Perhaps you've forgotten, but you can still buy actual paper dictionaries:-) You tend to learn the correct spelling faster with a paper dictionary, too.
There is never, ever any need to try and push your framerate above the verticle refresh rate of your monitor.
Not true. Plenty of games have synchronous event handling. Faster framerate won't give you faster display but it will mean more responsiveness and/or more accurate physics in many games.
Depends on the game. If events are only handled before (or after) a frame is drawn then yes increased framerate is always a win. Visually it is impossible to see very high framerates, not just because of human visual limitations, but also because most monitors refresh less than 100 times per second.
Unfortunately modular design is very difficult when it comes to supporting multiple CPU families. The problem is, of course, that you need to swap the north bridge (what Intel now call the MCH) when you swap the CPU type because the bus protocols will be different. There has been some speculation that you might be able to drop an Athlon into a Alpha motherboard (and vice versa), as they use the same CPU bus protocol, but I've never heard it being done.
One interesting design was that of the PIOS One, which put the north bridge and the CPU(s) on a daughterboard that plugged into a PCI bus. Unfortunately it never got passed the prototype stage but it would have made for an easy way of changing CPU families and even changing the number of processors (up to four).
My first thought was that it's ironic that Intel are trying patents on instruction sets now, given that no one has expressed any interest in cloning IA64 at all. AMD have their own 64 bit architecture after all, and it looks more acceptable for desktop use than IA64. This is an excellent overview of AMD's plans.
Of course with all the convenient secret patent 'licenses', intel will naturally be using this exclusively to sue AMD or anyone else trying to compete with them.
Until Rambus appeared these sorts of things were almost always resolved via patent license trading. AMD have a fair portfolio of their own, I doubt they'd be afraid of anything Intel are likely to do.
Nope, my guess (without having checked the details of the patent) is that this is an attempt by Intel to get some leverage over Transmeta (or anyone else) incase they want to simulate the instructions in software. I'm sure Intel would love to get their hands on some of Transmeta's patents.
Here's a better one: Z Corporations Z402 3D printer. It's been available for a few years and costs about $50,000. At 1-2 inches per hour (vertical) it's quick for a 3D printer. Does color printing and the model is a bit easier to handle than a block of ice. Looks like they're offering to print a free sample at the moment, too.
It's been discussed in the kernel mailing list recently. The general consensus is that since Linux will soon have a bunch of "real" journaling filesystems which are more robust soft updates are not necessary, and also it'd be hard to port anyway because the VFS layers are quite different. Here is a summary from KernelTraffic.
Tux2 doesn't prevent you from running fsck or a similar recovery tool to try to recover pieces of an interrupted write. You just don't need to run it to be guarenteed a consistant filesystem.
Re:Uh-Oh, Watch Out! The C-guy's on the warpath!
on
SDMI *NOT* Cracked!?
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· Score: 2
I would be very surprised if the "inside sources" weren't simply acting on educated guesses based on preliminary findings.
I agree, although the number of entries makes it likely (IMHO) that some of them are very good cracks. Contrast it with some of the "real" crypto challenges reported here lately like the E. A. Poe challange (one or two solutions submitted), and the Code Book competition (one correct result after a year).
A crack may slightly degrade the quality of the audio but leave it sufficiently intact that your average MP3 listener isn't going to mind. By a techincal "all-or-nothing" definition, this is NOT a successful crack, but it's still enough to send them back to the drawing board I'm sure...
But not enough for them to pay the money, I'm guessing. This whole competition has looked fixed from the start - very vague statements about just what the winning conditions and prizes are, a ridiculously short amount of time for a crypto challenge, and the winner having to sign over rights to the crack.
You may not have noticed but many people and especially corporate-style groups are not good at admitting they're wrong. They've received 450 submissions. I'd say the chances are that the 6 SDMI technologies have been cracked. The first question they'll ask themselves is "can we cover it up?". Otherwise they'll probably have to throw out a lot of work, and suffer the bad PR that will result.
The ZDNet story mentions that the code is licensed under the GPL and the Sun Industry Standard Source License (SISSL). They stated that compliance to both licenses is necessary. They may be smoking crack and completely off (I haven't checked - there wasn't anything obvious at openoffice.org), but if not there are problems with this. IIRC the GPL forbids the addition of restrictions of any kind, so while it's possible to allow alternate license terms it is not possible to apply the GPL and another license simultaneously if the second license adds any restrictions. Also, according to the GNU license list page the SISSL is not GPL compatible.
IMHO you and a bunch of others have missed the point. I think Jamie has written in a deliberately sarcastic style to get his point across. He is not seriously suggesting that increased violence in video games and movies reduces violent crime. What he is pointing out is that the facts don't support the contention of the likes of Bush and Gore that violence in entertainment has induced violence in society. All the statistics show is that violence is dropping.
It's really quite simple: these politicians are manufacturing an emotionally charged issue for their own gains.
First of all, by the GCC Steering Committee's own admission 2.96 is NOT likely to have compatibility problems with C programs. Where talking C++ here as the main problem (as you mentioned). So a lot of software won't be affected.
2) Few companies or groups are going to release only for RedHat. They either release something that works on several distributions (thus avoiding this "problem"), or they'll release separately for different distributions. Either way I don't see how you'll be getting tied to RedHat.
C) In the unlikely event that they're releasing binary only for RedHat chances are they're not going to release only for 7.0. They'll want to maintain compatibility with 6.0+ at least so they'll either compile for 6.x which will make the binary compatible with 7.0 and other distributions or they'll provide separate binaries for 7.0 and 6.x.
In summary, unless a program vendor doesn't care enough about their users to want to offer support for more than just RedHat 7.0 there won't be a problem. If they do then it is the vendor at fault, so why blame RedHat? There are always ways to tie a program to a particular distribution if you want to, and that hasn't changed AFAICS.
What Microsoft is trying to achieve with that page is quite obvious. They're trying to make their problems with piracy into the vendors problem. There is no way in Hell they could sucessfully pin the responsibility for a buyer using a pirated OS on the vendor. If they could they'd be including it in their contracts. But reality doesn't get in the way of FUD.
It's also a nice piece of psychology. By talking as though there is no other option than Windows they encourage that view in the vendor's minds.
So let's see if I've got this right...
You're pissed off because government employees are goofing off which requires the government to hire consultants which is what you are?You're pissed off because people are making you're job necessary. Interesting perspective.
Use an anonymizing service. Of course they could block that too. But if the Akamai censorware workaround still works (and it seems to) then you're set. They'll have a lot of trouble justifying blocking Akamai.
If you're really paranoid you can get around keystroke monitoring by going to a frequently updated website such as Slashdot and using copy and paste to put letters and words into you're message. Then use a SSL based system like Hush or encryt the email. Should be very hard to intercept.
My experiences with NT SMP left me profoundly disappointed. NT seems particularly bad at keeping processes on the same processor all the time. So bad in fact that there's a setting (under task manager) you can use to force a process onto a particular CPU.
Why do the movie and recording industries have so much trouble understanding? If people want to do something like watch any DVD or download music they will find a way. I really was hoping that the MPAA, DVDCCA, and studios where comming to realise that the regional encoding scheme is hurting sales outside of Region 1. They certainly didn't seem to be doing anything about it and I thought I'd noticed a trend in more simultaneous global movie releases. But alas, no, they were just looking for a way to tighten up a discs themselves - something that will be only partially effective and easy to bypass as others here have described. Despite the fact that the regional encoding scheme amounts to price fixing and is ethically wrong and even illegal is some places.
You can't forget about static content altogether. Something has to serve the pictures. A web page is a lot more than just a single html page, static or dynamic. Of course often the static content is cached nearer to the user so it's impact is difficult to measure in the real world. The main thing is to benchmark with a realistic situation.
2.4 has NOT been delayed. Don't buy into the media hype (even on/.). Linus has always said it would be released when it was ready. He hoped that it would be done before now but it wasn't - nothing more to it than that.
As for vaporware the difference in the Open Source / Free Software case is that anyone can try it out and see for themselves how vapourous it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought NT4 less than a month ago (for work). I could also have bought Win98 had that been my weakness.
Perhaps you've forgotten, but you can still buy actual paper dictionaries :-) You tend to learn the correct spelling faster with a paper dictionary, too.
Depends on the game. If events are only handled before (or after) a frame is drawn then yes increased framerate is always a win. Visually it is impossible to see very high framerates, not just because of human visual limitations, but also because most monitors refresh less than 100 times per second.
One interesting design was that of the PIOS One, which put the north bridge and the CPU(s) on a daughterboard that plugged into a PCI bus. Unfortunately it never got passed the prototype stage but it would have made for an easy way of changing CPU families and even changing the number of processors (up to four).
Nope, my guess (without having checked the details of the patent) is that this is an attempt by Intel to get some leverage over Transmeta (or anyone else) incase they want to simulate the instructions in software. I'm sure Intel would love to get their hands on some of Transmeta's patents.
It'd be an interesting experiement to see how much of it is preserved on Google.
Here's a better one: Z Corporations Z402 3D printer. It's been available for a few years and costs about $50,000. At 1-2 inches per hour (vertical) it's quick for a 3D printer. Does color printing and the model is a bit easier to handle than a block of ice. Looks like they're offering to print a free sample at the moment, too.
It's been discussed in the kernel mailing list recently. The general consensus is that since Linux will soon have a bunch of "real" journaling filesystems which are more robust soft updates are not necessary, and also it'd be hard to port anyway because the VFS layers are quite different. Here is a summary from KernelTraffic.
Tux2 doesn't prevent you from running fsck or a similar recovery tool to try to recover pieces of an interrupted write. You just don't need to run it to be guarenteed a consistant filesystem.
You may not have noticed but many people and especially corporate-style groups are not good at admitting they're wrong. They've received 450 submissions. I'd say the chances are that the 6 SDMI technologies have been cracked. The first question they'll ask themselves is "can we cover it up?". Otherwise they'll probably have to throw out a lot of work, and suffer the bad PR that will result.
The ZDNet story mentions that the code is licensed under the GPL and the Sun Industry Standard Source License (SISSL). They stated that compliance to both licenses is necessary. They may be smoking crack and completely off (I haven't checked - there wasn't anything obvious at openoffice.org), but if not there are problems with this. IIRC the GPL forbids the addition of restrictions of any kind, so while it's possible to allow alternate license terms it is not possible to apply the GPL and another license simultaneously if the second license adds any restrictions. Also, according to the GNU license list page the SISSL is not GPL compatible.
According to the ZDNet article there are 450 people at sun "and other companies" working on the code. That sounds promising.
The Win32 build I just downloaded (installer version) in 6.71MB. On MS' site they list a typical IE5.5 download as being 17MB. IE5.01 is listed as the same. Last time I installed it it required 60MB of disk. If you can get smaller please tell me where.
It's really quite simple: these politicians are manufacturing an emotionally charged issue for their own gains.
First of all, by the GCC Steering Committee's own admission 2.96 is NOT likely to have compatibility problems with C programs. Where talking C++ here as the main problem (as you mentioned). So a lot of software won't be affected.
2) Few companies or groups are going to release only for RedHat. They either release something that works on several distributions (thus avoiding this "problem"), or they'll release separately for different distributions. Either way I don't see how you'll be getting tied to RedHat.
C) In the unlikely event that they're releasing binary only for RedHat chances are they're not going to release only for 7.0. They'll want to maintain compatibility with 6.0+ at least so they'll either compile for 6.x which will make the binary compatible with 7.0 and other distributions or they'll provide separate binaries for 7.0 and 6.x.
In summary, unless a program vendor doesn't care enough about their users to want to offer support for more than just RedHat 7.0 there won't be a problem. If they do then it is the vendor at fault, so why blame RedHat? There are always ways to tie a program to a particular distribution if you want to, and that hasn't changed AFAICS.
It's also a nice piece of psychology. By talking as though there is no other option than Windows they encourage that view in the vendor's minds.
So let's see if I've got this right...
You're pissed off because government employees are goofing off which requires the government to hire consultants which is what you are?You're pissed off because people are making you're job necessary. Interesting perspective.
Use an anonymizing service. Of course they could block that too. But if the Akamai censorware workaround still works (and it seems to) then you're set. They'll have a lot of trouble justifying blocking Akamai.
If you're really paranoid you can get around keystroke monitoring by going to a frequently updated website such as Slashdot and using copy and paste to put letters and words into you're message. Then use a SSL based system like Hush or encryt the email. Should be very hard to intercept.
My experiences with NT SMP left me profoundly disappointed. NT seems particularly bad at keeping processes on the same processor all the time. So bad in fact that there's a setting (under task manager) you can use to force a process onto a particular CPU.
Why do the movie and recording industries have so much trouble understanding? If people want to do something like watch any DVD or download music they will find a way. I really was hoping that the MPAA, DVDCCA, and studios where comming to realise that the regional encoding scheme is hurting sales outside of Region 1. They certainly didn't seem to be doing anything about it and I thought I'd noticed a trend in more simultaneous global movie releases. But alas, no, they were just looking for a way to tighten up a discs themselves - something that will be only partially effective and easy to bypass as others here have described. Despite the fact that the regional encoding scheme amounts to price fixing and is ethically wrong and even illegal is some places.
You can't forget about static content altogether. Something has to serve the pictures. A web page is a lot more than just a single html page, static or dynamic. Of course often the static content is cached nearer to the user so it's impact is difficult to measure in the real world. The main thing is to benchmark with a realistic situation.
As for vaporware the difference in the Open Source / Free Software case is that anyone can try it out and see for themselves how vapourous it is.