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User: Wavicle

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  1. Re:Science is a Religion on Physicists War Over a Unified Theory · · Score: 2
    You are mixing your definitions. "velocity" is usually defined as "motion through space with respect to time". In fact, dx/dt means "change in x with respect to time". dt/dt means "change in time with respect to time". You don't usually measure the change in something relative to itself because the answer is always 1. You could measure dx/dy and dz/dy, but you wouldn't measure dy/dy. We usually measure with respect to time because time's motion is fairly constant in our frame of reference and we aren't very good at changing our motion through it anyway.

    I don't see that you've proved that time can't exist. I am kinda wondering about your grasp of calculus though. Did you mean for dx to mean "delta x" or "differential of x"? In any case, you seem to be bothered that you can't describe motion in space-time with a variable independent of space and time. This is the same thing that bothered many physicist when Einstein first introduced relativity.

    This might explain your difficulty with "distance between two points". You give the equation (X1-X0)+(Y1-Y0)+(Z1-Z0)+(T1-T0), this equation assumes that the two points are fixed in space (X,Y,Z) and time (T). You also don't mention in your definition of distance that time is measured in units separate from X,Y,Z. Thus a solution would look like "1 million meters + two thousand seconds". If, however you measure X,Y,Z at the same time (T1=T0), then your solution is much easier to work with as it would just be "1 million meters".

  2. Re:The Real Treasure Of The Moon... on Mining On The Moon · · Score: 2

    I've heard that old "water just boils" in outer space, and while I've seen the boiling water in a vacuum jar trick, I'm not so sure about ice. For example comets: one of the frozen "ices" that make them up is plain old H20 ice. Clearly it didn't sublimate a billion years ago. If water does exist on the moon, it will be someplace that stays very cold all of the time. Either at the poles or deep below the surface.

  3. Re:Why is this so bad? on Andromeda To Become Less Complex? · · Score: 2
    Well, there were a few (very few) non-action, low special effect episodes of Star Trek that were very good.

    Most notably "The Inner Light" #125, which won the 1993 Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

    For 99% of everything else though, you're right... The action episodes at least give us something to look at. We already know with the Prime Directive episodes what's going to happen: The primitive people have a secret weapon called a "rock", which is impervious to phasers, undeflected by shields, and pops a rivet on the starboard nacelle causing plasma to vent. Picard must use his clever intellect to get the enterprise out of harm's way before the barbarians hurl another "rock" at them which will surely breech the warp core!

  4. Re:Some REAL points on GTK-- vs. QT · · Score: 2
    If I understand correct, the other poster talks about database access from visible GUI elements. This is insane, by my book. Having an embeddable database viewer component is probably a good thing, but bolting it into library widgets is perpetrating unnecessary bloat.

    The original poster was slightly mistaken. Qt 3.0 has a few SQL enabled widgets in its new SQL module library. see trolltech.

    An object-oriented database layer can be helpful though, for you weaklings, hehe.

    [...]

    Sorry, but you're a fucking troll.

    hmmmmm....

  5. Re:Some REAL points on GTK-- vs. QT · · Score: 2
    Why do I care that the widgets provide SQL? I may consider that bloatware and more that I want for my development needs.

    You may not care. Many application developers in the world need both rapid development and database access. This feature is something they would care for very much. Yours is a poorly thought through argument.

    Qt feels "snappier"? Puh-lease. Lets live in the land of the subjective here.

    He was being subjective, so are you.

    You are obviously lost. Look into the role of the WM.

    If the same functionality under the same WM has a feel of faster feedback with a Qt application than with a GTK-- application, that kind of eliminates the role of the WM, doesn't it?

  6. Who modded this as troll? on GTK-- vs. QT · · Score: 1, Troll

    You know this is just one kind of crap that is really killing slashdot. There is nothing trollish about this post. If someone's opinions differ from yours, that doesn't make them a troll. If someone's experiences don't favor your favorite toolkit, that doesn't make them a troll. Read the moderator guidelines or, if you can't, go into your user preferences and remove yourself from moderator participation.

  7. Re:*Yawn* on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2
    And for a PC motherboard that is equivalent to the Xbox where the video chip is on the motherboard but no video memory is... What then? How is the memory for video electrically isolated from the rest of the memory.

    You don't see many rogue apps writing all over the screen on your PC - the directly accessible frame buffer isn't as directly accessible as one might think because the kernel has put the memory into a protected page descriptor. (obvious exception for directx)

  8. Re:*Yawn* on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2

    That's sarcasm, right?

  9. Re:*Yawn* on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2
    Many low cost PCs use motherboards with "onboard video", but no video memory. The video chips use some of the system memory for their video memory. This was the original promise of AGP.

    I compare low cost all in one motherboards because that's what the xbox uses.

    This unified architecture is not at all foreign to the PC. The big difference here is that the video chip is not usually a GeForce.

  10. Re:*Yawn* on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2
    Have you ever been in the business of developing games?

    Yes, actually. I spent the first five years of my professional software career (91-96) writing games for Amiga, CD-I, Macintosh, DOS and Windows.

    Now, let's see if I can think of a few gaming consoles that haven't needed a hard drive, dvd drive, ethernet port and USB port... Ummm... Hmmm... Atari 2600, NES, Sega Master System, SNES, Genesis, N64, PS 1, Saturn... That's a lot of systems, and I'm not really trying.

  11. Re:*Yawn* on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2
    Well, let's look at the majority of boards out there. I contend they fall into one of two categories:

    1. The video is "on board". The video chip has no physical memory of its own and must use some of the system memory. This is very common for low price consumer PCs (like eMachines).

    2. The video is on an AGP card. The system bios will have an "AGP Aperture" setting so that the chipset will map physical addresses requested by the processor to addresses on the AGP card.

    In both those cases, as far as the processor is concerned the video memory itself is simply part of the total sum of physical addressing space.

    AGP was originally sold as a technology that was going to save us tons of money because video cards would no longer need to have on board RAM. Instead they could use some of the system memory. This is exactly how case #1 above works. All those "on board video" motherboards claim the video is AGP... because it is.

  12. Re:*Yawn* on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2
    Not true. That feature has little to do with NT. It's a hardware issue.

    That's why I said "in this case".

    Most "onboard video" motherboards and laptop video also fit into this case, but the kernel sets up a virtual mapping so you can't just plug in a physical memory address into a mov instruction and have it show up on the screen. In this case the only reason you don't see the "shared memory architecture" on a modern PC is because the CPU's MMU is set up such that you don't.

  13. Re:Wow... looky here. on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2

    Hey, if that's it, that's good news. I imagine many hackers (myself included) aren't intimidated by a little soldering job to get a "standard" USB port. Heck, I bet I could hijack +5v and Gnd off the Xbox's power supply and wire them directly to a small usb hub I've managed to fit in there somewhere poking out the box to give me 4 standard USB ports. I doubt I could connect 4 500mA devices though :)

  14. Re:Hmmm... on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 3, Interesting
    There is all manner of copyrighted content that may be jeopardized if you hack the Xbox. And that's what the DMCA is there for. To prevent you from doing something which may defeat the copyright protection measures of some device.

    For a real life version of this, check out aibohack.

  15. Re:Hmmm... on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2
    I was tempted to make a direct reference to the beowulf thing, but that'd look too much like Karma Whoring :)

    I wonder if that GPU has an underlying instruction set? A cluster node doesn't really have need for a high performance graphics chip, but it'd be a shame to see all that power go to waste. Maybe somebody could port seti@home (or my personal favorite Folding@home) to the GeForce.

    You never know. I remember all manner of small postscript files "to print" that were just cute ways of exploiting the processing power of the printer's cpu.

  16. Re:*Yawn* on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The 'stripped down PC' uses a shared memory architecture that you won't find on a modern PC.

    In this case that's a function of the operating system kernel.

    Also runs all code at Ring0.

    Also a function of the kernel.

    And I think it's quite clear that the Xbox was designed (hardware-wise) specifically as a gaming system.

    I disagree. Games don't need a hard drive, a dvd drive, USB port, or ethernet port. Although it is marketed as just a games box, it's pretty clear that it is also intended to serve tasks such as a DVD player, broadband WebTV (and all that goes with it), Personal Info Manager (Outlook Xbox), etc.. Microsoft hinted that they would discourage xbox usb peripherals from being developed... I'm betting within 18 months you'll see an internet access pack for the Xbox that includes a usb hub, usb keyboard and usb mouse.

    I think the Xbox could become what CD32 and CDI were trying to become.

  17. Re:Wow... looky here. on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2
    They have a USB port, although microsoft calls them 'not quite standard'. Not sure what that means yet. They also have a 100Mb ethernet port. But, yeah it doesn't look like there is so much as an ISA slot in there.

    Still, I plan to pick one up as soon as I can get it without paying $200 extra for a "value" pack. It looks like a hacker's dream.

  18. Re:so what does the price tally to on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 2
    It looks like you probably could not cannibalize much besides the hard drive and DVD. The processor may be slotted and come off. Everything else looks to be built onto the motherboard.

    If you were to try and build a system yourself that was equal to the Xbox, it would cost you a bit more than the Xbox. That's one of the reasons the Xbox has some appeal as a server commodity box. A 16 node cluster of Xboxen costs $300*16 = 4800. Not bad at all, and they're all linked via a 100Mb ethernet backbone.

    This of course assumes you could buy an Xbox without having to buy 4 games and a controller for just $250 more.

  19. Hmmm... on TechTV Cracks Open The Xbox · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Rather light on information, even for slashdot... Still, it looks like a hackable box. Since consoles are generally sold at a loss, the Xbox could find itself a popular distributed computing node. We'll probably have to do an old TiVo trick and make a hard drive image backup before plugging in the unit... Then let the hacking begin.

    Of course, MS almost certainly has used a proprietary filesystem to thwart such an effort. And reverse engineering such surely violates the DMCA.

  20. What was the lower court thinking? on Student Researcher Wins Patent Dispute · · Score: 2
    I hate to say this without reviewing more facts of the case, but... What was the lower court thinking? How do they find that since she had no ownership interest due to assignment that she is entitled to no relief?

    The law is VERY clear on the matter, as the circuit court mentioned. Being listed as co-inventor is very much a right of an inventor, and they threw it out because the inventioned would have to be assigned to the university anyway? Excuse me?

    I think that the defense should have had to prove that the lower court hadn't been bought.

  21. Re:Really good point on CEO of RIAA Speaks at P2P Conference · · Score: 2
    You didn't read her speech, did you?

    She says quite pointedly that only a small fraction of artists do concert tours. Older artists who depend on royalties are not up to the task of going on tour.

  22. Re:HP sucks on HP Calculator Department Closing · · Score: 2
    As someone who has both an HP 48GX and a TI-92...

    The HP48GX is very slow. It has been several years since my college days when I bought them, but as I recall the HP had all of its higher functions written in an interpretted calculator language. Between hitting the HP's enter and seeing a result there was always a noticeable delay. The more complicated the process, the longer the delay. The HP felt sluggish. I seem to remember that someone was selling a "compiled" version of the HP OS for the 48GX that ran significantly faster.

    I never ran definite integral calculations on the HP because the time they would take was on the order of tens of seconds. The TI-92 would whip the answer out in 1 or 2 seconds, and I would see my equation formatted so I could decide if I had entered it correctly or not. The HP has an equation editor, but it was nothing like what the 92 has.

    The symbolic math of the 48GX SUCKS, or maybe I just can't figure it out... hit "symbolic"->"integrate", enter "x^2", variable "x", "ok".... Ooops, it won't symbolically integrate without a range. Huh? Okay, try the range 0 to 1 (even though I want a symbolic/indefinite, not definite answer). The result: X^(2+1)/((2+1)*dX(X))|(X=1)-(X^(2+1)/((2+1)*dX(X)) |(X=0)). Okay, the answer X^3/3 is there, but in a terrible form. If I didn't already know the answer I'd have an awful time FINDING the answer. Doing the same thing on the TI yields the correct answer in the simplist format and doesn't ask for a range when I want the answer symbolically.

    The TI-92 was a superior calculator for mathematics courses.

    However, as has been said on numerous posts... RPN is efficient for science and engineering, once you get used to it. For all my labs and engineering courses, the 48GX was my companion. Not to mention I was always afraid that my TI-92 would shatter to bits if it took a fall in the lab. The 48GX felt rugged from its case to its keys.

    Other things the 48GX had which I found the TI-92 lacking:

    • I made the computer connection cable for the 48GX one evening from parts I scavenged from an old 386 in my closet and a little solder.
    • The IR port was invaluable when swapping lab data from classmates. I suppose the TI folks could have used the wire link, but for whatever reason they just never went through the extra trouble.
    • I once pointed the 48GX at an HP printer and printed my results with the IR Port. The formatting wasn't so great, it didn't really help, but was never the less very cool.
    • I never used the PCMCIA expansion slots for anything, but the fact that HP had used these industry standard card ports seemed like a good idea to me.
    • It was a lot easier to get fun games working on the HP. The TI-92 required some program to hack it and open it up to download native 68K apps. This wasn't in and of itself bad, but I never went through the trouble. The 48GX had no such problem.
    • Oh yeah, I could get 4 color gray pics viewed on my 48GX which would throw the epileptics of the class into a seizure.
    • The 48GX had a small capacitor which would keep the memory powered while you changed the batteries so you didn't lose everything when your NiCad's went dead. Maybe the 92 had this too, but I don't remember that being the case.
  23. Re:Look at ticalc.org for TI hacks on HP Calculator Department Closing · · Score: 1

    Wow that was an interesting read. I was a big fan of the Amiga back in the late 80's and early 90's and remember Commodore doing exactly what the author of that article said... At one of the Amiga DevCon's, I remember listening to Commodore's V.P. of something or other explain that it wasn't so bad that they had no 1200's in inventory... Saying they'd rather have no back inventory of 1200's than having them collecting dust on some warehouse shelf... meanwhile people who would have purchased an Amiga went somewhere else...

  24. Re:Digital Worries me in 4 years on Do Digital Photos Endanger History? · · Score: 2
    Yes, for a crappy 1-CCD camera. But what do you think a professional journalist will be using? They use $5,000+ film cameras today, and $5,000 buys a very nice 3-CCD camera. Take a look at some of the cameras on the market before you post, please.

    Out of curiousity, what camera are you talking about? The Nikon D1x is probably the finest professional digital camera around. It captures 5.32 megapixels, 12 bits per pixel, accepts microdrive, lists for over $6,000 and has a single CCD. It is about comparable to professional ISO 800 film. What is the comparable 3CCD sub-5K camera?

  25. Re:Digital Storage vs. Print Storage on Do Digital Photos Endanger History? · · Score: 2
    The average lifespan of a CD is about 20 years. Slightly less if you use CDR.

    Unless you are getting the really cheap CDRs, the archival lifespan of a CDR is over 100 years.