boy does/. need the extra performance;)
(The title is a Bill Hicks reference - this is not a troll)
But, c'mon Abrash, how far can you toe the Company Line? Is this some new conspiracy between Microsoft and Dr Dobbs? Microsoft publish squat on their website and then allow the details to "leak" out to Dr Dobbs. What a cynical display! Abrash is now the hype mongerer for Microsoft, in league with Dr Dobbs. Abrash, suck Satan's cock!
Other things: Abrash's comments about "allocating memory bandwidth" either presuppose a memory controller that permits this, or else dramatically misunderstands how UMA functions in practice. I would have liked to see more details, since this is the killer or savior of any console system. But does anyone really expect a UMA console to achieve the performance figures they give? I don't, even after Abrash's "analysis".
Mind you, the new GPU architecture looks sexy. Very sexy. If only the console didn't run DirectX. I mean, what is the point of DirectX? It is an abstraction layer. You don't NEED abstraction layers in consoles. But maybe by generation 2 M$ will have wised up and given developers the documentation - the HARDWARE documentation - they need.
We used to measure cost in beers and CDs. A CD was worth about 6 beers. You want to buy something? Figure out how many beers and CDs you could buy instead;)
Interesting that you guys call them "English" measurements. The English - who haven't used them in engineering for many years - call them "Imperial" measurements (anyone remember the Empire?;) We only use them for measuring beer these days (and a pint is 20 fl oz compared to the US's measly 16 fl oz pint).
VGS2 is a way off yet... PS2 emulation won't be possible on a desktop PC until you have around 9 GFLOPS to play with (assuming a 10:1 instruction emulation cost, which doesn't seem unrealistic).
Of course, TransMeta CPUs should do the emulation must faster, but they have CLOSED that part of their architecture...
ROFL! I used to work at Mucky Foot until I moved to Santa Monica, CA. Guildford may have a lot of tech companies, but Christ alone knows why they located there (except for all the Bullfrog spinoffs). I would no way recommend that a geek moved to Guildford, unless he or she had an excellent job lined up. If you're going to pay London prices anyway, live in London! At least the atmosphere is at least somewhat cosmopolitan, and there's a night life other than the extremely dodgy discos.
The pubs in Guildford are nice, though.
Re:Why shouldn't I be able to have designer kids?
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 2
If you take a gene and make your child a great artist
But the first paragraph of your post said you couldn't do that. Which is it?;)
This is a geek answer to the question (not meaning the word in a derogative sense). Do you really imagine that geeks represent a large proportion of the people who buy video games?
Sure, if geeks want geek games, the way to do it is opensource (geeks writing their own games). But don't confuse the larger games industry with the tiny fragment which Slashdot sees.
To answer your question "Why is this market not being exploited" the answer is simple: the market is MINISCULE. Go ahead and exploit it yourself; you won't make any money - and (oddly) money is all the Sony's of this world care about.
I won't even take the suggestion seriously that we should fire half the games industry. That runs counter to my Marxist tendencies;)
Of course, this doesn't alter the fact that 80% of video games are crap... but 80% of ANYTHING is crap. It's a natural law.
I haven't used PGP for years; can you set an expiration data on a key?
Sounds to me like an expiration date would make your key pretty worthless - the old "change the computer's clock" hack would expire the key, wouldn't it?
Just as a matter of interest, have you ever run a CD player with the top off, and watched the lense float over the surface of the CD? It's an amazing sight.
And yeah, with error correction you can handle any amount of environmental noise, but in return you lose data storage to redundancy. It would be a shame if the only practical implementations of holographic memory had so much redundancy that the actual data storage capacity was reduced back down to hard-drive levels;)
What type of closed-loop technology do you mean? General Systems Theory includes a lot about closed loop. The CD tracking mechanism uses a similar feedback mechanism to keep its head on track - this is really very clever, but I read about it in a book so I don't have a link. The basic principles of error-controlled negative feedback can be found in the basic op-amp circuit, too. And even sound compression technology utilizes similar ideas. Does any of this help at all?
The main problem I can see with using a servomechanism to damp vibration is that the tiny vibrations happen very happen, and a mechanical damper that could react quickly enough would be hard to engineer. Maybe active magnetic suspension would be the way to go?
Slashdot Mirror
It takes far more imagination to pray than it does to regurgitate these vanilla pseudo-scientific opinions on religion.
And, scientifically speaking, your belief in the "subconscious mind" solving your problems is just as superstitious as anyone's belief in a deity.
Thanks, that's better.
That's NOT WHAT THEY ARE FOR!!!
You should use your moderation points to attack opinions with which you disagree (especially if they are anti-Linux or pro-Microsoft).
If you don't get this you've got no business moderating on Slashdot.
"Hey, Mr Jobs, I've got a great design for a GUI - force the user to constantly switch from mouse to keyboard."
"Hey, Mr Jobs, I've decided to remove the "delete backwards" key and instead have a key combination to delete the entire rest of the document. That should be useful."
"Hey, Mr Jobs, don't worry about multithreading. Users won't mind having a modal dialog box up the entire time the modem is connecting."
Sorry if I'm offending any religious believers out there, but my experience of Macs has been atrocious, and I'm also having a bad day at work <g> Apple have given us some fantastic technology (ObQuicktime), but Mac OS 8 isn't it.
And to think, for the price of my 15" iMac, I could've bought a 19" PC that actually ran some useful software.
Grrr! Hate Macs. Hate Macs. Hate Macs. etc. etc.
Isn't that his job?
I post regularly, and I have unorthodox opinions for Slashdot (e.g. I think Linux is the most boring piece of software ever devised). I have on occasion been moderated down unfairly. I have also been moderated up to my surprise. On other occasions, I have posted a little slice of my life - pure experience - and they always get moderated up. But I have never posted a dishonest opinion, and I never will.
But the one lesson I've learned - which is the one way I have "restructured my views" - is that it's not what you say, it's the way that you say it.
Anyway, your comment got moderated to +4, which, ironically, completely defuses your statements ;)
Did this strike anyone else as a steaming pile of BS?
Why can't they just say: we're doing it for fun, because we have way too much time on our hands?
You've obviously never used the API in a professional capacity. DirectX 7 is a useless pile of junk. Even ignoring the unnecessary complexities of the API itself, the lack of a conformance suite ensures that all drivers are different, therefore DirectX fails in it's ONLY TASK - that of shielding the developer from the specific hardware.
He works for Microsoft. It says so in the article. He's a whore.
Or Ally McBeal ;)
Why is 120 more arbitrary than 128?
Maybe they have a couple of DWORDs in the structure, and make the structure 128 bytes long? That's more cache-friendly, and boy does /. need the extra performance ;)
APIs? It's DirectX 8. That's all you need to know. If you want to know exactly how bad DirectX 8 will be, read the DirectX 7 docs and extrapolate.
Heh heh, so where's the DVD support?
But, c'mon Abrash, how far can you toe the Company Line? Is this some new conspiracy between Microsoft and Dr Dobbs? Microsoft publish squat on their website and then allow the details to "leak" out to Dr Dobbs. What a cynical display! Abrash is now the hype mongerer for Microsoft, in league with Dr Dobbs. Abrash, suck Satan's cock!
Other things: Abrash's comments about "allocating memory bandwidth" either presuppose a memory controller that permits this, or else dramatically misunderstands how UMA functions in practice. I would have liked to see more details, since this is the killer or savior of any console system. But does anyone really expect a UMA console to achieve the performance figures they give? I don't, even after Abrash's "analysis".
Mind you, the new GPU architecture looks sexy. Very sexy. If only the console didn't run DirectX. I mean, what is the point of DirectX? It is an abstraction layer. You don't NEED abstraction layers in consoles. But maybe by generation 2 M$ will have wised up and given developers the documentation - the HARDWARE documentation - they need.
That's my $0.02 ;)
We used to measure cost in beers and CDs. A CD was worth about 6 beers. You want to buy something? Figure out how many beers and CDs you could buy instead ;)
Interesting that you guys call them "English" measurements. The English - who haven't used them in engineering for many years - call them "Imperial" measurements (anyone remember the Empire? ;) We only use them for measuring beer these days (and a pint is 20 fl oz compared to the US's measly 16 fl oz pint).
Of course, TransMeta CPUs should do the emulation must faster, but they have CLOSED that part of their architecture ...
The pubs in Guildford are nice, though.
But the first paragraph of your post said you couldn't do that. Which is it? ;)
It's the conqueror's fault, not the cartographer.
Knowledge is knowledge. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Sure, if geeks want geek games, the way to do it is opensource (geeks writing their own games). But don't confuse the larger games industry with the tiny fragment which Slashdot sees.
To answer your question "Why is this market not being exploited" the answer is simple: the market is MINISCULE. Go ahead and exploit it yourself; you won't make any money - and (oddly) money is all the Sony's of this world care about.
I won't even take the suggestion seriously that we should fire half the games industry. That runs counter to my Marxist tendencies ;)
Of course, this doesn't alter the fact that 80% of video games are crap ... but 80% of ANYTHING is crap. It's a natural law.
Sounds to me like an expiration date would make your key pretty worthless - the old "change the computer's clock" hack would expire the key, wouldn't it?
And yeah, with error correction you can handle any amount of environmental noise, but in return you lose data storage to redundancy. It would be a shame if the only practical implementations of holographic memory had so much redundancy that the actual data storage capacity was reduced back down to hard-drive levels ;)
The main problem I can see with using a servomechanism to damp vibration is that the tiny vibrations happen very happen, and a mechanical damper that could react quickly enough would be hard to engineer. Maybe active magnetic suspension would be the way to go?
As you may have guessed, I flunked materials science ;)