Just think-- that's five less annoying games to bother your practical and productive non-game computer usage.
Re:A few things most people don't know about DVI
on
DVI Flat Panels?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"All LCD flat panels refresh at 60 Hz" is not precisely true. While the analog input may be running at 60Hz, the pixel refresh rate on an LCD monitor varies greatly, usually measured in milliseconds. This is the time it takes the pixel to change colors-- it's not quite the same as refresh on a CRT, where the rate is precisely controlled by the time it takes for the beam to scan back around to the same point.
Just build layer after layer of virtualization like that (Bochs running Windows VMWare in WINE on VirtualPC in a Mac emulator on Linux on VMWare on Bochs etc...) and eventually you'll have enough virtualization that you can pull the original hardware out from under it all, and your "virtual PC" will just run on it's own without hardware. The trick is just getting enough layers of software in their so that they all support eachother's hardware needs.
I would think it would be even easier than that-- the display doesn't actually have to be aware of the depth of anything, it just has to show two pictures. It could care less what they are.
A new 3D driver that renders the scene from two viewpoints, each an inch and a half to the left and right of the original viewpoint, would end up rendering exactly what your eyes need to see. I'm assuming their modified version of Quake does something similar-- rendering a shot for each eye, with the viewpoints separated a few inches.
I've had this happen several times, but never worse than this particular case. I use my work address just for work, which is mostly contacting other people at the same company and an occasional client, but once in awhile, you get bitten anyway.
I wrote a small Dreamweaver library function (javascript) as a favor for a friend in the graphics department who needed one that worked with the new-at-the-time NS6. I told him to deploy it to all the HTML folks, so that we wouldn't bump into the issue anymore-- and (here's the kicker) put my email into the comments so that if there were issues, they could find the author.
Whoops. I figured they'd clip the comments out to save page space, but I was wrong (my fault!). So my email address shows up in the HTML source of every page of a major patent-search website.
Which ends up in the browser cache of millions of people every week.
Which gets parsed by an email worm that can read IE browser caches.
Which then emails me.
When I finally had the admins shut that account out of desperation, I was getting thousands of emails a day, sometimes as frequently as one per second.
One slip, and you're gone. Of course, it's usually not so spectacular-- more along the lines of "your mom got an email virus and it raided her address book" or "your address got guessed at random and now they know it's live".
Side note-- the particular virus I was getting emails from attached files it found on the infected people's machines. I received pictures of families,.doc files entitled stuff like "Quarterly Sales Projections", a very long and tough-to-read paper on some chemistry research I didn't quite follow, and so forth. Seeing what I got was almost fun.
Re:Why government action?
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I seem to recall that the phone companies had the advantage of being legal monopolies (until as recently as 1984) for many years, in addition to getting right-of-way. All that "infrastructure" can hardly be considered the sole provenance of the phone companies, as they had huge government-granted advantages building it. I think it is only fair that lines the public helped to pay for be opened to competitors. I don't know if they are being offered below cost or not, but I suspect the phone companies may be overstating their cost to seem like victims.
Personally, I think parallel infrastructure is a huge waste, and would like to see the phone companies pool their resources on one large network and compete on service and quality. But that's a giant pipe dream-- nothing that practical or reasonable will happen in my lifetime, the way things are going.
I actually bought a stack of those old adventure games *because* of ScummVM. I had played a few of them (Maniac, Monkey Island, Zak McCracken) growing up, but didn't realize how many more of those great games there were.
I bought (just a few months ago) both Indiana Jones games, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, a Monkey Island or two, Loom, and I don't remember what all else. But the point is I bought them BECAUSE of ScummVM, and I wish LucasArts would just GET IT and leave the ScummVM folks alone. They're not stealing IP. They're not hurting profits. They're actually contributing to sales of older games. Why are they still being hounded?
Ah, well-- enough ranting. Glad to see the ScummVM folks are sick of waiting for LucasArts to make up its mind, and have gone ahead with the latest release of ScummVM without their permission. Good work, guys!!
"The low cost of GPS equipment could allow a device to determine its location and use information from a database to determine whether there are any licensed operations in its vicinity. Equipment can be designed that is frequency agile, with the capability of changing frequency as needed to avoid interference to licensed users."
This means the devices will include the additional expense of a GPS chip and some way to contact the database to check if the location is safe for the frequency it wants, but this is certainly affordable. Heck, you can get a $130 phone from Sprint PCS that does all that (GPS and data network over 1xRTT). So, worst case, these devices will cost as much as a wireless NIC and a cell phone at the start. It is also possible that the database could be stored locally on the device (since TV stations don't move too often) with an expiration date, and need to be reloaded via a cable at some point or the device quits.
But cost aside, the problems you mention are addressed already in the proposal.
Samsung has, until the last few years, been a company that competed on price alone. They made use of super-cheap local labor and parts to undercut the competition. However, with the standard of living improving in Korea, they have made a major shift recently into building quality goods. They understand that as it gets more expensive to pay their workers, they will not be able to undercut China, and are taking the initiative now to compete on quality with the likes of Sony (who seems to be cutting costs and quality for a change for their own reasons).
There was a large article about this in a recent Newsweek (i think-- i read a lot), but I can't seem to find a web link to it to show you.
We'll see if their efforts hold. But hey-- my VCR isn't broken yet, and my microwave is alive and kicking.
It is kinda confusing if you read it quick, but they meant that it gives copyright holders (like Disney, or whoever) more rights. Not end users. As in "more rights to screw you."
Practical, non-radical, everyday environmentalism.
on
Green Geeks?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm an environmentalist. But not one of the crazy, chain-yourself-to-a-tree types-- I just make an effort to reduce my impact, without sacrificing huge things from my life. Here's my short list of things you can do that will make a big difference without upsetting your lifestyle terribly or requiring you to cover your property in solar panels.
1. Replace your lightbulbs with compact fluorescents. Yeah, some of them suck, but not all of them. Several brands are indistinguishable from incandescents. They are available dimmable, 3-way, R30 and R45 reflectors, etc... and they use around 1/5 the power of incandescents of the same brightness.
2. Turn off your PC when you're not there. Yeah, it's gonna kill your d.net stats, but every bit helps. Leave your server box up, but do you really need all five of those desktops on?
3. Lower your thermostat 1 degree from where it sits now in winter, and raise it 1 degree in the summer.
4. Insulate your house and water heater well.
For extra credit:
5. Consider a reasonably efficient car as your next purchase. I have a Civic HX-- gets about 40mpg. Other options: Civic (also available as a hybrid), Jetta TDI, Toyota Prius, Ford Escape HEV, etc... Your car uses as much power as your house. This is a good place to cut down. But you don't even have to go this far-- if everybody picked a vehicle that got 1 or 2mpg better than their last, we'd all be better off. So step up to a cleaner car, but there's no need to go straight for a 1-person go-kart powered by your sense of self-satisfaction.
6. Look for more efficient refrigerators, water heaters, AC, heaters, washing machines, dryers, and so forth. When yours wear out, consider a cleaner model.
I'm glad somebody else remembers.:) The other bit I liked was the chute they had that could open instantly at ground level-- compressed air or an explosive charge or something. For low-altitude ejection, I think. It was pretty cool to see them set their demo box on the hangar floor, step back, and then *BOOM* the chute was just standing up in the air as if the box had landed there.
will be to make a parachute big enough to slow the descent of a plane that large that won't tear the wings off when it opens at cruising speed. A big enough chute (assuming they can find cables) will exert an unbelieveable amount of pressure on the anchor points. Far more than the forces needed to keep the plane aloft.
I vaguely remember a Discovery-type special on this years ago, where they were trying for chutes that would only open partway (using some sort of ring) until it slowed the plane enough to survive full opening, but I've forgotten the details.
Nobody says you have to pick up all those calls. Put it on silent, and either ignore it altogether or only answer calls you want to via caller ID. Did you really feel like you HAD to answer EVERY call that came in to your cell? No wonder you didn't feel in charge of your time. Seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to give up your cell phone over an uncontrollable urge to answer every ring.
Your world won't end without one, to be sure-- I have lived without one myself on and off. But it's certainly convenient to have it around. I just don't have the "talk to everyone" compulsion that it seems everyone has hardwired into their brains.
This sounds awfully ranty. I don't mean this as a personal attack on you-- I'm just baffled by people who pick up every single call on their phones, but seem perfectly capable of saving email until later. And they seem to be the rule, rather than the exception. Caller ID and voicemail are fantastic. Let 'em wait until *you* have time.
You CAN be connected 24/7 without giving up control of your life.
Damnit man!! I was just discussing doing that very thing with the guys at work, and here I find somebody else thought of it first. I've never done any mod work, but I'll certainly look into it this weekend. If anybody has done anything before, let me know-- I'm happy to help anywhere, and grateful for advice/examples to work from.
You are absolutely right about that. Like the half million posters who have pointed out that the Tivo isn't much better than a VCR, can't save stuff forever, and can't loan shows to your friends-- I didn't think they were worth the price at all, and had no intention of spending money on one.
Then I put my name into a drawing a couple of years ago on a whim and won a 14-hour Tivo, which they promptly shipped to my house.
I didn't even have cable TV.
Two weeks later, I was hooked. I have tried and tried to explain how useful, intuitive, time-saving, choice-expanding, and powerful these things are to people, but it doesn't work. Nobody wants one until they've had a chance to fiddle with mine in person for an hour or so, and then they end up buying one. As an example, at the company I am currently consulting for, everyone with a cubicle adjacent to mine has purchased one since I started here a month back, and it's spreading to the next ones.
Tivo has their marketing work cut out for them. Personally, I think they should have more of these giveaways with their old stock-- I'll bet every one of the old 14-hour units they gave away in that contest has come back 10-fold in new customers.
I realize that no one else is going to believe me either, but I hope that somebody will read this and give one an extended test-drive before they decide they're not worth it. Also worth noting-- Tivos have the highest girlfriend-approval rating of any piece of home-theatre equipment you can acquire. One of the guys in the adjacent cubes didn't think his wife would let him buy one, but he borrowed one to show her, and she then insisted that he buy the largest one available.
I can't seem to find it now, but Sprint had a disclaimer on their page about using the "unlimited" PCS Vision minutes with a PC. The original wording said that you could only use the unlimited time with the phone itself, not as a data connection for your laptop or whatever. Can anybody confirm if they have changed this?
Note that other pages in the article include the Kyro II, Matrox Parhelia, and the older GeForce 2 and 3 lines, as well as the GeForce 4. Keep in mind that the faster the card gets, the faster the CPU must be to keep it fed with data. You may not see CPU saturation with a slow card, because the card is maxed long before 100% CPU usage. In the Radeon chart, you can see that the faster the Radeon, the more CPU constrained it is. Just like with Nvidia.
The Radeon 9700 isn't there because it didn't exist when the article is written. It will be even more CPU constrained than the GF4.
I suspect you are a troll, but I'd hate to see the issue confused any further.
I love it. I got 4 calls in the first month after it went active for me (down from 4 or 5 daily), and filing a complaint was fairly easy and seems to have shut them all up. I haven't been called since.
Yet another long, stupid stint in a computer lab.
on
Programming Marathons?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A few years back at Purdue, I was in EE365, the microprocessor design course for EE and CmpE undergrads. Through a terrible mishap involving rm and a misplaced whitespace character, our project directory (finished, and working with a few minor bugs) got wiped while trying to clean out some Mentor Graphics temp files. All the schematics, all the VHDL, all the whatever. *poof* One week to go.
Now, there were plenty of workstations available-- many more than there were teams working in the class. Unfortunately, most of them were old 50MHz machines. Not quite enough to do the simulations in a timely fashion. As in, not quite enough to get *any* of them done in a week.
There were, however, 6 or 8 HP VISE workstations that just screamed. Obviously, in high demand. So, my partner and I waited until one opened at 3 in the morning, and proceeded to camp it out for an entire week. We took shifts, brought eachother food, and covered eachothers' classes. The last two days we were there straight through.
I have never been more tired in my life, but we got it done.
My advice? Don't do it. Make backups. If, like us, making a backup would be bigger than your disk quota and took too long to send home via a modem-- MAKE THEM RAISE YOUR QUOTA.
Slashdot Mirror
Just think-- that's five less annoying games to bother your practical and productive non-game computer usage.
"All LCD flat panels refresh at 60 Hz" is not precisely true. While the analog input may be running at 60Hz, the pixel refresh rate on an LCD monitor varies greatly, usually measured in milliseconds. This is the time it takes the pixel to change colors-- it's not quite the same as refresh on a CRT, where the rate is precisely controlled by the time it takes for the beam to scan back around to the same point.
Sorry I don't have time to dig you a link.
Just build layer after layer of virtualization like that (Bochs running Windows VMWare in WINE on VirtualPC in a Mac emulator on Linux on VMWare on Bochs etc...) and eventually you'll have enough virtualization that you can pull the original hardware out from under it all, and your "virtual PC" will just run on it's own without hardware. The trick is just getting enough layers of software in their so that they all support eachother's hardware needs.
I would think it would be even easier than that-- the display doesn't actually have to be aware of the depth of anything, it just has to show two pictures. It could care less what they are.
A new 3D driver that renders the scene from two viewpoints, each an inch and a half to the left and right of the original viewpoint, would end up rendering exactly what your eyes need to see. I'm assuming their modified version of Quake does something similar-- rendering a shot for each eye, with the viewpoints separated a few inches.
But hey, what do I know? I just post here.
I've had this happen several times, but never worse than this particular case. I use my work address just for work, which is mostly contacting other people at the same company and an occasional client, but once in awhile, you get bitten anyway.
.doc files entitled stuff like "Quarterly Sales Projections", a very long and tough-to-read paper on some chemistry research I didn't quite follow, and so forth. Seeing what I got was almost fun.
I wrote a small Dreamweaver library function (javascript) as a favor for a friend in the graphics department who needed one that worked with the new-at-the-time NS6. I told him to deploy it to all the HTML folks, so that we wouldn't bump into the issue anymore-- and (here's the kicker) put my email into the comments so that if there were issues, they could find the author.
Whoops. I figured they'd clip the comments out to save page space, but I was wrong (my fault!). So my email address shows up in the HTML source of every page of a major patent-search website.
Which ends up in the browser cache of millions of people every week.
Which gets parsed by an email worm that can read IE browser caches.
Which then emails me.
When I finally had the admins shut that account out of desperation, I was getting thousands of emails a day, sometimes as frequently as one per second.
One slip, and you're gone. Of course, it's usually not so spectacular-- more along the lines of "your mom got an email virus and it raided her address book" or "your address got guessed at random and now they know it's live".
Side note-- the particular virus I was getting emails from attached files it found on the infected people's machines. I received pictures of families,
I seem to recall that the phone companies had the advantage of being legal monopolies (until as recently as 1984) for many years, in addition to getting right-of-way. All that "infrastructure" can hardly be considered the sole provenance of the phone companies, as they had huge government-granted advantages building it. I think it is only fair that lines the public helped to pay for be opened to competitors. I don't know if they are being offered below cost or not, but I suspect the phone companies may be overstating their cost to seem like victims.
Personally, I think parallel infrastructure is a huge waste, and would like to see the phone companies pool their resources on one large network and compete on service and quality. But that's a giant pipe dream-- nothing that practical or reasonable will happen in my lifetime, the way things are going.
I actually bought a stack of those old adventure games *because* of ScummVM. I had played a few of them (Maniac, Monkey Island, Zak McCracken) growing up, but didn't realize how many more of those great games there were.
I bought (just a few months ago) both Indiana Jones games, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max, a Monkey Island or two, Loom, and I don't remember what all else. But the point is I bought them BECAUSE of ScummVM, and I wish LucasArts would just GET IT and leave the ScummVM folks alone. They're not stealing IP. They're not hurting profits. They're actually contributing to sales of older games. Why are they still being hounded?
Ah, well-- enough ranting. Glad to see the ScummVM folks are sick of waiting for LucasArts to make up its mind, and have gone ahead with the latest release of ScummVM without their permission. Good work, guys!!
"The low cost of GPS equipment could allow a device to determine its location and use information from a database to determine whether there are any licensed operations in its vicinity. Equipment can be designed that is frequency agile, with the capability of changing frequency as needed to avoid interference to licensed users."
This means the devices will include the additional expense of a GPS chip and some way to contact the database to check if the location is safe for the frequency it wants, but this is certainly affordable. Heck, you can get a $130 phone from Sprint PCS that does all that (GPS and data network over 1xRTT). So, worst case, these devices will cost as much as a wireless NIC and a cell phone at the start. It is also possible that the database could be stored locally on the device (since TV stations don't move too often) with an expiration date, and need to be reloaded via a cable at some point or the device quits.
But cost aside, the problems you mention are addressed already in the proposal.
Samsung has, until the last few years, been a company that competed on price alone. They made use of super-cheap local labor and parts to undercut the competition. However, with the standard of living improving in Korea, they have made a major shift recently into building quality goods. They understand that as it gets more expensive to pay their workers, they will not be able to undercut China, and are taking the initiative now to compete on quality with the likes of Sony (who seems to be cutting costs and quality for a change for their own reasons).
There was a large article about this in a recent Newsweek (i think-- i read a lot), but I can't seem to find a web link to it to show you.
We'll see if their efforts hold. But hey-- my VCR isn't broken yet, and my microwave is alive and kicking.
I think it's safe to say that thanks to these sewer-fiber-laying robots, all this plumbing is finally becoming "interactive".
from the You-can't-patent-hyphens-because-we've-been-doing- it-for-years dept.
It is kinda confusing if you read it quick, but they meant that it gives copyright holders (like Disney, or whoever) more rights. Not end users. As in "more rights to screw you."
I'm an environmentalist. But not one of the crazy, chain-yourself-to-a-tree types-- I just make an effort to reduce my impact, without sacrificing huge things from my life. Here's my short list of things you can do that will make a big difference without upsetting your lifestyle terribly or requiring you to cover your property in solar panels.
1. Replace your lightbulbs with compact fluorescents. Yeah, some of them suck, but not all of them. Several brands are indistinguishable from incandescents. They are available dimmable, 3-way, R30 and R45 reflectors, etc... and they use around 1/5 the power of incandescents of the same brightness.
2. Turn off your PC when you're not there. Yeah, it's gonna kill your d.net stats, but every bit helps. Leave your server box up, but do you really need all five of those desktops on?
3. Lower your thermostat 1 degree from where it sits now in winter, and raise it 1 degree in the summer.
4. Insulate your house and water heater well.
For extra credit:
5. Consider a reasonably efficient car as your next purchase. I have a Civic HX-- gets about 40mpg. Other options: Civic (also available as a hybrid), Jetta TDI, Toyota Prius, Ford Escape HEV, etc... Your car uses as much power as your house. This is a good place to cut down. But you don't even have to go this far-- if everybody picked a vehicle that got 1 or 2mpg better than their last, we'd all be better off. So step up to a cleaner car, but there's no need to go straight for a 1-person go-kart powered by your sense of self-satisfaction.
6. Look for more efficient refrigerators, water heaters, AC, heaters, washing machines, dryers, and so forth. When yours wear out, consider a cleaner model.
I'm glad somebody else remembers. :) The other bit I liked was the chute they had that could open instantly at ground level-- compressed air or an explosive charge or something. For low-altitude ejection, I think. It was pretty cool to see them set their demo box on the hangar floor, step back, and then *BOOM* the chute was just standing up in the air as if the box had landed there.
will be to make a parachute big enough to slow the descent of a plane that large that won't tear the wings off when it opens at cruising speed. A big enough chute (assuming they can find cables) will exert an unbelieveable amount of pressure on the anchor points. Far more than the forces needed to keep the plane aloft.
I vaguely remember a Discovery-type special on this years ago, where they were trying for chutes that would only open partway (using some sort of ring) until it slowed the plane enough to survive full opening, but I've forgotten the details.
It's Rudy Rucker's Lifebox! See "Saucer Wisdom" for Rucker's prediction-- people backing up their brain stuff on a box similar to this.
Excellent work. :) Now somebody beat this guy!!
Nobody says you have to pick up all those calls. Put it on silent, and either ignore it altogether or only answer calls you want to via caller ID. Did you really feel like you HAD to answer EVERY call that came in to your cell? No wonder you didn't feel in charge of your time. Seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to give up your cell phone over an uncontrollable urge to answer every ring.
Your world won't end without one, to be sure-- I have lived without one myself on and off. But it's certainly convenient to have it around. I just don't have the "talk to everyone" compulsion that it seems everyone has hardwired into their brains.
This sounds awfully ranty. I don't mean this as a personal attack on you-- I'm just baffled by people who pick up every single call on their phones, but seem perfectly capable of saving email until later. And they seem to be the rule, rather than the exception. Caller ID and voicemail are fantastic. Let 'em wait until *you* have time.
You CAN be connected 24/7 without giving up control of your life.
Hahahahahahahahaha!!!!!
Somebody beat me now!!
Damnit man!! I was just discussing doing that very thing with the guys at work, and here I find somebody else thought of it first. I've never done any mod work, but I'll certainly look into it this weekend. If anybody has done anything before, let me know-- I'm happy to help anywhere, and grateful for advice/examples to work from.
You are absolutely right about that. Like the half million posters who have pointed out that the Tivo isn't much better than a VCR, can't save stuff forever, and can't loan shows to your friends-- I didn't think they were worth the price at all, and had no intention of spending money on one.
Then I put my name into a drawing a couple of years ago on a whim and won a 14-hour Tivo, which they promptly shipped to my house.
I didn't even have cable TV.
Two weeks later, I was hooked. I have tried and tried to explain how useful, intuitive, time-saving, choice-expanding, and powerful these things are to people, but it doesn't work. Nobody wants one until they've had a chance to fiddle with mine in person for an hour or so, and then they end up buying one. As an example, at the company I am currently consulting for, everyone with a cubicle adjacent to mine has purchased one since I started here a month back, and it's spreading to the next ones.
Tivo has their marketing work cut out for them. Personally, I think they should have more of these giveaways with their old stock-- I'll bet every one of the old 14-hour units they gave away in that contest has come back 10-fold in new customers.
I realize that no one else is going to believe me either, but I hope that somebody will read this and give one an extended test-drive before they decide they're not worth it. Also worth noting-- Tivos have the highest girlfriend-approval rating of any piece of home-theatre equipment you can acquire. One of the guys in the adjacent cubes didn't think his wife would let him buy one, but he borrowed one to show her, and she then insisted that he buy the largest one available.
I can't seem to find it now, but Sprint had a disclaimer on their page about using the "unlimited" PCS Vision minutes with a PC. The original wording said that you could only use the unlimited time with the phone itself, not as a data connection for your laptop or whatever. Can anybody confirm if they have changed this?
I went ahead and got you a link to another page in the SAME ARTICLE I linked that shows a chart of CPU usage with Radeon cards:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1650&p =6
Note that other pages in the article include the Kyro II, Matrox Parhelia, and the older GeForce 2 and 3 lines, as well as the GeForce 4. Keep in mind that the faster the card gets, the faster the CPU must be to keep it fed with data. You may not see CPU saturation with a slow card, because the card is maxed long before 100% CPU usage. In the Radeon chart, you can see that the faster the Radeon, the more CPU constrained it is. Just like with Nvidia.
The Radeon 9700 isn't there because it didn't exist when the article is written. It will be even more CPU constrained than the GF4.
I suspect you are a troll, but I'd hate to see the issue confused any further.
I love it. I got 4 calls in the first month after it went active for me (down from 4 or 5 daily), and filing a complaint was fairly easy and seems to have shut them all up. I haven't been called since.
A few years back at Purdue, I was in EE365, the microprocessor design course for EE and CmpE undergrads. Through a terrible mishap involving rm and a misplaced whitespace character, our project directory (finished, and working with a few minor bugs) got wiped while trying to clean out some Mentor Graphics temp files. All the schematics, all the VHDL, all the whatever. *poof* One week to go.
Now, there were plenty of workstations available-- many more than there were teams working in the class. Unfortunately, most of them were old 50MHz machines. Not quite enough to do the simulations in a timely fashion. As in, not quite enough to get *any* of them done in a week.
There were, however, 6 or 8 HP VISE workstations that just screamed. Obviously, in high demand. So, my partner and I waited until one opened at 3 in the morning, and proceeded to camp it out for an entire week. We took shifts, brought eachother food, and covered eachothers' classes. The last two days we were there straight through.
I have never been more tired in my life, but we got it done.
My advice? Don't do it. Make backups. If, like us, making a backup would be bigger than your disk quota and took too long to send home via a modem-- MAKE THEM RAISE YOUR QUOTA.