ATI did NOT design the graphics chip in the GameCube.
The chip was designed by a company called ArtX, which was purchased by ATI prior to the mass production of the GameCube. I believe that ATI kept most of the employee base from ArtX, and let them run with it through final production. I wouldn't be surprised if it came out that ATI bought ArtX just so they could say "see, we make console GPUs too," to nVidia. A lot of this is from an interview with one of the head engineers on the Flipper chip that I read on IGN, but I can't find now.
Having an ATI GPU doesn't give me worm and fuzzies
I, for one, am very glad that you don't have worms;)
These are five 'states' of matter, each one obtained (at least for the first four you list), by adding more and more energy into the system. I am not very familiar with bose-einstein condensates, but I believe (someone please correct me if I am wrong) they are a state of matter that occurs at energies close to absolute zero, and are thus just another step on the continuum with which most of us are familiar.
I think that examples of different 'forms' (to which they are referring in the article) of matter might be regular matter and antimatter, but don't quote me on that.
We recently bought a Sony DSC-505V digital camera for use in my lab (Biomedical Engineering research). In addition to making sure the camera could store in TIFF format (no compression), we also had to make sure that there was a physical zoom (i.e., in the lens), as opposed to just a digital zoom. We got both in the camera we bought, but we keep the digital zoom turned off. This particular camera is also nice because it has a (very nice) Zeiss lens.
Plexi is very easy to work with. It is probably easier to cut than wood, and it will hold a thread, so you can actually bolt everything together. They also sell an adhesive that is specifically made to bond plexi, and boy does it bond. All very easy to use, and relatively inexpensive.
Thin plexi, the adhesive, and tap kits (for putting a thread into a hole) are available at Home Depot (and I presume the like). Thicker plexi is available at plastics distributors, just look in the yellow pages under 'Plastics'
The way I've thought about graphical pipes is thus:
Use a meta-key drag to drop one entity onto another, keep the meta-key held, and drop that stack onto another entity, and repeat. When you let go of the meta-key, the first program runs, dumps into the second, and so on.
I don't know how well it would work in practice, but it doesn't sound too bad to me. I know this doesn't get us any farther away from WIMPs, but it is a simple way to implement pipes in a GUI.
Note - the document open in the screenshot is an imported 1.5 Meg Word file with 37 images, footnotes, comments, revisioning, styles and formatting and everything else brought in just dandy.
I'm curious, how well does it handle equations from Word's equation editor? That's the feature I probably would need most, as I've got a lot of papers with too many equations to retype.
Speaking of historic events, I'd really like to see video footage of Kruzchev (sp?) banging his shoe on the table at the UN. Anyone know where such a thing could be found?
Not that it'll help much with getting a copy, but I've seen the shoe-banging footage on the History Channel. I think it was on one of the shows like "History Undercover" or "Sworn to Secrecy" (I seem to remember the announcer's voice narrating the scene, quite distinctive, that voice). You might keep an eye out for some of those shows (I tended to see only the late night ones), or see if it's listed on any of their orderable sets of videos.
Re:How it'll probably shake out
on
XBox Delayed
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· Score: 1
I've read some info on this in the past, and specifically, Sony initially sold the PlayStation and the PlayStation2 at a loss, and that they eventually would make a profit (hence, the potential for price cuts later in the system's life).
Conversely, Nintendo has a history of not selling a system unless they make some money on hardware sales. The profit may be minimal, but they keep themselves afloat if no games sell.
I believe that the XBox will initally sell at a loss.
I think I read about this on IGN, but I can't find it now.
Believe it or not, I've run my Win98 machine without a swap file and it does just fine. I turn it off every now and then to defragment the swap file, and I'll run with it that way afterward (as opposed to rebooting again). I have 128MB of RAM, and I've opened up Word 97, multiple IE 5.5 windows, and the connection software for my Psion before the machine begins to complain. I usually leave the swap turned on, though, as I believe Windows caches closed programs in memory for faster opening, and I kind of like being able to take advantage of that feature.
Psion has already done this. It looks pretty damn cool, as does the other prototype they came out with (three flip-out screens). It's too damn bad they have suspended consumer market operations (for the time being... maybe... ok, maybe they didn't mean it... hell, I dunno... I can hope, can't I?). You can check out their prototypes here (at the bottom of the page, two of the last three pictures). There was another site that had more and better pictures, but I can't find it now.
I second this one (I'm just glad I read enough comments to not repeat the initial message). This is a book that is good in both general theory and in implementation.
One other thing though, you may also want the FORTRAN version (I know, heretical dinosaur), as FORTRAN is still an undeniably useful and irreplacable language in some respects. The other nice thing about FORTRAN is that it is easier to understand than C when you don't know either language, and thus tends to be more language-agnostic (easier to port to your language of choice, without having to learn the deep black voodoo of the original language).
You may also consider the Pascal version, as some high-school computer courses still use this as their teaching language (at least, I think they do). This is, of course, assuming that the assignment is for a public library, which I always assume has to cater to at least up to the high-school level of education.
I don't think she's a Beta. Everybody knows the Alpha children are the most physically enodowed!
Nah, Lenina Crowne was described as "quite pneumatic," and she was a Beta. If that doesn't scream 'sexpot' I don't know what does. I'd probably rank Brittney as a Beta minus. She's at least intelligent enough to do what she's told, provided money-making is involved.
The coral scaffold is strictly mineral, and the material is very similar to the mineral matrix of bone. It integrates very well with the surrounding tissue, and it should be relatively unrecognizable as a xenograft after a few years at most.
Cadaveric tissue is another thing all together. Cadaveric tissues / tissue transplants are either accopanied by the continued use of immuno-suppressive drugs for the rest of the patient's life, or the tissue has been treated (frequently with gluteraldehyde, with is similar to formaldehyde), with a "fixative." This removes all of the cellular material from the tissue, and strips most of the identifying protiens (these are what the immune system key in on) from the remaining tissue. The tissue also ends up being extremely stiff, and I don't believe that much new tissue ingrowth occurs. Commercial porcine heart-valve replacements use fixed pig heart valves sewn to a bio-compatible polymer ring for implantation. Fixed tissues require no immuno-suppressive therapy.
What is more chilling is that Mundie quotes the opinion of a businessman as if it were undisputeable fact -- Mundie states that we've just been thru the popping of a speculative bubble, & to prove it he quotes Gates from 1995, as if the man were a genius or a prophet.
Every time I hear someone quote from that damn book, all I can think of is L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology goons. I think it's the fawning tone toward "The Founder"
I can do this today with my Nokia and the Palm. The IR port works quite well - and I can actually carry the combo on me.
Needless to say this is also a considerably cheaper solution...
I could do this today with my Psion Revo (much better than any of the Palms if you ask me, and about the same price to boot), if I'd had the forethought to buy a phone with an IrDA adapter. I've found that (in the US at least) finding a reasonably priced phone with an ir port on it is far and away the most difficult part of solving the equation.
Visit http://www.times2tech.com/pocketpc.html to get on a long waiting list.
Just as a note, these guys have been around for a while. I believe they got their start replacing the clock crystal on the HP200LX (Hewlett-Packard's MS-DOS v5.0 handheld PC) with one twice as fast (hence the name), and doubling (or more) the memory in those old boys. I have always heard good things about their work, and the fact that they've been at it a while may encourage some of the less trusting types out there.
P.S. I have no association with these guys, nor have I used their services. I just got hit with a wave of nostalgia for my old handheld (still runs) when I followed that link. YMMV.
What I would LIKE to see is a color display that doesn't emit ANY light.
The screens used in the GameBoy Color (and Advance, for that matter) and the iPaq are completely passive, reflective-only color LCDs. That is why you can play Tetris in the sun and still see it. The screens work really well, and I'm kind of surprised they don't make full-sized monitors out of them.
Ahhh, but you forget that there is some debate as to whether or not Scientology is a real religion. The government of Germany, for example, does not believe so (of course, they're a little touchy (rightfully so) on the whole "brainwash the masses thing")
Psion handhelds also generate DTMF tones when you hit a key combo. It works really well, but I find that I tend to forget people's phone numbers if I use it too much, so I use it sparingly.
I can't get the idea of National Instrument's 'G' (the language used to program LabView) out of my head. In case you haven't used it, it's all icons for functions, wires for data flow, and frames for loops. Completely point-and-click. Sometimes G is easy. Sometimes you want to just type a for loop.
Yes, the body tends to encapsulate anything it can't break down inside a fibrous collagen-based capusle. Eventually (if it's close enough to the surface of the body) the offending piece will be exvaginated (i.e., it'll pop right out). This happens with things like BBs all the time. Unfortunately, this capsule stops electrical connections dead, so all the research up to this point has generally ended in eventual failure (it takes a few weeks for the electrode to be completely sealed off). The thing to do is to modify the surface of the electrode with something the cells love to stick to, making them WANT to connect with the outside world. I wouldn't be surprised if the electrodes discussed in the article were surface-modified for biocompatibility.
I know that the parent was modded as 'Funny,' but I'm going to reply seriously anyhow.
Genetic alteration would allow us to breed animals with human organs.
We're one step ahead of you, chief. Pigs, man, pigs. Pigs is where it's at right now. They are already modifying pigs to express human histocompatibility protiens on the surfaces of their cells (thus, human immune systems don't attack the organs). Two reasons for pigs, first, their organs are the right size (a big issue, if you think about it), second, pigs have few or no disease that cross infect humans. The ethics surrounding this are tangled, at best.
I took a graduate level class about the ethics of science last semester. We used sci-fi novels as our text books, and analyzed what technology is available now, and what we as a society will do with it. Then we analyzed the ethics of the predicted actions. I gotta tell ya, the future could be a really scary place.
I, for one, cannot wait for the day when a genetically modified, super race of humans rules the earth.
You should read the final paper I wrote for my class. A predictive paper about the future of technology and the ethical implications of its implementation. It is entitled "Future Predictions for the Growth of Human Enhancement via Gene Therapy"
It would be fun to put together a computer game where the goal is to run a nation (in a sort-of SimCity/Civilizaton style), and where success is measured according to the success of your nation, but where wiping out an enemy almost never serves your best interests, where a conquered nation can assemble an underground revolutionary movement and regain their sovereignty, and where the game simply continues to be played for as long as the participants are enjoying themselves.
This could conceivably get VERY Machiavellian extremely quickly. Just think about the benefits of reading "The Prince" prior to playing this game. And somebody in here was concerned about breeding a good little capitalist.
(not to say this wouldn't be a very fun game; micromanaging the torture of revolutionary leaders and/or turning city-states over to the rule of a benevolent puppet government. In fact, I may have to go write this right now.)
Slashdot Mirror
The chip was designed by a company called ArtX, which was purchased by ATI prior to the mass production of the GameCube. I believe that ATI kept most of the employee base from ArtX, and let them run with it through final production. I wouldn't be surprised if it came out that ATI bought ArtX just so they could say "see, we make console GPUs too," to nVidia. A lot of this is from an interview with one of the head engineers on the Flipper chip that I read on IGN, but I can't find now.
Having an ATI GPU doesn't give me worm and fuzzies
I, for one, am very glad that you don't have worms ;)
These are five 'states' of matter, each one obtained (at least for the first four you list), by adding more and more energy into the system. I am not very familiar with bose-einstein condensates, but I believe (someone please correct me if I am wrong) they are a state of matter that occurs at energies close to absolute zero, and are thus just another step on the continuum with which most of us are familiar.
I think that examples of different 'forms' (to which they are referring in the article) of matter might be regular matter and antimatter, but don't quote me on that.
We recently bought a Sony DSC-505V digital camera for use in my lab (Biomedical Engineering research). In addition to making sure the camera could store in TIFF format (no compression), we also had to make sure that there was a physical zoom (i.e., in the lens), as opposed to just a digital zoom. We got both in the camera we bought, but we keep the digital zoom turned off. This particular camera is also nice because it has a (very nice) Zeiss lens.
Just an FYI
Plexi is very easy to work with. It is probably easier to cut than wood, and it will hold a thread, so you can actually bolt everything together. They also sell an adhesive that is specifically made to bond plexi, and boy does it bond. All very easy to use, and relatively inexpensive.
Thin plexi, the adhesive, and tap kits (for putting a thread into a hole) are available at Home Depot (and I presume the like). Thicker plexi is available at plastics distributors, just look in the yellow pages under 'Plastics'
The way I've thought about graphical pipes is thus:
Use a meta-key drag to drop one entity onto another, keep the meta-key held, and drop that stack onto another entity, and repeat. When you let go of the meta-key, the first program runs, dumps into the second, and so on.
I don't know how well it would work in practice, but it doesn't sound too bad to me. I know this doesn't get us any farther away from WIMPs, but it is a simple way to implement pipes in a GUI.
I'm curious, how well does it handle equations from Word's equation editor? That's the feature I probably would need most, as I've got a lot of papers with too many equations to retype.
Not that it'll help much with getting a copy, but I've seen the shoe-banging footage on the History Channel. I think it was on one of the shows like "History Undercover" or "Sworn to Secrecy" (I seem to remember the announcer's voice narrating the scene, quite distinctive, that voice). You might keep an eye out for some of those shows (I tended to see only the late night ones), or see if it's listed on any of their orderable sets of videos.
I've read some info on this in the past, and specifically, Sony initially sold the PlayStation and the PlayStation2 at a loss, and that they eventually would make a profit (hence, the potential for price cuts later in the system's life).
Conversely, Nintendo has a history of not selling a system unless they make some money on hardware sales. The profit may be minimal, but they keep themselves afloat if no games sell.
I believe that the XBox will initally sell at a loss.
I think I read about this on IGN, but I can't find it now.
Believe it or not, I've run my Win98 machine without a swap file and it does just fine. I turn it off every now and then to defragment the swap file, and I'll run with it that way afterward (as opposed to rebooting again). I have 128MB of RAM, and I've opened up Word 97, multiple IE 5.5 windows, and the connection software for my Psion before the machine begins to complain. I usually leave the swap turned on, though, as I believe Windows caches closed programs in memory for faster opening, and I kind of like being able to take advantage of that feature.
Psion has already done this. It looks pretty damn cool, as does the other prototype they came out with (three flip-out screens). It's too damn bad they have suspended consumer market operations (for the time being... maybe... ok, maybe they didn't mean it... hell, I dunno... I can hope, can't I?). You can check out their prototypes here (at the bottom of the page, two of the last three pictures). There was another site that had more and better pictures, but I can't find it now.
One other thing though, you may also want the FORTRAN version (I know, heretical dinosaur), as FORTRAN is still an undeniably useful and irreplacable language in some respects. The other nice thing about FORTRAN is that it is easier to understand than C when you don't know either language, and thus tends to be more language-agnostic (easier to port to your language of choice, without having to learn the deep black voodoo of the original language).
You may also consider the Pascal version, as some high-school computer courses still use this as their teaching language (at least, I think they do). This is, of course, assuming that the assignment is for a public library, which I always assume has to cater to at least up to the high-school level of education.
id is bringing Commander Keen to the Game Boy Color (not even Advance). Check it out here:
http://pocket.ign.com/previews/16248.html
Nah, Lenina Crowne was described as "quite pneumatic," and she was a Beta. If that doesn't scream 'sexpot' I don't know what does. I'd probably rank Brittney as a Beta minus. She's at least intelligent enough to do what she's told, provided money-making is involved.
Cadaveric tissue is another thing all together. Cadaveric tissues / tissue transplants are either accopanied by the continued use of immuno-suppressive drugs for the rest of the patient's life, or the tissue has been treated (frequently with gluteraldehyde, with is similar to formaldehyde), with a "fixative." This removes all of the cellular material from the tissue, and strips most of the identifying protiens (these are what the immune system key in on) from the remaining tissue. The tissue also ends up being extremely stiff, and I don't believe that much new tissue ingrowth occurs. Commercial porcine heart-valve replacements use fixed pig heart valves sewn to a bio-compatible polymer ring for implantation. Fixed tissues require no immuno-suppressive therapy.
Every time I hear someone quote from that damn book, all I can think of is L. Ron Hubbard and his Scientology goons. I think it's the fawning tone toward "The Founder"
I can do this today with my Nokia and the Palm. The IR port works quite well - and I can actually carry the combo on me.
Needless to say this is also a considerably cheaper solution...
I could do this today with my Psion Revo (much better than any of the Palms if you ask me, and about the same price to boot), if I'd had the forethought to buy a phone with an IrDA adapter. I've found that (in the US at least) finding a reasonably priced phone with an ir port on it is far and away the most difficult part of solving the equation.
Visit http://www.times2tech.com/pocketpc.html to get on a long waiting list.
Just as a note, these guys have been around for a while. I believe they got their start replacing the clock crystal on the HP200LX (Hewlett-Packard's MS-DOS v5.0 handheld PC) with one twice as fast (hence the name), and doubling (or more) the memory in those old boys. I have always heard good things about their work, and the fact that they've been at it a while may encourage some of the less trusting types out there.
P.S. I have no association with these guys, nor have I used their services. I just got hit with a wave of nostalgia for my old handheld (still runs) when I followed that link. YMMV.
Two Words:
Something Machiavellian
Teach 'em right early, and your job later will be that much easier.
What I would LIKE to see is a color display that doesn't emit ANY light.
The screens used in the GameBoy Color (and Advance, for that matter) and the iPaq are completely passive, reflective-only color LCDs. That is why you can play Tetris in the sun and still see it. The screens work really well, and I'm kind of surprised they don't make full-sized monitors out of them.
Ahhh, but you forget that there is some debate as to whether or not Scientology is a real religion. The government of Germany, for example, does not believe so (of course, they're a little touchy (rightfully so) on the whole "brainwash the masses thing")
Psion handhelds also generate DTMF tones when you hit a key combo. It works really well, but I find that I tend to forget people's phone numbers if I use it too much, so I use it sparingly.
Does this thing remind anyone of APL?
I can't get the idea of National Instrument's 'G' (the language used to program LabView) out of my head. In case you haven't used it, it's all icons for functions, wires for data flow, and frames for loops. Completely point-and-click. Sometimes G is easy. Sometimes you want to just type a for loop.
Do these connections deteriorate over time?
Yes, the body tends to encapsulate anything it can't break down inside a fibrous collagen-based capusle. Eventually (if it's close enough to the surface of the body) the offending piece will be exvaginated (i.e., it'll pop right out). This happens with things like BBs all the time. Unfortunately, this capsule stops electrical connections dead, so all the research up to this point has generally ended in eventual failure (it takes a few weeks for the electrode to be completely sealed off). The thing to do is to modify the surface of the electrode with something the cells love to stick to, making them WANT to connect with the outside world. I wouldn't be surprised if the electrodes discussed in the article were surface-modified for biocompatibility.
I know that the parent was modded as 'Funny,' but I'm going to reply seriously anyhow.
Genetic alteration would allow us to breed animals with human organs.
We're one step ahead of you, chief. Pigs, man, pigs. Pigs is where it's at right now. They are already modifying pigs to express human histocompatibility protiens on the surfaces of their cells (thus, human immune systems don't attack the organs). Two reasons for pigs, first, their organs are the right size (a big issue, if you think about it), second, pigs have few or no disease that cross infect humans. The ethics surrounding this are tangled, at best.
I took a graduate level class about the ethics of science last semester. We used sci-fi novels as our text books, and analyzed what technology is available now, and what we as a society will do with it. Then we analyzed the ethics of the predicted actions. I gotta tell ya, the future could be a really scary place.
I, for one, cannot wait for the day when a genetically modified, super race of humans rules the earth.
You should read the final paper I wrote for my class. A predictive paper about the future of technology and the ethical implications of its implementation. It is entitled "Future Predictions for the Growth of Human Enhancement via Gene Therapy"
It would be fun to put together a computer game where the goal is to run a nation (in a sort-of SimCity/Civilizaton style), and where success is measured according to the success of your nation, but where wiping out an enemy almost never serves your best interests, where a conquered nation can assemble an underground revolutionary movement and regain their sovereignty, and where the game simply continues to be played for as long as the participants are enjoying themselves.
This could conceivably get VERY Machiavellian extremely quickly. Just think about the benefits of reading "The Prince" prior to playing this game. And somebody in here was concerned about breeding a good little capitalist.
(not to say this wouldn't be a very fun game; micromanaging the torture of revolutionary leaders and/or turning city-states over to the rule of a benevolent puppet government. In fact, I may have to go write this right now.)